Experience Case

I'm not going to bad-mouth my father but I am going to be honest. My dad wanted to be a rock star. He had the looks and the talent. Long wavy hair, a sheepish little grin, and a strong chin, what he lacked in looks his charisma and attitude more than made up for. As for his talent, he was ranked the number one bass player in Ohio and tenth best amateur on the east coast. When I was little he moved to L.A. to try and make it. Well, unfortunately he didn't. A year later he was back home, only thing is he brought something with him. He came home with a habit, a heroin habit. I knew what my dad did, but he was my dad and I loved him.

We're going to flash forward about 15 years.

When I was nineteen we moved to a small town, Salem, Ohio. It's a little place not even a quarter the size of Cleveland. I can remember how everything was so clean and how quiet it was at night, no gunshots or sirens, just quiet. It was nothing like my old neighborhood in Cleveland. The bad thing, or so I thought when I was young, about little towns is that they have a very low tolerance for young punks who think that they can do whatever they want. Needless to say, I was one of those punks. I showed total disregard for the law. The first five years of my adult life, I spent more time inside than out. Around my twenty-first birthday I was convicted of grand theft of a motor vehicle and sent to prison for six months.

I remember when I was sitting in the county jail waiting to go to LorCI (Lorain Correctional Institution), I called my dad. I was surprised that he was home but I'm glad that he was. When I was sentenced to prison, I didn't know what to think. I was just scared and he was just who I needed to talk to. I think that he was probably a little out of it, he told me to be cool and started to sing " Renegade " by Styx. I love my dad; he could always make me laugh. No matter what the situation, he always knew what to say. Unfortunately, we weren't able to talk much after that. He just got caught up in life and I was at the mercy of the state. I'm sitting in prison and not really thinking about too much of anything other than getting home. It was time for me to make my weekly phone call, so I did. I called my Grandma, I remember clear as day what she said when she answered, "Scotty, I have some bad news, are you sitting down? It's your dad honey, he's O.D.'d. It didn't really hit me right away; I just went numb. For the next couple of months that's the way I stayed. I guess it was a good way to be, all I know is that it got me through my time. Okay big day. I'm supposed to be going home today, the only problem is when I went to prison I owed a lot of fines. The day I'm supposed to go home, I go back to jail.

That night sitting in my little 8X10 cell that smelled faintly of urine and some other unidentifiable