Dorsi: A Story of Redemption - Chapter 5

It all seems so glamorous, the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Hard living, hard playing and sex sex sex. But when that person indulging is only 14 years old, it's the beginning of a nightmare.

My parents never knew what I was doing, if they had they probably would have shipped me off pronto to a boarding school. And because I flew low under their radar I was basically undetected, free to indulge as I wanted. Since my dad had had 5 major strokes, and couldn't speak any more, my mom was busy taking care of him and that's when I started flying higher than I should have ever gone.

I'd always wanted to remain a virgin too, for the right boy to marry, but those plans got shot out the window too. Getting involved with drugs and an older boyfriend was like adding fire to an already lit flame.The first time I smoked pot was with my best friend Debbie. Since I had been a somewhat protected and lonely child, I jumped at the chance to have a best friend that lived right next door. Pretty with long blond hair and blue green eyes, Debbie had the eye of all the neighborhood boys and for once in my life I felt excited to be a best friend and be part of the neighborhood gang. Debbie and I became truly best friends, inseparable in every way, even to the point of passing notes to each other through our fences when we'd get restricted for doing dumb things like running down the street in the middle of the night in our underwear.

She was so much fun to be with, and I'm not sure who influenced who but we ended up smoking our first joint in the school tunnel after school one day. It was dark and creepy, and all we had was a bobby pin to hold the joint, and we felt wickedly bad and adult like to actually be able to indulge in the forbidden. I don't remember getting high that day, I just remember feeling very grown up and very wicked, a bad thing for a 14 year girl to feel, but I didn't know it then.

Whoever says pot is not a gateway drug must have a few screws loose because on that day the gateway was opened wide and there was no looking back. Bad went to worse.

I started taking acid during lunch time at school, and I would go to art class everyday seeing things that weren't there. Amazingly, none of my art teachers ever caught on, if anything they gave me even more freedom because of my endless creativity. I was allowed to work as an independent art student in class, and could pretty much create whatever I wanted. It was during this period of my "acid days" that I painted "The Melting Man" and "When My Mom and Dad Aren't Home", painstaking works of art done in blended oils, some small sections taking as long as 4 hours to complete.

It was a blast, I've never had so much fun creating as I did back then (or so I thought - I do far better artwork straight now than I ever did back then, but I thought I "needed" the extra "boost" drugs gave me to be creative then)

Everyday we would go out to the grove at lunch, smoke pot and I would take acid almost every day. Sometimes I took dexi's or cross-tops to really zip me up- taking speed made me feel good, like I could do anything and everything, or so I thought. Drugs were plentiful during the seventies in the San Francisco Bay Area, so getting them was never a problem.

How I flew under the radar of the school, my parents and my family I will never understand. Probably because all throughout time this I managed to keep an A average across the boards, even though I partied I did my homework and most of my classes had to with writing, art , drama or dance so I had plenty of places to express my creativity, and maybe my teachers just thought I was an odd duck ( which I think I really was anyway)

One day I was so bad I gave my best friend mescaline without her knowing it, as a joke. To this day I feel horrible that I did that. I could have killed her, sent her on a bad trip, made her go crazy. That's one of the things in my life I am so ashamed of, that I did that to ther, and I am eternally grateful nothing bad happened to her. I would have never forgiven myself.

I didn't consider my drug use bad back then, it made me feel like I fit in and to me, it was alot of fun.

Soon I started drinking too, with my friends, and pretty soon the best high was weed,Dexi's and alcohol,all combined at once. The perfect high I used to say.

One night at a party when I got home before my parents, my boyfriend had to get me sobered up because there had been an "incident" at a party we went to- apparently someone has slipped me something in my drink and I passed out on the floor, where someone proceed to accidentally drop a cigarette in the cuff of my pants. I was so stoned I don't even remember what happened except that all I knew is that the next day my pants had a great big burn hole in the cuff, and I was told that I'd been on fire at the party, and still I hadn't woke up, throughout the entire ordeal.

Whatever else happened that night is only speculation, as I don't remember a thing.

So you think I would have learned from that lesson but no, the partying didn't stop, it only got worse, It escalated to PCP (horse tranquilizer) which was the weirdest high I'd ever felt in my life. I was like a complete zombie, and everything felt like it was in slow motion, and everything was funny for some reason.

When I look back at those days all I have to say is there was definitely an angel looking over my shoulder, because no teenage girl should have been doing the things I did.

The night I lost my virginity was another one of those stupid things you never expect to happen in the way that it does. Still at 14, my then boyfriend Dennis who was 17 decided we needed to have sex at a party one night. I didn't want to do it but he insisted, and I lost my virginity in the garage of my house, and woke up wondering how in the world that could have happened to me, because I was so sure that one day I would grow up and present myself to my husband as a bonafide virgin.

As I look back know I realize that what had happened to me is now called "date rape" I didn't know it then but when someone forces you to have sex against your will, it's exactly that.

But being young and stupid I just thought it was the thing to do because after all, I was in love and I my boyfriend was going to marry me, right?

The sex and the drugs escalated. My boyfriend and I continued to have sex after that night, and of course it was unprotected (another stupid thing I should have figured out was wrong to do) But hey I was in love so what was the harm, right? Soon I started stealing pills from my mothers bathroom medicine cabinet. As weird as it may sound, I don't know that she ever even noticed, she was so stressed out taking care of my dad that she never even realized her Valium was missing. I took anything and everything I could get my hands on- speed,mescaline, mushrooms, peyote, acid, PCP, crystal,Valiums, whatever was available I tried at least once, and this pattern continued through high school and into my twenties. Little did I know however that soon my drug use was to be discovered in the worst way........ on a night I will never forget.