A (101:28)
Yeah. So I crawled in my room, I laid in my room, and I cry and cry and cry. And that's when I. That's kind of one of those days where I was just kind of like, I'm going to do something special with my life. I'm going to get the hell out of here. I'm going to do like, this is not normal. This is not okay. It's also. I began to have, like, a lot of suicidal ideation. Started thinking about killing myself a lot. I would think about different ways I could do it, which there's, you know, a few mechanisms as a. As a child. And shooting, stabbing, drowning, jumping were like, the things that I would think about. I just. I was scared to feel pain. So that's like the thing that detracted me the most was I just didn't want to feel the pain. So I would sit outside my window at night, like, no shit. Staring down 25ft below, like, if I land just right, I'll fucking break my neck and die. But if I don't, I'm just gonna be this asshole who's crippled or tried to kill himself, you know, I mean, that's. That's literally the. The process that was going through my brain at 10 years old. And, you know, thought about stabbing myself, thought about shooting myself. I didn't have access to a weapon, had knives, but I was scared of that pain. So I never, never did anything, never attempted it. Nonetheless, those thoughts were probably nearly every day. Eventually they did become every day. But maybe in the early stages they weren't every day, but they were pretty frequent. And 10 years old, okay, so my mom, she starts to work at night. So she starts to work. We would go to bed, 8 o'clock or so she'd go to work. And she worked a factory shift. So she'd work like nine to nine, you know, at night. And we lived in this neighborhood. One night my sisters wake me up and they say, seth, somebody's trying to break in. And I'm like, what do you mean? I think they're messing with me at first. And I wake up and my one sister has a knife and the other sister has a alarm clock. She has the cord wrapped around her hand. She can swing it around, right? And I'm like, okay. They're serious. So we get downstairs and at 9, 10, 11 years old, me and my sisters are standing in the kitchen. We're watching the back door that has the handle, deadbolt and a two by four nailed across the door. And I'm just watching it, just ripping from the frame. Like there's three men outside my back door. One of them's got a baseball bat, the other one has sledgehammer and some other sort of blunt object. And they're, I mean literally just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Just striking this door, trying to get in the house. And I don't remember if I grabbed anything or what I had done. But we're standing there and we didn't have anything. We didn't have like electronics, we didn't have money, we didn't have anything for these people to get. And I don't know what they would have done had they gotten in the house. I don't know if they were coming for me and my sisters. Like, there's no telling what they were going to do. And neighbors come outside, scare them away, call the cops, cops show up, call mom home from work. Everybody gets there and the conversation was quite literally, these things happen, okay? Go back inside, go to sleep, wake up the next day, go to school. And so that was it. Like, there was no, like, hey, we need to talk about this. Are you kids okay? Like, whatever. There was nothing like that, you know, Wake up next day, go to school. Like, nothing, you know, and then, and then I go to school and I'm a, I'm a straight A student, but I was a troublemaker. I was a class clown, talking, fighting everybody. And so I was as smart as I was. I was that kid that all the teachers, I was a pain in their ass. And I was always the kid who was just like, why is this little kid being a fucking asshole? Right? That's what I talked about earlier, right? Where like, what happened? Like, what's happening to that kid? Why is he not paying attention when he comes to school? Or why is he being the way that he is? And so those are the questions that we fail to ask is what happened? So nonetheless, a week or two later, same thing happens. And this is kind of where we figured out that this was calculated. My mom left for work, same thing happened. People come in to break into the house. And so somebody that we knew, it had to be because they're, they knew her schedule or something. That time though, I woke up in my neighbor's arms. I don't know if they got in the house. But I woke up in my neighbor's arms. He said, hey, somebody tried to break in again, don't worry about it, I got you. Takes me over. The next takes me over to their house, same thing. Cops come, go back to sleep, wake up, go to school. So mom was crazy, she was getting crazier. And then our house is broken into several times, which just. I don't, I didn't realize how bad that affected me. Maybe at the time, but, but as an adult now, like if I hear something at my. If I hear the refrigerator making ice at night, it's like, is my alarm set? You know, because if it's not, then I'm like fucking freaking out, you know, so it really does fuck with you pretty bad. Yeah. Your personal security is something that is very important to you and you just don't realize it till it's been like breached or whatever, you know, compromised. So around that time, my mom gets a new boyfriend. This guy's name is Jamie. He's a fucking piece of shit. Light skinned guy, six, six foot tall, six'one six'two very muscular build, you know, just looked like a naturally muscular guy. Had cornrows, had a gold tooth, couple missing teeth. And I talk about him in my book and I say he had a crooked smile because he was very charismatic and just very. Everybody loved him. And as soon as I saw him, I knew he was a piece of shit. I mean, I just, I just knew it. I just knew something was wrong. And a lot of that comes from like, I can read body language very well, almost to the point where I swear I can read people's minds. I think if you understand human nature and body language and all those things, you likely can to some extent. But when you grow up the way I grew up, you know, and you know, you're walking down the street and you see somebody 50ft away, you have to know if that person's a threat or if somebody comes in your house, you have to know if that person's a threat. So you're just constantly assessing people all day long, you know, and so that's what happened. When I saw that guy, I just, I knew he's a threat. He was the pastor or preacher, whoever gets up there and speaks at a church, he was that guy. And my mom met him. He was a man of God and he was a savior, you know, so we go to this church and these are all people that are. This is my problem with churches. These are the people that need the most fucking help. And they would never These people that were in that church would never step into like your traditional church because they don't have their Sunday best and they don't have like all the nice shit. They're people with smokers coughs and fucked up teeth and bad hair and they stink because most of them are homeless or eating at a shelter or they're people that need fucking help and they can't even get it because society just deems them as. We don't want to associate ourselves, right? So I go into this church and that's all these people are. So I'm like, Jesus, you know, I'm like, you just have this uneasy feeling. He's leading the congregation or whatever. Everybody here loves him. My mom loves him. He starts selling her pipe dreams, okay? The way I think of pipe dreams are you sit around, you're drinking or smoking, you're hitting the pipe maybe, and you start to have all these visions, right, of like, hey, we're going to buy a house. We're going to live this great life. We're going to get out of this and we're going to do great things. And what happens when you're sober? It goes away, okay? We end up. He starts dating my mom, starts dating this guy. And he has my mom and sister's like fucking hook, line and sinker. Just, he's got him. And I was always just uneasy about him. And we end up moving to this other house that had no utilities. We lived in this house. We were moving in and didn't have the utilities, weren't turned on. And living without utilities was something I was familiar with. There were often times where we had to boil the bath water or whatever, which sucks, but that's just being poor. Being poor is not that hard. Living without love is hard. So I'll say that living without utilities was not a traumatic moment in my life. Although to some people, they can't even begin to fathom what that's like. Nonetheless, we move into this house in the middle of winter in Ohio. Okay? It's cold as fuck and so cold in the house, you can see your breath. We're running an extension cord through the shared basement of our neighbors to steal their power just to run a freaking space heater. And I. So the downstairs, there's no bedrooms. The upstairs has two bedrooms. So me and my sisters would go upstairs. I always got the smaller room because it was me. And then those two shared a room, right? We go up. At the top of the stairs is my room. I walk in, it's got hardwood floors. They're buckled all the way across the floor, like cracked, split, damaged. The room smells like shit and piss. Just stunk really bad. The people that lived there before apparently had like two or three dogs that were locked up in the room. And. Yeah, so, I mean, it was like fucking horrible. I just remember being just disgusting and I, you know, the floors are damaged and you might be wondering why. I look up and in the, in the corner of my bedroom, there is a fucking hole that's like 3ft by 4ft in the corner of my ceiling in my bedroom. Like everything's missing. You can see straight into the attic above. No insulation, like nothing. Right. I mean, it's, it's like I'm looking up, I'm like. And it's fucking freezing. Obviously the solution was to staple up some plastic and to stop the wind. So the elements were quite literally blowing into my room. Rain, snow, all of those things. It pulled up, you know, eventually there was like this big like puddle in there and it, you know, unfortunately it actually ended up busting one night while I was sleeping and soaks my whole room. But I, but I move into that room. I'm sleeping on like a 4 inch mattress. I have a thin little blanket. I'm pissing the bed every night, which is common with just trauma in general. Any, any kind of child who's stressed out, they usually wet the bed for a long time. And I was 10 years old and I was pissing the bed every night. So I'd wake up freezing cold in my own piss, get ready for school and go to school. You know, we're at this point. Jamie had gotten my mom addicted to cracking cocaine. So they're just, there's another layer of just trauma that gets added to the, to the, to the table, I guess. And with heavy drugs, there comes addicts and more people. And so in this, in this new environment that we're in, this new house, I mean, every fucking day there'd be like 8, 9, 10 people that come through the house. And we didn't know that my mom was addicted at that point. We had our suspicions because the house would stink really bad and there would be all these people, but then they would go to the bathroom and they would sit in the bathroom for four, five, six hours and they were just sitting there and get high all day long. And it was, that's when we started to put two and two together that something was wrong. And you know, and living in that house, that's when I, at 10, 11 years old or so, that's When I had started to lose respect for my mom and start to like have this hate towards her instead of loving her because of like going into that room and her just like putting her child in this room to sleep in versus like maybe sleep on the couch downstairs or like maybe somewhere where there's like warm, I don't know, you know, somewhere safe to sleep. And she put me in there, like no questions asked. So I, that's when I kind of started to hate her, to hate her for that. So around the same time of moving into that house, I meet this kid. His name is Jacob or a fake name for the story to protect his identity, but call him Jacob. And he's 15 years old, I'm 10 and start hanging out with him. And Jacob knows that my life is fucked up at home. I don't know if I told him or if he had been around enough to. You kind of just pick up on it maybe. And so he starts to protect me. I start hanging out with him and all of his friends, you know, going over to his house, playing video games. He's feeding me. I always had friends that were bigger than me or older than me and that's probably a father wound thing, looking for just somebody bigger to protect you, things like that. But a lot of my friends, they would invite me over and feed me. I mean they just knew that I something was wrong and I'd go over their house and eat all their eggs, you know. So Jacob was one of those kids, started to protect me. Well, one day after two or three months hanging out with Jacob, started hanging out with him every single day. After a few months I'm at his house and coming down the stairs and this guy walks in the front door. He's 6, 5, 6 6, 380 pounds, built like a left tackle, like just a massive guy, very big, but does not look sloppy. He looks like very imposing. Like he could throw a hard punch and you can tell he's Hispanic, but he's very pale, very pale skin. He's got like big like Dahmer style glasses on, long black slicked back hair. He walks in, he's wearing this big plain red T shirt and he's like, hey, what's your name? I'm Seth. He's like, oh, do you like football? Love football. Like the Buckeyes. Love the Buckeyes. You like video games? Yeah, I love video games. Oh cool. Well, why don't you come up to my house this weekend with me and Jacob and you know, we'll play, play video games. Eat pizza and watch football all weekend. I'm like, yeah, bro. Like, let's do it. So I'm gonna go home and ask my mom. So I go home, ask my mom, My mom says, hey, as long as you're with Jacob, you're good. Whatever. Go, go. So I go back to Jacob's house, get in the guy's car. And for. I didn't know this at the time, but the guy's like 30ish. Which is really weird because I'm 30. And so now, even when I tell the story, it's like, what the fuck? So I get in this car. He's driving a white Honda Civic. And I remember the AC being on, like, full blast. And this is the first time I think I'd ever got into a car. That ac. So I was like, damn, this is fucking nice. And because it was like. Like, these are the things that you appreciate as a kid, you know? And so there's trash all over his fucking car. But I didn't give a fuck because I was like, whatever, bro. Like, I'm a kid. You don't give a fuck. You know? So we go to this chicken place in my hometown before we hit the road to go to Bluffton, Ohio, which is about 30 minutes away. He gets me a freaking meal, you know, sides, large drink. And I'm in the back seat. I'm like, dude, this is fucking awesome. Like, I got a friend who can drive. He can buy me food. My buddy Jacob's riding shotgun. We're going up to Bluffton. We're listening to Metallica, AC dc. I'm eating all this fucking food. We're allowed to cuss. We can. Like, this is fucking awesome. I'm like, man, my life is going to turn around. Like, this is pretty cool. And so we get to his house, and it's a studio apartment. So it's one big room. You walk in. It's got low ceiling, acoustical ceiling tiles. And look off to the right, there's an entertainment center and like two or three TVs. Couch, chair back right corner's got two desktop computers. The middle of the room has a big glass table with a bunch of like, Dungeons and Dragons shit all over it. We end up. We played that a lot when we were over there. Back right corner is like the kitchen and the bathroom. And then the back left corner, there's this black curtain that's hanging from the ceiling and it's cornering off. That's where his bed was. And my initial thoughts were, one, the apartment was cold. Because the AC was on and it was just full blast. Big ass dude, he ran hot. Two was. There was multiple TVs and multiple game systems, which meant you didn't have to take turns and you could play all night long. And so we sit down, we started playing video games. You know, dinner time runs around, he orders a bunch of pizza, get a bunch of pop, energy drinks, and we're. And I mean, I didn't go to sleep, like, when I was at his house, especially that first weekend. I mean, I played video games for 36 straight fucking hours, like, just having the time of my life. Life, you know? And I remember, like, Jacob going back and sleeping in his bed with him. And I didn't think anything of it because as a boy, you're. You have sleepovers and you. You sleep with your friends and it's not a big deal, you know, and that's what I attributed it to. And I just was like, yeah, whatever, you know, not a big deal. Didn't think twice about it. And so he drops me off, you know, Sunday. That was like a Friday or Saturday. He drops me off Sunday, says, you know, hey, when do you want to come back? And I'm like, I'll come back whenever. Like, this is awesome. So basically from that point forward, I start going to his house every single weekend. 52 weekends in a year, I was at his house. No, 45 weekends out of the year.
