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Chapter 1

Before I Knew Who I Was

I grew up moving around.

Odessa, Texas. Hobbs, New Mexico. Arizona. Then back to Texas.

There was never really one place I could point to and say, That's home.

Home was wherever we were living at the time.

And wherever I went, the bars seemed to be part of my world.

When people hear the word bar, they probably picture adults drinking, music playing, and people sitting around talking.

For me, it was just life.

Sometimes the bars were fun.

There was pool.

There was dancing.

There was singing.

There were people laughing and having a good time. I saw grown men and women who could walk through those doors carrying the weight of the world and, for a few hours, forget about it.

But sometimes the same place that could be full of laughter could turn ugly in a heartbeat.

Fights would break out.

People got stabbed.

People got shot.

Sometimes people died.

As a kid, I saw things that most kids shouldn't have to see.

And somehow, I got used to it.

That's probably one of the strangest things about growing up around chaos. Eventually, chaos doesn't feel like chaos anymore.

It feels normal.

Weed was always around me.

I was exposed to drugs so young that I don't remember a time when they weren't part of the world I knew.

By the time I was eight years old, I was doing meth.

Eight years old.

While other kids were worrying about school, cartoons, and what they were going to do after school, I was already being pulled into a world that would follow me for years.

I started selling meth too.