Conquering Chaos by Catelynn Lowell, Tyler Baltierra Read Free Book Online Page B

eight. I got into everything with my cousin. He was the same age as me,
     and we ran wild around that house while my dad and my uncle and all their friends
     were doing whatever they were doing. No supervision. So, big surprise, one day we
     came across one of my uncle’s bags of weed. We basically knew what it was, but we
     didn’t know what to do with it. We knew how to poke holes in a pop can to smoke it,
     but we didn’t know how to break it up or anything, so we kind of just stuck it on
     top and burned it. Either way, it’s the thought that counts. I was toking up when
     I was eight years old.
    Catelynn and I were both smoking a lot of pot when we got together. And once we were
     dating, we did it with each other all the time. We messed around with pretty much
     anything we could get our hands on — not the hard stuff, but the usual bad junior
     high kid stuff. For example, air duster. We went through a huge phase of huffin’ air
     duster. I’d go into CVS and steal four cans of air duster for us to huff.
    That stuff is serious. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen friends collapse
     and lie on the ground in their own blood for hours after huffin’ air duster. Someone
     could punch you in the face when you were on air duster. All you can hear is this
     “WOM-WOM-WOM” sound. It feels all tingly, but you’re out of control of your body.
     You feel your head turn into a balloon. You feel light and heavy at the same time.
     Out of every drug I’ve ever done, it was the most intense high and the most messed
     up thing I’ve ever done in my life. Everyone should be scared of that shit.
    Once I woke up after huffing too much air duster, and I was lying on the floor with
     chunks of foam coming out of my mouth. I was like, “What happened, dude?” All my friends
     were so wrecked on air duster they were laughing. They said I started having a seizure
     and shaking around on the ground, that my eyes rolled back in my head. I even pissed
     myself. I was so freaked out I had to leave. I thought about it all the way home.
    Catelynn:
    The first time I saw someone doing drugs, not just alcohol, was probably when I was
     ten. I could smell marijuana in the house. I didn’t see it, but I smelled it. Of course
     that was one of the first things I ended up getting into when I was a little older.
    We used to get high on the sleeping pill Unisom. We’d pop five or six Unisom and totally
     trip out. Our feet felt like cement, we couldn’t move, and we hallucinated all this
     stuff on the walls. Other times we’d snort Ritalin or whatever other pill was on hand
     to try. And there was Robotrippin’, where we chugged a bunch of cough syrup to get
     high. We did Ecstasy when we had that. Basically, anything we could get our hands
     on to get high with, we’d do it.
    I was a little behind on the air duster. I watched my friends do it for about a month,
     but I was kind of scared of it. But then I got curious to see what the big deal was,
     so I started doing that, too.
    We never really drank much, funny enough. We did everything else we could get, huffin’,
     snorting pills, smoking weed, we were all about that stuff. But even our friends weren’t
     really drinking. Why drink when you can huff air duster?
    The stuff was crazy, though. Once my friend Sam and I were riding our bikes in the
     trailer park while huffing air duster. I huffed some, and then I got on my bike to
     ride away. Next thing I knew, I was lying on my back on the street with rain pouring
     down on me. That freaked me out. I didn’t even know how long I’d been there. I could
     have been run over.
    Tyler:
    We used to have this friend whose mom and boyfriend were... well, kind of freaky people.
     We used to call them “Mom and Mike.” She was this forty-year-old woman, and she’d
     let us do whatever we wanted in her house. Not only that, though. She’d push drugs
     on us. She’d offer us booze and offer us pills and offer us crack. All