CRUSHED BY LOVE
“A foolish woman is clamorous: she is simple, and knows nothing. For she sits at the door of her house, on a seat in the high places of the city, to call passengers who go right on their ways: Whoso is simple, let him turn in here: and as for him that wants understanding, she says to him, stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knows not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell.” (Proverbs 9:13-18)
As a teenager I lived I guess what could be called a pretty normal life. I would go and hang out with my friends. We would usually play football or some other game or we would be up to some kind of mischief. Somehow I managed to stay out of any real trouble until I was twenty. As a teenager though I was very lonely inside and I longed for someone to really love me. I had a lot of friends but I never really opened my heart to anyone. A teacher in high school wrote in my yearbook: "Open up! Open up!" I longed to have a girlfriend but I was too afraid of being rejected to try to get one. I began drinking regularly at sixteen and I smoked pot for the first time on my eighteenth birthday. In my last year of high school I had internship working in the grand jury department in Queens County criminal court. At one time I had really wanted to be a lawyer like my father. Somehow I managed to finish high school with an eighty-six grade average. Graduation was June 24, 1976 one day before my eighteenth birthday. Shortly after I turned eighteen I stole my brother's car and drove to Durham, North Carolina. For some reason I thought that I had some kind of inheritance coming to me, but I didn't. I left New York City at twelve noon and arrived in Durham at nine that night. I drove like a madman, doing ninety miles an hour in the pouring rain. When I got there I parked the car at a shopping center by where I used to live. As I was walking in the street the police stopped me and asked me where I was from. I didn't know it then but there was a twelve-state alarm out for my brother’s car. When I had first gotten into town I had a bumble bee fly into my window and I freaked out trying to keep this thing from stinging me. I ended up losing control of the car and wound up on someone's yard. There was no real damage to anything but someone called the police and gave them the plate number. They had found the car but they didn't tell me that. As they took me to the police station I stuffed the keys to the car between the cushions in the backseat of the police car. At the police station I told them that I had come to see some friends of mine. They called my friends said that I had seen them. That and the fact that my brother and I have different last names (we had different fathers) really saved me from being locked up. They let me go and I called Freddy to get a bus ticket back to New York. My brother let me come home and talked to me about doing something with my life. I started college that fall at hunter college and I even managed to make the soccer team, but I was so messed up that I didn't even finish one semester. One time while my brother was away on a diving trip he said I could drive his car. A friend and I tried to drive out to Stonybrook to see another friend who went to school there, and we ended up getting lost. We were on a local street trying to figure out where we were and it had just begun to snow. We were approaching a hill with a funny curve that was slanted the wrong way (toward us). The last thing I remember was looking at my friend and seeing a telephone pole right on the other side of him. Then I looked ahead and saw this car coming down the hill towards us and I could see the wheels on the other car lock up as the driver hit the brakes. When I came to the first thing I saw was my hair sticking out of the shattered windshield. Immediately I looked to see if my friend was all right. Amazingly he had just put his seat belt on about five minutes before the crash. The impact was so hard that we got hit on the left front and the back right tire was blown out. Also the telephone pole that was just opposite my friend was now ten feet in front of us. I didn't have my seatbelt on but all I walked away with was a mild concussion from where my head shattered the windshield. Once again God saw fit to spare me. At twenty I was living in Flushing, NY with Freddy. One night I went to a local bar and got so drunk that I walked outside to see something and I tried to jump over the bumpers of two parked cars and fell flat on my face. I was so messed up I didn't even realize that I had ripped out a half an inch of flesh right by my temple. Three days later when it wouldn't heal I went to a doctor and he couldn't believe what he saw. When I was twenty I was hanging out with some younger guys in my old neighborhood and we ended up breaking into the basement of a building. Looking back I can't believe how stupid I was. The police came barging in with guns drawn and we had no where to run. It turned out that my friend’s mother was the one who called the police. She was a FBI narcotics agent and she lived right above where we broke in. I remember feeling so embarrassed and ashamed as they took us out of the building. They took me to central booking and then to Queens criminal court. This time I was on the wrong side of the law. I called Freddy who called my brother and they came to bail me out, but there was a mix up and they couldn't. The judge had said the bail would be five hundred bond or one hundred cash, but somehow the paperwork said five hundred bond or five hundred cash. Anyway I ended up at Rikers Island getting processed to go into one of the cellblocks. We had to go through this long list of steps before we could go in. We had to take showers and change clothes and all kinds of tests. The last thing they did before you went to the cell block was give you two shots. Just as the nurse pulled the second needle out of my arm I heard over the loudspeaker “bail for cotton". I remember how terrified I was at the thought of being in prison. Afterwards my brother gave me a three hour talk on staying out of trouble and doing something with my life which was ironic since he ended up being the one who spent over ten years in prison.
After the incident with Rikers Island I started hanging out with a friend from my old high school. There was one night I was with my friend in Washington Square Park high on acid and ended up hanging out with some bikers. Any way I got a ride home with one guy riding on the back of his big Harley motorcycle. I remember holding on for my life as this guy raced along the Long Island Expressway at 130 miles an hour. A couple of times I was sure that I was going to die. Anyway I used to have a lot of records and one day he introduced me to a girl who had a really large record collection. She invited us over to her house to check out the records. She lived near my house so I started going over to her house by myself. This was the first time any girl had ever showed any interest in me. It wasn't long before we were sleeping together. We spent more and more time together until we were together almost every day. Then one day we had run out of pot so I went out to try to get some. It was a very dry time and no one seemed to have any. I met this guy who said that he could get some so I went with him. Anyway I ended up hanging out with this guy all night partying and I didn't call Eve. Looking back I honestly don't know why I didn't call her. I guess I just didn't know any better. After all I had no idea what it meant to have a relationship. Also just like the night before my father died, I was still driven by my own selfishness. When I finally did call her she was so upset that I didn't call her earlier. She had thought that something had happened to me and was worried about me. After that day things began to change. She didn't want to see me as much as before. I tried desperately to get her to forgive me for that night but she never really did, or if she did, she didn't believe me when I told her that I loved her. She kept seeing me but not as often as before. I was so desperate for love that I kept going after her even though she tried to discourage me. It was about this time that I started smoking cigarettes even though I had seen cigarettes kill my father. I think I started as a desperate try to get her to feel sorry for me. I had told her before how much I was against smoking because of what it had done to my father. Also I think I began to lose my will for life. I began to get more heavily involved in drugs. At first I began to take pills to feel good, plus she liked to get high so I would try to get as many drugs as I could so I could be with her. I remember going with her and her sister and her sister's boyfriend to an acid party in the village. They had put dozens of hits of acid in some orange juice that everyone was drinking. We were still very high on acid when we went back to Queens where she lived with her parents. I wanted to be with her so bad I felt like everything in me was being torn to pieces, because she didn't care about how I felt. I think that night I came very close to going crazy. Still I wanted to be with her so much. I think more than anything I wanted her to really forgive me and give me another chance. I was living with Maureen and Denver for a while until I actually moved in with her, her sister and her sister's boyfriend. Maureen was Tommy's mother and Denver was her second husband. Also I was working in a bar as a bartender on weekends and going to school full-time during the week. I didn't stay in school long because one night I came home after school and was told that I had to move out because someone else was moving in. I felt so crushed and angry that I came very close that night to killing someone. Even still I kept trying to win her back. After that I was too emotionally messed up to be able to cope with school.
By William A. Cotton