[1043] One Step

The ten second version of my Saturday night/Sunday morning is that, on a trip back from Fort Wayne, I pissed off the kid, he pulled over and kicked me out of my friend's car while waving his airsoft gun around and ranting about how he does whatever he wants and what it is to be a man. The several pages that come next are going to build the months, if not almost two years-long context around that moment.

Most of you know my friend adopted a kid. It was a kid from his caseload when we were at DCS. He's known him since he was 7 or 8, and he's going to be 18 in July. He's, by the numbers, the highest you can score across categories recording trauma. He's had, or continues to have, every "behavior" dumbass eager Christian foster homes blithely discuss before they figure out they can't handle it. He's adopted the hood gangster affect, changes how he talks, walks, and is always, always, "on" in some form of aggressive tip, be it in name-calling or slamming cabinets in pouring himself milk. That is, to hear my friend tell it, if there's anyone else around and it's not just the two of them.

This is the same kid who found his dead brother, cousin, and cousin's fiancé after, in the months before the murder double homicide, my friend warned the kid if he kept antagonizing his brother, something like that tragedy would be the result. My friend had made a certain kind of pact with himself, that if he was ever going to foster or adopt, it would be this kid or this other little girl with her own sordid story of abuse and behaviors that he could navigate in a way others couldn't.

To my friend's credit, while it is an extremely weird habit and pattern, his "adoption" of disaffected white boys and seeing them all grow up, not precisely in the best place mental-health wise, but not having committed suicide, all with professional jobs, homes, or a connection that sees them reaching out for decompression or hang-out and come-to-Jesus sessions that don't spiral more than they need to. That this kid, with his extra-special aberrant status would kind of fall into his lap feels like so many mile markers on a highway we've been driving down for 20+ years.

The last few times I've written, I've wondered why so many "simple" things about what I desire are so hard or expensive to achieve. I've asked how much agency or control we really have under the spell of our pimps or cultural paradigms. Rarely anymore am I looking for the lesson, more than underlining or reiterating things it can be hard to build into new normative behaviors. Regardless of your trauma, level of emotionality, discomfort, or specific story of woe, you either discover and practice the littlest pieces of control and accountability, or you don't. It takes one moment to eschew your better demons and best ideas, and so practice, and honesty, and articulation deeply matter.

With all that in mind, if your goal in taking on a child is to merely "keep them alive," my friend is doing very well. If it's to expand their horizons and attempt to plug them into the larger world, no one is more keen to travel with the kid, take him to art galleries, buy him things related to cars and video games, and invite him along to the shows or activities he might otherwise be doing. Most parents, at least the ones concerned about how "the world" is going to perceive their children, know the task is much harder than keeping them fed and culturally enriched. And don't get me wrong, my friend knows this as well.

Here's the big "but."

This kid is mean. He's mean-spirited. He's volatile. He's aggressive. He's as unaccountable a person as I've ever encountered in life. I've worked for DCS. I've worked in prison. This kid is meaner and more disingenuous than people barely older than him serving years of their life for things he glorifies. Anyone who's been or has a teenager knows they're irrational and a certain kind of frustrating or "crazy." But you also probably have a strong instinct of when you're feeling particularly hormonal or out of control, and just being mean for mean's sake. It's unclear if the kid can differentiate, but again, to hear my friend tell it, when no one else is around, he's otherwise pretty decent and "normal." So?

We're beginning to shape the "have it both ways" portion of the narrative surrounding this kid. The fact that he can turn off and on whether he wants to be decent is not points in his favor. It shows that he's being as deliberately malicious as I accuse him of being. If I thought he was just "stuck" in some form of extreme PTSD or disassociative acting out, I'm backing off. I'm not writing this, forming some damming opinion, nor expecting him to behave in any other way than someone who functionally doesn't have their brain in their possession is going to behave.

My friend is extremely indulgent and entitled. I don't mind those character traits in and of themselves as, obviously, so am I. This influences his approach to creating a "stable" or "therapeutic" environment for what I call his "charges" more than "disaffected white boys." You're depressed? He'll take you to the woods and do some shamanic acid session. He'll get food with you and smoke you out. He'll let you rant about your blind spots and the consequences they've wrought indefinitely. It feels bad to be broke, abused, neglected, and lonely, like so many of us are, so if you get around him or he decides to care for you, let's flood your experience with the opposite of the pain.

The strategy has kept many a potential school shooter or suicide statistic alive. The strategy is incomplete and is being taken advantage of by the exact kind of mean-spirited violence engine that thrives on chaos. My friend drives a Camaro. That is, he did, before he functionally gave it to this kid who doesn't work, barely does chores, can't refrain from getting suspended or expelled every few weeks, and uses it to drive a series of high school girls back to their apartment to fuck and dismiss with some regularity. When my friend's cars are busted and the Camaro still works, he's coming to borrow my, also old and broken vehicles, because he doesn't want to leave the kid without a car.

The kid's "therapeutic environment" consists of constant access to vapes, I think Delta-8, weed, all of the accompanying parts that enable smoking from torches or pieces or batteries and surely a dozen other things I couldn't name. There's a tightrope you're walking at any given moment regarding his stability, and that's not to be disrupted. If he doesn't have a car, he doesn't get to go to his usual spot to get the "lesser" drug from the reliable spot and people they've coordinated to facilitate. Drug use is literally built into this kids DCS safety plan, because for years every other form of intervention has proven to cause more harm, stress, and drama than anyone involved, including the judge, cared to keep returning to.

It feels like now is the time to tell you, as I was being kicked out of the car, the kid referred to it as ,"my whip," which it absolutely is not, and he's had a melt down upon the realization of such in the past. Yelling at my friend, "That's not my car, that's your car. I don't have anything around here, none of this shit is mine for real," not an exact quote.

Anyway, some of the consistent interests the kid has shown are in guns, violent Youtube videos, Grand Theft Auto, and cars. He and my friend will talk cars indefinitely. The kid will bring out and clean his guns, airsoft or otherwise, like he's a war veteran trying to stay vigilant. They'll spend hours flipping through different skins and modifications to their in-game characters and cars. I can forgive a kid for being boring and single minded or having shitty taste in music. But he uses his interests to help bolster and glorify his thug-life narrative and demons.

On the way to Fort Wayne, there are decent stretches of straight highway. The kid, smiling, seatbelt-less, gestures with his head back to my friend, "You know, we have to come back out here and see what we can hit (speed wise.) We gotta make a pact though, that if one of us dies, it's not on the other one. You don't gotta feel bad or there's no heaviness or bad blood." Also not a direct quote. As far as I can tell, the kid has a familiar suicidal impulse that I want nothing to do with. I certainly don't want to be in the car with him as he's racing past 120 miles per hour weaving through traffic and riding asses from old people to bikers.

The kid does not seem to retain the capacity to genuinely appreciate the chance he's been given. He was literally on his way to a mental facility or prison before my friend stepped in. On his super speeding racing stints he'd say something like, "I got this bitch all the way to 125 even with your fat asses in the whip." I'm as much for jovial shit-talking as the next person, but that's all he's ever on, and he's proud of the danger and, at least while I'm around, almost never corrected or redirected. It's precisely here you start to flirt with terms like "codependent" and "enabling."

My buddy has his own list of stressors and drama related to his family and a bank fucking him financially. DCS has always played games. His jobs require a lot of time and driving. If the kid was a saint, his life would be particularly stressful the last couple years. With the kid as an ungrateful, hateful engine of chaos, we've seen even periods of remote stability get shaken by a stiff breeze. For every little seeming win, he's just as eagerly prepared to regress and destroy and throw what's been accomplished out the window. I don't care if for the first time in memory the kid is waking up and regularly taking out and cleaning up after the $800 dog he got last week if he's prepared to wave a gun at me when I yell at him to slow the fuck down and stop driving like he wants to kill us all.

We're at the point now where I want the game called. I want to press charges. I want consequences to send the kid where he belongs, which is not in a struggling household with a single foster parent who does not have the time, energy, or intention of the mental facility the child needs. Would they do right by him? Probably not. We live in Indiana and a country that doesn't train or care or invest in dealing with kids nowhere near his level. Is that his, or especially my, cross to bear? I don't think I've for a second supported him getting this kid well before I had any instantiated opinion on the kid for a dozen reasons related to getting our own shit together first. There's many reasons I don't have kids, even if I went to zero concerts the last two years and had thousands to spend on them.

The problem has reached the point where I'm feeling very "me or him." I want nothing to do with the kid. I'm watching my best friend functionally abandon me to the whims and chance of his kid's behavior, and I'm so devoid of how to conceptualize that, that it doesn't even make me feel angry or like I want to move into a space of judgment and resentment. I think my friend cares. I think he tried. I think it's an abject failure. I think I accepted the nature of our dynamic being that of, "You know, I'm not really trying to take the bullet for you," when we were having those discussions as teenagers. I'm not taking a bullet, or high-velocity air rifle rounds, from this little shit.

I handle crisis or crisis-adjacent situations all the time. To even talk about my "anger" related to the situation might give you the wrong impression that I didn't make a calm deliberate call to the police as I heard the tires screeching as the kid peeled away. My adrenaline wasn't pumping. I wasn't yelling. But, much as when I handed my ex the knife to shit or get off the pot with the threat of her slitting her wrists, I don't deal well with living under the sword of Damocles. This kid has been too hot and too unstable from the jump, and the gifts and rewards and placations have done nothing but provide an environment for him to feel emboldened to continue and draw pride from his self-destruction. My friend smokes a lot, speeds, and plays the same games. I don't see the capacity to lead by example along the metrics the kid needs to change. I see an uncle the kid might be allowed to visit in small doses after he's actually shown something worth rewarding.

One of the topics I've been talking about in Groups this last week is forgiveness/grace. How much room do you give? In my view, we never had to get to dropped on the side of the highway at 3 AM after gun waiving, but we did. I was certainly speaking to the issue well before it got that far. How much should we belabor the story of the kid's trauma? Certainly to a serious and far degree, but are we willing to also accept that you can be a fucking dickhead psychopath on top of that? Our job isn't to save anyone. It's to exercise your perspective and try. I tried right up until the point I couldn't stop repeating to myself, "I'm not dying for the fucking kid," and thinking about Ryan Dunn or all the shows unseen and projects not attempted.

I'm not forgiving the kid anymore than I'm forgiving my mom. Like her, he's not equipped to build on and exercise an accountable perspective. His upbringing or genetics broke his brain. The Hail Mary that is my friend attempting to contain this kid is causing me to contemplate in a measured way how I need to consciously uncouple from anything to do with either of them. This isn't a game, for all of my analogies suggesting otherwise. An excellent DMT trip might have released my buddy from a fear of death, but I'm not so ambivalent.

We can return to fundamentals. What can I control, what can't I? I can't make my friend adopt my perspective. I can never be in contact with the kid again. I can deny my truck to be loaned out and say, "You invited his impending meltdown into your home, not me." I can clear my booze and video games out of their house and go back to paying to do my laundry. I can press charges. I don't know if there's an underlying cry for help to release my friend from some sunk-cost fallacy that's rooted itself into this dynamic because I don't know what I can trust in the "I'm sorrys" that change nothing and persist in bad behavior, and tales of appeasement held up as growth. That's not good for my friend, for the kid, and certainly not for me.