I went to church today. Every time I go I feel like a fake. I don’t believe in the Bible and when I see all these people lifting their hands and singing I feel like laughing. They look so dumb. I can actually recall the exact moment that I extinguished god and faith out of my life. 

I remember I was six years old sitting Indian style on my bed, in my white and blue striped skin tight pajamas. I was flipping through the channels when it happened. I stopped when I saw a man in a white beard walking down a dirt path with some kind of shelters behind him. The clouds were dark and churning in the background. I was compelled to watch it even though it was a commercial. The guy was dressed in a white button down and khaki shorts, as he walked children flocked to him. They were my age and yet I knew they didn’t attend Embassy Creek Elementary. Their feet were barren, their eyes were as black as their skin, their shirts were filthy. As the man spoke, I found myself covered in tears. The man was asking for donations to help these deprived children. They were starving. They were in need of a miracle. My brother came out of the shower to find his little brother balling in front of the TV, and he was scared. He ran to get my mother and I heard him yell, “something’s wrong with Bryan!” My mother came in and held me in her arms. She began to rock me back and forth, and I was crying harder than I ever did before, the kind of crying where you can’t breathe. Through the huffing and puffing, I look up at my mother with sobbing eyes. I managed to ask, “Mom, is God real?” I asked it although I already knew the answer. She assured me he was and continued to rock me back and forth. “Of course, God is real,” she said… I knew she was just saying that, there’s no way he could let this happen… to those kids.


I can’t remember what else my mom told me and frankly it didn’t matter. I knew there was no God. What all powerful being could let a child starve? I mean really starve, not like when I say, “c’mon Mom, I’m starving.” 

No, these kids were starving to the point where their bodies fed upon themselves. These weren’t bad people; they were my age, living in the same world and yet another universe all together. A child is the embodiment of pure innocence, if there was a God how could this be going on in the world, and how could he allow it. I looked down at my pajamas and I hated everything about them. I hated their color, the stretchy elastic on my wrists and ankles. I despised my house. I began to realize how nurtured and pampered my life really was. I didn’t want any of it.

From that moment on I was convinced that God was an illusion and the world wasn’t a good place. I yearned for pain and wickedness, and in the years to come I would receive them both, disguised under the false truths of what my friends and I called “having fun.”

September 8th, 2008

I feel ok today. Abigail is coming over. She’s a lousy fuck, but whatever. We were in treatment together.

In Spanish 2, I see this freshman across from me. He can’t weigh more than 120 pounds. Short, soft spoken, shy, he’s probably really excited to be in high school. 

Enjoy the ride little fucker. 

His parents probably go over his homework. The most traumatic thing in his life was most likely when his Golden Retriever died. I look at him and think, “when I was a freshman I was smoking crack.”

That was in boarding school. My parents sent me to a military school in Melbourne right at the beginning of freshman year. They had caught me doing coke a few times and they were fed up. I remember my mother asking me if I was addicted. I said I wasn’t, and I really believed it. But when she asked me why I couldn’t stop, I didn’t really have an answer for her. I ended up telling her that I was just “experimenting,” as if experimenting with coke at fourteen is acceptable or some shit. I have to remind myself that parents aren’t given a handbook on how to deal with this.

I had started school at Western, but after the first month my dad picked me up from school and drug tested me. Both me and my brother, actually. All my brother ever did was smoke weed, but he passed with no trace of it in his system. I wasn’t so lucky. We went into a small shopping plaza and pulled into a store front called Cobra Drug Screening with that picture you often see on lifted trucks of a little kid peeing, but here he was pissing on a cobra. 

I took the test and the results came back positive for EVERYTHING.

Coke, weed, amphetamine, benzos and some other things. Actually, now that I think of it, I was positive for everything except opiates. I didn’t even know what opiates were back then. I thought an opiate was that shit Edgar Allan Poe smoked… funny how I would find out what they were soon enough. Ironically, I did my first Oxy in military school.

After some talking and some yelling, my parents sent me to my room and told me I was grounded. I didn’t know where they would send me, but I knew I was going somewhere, maybe rehab. I felt so ashamed and didn’t know what to say or do. I thought about HER, but we weren’t talking. She was one of my only friends my age. I always thought of her when stuff like this would happen. I knew she would find out what happened to me. I hoped she would feel sorry for me. I wanted her to feel bad. I don’t know why, but when I feel miserable I want everyone else around me to feel it too.

A few days later my parents told me we were all going somewhere, but I still didn’t know where. I didn’t even bother to ask, but I noticed my mom packed me a small overnight bag. We drove two hours to what looked like a prestigious school. We took a tour and all I thought was, “what other choice do I have?” 

We sat down with some military guy and they made me sign some papers. My dad paid extra so they would give me courses in flying. It was an Air Force Academy and they would teach kids how to fly Cessna planes.

I’m a fucking fourteen year old cokehead and they’re going to let me fly a plane?

My mom, dad, brother and sister left. As I watched my dad’s truck pull away, I felt a sense of relief. 

A sincere feeling of, “okay, now they’re gone.” 


A smirk started to crawl onto my face. I felt excited. My parents sent my things and I quickly adjusted to military school, which really wasn’t a badass military academy or anything like that. It was more like a preppy boarding school. 

There were two kinds of students at Florida Air Academy. Some of the kids were there because their parents heard it was a prestigious school and spent a lot of money for discipline and education. On the other hand, there was the kind that was court ordered there, and to them it functioned as a disciplinary school. The government paid for them to be there. I always felt like I was somewhere in the middle. My parents had money and they paid for me to go, shit, they even paid the extra ten grand for the flight lessons.

After a few days, I got all the details of the who’s-who at the school. On my first day, people warned me about a Mexican kid named Diez. Since it’s a military school, everyone goes by their last name. They said he was a total asshole and really prissy. I imagined a big brown kid that didn’t take shit from anyone, but when I first met Diez I couldn’t help laughing. 

He was white; white as fuck, with a Spanish accent, stupid ass hair, lanky, skinny, scrawny, and about five inches shorter than me. Even though I was doing drugs I was still working out. I’ve always worked out. In fifth grade I got a bench press for my birthday. I was stronger than practically anyone in my age group, even stronger than kids a few years older than me. I was benching about 185 which was considered really good for a fourteen year old. When I met Diez, I quickly noticed what everyone was talking about. You couldn’t go near his bunk, touch his things, or even say a rude comment to him without him blowing up in your face. He had a temper. I don’t know why everyone was so scared of him, though. He was just a little snobby rich Mexican kid. Apparently all the popular kids there were Mexican. When I told Diez I was Mexican and Colombian, he looked at me and said, “you’re Mexican AND Colombian, that’s fucking crazy meng.”


Next on the list of people to know was yet another prissy kid named Bernard, who everyone called Frenchy. 

After my first day, I was tired, and I fell asleep on top of my bunk. I was rooming with Diez and I heard him talking to Frenchy, or as Diez called him, “Frances,” down below the bunk. Frances was asking him about me. “Ey, who’s this faggot, what’s his name, what the fuck, they put some new kid in your fucking room?” He started shouting my name, “Hey, Alzate, wake up!” I pretended not to hear. He threw a basketball at my bunk and repeated, “Ey, wake up faggot!” I looked at him.

“Yo, fuck off!” He threw the ball again. 

I felt a surge of rage fill my veins. I jumped down from the bunk, ignoring the little metal ladder, and he was taken off guard. He was a few inches taller than me, but skinnier. I tackled him and he fell over a foot locker that was placed directly behind him. I was choking him and kneeing his sides when our drill sergeant broke it up. I told the drill sergeant what happened. I figured he would take my side because it was my first day and all. He did. 

Frenchy got KP (Kitchen Patrol). I cursed him out when he left the room, “you’re lucky, I was going to the beat the fuck out of you.”

Frenchy was tan, about 5’11 and lean. At first, I had mistaken him for being scrawny, but then I realized that he was addicted to working out. I was still bigger than him and could bench more, but he was lean—lean as fuck. Craziest eight-pack I’ve ever seen. And his skin looked as if he slept in a tanning bed and showered in baby oil. He was from a rich family that lived in North Miami, but he grew up in France. He had a thick accent and gay ass faux-hawk. Pretty much all those faggots from North Miami had faux-hawks.

I stayed away from Frenchy for weeks and he stayed away from me. In military school, everyone is in uniform so no one knows who is cool, or whose tough, and the tough kids try you, or the kids who at least think they’re tough. In my eyes, there wasn’t a single tough kid here… but word got around that I wasn’t a punk and a few other kids tried me and I wasn’t the one. Not to say I’m a thug or gangster but I’m not letting these dweebs fuck with me.

I would see Frenchy all the time and I would grill him, letting him know if he says one fucking word to me I was ready to go, making sure he knew that I wasn’t scared of him like all the other kids. Frenchy was a sophomore and felt he could pick on the younger kids. With Diez as my roommate, I started to win him and the other kids at the school over pretty quickly, with stories that were only half true. Diez wasn’t tough and scary but he was actually pretty cool.

I asked who had coke and if they knew where to get any. They looked at me like I was crazy. Our Flight Sergeant Dustin Adams said he loved coke but that it was hard to get there. Adams was a junior who lived in our hall. He could lock his door and do pretty much whatever he wanted. In return, he looked after us and told us when to fall in and shit like that. He was a blonde haired skater kid from Venice Beach, and we became close friends while I was there.  

Every two to three weeks, I would go back home on a three-hour bus ride and visit my family, and when I went back to school I made sure to bring some coke with me. I bought an 8 ball, put it in three sandwich bags, and dug it deep down in my protein container. I already asked the drill sergeant if I could keep the protein in my bunk, so he didn’t really check it when I came back. Normally when you come back to school they go through your things to make sure you didn’t bring back cigarettes, porn, or weed, but no one opens a protein container. I mean, they would open it but they’re not sticking their hand all in it.

With me bringing back the coke after my first few weeks, everyone knew I wasn’t full of shit. We went into Adams’s dorm, locked the door and started doing it pretty often. I would sell some here and there, but not so much, cause I didn’t want any of the retarded kids to rat me out. I would overprice the fuck out of it though and make my money back in two grams, so it was pretty sweet.
I had still been avoiding Frenchy, but then one day he came up to me in formation. Totally out of the blue, he leaned over and said, “Hey, my roommate is moving out of my bunk. Will you be my new roommate? Please?” I started laughing. Frenchy continued, “I hate all these faggots here. All of them. But I like you. Even though you wear those Lacoste shoes.” I laughed again and told him Lacoste was the shit. “Pfft, in France only homeless people wear Lacoste. You gotta get these.” He showed me some gay ass shoes called Le Tigre. His French accent was super thick, I never met anyone with a French accent before.

Quicker than expected, I finished out the school year at Florida Air Academy. Frenchy, Diez, Adams, and I became good friends and had a lot of fun there. They had a gym downstairs, so we kept working out during the year. My problem with working out was always that I could never stick to it, but at military school the gym was there 24-7. It was hard not to work out. But sometimes I’d get too coked out and be stuck in my room, missing class, doing coke all day long. Nevertheless, I went from benching 185 to 205. Frenchy and I worked out together every day.


There was this one kid, I can’t remember his name, but he swore he was from Miami and would do anything to fit in with us. We would all slap him around, and Adams would pants him in a room full of girls and embarrass the shit out of him. I remember actually slapping him pretty good a few times. He strolled into our room one night and was bragging to us about how he got herpes from making out with some chick at the movies, and we all knew it was bullshit. He said she was super fine. He stuck out his lip and exhaled, “Uhh, yeah man, that’s what happens when you mess around with a lot of girls, you get stuff on your lips.” I just looked at him like he had two heads. Why someone would say that, I don’t even know. He showed Diez and I his little medicine drops for his mouth. He had to squirt it under his lip and keep it there for a few minutes before rinsing it out. One night, while he was showering, I got an idea. I called Diez, Adam, and Frenchy into his room. I emptied out his medicine dropper and we all proceeded to hock loogies into the plastic container. Adams had the nastiest one, thick and yellow with this brown hard thing in the middle that looked like an egg yolk. I squeezed the dropper and sucked up all the spit and yellow snot-barf that I could and then put it back in the bottle. Then we waited. He came into the room in his towel and we all watched. He was a freshman, but he looked twelve, and acted like a five year old. He reached for the dropper and squirted the shit into his mouth. Frenchy couldn’t contain himself and started laughing. Skeptical, but still unaware of what was going on, the kid squeezed the dropper of loogies and put more into his mouth. He held it there for as long as he could, and then said it tasted weird. We all started laughing and Adams told him it was filled with loogies. He almost started to cry and went to rinse his mouth out.  The drill sergeant came in to see what all the commotion was about, but he didn’t really like the kid to begin with because he had caught him saying “nigga” with a hard R a few times, so when he went complaining to Major John about us spitting in his medicine, the Major didn’t really give a fuck. A few times when I would bring back coke he would beg me to give him some, so one night I made a fat line of protein power and the kid snorted it. Adams and I laughed our asses off. Even if he told on us, they would never find the coke. I had it hidden in my computer. I would open the side of it and there was a little ledge above the fan that you could hide pretty much anything. Even Frenchy didn’t know where I hid my coke. 

That’s pretty much how freshman year went, bringing back any where from an 8-ball to a quarter on my trips back home, selling it, doing it straight for a few days, coming down on Thursday, skipping class, jerking off when I could, sleeping all day, waking up, eating, and working out. I wouldn’t touch the coke or even crave it for a few weeks, but I would go and get more whenever I could. A lot of kids in high school don’t really do coke because it's expensive, but I could take a few hundred dollars every few weeks from my dad’s debit card and he’d never find out and just flip it. I would sell kids in military school lines for 20 bucks… LINES not grams.

It wasn’t always a big coke fest. Sometimes Frenchy and I would wake up real early on a Saturday and go running. But to be honest, after a while everyone started to realize that I did coke way too much. Sometimes Adams would say stuff like, “I can't this week man, that stuff is messing up my heart,” and I would end up doing coke alone. I remember I stayed up all night once and finished off the 8 ball I had. The next morning my eyes were all fucked up and my nose was a runny mess. The Mexican kids in school would call me “El Cocadrillo,” but Diez looked at me that morning when we were lining up for formation and said, “man, you’re a fucking crackhead.” I knew he didn’t mean anything by it, and was just messing around, but even I couldn’t deny that I was getting out of hand. 

I had crossed the line again, where using drugs turned into the drugs using me.

Below, a photo of me at Military School, 2006.