My childhood years were not normal compared to what most people experience growing up. I would consider my childhood nothing less than dysfunctional. My father and my mother were together for only one year after my birth. After that first year, I saw my father only occasionally through a thick plate-glass window while he was incarcerated for his ongoing problem with drug abuse. I remember touching that glass and wishing I could touch him instead. Unfortunately, that was something I was never able to do.

My mother and father were addicts, although I perceived their behavior as normal in the early stages of my life. In fact, I believe I had those addictive characteristics from birth, through the genes that I inherited from them.

After my parents separated, my mother raised me by herself. Growing up with my mother was exhausting, as we moved continuously when I was young. From the ages of one through nine, I never lived in a place called home; we lived in many different apartments and with various family members. The word home was not in my vocabulary.

Both of my parents' families were drunks. My mother's father was an alcoholic, and so was her grandfather; therefore my mother was a third-generation addict. Her mother was what we called a "normy," someone who could take it or leave it when it came to alcohol. Dysfunctional behavior — arguments, yelling, and lots of drinking and drunkenness — was a part of my daily life as a child. At social gatherings, alcohol was always present. I remember being at my grandmother's apartment when I was three years old, taking her glass of wine in my hands, and drinking it. I ended up crawling on the floor, too dizzy to walk.

It was a memorable experience, being drunk at such an early age. I can still feel the euphoria that resonated within me, and the destructive pain that alcohol caused within my family. Our daily lives were chaotic, as we were always going from place to place; we were never in one place for any significant length of time. From first through sixth grades I lived in Inglewood, California — that was the longest my family stayed in one place. This was in the early sixties and seventies, during the time of the Watts riots, and I was exposed to violence on a daily basis. I will never forget the arrests of picketers and the mandatory program through which kids were bused all over the city to create an integrated school system. This program was designed to ease racial tension, but as a result I always felt unsafe and like I didn't belong — not only at home, but now also at school.

Every morning when kids got off the bus, there were picket lines in front of the school. Once we got into class, everything was okay. I did not have a clue about the prejudice driving the situation, but I did know that it was chaotic outside of school. We kids were all together, and I was thankful for the stability of being around my peers, but the turmoil that happened before school made me confused about who was right and who was wrong. I had to walk three or four blocks to school, and with everything going on, I was always afraid. My mother worked during those years, and so most of the time I was home alone after school. Confused by all the instability around me, I would lock the door behind me at 2:00 p.m. and wait for my mom to come home at six.

In Inglewood I lived in a poverty-stricken neighborhood full of criminal activity. People sold drugs right outside my apartment door. After regularly witnessing this activity, I became receptive to the idea of drugs and immune t