TOMMY

PHOTO BY RANDY BACON

TOMMY’S STORY

My family is nothing but a whole bunch of either federal or DOC inmates. A lot of my relatives are criminals and the way that I was raised up in life was not any way that a child should be brought up. I was selling meth by eleven years old for my uncle, and I didn’t really start using drugs until some things with my mind started going wrong. I have a mental disability. Most of my family has struggled and have had to do horrible things in order to be able to keep other parts of our family afloat, or even to keep their kids in the house. 

I don’t really want anybody to really know about my life, but even with most of the struggles I’ve been through, I’m glad I’ve found faith. Today I can say that I have discovered quite a bit about myself, and my life doesn’t have to be filthy or violent or just even harmful. Life can be in peace and I’m still kind of learning the whole thing about love. I just kind of have a little bit of a soft spark for everybody nowadays, even though they do horrible things to me, I’m still there for them. I segregate myself and whenever I do walk or skate around if I see any of my homeless brothers or sisters, I check in with them to see how they’re doing and if they need anything. There’s a lot of people that are very selfish, and it’s like people don’t want to accept that a person who came from my background can change. But we all can change.

My advice is to keep the faith, and help thy brother whenever, if they are in need of something. We all should be lucky that we’re still alive out here. I mean, I have some external problems, and it’s pretty hard for me to be able to get the nourishment for my body that it needs, and my diet pretty much consists of just bread, yogurt, cheese and milk. Also, keeping doctors appointments is really tough on me. I’ve been trying to get Medicaid for almost five years now. I haven’t even gotten a letter from them yet.

The biggest let down I think was whenever I got clean and sober after all that and I had a child with this girl and Department of Social Services got involved because of an altercation that me and her brother got into, and the kids got taken from the home. It split me two different ways. And I ended up going to jail over it and going to court for it, and it just completely messed me up.

A lot of my dreams have been very misguided. Back whenever I was still a teenager, and I was still selling drugs, I was able to become a sponsored skater and I made it all the way up to the Dew Tour. Then my third session happened where I ran over my left foot, it came out of socket and twisted my whole foot at 360 degrees. So I’m trying to come back from being at that state, it was real hard, because I now see that my addictions were the downfall and I’ve just been trying to restart on a different page.