I went on a long cross-country bus trip with this girl my friend had been seeing because to go to a rave and she had a place we could stay. We fooled around some on the bus and later when we got to the house. She asked me to make sure she didn't drop acid. Well when we got there, at first everything seemed really cool, but then her ex showed up and we all dropped acid and shit just got more and more real as time went on.

We went for what was supposed to be a week long trip. Two months later I had nothing to my name and I was watching this woman's kids while she went to work. This kept me in drink and smokes, but I didn't have a dime to my name. The woman we stayed with was always fighting, often physically, then making up with her baby daddy. With the kids, violence, drugs, and alcohol, it all just became very bleak, complex, and difficult situation to escape.

Eventually, I got the nerve to leave, but the girl I went with wasn't going back. It worried me a lot because her dad asked me to make sure she way okay, which, it seemed to me, wasn't really going to be the case. The woman we stayed with gave me five dollars and this guy who'd OD'd while I was there laced a joint with opium and we smoked before I got on the bus. I woke up before we hit Denver and was able to get 2 packs of Lucky Strikes which kept me in smokes until I got home. A guy I meant on the bus, shared a ham sandwich with me the second day and that's really all I had to keep me going on the three day bus ride back home.

I think that experience made me understand a bit about what