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Sherry's Story W E L L , I ’ L L S TA RT. My earliest memory is, I was, I’m going to call it three, and—this is a screwed-up first memory—I witnessed my father get murdered by my uncle. This is my earliest memory. My mom was a drinker and so was my dad. And they got into it one night and my uncle came in and shot my dad. From there I moved to an apartment and I got a new dad. He was a drinker like Mom, too. And he was abusive. Mom, God rest her soul, she slept around a lot. She was just a good-time party girl, I guess. And then when I was in kindergarten, first grade, she got cancer and we moved from the city to a small town and we had long years of cancer, and through that time she still had lots of boyfriends, lots of parties. My stepdad was still there and there was all kinds of boyfriends. But my stepdad molested me when I was seven. And then Mom died and I was eleven. But from seven to eleven we went back and forth with my grandma and my uncle and all our relatives. She was up here in a hospital. After Mom died we went and lived with my uncle back in the city. And that’s where most of my memories are. He was abusive to his wife. There was me and my brother and my sister. We moved in with him and he had at the time two kids. And he was drunk and abusive and my Aunt Susan was a real—what I call a real lady. You know she’d do anything for us, you know, she was just wonderful. And he just always beat the hell out of her. Then we left the city and moved back into the country and he was still mean to her. And that’s when I started getting onto drugs—but years before that—see here’s where it gets confusing— When Mom was sick, I started getting into—I made friends in town, we lived out in the country and I started—I think my drug use has to do with my abuse. The first time I ever did any drugs I was like seven and I took “tea”?— which is like a base of heroin and cocaine mixed. And I was the youngest of the crowd. It was my sister-in-law, it was her friends, her age, she was three years older than me. And then I started drinking. It wasn’t like I turned into a seven-year-old alcoholic or nothing, but every weekend we would go in and I was always the funny one to get drunk, I would always throw up first. I was seven. And then I started getting high. Then we moved up to the city and Mom died when I was eleven. The drinking and the getting high went on through 162 S H E R R Y ’ S S T O R Y 163 that period. But Mom was on liquid morphine and my sister, she was three years older than us, and she was trying to keep up with me and my brother and raise the family and she started giving us Mom’s liquid morphine, you know, to put us to sleep. Not a whole lot, she wasn’t trying to kill us or nothing. Anyway, Mom dies and we moved back to the city and my uncle, he’s drunk and abusive. He used to let us sniff gas. He thought that was the coolest thing in the world to do and get high on the stuff. He was really stupid. That went on and then I started getting interested in boys and my big thing was like, I’d always have to have the party guy. You know, the cool, tattooed, long-hair, skull-earring-type guy, you know [laughs]. I got real promiscuous. The first abusive relationship I got into, I was thirteen. I was thirteen and the guy was twenty-two. He was the coolest thing in town. He had a Harley Davidson and a Green Demon and he was just so cool. He never really, his [abuse] wasn’t—he wouldn’t smack me in my face. He whipped my butt, you know, like a child, you know, that was his thing. But I thought...

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