Sink or Swim | Chapter 3
by Trenton Grant | edited by Justin McKee
I was around 11 when my father and stepmother separated. This is when things really started spiraling out of control for him.
He was selling weed and methamphetamine and had developed a serious meth addiction. We were renting a house at the time, but he couldn’t keep up the with bills and it was all just too much for him. I remember one time where I watched my father lock up, as if he was having a seizure. Whatever it was, it scared the shit out of me. He had a hard time keeping food in the house; I guessed he was experiencing the effects of malnutrition or sleep deprivation. On one occasion, he said he was going to the store…and didn’t return until the next day. I found out later that he’d been arrested for trying to steal a roast.
Eventually we were evicted, and my father found another job as a mechanic, or so he told us. But I knew he was just using it as a front to sell drugs. He made some sort of trade for a 5th-wheel trailer that he put by the shop for us to live in. This thing was a real piece of shit. The rear wall wasn’t even attached to the floor. I was living there with my brother, my father, and whatever crackhead girlfriend he happened to have around. We had an extension cord that supplied us with a little bit of electricity, but we had no toilet or running water. We had to cross the parking lot to use the bathroom at the shop. The trailer was always loud and people were always around doing drugs and talking nonsense. It was so hard to get to sleep at night, and I was always tired in school. One time, I walked into the trailer and there was meth on the coffee table, all divided up into ounces, and cash everywhere that my father and others were trying to count but failing miserably because they were all whacked out of their minds. I couldn’t understand why we were always so broke with all that money around, and why — if my father was a mechanic — he had a piece of shit car that barely ran.
That life lasted a couple years, until my father’s place got raided by the police. I was walking home from school and I saw the cops and SWAT team everywhere, searching the shop and the trailer. I decided to turn around and I slept at a friend’s house that night. When I went back in the morning, the place had been destroyed, which wasn’t really that much different from how it was before. My father was arrested and sent to prison, and my brother and I went to live with my mom.
She’d since remarried to a man with two kids of his own. My new stepfather was a decent man who worked for the electric company. He was a positive role model in my life at that time and to this day I am grateful for that. I learned from him a different way of conducting myself. I was somewhat of a problem child at the time, drinking and smoking and fighting, hanging out with a rough crowd. My stepfather told me something once that stuck with me, and was so opposite the message I’d received from my father. He said ‘Trenton, I know you think I’m just being a hardass, but you don’t think that I’d like to sit back and smoke a joint and go party? I’d love to do this, but the reality is that I have a good job, a nice car and house, all you kids and your mother to look after. I’ve worked so hard for all this and for me to lose focus and risk throwing it all away is crazy.’ When he put it like that, it made a lot of sense to me.
When I was in 10th grade, my stepfather got a better job and we moved to a little town called Manton, in Northern Michigan. I was the new kid in a school in a new state. I got into a few fights at first, but eventually settled in and started playing sports. I wrestled, ran track, and played football. It was a great time in my young life, and seemed like things were finally beginning to turn around. But my time in Michigan ended at the beginning of my senior year, when my stepfather secured a CEO position at an electric company in Sundance, Wyoming. So we moved again, making this my third high school. Wyoming was difficult for me, but I made it through and graduated with my high school diploma. I was glad to have done it, but the best part was seeing how happy it made my mother. She was so proud of me.
Trenton Grant works as an offshore commercial diver in the southern United States. His autobiography Sink or Swim was edited and published by the raffish and can be read in full here.
