Shifting Tides A Memoir

A short excerpt from a novel set in the 80’s and 90’s of a deaf runaway’s story of survival on the streets and the odds he had to overcome. The story illustrates despite how life can begin…it can get messy or a lot better with the right perspective and a little help along the way. The story was written in hopes to help others avoid making some of the same mistakes along the way.

Dedicated to my besties, jc, rc, dt, jm and mi la familia. I wouldnt take two steps without all that helped me along the way.

And for my pun loving friend I couldnt Kelp It.......Remember to seas the day, make friends not anemones, dont be shellfish, water you waiting for? Thanks for inspiring me to write this thing.

J Fields.

• Foreword

  - The Shoreline - Present Day.

  I'm standing on the beach watching a kid catch their first wave. The smile is infectious. I've long forgotten all the smiles and laughter of those early first days of catching waves, but I do remember I fell in love with it instantly. I knew it was where I wanted to be.

  The ocean rumbles under my feet as a surge races to the shore. Shorebirds scatter at the intrusion. The wind presses at my back. I'm not wearing my cochlear implant. The sounds are there, but they don't reach me the same way—they never have. What most people hear as noise, I've always experienced as something else. Not silence exactly. Something closer to what I think of as beautiful chaos—air, wind, and water moving in a rhythm you feel more than hear.

  The shoreline is never quiet. Not really. Especially on hot summer days filled with tourists and voices and motion. But standing here, watching that kid fight to stay on his feet in the inside turbulence, it feels different. He's not just smiling—his whole body is lit up. Frozen in that moment of disbelief and excitement, riding something bigger than him and somehow staying upright.

  I recognize it instantly.

  Not the wave. Not the stance.

  The feeling.

  I found myself thinking about who I was at that age—before everything that came after. Before being bullied for being Deaf. Before sleeping in bushes behind stores. Before the chaos of nightclubs, addiction, rehab, and losing everything.

  That kid has no idea how close I came to never being here.

  To understand why this moment matters, you have to understand what I went through to make it there.

• Chapter 0

  Ground Zero

  The first punch landed before I was fully awake. One second, I was asleep in my sleeping bag, curled up in the bushes behind an auto parts store. The next second, something slammed into the side of my head, and my whole world exploded into motion. 


  
  When you're Deaf, sleep is different. You don't wake up to footsteps or voices. You wake up to vibrations, sudden movement, or pain. That night, it was pain.
  
  I opened my eyes to shadows moving above me—two shapes. Maybe three. I couldn't tell. 

The darkness swallowed their faces, but their intentions were clear.
  
  Someone grabbed the edge of my sleeping bag and yanked it hard. My body rolled sideways into the dirt and gravel. Before I could get my balance, another hit came—this time to my ribs. 

I remember thinking one thing, clear and sharp: I had to get up. Now!
  
  When you can't hear what's happening around you, fighting is different. You don't react to sound—you react to movement: hands, shadows, the shift of bodies in the dark. 

A fist came toward my face. I ducked and drove forward, slamming my shoulder into whoever was closest. We crashed into the dirt together. For a moment, everything was chaos—arms grabbing, bodies shoving, gravel grinding under our feet. One of them shoved me hard in the chest. 

Another kicked my backpack a few feet across the dirt. I went for it immediately. My hearing aid was inside. I could lose everything else—but not that. Normally, I kept it in my pocket, but that night I'd zipped it into the front pouch. I grabbed the pack, swung it onto my shoulders, and turned back around. There were five of them. Two had waited outside in the parking lot on the other side of the bushes waiting for me. I'm no fighter. Not even close. I had been in a lot of fights but no way could i even begin this one. But the adrenaline hit hard, and I knew I needed out. Fight or flight was kicking in hard. There was only one way back to the street. 

One of them stepped forward, mumbled something unintelligible, and then asked if I liked sleeping in the bushes. I didn't fully catch it—just the shape of the words as he stepped into the light of the back dock.
  
  Then he abruptly swung at me, a smile on his face as if he was doing me a favor. I ducked. Someone grabbed my shoulder from behind. I twisted, punched backward, shoved my knee into another guy who was just too low to the ground and got it in the face and dropped like a brick, and I ran. I ran like Prefontaine.
  
  I ran until I ran into a friend who was just getting off work. She took me to her moms and they called the cops. I didnt want to talk to them but it was just a detective. He said he knew who the group was. They attacked homeless people. I was just another target for them.
  
  I left everything else behind that night. All my mementos, a couple of childhood things, my sleeping bag, my song book journals, and what little extra shirts i had. . By this time, sleeping in bushes behind stores wasn't new to me. When you're homeless, you learn quickly where you can hide—places security won't check, places the police won't bother with unless someone complains. 

Behind that auto parts store, I felt safe. Thick shrubs. A dark corner of the lot. A fence wall to your back. Far enough from the road that no one would notice a sleeping bag tucked under the drooping branches. But hiding places work both ways. If you can disappear there, so can trouble. 

Nobody knew what had just happened behind that store. Nobody heard it. That was the thing about my life back then. Most of it happened in silence……
  To be continued. …….