Nothing.

What did I learn in high school?

Absolutely nothing……

I dropped out of school at the start of grade 9. That’s junior high school. I never made it as far as high school.

Had to get out of the PMQ.

1987 was the start of the grade 9 school year for me.

September of 1987 was also two years removed from the summer of 1985.

The summer of 1985 was the last summer that my brother and I spent with our grandmother.

The summer of 1985 was also the summer that my father went on a rampage in the PMQ on CFB Downsview. He did some very significant damage to the PMQ. It took three military police officers to subdue him.

When my brother and I arrived back in Toronto from Edmonton my father was required to notify the base military police of our arrival so that they could come speak with us. When they did come to speak with us they told us that during their investigation they grew very concerned when they couldn’t find us so they started talking to the neighbours and that’s when they started hearing about Richard’s yelling and screaming and his physical abuse. The military police said that if my father ever lost his temper again that we were to flee the house before calling the base switchboard to ask for the military police.

In September of 1985, my father bought me a birthday cake. This blew my fucking socks off as he had never acknowledged a single birthday of mine since 1976, the year before my mother left. Even though he promised to never forget my birthday again, he never acknowledged my birthday again thereafter.

And his temper started to get out of control again by the spring of 1986. He just knew how to hide his outbursts better as he was under supervision of the military.

By the summer of 1987 my brother had graduated to credit card theft, B&Es, and car theft. He had also grown significantly larger than me and he was even physically larger than Richard. Richard could no longer control Scott. And Scott was now running with a group of thugs. Kids who had been in and out of the juvie system.

As Richard had given up on trying to control Scott, he instead turned to lashing out at me for allowing Scott t have been molested by the babysitter on CFB Namao and this is why Scott was acting as violent as he was.

So yeah, by the time September of 1987 rolled around, I had to get the fuck out of the house.

What would really piss me the fuck off is that in the summer of 2011, when I obtained my social service records from across Canada, I would learn that my family was actually under the supervision of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto from the time we arrived in CFB Downsview in the spring of 1983.

This pissed me off because when I moved out I had to take my employment from part time to full time so that I could afford to rent a place to live.

Had I known about my family having been under the supervision of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, I could have applied to CAST for emergency accommodation. I could have even arranged for the courts to make it mandatory for my father to pick up my bills until age 18. Either of these would have allowed me to finish off school while living in a safe environment.