Gregory

I came home to Lake Charles on break expecting to have a good time. It was the holiday season for giving. There were many things that I had to be proud of. I passed all my classes, Christmas was coming up on December 25th, my birthday was on December 29th, and New Years on the 1st and I wanted to have a good time. However, things just didn’t work out for me. My body was really starting to fail me now. During this holiday break, I knew something was really wrong with me. I started having mood swings, I couldn’t sleep at night and my bones were starting to crack all the time. My close cousins knew what kind of athlete I was, but they assumed that I was just getting lazy and they knew me better than anybody. My cousins, Theryl Johnson and Arnold McKinley, were really close at this time. We were all attending Southern now. Arnold thought I wasn’t getting any exercise. I ran everything in high school from cross country, which is a 3-mile run, on down to the 440 yard dash. So he challenged me to a mile race. I beat him soundly. I told him he would have to live a long time before I would let him beat me in a mile. He was a high jumper, not a miler. The next day, another high school friend wanted to race 440 yards. I beat him too.

However, I knew something was not right with my whole body. I was too young to be feeling like this. The previous semester in college I went out for the track team but I had to quit because I could not perform up to my expectations. I had taken considerable pride in my running abilities, but it just wasn’t there anymore. It made me look and feel like a loser and a quitter; that was something I had to live with. It lowered my self-esteem but it did not destroy me.

About half-way through the semester, I even changed beds to see if I could sleep better. It didn’t work. I was getting very frustrated now. I saw a couple of doctors but none of them gave me a reasonable explanation of what was going on. It was either stress or I needed to start taking vitamins again. So I just stopped complaining. The doctors told me there’s nothing wrong with me so I prepared to head back to school for the spring of ‘81.

I had been living in Baton Rouge for 18 months now. I found myself starting to call Baton Rouge home instead of Lake Charles. I liked Baton Rouge. It was bigger than Lake Charles and there were many more things to do. It wasn’t just school anymore. Everything that went on in my life now was in Baton Rouge. When I would go to Lake Charles, I was a visitor. I was growing up quickly. I had total control of my life. I was making my own decisions now, without any outside interference. I made mistakes, but they were my own mistakes and I corrected my mistakes by myself. I was learning to be a man and to be responsible on my own in Baton Rouge. The streets of Baton Rouge and the classrooms of Southern University were the two major factors. Some people thought I was being rebellious but I wasn’t, I was being independent. The choices I was making were mine. For the people who did not agree, I just didn’t care anymore what they thought, this was my life and if I wanted to live it recklessly, that was what I was going to do.