From Drug User To Engineer
From Drug Addict to Engineer: A Father’s Choice to Move on with His Life
The harsh reality of growing up during the 1980s,well for one man that I have become very accompanied with was that of drug abuse and living in an underdeveloped part of Houston, or that is at least what has been told to me by my father. In recent years I have learned of the struggles that my father went through after he graduated high school; having succumbed to working a minimum wage job with no one to go home to. My father, Joseph Wachel, went from smoking marijuana and shooting cocaine on a daily basis and having a child at twenty to now becoming one of the supervisors at a major engineering firm in Houston.
“The reality had finally set and I realized what I was doing. The needle that I just put in my arm could have just given me HIV or Hepatitis, but did I care? No, there was only one thing that was on my mind at that time and it was getting the feeling that I would no longer have to worry about the stresses of the day” (Wachel). This was my father’s outlook on his everyday life, on how he viewed what he was good enough to do with his life and how he thought that people viewed him and his lifestyle.
My father grew up in north Houston; a city very well known for its drugs and terrifying gangs that own the city. Living in this part of town he was used to hearing gun shots and buying marijuana off of street corners just as if it was part of his everyday routine. After graduating Aldine High School, my father worked as a pizza chef at Pipers Pizza. While at this job he only made $3.10 an hour,(Federal Hourly Minimum Wage), the hourly minimum wage during 1980, and nearly half of what he made went straight to the drugs that he bought and the other half went to rent. He was supporting both his and his current wives drug habit. “Sharon and I used to shoot up about two or three times a week” stated Wachel. “There was nothing really for us to do but that at...
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