At school I started to make new friends, my parents had finally found a job, and the air around us started to become tranquil.
Then there was the birth of my sister, Angela was the best gift I’ve ever received in my life. Just finished primary school and found myself in junior high.
During this period my passion for music was born. When i was a child , at home music was always constant. At school I was good, I liked to study, and in no time I made new friends, guys like me who loved music, shared a common interest, we discussed topics we liked. Afternoons were spent together looking for new albums and songs, and inside of me the urge was getting stronger to start playing an instrument and to be like our Rock Stars.So for me middle school passed quickly and easy. I had finally found my identity, made up of passion for music and the love for my family, but especially for my sister. Then arrived high school. I enrolled at the High School, where I met Emanuel, a guy like me who had a great passion for music. The thing that made us become inseparable friends was the common idea to start a band. I began to play guitar. Emanuele and I wanted to be more similar to our idols, like the Sex Pistols and Gun’s and Roses. We started to think like them, increasingly convinced that to be a true rock star you had to disobey, to get a high, cross the limit and try new experiences to be like rock stars.
Interest in studying began to drop and with it my marks as well as my behaviour at school. We started to drink and one day we also began to smoke marijuana. Such was the curiosity and the desire to be like our idols.
I did not see it as something wrong because they too did it … I was good at telling stories and making up lies!! Alcohol and marijuana became the order of the day. Now I stopped going to school, around the house I was non existent and most of the time I was closed off from the world and in my room pretending to study. My parents were aware that something was changing. Every day they were lecturing me, but it went in one ear and out of the other!
I was still finishing high school and fortunately our band started getting a name in the local scene, playing at many venues in town and recording a album.
The worst thing is that all those beautiful moments specifically our passion for music and my music career, those memories are really fuzzy, in some cases I have zero recollection!!
I finished high school and decided to go to Florence, where I believed I would be successful … To my disappointment I lost everything and ended up back in Calabria, where I did not find one single thing of mine that I had left behind. My band was gone now and I … well, I was alone, without stimulation, without motivation and disappointed!
I was 20 years old. A friend of mine, Matthew said try heroin. I wouldn’t think twice about doing marijuana but it was a solution to all that fog and disappointments. Now marijuana and alcohol were not enough and weren’t giving me the answer to all those disappointments and dissatisfactions. From that day forward I began use heroin every day.
My dreams of glory had died and my days became the same. I completely lost all my inhibition…I was unapproachable. At home I stopped speaking and when my parents tried to talk to me, I would make a scene and argue then I would leave. My sister was a afraid of me because I was irritable and out of control.In those moments of lucidity it hurt them to see all of this, but now I could not go back. In the house the fighting continued, because every time I asked them for money they would refuse, so it would set off screaming and shouting and with my father, we would exchange fists. I began to steal, peddle ..do everything that life makes you do to get your fix. Then I got myself arrested.
The police searched the house, I still remember my mother’s face when she saw the police. Who began to rummage through my families personal belongings.
Pale in the face and with two eyes full of hopelessness and helplessness I saw my father… speechless, I did not know if he would rather shoot me or rather shoot himself. Finally, the sight of my sister sitting at the end of her bed, terrified and i will never forget that sound of her screaming.
Scenes of such agony that you only see in movies. A family kneeling … destroyed.
I realized for the first time what I had really become…
After being released from prison after a summary trial, the thing that gave me the strength to get up, seek help and change, were the images of the faces of my family and especially the words of my father.
We were in the house, and he came up to me with a love that only a father can give, he told me that it was time to turn the page. I had to expect and believe more from myself because I was worth much more than all that crap and that he had put me into this world with big plans for my future.
Those words split me in half for a moment and I felt the same emotions when i was a kid and we were playing in the courtyard of our house.
With the last breath I had left I told him that I was tired and I wanted to change my life, so I started accepting their help. From that day we began the process with the association and now here I am at San Patrignano
-Marco-