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Klingbeil, Kate
News
February 27, 2006
"I remember the police picked me up real late one time. I was walking down the street and they wanted me to go and view this body. I thought they were going to take me down to the morgue, you know like they do on TV. No, the took me around the corner in this house and this girl was shot in the head in there. I was trying to look and see if I knew her. I remember seeing her early that day." She said. "[The police] didn’t take me home, they just let me out the back door. That wasn’t enough to make me stop." To a former drug addict who once lived a questionable lifestyle, life seems more precious than most can imagine. Kay, 47 and a Milwaukee native, formerly addicted to hard drugs, has given up the dangerous lifestyle of essentially selling her life to live off the drugs that could have easily killed her.
"I went to college, business school, for two and a half years. I don’t like it, typing and all of that stuff. I think you need to know what you want to get into before you get into other stuff," Kay said. "I think the biggest problem, what made me change, was my self-esteem and boys. I mean really, boys was the thing. Girls are controlled by their emotions and the only way that a female, or myself, can keep a handle on things is by keeping a handle on our emotions," Kay explained.
According to Kay, her lifestyle started to take a wrong turn when she dropped out of high school and moved out of her mothers house at the age of 16. At 17, Kay was on the road dancing. "I remember they let me dance in the club. I was too young to drink but they let me strip." She laughs. "I thought that was what I wanted to do and no one could tell me and different."
"There are some things that you don’t experiment with no matter what. You can wonder about them, read about them or whatever but you can’t take chances like that." According to Kay, the reason she became involved in dancing and drugs was because she was not her own person. Kay said, "I was what anybody else wanted me to be."
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Klingbeil
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The dancing came first and then led to drugs. "I was just a follower and the people I was around wanted to try new things. I really didn’t get involved with hard drugs until I was in my late 30’s. Still, I didn’t have a mind of my own," Kay said. "When you think of something that you might want to do, you think of all the repercussions before you even do it. We always just by our human nature want to do things that we aren’t supposed to do."
Kay said that because of the use of hard drugs, she couldn’t go to work to dance. "The dancing was second to the drugs. It was just totally, totally drugs," she says. "I remember I got put out of my apartment and I didn’t have a house for six years. I was just living in places where they do drugs."
"From those drugs it just went on and on. You deal with a lot of people that you normally wouldn’t even look twice at. I mean, they’re not your friends, they’re drug addicts just like you," she explains of her old lifestyle. Even though many of her friends had died from the same drugs that Kay had been using, she couldn’t stop.
"I had boyfriends when I was doing drugs that I would be totally ashamed to tell somebody about. There’s just people that you wouldn’t dare be around," she says.
"It’s all in your own self. It all comes down to being your own person and knowing the right way to go and knowing how to listen to people that have been there," She says of staying drug-free. Kay has now been drug-free for 10 years.
-30-
News
February 27, 2006
"I remember the police picked me up real late one time. I was walking down the street and they wanted me to go and view this body. I thought they were going to take me down to the morgue, you know like they do on TV. No, the took me around the corner in this house and this girl was shot in the head in there. I was trying to look and see if I knew her. I remember seeing her early that day." She said. "[The police] didn’t take me home, they just let me out the back door. That wasn’t enough to make me stop." To a former drug addict who once lived a questionable lifestyle, life seems more precious than most can imagine. Kay, 47 and a Milwaukee native, formerly addicted to hard drugs, has given up the dangerous lifestyle of essentially selling her life to live off the drugs that could have easily killed her.
"I went to college, business school, for two and a half years. I don’t like it, typing and all of that stuff. I think you need to know what you want to get into before you get into other stuff," Kay said. "I think the biggest problem, what made me change, was my self-esteem and boys. I mean really, boys was the thing. Girls are controlled by their emotions and the only way that a female, or myself, can keep a handle on things is by keeping a handle on our emotions," Kay explained.
According to Kay, her lifestyle started to take a wrong turn when she dropped out of high school and moved out of her mothers house at the age of 16. At 17, Kay was on the road dancing. "I remember they let me dance in the club. I was too young to drink but they let me strip." She laughs. "I thought that was what I wanted to do and no one could tell me and different."
"There are some things that you don’t experiment with no matter what. You can wonder about them, read about them or whatever but you can’t take chances like that." According to Kay, the reason she became involved in dancing and drugs was because she was not her own person. Kay said, "I was what anybody else wanted me to be."
-more-
Klingbeil
Add One
The dancing came first and then led to drugs. "I was just a follower and the people I was around wanted to try new things. I really didn’t get involved with hard drugs until I was in my late 30’s. Still, I didn’t have a mind of my own," Kay said. "When you think of something that you might want to do, you think of all the repercussions before you even do it. We always just by our human nature want to do things that we aren’t supposed to do."
Kay said that because of the use of hard drugs, she couldn’t go to work to dance. "The dancing was second to the drugs. It was just totally, totally drugs," she says. "I remember I got put out of my apartment and I didn’t have a house for six years. I was just living in places where they do drugs."
"From those drugs it just went on and on. You deal with a lot of people that you normally wouldn’t even look twice at. I mean, they’re not your friends, they’re drug addicts just like you," she explains of her old lifestyle. Even though many of her friends had died from the same drugs that Kay had been using, she couldn’t stop.
"I had boyfriends when I was doing drugs that I would be totally ashamed to tell somebody about. There’s just people that you wouldn’t dare be around," she says.
"It’s all in your own self. It all comes down to being your own person and knowing the right way to go and knowing how to listen to people that have been there," She says of staying drug-free. Kay has now been drug-free for 10 years.
-30-