The Coholics become the one thing holding everything together as home life deteriorates and teenage rage spills into music, fights, theft, drinking, and drugs. A night of stolen pills and Mad Dog 20/20 nearly kills him, sending him somewhere strangely peaceful before he’s violently pulled back into the world. He wakes in a hospital, handcuffed to a bed and furious to be alive, haunted by the place he almost didn’t leave.

Some families give you roots. Others give you reasons to run. This chapter follows a path from a fractured childhood into the welcoming chaos of punk, where skateboards, spray paint, loud music, and the right group of misfits become a lifeline. Beneath a graffiti-covered bridge, war stories are traded like cigarettes, proving that sometimes the closest thing to therapy is finding people just as beautifully fucked up as you are.

A brutal, unflinching serialization about surviving abuse, finding refuge in punk, and carrying the weight of trauma into adulthood and emergency response work. Moving between memory, firehouse reflections, and the formation of Al & the Coholics, it traces how music, rebellion, and chosen family became a lifeline for someone trying to outlive the ghosts that never fully leave.