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Becky Beane
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 Gerry Tinney’s first dating experience ended with a beating. When the 12-year-old came home from taking a girl to the movies, his father accused him of smelling like a French tart and savagely pummeled the child.
It didn’t take much to ignite his dad’s violent eruptions, stoked largely by his alcoholism. “Ever since I can remember,” says Gerry, “I was terrified of my father.”
One night Gerry came home from a rock concert, high on LSD. Enraged, his father threatened to throw him through a window. Uncharacteristically, Gerry turned on him and snarled, “Go ahead and try!” His dad backed down, and Gerry got his first sweet taste of empowerment from being high on drugs. That feeling solidified his addiction.
Seldom home, Gerry survived by his wits. In the winter he shoveled snow to earn a few bucks. He stuck dimes in the Laundromat dryers to warm up from their heat. But it was the warmth of a loving home he really craved.
By 15, Gerry had racked up several burglary and car theft crimes in upstate New York. Locked up in jail, the teen witnessed another inmate’s rape. “I was calling home pleading with my parents, ‘Please get me out of here!’ ” he recalls. “And my parents said, ‘You can sit there and rot.’ ”
Finally Gerry’s uncle bailed him out and took the boy home to an even more abusive environment—“one of the darkest periods of my life.”
At 16, with money he earned as a busboy, Gerry took the bus to Florida and hit the squalid streets there. He got some comfort from drugs, but nothing could fill the bottomless well of his loneliness.
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