Domamick Skillings graduated from Medomak Valley High School this June while juggling four jobs -- bagging at Hannaford’s, landscaping at Cider Hill, mowing for anyone who needed it and working in a factory. He did it to survive because for most of high school he had no home. On occasion, he slept inside a real family’s home in a bed. Mostly, though, he bounced from sofa to sofa in friends’ houses, or lived in a house with other teenagers. These mornings he wakes at 3:00 to shower, dress and ready himself to clock in at Fisher Engineering in Rockland by 5:00. After group stretching, Domanick works assembling the fronts of plows, lifting 50 lb. pieces of metal while standing on a cement floor in a metal box without air-conditioning. Some days when he clocks out at 3:30, he has barely enough time to clean his face before punching in at Narrows Tavern where, for three days a week, he works the flattop making sandwiches, burgers and, fries in a shift that generally ends around 10. He is doing great, which he says without any irony. And he is.
When I was 10, my mom gave us kids to my stepfather. She had a drug addiction problem. But he was an alcoholic and did drugs, too, and got an abusive girlfriend. So he got abusive, too, and I felt like he didn’t love us anymore. The two of them just wanted to do bad stuff, and they wanted us kids out of their hair.
Anyway, one day, I think I was thirteen, he told us to pack our bags. He was taking us to a concert. But when we got to there, we only stayed fifteen minutes, and then he led us back to the car. He drove from Belfast to Waldoboro. It was about 11:30 when we unloaded at my grandparents’. We were so hungry we ate our cereal in about less than a minute. My grandmother called us animals. But we often didn’t eat for a couple of days.
In the beginning, my grandparents locked me in my bedroom at night with a bucket because they didn’t want me going downstairs to eat food. We went to school, but at home we had to sit at a picnic table in the kitchen doing nothing, all day long, 365 days a year. I wasn’t allowed to go outside unless I was taking the dog out. After a couple of years, my grandmother wanted to put me into an institution, and I just felt I couldn’t take it anymore. But deep down I knew there was a greater purpose for me in life.
So I packed up my bags and walked out. By chance, my friend Levi and his mother Amy Grant picked me up. Amy invited me to live with them and talked to the school about making it happen. Amy became the mom I never had. She taught me how to cook. But after a year, I had to leave. Her dad didn’t want another person living there. I understood. I liked her dad.
I started to sleep on friends’ sofas. Then I lived with my girlfriend’s parents, and we had grand old times… sleeping in the tent with the kiddoes and telling stories, going for long bike rides, even getting my girlfriend out and going for walks. But stuff eventually went downhill with her father.
Last year I moved into a house with other kids. I was one of the oldest and the only one with a job. But last week someone broke into my room, so now I’m back with friends, bouncing around.
When I was younger, I had nobody to help me out. Nobody until recently. Even a little help means so much. I mean, it’s everything, especially when I don’t have anything. That’s why I help people out. If I see someone in Hannaford’s that looks like they don’t have money — maybe an old man or a mother with three kids — I’ll go up to them and offer to fill their shopping cart. They’ll say no but I’ll tell them that this is something I need to do, and we’ll load cart, and I’ll pay with my leftover food stamps. I feel good helping somebody out because I know what it means to have nothing.
I almost died a year ago. I’d broke both my hands and went into surgery to repair them. But they got my weight wrong and gave me too much drugs before, during and after the operation. Then they gave me more and sent me home. The next thing I knew I was in the ambulance with something in my arm. I’d OD’ed. When I was unconscious, though, my only thought was that I never got to cook a turkey upside down with the crusty, crunchy skin. Afterward, I got to thinking how you can be alive one second and gone the next. I thought about all the things I wanted to do.
I’m saving to buy my own house. I’m going to always have a roof over my head. I’m always going to have at least a couple of hundred dollars in the bank and I’m never going to live paycheck to paycheck. I’m going to be the Skillings that changes things around. I’ve earned it, and I will push to keep on earning it if that’s what it takes. Because that’s the greatest reward, earning instead of taking.
But you also have to cherish the things around you that are alive. When I’m walking in the woods, I get really excited to see a tree frog. They’re so small, and they never get noticed. But everything in life needs a little bit of acknowledgement for being. Take the skunk. It might not be perfect, but it probably has feelings like we do. I know I wouldn’t want somebody yelling at me and telling me to git just because I’m stinky, you know?
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