Early Life and Struggles
Avalon was raised in a non-practicing Jewish family with many turbulent experiences. His mother worked as a marijuana dealer (which Avalon began doing as well) and his father was a heroin addict. By the time he was out of his teenage years, he had prostituted himself in order to get money to support his heroin addiction. He spent time as a prostitute and drug dealer before finding success in music. During his late teens, Avalon briefly adhered to Orthodox Judaism. By his early 20s, Avalon got married, had a daughter, and moved to Portland, Oregon. While battling his drug addiction, Avalon moved in with his sister to aid each other with recovery. During this time, his sister relapsed and died from a heroin overdose.
Read more about this topic: Mickey Avalon
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or struggles:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“Being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“We of the sinking middle class ... may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)