Deep Cuts Part Three: Father Facade

Okay.  Let’s wrap up this depressing history lesson and get on with some truestoopidshit.

I wasn’t really a fully formed asshole until I came back from living with my father for the second time, so this last little bit of history will get us all caught up to that point.  Before then, I was a product of my environment; and afterwards, my environment was a product of me.  I did wrong again and again.  Knowingly.  Willfully.  Joyfully.  Not because of anything that happened in my past, but because I wanted to do wrong.

This post is going to be about losing my last little bit of the innocence, but don’t worry, it’s not that bad.  I really didn’t have a lot of innocence to lose at this point, and to say I “lost” it might be a bit disingenuous.  I’d have sold it for drugs had anyone been willing to pay for it, but instead, I just threw it away.

I started having mental breakdowns around the time we moved from Le Nez and roughly coincident with my decision to start stealing drugs and alcohol from my mother.  I only stole a little at first.  It doesn’t take much to get a twelve-year-old kid high.  When I started having panic attacks, insomnia, and bouts of depression, I never thought to connect these with the chemicals I was ingesting.  Not until just now, writing these words, did I even consider the possibility.

Funny little blind spot, that one, huh?

Anyway, these breakdowns got worse through middle school and high school, and eventually, I learned to incorporate them into my mythology.  I learned to give into the paranoia and enjoy the fear my panic attacks brought.  I learned to chemically amplify the delusions with booze and to enhance my insomnia with meth.  But that was later.  At first, my breakdowns scared the living shit out of me.

My mother took me to a free clinic a few times, and the psychiatric doctor gave me a couple prescriptions that I abused.  I used to go without sleeping for so many days in a row, that I’d actually hallucinate or fall asleep in the middle of sentences.  And this was before I’d ever even tried speed.  I saw other doctors and other therapists, but they all had different theories about what was wrong with me, and no one ever diagnosed me with anything solid.

I met Rudy at around this time, (Rude Dog Blog) and I started doing even harder drugs.  This, of course, led to increased breakdowns, and since I never told anyone that I was stealing my mother’s pot and alcohol, or my grandmother’s pills, no one ever made the connection.  And let’s not forget that I’d been hiding behind a reputation for instability and brutality for quite a while.  Now I had an actual mental condition!  It made for a handy excuse once I started getting suspended for pushing cabinets over onto kids, or stomping on them with my steal toed army boots.  (See Deep Cuts Part Two).

And then I went to middle school.

Within minutes of starting my first day of middle school, I knew I was going to get in a fight.  My instincts told me to establish myself within the pecking order quickly — somewhere near the top would be fine — and thereby avoid future fights.  So I picked a biggish Mexican kid who acted tough, and I called him out.

Yes.  We still did that back in my day.

I said something like, “Meet me after school at the bike racks, pussy.”

He flipped me off and said something in Spanish.  For the rest of the day, I got myself all worked up and prepared to fight.  I told all my friends to come watch.  I told people in my gym class, people I barely knew, to come watch.  I wanted big word-of-mouth buzz, and I got it.  Half the school must have been there, waiting for me and the Mexican.

At the time, I preferred the blitzkrieg fighting style.  I’d wait until my opponent started talking trash, and then, without warning, swing my fists wildly at his face until he started to run.  Once he began his retreat, I’d kick him with my boots, hopefully tripping him and knocking him to the ground where I could kick him some more.

The kid opened his mouth to talk some trash, and I didn’t even let him get a word out before trying to shove my fist down his throat.  Get this out of the way, I was thinking.  Stomp this guy and get some respect.

Only this kid didn’t run when I hit him.  Instead, he tucked his chin, lifted his hands into a boxer’s stance, and punched me back.  A lot.  And hard.

You see, ever since I’d been kicked out of Smithridge for attacking some kids with a hammer, I’d been fighting people who didn’t really want to fight me.  I’d fought guys who’d talked like they wanted to fight, and guys who’d looked like they wanted to fight, and even guys who’d thrown a punch or two, but I’d never fought anyone who’d really just wanted to fight.

And this kid wanted to fight.

He kicked my ass in front of everyone, and the protective coloration of my bad reputation was gone, just like that.  I felt like a turtle pulled from its shell, totally exposed to the environment and unprotected.  Now everyone knew that I was just a small and frightened little kid.

I wish I could say I returned to The Dojo in search of myself, or in search of my heritage, or in search of martial arts even, but that would be untrue.  I went home so I could learn to fight, so I could exact some revenge.

I hadn’t seen my Uncle Herb since moving out of The Dojo, seven years earlier.  I’d been told bad things about how he’d screwed our side of the family, and some members of my family actually considered me a traitor for going back, but I decided to make up my own mind.

Since I’d last set foot in the dojo, Herb had turned it into a martial arts commune and had it legally listed as a church.  No longer did the corner house have a porch or a front door that opened to the street.  High, wicker wrapped fences made the whole place seem like a military compound from feudal Japan, complete with a rock garden, sliding doors, and a little Buddhist shrine.  Classes were free, but most folks paid the suggested $30/month donation.  Herb told me not to worry about paying a donation, but that I should try to do something around the dojo to help out.

My very first class, I discovered that I already knew how to do many of the rolls and falls beginners find so daunting.  I don’t remember ever going to classes when I was a little kid, and I don’t even think they taught kids classes back then, yet I had apparently gone to a few, and my body still remembered some of what it had learned.

So every Tuesday and Thursday I rode the city bus from Trainer Middle School to the dojo.  I did my homework in the communal kitchen, swept the sidewalk out front, and vacuumed the mat and stairs.  I went to a one-hour children’s class, then I’d eat a snack and go to the two-hour adult class.  Afterwards, I’d sometimes eat dinner with Herb, his wife, and maybe a few students.  Then I’d ride the bus back to Sun Valley.  Eventually, I started helping teach children’s classes.

During this time, I excelled in school, didn’t get into fights, and cut my drug use down to almost nothing.  I hit the weights and ran.  I read books on martial arts, philosophy, meditation, military strategy, and magic.  In addition to Jujitsu, I practiced techniques for lucid dreaming, astral projection, and pain tolerance.  Everything seemed magical again.  The dojo has always been like that for me, and remains so even today, despite the defiling it suffered at my hands later.

Once, when I was just hanging around the dojo, I put an acupuncture needle against the back of my forearm, about two inches below my wrist, and slowly worked it back and forth until it stopped hurting.  Out of curiosity, I continued twisting the needle and watched as it painlessly slid further through the meat of my forearm, a full inch and a half, at least.  Eventually, twisting the needle began to hurt again, only this time, it hurt on the underside of my arm.  I looked, and, sure enough, the skin on the bottom of my forearm had begun to tent around the emerging acupuncture needle.  I figured I was pretty committed to the experiment by then, so I backed the needle off just a bit, set my arm down on a paperback book, and returned to drilling.  After a few seconds, I picked up my arm, and the paperback came with it.  I pulled the book off my arm and looked at the acupuncture needle.  The plastic cap of one end stuck out the hairy side of my forearm, while the pointy part stuck out of the soft underside.  When I flexed my hand, the ends of the needle bowed up and down.

“Quit doing that,” my uncles wife said, when she came into the family room and saw what I had done.  “You’re going to break that thing inside your arm.”

“Sorry,” I said.

She squinted at the needle.  “You should go show your uncle.”

So I went upstairs where the actual classes were held, and waited for my uncle to finish teaching black belt class.  When I showed him the needle protruding from both sides of my arm, he seemed very pleased and called some of his students over to see.  I loved making him proud of me and adored the attention.

I enjoyed the celebrity of being “Sensei’s nephew,” and for the most part, I did well in school and life while I attended classes.  So what happened?  Where did I go wrong?  What pulled me away from the dojo?

It was a couple things, actually, but the biggest reasons were definitely jealousy and girls.

First off, I was jealous of Uncle Herb’s children, or to be more precise, I wanted to be one of them.  Sometimes, like when I put the acupuncture needle through my arm, he was very proud of me and told everyone how I was his nephew and how I looked like Bumpa (his father).  Most of the time, however, I was just a kid that hung around the dojo.  Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I would never be as important to him as his own children, and even though that is the way it should be, the disillusionment took a bit of the glow off my training.  I told myself I was better than his kids, because I didn’t even need a father, and in doing so created a new myth: Bastard Leon.

Then there were the girls.  I’d messed around a lot by the time I went to middle school, but mostly it was clandestine midnight groping and secret screwing around.  No one wanted to be my girlfriend, and though I’d gone down on girls and gotten blowjobs and done lots of stuff, no one had ever really let me kiss them.  Then I got a nice girlfriend (See Helicopters Over Leon Street), and suddenly all the other girls started noticing me.

Of course, I dumped my nice girlfriend and started dating fast and dangerous girls.  One of those girls broke my heart a bit, and I decided to go live with my father.  The night before I moved to Oregon, I entertained two girls from school.  We drank stolen whiskey and smoked my mother’s crappy weed.  We messed around and traded blowjobs.  They promised to write me while I was in Oregon, but I never heard from either of them again.  I don’t even remember their names, but I remember one of them had extremely long and soft hair that, when I looked closely, seemed to contain every shade of brown, red, and blonde ever invented.

So I moved back to Oregon, to a father I barely remembered, and spent my 8th grade school year there.  The endeavor was doomed from the start.  Since last time I’d lived with my father, he’d become pretty bitter about my mother and her side of the family.  He took the stance that anything any of them said was a lie, and that I had been raised entirely by deceptive and manipulative white trash, and therefore, I must be a liar as well.  For my part, I’d given up on the idea of a father figure when I realized Uncle Herb wasn’t looking for any more kids.  I’d become attached to the persona of Bastard Leon, and actually living with my father made maintaining that myth difficult.  My father and I clashed early and often.

My father’s assumption that my family was dishonest was not without basis.  On Mom’s side of the family, the code of ethics had two distinct parts: the way we treated family, and the way we treated outsiders.  Family was to be defended at all times regardless of right or wrong.  Outsiders were lied to whenever it was convenient.  So I was stuck living with a man who’d become hostile towards my family, albeit with good reason.  Though I considered him an outsider, he was also my father, so I couldn’t live inside my myth of being a hard-case, bastard, ghetto-child while living with him.

Also, with my long hair, cigarettes, attitude, and aggressiveness, I was the ultimate misfit in the little hillbilly middle school.  By the time I left Oregon, at the end of the school year, I’d made some friends and been marginally accepted, however, the situation with my father had gone about as far as it could go without major violence.  I was nearly man-sized by then, and every night I went to sleep after long and detailed fantasies of killing him.

It was in everyone’s best interest that I not stay.  That first time I went to Oregon, when I was in second grade, things could have worked out, but by the time I went to stay with him in eighth grade, things had gotten too far out of hand.  I was proud to be a bastard, and he was a father who’d been misused.  I went back to Reno hating my father, and though we have a cordial relationship now, it took me a long time to forgive him for trying to be my dad.

The Nevada I returned to was not the same state I’d left, however.  A strange transformation had taken place while I’d been stuck in Podunk Fields, Oregon (a.k.a Brownsville, Oregon).  Nevada had discovered NWA.  When I’d left, everyone I knew had been smoking pot, fucking, and listening to glam rock.  When I returned, less than a year later, everyone was snorting speed, fighting, and listening to gangster rap.

The new world order suited me just fine.  Before Oregon I’d been hedonistic, but I returned with a sadistic streak.  I’d already learned to fight at the dojo, half of my family was dealing drugs, and the bad friends I’d left had done nothing but get worse.  Also, I’d accepted my status as bastard, returning from Oregon with the world’s biggest chip on my shoulder.

Fuck fathers.  Fuck my mother’s murdering husbands and junkie boyfriends.  Fuck Uncle Herb for not loving me as much as his own children.  Fuck my real father for trying to fill the hole he’d left in my life when I was two.  Fuck em all, because the bastard was coming home.

Deep Cuts Part One: Sympathy for the Backstory

I’ve figured out why everything I write on this blog makes me seem like an asshole.  I think it’s because the story of my life, as told in 2000-word installments, has no plot and no character arc.  I never really change.  In order to rectify that, I’m going to do a couple blogs on my childhood.  Maybe seeing the relative innocence I came from, and knowing that I ended up all right in the end, will make the depths I reached as a teenager and adult resemble some sort of inverted plot arc.

Or maybe I’m just an asshole.  Feel free to judge.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, my sister had a boyfriend who used to work for a telephone psychic company.  He had a special line in his bedroom to take those calls, and we’d sometimes watch him drunkenly toy with the lives of strangers.  I asked him how he made people think he was psychic, and he said he just told them things they already wanted to believe.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like the most common thing I say when I’m feeling out a new customer is: ‘I can see from my cards that you’ve had a hard childhood.’”

“But what if they didn’t have a hard childhood?”

He just laughed at that.  “Everyone thinks they’ve had a hard childhood.”

He was right.  Here’s the hard part of mine.

Before I was born, my family had a lot of money.  They owned gold and copper mines, warehouses, carpet installation companies, martial arts studios, and a house in an upscale part of town.  Of course, I never saw any of that shit.  Shortly before I was born, a series of unfortunate events occurred that left my family broken and mostly destitute.

First, my Uncle Herb was arrested for possession of automatic weapons.  While he was locked up, the family businesses faltered, and fighting his court cases cost a lot of money.  Depending on whom you talk to in my family, you’ll get a lot of different opinions about where the guns came from, whom they belonged to, why the businesses faltered, and where the money for the court cases came from.  For instance, Herb claims that my grandfather set him up to take the fall for the guns.  I don’t know any of that shit, and I honestly don’t care.

Then the house on Lodestar burned down.  I’ve been told Grandpa John burned it down to collect insurance money, but Grandpa denied that till the day he died.  Pretty much everyone else in the family seems to think he did it, though.  However not everyone agrees about why Grandpa burned the house down.  One side of the family says Grandpa did it to pay for Uncle Herb’s spiraling court costs.  The other side claims Grandpa did it to pay off the IRS.  I’m not even sure if any insurance money got paid out, and again, I honestly don’t care.

The gold mine was still in the family when I was born, but not for long.  Before I learned to walk it had been lost to some sort of shady land deals with religious zealots and KKK members.  (See Grandpa’s Ashes)  All that was left was the martial arts studio and the property adjacent to it.  Uncle Herb says the Dojo was never family property.  Other family members say he snatched it away from them.  Once again, I don’t know the details, and once again, I don’t care.  My whole family has been torqued on dishing out blame for the family downfall for so long, it’s like a poison in our blood.

Anyway, I spent my toddler and early childhood years in the house next door to the Dojo.  All my earliest memories are from there, and it was a magical place to be a little kid.  I remember a student with no legs everyone called Spider, who used to walk everywhere on his hands.  I remember the annual formal classes and dozens of Gi-clad students doing rolls and falls outside on the sidewalks, while neighbors watched in shock out their windows.  I remember love-in type dinners after the big formal classes, where those same students flitted from the sauna to the hot tubs to the massage table and back in a long line of naked flesh.

I also remember sitting on the front porch of the corner house with my grandmother and my great grandmother — back when the corner house still had a front porch — sipping tea, and watching the sky go dark with dragonflies.  We didn’t seem surprised.  In fact, I think we’d been expecting them, what with the tea and all.  When a few of the monsters landed on the porch railing, I watched them creep along the wood on spindly legs.  I noticed their huge faceted eyes and the way their blue bodies seemed to catch the light like living metal.  This memory is one of the most puzzling things I’ve discovered while trying to remember my past, because, despite the vividness and detail of the events, I’m pretty sure it never happened.  Dragonflies of any kind are pretty rare in Washoe Valley, and I have never seen another of the big blue monsters from the swarm.  Not one.

I remember some bad stuff from my time at the dojo too, but nothing specific.  Mostly, I just remember this vague feeling that me, my mother, and my sisters where not wanted and that we were somehow inferior to Uncle Herb and his students. Eventually, we moved.  I don’t know why.  I don’t care why.

After the dojo, my mother, my sisters, and I lived in a lot of different places.  We stayed with my grandmother’s boyfriend for a while.  He was a quiet guy who played jazz drums and lived in a little singlewide trailer outside of town.  I don’t remember my mother ever being there, but I remember Aunt Shelly.  She was nine or ten years older than me and therefore often got stuck watching me and my little sisters.  She had a friend who used to ride horses through the trailer park.  I followed them out into a field one time because I had a crush on the girl with the horse.  They were passing around what looked like a small cigarette.  They offered the joint to me, and when I told them I didn’t want any, they slathered on the guilt.

“Well, if you aren’t gonna have any fun, then I guess we can’t have any fun either,” Aunt Shelly said.  “We don’t want you to tell.”

“I won’t tell.”

“The only way we can be sure is if you do it too.”

So I did.  I took a hit, and I coughed smoke, and I pretended to be high, but as far as I could tell, it had no effect.  Or maybe little kid brains come pre-altered, and we only sober up as we get old enough to stop believing in Santa.  Regardless, I learned to stop being afraid of drugs at a very early age.

After Grandma’s boyfriend, we lived with Aunt Bonnie, one of Uncle Herb’s ex-wives, out on the old Stead Air Force base.  She had no reason to take us in, my mother and her three kids, but she did, and for that I never thanked her properly.  I have very few memories of living there.  I recall getting beat up a few times at the elementary school, sneaking into the air races with some neighbor kids, and sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night with my older cousin.  My cousin had heard from Aunt Shelly how funny it was to get me high, so she used to take me along to all her clandestine parties, where half a dozen teenagers would feed me beer and weed and laugh at me when I stumbled around.  I liked the attention and the thrill of sneaking out.

Eventually, Mom, my little sisters, and I had to move on.  Don’t know why.

Our little family ended up bouncing around, staying in a lot of different apartments, mostly in the Neil Road area, and mostly with the family of one of my mother’s close friends, Sherrill.  My sisters and I shared a bedroom with Sherrill’s son and daughter, who were about our age, and we were expected to stay in the room and play for most of every day.  In the living room, our parents kept the bong going from the time they woke up until they went to bed, and I doubt if the metal bowl on that bong was ever cold for more than a few hours.

Outside our perpetually smoke-shrouded household, the neighborhood was Darwinian.  Neil Road wasn’t exactly Compton, but after the insular and self-contained reality of the dojo, it felt like Hell to me.  Shortly after moving there, I saw two young, drunk guys fighting in the street.  After the fight, I watched the loser crawl around leaking blood from his mouth as he searched for his missing teeth.  I remember feeling like I’d never be tough enough to live in a world where people had to bring their teeth home in their pockets.

Another time, a guy tried to kidnap me.  He pulled up in a mini truck and parked at the curb a couple houses in front of me.  I got suspicious when he didn’t get out of his truck.  When I got close, he leaned out of his window and asked if I’d seen a puppy.  The guy actually tried the old missing puppy trick; I shit you not.  Even as young and sheltered as I was, I knew better than to fall for that.  I shook my head and kept walking.  But continuing along the sidewalk towards home would mean I’d have had to walk past the guy and his truck, so instead, I turned immediately into the next driveway and walked up onto the porch like I lived there.  When the guy in the truck didn’t drive away, I opened the front door and walked into a strange living room where a Mexican family sat watching television.  The parents didn’t speak a word of English, and their teenage kids had to translate.  When I was done sobbing my story, the father of the household walked me home.

I got picked on by other kids in the neighborhood, and at first, I was too frightened to fight back.  But that couldn’t go on forever.  My life had become a lot harder, and eventually, I became harder in response.

That’s where the ball peen hammer comes in.

For weeks, my sisters and I had been terrorized by a group of older black kids.  My mother may have been dating a black guy at the time, and that might have been the start of the problems.  These kids threw rocks at my sister, Olivia, and me as we walked to or from school.  As soon as the first rocks started skittering past us, I’d tell Olivia to run home without me.  At first, she argued, but eventually she learned to run home on her own.  Then, with my sister safely away, I would turn around, lift my hands into the boxing stance my mother’s boyfriends had taught me, and get the living shit beat out of me.

Beating my ass seemed like a lot of fun for these kids.  I could tell they were really bonding and having a good time.  Once, when they knocked me down, I fell against an old fence, and the flimsy wood bounced my head like a diving board.  They took turns punching me into the fence, and then trying to punch me again on the rebound.  Like I said, lots of fun.

My family called the school, but nothing could be done because the older boys never did anything to me on school property.  We called the cops, but they just sent a patrol car to follow me to school . . . once.  Of course nothing happened that day, and the next day they kicked my ass even worse.  I got so terrified of going outside, I’d throw up my breakfast every morning, but staying home wasn’t an option.  Someone had to walk Olivia to school.

“You’re the man of the house now.”

People need to quit saying that shit to little boys.

I stole the little hammer from the junk drawer in the kitchen, slipped it up the sleeve of my jacket, and went to school.  I remember the walk to school very well.  Not surprising really, because it took roughly ten million years.  I shook violently the whole way, dropping the hammer and breaking into tears every block or two.  By the time I finally got to school — without incident, of course — my whole body had become physically exhausted.

I remember feeling like I was going to pass out, and I remember seeing the kids who’d been tormenting me on the playground.  I don’t remember much of the fight, however.  I’m pretty sure I got one of them in the cheekbone and was going for another when the teachers disarmed me.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t put anyone in the hospital or anything, however, I did get expelled from school.

Which was fine with me, because I’d hated it there anyway, and Roger Corbett Elementary was a lot nicer.  (See: Don Armitage: Happily Ever After).  And, the fight had another unforeseen benefit.  From that day on, I had a reputation around the neighborhood as an unstable and violent kid.  Other kids my age gave me a wide berth, and even the older kids started waving or nodding their recognition when they saw me.

This reputation bought me a little peace, but not enough.  Inside, I was still a terrified little boy, and I just knew something was going to happen to let the whole world see past my new facade.  My sisters and I went to live with our father, in Oregon.  It didn’t last long, but by the time I came back, I’d grown more confident, and stepping into the bad reputation I’d left behind was easy.

So, that’s the end of my traumatic childhood.  Boo-hoo-hoo.  Poor me.  Poor you.  Poor all of us.  But maybe it’s true.  Maybe we’ve all had traumatic childhoods, because childhood is, itself, inherently traumatic.  Think about it.  When you’re really young, you can’t communicate well, you can’t understand anything going on around you, and everyone in the world is big enough to kick your ass.  Sounds pretty traumatic to me.

And that might be the moral of this retelling of my early adolescence: Childhood sucks.  It sucks for almost all of us, and sometimes it keeps sucking for a very long time.  But, if you don’t let it all overwhelm you, and if you can hang in there long enough, eventually, it gets better.

Till next time . . . hang in there.

You Broke Into the Wrong House, Buddy

So, this is a link to a newspaper article written before I was born, about a guy breaking into The Dojo.  The Dojo is the place where I lived when I was very little, and the place I went back to live as a teenager.  Pretty funny little article, however.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2002&dat=19710902&id=4WwlAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_7IFAAAAIBAJ&pg=3510,587449

The Rude Dog Blog

I met Rudy when I was fourteen, either right before I moved to my father’s house in Oregon, or shortly after I moved back.  I can’t remember when exactly, but I do remember how.

I was in Jeff’s yard, with a bunch of the neighborhood kids, and we were all boxing with a single pair of cheap boxing gloves.  Since we only had one set of gloves, each contestant only got one.  The champion took the left glove, and the challenger got the right.

An Indian looking kid wandered down and watched us for a while.  He laughed at us and asked if we all lived around here.  We asked him if he wanted to play, but he shook his head.  At some point he picked up a cat and began to stroke it while we boxed.

I remember I was boxing a kid named Chad.  Chad was dating a girl named Jeanette (Neddy) at the time, and I liked her, so I’d been feeling pretty good about beating him left handed and all.  Then, suddenly a cat landed on my back and clawed the hell out of me.

When I turned around, the Indian kid was laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.  He’d obviously thrown the cat on me.  I tore off the glove and got in his face.  Rather than back down like I’d expected, (after all I was the left handed boxing champ of the afternoon) he jumped up from where he’d been crouching and shoved me in the chest.  We puffed up and said some tough words, but we didn’t fight.

The next day — or later that week or month I’m not sure — I found him hanging around with my friends.  We all hiked in the hills and explored caves and played war games.  The US was having trouble with Libya at the time and the movie Red Dawn was still a pretty big deal, so we thought of ourselves as survivalists and potential freedom fighters in the coming war.  At some point we found some baby rabbits and, working together, we caught a few of them, took them to my house, and put them in a little shelter we made on my bed.  I called my mother at work and told her to look on my bed when she got home because I had an Easter surprise for her.

That’s when Rudy told us he’d stolen some pot from his older brother-in-law, Lance.  The younger, not so stupid, kids in our neighborhood begged off and went home.  Rudy, Jeff, and I climbed a tree somewhere in the neighborhood, and smoked the joint.  I still think it was laced with something, but maybe I just had a really bad reaction to the pot.  Either way, I started freaking out and seeing things, and so did Jeff.  Rudy played it cool at first, but after a while, even he started to get worried.  We all went to our separate homes to sleep it off.

By this time, my head was spinning, I was seeing tracers when I moved too fast, and the whole world seemed like a dream.  I kept having panic attacks, (which I’d been having on a lesser scale for a few years) and I thought my heart was going to burst.  I climbed into my bed and yanked the covers over my head.

Startled baby rabbits shot in every direction.  I emptied an underwear drawer, crawled around the room collecting the rabbits, and stuffed them in the drawer.  Back in bed, I cried while my head invented ever more awful hallucinations.  My heavy metal blacklight posters leered.  My little sisters poked their heads into my bedroom to check on me once or twice, and I shouted at them to leave.  It was a wonder I ever tried drugs again, but no one has ever accused me of being a quitter, especially when it came to drugs.

Several hours later, my mother returned from work and peeked into my room.  “Leon, honey, are you in here?”

“Mom,” I said from beneath my covers, “I’m sorry, but I can’t talk.  I’m really high right now.  I think maybe someone slipped me some acid or something.”

“So this is my Easter surprise?”  She didn’t sound as mad as I’d expected.  “My son laying in bed too stoned to talk?”

“No.”  I peeked out from beneath the covers.  “We got you a bunch of baby bunnies, but they were flying all around the room, so I put them with my underwear.”

She gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me, patted me on the head, and asked if I needed anything.  She could be very understanding and nurturing in her own way.  I think of the crap I put her through growing up, (and trust me, being zonked on laced weed and jabbering about baby rabbits in my underwear was the least of it) and I’m amazed she didn’t just abandon me in the desert when I was too young to find my way home.

Digression:

My mother was barely fifteen when she had me.  She and my father said they made me in the back of a van in the Sparks High School parking lot.  They’d both been cashing in on the tail end of the hippie movement.  My father actually believed in alternate energy, overthrowing the power structure, rethinking society, and high-minded shit like that.  I’m pretty sure my mother just liked the idea of sex and drugs, though she had taken the nickname “Freedom,” so I guess that’s something.

Dad left when I was two, shortly after getting my mother pregnant with my little sister, Olivia.  He moved to Oregon with another woman, who was already pregnant with my other sister, Taneea.  I have no memories of my parents being together.

My mom had a lot of asshole boyfriends and husbands between my father and Norman, the old black guy we were living with out in Sun Valley.  My youngest sister’s father is a pederast and killer currently serving time in prison for–you guessed it–killing his wife and raping her kid.  Kenneth was a big black body builder who beat the crap out of my mom and eventually died due to pneumonia brought on by a cocaine overdose.  Other guys didn’t last as long, so I don’t remember them as well.  Norman wasn’t so bad.  He took my mother and her three out-of-control kids into his house.  He gave us a home, the first one I ever remember having.  I repaid him by trashing the place and stealing from him.

End of digression.

Rudy and I were always semi-confrontational, but we always stuck up for each other too, kind of the way I picture real brothers would behave.  He picked on me constantly, and I always took the bait.  Wrestling matches only ended when blood got spilled.  We nearly came to blows about once a month.  We actually came to blows three times.  (I’ll probably get to those stories later.) But, if someone else ever tried to hurt me . . .  (See Helicopters Over Leon Street.)

At one point, Jeff’s mother adopted Rudy, or she assumed custody or something.  Anyway, at the time of our fight with the Vatoes, he lived with Jeff, Jeff’s mother, and Jeff’s older sister.  I remember being really jealous of the whole situation.  I felt like Jeff stole my older brother.  Then Rudy and I got into that fight on Leon Street, and things changed.

For one, the Vatoes wanted to kill us, and that was a bond all unto itself.  But we also went to jail together for the first time.  We called the cops on ourselves concerning the fight on Leon Street.  We figured we didn’t have much to worry about.  The Vatoes were a known gang.  During the fight, they’d outnumbered us four or five to one.  Anything we’d done, we’d done in self-defense.

Here’s a note to any would be confessors: if you admit to the police that you hit someone, even in self-defense, plan on spending the night in jail.  Especially if people got stabbed during the fight.

The detective we’d talked to on the phone asked us to come down to Parr Boulevard, the brand new police facility outside Sun Valley, in order to “make a statement.”  My mother came with me.  A guy named Detective Cody took my statement, and then informed my mother that I’d be going to jail for assault.  When he left the room, I told my mom to warn Rudy.

Rudy showed up about fifteen minutes after they put me in a locked holding cell, and my mother warned him.  I guess he actually tried to run, but the idea of a fifteen-year-old kid escaping from a state of the art jail is pretty ridiculous.  Within a few minutes of showing up, he joined me in the cell.

We went to Juvie together.  I was released to my mother, and Jeff’s mom let Rudy stay locked up for a few days, in order to teach him a lesson.  (As if either of us could be taught anything at that point in our lives.)  We got court dates, but we never ended up going to court.  Maybe we went to the first date.  I can’t remember.  Anyway, the whole thing just . . . evaporated.

Here’s what I think happened:  Lorraine, my girlfriend at the time, got attacked by the Vatoes a few weeks after the fight.  They pulled a knife on her and cut her sweater, leaving a little scratch on her belly.  Since the cut was so small, the detective she’d been talking to advised her to say that the Vatoes had only showed her the knife when she wrote out her official statement.  Lorraine’s mother and stepfather found out about the coercion concerning the wordage on the statement, and raised a little hell.  The detective who had suggested she lie on the statement was Detective Cody.

I’m pretty sure this is when Detective Cody started to hate me.  Regardless, he hounded me at several points later on in my life.

In the meantime, however, Rudy and I had gotten into more trouble.  In order to protect ourselves from the gangbanger reprisals we figured were sure to come, we stole a bunch of guns from one of our neighbors.  The story on that will be the subject of an upcoming blog, once I get permission to use the neighbors name.  When we realized the trail of evidence pointed squarely at us, Rudy and I packed up and ran away.

We ended up living with my uncle, at a martial arts dojo and commune.  (Lots of blogs on that later, once I figure out how not to get myself killed or disowned for writing about it.)  Uncle Herb took over custody of both of us, but we didn’t slow our crime spree.  We continued on with the same friends, doing the same bad shit, only now we lived in a much cooler house, complete with hot tub, cold tub, massage room, sauna, weight room, rock garden, and training room.

Rudy got along better with my uncles wife than I did, so when I ran away from the dojo, Rudy stayed behind.  He eventually left the dojo.  I eventually returned.  He returned again.  I left again.  He ended up living with my mother for a while.  At one point we both lived with her.  Rudy called me from prison, the first time he went, and asked if I’d be at the birth of his son.  I didn’t want to be at anyone’s birth, so I told him I’d joined the Army, and enlisted the next day in order to make my lie true.  After my short stint with the US Army, we both went to jail together again.  This time as adult guests of Parr Boulevard, the same place we’d made our statements concerning the fight on Leon Street four or five years earlier.

Aahh the memories.

Again and again throughout our lives our paths crossed and re-crossed, until about fifteen years ago, when I moved to Oregon, and Rudy went to prison for the second or third time.  We’ve written letters, but not many.  I attended his wedding when he got married to my cousin.  Otherwise, however, our paths have finally stopped intersecting.

He’s in prison again now.  Parole violation.  He says he’s learned his lesson, and I really hope he’s changed — for himself, for his sons, for me, and for my cousin who is still married to him.  A whole lifetime of history to the contrary, however, makes hope seem a little futile.  I love him, and I still consider him my brother, but at some point, I guess you just have to cut your losses.

I’m at that loss-cutting point in my life now.  Last chance, Brother.  Take it, please.

Anyway, I’ve already used too many words this week.  Sorry for the info dump.  To make up for it, I’ll post a couple pics of Rudy below, one from prison, and another from his wedding.  Next time, I promise TrueStoopidStories instead of historical ramblings.

For now, however, this is all I have.  Take it or leave it.  Love it or hate it.  Not a story.  Just a life.  True, stupid, and mine.