There is no question but that I get that I attributed every bit if negativity in my life to my mother prior to years of therapy. It's such a standard theme in psychology it's practically to be expected. But hey, it isn't by accident that those themes are there and for me it took decades of work, including hundreds of hours of my own therapy to set my "mom issues" to rest. 

When it comes down to where I developed my criminal mentality there is no question but that it started by observing the all-powerful "Oz" do her thing. To put it mildly she was an ego maniac. The term “narcissistic” is thrown around in pop culture too frequently and easily and while I believe that she met criteria for the condition it is important to remember that these conditions aren’t black and white but have a range and she was in the lower range of the condition. Even with the term “ego maniac” there is a pop culture use of the word where if someone is full of themselves, and/or thinks that the world revolves around them people tend to call that ego maniac. There was certainly plenty of that in her makeup to be sure, but I’m referring to it more in a clinical sense where she had no basic morality, ethos, nor ethics other than what was in her best interests. She calculated everything from that vantage point of "What's in it for me? Then let the chips fall where they may". As far as I can tell all of her relationships, romantic, employment, parenting, or just interacting with random strangers where run through a calculus which the only important outcome was how it served her. Without parsing this out for an hour, and in order to not disparage her and to avoid giving the wrong impression, she did seem to have a decent enough sense of responsibility for her kids, up to a point. It should also be said that the things she did never rose to the level of evil to the degree of, say, the type of rotten shit her son would do. That's me folks! 

One of the things that she said that kind of encapsulates how she went approached getting what she wanted was her frequently used motto of “I will get it by hook, or by crook”. Meaning, of course, that if she wanted it she would do whatever it took to get it. If that meant she had to lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, intimidate, it didn’t matter. Getting whatever she sought, or having her way, whatever it was. That was the only important thing. It seems obvious that I picked up on this very early because I remember taking money from her purse and my father’s wallet as far back as I can remember clear back to kindergarten. I also remember being all of maybe 5 years old stealing candy from the corner drug store. I remember sitting in my treehouse eating marshmallow peeps and Mallow Bars sans any visible means of five year old support. 

So where was my father’s place in all of this? He was a difficult character to know what to make of. He was a good man as such things go. The two things that I would say about him was that for one thing in my mind he “did what he had to do”. No more, you understand. He seemed to just what minimal amount that he could do to be a decent “enough” man. I don’t judge him for it. He was easy going and fun and funny as fuck a lot of the times. He was great fun to be around. He was just not much in the fathering department. He was uninvolved and absent a lot. I’d put the amount of time that he was around to be at about 30% and about half that percentage of time he was doing father-ish things, and here I’m including working jobs to support his family, mostly through the insistence of my mother. I’d say that in the other important areas for a good father such as guidance, support, teaching, nurturing, discipline his involvement would probably not make it to 5%, and I honestly can’t remember him doing those types of things except on occasion. But he did pick up the proverbial ball sometimes and he would do what he needed to do. And, I should say that if that meant working his ass off at sometimes multiple shitty jobs, then that’s what he did.

So he could put his nose to the grindstone when he had to, but he was okay with being mostly left alone and serving my mother however and whenever he could. And this was no weak character, but a professional boxer back in the day, so allow me to make that point. He loved my mother immensely, which would be the second thing I could say about him for sure. Theirs was what would come to be known in these days “an alternative relationship.” That wouldn’t be very surprising since we were all living something other than anything resembling a “normal” life. He loved his children for sure and he just did what he was called upon to do whatever the circumstance and within obedience to my mother dictated…to the best of my understanding. This way of being in the world brought with it plenty of bizarre twists.

For example, when I was , around the age of 9 close to 10, three of my siblings were dragged down to Mexico by my mother who decided that my father should stay behind to sell the house we had and to work to send her money to support us, which he did. The kicker was that she wanted to present herself as a rich widower so we were all instructed to tell everyone that our father was dead. And if that wasn’t weird enough after some months he showed up while she was deeply involved with this guy Chemma, who was essentially a town hero, more on that later, and we were told to act like dad was our uncle, for some reason calling him “uncle George” when his name was Newton!

But before getting to Mexico I attended maybe 20 different schools before I dropped out in the 11th grade. Theft was really the only "criminal" behavior until 4th grade when theft was joined by cheating, truancy, being a disruption in class for the fun of it, and violence started to appear and with such frequency that I'd say it was daily, if not more than that, on average. So, in an attempt to keep this from getting bogged down in that minutia I’ll jump to the first time I landed in “jail” which was in Mexico.

We lived in a beautiful little town in central Mexico called San Miquel de Allende. The fact that it was all that didn't matter to my bitter little 10 year old brain in 1969 is that there was nothing familiar about it and I was hated by kids my age and probably most of the population for simply being a gringo, which is the derogatory name for an American. I was already diagnosable as a child with conduct disorder, which in the world of psychology is a necessary precursor to anti-social personality disorder, so I hated society and people in general anyway. Put a kid like that into an environment where I got off on causing trouble anyway so bad things are apt to happen.

The towns in Mexico like to have their regular little festivals in the town center, called a Jardin, translated as Garden, because they are usually beautifully taken care of places for the locals to congregate, beautifully landscaped with manicured trees, wrought iron benches, well-tended flower gardens and generally sweet esthetics. By the time we were living in Mexico I was 10 going on 18 and I had already lived in more places and done more things than a lot of adults. I would even say, without hyperbole, that I had more variation in my life that most adults, and not just “more than a lot”, but there’s no way to validate such a statement. Certainly I had far more experiences than any 10 year old that I’ve ever even heard about, including getting drunk, and spending a good amount of time unsupervised and making daily dumb-ass early adolescent decisions without adult input.

On a particular festival night I was being a menace to the local population in the central square. There were vendors selling eggs filled with confetti with the idea that kids would crack them on each other in play, or perhaps a child would do the same to a parent, or some such socially acceptable thing. Meanwhile I was whipping them at complete strangers with malicious intent and a cop was close enough by when I did that one time (honestly I have a vague memory of throwing one at the cop, but don’t want to come off too over the top without that being a clear memory, so I’ll leave it at that.) So I was scooped up and put into the jail. Not down into the holding cells, but in the main office area where they figured out what to do with people. And while I had some type of maturity that is not to imply that being in a Mexican jail was easy. I mostly saw through the idea that the cops who had me in the jail were trying to frighten me and since I understood the game I was not as scared by it as most kids naturally would be. Primarily because the guy that my mom was dating, Chemma, was a big deal in that town and I knew that they knew Chemma because everyone knew Chemma and nothing bad was likely to happen to me. So when he came to pick me up there was a lot of laughing and back slapping between them and it was all good. Chemma made a show to give me a hard time, but he was uninvolved with me and so it was all for show and I knew it.  After maybe 11 months, or so of abject daily misery in Mexico we moved back to Massachusetts where things just seemed to get ever weirder.

Upon return to the U.S. and Massachusetts the criminal activities that I remember were more of the vandalizing type. There was more drinking and then drugs came into the picture around 12, or 13, as I found out about other substances to abuse. I got deep into music as many kids do at that age and ripped off my first album, Black Sabbaths Paranoid, from a record store. Try that sometime! This being a narrative on criminal behavior I won’t delve into how deeply I got into music, but it was far from typical. As regards to other criminal behaviors I was mostly into vandalizing for what could only be reasons of being a petty menace to society. One weird “hobby” that my friends and I had was that we went around stealing, are you ready for this, not just hub caps, but mostly gas caps off of cars. I remember having a huge plastic bag of gas caps that must have numbered maybe 40 of them. Occasionally to be extra huge assholes we would bring sugar to put in some gas tanks. Mostly it always felt kind of good to be getting away with something while spreading misery in the world I suppose as I analyze it in retrospect. I would steal from my parents if I could so that we could drink on the weekends and pool our money to buy pot whenever that opportunity presented itself to 11 year old kids circa 1971. But in addition to a sense of getting away with something I guess that stealing the gas caps was mostly an expression of hatred of everyone and hurting anyone that I could in any way I could in a passive aggressive way. 

But that wasn’t the weird part so much as the living arrangements and how things played out because of them. We all were living in this huge house my mother had purchased using the leverage of being “Miss Jan” from an old T.V. show that was a predecessor of the now famous Sesame Street show from PBS called “Romper Room”. The house wasn’t mansion sized like Beverly Hills, but certainly several sizes more than a typical house. She had converted the massive downstairs to a daycare facility. An array of family members occupied the upper 3 stories, which, at one point included Chemma, my father, my dying grandfather, my mother, of course, four kids, and an infant nephew of my 18 year old sister. My older brother rarely appeared but my oldest sister, Jan who was probably in her mid-20’s at that time came around with some frequency. At least one reason for that, it seems, was that she was getting the occasional diddling by Chemma. 

TMI? Perhaps. To me it’s just sharing whatever bits and pieces of the shit-storm of the stories as they came up. There is, in fact, some shit-hurricanes to share and at any given time I run the risk of yet another digression, so this was truly just a different flavor of the whirlwind of weirdness that swirled around almost all of the time in my life. When this predictable time bomb exploded Chemma headed back to Mexico and mom took off back down to Mexico after him leaving my little sister, Donna, and I in the care of my older sister Joy, who, at 18 years old had an infant who was already a handful. Joy tried to care of us but I was out of control and while Joy did what she could to keep us fed and taken care of it was an exercise in futility where I was concerned. I was all of 11 years old and was basically unsupervised so I fed myself with snack food and soft drinks for the most part. Naturally after a while I became malnourished. Specifically I remember that my heart was constantly beating so hard that it was preventing me from getting to sleep some nights. This caught the attention of my father who lived elsewhere and would show up on occasions, mostly to watch TV with us, which was, again, his idea of parental supervision, I suppose. The doctor said that I had anemia and I suppose that was enough of a red flag that my dad made a reappearance as a care provider in our lives,…. for a while anyway. That’s when he took us down to Florida, and that’s when I was in 6^th grade, so I was maybe early 12 by then. He did what he had to do when the time came for him to do it. So for a couple of years he worked and supported the troop consisting of 3 of my sisters, Joys baby, BJ, and me down in Florida.

That lasted until mom reappeared and insisted that he give her back the reins of the kids probably for the purposes of getting welfare checks as I remember her deal at the time, which he seemed to happily turn over to her. The point being that nobody would mistake him as an involved father. I can’t remember anything that he even attempted me teach me coming up. Well, there were some baseball basics that he gave me around the time I played little league, but after that, at something like 8 years old there was nothing that I can remember where he attempted to provide fatherly influence in those important areas I mentioned previously. Except there was one small bit of advice that stuck in my head and that was; “Son” he said one time, “take care of your feet.” He had very messed up feet. 

Next Stop Santa Barbara.

During her travels in the early 70’s mom stopped in a medium sized city in central California to get gas and, as she told it when she stepped out of her car to take in the panorama she was instantly overcome by the beauty of the town and the surrounding environment nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Los Padres National Forest. That’s when she decided that she should call upon her troop of children and their father, at that point in Aurora Colorado, to come and be a source of income for her to live in Santa Barbara. Of course the place is popular now but it was almost a small town then with a lot of natural open spaces. I would walk through huge open fields of wild flowers on the way to school every morning without even really understanding what a great time it was to be in such an idyllic place.

A feature of the school system there is that they placed a premium on physical ability inasmuch as in their gym classes they had a tier system whereby there were maybe 20 or so different tests of strength, endurance, speed and coordination and when a student achieved a certain score in each category they would be given different colored shorts for all the world to behold. The top tier color was powder blue and there might be one ultra-athletic guy who came along once a year, or once every other year who could manage to attain those shorts at La Colinna School that were at that time like having earned a Gold medal in the Olympics. Still the gold colored shorts where instant stud status and maybe 20 guys a year managed to get those. Silver shorts were attained by, let’s say, 50 guys and those guys who achieved those still held stud-status and were bestowed plenty of admiration. The student body had to have numbered in the hundreds of males with most of the minions wearing red, greed and then the dreaded blue shorts for the dregs of the school. In that school if a kid wore blue or red colored shorts, forget it; their social status was nil. Even if a child was a prodigy, or a musical genius, it didn’t matter in that school, the color of the gym shorts was all that mattered as an indicator of ones worth. The gym classes were places of serious training and the higher  went in the color system the more rigorous the training, and yes, for 14, 15, 16 year olds that kind of rigorous training occurred for those who were into it. I entered that school having had no such training, but I was always very athletic and I hit puberty early so I was all set to do well. My initial athletic tests earned me silver shorts and the next quarter I was awarded gold shorts. I had arrived!

The reason that I mention all of that is that with that status system, where the kids that had the high athletic abilities where held up on a pedestal I was held in high esteem by the popular males and, of course, the attractive popular females. It was the first time since I entered into any school system where I was recognized for something other than causing trouble and getting into fights. The effect of that on me was to act mellow out some. I still loved causing trouble and creating whatever havoc I could in classes. I wasn’t just the class clown, which was always an aspiration and effort at whatever school I went to, but I was the class ass. Passing notes wasn’t my thing; I was into throwing wads of paper, placing tacks on seats, once having hurled with all my strength a metal nut across the metal shop class just barely missing the shop teacher and placing a deep divot into the wood cabinet, kind of things. That was me mellowing and it was just a part of my personality by then. I got into a couple fights as well and had one the first week. It was a bloody affair where I was completely mismatched. Plus the other kid blindsided me as I handed my jacket to a friend. WHACK! A bloody mess. Mike F, (funny the things you remember) then pummeled me without me getting one punch off. The result to my grill was pretty…pretty bad. Oh well, just another new school. As I said in other narratives I learned that I was never, ever going to back down, so it didn’t matter how big the school bully was. I remember it like it was yesterday and in my mind’s eye I don’t see a kid fighting another kid. It seemed to me so much like a couple of adults going at it. Funny that. But at that age kids mature at different times and we had both had hit our adolescence by that time. Anyway, for the purposes of this narrative the point is that my criminal behavior was reduced during that year of 9^th grade.

I started smoking cigarettes that year and had been drinking and smoke pot whenever I could for some years prior to that. Let’s guess at maybe 5 or 10 times a month. The big accomplishment for me criminally speaking was that about midway through the year I discovered how to make a master key to the lockers at the YMCA. Being that I had this newfound status of school-athletic-stud I went to the Y a lot to work out. Plus I was and always have been athletic by nature, so I actually enjoyed sports and working out. The gym would naturally provide padlocks with keys to the members. At some point I guess I noticed that all the keys had something in common. They all had two small teeth on either side at the tip of the keys. So I took one of the lock and keys and I filed down the other teeth, leaving the ends of key at either side and, voila, I had made a master key to all of the gym lockers.

Over the course of the next 6 weeks or so I probably got my hands on 10 to 15 or so wallets and I had what seemed to a 15 year old like a million dollars in cash. That amount translated into real dollars was certainly several hundred at the very least. Later in life when I became a much more conscious person it was one of the things that I most regretted having done to people. Not for the money but for the misery that I obviously had caused by virtue of being the source of stolen credit cards, which I was too young and stupid to do anything with but throw away, Social Security Cards, precious pictures that maybe couldn’t be replaced, and who knows what all kind of problems I caused for those men.

I don’t know exactly how long I managed to keep it going. I seem to remember thinking that it was going to be an endless source of money at the time, so long as I was sneaky enough. In retrospect I wonder how it could have happened more than a few times before the gym put someone on the case to try to bust whoever was perpetrating the crime. As it turns out I had the good fortune of having with me at the time of my arrest the brother of my girlfriend. My girlfriend, at the time was the daughter of the DA of Santa Barbara. Not the assistant DA, but the DA! I spent the night in juvenile detention but the charges did magically disappear as did my girlfriends ability to be my girlfriend from then on, although, school was school and her father had no “jurisdiction” there, so we still flirted and made out when and where we could.

But I also made out with her friend, and I also did what I could to get into her panties Since  found out about Alice that put the brakes on April for good. All of this factors into the story because this was the first time of so many times to come that I was emotionally distraught due to a break up. Sure it was puppy love, but it was the first time I felt anything romantic for a female and, again, like so many times to come, I had caused the problem. I have come to understand only after years, perhaps decades, of introspective and self-critical work that I had self-loathing ever since I was a child and these kinds of things reinforced those thoughts and feelings over the course of my whole life, leading to an array of problems to come. And while I had that moment in the sun in that athletically based school system, which, by the way, was so clearly fueled by testosterone based elitism and blatant-on display, discrimination of “weaker” kids that I have little doubt but that the whole school system would be sued into oblivion today. Anyway, it was the end of the school year and none of that could be identified, much less understood by my angry little mind, so it meant next to nothing to me.

The Carnival

What did matter to me was that when the carnival came through Santa Barbara as it did every year at the beginning of the summer. What mattered was that the old drunk who was running the Paratrooper ride, and who I had somehow been talking with at length, probably trying to wheedle some booze from him, needed to get his belt and allowed me to run the ride. Yes I was 15, but as stated I had matured early. In fact by that time I had sprung up to almost my adult height. I was also very mature in some ways. It’s easy for me to acknowledge that in other ways, particularly emotionally, I remained adolescent into my late 30’s, but that’s another story. I was very tall for my age and very fit as I mentioned earlier, so I’m guessing that added to the impression that I was at least 18 I would think. It helps to make this credible to remember that with all of the moving, drinking, fights, criminal activity, I think that I came across as, I could say “worldly” if only using those markers. I’m relatively sure that if the derelict ride operator had known that I was 15 he would have…well, he probably would have gone to take his drink anyway, but, maybe not. As it turned out he took his time and I got used to running the ride which was pretty straight forward. After he returned I hung around a while after that and somehow this turned into a paid position within a couple of hours. I’m guessing that the guy got used to walking away and letting me run the ride, got too smashed to continue running the ride and they needed someone to run it and they had a readymade “man” to do it, certainly not knowing, or suspecting my age.

Of course I can’t clearly recall the specifics from 50 years ago but I did get the job and worked there all weekend thinking that I had hit the jackpot earning maybe five dollars an hour, or whatever it was that they were paying me in 1974 dollars, but compared to nothing it was something. Then on Saturday they asked me if I wanted to go on the road with them. I calculated the amount of money I would be making and I was eager to go. Then they found out my age and they kind of freaked out about it. They kept the offer but said that I would need to get written parental permission. I told my mother later that day and she went right out and had a statement legally notarized. She had always told me that it was in the spirit of adventure that she did that, but it seemed to me that her enthusiasm to have me gone was palpable. Even though I wanted to go I felt hurt by how much she wanted me gone and the lengths that she went to make sure it happened. Did she have to be so happy about it? Of course I never said anything about it, and I probably didn’t even acknowledge it until 40 years later when I was knee deep in therapy, but, yeah, it hurt. And as I write these words I think about how that was only one of countless things that I learned to repress, or, as I came to use the term “shove it into my shit-closet”. It’s really a wonder I’m not crazy (er)…

The preferred drug for Carnies back then were these amphetamines called “white crosses” which we would take fairly regularly, especially on Sunday night when the “show” would be taken down in a frenzy. Taking the show down quickly matters because we typically started around 10 or 11 on a Sunday night when the midway was emptying and there was little to no people left to spend their money. Then as soon as the ride was dismantled and set into the trucks, of which many of the carnival rides were, and probably still are, built into and a part of the truck it rolls down the road on. The ride would just get kind of folded into itself in a manner of speaking and as soon as that is done for each particular ride the standard operating procedure, as stupid as it was, would be to then drive to the next town.

On average I would say that the next towns would be a few hours away, but sometimes we’d be driving until the sun came up. One time I was riding shotgun and it was my job to keep the conversation going but during a lull in our talk the driver of this huge truck, as big as any you’ve seen on the road that isn’t a double, had fallen asleep. It actually took me a while to notice because I was only half awake myself and we were in the slow lane of an empty two lane freeway and he drifted into the fast lane and I was in a tired haze myself and I guess I just figured he had his reasons, or, more than likely I didn’t think about it, but then he started to drift off into the emergency lane at which point I looked over to see him folded over the steering wheel. I woke him up and he jerked the big rig back into the fast lane and all’s well that end’s well, but still, it isn’t something you hope to see and I’m pretty sure I didn’t stop talking until we get where we were going to.

When I had previously calculated how much I was going to be earning I was dead wrong. I was surprised when I found out that they paid in salary and not hourly and when considering that a carney is a carney 24/7 the pay probably comes down to a dollar ah hour. We would literally sleep wherever he can, which in the heat of summer does NOT include inside for reason I won’t bother to elaborate on. So sleeping on the nearest grass if there was any around that a carney, probably drunk, was lucky enough to be able to sleep on was luxury. But mostly a sleeping bag on the asphalt of the parking lot that we were typically set up in was where much of the sleeping happened. If, every once in awhile the owners of the carnival could find us someplace like a local high school gym to shower in occasionally that would be a bonus.  

The counterbalance to the White Crosses was the alcohol, typically the cheapest beer, or rot-gut hard-core liquor available. I knew of a guy who would sometimes drink a shaving lotion called “Aqua Velva” if pushed to it. Maybe we were not drunk while the citizens were on the rides, but sometimes some of us would be half drunk even then too. Add to the altered mind state of the typical carny back then that these rides were very often in horrible disrepair and it is really incredible more tragedies didn’t occur. The Paratrooper was the ride that I was mostly assigned to run. It didn’t have the proper operating braking systems meant for keeping the seats from drifting. The trick was to get the rides as balanced by weight from one side of the ride to the other so that whatever amount of break that did work would keep the ride from drifting enough to at least give the impression that all was well. But sometimes a rider would have to jump in real quick, or sometimes they would be asked to step aside while I reversed the ride so that they could get on real quick. . So plenty of times I would have to hurry people on and off the ride to keep it from slowly moving while the breaks would be screeching as they did what they could to keep things stable.

So then think about the fact that sometimes mothers were putting their beloved little kids on rides that were unsafe no matter who was running it, but it was being run by a half-drunk, or amphetamine addled 15 year old who probably hated them and their kid for simply being alive. As for me I came to hate that summer a lot for a variety of reasons. That summer deserves a chapter so I won’t elaborate here but to say that when that story is written it will include catching a little girl who was falling out of a ride in Bishop California called the Rock and Roll that I had only just learned to run less than an hour before. Sure it must sound like bullshit, but, yes I did that and had a very important witness! And then how I had just been running another ride called The Hammer, or sometimes called The Rocket, in Downey California on the fourth of July when the cable broke, the links of which were the size of a forearm, and the length of the cable, probably a good 20 feet long whipped out severing all electrical cables in its path resulting in live wires shooting out sparks all over the place, loss of control of the ride, and the whole park screaming. Not a word of any of these stories is made up.

When I came off the road toward the end of the summer my mother announced that she had found a place for us in a little town outside of Santa Barbara. I hated the idea because, check it out, I had status as an athlete in that school, I had friends, I was admired by males and females alike, girls liked me and I even though I was bereft of social skills to speak of I was in the cool crowd and I was likely to be looked up to even more as the guy who just took off and joined a carnival for the summer. Are you kidding me!? I’d be “the man”! But the ongoing theme of my life as I knew it to be was mom was always going to find some kind of way to make my life a bigger shit-hole to be and this move did do that.

The town that we moved to was hardly more that just a freeway exit in those days with the lovely name of “Summerland”. It was most semi-famous in that region of California for having a nude beach. A person would want to walk far enough down the way to get there and what 16 year old wouldn’t….and I did regularly! With that statement said I am now going to take a self-indulgent detour off of the crime story for a minute to share something that most people probably wouldn’t think about, or care to know anyway, but I think it might be interesting enough to share. So, for the fun of it see if you have some kind of thought that comes to mind when you think of “nudists”, or even just some simple judgement of a person who might prefer to go to a bathing suit optional beach and see if that notion holds after I prattle on here for a few minutes. I think that most people, if they thought about such things at all, might think that going to a nude beach is just of prurient interest. But having been to many over the years when I was a teenager I would offer that the typical nude beach goer is not perverted and probably not, as one might surmise neither an exhibitionist nor a voyeur. Of course there are those folks, no doubt about that, however given the perspective gained with the experiences of having been to bathing suit optional beaches in Santa Barbara maybe 20 or 30 times might provide a different perspective. I can’t remember when or why I first went but I discovered that the typical people going to those beaches were freedom loving folks who enjoy what is simply a pervasive good vibe that I guess comes from what I would say is just being in the world 100% naturally with no shame, nor anything to hide. At these beaches there were often times families, mostly parents of some preadolescent children, sometimes older folks, and a whole lot of hippies since it was the 1970’s who were just doing regular beach stuff. They were uninhibited and seemingly not at all self-conscious. I know that very quickly I stopped thinking about the fact that I had no clothes on.

The suit optional beaches were always out of the way and most times difficult to get to so it kept the pervs and the voyeurs from showing up unless they were extremely motivated. When they did come around they were pretty easy to spot, so I doubt that standing out in that crowd was very comfortable for them so their particular bent would have had to be strong enough to overcome that, I would think. The inaccessibility and the fact that it was accepted as a clothing optional beach would also keep the cops away. So these beaches were populated by freedom minded, uninhibited people with no body hang ups, hiding nothing, as it were. They were seemingly happy, probably most law abiding fringe members of society even though plenty of marijuana was passed around to complete strangers….like me…. They were throwing Frisbees and going on their walks, and doing normal beach stuff, just without cloths. And if people wanted to be there wearing bathing suits they could and they did, but mostly they did not. It really felt like a slice of paradise. Oh, and it probably goes without mentioning but Santa Barbara in the early 70’s was as good a place to be as I think that there could be on the planet. I would say that lasted through maybe the early 80’s. It was an “open secret” paradise compared to what it is now. I am tempted to continue to wax nostalgic about how nice it was but this is a narrative on my tendency towards being a budding outlaw, so it’s best to stick with doing things like picking avocados of off the trees which grew in abundance and were a simple scale of a wall or fence away. By loading up a bag of those and going to the nearest bar, store, or parking lot and selling them 3 for a quarter equaled beer money in no time.  

So then, getting back to Summerland, the thing about that nude beach at that location was that the railroad tracks running all along the California coast ran along the cliffs maybe 200 feet above the beach. It was kind of a known fun-fact that the Amtrak passengers, plenty of whom presumably would not have been aware of the unexpected view that their route offered what would have had a fair share of surprised passengers along that stretch of their journey witnessing naked humans frolicking on the beach. I like to imagine a scenario where some real uptight folks are dinning on….oh, please let it be sausages, or Weiner schnitzel…. No that would be too much to ask for,…but dining, let’ say, completely unsuspecting and the next thing that catches their eyes is the hippie bending over to get his Frisbee, or, the 80 year old woman, or fat dude jogging. While such scenes are probably too much to ask for my guess is that there was more than one Heimlich maneuver performed on those trains back then.

These are such fun images but this narrative is about how I was at that point a seriously pissed-off 16 year old young man. To bring it back to the point the reason there was even a bathing suit optional beach down the way from the main Summerland beach was that, as I stated before, the bathing suite optional beaches required an effort to get to and the further point is to say that the reason there was one outside of Summerland was that IT WAS BASICALLY IN THE FREAKING BOONIES back then. Summerland was situated far enough from everything, without even a bus line, so I was basically stranded there, with no friends and nothing to do and no place to go, except for the beach. I understand that this might sound pretty great, but for a 16 year old full of vitriol for humanity the appeal to going to the beach every day wears thin very quickly.

Then school started and that was another layer of misery. To fully appreciate that misery it requires that you follow this; any kids my age growing up anywhere close to this place would have known from they became aware of anything at all that they had to do everything humanly possible to secure a car by the time they were old enough to drive so that they weren’t stuck there. I’m guessing those kids saved every penny and worked since they were two years old in order to make sure that they had some kind of mobility as soon as possible. I also think that it is safe to say that a guy who had the kind of exceedingly experienced life, including having just come off the road from a summer as a carny was probably the worst type of character to ask to be put into a situation of riding maybe 1.5 hours each way every day in a school bus full of nothing but grade school little kids. There were certainly no other kids my age that went all the way to the end of the line, that being Carpentaria High School. Think about that age span at that time of our lives and it feels, or felt, like I may as well be riding with kindergarteners. I realize as I write this that this might come across as some petty complaint, which, for a half-way calm and centered kid taking that bus for a couple of weeks might be just so-so, but for me, under the piles of shit accumulated my entire life up to that point it was another layer of all that I have been describing in this narrative, with plenty more on the way. It didn’t matter to me that it made no logical sense that my mother must be stealing from Satan’s own playbook on how to make my life worse; it’s was just what it was, abject misery. The fact that on top of all of the shit that went into making my life a place that I wanted to exit from on a daily basis I had to now take a 3 hour a day mind-fucking hurricane of hate that made me want to hijack the bus and drive it into oncoming traffic was…. Well… let’s say it left an impression.

I am as certain as I can be about anything that if I hadn’t worked through all of these things and more through therapy and consuming whatever information I could get my hands on later in life in order to resolve these things that my life would have been an exponentially worse place to be. Again, therapy works and it is because I know the massive value of the work that I ultimately became a therapist. But back then I literally wanted to kill my mother for, once again, putting me in a miserable situation. I wanted to kill my younger sister who I was living with because she was my younger sister. I wanted to kill every kid on those bus rides that made inane kid statements, which, as I experienced it there was nothing but that during that shit-show EVERY-STINKING-DAY! And, the overriding mindset that I had always, well, since I was around 9 years old as I remember it, was that I hated every moment being alive and I very much wanted to put an end to it. My conflict was that I didn’t want to kill myself overtly and I do remember why. I held onto to the idea that once I became an adult that everything would change. I conceptualized the notion that all things would equal out, in a way, and that I was somehow going to be okay. I knew that I didn’t want children of my own and I’d be a cool and happy bachelor playboy type. I would drink all I wanted, fuck all sorts of different woman, get high all I wanted and just live it up. My main idols where Hugh Hefner and Hunter S. Thompson and I felt like I could pull off having a crazed, fun, maniacal life that I could cultivate if I could manage to stay alive and out of prison long enough.

That was the fantasy that kept me from overtly acting on an impulse to get the hell out of this life. Meanwhile the additional isolation and misery brought on by living in Summerland impacted me in several ways as I see it. I have always been a reader and during the first months living there I had little else to do. We didn’t even have a good TV signal, so I read a lot. Also, just a point of fact, I had been into music even more than typical kids my age. One of the many extra cool things about Santa Barbara, from where I could still get a clear radio signal from KTYD is that it had either the last or one of the last free-form FM radio stations in the country. It was the kind of station where you could hear whole album sides if the DJ felt like it. The DJ’s were very interesting, laid back, sounding stoned a lot, and they never seemed in any kind of a hurry to get to their point when they were on air. They would just ramble on sometimes and talk at length and depth about the bands and music that they were playing. I would sometimes call these guys up and talk with them about all kinds of things, mostly related to music, of course, but I thought of them as kind of surrogate friends.

I got into music that much more as a result of being isolated in Summerland. Another effect was that I remember that my peaks of anger grew in the areas of intensity, duration and frequency. I was a walking, talking ball of rage looking for a place for it to land during those days. That feeling had been common for me from late childhood until my late 30’s but it was very pronounced during those months from the end of that summer at fifteen until sometime in late autumn during tenth grade.

And the last effect that I am able to identify from that time and in those circumstance is that I fell in with a group of guys and we came to be recognized by the rest of the student body, including, of course, the faculty  as the biggest “heads”, or “stoners” in the school. We were also well known as the source for weed which was how we financed what was basically our daily use. Our primary goal all day every day was to stay high. My daily routine was what was known as “wake and bake”, which is to get high as quickly as possible after getting up. If I didn’t get high in the house, blowing the smoke out the window I would defiantly have to smoke on the way to the bus stop. When I got off the bus I would hook up with the boys who were probably already in our spot on the far side of the football field and we’d commence to get as high as possible relative to being able to navigate school in some kind of way, just as a start to the day. Then during pretty much every break I’d go to out to the field and there would be at least a few guys out there getting high. It didn’t matter who had some weed and who didn’t there was always enough to go around and as stoners do we were always happy to pass it around. By the end of the school day of I’d have to get high before getting on the bus. Once off the bus, well, the point has been made I’m sure that basically coming down was kind of not supposed to happen and rarely did happen.

Getting high was not so much a thing to do as it was a lifestyle. Smoking it, selling it, having it, being it, had become who I was, in a manner of speaking all day every day. And I suppose that being that stoned that often that young did tend to reduce the expression of the ever-present rage I was always carrying around, repressed just under the surface of the high, but by no means had it gone anywhere. My anger and rage which was always there in abundance for my mother surfaced in full force with a heavy dose of vitriol when one day and I locked my mother out of the house with the safety chain of the front door. She was out in the hallway with a ton of groceries with the door propped open enough to see me in a reclining chair taunting and mocking her as she naturally became more and more upset. We lived in apartments so this whole thing was on public display pretty quickly.

Here was this monumental shit of a kid sitting just 2 feet away from the woman who paid the bills and did what she could with what she had to work with to be as good-enough of a mother as she could chained locked out of her own place by a taunting shit-head for God knows how long. She must have been out of her mind with rage. She eventually broke through the door shattering the surrounding wood, of course. 

Moments later she was furiously calling anyone she could to get rid of me. The “loser” was my brother in Colorado which was a whole other nightmare. For the sake of the story I will share that my brother picked me up at the Denver airport. He lived in the Rocky Mountains in a small town called Evergreen. I remember the ride taking forever and my Google search just now has it at 29 miles. Maybe it was the fact that the whole way he was doing his best to get me to respond to his repeated attempts to get me to fight him. I’ve been in plenty of hostile situations but none as prolonged and silly. I say “silly” because, since if I had a choice whether to fight him or not, and I seemed to have that choice, then, no,!....you huge and crazy m-f. er I will not fight you!….duh… Anyway that was a harbinger of the misery to come for sure.

My brothers tolerance for me was pretty much non-existent. I was treated like an unwanted houseguest that was thrust upon his literally insane and irresponsible ass, which I was.  I remember freezing my ass off in the dead of winter in the mountains most of that winter. Keep in mind that I left Southern California with no real cold-weather cloths so I was obviously ill prepared for that environment. He was definitely not going to spend his beer money on getting his despised little brother who had been unwelcomely thrust upon him clothes that was for sure. So that was a problem I had to figure out. Then being that he was a stumble-down drunk there were more than one morning when I’d be awaked by the temperature being so cold that it felt like I was in a walk-in freezer. My dip-shit drunken brother would often times leave the front door open in the dead of winter in The Rockies, no biggie. As it was we were living in a dilapidated semi-apartment underneath a bar-restaurant. Where once there had been tile, probably years ago, there was cork floor that was so thoroughly broken through that I had to walk on the half inch sides of the floor where there was enough support so that I wasn’t walking on pipes, some of which were scalding hot. And, in case you missed it, a bar-restaurant, hold up, a very popular bar-restaurant tends to be “LOUD AS FUCK” into the wee hours of pretty much every morning. This tends to be less than perfect for any adolescent who might want and/or need sleep every night. So we can add sleep deprivation, probably chronic to the point of never getting one good night’s rest for that whole winter to the mental illness cocktail for our young desperado.   

Some more information on my brother is appropriate in this crime narrative if only that he did flow in and out of my life. What he brought to the show whenever he was around was almost always some form of chaos. His story starts as a kid who would wonder off into the woods and mountains, the same Rockies since we were living in Denver at the time. I was a baby but my family said that often enough he would disappear with his dog, at 9 years old for days at a time. When asked why she didn’t stop him from doing that my mother says “I couldn’t. Besides, he always came home just fine.”

This was not his only quirk by a longshot. By all family accounts he was a psychological mess in a variety of ways from an early age. I have gotten vague reports of serious abuse at the hands of a baby sitter, but I’m not sure of the details. When the war came he joined the 101^st airborne. I have read enough bookd on The Vietnam war and I have read a book on the accounts of some of the things that the 101^st went through and the book describes some seriously fucked up shit. Whatever he went through in Vietnam I am sure that made things decidedly worse for him. For one thing ever since he got out, for maybe the next 20 plus years until I divorced him when I got sober at 38 I would estimate that the word “kill” was apt to come out of his mouth any given day maybe 30 times, if not more. I realize how absurd that number seems as I write it but I really don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Certainly I would say, given how frequently I heard him say it around me, with zero reason, nor provocation, that 100 times a week must be a low estimate. It was clearly a part of the psychosis for which he received a chapter 8 discharge and subsequent benefits from the military. Chapter 8 means that the person has mental health problems, which is not easy to achieve in the military, much less Vietnam era military. As a behavior therapist I am going to guess that, while he was certainly deserving of his Chapter 8, that he also got “mileage” from it. What I mean by “mileage” is that I think that he discovered shortly after he returned to the US and civilian life that when he talked about anything to do with killing that he got a variety of reinforcement. For example I would imagine that some people would put some distance between them,  leaving him alone, which would have appealed to him as an anti-social person. Other times he would probably have gotten attention, which would have appealed to him in other settings, like bars, where other bar-flies, perhaps vets from a variety of wars, or those interested in violent stories might be likely to buy him drinks, which would of course be very reinforcing. He might feel respected from some on some level but the biggest payoff that he probably got from it all in my opinion was that he was intimidating and he absolutely loved to be intimidating as far as I could tell. He played the part of the angry vet all day every day and it didn’t matter who he was around. I mean, as a matter of compassion I am pretty sure that he didn’t have to pretend to be a pissed of violent minded vet. I just think that he played it up so often that it became who he was without much more to his personality. Maybe that was all that he was, but I don’t think so. Until maybe that was all that he was. Well, one other part of his self-identity was being a mostly unemployed freelance automobile mechanic, meaning he could fix cars but he couldn’t hold a job, say, in a garage with a boss and other employees. And even that skill faltered when computers became a part of automobiles and he couldn’t keep up. He was several parts drunk and that could be of the 24/7 variety as well. But, whether he was turning wrenches, or drinking, or babbling violent nonsense, at the core he was a always a crazy vet.

What my brother brought with him every time that he was around me, and I’ll assume this didn’t disappear when he walked away from me, which is to say I assume the following was simply his life all day every day was fear (in addition to his erratic and intimidating words and behavior he was large and very muscular, even into his 50’s which was around the last I saw of him. His strength was admittedly surprising and impressive because given how poorly he ate and how much he drank it seemed he should have been a lot closer to dead than to intimidating. I found it surprising that he was alive, much less fit into his 50’s. I suppose it isn’t a stretch to think that some of the guys at the VA would provide him with the occasional steroids. Still, given what I have witnessed in my family I think it’s safe to say that our heredity has some very resilient genes. Interestingly and conversely self-destructive genes also I would say, particularly of the cancerous type, and resilient genes, but, they’re genes, just following instructions from our ancestries. In addition to a general sense that violence might occur at any time when he was around there was also a kind of foreboding impending chaos that always seemed to be lurking just around the corner. When he was around there was a sense that things were now dangerous and bad things were likely to be happening soon, as they often did.

Buddy was my brother’s name, well technically his nickname that he was called “Buddy” since he was a kid and I doubt that anyone outside of his family ever even knew his real name. “Buddy”, ironically a synonym for “a friend” (and I just now made a connection to the name “Dakota”, meaning “a friend” in the language of the Sioux…jeez…what’s that all mean?) and he was anything but a friend to anyone except to the occasional dogs that he seemed to “find” (I’d lay bets that he dog-napped plenty of dogs in his day) and those dogs he would seem to love, in the complicated way of a man who loved these animals, but loved booze more, so I’m guessing that more than one dog went hungry on occasion, if not worse. His demeanor was only friendly in the occasional half-minute flash when he dropped the Vietnam vet killer guy, probably by mistake, I’m assuming, only to find himself out of sorts by the momentary loss off his created identity and he would get right back into his role in order to find his bearings.

But anyway, getting back to how he was Captain Chaos there was one time, for example, that stands out as a foreshadowing for the time that he got arrested for murder. Yes, he got arrested for murder, for which he was on trial for over a year and probably did do, but was eventually acquitted. So this one time some friends of mine pulled up at the stop light in the car next to us and they were giving me shit, as friends do. Buddy reached over and popped open the glove box where there was a huge gun. I don’t know much about guns but my guess was this one was one of those 357 Magnums cuz, I mean it was huge. And he said to me ‘If you need it, there it is”, as casually as if he was pointing to “gum” and not a “gun”. I was probably about 16 and stunned at the site and circumstances along with the suggestion so I just stumbled out a response of “no thanks” to his generous offer. And later that year he got arrested for murder. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it, but that’s another story.

Getting back to the end of that winter with Buddy when he had reached his tolerance and couldn’t stand me any more I got shipped off to Florida to live with my father. He was living in Miami Beach, which has always been his favorite city in the world. He was living in a hotel room that was surely the coolest place to be, like….back in the 30’s, or something. Lower Biscayne Boulevard was occupied by nothing but retirees and I don’t think that it’s an exaggeration to say that I was maybe 40 or 50 years younger than anyone else for miles. So then, whaddya know, another miserable circumstance for Mikey.

I spent winter freezing my ass off in the Rockies, mostly because I was lacking proper winter clothes with the added fun-time-crazed-drunken-brother and all that stuff of corked floors, open doors, noise galore and tolerated no more…ta-da! By the end of that winter Buddy convinced my father to take the burden. Of course I understood that that there must have been plenty of negotiations that I wasn’t privy to, but most certainly there would have happened between whatever family members where struggling to avoid being the person stuck with having me around. I can imagine each saying something like “No way. I just cannot take him”. I would assume that the “loser” had to endure me for as long as they were able. So, anyway, I made the trip from the freezing winter in the Rockies to the stifling heat of south Florida just in time for summer. My presence there was like some proverbial little island of angry youth in an ocean of bitter, grumpy, outdated thinking, leather skin, absurd looking wigs and the ever-present scent of Vicks Vaporub. Remember that I was so poorly socialized that I didn’t really have any social skills beyond drinking, drugging and the criminal element, and then just barely, so I sure didn’t have any clue how to navigate old folks who were ripe with fear to begin with and seemingly endless in numbers as far as the eye could see. It seemed that I could reach out and touch 10 at any given moments and they seemed to find delight at letting me know, as the involuntary surrogate spokesman for anyone under 90 how messed up the “kids are nowadays”. Remember, in the early to mid 1970’s the youth were to them a different species of human and not just confusing but a threat to them in a variety of ways. Not knowing for sure what went on in all of those ancient noggins I think it’s safe to assume that to most of them I was the very embodiment of all hippies, the counter-culture, the whole “don’t trust anyone over 30” mentality so when they weren’t contriving some kind of bullshit kindness there was a general vibe that I was “the enemy” to them.

As I stated previously I’m so glad that I discovered the value of therapy because it allowed me to be able to sort things out and I don’t feel that perpetual anger towards the elderly, the youth, you, or me, that I would have otherwise. But in those days I was surrounded by discomfort, inside and outside of me and it was perpetual. I guess that I could say that I was awash up to the top of my being in the discomfort of being WAY out of place in that environment, among other things. Try that moment after moment, day after day….then after year…then after decades…. Can I get a witness? … No, I’m not trying to get sympathy, nor am I just looking to snivel, but, this effort I am into being to TRY to be known to some degree I think that it is fair to point out that, not only did this stuff happen, okay, fine, but, man, it was FUCKING HARD to work through it all. And that I want to be said as well. So then, my dears, that constant discomfort, you might have heard it put as dis-ease, or disease, and it was pushing me closer and closer towards wanting to commit geronticide (I just looked it up. It means the killing of the elderly.) And of course I’m…kidding…but what did happen is the crime that I had come to regret the most and the one I have chosen to recall to make a point to my clients over the years more than any for good reason.

The scene being that I was broke, angry, as always, and I had an ever present growing distain for humanity as a whole. In that circumstance my hatred was focused onto the elderly since they were the “flavor” of humanity surrounding me at that time. I decided that I needed to get some money and since the victim pool was nothing but elderly it seemed obvious that they were going to be the source of whatever money I could manage to attain. Purse snatching seemed like the easiest way to go about getting what I wanted so I stalked this lady for a while and I finally made my move. Getting the purse was easy and lasted a few seconds but her cries of dismay haunted me for years. I could hear the sadness and despair in a voice which was very weak and straining to make any sounds, much less the effort she expended crying out for help. There is no other way to look at it but that I was the author of this late-in-life horror show experienced by this poor old lady.  I did plenty of drinking over the years to try to silence the echoes of the unfortunate cries of that woman. Oh God, who knows what was going on in her head? And while drinking does have that ability to numb, and eventually obliterate consciousness the problem is that once the alcohol wears off, and it will always wear off, that these horrors will always came back. Alcohol is a great short-term term solution to what are typically long-term problems. To make this episode that much more horrific for us both I will share that when I looked in the purse to find only a dollar I was so full of hate and anger that what I remember thinking was that I should go back and beat that filthy bitch because she cheated me out of “my” money somehow. That boy was not well!

Since this was such a heinous act I would like to jump ahead for a minute some twenty five later to when I became a drug counselor in order to point out that I used that episode to help people to overcome shame. My clientele were men who had just been released from prison and it was important for them to work through their shame as part of their treatment. It wasn’t critical for recovery, but it helps. As felons they had plenty of things to feel ashamed of. I had always thought that the story I just told qualifies in most rooms as pretty high up the ladder as a story that a person might share where they might typically carry shame, if it hadn’t been resolved. That and the gym locker-room wallets take the prizes as the most “shameful” things that I did in my life. And that is saying something for a life that was pretty much full of shitty acts. It has been my good fortune to learn to forgive self and others. I have tried during my career to help others to do that as well. It is a lot easier said than done, but this isn’t therapy, so I will say only by way of example that the boy who did those things is no longer with us. I point out that I am no longer that boy just as I am no longer the baby who would soil his diapers. And just as babies go through a process of learning to not soil their diapers, so do we have to go through various processes as humans, some of whom are damaged and will probably have to go through different process than “normal” people. But we all go through processes in order to get to the next phase of our journey, whatever that may be. If we stay stuck in a particular phase then we cannot grow. Therefore self-forgiveness is critical to the growth process. I own the fact that I did all of those things as a youth. I will never do it again because I am no longer that person. We must move on.

Moving on is what I did from Miami. I hated it there. Leaving was pretty much a no-brainer since, for one thing I had never enrolled in school, my father didn’t seem fairly oblivious to me, which was fine with me and I just didn’t like the place. The one place that I liked a lot was Santa Barbara. I had been to many places as you know but that was the only one that felt like home, even though I didn’t have a home there. Well, figured, by God, since nobody wants me around anyway, why don’t I decide where to live? I was all of 16 years old and needed to figure this out. So the first thing was to get myself back there, which was an ordeal with enough moving parts to be its own story, so maybe I jump ahead to being back there.

I can’t recall exactly how I ended up in a social services office but I told them some of my story and found myself placed into foster care. In the first foster home I met Jim C, who became a friend and an occasional partner in crime. One thing he liked to do was to steal small motorcycles and part them out. He “taught” me to ride motorcycles by giving me a two minute tutorial, then he hotwired the motorcycle that he wanted me to take, since there were two that he wanted and he was, um, entrepreneurial. Off I went. I detail that episode of running into a parked Cadillac in some other writing so I’ll forego that now. I’ll also gloss over some of the other petty theft, vandalism, and drunken idiocy without details, instead hitting the finer points of our petty crimes around that time. For example we broke into two vending machines that were completely full of goodies. We had bags of crap snacks for a while. We would steal things out of cars, mostly eight tracks. There was no finesse at all. We would see something we liked, hammer the window to pieces and take whatever it was that we were after. We burglarized a greasy spoon hoping to find money but instead came away with bags of burgers, buns and beer. Speaking of stealing beer it wasn’t uncommon for me and my cronies to help ourselves to cases of beer off of delivery trucks. One time I whipped up the side panels, grabbed a couple cases, turned around and there was a police cruiser driving by with not a single obstacle in his view. I stared at him as he was in some kind of daze looking straight ahead with what must have some heavy shit on his mind because he drove right past me as I stood there just waiting for him to turn. That was extra tasty beer!

 I had two drunk driving charges years before I ever had my own car. Thinking just now of transportation I realize that I forgot to mention that I swiped probably 20 bicycles, either for transportation, resale,  sometimes parts for existing bikes, or just to be a delinquent asshole. I have enough hitchhiking stories to qualify as another narrative. Some of those trips were hundreds of miles long. I’d have to go back to around 12 to begin that count. And then there was stealing the Jaguar. It was my mom’s Jaguar, but the cops didn’t know that.

I had snatched up the spare keys to my mother’s Jaguar, XK-E, which, if you aren’t familiar that was the one from around the 60’s with the extra-long front end . I grabbed the spares during a visit to her home about a week before just waiting for the right time, or reason to drive that bad boy. Ironically my mom had moved back to Santa Barbara after I went into the foster care system. Notice, she moved back to live in Santa Barbara after I was in foster care? What a piece of….work…. The reader should not misunderstand that remark since I did get over the hate that I carried for my mother. That was another monumental success story that came from learning to forgive and another reason I didn’t stay stuck.  Anyway my other friend Jim, of which there were three Jims and me, this time Jim W. and I had made arrangements to meet up with a couple of girls who had “put out” for us before. The problem was that they lived way up in the mountains and we needed to get there somehow in order to do our teenage dastardly deeds. Well then, what better time to grab the Jag? So Jim and I figured we’d push the car down the driveway, into the street, and then down the street far enough so that we would not tip off my mother. The problem being that her neighbors happened to be watching the whole thing take place and promptly called the police.

It took no more than 5 minutes before we were pulled over by what seemed like the entire Santa Barbara police department. What I saw when I looked in my rear view mirror was very bad. I can’t say how many weapons, mostly shotguns and plenty of them, were pointed at us. Next came very specific instructions; “You, in the driver’s side put your hands on the dashboard. Now, using your right hand reach out and open the door”..etc.. Then once on the ground came the obligatory kicking in the ribs etc... as the normal antecedent cops typically use whether they need to, or not, before arresting us and throwing us in jail.

And just now as I was writing this I started to remember that this was when my P.O. Mike Parr entered my life because I was just about to write that “somehow” the word got back to us that the cops almost opened fire on us. It was Mike who told me sometime after getting to know him better that they cops said that they thought Jim was going for a gun. It turns out that Jim must have gotten too nervous, scared, or whatever and he must have automatically gone to open the car from the inside and cops being cops were halfway convinced that he was going for a gun. The saying “almost dodged a bullet” pretty much literally applied that night.

The next crime I remember worth sharing that was significant due to the circumstances surrounding it and the resulting outcome is when I got in a fight with the natural son of the foster family, Charles. We were the same age and build so when he stopped the car in the middle of an empty street and jumped out to challenge me I figured all was fair and I left him in pretty bad shape. The result being that it got me kicked out of that foster home. The foster parents in the next place weren’t even trying to hide the fact that they were in it for the money. The guy was a functional alcoholic who owned a body shop, he was a horrible man and he had a horrible wife and child. They made it clear enough that if I didn’t cause them any trouble that they didn’t really care what I did. It didn’t matter to them what hours I kept, or even if I came home. Just don’t create any problems and, whatever you do, don’t touch the Jim Beam!

So now we are into 11^th grade, having been basically an adult in some ways since early adolescence. I had no moral compass at all. My way of deciding what to do and/or what not to do was to do the calculation on the likelihood of getting caught, and if whatever the thing was that was illegal compared to the likelihood of getting caught then it was a done deal. Really that was born in childhood and cultivated for all of my formative years except maybe the first 5 years of my life. The approach of “do whatever you want to do if your chances of getting away with it are decent” was ingrained in me enough to say that is was a part of my character.  An aside is that I’ve had certain criminal activities crop up in my memory on occasion that happened at some time previously in my mostly linear narrative that were very much worthy of adding when they came to mind. Then, as I focused on writing I would lose the memory. Perhaps they will resurface and maybe they won’t. I mention this to emphasize the obvious, which is that there was so much going on that falls into the criminal category that it’s really hard to remember it all.

The army was simply awash in criminal activity. I joined the Army at 17 years old and even though I had kind of hoped that it would change my life and make a “man” out of me it seems that my criminal character was a more powerful force than the US Army. I need to break my Army story up into a chapter of it’s own but those two years where so rich with criminal activity that I will sum it up as best as I can without taking some pages to do it. The overview is that starting with AIT, which is advanced individual training that occurs right after basic training, of which mine was at Fort Belvior VA, weekends would consist of trips to the nearest city, that being Washing DC where there would be the underage drinking, drugging, whoring (a G.I. with no hair in 1978, no time, nor skills, really, to pick up woman and no place to bring them if he did had little chance of getting laid so the street walkers where the answer to that) and the occasional dashing from the taxi drivers for fun and profit were about the total of crimes at that time.

It was when I got to my permanent assignment in Germany that things really took of. I quickly became aware of how much money was to be made by black-marketing American cigarettes to the Germans and figured I needed to get in on that. I cultivated a group of non-smoking G.I.’s to sell me their rations each month in order to then resell them to an old German lady off post that went by the handle of “Mama”. Sometimes she would give me money straight up and sometimes she would trade me for a drug called Mandrax which is the European version of Quaaludes. The Mandrax deals were very lucrative since I would double my money in cigarettes to her and then double it again selling the Mandrax to G.I.s, some of whom I bought the rations from in the first place. Another connection I established was that I knew where to go in Frankfort to get hash that sometimes came in 100 gram plates. These deals were very lucrative and so during the year and a half that I was in Germany I had piles of money. Another revenue stream related to that is related to the fact that it was a standard operating procedure for G.I.’s to spend money beyond their means, being mostly impulsive types and knowing that their basic needs of food and shelter will be met no matter what. They would often go broke at whatever point in the month that they do and would come looking for loans, or to get fronted some dope, with little care about whatever amount that they might have to pay back when they get paid next. Enter the 18 year old with a pile of cash in his locker. So, I had a nice little loan sharking business going on as well.

I pushed the envelope on military rules and regulations frequently, which was not as serious as all of those felonies I previously mentioned, but it was simply a part of my personal approach to be as much of a pain in the ass as I could be without going so far as to get court martialed. It was a fine line that I had to walk since my company commander would have liked very much to court martial me. Hell, without exaggeration I’m pretty sure he would have liked to kill me and the feeling was very much mutual. As I said the army story needs to be detailed to be appreciated. Anyway, along the way I drunkenly ran a friend’s car off the autobahn totally wasted on Mandrax and beer. The car was drivable and my friend took over and I got away with that one. I had to pay for his car but since I was pretty much rolling in cash relatively speaking, it didn’t matter.

I consumed every drug that came my way, including heroin for a while. As the months passed and I found myself slowly surrounded by functional heroin addicts in the military I saw the writing on the wall enough to be motivated to get out of that way of life. I still got in the occasional fight, but not as often anymore. One time I was arrested and then charged and convicted of indecent exposure. This was the effort of my company commander to do everything he could to make things as tough on me as possible, as I did likewise for him. The story goes that I had come on post at maybe 2, or 3 A. M and there was nobody anywhere in site so I went around to the back of the MP building and did what nature requires. The problem was that I did it decidedly not in nature and it is really my bad that I did have the proper situational awareness because I was standing under a window of the jail without realizing it. Off in the dark distance a ways someone approached me at a fast pace shouting “hey, what are you doing?”. I said, “Just taking a leak” thinking that would be the end of it. Well it wasn’t the end of it because he was an MP and I could have been passing dope, or whatever else. They invited me in to stay the night and charged me with indecent exposure. Oh well.

Which does bring me to somethings that I have missed in this description. Goofy stuff like getting busted on occasion for urinating in public doesn’t rise to the level of “crimes” worthy of sharing, but what they lack in “umph” they make up for in frequency. Not that I got many of these citations, but maybe 7 total. Public urination might seem like really bad luck, or blatant stupidity, but you’d have to be a heavy drinker on most days to understand how often a person might find themselves needing to go right now with nowhere to go. One might go wandering away from a bar to do God knows what, lose track of their mission, if not their name, and just then find themselves needing to let loose. I don’t know how many hundreds of times that happened over the decades but the odds are that at some point there is a cruiser going by an alleyway and they want to know what you’re doing and they don’t like the answer “just taking a leak”. A close cousin to the urinating in public charge is public intoxication, of which I’ve also had a few. To “earn” one of these charges I’d have to be stumble down drunk, therefore blacked out, therefore waking up in jail wondering what I had done. That was never a good thing for obvious reasons. Finding out it was public intoxication would be a relief. 

Jumping back to the army let’s establish that the military equivalent of the civilian misdemeanor is the Article 15. If you plead guilty to whatever charge that doesn’t rise to the level of a felony that they want to pursue they typically fine the G.I., me in this case drop a military pay grade and deliver usually a week or two of extra duty. Most people who have any idea of extra duty would think of K P, although believe me, there was a very wide array of extra duties that they can deliver. And sometimes the extra duty given to me made K P seem like a holiday.

For example one time I was given an ax handle and told to provide guard duty for two weeks from 11 P M   to 8 A. M. in the slushy snow. My boots never had a chance to dry out and my feet (let’s listen together as we hear the distant echoes’ of “Son, take care of your feet.”) literally rotted. I developed a case of what’s called jungle rot. And no, my captain didn’t care and the medics told me to get dry boots. I wasn’t sure where these boots where supposed to materialize from but I sure didn’t have any. They gave me some athletes foot powder but by the time that joyous couple of weeks was over I had what looked like a bunch of pin holes in my heals. During that extra duty period one night I was all of maybe 15 minutes late and this very large man who didn’t like waiting the extra 15 minutes walked up and knocked me out cold with one solid punch to my head. I know, I know, getting KO ed isn’t a crime…unless they arrest you for loitering, I suppose.

I estimate the number of article 15’s that I accrued to be easily more than 10. I’d say that there were less than 20, but in between the two for sure. Which, considering the amount of things that I was doing was a pretty good success rate. I had more money than I knew what to do with so that trade off was totally worth it. I had a girlfriend in the legal department called RPAC who buried my paperwork whenever it surfaced in her stack of paperwork. I left the army as a PFC, which is a paygrade of E3, which would have been wiped out the first time I was busted and I was busted a ton of times. As for the extra duty, well, two things about that is that I entered into a little game with the company commander and actually the whole company in a manner of speaking. It’s a long story and will be detailed when I write about the army but basically I learned to get very little of what they wanted me to do accomplished, while still following orders. So, I was engaged in the game, which made the extra duty interesting. Then, when I couldn’t play the game, my position was that it was all part of doing business and I was so used to it that it was what it was and no biggy.

Here I want to add something of a disclaimer to say that if anyone ever reads these stories and this part about my military service brings a distaste to their mouth, as it were, well, just to be clear so that the reason that I am writing this disclaimer isn’t mistaken for attempting to curry favour from the reader… fuck you…walk a mile in my moccasins! I am making this statement to all of the millions of veterans in absentia who served, fought and died righteously. I know that it is important to be aware that drawing any conclusion about a person based on the fact that they were even in the military is a fool’s errand because of the variances involved, which are countless. There are the obvious variables to take into account, such as is there is a war going on or not, what that person’s job is, where they are doing that job, what their command structure is like and on and on. Then, after all of those variables are taken into account the one left to consider would be how those factors interact with the character and beliefs of the individual, which, even that might change for that person from day to day. Even being an “individual” in the military is in and of itself a problem. Anyone who knows the process involved in “turning a civilian into a soldier” is to “break them down, in order to build them up” into what the military wants and that is unquestioning “units” who will, for example charge up a hill without question, nor hesitation, where they will likely die knowing that the hill might be left to the enemy the day after that. This process begins, of course in basic training when all semblance of individuality is systematically stripped away. Our culture has done a great job of creating a population of mindless “clones” to begin with, so that effort isn’t too difficult for the military to accomplish for most people in the first place.

I entered the Army as a young man who didn’t just not think like the ‘masses”, I even reveled in being a non-conformist, recognizing very early on how fucked up people were in general. In fact I was not just a non-conformist but I was anti-social and a misanthrope, meaning I had a strong distain for humanity in general. The military never did take my individuality away. I can also own the fact that I was an emotionally immature, rebellious, petulant, non-compliant, criminal (shall I go on?) teenaged asshole. It didn’t take long for me to realized that I had been lied to by the recruiters and that I had been trapped into a situation that I didn’t want to be in (which is, unfortunately, nothing new to the military) and then I found myself locked into a personal battle with the power of the entire the U.S. military working against my efforts to leave as soon as I could, with all of my benefits intact, which they had originally promised. There were actually quite a few men who had tried to execute that goal at that time and nobody else that I am aware of was able to pull it off. That is no small thing for anyone to accomplish, much less for a teenage kid. Aside from the admiration I have for soldiers over the course of history doing the right thing and sacrificing their lives I am very proud of my accomplishment. Again, if you don’t like it, oh well, I’ve said my piece.

I was honorably discharged and that is not an easy thing to do if someone has even a few article 15’s, much less over a dozen. So then, onto my civilian crimes we go! While I had been engaged in my criminal enterprises in the Army I had been sending some hash to my friend Jim W. and I brought about 20 grams back over with me to the U.S. through customs. In fact while I’m on the topic of bringing contraband through international customs I’ll add to the overall crime tally at least six different times that I can recall smuggling some type of substance through customs. Of those 20, or so, grams I had been carrying around I had been scraping off some here and there to get high with during the couple of weeks since I returned from Germany. That particular night I had just closed down a bar and I was looking for something to do but there was nothing at all going on that I could find. I was on the main street in Santa Barbara and there weren’t any cars as far as I could see anywhere and so I made a U turn to head back home. Probably less than a minute later I was being pulled over by Santa Barbara police. Keeping in mind that I had just spent the previous two years in Germany drinking more days than not having developed a high tolerance for alcohol that I didn’t really feel drunk at all. Of course that doesn’t matter to police armed with breathalyzers. 

Here it is worthy of mentioning that when I would get arrested as a juvenile I was angry and stupid enough to be hostile towards cops refereeing to them as “pigs” and just be a world-class asshole. The brilliance of exhibiting such and attitude, of course, was that it was always to my detriment and resulted in the worse possible treatment from them. In case recent events aren’t enough to convince you the attitude of cops since way back is that they just love to exert their authority in every way when they have a chance. I know it’s a blanket statement but, come on, if you don’t see it you aren’t looking. One frequent result of my shitty and stupid attitude towards them was that I was often enough on the receiving end of their beat downs, or at the least I could count on them placing handcuffs on to a point of some very real pain.

Anyway I suppose a little bit of maturity and perhaps the military cured me of that because I remember being congenial with these guys playing up the fact that I had just been discharged out of the military and maybe that got me so kudos. Plus I knew that there was no way to win this one because the boy-genius shot himself in the foot when the cops where doing their field sobriety test and asked me to recite the alphabet backwards. In a stroke of shear brilliance I said “Hell, I can’t even do that when I’m sober”, which, of course, was being recorded. They had me dead to rights and so I just went with that flow and was cool with the whole thing. I was immediately rewarded by having them handcuff me in the front instead of the back. Anyone who has taken a handcuffed ride in a cop car knows how painful those things can get. But the great big reward was yet to happen.

At the Santa Barbara jail they bring the detainee in the first door where there are then bars maybe 3 feet beyond that separating that outside section from the area where the intake process starts. When we arrived there was a guy who was getting processed on the other side of the bars. Part of the process includes that the jailors strip search the detainees and so I sat down on my haunches waiting with the cops who were chatting it up on either side of me. As I watched the other guy having his socks and shoes removed it hit me like a ton of bricks that I had completely forgot about the hash, all 20 grams of it, more or less, that I had put in my socks. I knew then as I know now and every time I’ve told this story how monumentally idiotic I was to have spaced that out. But at the time I had no time to think about that, it was all about fixing the problem. So as those two chatted away I worked one chunk of hash up one pair of those knee-high tube socks I used to wear and then down my pant leg, keeping half an eye on those two  cops talking to each other while slowly moving the hash into my mouth. I chewed that nugget frantically while working the other chunk the same way. Not only was it a good fix, especially considering what would have happened to me possessing 20 grams, which would have surely brought with it an “intent to distribute” felony, never mind there would be no fighting it, and I don’t know what extra charge there might be for l bringing it into a jail, but with my record it would not have been good. I would never have been able to be a therapist, that’s for sure. But what did happen is that I had a very wonderful night. I remember that the concrete slab in the holding cell felt like sleeping on a cloud. I if you don’t know one can have some wonderful hallucinations on enough hash. I walked out of jail the next morning far more loaded than when I went in. Plus I had a story I could tell for the rest of my life.

I also have a drug related close call story to tell about a subsequent drunk driving arrest. As the stories go it started with that I got pulled over and arrested.  As I was being put into the cop car I asked for them to grab my contact lens case out of my car. I had spent far too many nights in jail with my eyes drying out from my contact lenses and nothing to do but grind it out. At that time I was using a van conversation to live in and travel to distant destinations during my off weeks. I was working at a group home at the time and would live there for a week and then get a week off so it made sense to not pay rent, but use my extra time and money to travel. I told the cop that my lens case was in the pouch behind the driver’s seat and when he didn’t come back for maybe ten minutes I realized two huge mistakes. This falls into that horrible category of “what the hell was I thinking”, because not only had I invited the cop to search my vehicle but I suddenly remember what I had no idea what I done with a palm sized packet of meth which was floating around the vehicle. I sat in that car for a good five minutes after what I assumed to be the realization that he had found the meth and was ripping apart my van searching for other contraband and that I my trip to the jail was going to become some years in prison. I was floored when he returned to the car, said that he couldn’t find the contact case and we drove off. I was beyond happy, but I was also very confused given how long he was in there and the fact that I knew the meth was in there and not hidden.

When I was released the next day I was eager to try to figure out what had happened. When I got back to the van I opened up the side door of there was the packet, dead center in the middle of the carpet with nothing to obscure it from being easily seen. What must have happened was the cop opened the side doors, with his flashlight above floor level, put his knee right on the bindle and searched the van using his flashlight to look around into things but never moving off his knee to look right under it. Wa-hoo!

During another drunk driving arrest I refused to take a blood alcohol tests and boy wasn’t I surprised to find out that they could pin me to the ground and draw blood against my will.  And cops being cops they would take their sadistic delight piling on, twisting arms as far up towards the neck as can be tolerated and digging their knees into my back and neck. Oh sure there was a nurse present, but she just waited for them to “restrain me”, which I was not resisting at all, until taking the blood. It always struck me as weird that they need warrants to go into a home, or vehicle, but not your body. So I was surprised and disappointed when I found out the whole thing was legal since the refusal meant the automatic revocation of my license. Of course I didn’t go along with that nonsense, but those antics are still to come.  

The next drunk driving arrest to narrate is the one in 1982. I knew that they had me on this one too so I had my plan all worked out. In fact I acted as my own lawyer (As the saying goes “he who acts as his own attorney has a fool for a client.” Yeah well, I did and I got exactly what I wanted out of the plea deal, so, whatever!) and so I negotiated a plea deal of 6 months, if they agreed to give me a few days to “get my things in order”, which they did. My plan consisted of getting that deal because I knew that my next move was going to be to put whatever I could manage to stuff into my army duffle bag, strap it on my bike and head east. I mean really east! I rode all the way to upstate New York from Santa Barba. There is a short and decent story about the ride itself and a plenty long story about the 3 years spent in New York. Stories, stories, stories..

In all I was convicted for 6 DUI’s. Today I would have gone to prison for a years. As it turned out for me, aside from the money it cost for lawyers, fines and the general aggravation as a result of the convictions I only ever did 6 months jail time. I did just try to explain why, but it bogs the story down. Meanwhile since the 1982 conviction also included the revocation of my license and a warrant for my arrest I had to get a fake I.D. under the alias of Michael Newton Richards, which lends itself to a very strange arrest story some years later. I’ll try to get back to my timeline, but just to say when we get to that story it entails monumental stupidity and a coincidence that is beyond belief that actually led to an arrest the very next day by the very same cop as the very same location. As impossible as I know that sounds, It’s a true story, as all of this is.

Jumping back to the timeline in 1979 now a “vet” at the age of 19 or 20, I was more criminally minded than when I went in, which we know already to be pretty much who I was, not just what I did. While I was in the Army I had been exposed to some guys who were bikers. Bikers are notoriously anti-social, they like to do lots of drinking, drugs, they tend to resolved many of their problems and disagreements with violence and they treat woman like property. Basically they tend to “live by their own rules” which are basically at an adolescent stage of development. These were my kind of people! Oh, and then there was the fact that I did love riding motorcycles, so there’s that. It was easy to find my niche around bikers since all it really takes is to be one of them. The “wanna be’s” and ‘hangers on” were quickly identified and it usually didn’t go well for them. I had no interest in being a part of a bicker “club”, which in Santa Barbara was The Bravado’s, but I was close enough to them as lose friends and at least an “associate” that I was invited to outings and events on occasion. Mostly those of us who were likeminded, meaning anti-social biker types, hung out at the same bars and knew each other. And while I didn’t belong to the Bravado’s I did have my set of “brothers” who I “loved” and meant everything to me and I would have done whatever I needed to in order to “have their backs”, which meant if they did something criminal that I got caught up for, I would have done the time, no questions asked. If they were in a beef of some sort and I knew they were in the wrong, I’m standing up, no matter what the odds were and no matter if there were weapons involved. In those circles that’s just how it goes. So as I pull out of the next 20 years of events worth sharing keep that notion of “biker guy” in the background for all of the criminal activity that goes on in that life which does not raise to the level of a sharing in a narrative like this. In other words there is going to be a shit-ton of things happening in regards to criminal behavior that the reader can fill in with their imagination and still probably come up short. But to give some idea I’d estimate that there were many hundreds of times that I drove drunk, contributing to the 9 motorcycle accidents that I have had. Drugs where a constant, including sales, violence and general mayhem (God did I ever want to use the words “hijinks” or “tomfoolery” as a fun little juxtaposition to the craziness that went on.) that happed regularly.

On the lighter side I forget to include public intoxications and goofy stuff like getting busted on occasion for urinating in public. Public urination might seem like really bad luck, or blatant stupidity, but you’d have to be a heavy drinker most days to understand how often a person might find themselves needing to go right now with nowhere to go. I don’t know how many hundreds of times that happened over a few decades but the odds are that at some point there is a police cruiser going by an alleyway and they wonder what you’re doing and they don’t like the answer “just taking a leak”.

I would like to say that I’ve never hit a woman, but that would be a lie. I will say that given the anger issues that I had, the depression, the biker lifestyle, the alcohol and drugs and the crazy and mostly volatile women and relationships I’ve been in that it is fairly noteworthy that I only hit two different women one time. The first time was your basic drunken frustration becoming one very regretful slap in the face. The other is a story.

Back in the mid 80’s I lived with Jackie, who had been abused as a child, she had lost her uterus very young, which threw her hormones off and was supposed to take psych meds, for what, I don’t know. Back then I had no idea what they were for but she was clearly emotionally unstable, especially when we drank, which was more nights than not. We would get into very loud verbal battles and it didn’t matter much where we were. So it could be in a bar, walking down the street, or, in this case fighting in our apartment for the countless time. Sometimes she would literally want to kill me in one moment and insist that we have sex immediately the next, as you will see in this story, which is as true and accurate just as all of my stories are.

We had been doing the aforementioned dance of the crazy couple for maybe a couple for hours. I finally had enough of it and grabbed my sleeping bag and laid down on the couch to try to end her rantings by disengaging and pretending to try to sleep. I knew that she was capable of being erratic, unpredictable and violent so as she was raging around the place and then coming towards me I looked up in time to see a very large kitchen knife heading downwards in my direction. I lunged myself into the back of the couch as the knife came down into the sleeping bag. I popped up and threw on my clothes as quickly as possible with her following me around saying she was sorry and basically begging that we have sex. I headed for the door and she threw herself in front of the door. Back then I knew about “fight or flight” because I had already been in a few mandated anger management programs. Now as a therapist who had specialized in anger I know that if a person is in a state of emergency and they person can’t run that they will instinctively fight. I punched her in the eye and, of course, the smart thing would have been to never go back, but a theme that would repeat itself to my detriment for the rest of my life is that I went right back to that hazardous environment. She reported me to the police who took a picture of her black eye and did whatever it is they do. She did tell me some time later that she had come to see things a bit more clearly and that she dropped the charges. Well, at least there was that.

I wish that was the end of it, but it wasn’t. It was the start of another story. At that time I had come back from 3 years in New York in order to do this six months county time so that I could work with Juvenile Delinquents as was my chosen career path at that time. What I didn’t know until I had done the time and was on probation was that when a person is on probation they can’t work with people on probation. So I spent months trying to find any work that I could, aspiring for a job working with challenged kids in some kind of way since I had discovered that was my calling. I finally got a job out of town in a facility that was residential treatment for a wide variety of folks with all sorts of mental, cognitive, emotional and behavioral problems and, joy of all joys I got work in the adolescent dorm.

Whenever it was that I was supposed to start work, you know how it goes, maybe in a few days, but anyway, the day before I was supposed to start I was notified by the Santa Barbara detectives that they were just cleaning up some things and they knew that Jackie had dropped the charges, but they “just needed to talk to me”.  So, like some unexperienced naive idiot I went in and when they asked me what happened I told them the truth. Of course the next thing I knew I was getting handcuffs put on me and taken to jail.

I was arrested around 2 in the afternoon and I was due to show up for my first day of work for the swing shift at 3 P.M. the next day. My sister, Nancy, who I needed to bail me out, was at work until that evening so she wasn’t able to post bail until the morning and the bail didn’t get processed until the next day in the early afternoon. Meanwhile one doesn’t get a lot of sleep in a jail holding cell so I had been awake all night. When I finally got bailed out I ran home to pick up some clothes, got out of there in probably a minute, I went to Nancy’s house to shower and get to my job with minutes to spare, having been up for maybe the last 30 hours of intense stress. As soon as I got to work my boss grabbed me to go to a mandatory in-service where there were maybe 40 employees in a big semi-circle and the teacher droning on about some kind of exceedingly boring stuff. As you can imagine as the adrenaline of everything was wearing off, plus the lack of sleep and boredom took over and the next hour, or whatever it was, had my head bobbing like one of those little bobble head toy  and since we were in a semi-circle I had it in my mind that, not only did everyone see me, but that they probably thought I was on heroin, since, anyone who has ever seen a heroin user, that head-bobbing thing is almost a standard.

So, that was how my first shift started. Then later that evening around 8 P.M. I was asked to take some of the clients down to the gym and I was expected to run up and down the court with teenagers playing basketball, on no sleep in maybe the past 48 hours. Once I got through that the rest of the shift was about the standard and daily de-escalations of acting out, the behavioral modification techniques that were expected of all staff all the time, as part of each clients treatment plans, and the obligatory end of shift paperwork. Getting off at 11 P.M. I went off to a local bar to try to drink the stress away, a habit which that lasted for approximately the next 13 years.

During those years I walked a fine line between being “biker guy” and “counselor guy”. To get a vague understanding of the work the clients that I dealt with were kids who were so challenging that even though school districts are required by law to deal with severe mental health and emotionally problematic children these were the kids that were so difficult that even their loving parents and their school districts, obligated by law, would have to put them into residential care. In other words, these were very difficult kids who were combative, and ran the range from autistic to psychotic. And I think that it is safe to assume that aside from whatever they were dealing with in their heads that they must have felt rejected, abandoned, frustrated and who knows what. They were easy to anger and act out violently.

And who could blame them? Staff, was required to provide corrective feedback all day every day, whether in school, or in their “home” which were the dorms. Part of our jobs was to shape “unwanted” behaviors using behavioral modification techniques. Here it is worth mentioning that his was one of 13 facilities nationwide of The Deveruex Foundation which is recognized as world class in providing these services. The point being that the staff was as highly trained for their positions using evidence based best practices and constant in-service training.

Still, what must it have been like for them? Personally I have never liked anyone telling me what to do at all and these poor guys must have been corrective feedback literally more than 50 times during the course of a day. Now as I write this I’m thinking about how we dealt with daily aggressive behaviors and amazed that there weren’t more. And since, as I said, this was a world-class facility we were trained in all manner of the most effective de-escalation techniques and we were allowed but one hold if aggression broke out, and that was the basket hold and it had to be done perfectly, of we could literally get fired. Keep in mind that this guys would do whatever, including hurling objects, spitting, ramming their own heads against the wall, or whatever, and there was no such thing as an acceptable verbal retaliation by staff and a physical response other than a self-defensive move, or a basket hold, were grounds for firing.

That is only a sampling of what might happen on any shift, although there were plenty of shifts that were quiet to a point of being boring. That was usually when we tried to catch up on paperwork, since, besides accounting for med distribution and money accounting, or whatever, we were supposed to write a narrative, or charting, on the behaviors on each of our 20 or so clients each night.

Maybe I’ll get around to some of the weirder stories, like when I took 12 kids by myself to Knotts Berry Farm in Los Angeles. I was driving in tandem with the staff of the female’s adolescent dorm when we pulled off the freeway returning from the amusement park to give everyone a pee break. One of my clients who had been saying things to the patrons of the park like “Do you think that Satan likes to have his cock sucked?” was in the midst of having a psychotic break and he ran off down the road screaming to everyone that he was being attacked as I ran after him. He ran off the main street and into a residential neighborhood and started banging on doors hollering for help. At that point I decided that I had to get back to the rest of my clients who were being watched by the female staff from the female dorm.

There was no such thing as a typical shift but the shifts were usually very intense and all too frequently involved being physically attacked, sometimes with kids who would “smear”, which is to take feces and smear it on things, including other people. There were those occasions that I would be dealing with a kid who smears and who was escalating all the while I’d know that there was the possibility of an attempted scratch coming if this situation wasn’t deescalated. A scratch from a fingernail with shit under it is not a fun thing to deal with under the best of circumstances. And that is but one example of some of the daily hideous possibilities. The staff turnover was so frequent that of an estimated 300 residential staff at any given time I’d guess that there might have been 20 to 30 who had been there for over 5 years and maybe no more than 10 of us who had been there for 10, or more years.

For most of my time working there, especially for the first 8 years or so, I worked the swing shift. I would get off at 11 go to the bar and close it down, typically sucking down Corona’s and 1800 Tequilas as fast as I could. When the bars closed at 2 A.M. if I didn’t have some other place to go, or someone to be with, I had booze and beer at home. I usually had a supply of meth or coke to either keep me going at night, or get me going the next day. I would frequently wake up close to my 2 P.M. shift often technically drunk from the night before, but so adapted to it as to still be able to do the work that I did. I was a functional alcoholic addict which kept me in the delusion that I wasn’t one at all. A lot of people I worked with over the years have convinced themselves that if they aren’t “that bad”, whatever that might be, then they don’t have an addiction. That isn’t how it works. If you wonder at all if you, or someone you have has a problem look it up in the DSM-V and just read the criteria. I was convinced that I didn’t have a drinking problem, I had a cop problem. If they’d just leave me to do my thing I was fine. Well, until the day came when I might have run into a school bus. Of course, given my history I might have done that anyway. And who won’t think a joke about running into a school bus is funny, eh?

I frequented the bar that I did after my shift was over because it was close to work it was enough of a dive for me to be comfortable in, plus since I was probably in there 3 or more nights a week I was a regular in no time. I was well known in dive bars throughout the general Santa Barbara area because I was on a pool league and literally one of the best players, having always place in the top 5, or 10 every year out of hundreds of players and first one year. Anyway, before I digressed into bragging about my pool-shooting prowess the point I was making is that the weekends were usually devoted to Sniffy’s which was THE biker bar of Santa Barbara, and for you just couldn’t find a my typical hard-corel biker bar. The shit that went on in that bar worthy of writing about could be another 50 page chapter. So during that decade I worked with kids who needed the utmost care, tolerance, skill, control and acceptance a person could bring to bear. On the weekends I was the stereotypical biker menace, but, at this is where the story has diverged, that aside from drugs, drunk driving, the occasional fight, my criminal activity took a turn towards non-existent as I started to become more interested in psychology and apply some of what I was learning about behavioral modification and anger management to myself.

But, hey, there are still fun storied to tell. Like this one from earlier when I referenced a story of monumental stupidity followed by horrendous bad luck the next day. I pulled up to a left turn traffic light seeing a cop also stopped at the light to my right going straight, putting un on the same heading. As soon as my light turned to let me go left he turned on his lights and pulled me over. At that time I had recently returned from New York and I had my revoked license under Michael Baker and the fake I.D. under Newton Richards both on me at the same time. I was on a motorcycle when I got pulled over and had both of them in my back pocket with no time or place to figure out which was which and grabbed the wrong one first and dropped it on the ground, which was obvious to him and so I was arrested for driving on a revoked license as well as providing a false I.D. to a police officer. So, off to jail I went.

Okay, as improbable as this is, that is to say “come on” that didn’t happen, given that this was not a small town, but maybe 30,000 people or more at the time, is the fact that the very next day I pulled up to a 4 way stop light and there, to my right, was the same cop, pointing me to pull over. I have evaded cops before but I was on a 1951 Harley Panhead rat which wasn’t going to be able to outrun any cop car. So, off to jail I went again.

Ah, so, this story brings up another, about the time I outran a police car in the mountains in my 1997 Stingray Corvette. Admittedly I had a head start since I was flying down a very windy mountain road as he was going in the opposite direction. Still, I did get away. Almost a year later there was a large fire in the mountains and the police where letting only residents up the San Marcos Pass where I lived. I pulled up to the cop blockade and, not knowing that this was the same cop, but he obviously recognized my care because he starting lecturing me about how if he ever sees me doing 1 mile an hour over the speed limit he’s going to arrest me and blah, blah, blah. I just kept telling him that I had no idea what he was talking about, but we both knew.

Circa 1996 I quit that job at the Deveruex Foundation and decided that I would be a professional poker player. The idea was to drop out of society, going off grid as it were and travel around in my R.V., mostly around the western U.S. My main objective was not to get rich at it but to simply find a way to be completely free and not work for anyone else. I did this at a time when the Indian casino’s where starting to pop up and the poker boom was yet to happen, which, anyone who knows the history knows that the popularity boom of poker happened after the 2003 World Series of Poker for reasons that I might specify if I ever write a narrative of my poker playing years of 1996 to 1999, but that info on how and why poker exploded that year is available if Googled.

Poker and meth went together very well for me. Ever since I first tried meth a decade before I had been a big fan but the advantage that it brought to poker for me was that if I was playing at a good table I could stay there for days. It would be easy to think that what I mean by that is to come and go, say, to eat, get a little rest, but, no; I mean that I would literally stay in the same game for days, around the clock. Casinos will bring food to the poker table around the clock, I could enjoy alcoholic drinks within reason without getting drunk. At such games players came and went but these games that were so full of “action” that people couldn’t wait to get in and there was a list of people waiting to get into the table. Other players, like me, would literally play around the clock. I have played for 3 days at the same table without leaving other than to go to the bathroom. Honestly, when I was that amped up at a table I’d even have to rush to the bathroom and back. Those who don’t understand the full force of addiction will just never get it. Playing for some 30 to 50 hours might happen on average of once a month the 3 years I played.

I shared the previous only to point out the fact that during much of my time playing poker meth was a big part of it. Enough so that whenever I rolled into the next town that had a casino I would often times seek out the meth users, which, for those of us who were into it we were easy enough to spot one another other. All of this leading up to the story about when I was in Riverside California I hooked up with a meth cook and one night we went out into the desert to cook up some meth. The desert is a great spot since it’s out of the way and the smell of the cook wouldn’t be a problem. We had both been up for days and sometime around 2 or 3 A.M. he decided that the twinkling lights from the closest city was an army of police with their sirens on coming out to arrest him. And I say “him” because in his meth addled mind he thought that the only way that the cops could have known that we were out there cooking meth was that I must be an informant who set him up. He had done time before and decided that he would rather commit suicide by cop than go back to prison. I only found this out later when the sun had come up and the shooting had ceased. The shooting he was doing was intended for me. I kept away for long enough and he had been hollering long enough after the sun came up to make it seem safe enough for me to come out of hiding. Especially since then it had to be clear to him that the twinkling lights had stopped as the sun came up and couldn’t be cops.

So then, filling in the blanks he did have a gun and they did not have blanks. In his meth soaked, sleep deprived paranoid brain he decided that since he was going to die anyway that he would take out the rat-fuck that brought this upon him, and, to him, that was me. I knew he was packing and as soon as he started ranting about how the cops were coming and how it must have been me who set him up, as he began running towards the van where I assumed his gun was, I started running the other way, uninterested as I was in being around to find out what was on his mind. I literally ran for my life while shots rang out. I got far enough away and I laid from behind some dunes where I was able to keep track of where he was by way of his flashlight so that I was able to keep hidden and running in the opposite direction until I knew he couldn’t find me. Still I kept my eye on the light coming from his flashlight knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to walk around too long before turning it on, if only for a few seconds. I also knew that he wasn’t going anywhere since we had come in my van and I had the keys so I figured I’d just have to wait it out until he realized that those weren’t cop cars coming. It was still a very tense ride back to drop him off at his place. I found out some weeks later that he got arrested by the FBI for having abducted a woman and had held her as a bound captive sex slave for some days shortly after our little trip into the desert.

It might be hard to believe but these last stories came up unexpectedly because really there was just so much shit I did that it’s hard to remember it all. I have no doubt but that once I decide that this story is ready to be completed and that more stories will pop into my head, but I think we’ve probably had enough of this for now.