Category Archives: absent fathers

Super Best Friends

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VINCE

When I was arrested in December of ’13, my dog Willie wound up living with my friends in the Fillmore County area.  He has spent over half of his life there and his dog friends are there, so I know he’s happy, and that soothes me.

The people that are taking care of him I miss just as much.  They were not just a part of my life, but they were my life, for years.  And although we were all pretty good at drinking, we bonded with each other, and I stayed out of legal trouble for many years.  Then, of course, I made a quick decision one night to use meth, and it took only a few months for me to separate from the pack, then leave altogether.

I miss you guys.  I think of you daily.  Not just you, but your families, who were all good to me.

Seth, our trip to Florida to watch [the Minnesota Twins] baseball spring training games was comparable to me to the best vacations I’ve been on.  We had more fun in seven days than most people have in a year.  It was “the crippie.”

Curt, you and I have had conversations that have not, and will never again, happen in this world.  I cherish every minute we spent together.

Sara.  You are a free spirit and a true friend to everybody you encounter.  You taught me how to ride a horse.  I failed to learn.  But that’s because your horses are stupid.

Those three plus me.  We were the “Super Best Friends Group” for years.  I abandoned them like I abandoned the rest.  They belong to the short list of the people I feel worst about.  I write to all of them constantly.  Some reply, some don’t.  But I keep writing.

Vince n Pals

Seth, Vince, and Sara at a baseball game.  It was about 101 degrees.

[ANNE: I made an effort to travel with Vince before he left home.  I considered it an important part of his education—travel itself, different people and places.  We went to Seattle, New York City, and Washington DC, among other destinations.  We mostly got along well when we traveled.

When he turned 30 he seemed to be doing so well—as was I—that I offered to take him on a “big trip” somewhere.  He had heard me talk about my friends who lived in a stately home (below) in the Scottish highlands, and said he’d be interested in going there.  I think he was attracted to the hunting and fishing, the six dogs and two cats, the meat-laden diet, and of course the whiskey.  It was a wild, manly, rural place.  I thought Vince and my friend Lynn’s husband would get on well together.  Maybe Richard would even inspire Vince to aspire to be more.

C2C1

Before I sunk thousands into a trip, I thought I should make sure he was serious about going, so I told him to get his own passport.  I mailed him the form.  It would have cost $75.  I realize that may seem like a lot when you’re a cook making minimum wage.  He said he would do it, then didn’t.  So the trip never happened.  I was disappointed, but relieved that I hadn’t forced it to happen if he didn’t really want to go.

A few years later he asked me if my offer of a birthday trip was still valid.  He wanted to go to watch spring training baseball games in Florida in February with his friend Seth.  I said yes.  I feel strongly that getting out of your comfort zone is vital to personal growth, and Vince had barely stepped foot out of rural Minnesota in years.  Besides, I had enough frequent flyer miles that it didn’t cost me much.  So he and Seth went, and apparently had a good time.  Don’t ask me what a “crippie” is.]

The One I Love

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VINCE

I passed a drug test and breathalyzer. I knew I would, but I did get a little nervous. Well, nothing to fret over now.

—

I remember a lot of good from Aspen Glen [the subsidized housing complex where we lived until Dr. Wonderful came into our lives]. Twenty plus years later, I still think about my daycare family—Duane and Mary and their three kids James, Shawna, and Michael. I spent years with them after school and playing with the kids on weekends. Even after we moved I stayed in touch for years. I really do miss them. I wonder if they wonder about me.

I also remember fondly my years at Bel-Air School. Years later I drove by it, and was surprised at how small it was. Everything is big when you’re a kid.

I remember when the suburb of New Brighton itself was small. Woods everywhere. Again, driving through years later, it looked commercialized. The town I grew up in, plastered with big city names. Big City businesses. I remember when the employees at the Red Owl grocery knew me. That was the first place I ever stole from. I got caught the first time. Oh, how things change.

—

I went out on another RJWC this week (Restorative Justice Work Crew). We spent five hours at a nursing home in Moose Lake. We cleaned all the exterior windows of the facility, then picked at the never-ending supply of weeds in the various gardens. I found quite a few agates in the landscaping. We’re not allowed to keep them so we put them in a bird bath for all the residents to enjoy. They always look nice underwater.

Agate

One of the hundreds of agates Vince collected before he was incarcerated.

—

So far, it’s been raining all day. This is the first time that it’s a rained on a Saturday while I’ve been at boot camp.

If it’s raining, we don’t have to go out and do work crew stuff. I don’t mind working, I never have, but this is a good opportunity to catch up on a lot of things, including writing.

One of my friends sent me a picture of my dog Willie. I instantly became sad. I miss him so much. It’s amazing how close we can get to an animal. He has been through so much with me. He’s about 12 years old now. I can’t wait to see him again.

Who knows how or what dogs think about. Somehow, I know he misses me, and we will both be just as excited to see each other, only I will have tears in my eyes.

79 days and a wake up, and I will have the ability to start figuring out how to get him back in my life.

[ANNE: At first read I thought these passages of Vince’s were not very interesting. After typing them and re-reading them, several things struck me.  1) He is capable of reviewing the past and remembering both good and bad things.  Most of us need to live more in the now, but addicts need to be able to reflect back on the past before they can move forward.  2)  He has at least one hobby, agate collecting.  Hobbies will be important diversions for him once he’s released.  3) He has someone (his dog) he misses; he can’t wait to be reunited.  Someone to miss, and who misses you–I would hope that’d be an strong deterrent to ever being locked up again.  I hope Willie lives a very long time.]

The Restorative Powers of Kittens

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ANNE

When Vince and I started blogging, I didn’t realize that a theme of redemption would emerge. Vince is transformation is probably obvious. Mine is subtler and has unfolded over many years.

I have been thinking about this lately because in the spring and sumer I get dozens of emails a day from the Humane Society about stray kittens. What does this have to do with redemption?

I signed up to do foster care of kittens a couple years ago. These kittens are born in warehouses or barns or even under car hoods. The mothers, if they survive, are emaciated and barely old enough to conceive. So that’s part of what makes fostering redemptive for me—giving care to vulnerable teen moms that I didn’t receive myself.

I keep these kittens, with or without moms, until they are old enough to be spayed/neutered, then turn them back to the Humane Society. It’s not all fun; I’ve had entire litters die because the mother was so dehydrated. Kittens have been smothered by their litter mates. One lost an eye to the claws of a litter mate. So it’s kind of a nature-tooth-and-claw experience.

People wonder how I don’t get so attached to them that I want to keep them. I think fostering is the ideal set up—I get the cuteness of kittens and the Humane Society pays all the vet bills and provides the supplies. I travel too much to have a permanent pet. When I turn them back in, I know they will be adopted immediately—there’s a huge demand for kittens. And I’m not even that much of a pet person.

So why do I do it, and what does it have to do with redemption? I think it goes back to one of the few memories I have of my dad.

A few weeks before he left home forever, he had been gone for weeks and showed up with a black kitten. I must have been seven, and my three younger siblings were thrilled. I was too, but also leery because I knew my mother was not thrilled. I can see now that the kitten was my dad’s wedge to get back in—if my mother had demanded he turn around and leave, “and take the darn kitten with you,” she would have been the bad guy.

I remember dad telling us to hold her gently and not fight over her because she was a living creature with feelings. He said her name was Surprise! and told us to always say it that way, like there was an exclamation point.

So then dad was back home, and the next day he went out to buy some cat food and kitty litter. He was gone all afternoon and missed dinner. My mom tried to put us to bed early. We did what we usually did, laughed at her and ran in four different directions. But I also can still feel how anxious we all were.

Dad made his appearance just as the cat had crapped under someone’s bed. My mom began to reproach him because of course he was drunk and hadn’t brought home any pet supplies.

We kids were giggling until dad roared, “I’ll Get that goddamn cat!” He ripped the kitten out of my sister’s hands, strode to the top of the stairs, and hurled her down the staircase like a fast ball, screaming, “You goddamn piece of shit!” He raced down to the landing, grabbed Surprise before she could get oriented, and sent her hurtling down the second set of stairs to the first floor.

All of us—my mom and the four of us kids—huddled at the top of the stairs. Someone was whimpering but I had learned to be silent, no matter how frightened I was.

That’s when I had the thought that would teach me to never make wishes:

“I wish he was dead.”

A few months later, he was.

Surprise! not only survived but had a litter of eight black kittens six months later.

Much later, there was a (nonviolent) incident involving cats and Vince but that’s his story.

Who could not feel their soul restored by kittens?

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A Room with View

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VINCE

Today we watched a movie in treatment called 7 pounds.  (The number is shown in that form in the title so I can’t be faulted for not spelling it out.).  It stars Will Smith.  And it’s one of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s really sad.  Funny in the right spots.  And at one point in the beginning he says to a man when asked why he was deserving of his help, “Because you’re a good person, even when you think nobody is looking.”

I liked that.  I want to be like that.

Throughout my life, I have always thought of myself as a good person.  Unfortunately, I haven’t actually acted like one very often.

From dealing drugs to stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down, to abandoning friends and family alike, I’ve done nearly everything possible to be a bad person.

I’ve looked into that a lot over the last two months, done a lot of soul searching, taken my moral inventory.  I can see the harm now in the things I’ve done.  Now I’m starting to build myself back up.  To gain the confidence I never had.  I can be that good person I’ve claimed to be.  I am going to be a good man.

—

Last night at 2100, like every other night, we stood at the POA at our bunks, waiting to be counted.  This time I noticed that it was still light out.  It reminded me of my childhood in Aspen Glen, the suburban subsidized housing complex we lived in until my mom met Kermit.  I remember staring out the window at the other kids still playing outside.  I don’t remember how old I was, or what time I had to go to sleep, but I do remember hours of boredom.

No boredom here.  Today we were allowed to raise our Reebok Step up to ten inches.  Ugh. What a difference.  For 40 minutes, they extra two inches made me sweat like a hog.  (That’s what she said?)  It was a good workout.

[ANNE: I feel myself getting defensive as I read Vince’s memory of Aspen Glen.  There must have been hundreds of kids who lived there.  We moved in when Vince was four.  Maybe he was staring out the window at the other kids because he was four and I actually enforced a bedtime, unlike a lot of the other parents.  There were good parents there, but there were terrible ones too.  And a lot of them, like me, were completely overwhelmed and exhausted with work, school, household chores, and parenting.  Sometimes I couldn’t stay awake past 9:00.  Unlike me, Vince is a night person, so I can imagine he was bored because he couldn’t go out and play and he couldn’t go to sleep.  But it’s not like I kept him locked in his room and slid trays of food under his door—just to be clear.]

Don’t Cry for Me, Minnesota

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ANNE

It’s Memorial Day, so here’s a post about death.

Am I the only one who thinks about death all the time? Bear with me. Honestly, I’m not depressed and I don’t find it depressing to think about death. If you do, maybe you should skip this post.

Death has been a preoccupation of mine since my dad died, when I was eight. When Vince was missing for that first worst year, all I could think of was him lying face up behind a garbage dumpster, eyes staring, with a bullet hole in his forehead. Ok, I also imagined him dead in a gulley, in a corn field, in the river, and any number of other cold, isolated, lonely places. But that’s not the kind of dwelling on death I’m talking about here.

My mother is continually clearing out her house, shifting mementos onto me and my siblings. She had a shoebox of loose family photos that we looked through together. Birthday parties, picnics, and school plays from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. “This is my cousin’s fifth birthday party,” she explained, showing me a summertime photo of small children assembled around a cake on a picnic table in someone’s back yard, wearing birthday hats. Little girls with Shirley Temple curls and elaborate home-sewn flouncy dresses. Boys with bow ties and their hair slicked down like Alfalfa. The cars parked in the background had gorgeous fins.

“My cousin and another child got sick after the party and they both died the next day—it was meningitis.” Her finger traced the circle of five-year olds. “I don’t remember who the other child was. We had to be quarantined, so they ran a yellow QUARANTINE tape around our yard. We couldn’t leave or have visitors for a week. Mr. Goldenberg, who owned the five-and-dime at the end of the block, would bring a box of food, set it near the back gate, and run back down the alley.”

Let’s face it, all these photos will be pitched into a dumpster when she dies. I won’t remember who any of the children are.

And so it goes. We are born and, if we’re lucky, someone loves us and takes care of us. Lots of photos are taken to celebrate our milestones. When we enter adulthood we are so focused on achieving goals that we don’t realize we will never be this healthy, energetic, or attractive again.

Now at 55 I have dozens of photo albums that will go into a dumpster when I die. I have thousands of photos on Facebook that will likely sit in cyberspace as long as servers exist, of interest to no one except maybe some future social anthropologist.

And so I—my whole life—my loves and dramas and losses, my story, all my brilliant ideas and daydreams and real dreams, my travels, my elaborately decorated dining rooms for dinner parties and painstakingly tended gardens, the thousands of miles I have walked and millions of repetitions I have done at the gym, my friends far and near, the millions of dollars I’ve raised for good causes, maybe even those good causes and their organizations themselves—will disappear.

We’re all on a conveyer belt. We move along it, conscious of it or not. We can’t get off, we can’t go back, and we don’t know when we’ll reach the end of the belt and fall off into … ??

A lot of people are sure they know the answer to that but I’m not one of them.

Again, I don’t find any of this depressing, or feel sorry for myself—I just find it intriguing. So what should we do while we’re here? The only conclusions I’ve reached for myself, after 55 years of armchair philosophizing, are: 1) it feels better to do good things than bad ones; 2) it’s important to have fun while you have the chance; and 3) if I ever stop seeking the answers to life’s imponderable questions, I’m as good as dead.

Whole Lotta @#%$

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VINCE

About twenty minutes ago we had our first monthly review.  I had high hopes that the worst of our group would be called out.  They were not.

I was pretty much passed by.  Mostly because I don’t get into too much trouble.  They did say that I need to challenge myself and run more.  To do that, I’m going to run on my off day, to see if I can build my stamina.  I’ve made a lot of progress since I was locked up nine months ago, but not enough.

I lost about two pounds and lost 1% body fat since I arrived here at boot camp.  It’s a start.  I can see in the mirror that I’m becoming muscular, toned.  I must work harder.  I will work harder.

—

30 days in boot camp and I can make my bed, iron nice creases into my khakis, and run farther than I ever thought I would.  If you would have asked me two years ago if I would ever run two miles total in my lifetime, I would have said, “Hahahahahahahahaha.”  You get the picture.

The point is, that I—we—are conquering the obstacles that seemed so daunting just a month ago.  We’re even starting to get along.  We still bicker, but what else could be expected, we live in the same room, shower, @&%$, and shave together.

—

My mother brought up a man named Kermit.  She didn’t include his last name or real first name but when I said them in my head, I became angry, which rarely happens.

Yes, I got to see the Red’s [baseball team] win the 1990 World Series right in front of my eyes.  It was cool as hell.  But that was probably the only highlight of that period of my life.

I remember where I was standing, on the back porch of our green apartment building on Dayton Avenue when she told me I had a brother.

Let that simmer.

photo-2

The third of four places we moved to in one year after the Kermit debacle.

—

In that same apartment, I remember getting a dog.  He was a sheltie, and I named him Flash.  He was…special.  Maybe flat out retarded.  And one time oh god it hurts me still to think about it, he ate an entire box of giant chocolate bars I had to sell for a school fundraiser, foil wrappers and all.

I know I don’t remember the correct sequence of events, but I know this: he @&%$ everywhere. He @&%$ outside, he @&%$ on himself.  He @&%$ on the piles of @&%$ that he had @&%$ on himself.  That was just outside.

Hoping he was done, we brought him inside so he wouldn’t freeze to death.  We shut him in the bathroom for the night, and when we opened the door in the morning, I will let my dear Mother take over from here because I am not allowed to use profanity in my writing.  Holy flippiin crap.  Nobody will ever see what we saw that morning.

[ANNE: I don’t care to elaborate on Vince’s dog story above. I am not a dog person, but I thought every boy ought to have one, right? Especially after what I had put Vince through with Kermit. I was wrong.

Vince says he rarely gets angry. Elsewhere in this blog, he writes about “anger coming off me like steam.” I wonder if he’s dulled his anger for years with chemicals, is just now experiencing it unfiltered, and doesn’t even recognize that?]

California Dreaming

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ANNE

And then Kermit changed his mind. He just wasn’t ready to get married. It was too late for me to keep my job or housing. He mailed me a check to carry me over for a month.

—

So Vince and I never moved to California. Instead, we moved into a friend’s unheated attic that winter until we could get a foothold and start over. Then we moved again, and that didn’t work out, so we moved again. Vince changed schools three times that year. I started working as a freelance writer so I could say I was self employed instead of unemployed. Also because I was too depressed to get out of bed, so woodenly depressed that I wasn’t thinking about Vince. Facing the impact of my behavior on him would have produced such massive guilt that it would have pushed me over the edge.

—

But wait, there’s more!

I went back to Kermit, after months of him apologizing, begging, wooing, and having massive bouquets of flowers delivered to my door.

And so Kermit and Vince and I flew back and forth, and the hurled Coke can turned into me being hurled—hurled, punched, kicked, and strangled. Once, in the course of strangling me, Kermit broke his own thumb. I can still see him standing over me, as I choked and gasped my way back to consciousness. “You bitch! Look what you did—you broke my thumb!”

—

A few years ago I had an x-ray for some reason, and the doctor asked me about my old neck injury. “Looks like you had a pretty significant injury,” he said. I had no idea what it could be, until a few days later it dawned on me that this was probably from the time Kermit had tried to strangle me.

—

The only ones who knew what was really going on were the St. Paul Police, St. Paul Fire Department, and Vince.

Kermit and I went camping in the Grand Canyon, where he beat me black and blue in our tent (but only where clothing would cover the bruises; he never hit me in the face). I escaped to the car, locked myself in, and shivered through the night. Back in St. Paul, I went to the police, who photographed my bruises. They couldn’t do anything because Kermit was in another state, but I thought telling others would keep me from going back to him.

When I tried to cut it off, Kermit would call 911, say he was my doctor, and tell them he feared I was having seizures. Would they go to my house right away and check on me, breaking down the door if necessary? I would hear banging on the door at 3 am, and find firefighters with axes posed to smash down the door.

I kept flying out to see him, spending money I didn’t have. That’s right, Kermit never paid. One of his recurring accusations was that I was a gold digger, so although he made at least 10 times what I did, he never paid for my tickets. He did fly Vince out for the World Series, and they drove up to Oakland in a limo. He bought Vince an A’s hat and jacket and full collection of baseball cards. Vince was in thrall to him.

Kermit and I took a road trip to Napa and visited vineyards. He bought expensive bottles of wine for his “collection” Which never made it back because he drained them all.   He told me he had access to drugs he could use to kill me if I tried to leave him, and no one would ever be able to figure it out because, after all, he was a genius.

I can’t bring myself to write about how it ended, but it finally did, with an interstate restraining order against him.

Vince knew I had done the right thing but he was crushed to lose his idol. Was it this episode that set Vince on the road to prison—on top of not having a dad, growing up in poverty, having a depressed mom, and being genetically loaded for addiction, compounded by all his bad choices?

Doctor Wonderful

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ANNE

People have asked how Vince can write so well, considering he dropped out of school at 16. First, I read and talked to him from Day One. Second, I got a full scholarship to send him to a Montessori preschool. Then, even though I am such a city person that I break into hives when I pass outside the city limits, I moved to a suburb in order to send him to the highest-ranked public school system in Minnesota.

Vince was 10 when I finally finished my college degree. That enabled me to get a new job that paid $20,000 a year—$20,000!—that seemed like a fortune. I also loved the job, which was at a private university. Vince and I lived in a safe and clean—if vanilla—subsidized housing project. I had pulled myself up by the bootstraps, and the future looked like it would only get better.

Here is where I “mom up” to the episode that really blew us off course and (I think) screwed Vince up.

As I type the words, “And then I met a man…” I feel my palms start sweating and my stomach tighten.

—

Let’s just call the man Kermit, because he was about as short, slippery, and spineless as a frog.

Kermit was originally from California and was finishing his neurosurgery residency in Minnesota. He adored Vince, the poor fatherless boy with the big brown eyes and quick wit, and Vince adored him. Kermit adored me, too, the spunky single mother with blonde hair and great legs who read novels by the pile. He only read medical journals.

Looking back, I guess I fell in love with him because I felt sorry for him. He had been abused by his mother. He told me about it in great detail. I tried to empathize by telling him about my alcoholic father who had beaten my mother in front of me and then committed suicide. He said that wasn’t the same thing at all—since my dad had died so long ago I shouldn’t blame my problems on him. Besides, Kermit would say as he slugged down his fifth rum and coke, you can’t hold an alcoholic accountable for what they do when they’re drunk; they can’t help it. Now, his mother was really abusive, and she didn’t even drink! The Witch was still alive. Becoming a brain surgeon had been his plan to escape from her and never have to ask her or his dad, who was a saint, for anything ever again.

There were a few episodes of foreshadowing, like when he got jealous and hurled a can of Coke against my kitchen wall, and left me to wipe up the mess. Or when a cop pulled him over for erratic driving, and he flashed his hospital ID and told the cop, “You wouldn’t want to throw me in jail, would you officer? I might be the one you need to operate on you if you get shot.” He laughed about it when he told me later.

But then he moved back to California to join a practice there, and begged me to marry him and join him. I said yes.

He was living in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Pacific, but he hired a realtor who started sending me full-color glossy profiles of million-dollar houses. “Just get rid of all your furniture and move out there asap!” he’s say. “You can go shopping wherever you want and buy all new furniture!” He had bought a red Maserati, but he would buy me an SUV—a Mercedes, of course—not a Ford! Vince would go to a private boarding school, and wait—what? When I expressed hesitation, Kermit accused me of not wanting the best for my child.

Alarm bells were going off in my head but I ignored them. My friends and family were beside themselves that I had not only met a man, but a rich one—a doctor! And so I quit my new job, gave notice on the subsidized townhouse, and gave away most of my belongings. We were moving to California! What could possibly go wrong?

Free Will

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ANNE

Vince has written about how he doesn’t believe in any god. I used to. For 50 years I never doubted God’s existence; I guess that’s called faith.

I was a seeker. I didn’t assume that, because I was born into a Catholic family, attended Catholic schools, and lived in a Catholic neighborhood, I would always be Catholic.

I spent my teens investigating other faiths and converted to one when I was 18. I’m not trying to be coy by not naming it. Once Vince is out it’ll be no big deal. I belonged to a congregation, went to services every week, and put Vince through religious school, much to his displeasure. I wasn’t a happy clappy bible banger. My congregation is as liberal as they get. Yes, I’m still a member, even though I don’t believe in a god.

Since my dad had died young, I had no problem believing in an invisible father figure who would always be there for me.

Problem was, He wasn’t there for me. For 50 years, I prayed. I tried the begging, pleading prayers and the grateful, worshipping ones. I tried shutting up and listening, aka meditating. But I never heard anything. I never got any answers and never felt comforted. People said, “you have to be patient,” and “maybe God’s answer is ‘no’.” I was well aware of how we contort our logic to make sense of God. For instance, how athletes thank God when they win but blame themselves when they lose.

Then one day, when I was 50, my belief in God just went poof! and disappeared. It was like a light switch had been flipped off. What a relief! I no longer had to try to shake answers or love out of a being I couldn’t see or hear. I was free to pursue or not pursue whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to wait around for a sign from God. If it didn’t work out, I could analyze what went wrong, figure out my part, if any, and do it different next time.

Soon after my faith evaporated, I read the old classic novel Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham, which is about an abusive relationship. This passage jumped out at me and summarized how I felt: “He was responsible only to himself for the things he did. Freedom! He was his own master at last. From old habit, unconsciously he thanked god he no longer believed in him.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to say everything is due to my effort, like in the old Rush song, Free Will. It’s easy to be smug when you’re a millionaire rock star. The fact is, we live in a world with constraints like race, class, intellectual and physical abilities, bad luck, good luck, etc.

Another great mind, former professional wrestler, Navy Seal, Minnesota Governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura, got into hot water for saying “Religion is a crutch for weak minded people.” I wasn’t weak minded all those years. I’m a very intelligent person. I just think I needed a father figure and I had been steeped in the Catholic life up until age 18, where questioning God’s existence just wasn’t done.

This new development did throw a wrench in the works for me in my Alanon meetings. Alanon is for families and friends of alcoholics and addicts. I attended weekly meetings and “worked the program”, as they say. Alanon, like AA and the other 12-step groups, uses the term higher power interchangeably with god—and everything depends on believing in one. In my group, people only used the word God, and spoke of God, personally, like he was kindly uncle. I kept going for a year but it finally bugged me so much that I quit.

I’ve written in previous posts about believing that human connections are the key to spiritual growth and inner peace and a feeling of belonging and all that jazz. Vince is counting on his sober friends to keep him sober, and I think he’s on the right track.

The Creep

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ANNE

Ouch. That Eminem song … so many ways I could go with that.

—

When I was in Istanbul in November, there was a guy from the Philippines in my meetings. His name was J.P. Morgan. No, J.P. Morgan is not a Filipino name. His father had changed the family name in hopes that it would bring prosperity. It didn’t.

I happened to be seated next to J.P.—John—on a dinner cruise the first night. I thought, “Oh no, trapped on a boat for three hours next to this guy—what could we possibly have in common?”

But then we started talking and by the end of the cruise I was calling him “son” and he was calling me “mom.”

John’s father was an alcoholic who had left the family when John was small. John was pimped out at the age of 10, sold to strangers for sex until he was too old and no longer desirable—19 or 20—and he began pimping out younger kids in order to make a living and survive.

By the time I met him, John was Vince’s age, had recovered long ago, and ran a recovery program for street kids. Here we are, talking about his “River of Life” program.  To prostituted young men, John has become their idol, big brother, and mentor. Everybody, including notorious gang leaders, listens intently to John and follows every word he says.

JP Morgan

John and another sex worker had had a son together. He was a teenager now, and John was doing his best to keep tabs on him, though the mother was an addict and moved around a lot.

I asked John if he thought that kids being raised by single mothers was the biggest reason that kids got in to trouble. He looked squarely at me and wagged his finger. “No. It is not the mothers. It’s the fathers.” Alcoholic fathers. Abusive fathers. Fathers who gamble away their paychecks. Fathers who leave.

—

On Vince’s first birthday I called to invite his father to have cake with us, and he said he was too busy with “business.” A drug deal, in other words. I never saw him again, except briefly in a crowd.

From time to time I would ask Vince if it bothered him that he didn’t have a father. “Let’s just call him The Creep,” he said once, and we laughed and I never really got an answer, if he had one to give.

Vince never asked about The Creep. The Creep’s dad had been a barge worker and his mother was a telephone operator who had grown up on a reservation. They lived in a dilapidated farm house in Rush City filled with cigarette smoke and no heat and large bowls of bite-sized Snickers and a big-screen TV. The Creep and I visited his grandmother once, on the rez. She lived in a tar paper shack without indoor plumbing or electricity.

I never mentioned to Vince that the Creep had been a drug dealer from a small town who didn’t have a car or a phone, a high-school dropout who worked as a clerk in a gas station. A guy who aspired to nothing more than hanging out with his friends, drinking and smoking pot, laughing and telling stories about drinking and smoking pot. I never mentioned any of these things because I didn’t want Vince to be influenced by them, if he harbored some unconscious admiration for The Creep.

The Creep had had a son with another woman before I met him, and went on to father four more children. I got $103 in child support once, but that was it.

—

I’m not trying to shift blame; after all I must have had a far stronger influence on Vince since I was there 24/7 for 16 years, right?  I don’t spend all day analyzing and angsting over why Vince is who he is.  But for every Vince, there are 10,000 more like him in prison, in Minnesota alone.  I’m sure they all derailed for a different mix of complicated reasons, just as I succeeded despite a complicated mix of factors that should have kept me down.  If someone could figure it all out, they would deserve to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Babies