The Prodigal Father: A True Story of Tragedy, Survival, and Reconciliation in an American Family

by Jon Du Pre

Overview

This is a story of how one American family turned its bright expectations into crushing disappointment and then, ultimately, a victory of spirit.

The Du Pre family’s story is told by the middle of three children, Jon. Fear and rage from the author’s childhood threatened to destroy the seemingly perfect life he had created. Jon made a terrifying pivotal decision—to seek out the cause of his confusion and bitterness.

This gripping story will enlighten and inspire you, showing you the true meaning of "family."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781401933081
Publisher:	Hay House Inc.
Publication date:	05/01/2000
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	290
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

John Du Pre is a correspondent for the Fox News Network. He lives in Southern California with his wife and three children.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The Journey Begins

I make my living looking into the lens of a television camera and telling people what's happening. It's an odd sort of job, being a news broadcaster. I never see the people I talk to, except at restaurants or supermarkets when they ask for my autograph. I smile and banter as I scribble, but ask myself what my name on a napkin could possibly mean to them. I'm just a face, a voice, a bearer of tidings, good and mostly bad. Sometimes when the attention makes me uncomfortable, I realize I'm still the quiet teenager with a constant look of worry on his face who lived in fear that people could just glance at him and know the whole sorry truth about his life.

    In the TV news business, young anchormen and women tend to move from job to job, scrambling for better deals at glitzier stations in bigger places. My scramble started in the Rocky Mountains and took me through the Upper Midwest. Then in 1993, when I was 34 years old, I landed the main anchor spot at a station in Boston. I was 15 years younger than the city's other anchormen, all of them well seasoned and well respected. I should have been intimidated, grabbing a plum position in the nation's sixth-largest television market. Instead, after the childhood I'd been through, I felt I'd left my past behind and arrived at my great reward. At least that's how I felt for a while, anyway.

    Like riding a new bicycle or pleasing a new lover, it takes time before you feel comfortable at a new anchor desk. Five months into my Boston gig, I had the feeling I was settling in. Itwas about that time that the first big snow hit. New England was in for the snowiest winter in 50 years, and a sizable part of my duties that season would be heralding blizzards, telling people how hard the storm would hit and what it would do to their lives.

    My producer had decided to play the storm late in the show, after we came back from a commercial break, as an introduction to the weather segment. When the floor director yelled, "Stand by!" I set myself in the posture I used for serious stories. Gently leaning on my left elbow, as I'd been trained, I turned my head slightly to the right, just far enough to focus on the center of the big studio camera lens with what I'd been taught was my dominant eye. The tally light on the camera lit red, and I drew a deep breath.

    "Brace for a squall, Boston!" I began. "A major storm's coming our way, and it's carrying a big load of snow." The director in the booth cued the videotape operators, and onto the screen came footage of a blizzard from the year before. Without looking at the studio monitor, I knew what sort of scenes there would be: sheets of white sweeping past the Prudential Building, probably, and snow-buried cars on Beacon Hill.

    "And wouldn't you know," I said, "that it's going to hit early tomorrow morning, just as hundreds of thousands of commuters are trying to enter the city."

    Then I adjusted my tone, moderating my professional detachment with just the right touch of manufactured sympathy. "The police," I said, "will find frozen bodies in the usual places, under the viaducts and in the alleys." The file footage, I knew, was keeping up with me, showing bent, bundled figures plodding along, dark shadows against the white. "Officers are patrolling the downtown streets," I said as the videotape continued to roll—images, no doubt, of men and women hunkering in corners and crannies. "Police say it's an impossible job ..."

    At this point, as I neared the end, I glanced up from my script at the studio monitor and saw the last of the file video. I saw a ragged old man curled on a manhole cover, trying to stay warm in the steam rising from the sub-street sewer system. My breath left my lungs. I thought I heard myself gasp. The fear that my audience might have heard the same sound instantly shredded my composure. Suddenly, I realized that the expression on my face had changed and I couldn't control it. I needed to finish the rest of the sentence: "... finding all the indigent street people and bringing them to the shelters." Camera three took me on a close-up. My director hadn't noticed my distress. I choked and altogether missed my last line, a nimble lead-in to the weatherman's segment.

    It only lasted a few seconds for the viewers at home. The way most people watch television, with little of their conscious attention, my gaffe probably went unnoticed. From my side, it was like being in a car wreck—your mind speeds up and you watch everything happen in slow motion. The silent pause that was supposed to be my last sentence seemed like several minutes. When I failed to speak, the director switched over to the weatherman, who launched into his standard blizzard quips. "That's right, Jon," he chirped, responding to the line I never uttered. "We'll need backhoes to dig ourselves out of our driveways tomorrow!"

    The station had recently brought in some broadcast consultants to critique our on-air delivery and help us communicate emotion without seeming emotional. They were fond of saying that an anchor had to not only convince the audience that he knew what he was talking about, but that he cared. I had just revealed that, for a journalist covering a blizzard, I cared too much.

    In the postbroadcast meeting, Mike, our constantly anxious producer, didn't mention my flub. He was concerned instead about where in the program the blizzard segment had been slotted. "We should have run the frozen man story up higher," he said, pushing his fingers through his hair. "I didn't like tossing into the weather segment on a downbeat." What he meant was that he didn't like leading into our happy-talking weather guy's routine on a note of misery and death.

    None of my colleagues seemed to have given the tragedy of people dying in the frigid New England night a second thought. They'd all read, written, and reported the story many times before. It was the sort of news fodder our producers regularly plugged into the newscast for a little jolt of pathos. As the anchor read the same old story, the videotape editors loaded the same old cassettes into the playback machines and showed the same old file footage, and the folks at home saw the pathetic ragged man lying on the manhole cover. The image had become one of the staples of the news consumers' diet, part of the mix. The shock value had worn thin.

    When we returned to the newsroom, Karen, my incurably self-conscious colleague, continued the anchorwoman act as she took calls from viewers commenting on her hairstyle and wardrobe. I got a call from a man who was phoning yet again to insist that there was a Martian mind-machine in his satellite dish and that our station was part of a conspiracy to cover it up. No one was calling to ask where the people stranded in the storm might be huddled and how the public might help. But we'd done our job. We'd attracted an audience and had gotten them to watch a few high-priced commercial spots, and we'd reminded them to stay tuned for the Arsenio Hall show.

    I could hardly blame the audience or my co-workers. Like them, I too had built up a professional veneer over the years, one that shielded me from the horror of some of the news I reported every day. But when it came to this particular story on this particular night, the veneer was thin. The old man in the file footage that night had broken through. I knew that when I went to bed and closed my eyes, I'd see him again, coiled on the sidewalk. For me he was more than a fuzzy image on the television screen. He had a face. He had an identity. He was my father.

    I had no reason to think that my dad was anywhere near Boston, but for a moment the man looked so like him—the same crouched shoulders and strong-looking legs, the bulk of the body, the distinctively French nose and jawline. And the setting was the same. I knew my father was on the street somewhere that night. Why not here?

    It had been years since I'd learned that the old man was down and out. For all my supposed knowledge as a newsman, I'd come no closer to understanding what had happened to him. In some part of my mind, my father was still the exuberant, hilarious, larger-than-life hero of my boyhood, still my champion and motivator, still full of hope and ambition. He was still the handsome young FBI agent, the legal counsel to a prominent U.S. senator, the successful prosecutor turned civil rights attorney who defended the poor and defenseless, often pro-bono and at risk to his own safety. He still had his pretty wife, his $700 suits, his collection of automobiles, his speedboat, his ultramodern dream house built on the perched clearing of his 35-acre lakefront property, all of which had made me the envy, if only briefly, of my childhood buddies and some of his business associates. It was so hard for me to accept that this man, my father, was out there somewhere, not unlike many of the pathetic, detestable people whose charity cases he had once championed. So, to protect myself from the thought, I simply tried to put it out of my mind entirely. I tried, but it had never worked.

    Driving home after the show on the empty midnight highways, the first flakes of the incoming snowstorm brushing my windshield, I was once again hit by the questions, the same ones that haunted me whenever I had time to think: Where was he sleeping that night? What did he eat? What about shoes? Did he wear shoes? What if somebody tried to take his shoes? Could he defend himself? And what, in the end, does a person who lives on the street do when he gets sick? Cold? Lonely? Why didn't he call? Nineteen years, except for that once, and he'd never called. When had he slipped away into this kind of existence? And why?

    And then the most painful of all the questions: Was it my fault? Could I have saved him? Can I save him still? And then, Can I save myself from becoming him?

    "I'm too old for this shit," I heard myself mumble.

    I wondered what normal people, the ones whose parents didn't sleep on the street, thought about as they drove home from work. Yet here I was again, speeding along in my red Volvo 850, one of the anchorman's conspicuous indulgences, feeling guilty that my father, now 66, was on the street somewhere this very night trying to cadge a place to bed down.

    As I had so often, I thought back to the days when my dad seemed to be the most indefatigable man in the world. I recalled his command of everything and everyone around him, his irrepressible humor, his dogged devotion to his cause, and mostly his knack for convincing me that I could achieve anything I wanted enough to work for. For all his miserable failures, he'd done plenty of good. I'd grown up determined to be counted as one of his successes. I owed a good deal of my achievements in life to him.

* * *

    My father enters my first memories at his best, as a showman—the ringmaster of fun and excitement. I was playing in the kitchen of our little brick rambler in Mauldin, South Carolina, one day when our babysitter looked out the window and spotted him. "Your daddy's home early."

    My father's daily homecoming was always an event, a moment my brothers and I awaited eagerly. To have him home early was unbearably wonderful. I ran to the window, and there he was, getting out of the car, pulling out a big white cardboard box, and coming up the walk. We boys, bouncing on our toes like pogo sticks and squealing with glee, met our hero on the porch. Marq was seven, I was five, and Daryl was two.

    "Hey, hey, boys! Daddy's home and he's got a party!" he yelled, holding the box over our heads. "Follow me inside."

    Like a waiter in a fancy restaurant, he set the box down on the living room coffee table. "How do you think she'll like this!" he said in his game-show host's voice, carefully removing the top.

    Inside was a white cake with pink rose petals in frosting all around its rim. In the middle, in a flowing frosting script, the baker had written Happy Birthday, Mommy! This was the first time I'd ever seen a cake with someone's name written on it, and I was fascinated.

    "You know what today is, boys?" he asked, lowering his voice as if telling a secret, making the occasion as suspenseful as a little boy could stand. "Today is Mommy's birthday."

    He closed the box and set it down. "Okay, boys, huddle up."

    Dad often got us together in a make-believe football huddle when he wanted to tell us something like "Let's go swimming" or "Let's drive down for ice cream sodas," or "Let's rake the leaves." We gathered around him, heads together, eyes wide and mouths open.

    "First thing," he said. "That closet over there ..." (we gaped at the closet door) "... is full of presents for your mother. There's one from each of you and two from me. Okay, here's the play. We hide the cake in the closet with the presents. When she comes in, we're sitting on the couch watching TV. As soon as she comes into the living room, I give the signal and everybody jumps up and yells, `Surprise!' Then we bring out the presents and the cake, and we light the candles and let her blow them out, and we sing `Happy Birthday.'" The three of us looked at each other with delight.

    "But," my father said, "you've got to promise to keep still until I give you the cue." We crossed our hearts and hoped to die.

    Mommy's shopping trip must have been to China. It seemed to take all evening. For three little boys, the wait was thrilling and agonizing. Finally, the kitchen door opened and in walked our mother, both arms loaded with grocery bags. Daryl started to make a noise. Marq and I grabbed him and held him down on the couch and covered every opening that might let out air and blow the lid off our secret plan.

    "Couldn't someone help me with the groceries?" she started to scold. Daryl wiggled free. "Mommy!" he piped. "Don't look in the closet! Your cake's in there, and all your presents!"

    Marq and I were furious. The secret was out, and we couldn't put it back in his mouth, although we tried. Our mother didn't seem to mind a bit. "Oh, my goodness!" she said as Dad swung the closet door wide. "All for me? What a wonderful surprise!"

    Dad brought the presents over and stacked them around her on the couch. We boys were dying to see what "our" presents to Mom would turn out to be. Mine was some fancy bath soap, and I couldn't have been prouder if I'd picked it out myself. Marq gave her pretty handkerchiefs, and Daryl gave her some nail polish. She hugged and kissed and thanked us.

    Dad's main present to her was a full-length, lime-green nightie. "Bob!" she said, gasping. "Where in the word did you get this? It's beautiful!" She stood and held the nightie to her body. "Come here, you," she said to Dad, reaching up to give him a kiss more fervent than any I'd ever seen before.

    "Hey," Dad said, flushed with pleasure, "we'll have to give that thing a road test tonight," and my mother answered with a saucy laugh. I thought that was pretty strange, Mom wearing her pajamas in the car out on the highway, but I accepted it as just one of those baffling, thrilling things grown-ups did.

    "Time to cut the cake," our game show host announced. We scampered to the seldom-visited dining room where Dad ceremonially lifted the cake from the box and placed it on a platter that looked like it had been cut from a giant crystal. We boys clustered around and watched raptly as he fit the candles. "Make a wish, honey," he said. My mother looked at each of us, shut her eyes, and made a wish, and we all understood what that wish was: that this happiness would last forever.

    "Blow out the candles," we boys began chanting.

    "I'll need your help," she said. "Everybody blow!"

    We all took deep breaths and blew and blew until all the candles were out. My father handed my mother a silver knife, and she began cutting.

    "Chocolate!" we boys howled in unison when the first slice came out.

    "My favorite," Mom said. We all knew it was.

    As we boys sat in a circle on the living room floor, Dad put a Ray Charles record on the phonograph and set the needle on a song that made everybody loosen and sway with its seductive melody and suggestive lyrics, something about holding and squeezing and stop teasing. "Get up off that couch, Birthday Girl," Dad said in a soft, low voice, his hand extended. Mom glided into his arms, as only a trained dancer could do. The two of them moved in unison around the center of the room. We boys beamed as we watched them in each other's arms, moving to the music, hugging and kissing each other. As I looked back on the scene, it had a mythic glow. It seemed to bypass my comprehensive ignorance of sex to give me a glimmer of how I was created and to assure me that I was the result of an act of love.

    The Mom's-birthday memory always led to another memory far less assuring. It was six years later, and I was 11 years old. We were living in Anderson, 30 miles from Mauldin. I was sitting on the curb outside the YMCA, alone in the dark, waiting for Dad to come and pick me up and take me home. He was nearly two hours late, and I was cold. Finally, I saw his tan Mercedes coming down the street, and I ran out to meet it. "Hop in, Jonny!" he said.

    He turned the car around in the parking lot and headed in the wrong direction, away from home. "Where are we going?" I asked.

    He responded in that voice he always used when he wanted something to sound a lot better than it was. "Guess what, Jonny," he announced. "We're going to a friend's house on our way home. You'll like her." He said it as though I was in for a treat. I was so tired that I barely took in what he'd said. I didn't mind the detour; at least I was off the curb and in his car.

    He drove to the far east side of town, where almost no white people lived. After ten minutes, he pulled up at a modest brick home, and we got out of the car.

    "This woman's name is Miss Tilly," he said. "She's a client of mine. I need to take care of a little business with her." I still thought nothing of it. My father often took me with him on business calls, to see his clients in their homes—the county jail and the state prison. He knocked, and an attractive and gracious woman answered the door and invited us in.

    She shook my hand and said, "You must be Jon." I was surprised she knew my name. She ushered us into the living room where her children were sitting, watching television. They looked startled. I was sure they hadn't had many white people in their house. She introduced me to them, and my father acted as though he expected us to become instant playmates. The girl was nine, and the little boy was seven. We were told to make ourselves comfortable in the living room and watch as much TV as we wanted.

    "There are plenty of snacks," Miss Tiny said.

    "You kids won't need to bother us for anything while we get our work done," my father quickly added. They disappeared down the hall, leaving us kids to stare at each other and wonder what to say.

    We pretended to watch television, but we couldn't help glancing back and forth. No one said a word. For an hour-and-a-half we sat there, looking at each other, passing potato chips and pretzels. Although we didn't know exactly what was going on, we sensed the nature of what our parents were doing down the hall. Those two kids looked at me with resentment, but I didn't blame them a bit. I'd accompanied the white man who'd come to soil their mother somehow.

    I stood up as soon as I heard a door open down the hall. "Okay, Jonny," my father said, "let's go." Miss Tilly didn't come all the way out of the dark hallway, but I could see that her hair was mussed and she was wearing a bathrobe. There were no good-byes. My father opened the door, and the two of us walked out.

    He had more instructions for me as we drove home: "Now, when Mom asks where we've been, I just want you to say, `Dad had to work late on a special case.' Okay? We don't want Mommy to get mad at us, right?"

    I wanted to scream. I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, but still I felt dirty. My father was doing something wrong, something hurtful to Mom, and I was his little alibi. He was counting on me to keep his secret for him, and I would, because I didn't dare do anything that would spark another of those fights my parents had been having. I felt so guilty I couldn't stand myself. And I felt rage because I hadn't done anything to feel guilty for.

    Luckily my mother was in bed when we got home that night, so I didn't have to face her questioning. I kicked off my shoes and went straight to bed with my clothes on. I lay there for hours, staring into the dark, just trying to breathe slowly as my feelings tore at my heart.

* * *

    Boston's blizzard had struck in earnest by the time I turned off the Southeastern Expressway at Hingham, a little harbor town 18 miles south of the city. My neighborhood was already tufted with white. I pulled up into the snow-covered driveway, and inside my house, I knew that my wife, Gina, and our children lay sleeping, peaceful and safe.

    When I thought of Gina, my first impulse was to feel sorry for her. Early in her marriage she'd discovered there was something wrong with her new husband, an anger just under the skin that broke through like an erupted boil whenever I was corrected or criticized, or even made to feel inferior through some act of generosity on her part. In our seven years together, she'd had to tread cautiously. She'd learned which of my buttons never to press. Money was a dangerous topic; if a bill went unpaid for even a day after the due date, I'd explode. "I shouldn't expect a trust fund baby like you to appreciate the importance of handling money properly! You think I work my ass off just so you can live like a princess? What if I throw you out in the snow and make you fend for yourself? You'd max out your credit cards and starve to death!" If she offered even the mildest critique of my on-air performance, I'd lash back with sarcasm. "If you were anything more than a talking hairdo, you'd still be on the air!" She never knew when some minor complaint might trigger a rebuke—like the time she asked whether I'd forgotten Valentine's Day.

    She'd just handed me an envelope and a small box wrapped in shiny red paper. The envelope contained a love note. In the box was a new watch. The beautiful gift made me feel inadequate; in my mined family we hadn't celebrated Valentine's Day. When she wondered aloud if perhaps I might have a gift for her, it was as though she were putting me down for growing up in a family that never showed love for each other, that was plagued by so many problems that we barely made it to school in the morning, let alone recognized Valentine's Day. I blew up in her face. "Does the whole world have to make it a fucking holiday every time greeting cards go on sale?" She shrank from me and moved quickly from the room, leaving me with my amazement and horror. What could have made me punish my generous wife for my own thoughtlessness? Where had that weird, mistargeted rage come from?

    Gina grew accustomed to being crushed in arguments, to being embarrassed in front of our friends, to taking the blame for little things that went wrong—the baby's stinking diaper, the burnt toast, the bounced check. She had the resilience to handle it all, while I teetered on the verge of a breakdown. I knew that demons from my past were threatening to destroy this new life that meant so much to me. But I couldn't even name them.

    I'd begun concocting a life for myself the day my childhood ended, the day my father left our home. I'd stumbled through adolescence and become an adult only to find that I didn't have the first clue how to be a man. The world expected me to know what I was doing, but I was a patch job, a man cobbled from wreckage, and one of the parts I hadn't been able to fabricate for myself was intimacy. Instead, there was resentment. I could convert my resentment into a kind of high-octane fuel powerful enough to propel me through most obstacles, but it was burning up my marriage.

    I wondered how deep Gina's well was, how much longer she could keep on greeting abuse with compassion. I wondered if there might come a time when she'd decide that the benefits of this one-sided relationship simply weren't worth the pain. It sickened me to think she might be worrying that I was passing my defects along to our children.

    I promised myself that when I got home that night I wouldn't, for once, wake her up and talk to her about my torments. I'd keep them to myself.

    I tried. I got into bed carefully so as not to wake her, and kissed her and tried to sleep, but I couldn't. My mind kept replaying the blizzard video, as I knew it would, and then once again I began obsessing over my childhood and its destruction.

    "Jon?" Gina whispered. "You're awake, aren't you." It was more an accusation than a question.

    "No," I whispered in the other direction.

    "Yes, you are. I can feel you jerking."

    "Sorry. I guess I'm just a jerk," I said.

    She rolled over and faced me in the dark and put her warm hand on my cheek. "Honey," she said, as she'd said so often, "you've got to concentrate on this thought: You survived. Your brothers went to jail, you got yourself an education and a career and a family. You should be grateful for your success."

    I started to dispute what she said about my brothers. "Went to jail" made it sound like they'd committed armed robbery when it was really minor—no weapons, no violence, no stolen money. But I knew what she meant; my brothers' lives had been badly hurt by what happened. They hadn't really survived.

    "You're right," I said, and she was. My life had become everything that, as a castoff child, I'd yearned for it to be. "I'll think about you and my beautiful kids and this beautiful house."

    "And remember," she said, "when you're not terrible, you're wonderful. The kids adore you." She kissed me. "And so do I." She snuggled against me. "Let's go to sleep."

    I waited until her breathing became slow and even. I thought the lovely thought she'd given me, and still I was edgy, anxious. I couldn't believe it—this feeling that something was missing, that although I had everything I wanted, it amounted to nothing. However irrational, the fear that I could lose everything I'd achieved was real, and it terrified me. All during my troubled youth I'd taken as a God-given certainty the fact that once I'd created my own sweet family and won a measure of prosperity, I'd possess a deep and lasting contentment. It hadn't happened.

    Out of sheer exhaustion, I finally fell asleep. The next day I was tired—too tired, really, for the ritual roughhouse with my four-year-old son, Kasey. Every morning we'd turn the family room floor into our own wrestling mat or karate ring or football field. We wrestled and chopped and tackled each other. The first to knock down his opponent five times was the winner, so long as it was Kasey.

    "Okay, Daddy!" he said when he'd swallowed the last spoonful of breakfast cereal. "Time for the karate championship!"

    I was dragging when we began, but I got myself into it, and we were having fun. Then, right in the middle of our pretend fight, he stopped and looked at me with a curious, almost perplexed expression on his face.

    "Dad," he panted, his karate guard down, "where's Grandpa Bob?"

    The question had come out of nowhere. It took me a few seconds to figure out what he was talking about. He'd heard his parents speak of a visit from a strange old man who had appeared on our doorstep a few years before. The man had played with Kasey on the floor for half an hour, then he'd gone away. Kasey remembered that we'd introduced this man to him as "Grandpa Bob" and that we'd spoken of him as if he was somehow important—important to Kasey.

    I was stunned, not only by the timing of his inquiry, but by its laserlike accuracy. His curiosity had led him to the one subject that this all-knowing, all-powerful father was afraid to examine. Kasey wanted to know where his grandfather had gone. He wanted to know why his father's father was missing from the family photo, the picture that defined this little boy's identity. And there I knelt, unable to utter a word. My mind ran through all the pat answers that parents use to brush off children's difficult questions. Long seconds passed. Finally, I forced out something like, "Grandpa Bob is traveling. Grandpa Bob is on the road."

    "Is he dead?" Kasey asked.

    "No, I think he's still alive."

    "You don't know?"

    "No."

    "Why don't you know?" he pressed.

    "I'm pretty sure he's still alive, Kasey." I tried to sound authoritative, hoping that would satisfy the boy and end the conversation.

    "Then why doesn't he come to visit?" he went on.

    "You ask too many questions!" I shouted at my curious little boy. He flinched at the boom of my terrible voice and cowered at the sight of my facial expression transforming instantly from pleasant to menacing. I reached for him, to pull him to my chest and give him a hug, but the nimble four-year-old stepped back and dashed out of the room and up the stairs. I heard him whimper as he fled.

    "I'm sorry, Kasey," I mumbled as I stared after him. "I just don't know."

    Then I noticed Gina, standing at the kitchen sink, glaring at me with a look of disapproval.

    "You wanna ration of your own?" I threatened. "Just give me that pissy look and you can have your own ration of shit!" She turned away quickly and continued washing dishes.

    "That was mean. Kasey didn't deserve to be—"

    "Shut up!" I roared. "Mind your own business." And as I was leaving the room to go upstairs to apologize to my shell-shocked little boy, I muttered, "You should know by now you can't lecture me. I already know it's mean as soon as it happens. I don't know why I do it." Gina didn't bother to look up.

    This wasn't supposed to have happened. Kasey had torn away part of the pretty picture I had painted over my old life. I thought I'd done a good job of making things seem just right—the new family, the house, the job. Now I wasn't so sure. Suddenly it all felt like a sham.

    I realized in that moment that we both needed an answer to Kasey's question. Thirty years had passed since my father left my brothers and me alone in a dingy two-bedroom apartment with our broken-spirited mother. He'd stolen a piece of my identity when he disappeared. Now I needed to pass it along to my son, and I couldn't. I'd spent the first part of my life worshiping my father and the rest of it trying to forget him. Kasey's question now made me realize why the image of the old man on the manhole cover had disturbed me so deeply. It had reminded me that the most important man I had ever known had deserted me. And not only that, he'd vanished into a world shrouded from my sight.

    As terrifying a prospect as it was to me, I knew what I had to do. It was time for me to go down into his gray world and find him. I had to get as close to him as I could and stay there as long as he'd let me. I'd go back through his life with him, tracing his path from loving father to deserter, his slide into desolation, until I understood. I'd thank him for what he did right, and make him answer for what he did wrong.

    How strange to go searching for the father I'd spent most of the last 15 years trying to forget. But I had no choice. As I'd just learned, I couldn't cancel him out. I felt an overpowering practical need to come to terms with his ruin. I needed to make sure that, through ignorance of some dark emotional inheritance, I didn't do to my own life and my children's lives what he had done to himself and his family. If it could happen to my father, it could happen to me. It could happen to anyone.

    In the many years leading up to this decision, I thought that my troubles were unique. Long afterward, however, when I'd made it through to the other side, I learned I'd had a recognized disorder afflicting people who once had been put through hell and had gotten stuck there. I fit right into the pattern of what psychologists referred to as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. It was first recognized when Vietnam vets came back from southeast Asia in such emotional turmoil. My anger and resentment were standard symptoms, along with my guilt and my shame and my fear that it was all my fault. Many victims of the disorder are blind-sided one day, years after the devastating experience, by a vivid image that brings it all back and precipitates an emotional crisis, and this was precisely what happened with me. In my case, it was the videotaped glimpse of the old man freezing on the sidewalk.

    Therapists urge sufferers to confront their demons. I didn't know that. I did so out of desperation.

Table of Contents

Chapter Sixteen: Day of Reckoning

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Chapter One: The Journey Begins	1
Chapter Two: The Amazing PB&J Sandwich	15
Chapter Three: Twelve Black Horses and Three Green Elves	27
Chapter Four: Stolen Potato Chips and a Daryl Sandwich	41
Chapter Five: California, Here We Come	59
Chapter Six: Cheerios and Powdered Milk	71
Chapter Seven: Humpback Jack from Across the Track	89
Chapter Eight: California, Here We Go Again	105
Chapter Nine: Missionary Man	119
Chapter Ten: Good-bye, Huckleberry Finn	135
Chapter Eleven: Miss Utah	177
Chapter Twelve: The Toothless Traveler	187
Chapter Thirteen: Casualties of War	207
Chapter Fourteen: Demons at the Door
Chapter Fifteen: Street Lawyer	235
265
Chapter Seventeen: Kasey's Answer	277
Chapter Eighteen: Amazing Grace	281
About the Author	287