Well, when my dad got home, my mom had a new set of china.
* * * *
My mom was a woman of her time. As the feminist movement caught hold in the 1970s, she ran with it. The 1950s archetype of the housewife with dinner on the table and a smile on her face had pretty much run its course, and my mom was not having any of it.
There was a television commercial around that time for a perfume called Enjoli. Its jingle, a reimagining of the Peggy Lee song “I’m a Woman,” was famous at the time. It depicted a woman of the moment, bringing home the bacon, frying it up in a pan, and still somehow retaining her feminine side.
It was a new era, and my mom was a new-era woman. That message—that a woman could do it all and then some—was delivered into America’s living rooms in a million different forms. It blasted through the television and right into my childhood. My mom was liberated.
With both parents working, the supervision wasn’t what you’d call exceptional. They were off doing their own thing—which was fine—and we were, too. I had the kind of freedom that most of today’s kids, with their helicopter parents and ultra-organized schedules, could never dream of having. Most of them wouldn’t know what to do with it, either, from what I can tell. My friends and I would get into all kinds of trouble: going to Padres games and hopping the fence one after the other when the security guard wasn’t looking (try doing that now); running free in the neighborhood climbing fences to eat the neighbors’ oranges; shooting at each other with BB guns without regard to collateral damage.
It’s worth repeating that my epilepsy had a major impact on my overall mind-set. With each successive seizure, I believed I was that much closer to death. This was just something I understood to be real, without much in the way of evidence, but those episodes were so goddamned frightening that I was left with no other conclusion.
So I reacted to it by really not giving much of a damn about anything. I was open to any adventure and any new experience, no matter how dangerous. I was still missing weeks of school at a time, and I was deathly bored when I was in school, and the medication I took didn’t help. Back in the seventies, the only known treatment for epilepsy was barbiturates, in my case phenobarbital. This was the era of people running around with tongue depressors, trying to keep an epileptic from swallowing his tongue.
I have no idea what kind of damage those drugs did to my body over the years.
The drugs didn’t seem to help stop the seizures. I averaged one every six weeks or so. I could feel them coming on but could do nothing to stop them. I’d be sitting in front of the television and it would be absolutely fucking terrifying: There would be this gathering storm in my head, the world would turn upside down, and then the world would shut off as quickly as if I’d flipped a switch in my brain.
For those few conscious seconds at the beginning of a seizure, every sense went into overdrive. It seemed as if all the circuits blew, and then my body would shut down.
They were terrifying and, in a weird way, liberating. They freed me up to do whatever the hell I wanted, and I became a terrible kid. Just awful. One of the worst. I have no problem admitting it, and there’s no way to overstate it. I learned to live for the moment and enjoy the hell out of everything I did. That hasn’t changed. I loved sports but couldn’t play them because my mom lived in mortal fear that I would get hit on the head. While my brothers and friends were playing baseball, I couldn’t. So, in a perverse twist, I became an adrenaline junkie. I loved anything that went fast and possessed an element of danger. And more than a few times, I smacked my head hard enough to give my mom a heart attack—had she only known.
Just like on Pawn Stars, in my everyday life I am prone to embarking on lengthy and barely relevant tangents when something either strikes me as interesting or bugs the crap out of me. Forgive me in advance, but here’s one such instance:
I have a real fear of government-run health care. There’s one reason: I lived it. If you don’t know what it was like to navigate the rivers and tributaries of the military health-care system as an epileptic child of the 1970s, I’m about to change that.
My mom and I would show up at Balboa Hospital—the biggest hospital on the West Coast—at 7 A.M. We would park and get onto a tram like the ones they have at Disneyland and have it drop us off at Medical Records. We would wait there for an hour to get my records. Someone would go in the back and root around for an hour and then come out carrying a big box with all my records inside. We would take the box to the doctor’s office.
Once at the doctor’s office, we’d sit around and wait for probably another hour. There weren’t real neurologists working for the navy at the time, or if there were they didn’t stick around very long, so usually I would see a new doctor every four or five months. I’d finally get in to see the doctor, and he would sit there and review my records and then say, “OK, let’s get some blood tests.”
(Once I remember having to go back two weeks in a row because someone in the lab lost the fluid they extracted during a spinal tap. Two spinal taps in one week—now that’s a good time.)
So my mom and I would scoop up the records and go to the lab and have them take my blood for the tests. By now it would be lunchtime, and so everything closed up and we’d go get some lunch. When lunch was over, we’d head back to the doctor’s office to see if the blood work had come back yet. They were checking to see if my medication levels were OK, and most of the time the doctor wanted to tweak the prescription some, so he’d say, “Here’s your prescription—head over to the pharmacy and get it filled.”
So my mom and I would trudge over to the pharmacy and stand in line with what seemed like hundreds of old retired navy people. We’d drop off the prescription and be told our wait was an hour.
We’d kill that hour by going and getting me a haircut on the grounds or heading into the commissary for a few things my mom might need. Then we’d head back over to the pharmacy and pick up the prescription and head home.
This happened once a month, and it was an ordeal. We wouldn’t get back on that tram to take us to our car until three or four o’clock in the afternoon.
When I think back on it, my mom had some saintly patience in those days. The time and effort it took to take care of a child with my health problems were significant. But there was one benefit to those monthly Doctor Days: It was the one day I knew I got to spend with my mom.
Here’s how a typical school day went for me: I would take a pill in the morning before school, and by lunchtime it was a battle to the death to see if I could stay awake long enough to make it to lunch. Then, after lunch, it was usually a losing battle. I would almost always clunk my head on the desk and be out cold for much of the first period of the afternoon.
It wasn’t long before phenobarbital wasn’t the only drug I was ingesting. In fourth grade, I smoked pot for the first time. Fourth grade. Nine years old. We had a babysitter, and she apparently couldn’t make it through a shift without smoking weed. She toked up right in our living room, and she must have noticed the way I was looking at her.
“Do you want to try some?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
That ended up being my go-to answer.
“Do you want some (fill in the drug name here)?”
“Sure.”
“Do you want to dive off that cliff?”
“Sure.”
I was willing to do anything. I was that kid. Consequences never factored into the equation.
Take school, for example. I didn’t think there was a good reason for me to keep going. The seizures made me miss an average of one week out of every six, so I always fell behind in my work and didn’t really care about catching up.
Nobody ever asked to see my report card. Nobody asked what I did that day in school. My dad was a workaholic, my mom was a workaholic. If you get right down to it, they didn’t pay enough attention to us. I don’t hold it against them, but it’s the truth. I’m sure they’d never admit it, but it’s the truth. I grad
ually began to lose interest when I got to middle school.
My mind worked on principles of mathematical certainty. I know that sounds heavy, but even then I was calculating and analytical. Every time I had a seizure, I felt like I died a little. This feeling grew stronger as the years wore on, and by the time I was in eighth grade it had metastasized into an actual scenario: I was going to be walking down a flight of stairs, have a seizure, fall down, and die.
School wasn’t the place I wanted to spend my days. The prolonged absences made it awkward, but more than that, I was one of those kids that just didn’t fit. Teachers couldn’t figure me out. I was a puzzle; I could go through complex math problems in my head with no problem, but I didn’t fit the profile of the smart kid. I was a fuckup, and in our institutional educational system, fuckups don’t get the benefit of the doubt.
School pretty much died for me when I was in eighth grade at Taft Middle School in San Diego. The first class after lunch was an advanced math class. Because of the epilepsy drugs, I’d fall asleep without fail, and the teacher was a complete ass. This was a bad combination for me. Math was always easy for me; I knew from the time I was nine or ten that I kicked ass in math. Nothing they were teaching even remotely challenged me, but since I was labeled a bad kid—OK, since I was a bad kid—nobody ever took the time to acknowledge my intelligence.
This teacher hated me. The work we were doing was well below my skill level, even though it was supposedly an advanced class. I never did my homework, and yet at the end of the week we’d have a test on the material and I’d go through that thing—bam-bam-bam—in no time. I’d get every answer correct and never show my work. I could do everything in my head, and I didn’t see the point of going through every step just to placate some teacher I didn’t like in the first place.
So Mr. Asshole came to the only conclusion his little mind would allow: I was cheating.
I was falling asleep every day because of the phenobarbital, I wasn’t paying attention, I wasn’t doing my homework and I was getting 100 percent on every test without showing a stitch of work. Plus, Rick Harrison was a fuckup. Therefore, Rick Harrison must be cheating. It was the only possible answer.
At the teacher’s urging, the vice principal called me into his office and searched all my stuff. They went through my backpack and my books. They didn’t find anything, and I’m not sure what they expected to find.
The teacher stood there and said, “There’s no way this kid could ace every test when he’s sleeping most of the time in class.”
I don’t remember the tone he used, but in my head it sounded like this: “There’s no way this kid could ace every test when he’s sleeping most of the time in class.”
Since the search didn’t work as expected—they didn’t uncover any cheat sheets or answers written on the inside of my eyelids—they came to their second conclusion: I was on drugs.
The day after the search, the teacher marched me back into the vice principal’s office. The teacher and I sat down on the other side of the desk.
“You must be smoking weed or something at lunch because you keep falling asleep in class,” the vice principal said.
The teacher was nodding along. I didn’t give them the satisfaction of a response. I didn’t defend myself or discuss my epilepsy medication because I just didn’t care anymore. I knew school wasn’t for me, and I knew my wild streak of independence wouldn’t allow me to play by rules written up by officious pricks like these guys. Besides, I was doing enough drugs to make their assumptions plausible.
They knew I had epilepsy. The school nurse had my pills in case I needed them. The teacher was frustrated because he couldn’t believe I could do the work without hanging on his every word.
Here’s one of my problems with the educational system: It never occurred to this teacher or this vice principal to look into it any deeper. Why couldn’t they test me, or interview me, or see if maybe I was different? It didn’t fit into their worldview that I might be a fuckup and a math genius. Maybe I had a capacity to do the work that had nothing to do with paying attention to him. The vice principal didn’t like me because I was always getting into trouble. I was a bad kid and I did do bad things. I wasn’t an angel, no doubt, but it was demoralizing when they couldn’t even acknowledge that I was good at something. I had a talent for math and reasoning, but they couldn’t see it through the tangle of assumptions caused by my overall poor behavior. Partly my fault, partly theirs. There’s no debating the end result, though: I hated school and didn’t see much point to it.
The solution? They dropped me to a lower-level math class. How’s that for education? Kid whizzes through an advanced math class, gets demoted because the teacher can’t figure him out. Perfect.
My new math teacher was Mr. White. I think I remember the names of three teachers in my storied academic career, and Mr. White is one of them. He was one of the very few African-American teachers at Taft, and he was cool. I’d been in his class for about two weeks when he asked me to stay after for a one-on-one conversation.
Everyone left the classroom. I walked up to his desk, not knowing what to expect but bracing myself for the worst. It was easier that way, since I was usually right.
“Listen,” Mr. White said. “You’re a really bright kid. You’ve got no business in this class.”
He was right. I had no business in his class. The problem was, I didn’t think I had any business in any class.
How bad of a kid was I? By the time I was in eighth grade, I had tried every drug imaginable. I took phenobarbital for my epilepsy and everything else for the sheer hell of it. If someone had it, I tried it. I guess it was all part of my fatalistic approach to life. If you’re going to die anyway, why not make the most of the days you have? Right or wrong, that was my attitude.
Oh, and there was this: I stole my dad’s motor home. I was fourteen.
I hatched a scheme where I would take the motor home, pick up two of my neighborhood friends, and drive to Las Vegas.
It was going to be a great time. There wasn’t a lot of forethought given to the plan. We weren’t really considering what our parents would think when they realized we were gone. We weren’t really considering that it might be obvious that we were gone and the motor home was gone.
It’s difficult to sneak away in a motor home.
We tried anyway. The idea was to leave in the evening, I guess to provide the cover of darkness. I started the motor home up and drove about three blocks to pick up the buddy who lived closest. I parked the motor home a couple doors down and went to his house.
At this point, we were all systems go. I hung out in my buddy’s house for a while, waiting for him to secretly pack a few things and get out of the house without drawing too much suspicion.
Well, it took longer than we expected, and when we got to the motor home—all full of bad-kid anticipation and adrenaline—we were in for a surprise. I had left the lights on, and the battery was dead. So was our plan.
I had to go back home and explain to my parents about their motor home. Awkward, to say the least, not just for the scheme but for the stupidity of leaving on the lights. More broadly, this was sort of a watershed moment for me. It left my parents with no choice but to realize just how thoroughly evil and horrible I was. Certain things could be excused or ignored as boys-will-be-boys, but a fourteen-year-old stealing a motor home with the intent of taking two of his buddies more than three hundred miles to Las Vegas was more than even distracted parents could ignore.
Whatever lecture they gave me, whatever words of wisdom Old Man imparted upon the jump-starting and return of the Winnebago, it didn’t work.
It probably wasn’t more than a few weeks after that episode when a couple of friends and I downed a fifth of Southern Comfort at lunch. I was so drunk—passed-out drunk, in fact—I left the administration at Taft Middle School with no option but to warehouse me in the nurse’s office and call my parents.
When my parents picked me up, they didn’t take
me home. Instead, they took me to the Southwind Mental Health Center, an inpatient drug and alcohol rehab center for teenagers.
My parents didn’t know what else to do with me. They knew they couldn’t control me, and they knew the school couldn’t control me, and they’d come to the conclusion I couldn’t control myself.
So I was a fourteen-year-old in rehab. I left eighth grade to go to rehab. If you can look at this picture and see the makings of a successful businessman and television personality, you’ve got better vision than I do.
I went straight from the school to the rehab center. I didn’t argue or fight; I was too drunk for that. I had no idea where I was or what was happening. It’s obvious my parents had been contemplating a move like this for some time, because they had the intake people all set to admit me when we arrived.
Once I came to my senses, later that night, I was pissed off. I didn’t believe that I was a drug addict. I rationalized it like every person in that situation: Most of my use was during the weekends, I didn’t stick to one drug, I didn’t often spend my lunch break sucking down SoCo behind a building. It was the seventies, it was the drug culture, I was just one of those assholes who wanted to try everything. One weekend it was acid, the next it was weed, the one afterward it was quaaludes. No harm, no foul.
(I was scared shitless of needles, so I never went there. I dreaded the monthly visits to get my blood drawn at the military hospital. Sometimes it took fifteen pokes for them to tap into the right vein. Eventually I started pointing to a trustworthy vein and saying, “Right there. That one right there,” whenever the nurse entered the room.)
My new living arrangement put a crimp in my primitive life plan, which was to do whatever the hell I wanted for as long as I wanted. That might not be that long anyway.
License to Pawn: Deals, Steals, and My Life at the Gold & Silver Page 2
