I stayed focused on the future, but I also stayed armed, assembling a massive arsenal of weapons, including a semi-automatic M14 rifle with a ten-round clip that I bought at the Barter Fair in Okanogan, throwing knives, survival knives, boot knives, bayonets, machetes, and a host of BB and pellet guns.
The obsession with weapons and, increasingly, all things military was not just my reaction to feeling powerless at the hands of Leopoldo. It was also a symptom of generational rebellion and in it I was not alone. I had the good fortune to come of age at Walker Creek with two boys my own age: Quan and Mason. We three, and others like us, instinctively gravitated toward militarism because it was the opposite of everything our parents stood for. If they were going to lecture us about love and peace and organic salad, we were going to embrace blood and war and K-rations. Together we formed the Walker Creek Community Defense Force and the Walker Valley Rangers, paramilitary groups that drew on our fellow counter-counter-cultural brethren. We were mostly just for pretend—weekend war games—but some of our incursions into off-road vehicle parks and a nearby Boy Scout camp crossed a line. I was arrested a couple of times and narrowly avoided juvenile hall. Still, a hard core of us clung together, sending ourselves on patrols farther and farther into the wilderness for days at a time.
After a while I realized our forest patrols weren’t about playing war anymore. They allowed us to experience camaraderie in the face of adversity. We were pushing ourselves to the limits to prove that we were men. These were coming-of-age rituals, and we savored the beauty of the wilderness surrounding Walker Creek. Lush little valleys of temperate rainforest and misty evergreen mountainsides that took our breath away. In the raw, untamed wilderness, I experienced the mysticism of King David’s 104th Psalm and felt God breathing, renewing the majesty of creation with every breath.
I had stumbled onto monotheism on my own as a young child, and now I began to look at the world through the lens of the Torah. I recognized myself in young Moses wandering through the wilderness, preparing to reconnect with his people. One day, as the sun was setting on our camp at the summit of a hill, I found myself reading the poetry of Yehuda Halevi aloud into the gathering darkness, a rifle sprawled across my lap. I realized that the poetry would sound just as good without the rifle, maybe better.
So Judaism became my rebellion. I had come to believe that everything that animated my mother was painfully contrived. Her 1970s Wiccan spirituality, her Marxist political perspective, her anarchist Utopia. These were all fabricated fads as outdated as their human creators. I craved authenticity. A tradition with roots that sunk all the way back into the mists of prehistory. I found what I was looking for in the ancient spirituality of the Land of Israel. It was the one and only original, and I would accept no imitations, additions, or substitutions.
As my mother began to anticipate my theological progression into Orthodoxy, she cautioned me: “You realize that you’re subscribing to a rule-based, patriarchal religion?” I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but it made perfect sense. For a kid who grew up without rules and without a father, could there be anything better?
My years at the Walker Creek commune gave me dignity and peace of mind, but were a struggle nonetheless. We were completely off the grid—no running water, no electricity, no refrigeration, no toilet. Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, I was the man of the house, and I spent much of my time chopping wood, hauling water, and generally fighting to survive the elements. Walker Creek was a politically conscious, agrarian, consensus-based community in the mountains. Our landmates were refugees recovering from the nearby Love Family commune, and were sick of charismatic leaders and empty platitudes. For my mother, Walker Creek was something like the Utopia she had been searching for her entire life, but for me it was never more than a temporary place of refuge. The actual Promised Land had become my promised land.
My ticket out of Walker Creek came in the form of a full scholarship to Oberlin College. I didn’t know one college from another, but Oberlin’s brochure boldly asked: “Think one person can change the world?” I couldn’t tell if the slogan was meant to be inspirational or ironic, but either way, it appealed to me. In the middle of the cornfields of Ohio, I threw myself into world-changing discussions that lasted through the night. I met young people from all walks of life who actually read books and cared about issues the way I did. I graduated with a triple major in Judaic/Near-Eastern Studies, Politics, and Environmental Studies, but felt that my education was not complete without learning more about my heritage.
I’d started teaching myself to read and write Hebrew when I was in middle school and, by the time I stepped off the plane in Israel, I spoke it well enough to tell my cabdriver: “After two thousand years I’ve come home!”
He responded: “Welcome home, brother!”
Everyone responded that way, and I fell in love with the land and the people of Israel. I studied at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev Desert for a year and then learned at yeshivas in the ancient holy cities of Jerusalem and Tsfat. Poring over ancient texts in the Galilee—chanting and dancing, fasting and praying—Judaism was all I’d hoped it would be.
Below the house of study in Tsfat, I built a home for myself out of an old cave at the edge of a catacomb complex. I was finding strength and peace on my spiritual quest, but I knew I wasn’t ready to stay long-term. Sequestering myself in the house of study felt too much like I was running away from reality. From my cave on the mountainside, I applied to law school back in the United States. From what I had seen, lawyers were the exemplars of success in America, and were uniquely qualified to shepherd the poor and powerless through the chaos of the legal system. I wanted to be such a person.
When I was accepted at Berkeley Law, I packed my bags with sublime memories of Israel and new excitement for America. I had been raised to believe that America was the Evil Empire, an oppressive Babylon of deceit and greed. But now that I had traveled through Central America, Europe, North Africa, and Israel, I knew that no one could top America for freedom and opportunity. Where else could an urchin raised on a tree stump find the gates of a top law school open to him? And where else could I finally achieve that sense of normalcy I’d always dreamed of?
When I came to Berkeley, I brought Uncle Tony with me to the campus and walked him to Sproul Plaza. “Well, Tony, this is it,” I said. But he didn’t respond. When I was in Israel Tony had suffered a nervous breakdown, lost his job, and become homeless for a time. I later learned that he’d struggled with alcoholism for years. “Tony, I’m a student here now, just like you always said.” I didn’t see any recognition on his face. He was partially deaf, and the antipsychotic drugs were visibly shackling his mind. “How ironic is this?” I told him. “I finally fulfill your dream and you’re not here to see it.”
Tony turned to me slowly and, in his thick drugged voice, said: “Now, wasn’t that easy?”
Three years later I brought him with me to my law school graduation. When I came off the stage with my diploma in hand I thought he’d repeat his catchphrase. But he didn’t. He just smiled and said: “We did it.”
I graduated from law school with every blessing I could have asked for: my life partner and wife, Leah, a house in trendy North Berkeley, and a job as a high-paid attorney at a top corporate law firm. Over time, I was also blessed with three delightful daughters. I had finally overcome the adversity of my childhood, burying the many hardships of my past under the bounty of the American Dream.
Given these many blessings, I did my best to give back, regularly taking advantage of pro bono opportunities to advocate for the less fortunate. One of these projects—the case of Deborah Peagler—changed my life. Deborah was only fifteen years old when she was taken from her home in South Central Los Angeles by a pimp and drug dealer who systematically and brutally abused her for six years. The police failed to protect her, and when she finally ran away from him, the pimp tracked her down and tried to bring her back. He was stopped by friends of Deborah
’s mother who strangled him to death with an extension cord. The 1982 killing was investigated by Operation Hardcore, a shadowy group of Los Angeles prosecutors who called themselves the Gunslingers and boasted a 100 percent conviction rate. These prosecutors suppressed key information and, relying on perjured testimony and false evidence, sought the death penalty against Deborah, alleging that she had had her “boyfriend” killed for life insurance proceeds.
By the time I took Deborah’s case in 2002 she had already served twenty years of a life sentence. What followed was a seven-year grueling crusade that consumed a third of my waking hours and garnered nationwide media coverage. By the time we won Deborah her release, we had removed an office of a thousand prosecutors from the case for disqualifying conflicts of interest and called into question the ethics and efficacy of the entire criminal justice system. Our struggle to free Deborah Peagler was captured in the film Crime After Crime, but what the film didn’t reveal was the deep personal satisfaction and sense of closure I received from helping to liberate an unjustly incarcerated survivor of domestic violence like Deborah.
When I took Deborah’s case, I had been suppressing my memories of the Leopoldo years, and my willingness to represent her didn’t have any conscious connection to my own experiences with domestic violence. But the nature of the representation soon exposed the parallels to my life, and my personal story became the focus of many media inquiries. I began telling people I took Deborah’s case “for my mother.” Deborah’s plight was similar to Claudia’s. The key difference was that Leopoldo didn’t find us when we ran away. Deborah’s batterer did, and he ended up dead. But only in writing this book did I discover that I also took Deborah’s case for an even more personal reason. To prove to my ten-year-old self that I finally had the strength and the courage to protect someone from abuse.
Domestic violence is an unstable injustice. Once it is unleashed, you never know what damage it will cause. Some batterers abuse their families for years, and they get away with it, leaving the victims to pass it on to the next generation in an ongoing cycle of violence. While other batterers, like Deborah’s, get a dose of what they’ve been giving and end up strangled to death. Leopoldo’s fate was awkwardly somewhere in between. I finally stood up to him, but never got the chance to kill him. Although it pains me to admit it, it took me decades to see this as a good thing.
On our first night sleeping in the school bus on the commune at Walker Creek, I asked Claudia: “What if he finds us out here?”
“Don’t worry,” she said reassuringly. “I talked to Aviathar about our situation and he agreed that if Leopoldo finds us, he’ll shoot him on sight, right through the head.”
I slept well that night. Aviathar, the de facto patriarch of the commune, was my friend Quan’s stepdad. He was tough and protective when he had to be, and inspiring and supportive the rest of the time. He became like a father to me and, if it hadn’t been for his mentorship and positive role-modeling, I might have turned into a different kind of man.
But in the days that followed, I realized I didn’t want Aviathar to protect us. I wanted to protect us myself. For the first year, I lived with the daily fear that Leopoldo would track us down and began training for the day of confrontation—lifting weights, doing push-ups and sit-ups, hacking at the air with machetes, and firing into Leopoldo-shaped targets. As the months went by, I stopped fearing the confrontation and began hoping for it, finally praying for the day he’d come stumbling into my sights.
But he didn’t find us, and we never saw him again. The last we heard of him, he was being served with divorce papers while in jail for yet another assault on a police officer. Maybe they finally deported him, and he was executed on the tarmac in San Salvador like he told us he would be. It’s remotely possible that he reformed his ways and became a righteous man. But I imagine that he’s still alive somewhere, up to his old routine, beating the woman in his life and then apologizing and pressing raw meat to her face to bring down the swelling.
Until I began writing this book, my mother and I never discussed the abuse. We never even uttered the name Leopoldo. When we referred to that man, we called him Dickface, a term for him we still use. In the years that followed, I inserted an emotional distance between myself and my mother. Her marriage to Leopoldo was too much of a betrayal. I couldn’t trust her anymore, and I implicitly forbade her from dating men again. When I was sixteen, a scrawny ice-climbing instructor named Willie showed up in her bed. I spent a couple of long nights sitting next to their slumbering forms, wrestling with whether or not I should drag him out into the snow and kick the shit out of him. I didn’t. But I would have if he had so much as raised his voice at her.
As an adult, I pushed Leopoldo far from my mind. Although, every now and again I’d see a crime thriller from the 1970s, and halfway through the movie I’d realize that I already knew key parts of the plot because I’d heard them repackaged as part of Leopoldo’s life story. In those moments, I would still feel pangs of illogical regret that I never had the chance for one last confrontation.
Claudia and me finally free from Leopoldo, Stanwood, Washington, 1988.
This finally changed when I found myself in the world’s largest maximum-security prison for women, as Deborah’s attorney. She was a new client then, and we were going down a list of questions. I asked her what her batterer would typically do when he was done whipping her. She told me that he would gently tend to her wounds with witch hazel, doctoring the red welts on her brown skin. He kept steaks in the fridge to heal her, she told me. The meat brought down the swelling. I stopped writing, and we both looked into the distance past the bars on the window.
And she said: “Isn’t it funny how raw meat heals raw meat?”
I agreed that it was funny.
After a pause, she started thanking me again for taking her case. “I was a stranger to you,” she said. “You didn’t even know me and yet here you are.”
“Here I am,” I said. “I feel like I’ve known you for a long time.”
After a silence, she said: “All I ever wanted was for him to leave me alone. That’s all I wanted. But he came after us. He found us. You have to believe me. I didn’t want him dead.”
I believed her. I believed that, unlike me, this “convicted killer” never wanted her batterer dead. And there—in the prison—I was finally thankful that Leopoldo never did find me, waiting for him.
For years, all Claudia would say about the Leopoldo era was: “He didn’t kill us. He made us stronger.” For better or for worse she was right.
Claudia’s Communist Jewish parents raised her with strange views of the world. One was that the world was binary. You were either on the side of the People or on the side of the Corporations. There was no in-between. Heroes of the People could beat their wives without tarnishing their goodness, and corporate executives could treat their families with abounding respect without meriting any. Another worldview was that violence in the home was just an inherited quirk of personality, not a moral failing. Grandma Harriette was abusive to Claudia as her mother had been before her, and her mother before her, and her father before her, all the way back to a pogrom in the Old Country where Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Avram Gedalia’s parents were murdered in front of him. Claudia was also raised to believe that the Revolution could happen tomorrow. This was some strange translation of the Jewish messianic ideal transfigured into Marxist rhetoric. But it stressed that at any moment the entire paradigm we live in might suddenly shift. Therefore life planning and career building were naive wastes of time.
To a large extent, these beliefs shattered when Leopoldo’s regime came crashing down. He may well have been on the side of the People, yet Claudia realized he was an evil man. Domestic violence wasn’t a quirk, it was a deep moral failing. And the Revolution wasn’t happening tomorrow nor, most likely, the day after.
In the years that followed, Claudia modified Timothy Leary’s famous phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” by adding “and craw
l back.” After our escape from Leopoldo, we grew up together, my mother and me. When I went to college, she went to college. When I started a career, she started a career. After graduating from Western Washington University with a degree in journalism, she went on to work for seventeen years as an award-winning local journalist and another five years as an investigator for public interest law firms.
When I found my way back to Judaism, so did Claudia. Today she identifies as part of a Jewish community, and her granddaughters call her Savta, the Hebrew word for grandmother.
Despite her participation in mainstream society, my mother didn’t completely abandon the world of the Spirits. She still relies on ESP more than most and is still waiting for the day when science catches up with our third eyes. Claudia eventually moved away from Walker Creek to be closer to my family in the Bay Area, but she still can’t bring herself to live anywhere without an open forest nearby to slip into should the need arise.
She has recently taken up political mural-painting again, but she is also volunteering as a domestic violence counselor. To some degree she still walks in an awkward gray area, participating in the counter-culture and in mainstream society without being entirely comfortable in either.
People sometimes ask me: If you could do your childhood all over again, would you grow up in the cushy suburbs you always dreamed of? And I always give a complicated answer. As a father, I have done everything in my power to give my children the stable, secure, and comfortable childhood I never had. But I also recognize that while my early life was difficult, I received an unconventional and powerful education that taught me self-reliance, righteousness, and empathy like no other. In the end, I would rather slog back down those trails at my mother’s side again. There are many ways to judge a mother, but I think the best way is to look at the man her son grew up to be.
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