Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain

by Ryan Blair

  He’d always had a pretty intense personality. My five older siblings had already learned to watch out for his temper; as the baby of the family, I had learned that lesson almost as soon as I learned to walk. But he wasn’t a bad guy.

  That’s the thing that always gets me. When people hear my story now, they say to me, “Your dad sounds like a terrible person.” He was terrible to live with once his life really started falling apart. But he wasn’t a terrible person—not at first, anyway. In fact, I learned a lot from him.

  For example, when I was a kid, I was rewarded through compensation. If I got a base hit playing baseball, there would be a certain prize at the end of it, like a new batting glove. I was always competing for something. It was my dad who offered these rewards—he was the first person to instill in me a work ethic and a risk-reward mentality.

  He didn’t believe in allowances; he believed in chores, and he paid me to do them. If I washed the cars, I got $5 per car. If I mowed the lawn, I got paid for that, too. Maybe it’s not the best arrangement for every family, but it certainly worked for me. I came to associate effort with profit.

  But it was more than just profit. Dad taught me about the pride that comes with hard work, too. He would always give me recognition among his friends and coworkers as he told them what a strong worker I was and how much I earned; as a result, I would try to work more and more. He bragged to one of his friends about my paper routes and I loved making him and his friends proud, so soon I had three paper routes.

  I also learned how to get the most out of an opportunity to make money. My dad paid me a dollar per bag of weeds I pulled from the yard. If I could persuade the neighborhood kids to do it for fifty cents, then I could turn a profit by having several kids fill a number of bags at once, while I worked on another paying chore. Thanks to my father, it was instilled in me early on to have ambition, motivation, and appreciation for money.

  But the psychological impact of his poor upbringing, his insecurities—all his issues—ended up getting the best of him. That’s what ultimately pushes everyone who goes in that direction, isn’t it? His “issues” pushed him into drugs, and everything else spiraled out of control.

  My dad was middle class, but he lived as if he were among the elite. He leveraged himself as so many Americans do—financed his cars, borrowed to buy his house, spent his last dollars on making our house look pretty—to make himself feel more important. He lived beyond his means and started using drugs to cope with it all; that was his undoing.

  One afternoon I was playing in the backyard with friends and my dad came home to my surprise. He had a look of shame on his face unlike I’d ever seen. Dad had lost his job. I found out later from my mom it’s because he’d been caught doing meth in the bathroom, and the execs of the company where he was the vice president at had finally gotten wind of it and set up a sting operation to catch him.

  That was the end of my father’s career and the beginning of him becoming a career drug addict. At the time, there were three children still at home—my older siblings had already moved out. As if my dad’s failure gave them the excuse they were looking for, their lives seemed to fall apart as well. They all left home, one by one, until I was left alone with just my mother and father. One sister moved in with a druggie boyfriend; another ran away and lived on the streets for a while. Finally, when it was just my parents and me, the bottom really fell out of my life.

  My dad used to love showing off his gun collection, and I did too. One time, a few days after I had shown them to my friends, the older brother of my best friend broke into the house and stole every last gun. I didn’t find out until several years later who had actually been involved, but at the time, it didn’t matter. Dad thought I’d done it.

  By this time, the meth was making him paranoid and even more violent. He swore I’d stolen them and sold them, and he threatened to kill me if I didn’t give them back. After all I’d seen, I knew that I didn’t want to stick around for the repercussions. It was dangerous. That night I called my sister Stephanie and told her, “It’s real. Dad is promising to kill me if I don’t return the guns, and I have no idea who has them or where they are. Save me.”

  As grateful as I was for my sister’s offer for me to stay with her, the new situation presented its own set of challenges. She was living with a musician at the time. He might have been an aspiring rock star—there are a lot of those in Southern California—but he certainly didn’t have rock star money. They were living in a tiny, dirty house and surviving on macaroni and cheese, which was all either one could seem to afford.

  When I arrived at their house, they walked a sleeping bag out to a dilapidated little shed in the back, tossed it in, and said, “Here you go.” It was a shack. It had doors, it had a window, and it had holes in the walls. There’s no nicer way to describe it. But I was away from my dad, and at that moment, that was the most important thing.

  A few days later, I went to a thrift store for rolls of carpet that people would donate after they redecorated their houses. There were a couple of pieces that were large enough to serve as insulation, so I pinned them over the walls to try to block out some of the weather. It was Southern California—not the most extreme climate—but it got cold at night, so I ran pieces of carpet over the doors to try to keep out the wind. I did have a tiny space heater, though, and the electricity to run it, and that helped me make it through the winter.

  But the weather was not my biggest enemy. That distinction belonged to the lice that infested the shack.

  It didn’t matter how much I showered or what I tried to do to my hair to get rid of them—the next day they would be back. I could feel them crawling down my head and onto my back while I slept on the floor on the beat-up mattress that eventually replaced the sleeping bag. Finally, in an act of desperation to be rid of the lice, I decided to shave my head. Michael Jordan’s dome gave shaved heads a big boost in the ’90s, but the look hadn’t really come on the scene yet. Shaved heads were definitely not cool at that time. The first time I showed up to class bald, the school bully walked up to me, slapped me in the back of the head and said, “Ryan Blair has no hair.” It became the favorite taunt at school, in an annoying, singsongy cadence that poked every nerve in my body, even as I tried to ignore it.

  I lived in that miserable little shack for close to a year. I felt that I couldn’t go home as long as my father was there and still an addict, and my mother clearly wasn’t planning on leaving him anytime soon. So I stayed at Stephanie’s, feeling that even though I was the one who’d left, I’d been abandoned by both of them.

  Finally, when the principal of my school, Dr. Judy Dunlap, called me into her office to talk to me about my failing grades, I spilled it all: the issues with my parents, the shack I was living in—I told her everything. Suddenly, my grades were the last thing on her mind. “We have to call social services. We have no choice,” she explained. “What you are telling me is that you are in danger.”

  By law, the principal also had to get me to a psychologist, and she demanded that my mother go along, too. After I recounted to the shrink everything that had gone wrong with my family over the past few years, he looked my mom in the eye and said, “You are the abuser.”

  My mother was shocked. “It’s his father!” she insisted. “He’s the bastard! He’s the beater and he beats me, too.”

  The psychologist just shook his head and told her, “You’re a grown adult, and you are letting your child go through this. You are negligent by law, and we are going to take him away if you don’t make things right immediately. You have no choice but to act right now.”

  This made my mother reevaluate the situation for the first time because, in her mind, she was the victim, not me. And she was a victim. She took the punches that I never got because she had stepped in front of my father. I remember her face being black-and-blue and her telling people she’d been in a car accident. I remember watching him throw the punches, and I remember him dragging me into the room to have me
watch—as a warning that I should never stand up to him. I remember once seeing him point a gun to my mother’s head and telling her he was going to kill her if she didn’t quit crying. There is no question that my mother was a victim. But in her mind, she had endured all of the abuse so that I wouldn’t have to. It never occurred to her that I was being damaged anyway.

  She finally agreed with the psychologist that she had to take action, so she called my father that night and told him, “They are going to put Ryan in foster care, so you need to leave. I’m bringing Ryan back to the house because he’s living in unfit conditions, and they are going to inspect us here.”

  That was what broke her from him—that the state was going to intervene. She took a stand, and we hoped it meant turning a corner for everyone. But after about three months, my father started dropping by again and was as violent as ever, coming after both my mother and me. Whenever the attacks would start, I’d run out of the house and back to my sister’s, which still seemed like a better option.

  My mother was determined to protect me this time, though. She found a little one-bedroom place next door to my sister and somehow managed to scrape together the $500 deposit without my dad’s knowledge. One day she told me to pack my belongings, so I piled into the car all of the things that matter most to a thirteen-year-old: my Nintendo, my CDs, and my clothes—all the trappings of my family’s pleasant, middle-class life that, in the end, were just part of the sham.

  We moved everything over to the new house and then went back to the old house for one last carload of my mother’s belongings. By the time we returned, our new place had been gutted. Everything inside was gone. Someone had watched us carrying in boxes, waited for us to leave, and then had broken in and taken it all.

  My mom was hysterical. Here she was going out on a limb in a last, desperate effort to break away from our abusive situation, and we were robbed blind on the first day. The police weren’t able to help us very much, either. The officer who arrived in response to our call advised us not to file a report. We lived right next to a park where all the vagrants and gangsters hung out. We saw scary-looking men congregating there, some with teardrop tattoos by their eyes and prison tattoos all over their arms.

  They watched us coming and going—inspecting us in a way that made my skin crawl. “If I take a report from you,” the officer told us, “they are going to know you told on them, and they’re going to get revenge. I’d suggest for everyone’s safety that you just let it go.”

  My mother was crying from the sheer helplessness she felt at that point. The officer reached into his pocket, handed my mother a twentydollar bill, and said, “I’m really sorry this happened to you.” Then he turned to me and said, “Hey, son, you do not want to tangle with those guys. Do not get mixed up with them, whatever you do.”

  And that was the welcome we received to our new life.

  WELCOME TO POVERTY

  Dad eventually found out where we were, but I guess he figured he was better off without us; he never made an effort at that point to get clean. Because my mother had taken me away to try to protect me, walking away seemed like a good idea to him, too. He disappeared from my life for the next fourteen or fifteen years.

  Mom and I both tried to make the best of the situation. She got a job at the deli in a local supermarket and tried to break free from her own drinking problem; I would play basketball at the park to try to keep out of trouble. I didn’t do a very good job, though—trouble was all around me, and I figured it was easier to join in than to fight it. Whenever I’d be out shooting baskets, guys would approach me and ask my gang affiliation. I told them I didn’t have one—the whole idea of street gangs was still pretty new to me.

  But I quickly saw how the system worked, how the street lords kept themselves in power through influence and manipulation. I observed how the older people used bribery and fear to get the younger kids to do their crimes, and I saw how the young people willingly went along with it because it seemed like the only power structure that had any kind of respect in the neighborhood.

  It was a flashy, angry, tempting world of getting what you want and not caring about the risks. The risks were part of the esteem—the more brazen your crime, the more respect you got. As a scrawny kid who felt powerless against everything going on in my life, that appealed to me. I don’t blame anyone or anything else but myself for my choices. But I do understand how a competitive, hyperactive, and confused person could easily allow himself to get caught up in it all.

  My behavior and grades plummeted again. This time, I was an eighth grader, and I got kicked out of school. Two months into ninth grade, I was asked to leave high school, too. I wasn’t big—my growth spurt was still a year or two away—but I was mouthy and always arguing with the teachers to the point where they felt threatened.

  Every day I came to class with a chip on my shoulder, thinking, None of you could ever understand what I’m going through, so how dare you tell me what to do? It’s interesting when you tell me that one day algebra is going to be important to me. Do you understand that in my life right now, my survival is what’s important to me? And you’re telling me it’s really important that I listen to history? I’m going to go home and get jumped on my way back or have a gun pointed in my face, and I’m supposed to care about what you have to say?

  The teachers immediately diagnosed me as a problem kid. They fought to get me Ritalin for ADD and Prozac for depression; they fought to get me out of the classroom. That was fine with me. It was easier to hang out on the streets, anyway. Breaking into cars to steal stereo equipment and resell it was easier than working for what I wanted, so I figured that was a better route for me.

  I landed in juvenile detention a couple of times, which actually ended up being a positive thing in the long run, because it was there that I discovered my fascination with computers, which in turn led to the development of my first company many years down the road.

  The other positive thing in my life during that period was Randy Pentis. He was a local cop with the type of face only a cop could have—all hard lines and ill humor. When I was a teenager, the sight of this face meant only one thing: the certainty of unavoidable punishment. One glimpse of this man would send my gang scattering down the street like billiard balls in a break, ducking behind buildings and flying around corners. I was desperate to get away from the police officer who had made it his personal agenda to keep me from making the mistakes I was determined to make.

  I remember Sergeant Pentis best for the grip of his hand on the back of my shirt, and for the time he dragged me up the walkway in the middle of the night to wake my mother and explain to her why her son wore the bandana, the sneakers, the belt, and the rest of the gang attire. Randy Pentis is the man who arrested me—more than once. And he challenged me to do better for myself than I was doing at that time. But the results of that lesson were years down the road, too. At that moment, I was an out-of-control teenager who seemed destined for prison.

  Then my mom started dating a man named Robert Hunt.

  YOU’RE NOT MY FATHER

  Over a few years, my mother had moved up from making minimum wage as a deli clerk to being the department manager, and she met Robert when he came to the store as a customer. He was a successful, stable businessman who owned his own real estate company. I’ll never forget the day I first met Robert Hunt. One day I saw a Cadillac Allante pull up onto our dirt road. A man was coming to pick my mother up for a date. I thought, Who is this bald-headed guy coming to see my mother?

  I was extremely protective of my mother, and when I shook his hand, I braced myself for confrontation. But I couldn’t find any sign of bad intention in him. By all physical appearances I had nothing to worry about. He was short and pretty skinny. And he had this sense of humor that wore down my defenses.

  My mom asked if I would come to dinner with them at his home. The last thing I wanted to do, as a soon-to-be-eighteen-year-old man, was spend time with my mother and her boyfriend. Bob could sens
e I was reluctant for more reasons than one, though. I had an issue with the idea of having a man around my mother and me.

  He said, “Tell you what, you drive.”

  I looked over at his Cadillac and I thought about it. It might be fun. I’d never driven that kind of car before.

  “But there are only two seats,” I said, looking for an excuse to not have to join them for dinner.

  Bob said, “I’ll get in the trunk.”

  Bob wasn’t a man to take an excuse from anyone. Certainly not from a punk seventeen-year-old kid. I thought, I’d like to see this happen.

  True to his word, Bob climbed into his trunk and I closed it on him; then I got into the driver’s side of the car and sat down. My mother sat in the front seat, and Bob peeked his head through a hole in the back seat and began to navigate me all the way to his home. I remember thinking that with my track record, if we got pulled over, having a rich man in the trunk might not go over well.

  They hadn’t been dating very long when Robert invited my mother and me to move into his house. He made the offer after being absolutely horrified by where we lived. My mother was a little hesitant, but Robert explained that it would get me away from the crowd I’d been running with, out of the bad neighborhood where we were living, and it would give him a chance to have a more direct influence over my life. He knew that at the rate I was going, getting out was the only shot we had at success. My mother and I realized that we had nothing to lose.

  I was seventeen years old when the move happened, and Robert insisted that I live with him and my mother until I was at least eighteen. I agreed to the arrangement because I didn’t really have an alternative. But I didn’t fit in on Westlake Island. For one, I had gang tattoos all over me, because when you fight for a living, the more wounds and ink you have, the less you have to fight.