American Outlaw Read online

  That evening, all of the residents gathered together after dinner for a large group meeting, about two hundred people in all. It felt more laid-back than the smaller group session, almost like a social gathering, and the room buzzed with discussion as a few patients halfheartedly tried to read the minutes from previous meetings, amid the conversations going on in every corner of the room. I kept mostly to myself, but couldn’t help observe the friendship and camaraderie evident in the room.

  The next morning, we had another group session.

  “This is pretty embarrassing for me to admit,” said one young man. He looked like he was in his mid-twenties. “I . . . hadn’t left my apartment more than a handful of times in the past few years.”

  “Really?” I asked. It just slipped out. This was a normal-looking kid. I couldn’t imagine what could have kept him so alone.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at the ground. “Pretty fucking loony-sounding, I know . . .”

  Ben, the therapist in charge of the group, talked with the young man for a few minutes, teasing out the details of his story: he had been enrolled in the armed forces, then had been discharged for an anxiety disorder. I listened to him with real sympathy.

  “Anyone else? Who’d like to share?”

  Slowly, I raised my hand.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m Jesse. I just came in yesterday, so I’m sort of new to this. But sitting here listening to you guys, I’m really impressed by how honest and open everyone is. I wanted to try to open up a little bit.”

  “That’s great, Jesse. What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, I think . . . I came from a pretty violent family. That’s my . . . I think that’s my issue.”

  “Is there anything in particular that stands out to you?”

  “Man.” I laughed. “There’s so much to choose from.” The other residents laughed, and I felt a bit more comfortable talking.

  “One of my first memories,” I continued, “is of this girl with freckles and red hair. She used to live around the corner from me when I was a kid.”

  “What do you remember?” Ben asked.

  “She was a Jehovah’s Witness,” I said, laughing. “But I don’t know why I remember that. Anyway, I always used to ride my bicycle by her house. One day, she was lying down on the sidewalk, with her little skirt on, just staring up at the sky without blinking, like she was dead. And I remember it made me cry. I was like four or five years old.”

  “Go on,” Ben encouraged me.

  “So I went and told my dad,” I said. “He was in the backyard, refinishing some furniture, and I went up to him, crying, all, ‘Dad, Laurie’s lying on the sidewalk! I can’t ride my bike!’ And my dad, he looked up and yelled, ‘Well, then fuckin’ run her over!’ Well now I know he was kidding, but I was just a kid so I did what he said. I went and got my bike and ran her over with it. I remember my front wheel hitting her square in the ribs, and I fucked her up really bad.”

  I looked at the group, a little apprehensively. “He was a pretty gnarly dad,” I added. “I have all kinds of stories.”

  “How did it make you feel to grow up in that kind of household?”

  “Not too good,” I said, remembering. It felt kind of odd to be talking about my family; I had only ever done it with a very few people in my life. Sandy and Karla, that was about it. But for some reason, this felt right. “My folks split when I was about six. I didn’t see my mom much when I was growing up. I just had a whole bunch of stepmoms—and my dad.”

  “It sounds like you have a lot of unresolved feelings toward your father, does that sound right?”

  “No, I think they’re pretty much resolved.” I laughed, kind of bitterly. “He hit me. He doesn’t know his grandkids, and I haven’t spoken to him in about ten years. That’s how I feel.”

  Soon we moved on to other residents, but a curious feeling of release and tentative happiness stayed with me for the rest of the hour. It felt like I’d dislodged something.

  After the meeting broke up, I kind of mingled around the room a little bit, feeling more open than I had been previously. Meeting the eyes of the other people in the room, part of me wondered if they’d judge me, now that they knew I’d grown up in a weird, violent type of life. But oddly enough, no one seemed to bat an eyelash.

  They’re all dealing with their own shit, I realized. I have problems, but so do they.

  “How are things developing for you, Jesse?” Dr. Thomas asked, during our private session later that day.

  “Not that bad,” I said. “I’m starting to feel a little bit more at home here, I think.”

  “And what do you think of the group meetings?”

  “I was a little resistant at first,” I admitted. “But today, I kind of opened up and talked.”

  “How’d that feel?”

  “Not too bad. In fact, it was sort of amazing.” I laughed. “So that’s what therapy is, huh? You unload all your baggage, get it out into the air?”

  “I think that’s probably part of it,” Dr. Thomas said, smiling. “Actually, it’s a big part. Our theory is that it’s helpful for you to tell your story. Your job is to put it all together into some kind of narrative that makes sense to you and the people around you.”

  I nodded, absorbing that. “I talked about my dad today,” I said, after a moment.

  “What’d you get into?”

  “Oh, I just talked about what a loser he was.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said, exhaling. “He was a beatnik, I think. But not the fun kind. My dad bought unclaimed storage units at auction and then tried to sell all the shit inside them. He got his kicks fucking people over for a living. That’s my dad.”

  My therapist laughed gently. “Well, was there anything that you liked about him?”

  “Well, sure, I guess,” I said, considering. “He knew how to work hard. He taught me that, at least. My function on this planet was to be a worker for his business. If he had a bunch of trucks to load, he had no problem with keeping me out of school. I don’t care if it was a test day or anything: I was going with him to work.”

  “Did you ever feel taken advantage of?” Dr. Thomas asked.

  “I think I was too young to really know how it worked,” I said, after considering for a second. “I wanted his approval, and work was the way to get it. So I got real good at it. After a few years, it even got to the point where my dad would sit on his ass in the truck and watch me do all the work, and I was thrilled. Like, ‘Dad! Check me out! I did it!’”

  “And did you get his approval, then?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But there was always more work to do. I didn’t care. I was a strong kid. I was like six feet tall by the time I was thirteen. Sometimes I worked twenty hours in a weekend for him.”

  “It sounds to me,” Dr. Thomas said, “like you had to grow up pretty quickly.”

  I sat there, looking at her, thinking, yes, I guess I had.

  ——

  As those first days passed, I settled into a routine. Group in the morning, private sessions in the afternoon, then the large communal meeting after dinner. In between, there was strange hippie bullshit I never thought I’d do in my entire life, like yoga and meditation. But I tried everything, and the peace that I’d felt at moments here and there over my first days began to come a little more often.

  I was safe here. That was the big realization for me in the first week: once I understood that I was actually freed from the media vultures outside, who had pecked at me until I thought I’d go crazy, the relief was impossibly sweet. Essentially, I felt like I was among people who, for once, actually sympathized with me. The other residents were ordinary folks who had gone through some pretty hard problems, and they had undertaken the same challenging unwinding process that I had. In a way, we were all in this together.

  “Yo, Jesse,” Tim said, nodding at me. “What’s up, man?”

  I smiled at him. “Hey, Tim, what’s happening.”

&n
bsp; He shrugged. “Just another day in paradise. You?”

  “Same here,” I replied.

  It wasn’t like everyone was my best friend right away. But somehow, it totally gave me strength to know that other people were fighting some sort of battle to make themselves better, too.

  It was probably on the fourth or fifth day that I decided I was going to work as hard at Sierra Tucson as I’d worked at everything else in my life: football, bodyguarding, building my own business. I would put in the hours and do whatever they asked me to. Some of the stuff was kind of corny, no doubt about it: they had this small outdoor walking maze that you were encouraged to wander around in—I guess the idea was you could sort out your feelings alone, after a hard day of talking trauma or something. But I’ll be damned if wandering around that little maze didn’t hold some answers for me. Some afternoons, watching my feet as I stumbled across the small stones, I remembered things there I’d been trying to forget for thirty years.

  My mom never remarried. She had only one boyfriend after my dad left.

  I pivoted, trying to keep my balance in the narrow pathways of the circular maze.

  He was a typical 1970s East L.A. Cholo . . . drank a lot . . . worked as a truck driver . . . I remember seeing him drunk and yelling at my mom, threatening to kick the shit out of her.

  I turned again, putting one foot directly in front of the other, treading as slowly and as deliberately as possible.

  Once, I told him to leave my mom alone and he directed his alcohol-fueled rage toward me . . . “What’s that?” he yelled. “You got something to say to me? Huh, you fuckin’ crybaby?” I think I was about eight years old . . .

  It was hard stuff, all of it. And I had always been unwilling to dwell for too long on it. I guess it hurt too bad. I’d bury myself in my work, or in getting fucked up, or wrenching on big, imposing machines. But all that had done was put me where I was now. The only way out was through the hard memories.

  Joanna, my stepmom, came to pick me up from football practice in sixth grade, and I was late getting out of the locker room . . . “Where were you?” she snapped. I didn’t say anything.

  “I SAID, where were you?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Did you hear me??” She backhanded me, and her fake nail caught on my mouth and cut my lip and then I was bleeding onto my shirt . . .

  The memory hit me full force. I swayed for a second, then continued forward, breathing with each footfall, just looking at the ground, letting my body lead me.

  So I punched her in the side of the head. She shut right up. It was the worst feeling I’d ever had.

  Slowly, I felt something expanding inside of me. Just having the courage to investigate the way I’d grown up gave me this sense of maturing, of advancing past this limit I’d always set on myself. Instead of constantly pretending that I’d grown up normally, just like everyone else, now I was allowing for the possibility that I’d been hurt. And pretty bad.

  “I came here thinking that if I followed the directions, and did what you guys told me to do, I’d maybe be given a second chance with Sandy,” I told Dr. Thomas. “But lately I’ve been thinking, maybe that’s not the point.”

  Dr. Thomas smiled at me. “So tell me, what’s the point, Jesse?”

  “Well, it feels like . . . I’ve stumbled into this amazing opportunity to work on myself. I think I better make sure I focus on that.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “I think that’s an excellent idea.”

  Gradually, I fell back into a regular sleeping schedule. Each night, I fell asleep around ten. Then I would rise the next morning at five, take a quick shower, throw on a pair of jeans, and step quietly out the front doors.

  A seven-mile horse trail led off the property. I wasn’t supposed to go on it, because it was off the grounds, but nonetheless, I did each day. The path wound itself through the mountains, and as I followed it, the nature around me filled me with a sense of freedom and wonder. It was just so incredibly quiet out there. There wasn’t a single soul around to bother me. Back in L.A., I’d taken early-morning walks on the beach a few times, but there’d always been company: I’d usually see between fifteen and twenty folks, running over the same stretch of ground as I was. Here? My only company were deer and javelinas and jackrabbits. Just me and cold desert morning air.

  And yet it was still surprisingly tough, some days. One morning in group therapy, I had been telling the other residents a little about my teenaged years, when it seemed like all I’d done was steal cars and get into fights—and, as usual, my attitude was one of mild pride, at what a badass I’d been.

  “I was probably a little out of control.” I laughed. “I remember this one time, my buddy, he stole a vintage Schwinn from outside of my house. I caught up to him the next night at a party and confronted him, like, ‘Hey, man, give my bike back!’ but he wouldn’t do it, so I called him out into the street.”

  The other residents smiled, and prepared for one of those “my life was so crazy way back when” stories that all AA meetings specialize in.

  I was just about to indulge them, just about to conclude my story with and then I jumped on his back like a fucking monkey, and rode him into the ground. BAM, just beat the living shit out of him, there was blood flying everywhere . . .

  But instead, I just burst into tears.

  I sobbed, right there in front of everyone, for a long minute.

  “Whoa,” I said finally, taking a huge, crazy breath. I was trembling. “Man. I’m sorry. Where the fuck did that come from?”

  “It’s okay, Jesse. Take a second to tune into what’s going on inside you.”

  I took in another big inhalation. I was actually really spooked; I’d never just started crying for no reason before.

  “I’m . . . I was just thinking about how many times I’ve used my fists to settle things in my life,” I said. “I guess the truth is, I feel kind of bummed about it.”

  “Why do you think you were in so many fights?”

  “Why do you think?” I snapped. “I was a messed-up kid! That’s the only thing I knew.”

  “All right, Jesse,” said Ben, our lead therapist. “Take note of what you’re feeling now. This is important.”

  “I’m fucking angry,” I said. “All right? That’s how I feel.”

  I stared at the faces around me in the circle. Quietly, they gazed back at me.

  “You all want me to break down or something,” I complained. “Well, I’m not doing it.”

  “No one wants you to do anything,” Ben assured me. “We’re here to listen. The important part is for you to . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, I remember, concoct my own narrative, or whatever. Well, I got news for you. My narrative fucking sucks.”

  “Listen,” he said. “We do a role-playing exercise here, where we have members of our group act out a pivotal scene from one person’s life. I’m wondering if that might be helpful to you today, Jesse.”

  I stared at him balefully. That was about the last thing I wanted to do at this moment. All I wanted to do was run, get off the grounds, do anything but be here.

  But you said you’d work as hard here as you did everywhere, a little voice inside my head reminded me.

  “Aw, fuck, I guess so,” I grumbled.

  “Great,” Ben said. “So first of all, you have to pick out a memory. Something that stirs up emotions in you, makes you feel sad, or outraged, when you recall it . . .”

  “No problem,” I said flatly. “Got mine.”

  “Okay,” Ben said. “Now, how many characters are there going to be?”

  “Just me and my dad,” I said.

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m seven. My dad is, I don’t know, in his thirties.”

  “Who wants to play seven-year-old Jesse?” asked Ben. A balding guy named Phil raised his hand. “Great. And can I have a volunteer to play his father?”

  Tim raised his hand.

  “Okay, great. So set the scene fo
r us, Jesse. What are we looking at?”

  I grimaced. “You really want to do this?” I breathed in deep, then began to tell my story. “Fine. Me and my dad are tossing around the football. It’s late at night, and we’re in the yard behind my house.”

  Phil and Tim pantomimed passing around a football.

  “We throw it around for a while, then he tosses the ball over my head. It goes into this open field right next to our house. And I’m scared of the dark, so I don’t want to go in there.”

  No way, Dad. I’m not going over there.

  “And my dad, he says to me, you better get your ass out there and get it. His face clenches up real bad. I can see the cords in his neck, and I get real scared. Then he starts to chase after me . . .”

  The memory was coming back to me, even more vividly than when I had told Sandy. My voice had started to shake, but I continued.

  “So I take off running into the darkness, my heart racing, scared out of my mind of the dark, afraid that my dad’s going to beat the shit out of me . . . I run, but there’s a low fence, and I trip and land on my arm.”

  Tim and Phil enacted the scenario, and I watched them, remembering.

  “My arm’s broken for sure, but I still limp over and go find the football. I throw it back to my dad with the arm I didn’t land on,” I said. “Then I come back to the house, and I’m crying bad. But my dad just stands over me and laughs at me.”

  You dummy.

  “How are you doing, Jesse?” Ben asked. “Is it okay to continue?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was lost in remembering.

  I remember, it was a greenstick fracture, the kind that happens to kids’ bones. I was so young they gave me only a local anesthetic . . . so they strapped me down to the table and gave me a racquetball to bite down on . . . they bent my hand all the way back, until it touched flesh. Then bam, they set it . . . the pain was so intense, it squeezed tears out of my eyes. But I didn’t cry.

  “Jesse? Everything okay?”

  I looked up at the group. “Yeah,” I said. My eyes were wet. “Thanks. That was pretty intense. Man, to watch it . . .”

  “Is there anything else you want to share?”