It didn’t occur to me that I had a drinking problem, but I knew I had a life problem. I knew I wasn’t happy. While all this craziness was going on, I was trying to do something about that. It just took me a while to get past the craziness and into something more normal.
It took Barbara.
She likes to joke it was love at first sight—on her part. She and Christine were friends working together at a convalescent hospital called Our Lady of Fatima Villa. Christine was the cook. Barbara was the dishwasher. They had started hanging around together. Barbara says the first time she saw me, I was passed out on the couch, lying on my side, snoring. She thought I looked like a ruffian. She was impressed by my size, and when I woke up she liked the sound of my voice. She said, half-joking, “That’s the man for me.”
I liked her, too. But at that time I liked all the girls. I was interested in Limey Lou, and Roxanne, and Lana, and Tammy, and some other girls whose names I don’t remember—or maybe I didn’t even know their names back then. I had a roving eye.
At first, Barbara was just Chris’s friend from work. Then she started babysitting for us, spending the evening with Justin and Rodney while Chris and I went out.
She was great. She was cute, and she was smart, and she was funny. She was originally from Chicago. Her dad worked for the San Jose Mercury. Her mom, who worked for the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, had been a dancer in New York. She once dated Marlon Brando.
Barbara was the youngest of five kids. She was the last one living at home when her mom and dad decided to get a divorce—and when her mom, right after that, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The doctors gave her a few months to live. Her dad decided not to go through with the divorce. Barbara was only fifteen when her mother died.
She had been sick a lot while Barbara was growing up. She was very overweight, and she had diabetes, and glaucoma, and heart disease. When she got the brain cancer, and got really sick, Barbara hated the way the nurses treated her.
That’s how she got interested in health care. She knew there was a better way to treat people who were seriously ill. When she was sixteen she went to work for Our Lady of Fatima Villa, where she met Chris. By the time I met her, she was good enough friends with Chris that she knew something I didn’t know: Chris was fooling around behind my back. She had a boyfriend at work, a dishwasher named Brian. So Barbara probably wasn’t all that surprised when I started showing an interest in her.
My relationship with Chris was bad. Our life together was bad. But our boys needed a proper home. So when the opportunity came for us to move to our own house, we grabbed it—even if the arrangement was a little unconventional. Chris and I had terrible credit ratings, and we didn’t have a lot of cash on hand. But Barbara had a great credit rating, and she had some money saved up. So we decided to combine forces and move in together. Barbara’s name went on the lease, and her money paid the security deposit.
Barbara had already put down another security deposit—on me. Christine had borrowed two thousand dollars and never paid it back. Barbara likes to joke that she purchased me for two thousand dollars. She says, “I had to buy you to get you.”
Barbara could see that Chris and I were breaking up. She wanted to be with me, but she did not want to bust up my relationship with my kids. She did not want to be the reason why I stopped being a good father.
So we all moved into the Kelley Park Garden Apartments, on Owsley Avenue. It was in a bad neighborhood. The police arrested a man for shooting up in our carport the day we moved in. There were always people hanging out in front of our building, drinking beer and playing their music too loud. It was a terrible place to raise kids.
But I wasn’t a bad dad. For a lot of my kids’ childhood, I was a stay-at-home parent. Christine worked full-time. Barb worked full-time. I had mostly part-time jobs, and so I was the one at home most of the time.
I was no Mr. Mom. First, I wasn’t any good at diapers. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it. I just couldn’t do it. I don’t know why. I could rebuild an engine, but I could never make the diapers stay on. I tried everything, from a staple gun to duct tape. They wouldn’t stay on.
I was always afraid I was using the wrong powder or ointment, too, and I was afraid to hold the boys when they were babies. They were so little. They seemed like tiny pieces of breakable china. I was so afraid of hurting them. I couldn’t wait until they got older and I could play with them.
Then they started to grow up, and that’s when I became a really good parent. I did yard duty when the kids were in elementary school. I went out and bought flag football equipment for them, because the school didn’t have any of that stuff. I did Little League with my boys. I even stayed at the elementary school with the flag football teams for several years after my kids left that school.
But I wasn’t much of a mate. I had become an abusive drunk. I liked to yell, and I liked to argue. I’d come home drunk some nights and wake Chris up just so I could yell at her. “What do you mean you’re asleep? Wake up and fight!” I was impossible.
One night I got so mad that I hit her. It was the second time in my life I had hit a woman, and it filled me with shame. To make things worse, I wasn’t working during this period. I hadn’t been working steady for a long time. I’d get a little job, or I’d start a little business, but it was always a crummy job or a business that went nowhere.
For example, before the print shop failed, I started rebuilding car engines in my garage. When I ran out of room in the garage, I moved the business into the house. I rebuilt a Porsche engine right in my living room.
Later, I worked at McDonald’s. I was the guy who did the stuff no one else wanted to do. I unloaded the truck. I cleaned the fry vats and the flues. I tried cooking for a while, but they told me I was going to be the guy who cleaned the vats. They told me that was a promotion.
For a while I was a gardener. But I didn’t enjoy the work, and I never got the knack of estimating the jobs right.
After that, I had a job driving a tow truck, working as a repo man. I knew a guy who had a Ford pickup with a hydraulic lift on it. He did repossessions for a pot lot—one of those used-car lots with the signs in front that say WE FINANCE and EZ CREDIT. People would fall behind in their payments, and the pot lot owner would call us and we’d go get the car. He’d pay $125 or $150 per car.
I don’t remember why I stopped doing the repo work. But pretty soon I wasn’t working again.
That meant I had more time for drinking and hanging around. My favorite place during those days was The Saddle Rack, this big cowboy bar down in San Jose. One day in mid-1985 I was in there drinking rum and Cokes.
Barbara was at work, and I had her car—a nice yellow Capri, which in those days was a pretty hot little car. It was in the repair shop. I was supposed to pick it up when it was done and then go pick Barbara up at work.
But I was drunk. So of course I got to the shop late and picked up the car late and got to Barbara’s work late. She had already gotten a ride home from someone else. So I started driving home.
Because I was drunk I ran out of gas on the freeway. I grabbed a gas can from the trunk and started walking toward this gas station I could see off in the distance.
A California Highway Patrol officer stopped and asked what the trouble was. I showed him the gas can. He offered to drive me down to the station.
I got in the car. I knew I smelled like alcohol. I thought honesty might be the best policy. So I said to him, “I been drinking a little.”
He said, “You look okay to me.”
The CHP officer dropped me at the gas station and took off. I bought the gas and carried the can back up the freeway. I was just pulling away when the same CHP officer reappeared in my rearview mirror. He pulled me over and arrested me for DUI. I was hauled in and booked and fingerprinted.
One more time, it was my dad who came down and posted my bail.
It was late when he drove me home. Chris was sitting on the sofa with Brian—the dishwasher she
was having her affair with.
I blew up. I started yelling. I shouted at Brian, “What the hell are you doing here?” I shouted at Chris, “What the hell is going on here?” Brian took off, fast. Chris didn’t have any answers that I liked. So I told her, “I’m leaving. I want you out of here when I get back.”
When I came home, it was three o’clock in the morning and Chris and the boys were gone. Chris moved into an apartment on Alum Rock Avenue, taking Justin and Rodney with her. Barbara and I stayed in the house.
But I wasn’t done with Chris. I was angry when I found out she had been cheating on me with Brian—even though I had been doing the same thing with Barbara. So I began to fight for custody of Rodney.
To be honest, I wasn’t interested in his welfare. I was only interested in hurting Chris. I didn’t realize that separating Rodney from Justin was cruel. So was demanding custody of Rodney and leaving Justin behind. His real father had abandoned him. Now I was abandoning him, too.
But I won. I got Rodney back.
The DUI thing was hanging over my head, though. My dad told me I should plead not guilty and fight the charges in court. But I didn’t have the guts. The judge sentenced me to DUI school, made me go to three Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and had me pay a fine of $800—which to me, at that time, living on government checks, was a huge amount of money.
In other words, the judge convinced me that I couldn’t really afford to continue drinking.
Barbara took this very seriously. She laid down the law. She said, “We have to get cleaned up. We can’t stay together unless you quit drinking and I quit using drugs.”
Barbara had been into cocaine. She smoked marijuana. She knew it wasn’t good for her, just like the drinking wasn’t good for me. She saw it was time for us both to get clean.
And so we did. It wasn’t that hard. We didn’t go to rehab. We didn’t go to detox. We just quit.
My life looked different to me when I wasn’t drinking all the time. It didn’t look good. It looked like it was going nowhere. I was an adult. I was a father. But I was sort of nothing, after that. I had never had a real job. I had never had anything like a career.
It’s like I had been living in some kind of fog, and the fog started to lift. One day I woke up and realized I wasn’t going anyplace. I was almost forty years old. I was ten years behind everyone I knew. I was just starting to do, in my late thirties, what most people had finished doing at twenty. I had been doing at twenty what most people did at ten. I felt out of place, and like my life was out of control.
I didn’t like the way I was living. Christine was having a hard time making ends meet, and Justin and Rodney missed each other. Barbara and I decided that the best way to take care of everybody was for us all to live together—again.
We rented a house on Curtner Avenue, in the Cambrian Park area of San Jose. It was a four-bedroom stucco place with a huge avocado tree in the side yard and a big old apple tree in the backyard. The front yard was filled with rose bushes, and the apple tree was full of rats. We had to cut the apple tree down to get rid of the rats.
We lived sort of hand-to-mouth. I had my government money. Christine was working. She had a job in the kitchen at Herman Sanitarium, a convalescent hospital for the mentally ill in San Jose. Barbara was still working at Our Lady of Fatima Villa.
I wasn’t doing much of anything. But now, for the first time in my life, I was ashamed of that.
What was wrong with me? I was willing to accept that I was different, that something bad had been done to me. But I was sick of being a wannabe and a wannahave. All my adult life I had been living off the government and off women like Barbara and Chris. I felt like I owed it to my kids, and to the women I was living with, to do better.
So I enrolled at Phillip’s College, a private school with a campus right near where we were living, and started taking classes in computer science.
It was a little scary. This was 1991. I was forty-three years old, and I was surrounded by kids twenty years younger than me. I hadn’t been in school since Rancho Linda—almost thirty years before. I was afraid I wouldn’t make the mark.
Mostly, I did fine. In some classes, I did better than fine. I still have a couple of papers I wrote for my English 1A teacher, Mrs. Davis. One of them is called “A Blade of Grass.”
“Somewhere there is a blade of grass that has been unchanged by man or machine,” I wrote. “It will sprout forth, grow, and die, without ever being validated by man nor beast. How many butterflies in all their splendid glory are born and fly through a mountain meadow, and soon die without their beauty ever being viewed or appreciated?”
The teacher gave me an A and wrote on it, “This is lovely, Howard. It reminds me of Gray’s ‘Elegy.’”
I spent two years at Phillip’s. In 1993 I graduated with an AS degree. I went out to look for a job as a computer repairman. I got some work doing that, but not a real job. It was was mostly friends asking me if I could fix their Macs and PCs. They’d give me twenty dollars to replace the hard drive. It was a bad way to make a living.
I probably would have gone on like that, except that two things happened that turned my life upside down.
In early 1994, my grandma Boo died. She was ninety-six years old. She had been living alone in a house in Cupertino. One Sunday morning she made herself some breakfast, sat down in her favorite chair, turned on the TV, and died.
Five months later, I almost joined her. On July 7, 1994, I had a heart attack.
I woke up that morning with a stomachache. This was not that unusual. I lived a very unhealthy lifestyle. I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. I drank coffee. I had bad eating habits. I would sometimes eat four or five Jack in the Box cheeseburgers as an afternoon snack, and then come home and eat a big dinner. I remembered having stomach pain the night before. I didn’t think it was anything important.
But it got worse. Soon I was sweating, and I had the chills. I was getting hot flashes and cold flashes, and the pain was intense. Barbara said I should go down to this health clinic to get checked out.
I had already decided I wasn’t having a heart attack. I was in denial almost as soon as I was in pain. I was sure this was nothing but stomach trouble.
The people at the clinic weren’t so sure. They thought I should get a chest X-ray and an EKG. They wanted me to go to the hospital for the tests.
Well, I didn’t feel that bad. I figured if I was having a heart attack, I’d know it. I remember leaving the clinic and having a cigarette. I thought, If I can still smoke, it’s not a heart attack, right?
An hour later, I felt even worse. So we went to the hospital. The technicians gave me an EKG, then took me down to radiology. They hadn’t even shot the first frame before these guys came running in and threw me into a wheelchair.
“It’s serious,” they said. “You’re having a heart attack.”
But instead of taking me into the ICU, they took me to the business office, where they made me and Barbara fill out a million forms.
I was really scared, and I was angry. I was going to die, and they were making me fill out a bunch of forms!
The doctors had me in the ICU for five or six days. The cardiologist told me a piece of fat had blocked one of the main arteries in my heart, but then had been pushed through and was no longer a problem. I should have died, but I was going to be all right.
My dad came to visit me. So did my boys. Chris came. They all rallied around.
I never smoked another cigarette. That one outside the clinic was the last one I ever had. The date of my heart attack is the day I quit smoking forever.
My recovery was slow. I didn’t rush things. I had medical insurance. I had my monthly check. I was afraid of having another heart attack, and I used that as an excuse to not do anything.
But I made an important decision. If I was going to die from another heart attack, I wanted to be married to Barbara before I did.
The date was September 30, 1995. It was a big outdoor weddi
ng. My dad came, and my new stepmother—Lois, who I liked a lot. My little brother Kirk was there, all the way from Washington, and my uncle Kenny, and his wife and family. I was sorry my grandma Boo wasn’t still alive to see it. I’d have liked her to be there. My brother Brian didn’t come. My stepbrother George didn’t come, either.
Barbara’s matron of honor was a friend from work. My best man was Edgar Rivera, a friend from college. All of Barbara’s sisters came. So did her brother John—on his chopper, along with another guy from the Los Gatos chapter of the Black Watch motorcycle club. There were about forty guests in all.
Barbara wore a traditional white lace dress with long sleeves. I wore a tuxedo.
Barbara’s employers at the convalescent hospital sent us on our honeymoon. They bought us four days and nights at the Monterey Plaza Hotel in downtown Monterey, in a big room right by the water. We ate breakfast in bed, overlooking the bay. We went for walks around the harbor. We rented one of those bicycle carts that can seat two or four or six. The bicycle-rental guys hung a sign on the back of the cart that said JUST MARRIED.
We came back to San Jose. I was out of work. I was still recuperating. But I couldn’t take living with Chris anymore.
She had always brought home strays—I was one of them—and that was part of her charm. Her door was always open. But now her door was open to all kinds of people who we didn’t want to live with us and the boys. The house was already a little crowded with five of us sharing it. Then Chris invited her sister Cindy to move in. Her husband, Henry, had committed suicide some years before, but Cindy still had two sons. So that made eight of us. Plus, all of the boys were welcome to have their friends around all the time. I’d get up in the morning and there’d be people I never saw before sleeping on the living room floor.
So Barbara and I rented a house in Saratoga, near where Barbara had grown up. Chris stayed in the house on Curtner with Justin and Rodney.
Chris had changed jobs again, too. She was back at Our Lady of Fatima Villa, working with Barbara. She had never been the picture of good health, but one day at work she had an episode. She had pain in her left side, and she couldn’t lift her left arm. She insisted it was just a muscle pull, and she refused to see a doctor.
My Lobotomy Page 21