A Mexican Standoff in Ecco Domani

It’s a tough predicament having alternate beliefs, goals and ideologies than one’s family. When I left home at 18 I was gone gone gone at least psychologically. I’m happier identifying as an orphan, I really am. I try to keep good relations at a distance. I tried making it work a thousand times and a thousand different ways. Every time ended in disaster. The last disaster made something painfully clear to me. I had been having my life ruined over and over again. I always felt it but I would find ways to make excuses for it or them. I had been dealing with one of my best friends being aggressive and threatening to sue for no good reason at all when another friend of mine I had worked with at the Mellow Mushroom in Lexington Kentucky posted a video on FB. It was “Dealing With High-Conflict People”. It stuck. I bought his book: 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life by Bill Eddy. And then I looked back over the years in my life when things fell apart with no real reason. Those days I just dealt with it and built it back. I generally keep a positive Can-Do disposition about problems and solving them. But now I look back and see I was getting my life ruined over and over by the folks I thought would be on my side.

2006: I was on a traveling Babe Ruth League baseball team with the winning team I had been with from middle school. My family and I were living and working on our 330 acre cattle & tobacco farm. I had planned to go to college and come back home to live out life on our farm. But then something happened. I lost all interest in the game. I felt like I was letting my team down but I couldn’t seem to get into the game. I found out my father was selling the farm and moving to Alabama. I was 17. The farm was bought with my mother’s grandparent’s (French) inheritance. Now I remember being 13 and asking my father about inheritances in our farm truck riding around the property. I asked if we, the kids, would get an inheritance and he said laughing, “I’ll spend every dime of it before it gets to you all.” As an adult I now realize why I had lost interest in the game. My life was being ruined.

2007: My parents had moved to Alabama and I had moved to Lexington Kentucky working at my first Mellow Mushroom. I had high hopes of being an author and planned on attending a University for English Literature. My mother wanted me to be a Massage Therapist. I was reading One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and On The Road by Jack Kerouac. there was a painter painting murals at work. I struck up a conversation with John Lackey about novels I was reading and he said, “One of The Merry Pranksters was just in here, Ed McClanahan. He was personal friends with Ken Kesey.” John arranged lunch with us three at the Mellow there with an aspiring young author he told Ed. Ed gave me novelist advice and told me what it was like partying with Hunter S. Thompson. I hadn’t read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas yet but I loved the film adaptation. Ed had just published Spit in the Ocean #7 All About Ken Kesey since Ken had passed away recently.

My Aunt passed away with stage 4 cancer. I had since moved to Alabama. My parents were acting different. They attended the visitation but had to leave before the funeral to get back to Alabama. I followed suit and left before the funeral. All the funerals I had been to before we went to either the visitation or the funeral One or the other. My older brother told my family I had skipped the funeral to eat acid with Ed McClanahan which wasn’t true at all. I had gone to find comfort in some very sober old friends before I headed back to Alabama. My parents didn’t even know I had ever smoked pot. I would forever be a junky to my family in Louisville, Atlanta, Tampa, Alabama and Kansas. My life and reputation were ruined.

2008: There was a Global Recession on while I was in college. It was a small town with very few jobs. There were signs in the windows saying, No We Aren’t Hiring. Please Stop Asking. I called my parents to ask for $20 for gas money to drive around looking for jobs. My father said no. He was afraid I would spend it on drugs.

2009: There was hang up in the apartment I was renting that semester. My roommate backed out of the deal. I had to borrow tuition from my rich grandmother until my student aid came in. I had only borrowed enough for classes and books but not enough for housing since I had planned to get a job for an apartment. I couch surfed all semester with no place of my own waiting for my father to file his taxes so my financial aid would come through. He didn’t file his taxes until the semester was almost finished. I had passed most of my classes but I had to drop a few. I was too busy going to class, finding places to crash, doing homework and figuring out how to eat. I went hungry for days at a time. When the financial aid money finally came through classes were almost finished and my father made me pay him immediately some $600 charge he had to make with his credit card. That summer he told me to give him the money I owed my grandma. I gave him $3,000. The following semester I had the same issue with financial aid and I needed to borrow tuition again. I called my grandma to ask and she said, “Well, I would lend it to you but you never paid me back the last time.” My father had spent the $3,000. She never saw it. He’s a preacher, you know. One of God’s chosen. That was what was so confusing about it all. My preacher father doing those things. I never could make sense of it.

(To Be Cont…)

Last updated June 25, 2023