I came into the world in 1972 at Fitzsimons General Hospital in Aurora, Colorado.
My parents were on their second marriage, and things were a bit complicated before I even arrived. My dad was a master sergeant in the Air Force—a technician who eventually became an engineer—just wrapping up his last overseas deployment.
My mom worked as a cocktail waitress at the non-commissioned officers’ club where they met.
Back then, that was one of the few safe spots for a divorced woman with two kids to work; it was a time when being a single mom carried a heavy, unearned stigma. Nobody approved of their marriage except me. Between them, they already had seven kids, all at least a decade older than me. Five from my dad’s side, two from my mom’s.
So, in a weird way, I’m an only child with seven half-siblings. If that sounds like a contradiction, well, that’s exactly how it felt.
For a little while after I was born, Mom, her kids, and I lived in an apartment at the old Lookout Mountain Hotel. She ran the bar and restaurant there to save money until Dad’s deployment ended.
In a sense, I guess you could say I was born right into the hospitality industry.
Then we moved out to a spot near Greeley, surrounded by endless rows of corn. For a short spell in the early seventies, most of us under that roof were together.
I think my parents genuinely hoped we could pull off this “big happy family” thing. It wasn’t meant to be. My dad’s kids resented my mom, and I’ve spent years playing detective ever since, trying to piece together details nobody wanted to say out loud.
My memories of that time barely include them; I was just too young. They rallied around their own mother in Denver and wanted nothing to do with our Partridge Family dream. The only one who stayed was Cindy.
Cindy is my mom’s oldest, eleven years ahead of me. She looked after me until she got married and moved into town when I was in second or third grade. In fifty years, she’s never been unavailable to me.
There are stretches in this book where she’s literally the only friend I have.
Before I was even old enough for school, my grandfather moved in. He couldn’t take care of himself anymore; the end was near.
Years earlier, he’d fallen from a ladder truck while working for the Chicago Fire Department. Around the time I started kindergarten, he passed away.
The death certificate listed cirrhosis of the liver but didn’t say why his liver failed. Nobody wrote the word “alcohol” anywhere on that document, and nobody was going to. A man whose entire career was walking into burning buildings died in the back room of my parents’ house with his liver gone, and the paperwork stopped one word short of saying so.
That’s the first thing to know about this disease in my family: it was there before my first memory.
My life took a geographic turn in 1977.
After Grandpa passed, Dad packed up the new family and headed for Coshocton County, Ohio. Mom wanted to be closer to her people, and Dad had bought eighty acres with an old thirty-acre apple orchard.
We were going to become farmers. But a flight technician and engineer isn’t much of a farmer. The orchard failed within five years. Still, for a small boy, it was paradise. I had a puppy, a pellet gun, and endless ground to explore.
For a short time, I even had a big brother named Eric before his mental illness started tearing his life apart. He taught me how to trap, fish, shoot, and forage.
One fine day, my father brought home the greatest gift a little boy can get: Sandy Dog.
He was an Irish Setter and Golden Retriever mix—dark red like a setter with a white patch on his chest. Sandy and I grew up together, and he was my buddy for twelve years.
I’ll tell you how that ended much later in this book, but you should know now that I dread telling it.
There was something else about Sandy I didn’t understand for decades. Around Christmas 2019, sitting in Idaho and thinking about him, I typed “red golden retriever” into a search engine on a whim. And there it was: actual red golden retriever bloodlines and one of the country’s most reputable breeders right here in Idaho. By July 2020, I was a dog owner again.
Sometimes life comes full circle. For me, it took forty years and a lot of wreckage in between.
Which brings me back to around 1979, to the day Eric vanished. He was about eighteen, driving an old late-fifties Chevy truck he’d named Patches, and suffering from a serious delusion. Mom had already taken him on a road trip to an American Indian reservation the previous summer to find a shaman who existed only in Eric’s head.
I can’t imagine how confused and terrified they both must have been as his sanity fell apart. She would spend the next three decades trying to protect her oldest son from his demons.
One winter day, Mom rushed Cindy and me to Tampa for my first trip down I-75. Everything felt incredibly serious and confusing. A trio of PCP-driven psychopaths had attacked and nearly killed my big brother.
He’d decided to run away to Florida and start over. His old truck broke down in Georgia, so he sold it and started hitchhiking. Fate intervened, and his next ride turned out to be nearly his last. The three of them—a man and two women—had already picked up at least two other people, killed them for their belongings, and turned the spoils into drugs and gas. They stopped on the interstate and picked Eric up.
After a short while, the guy said they needed to stop for fuel. Eric was expected to pay, and he did so happily. They did need gas, but it was really about control. They put him in the back seat between the two women, and somewhere outside Tampa, they pulled over and demanded his money.
He walked away with a gunshot wound, two slashing knife wounds, and several deep bites on his back. Yes, I said bites. Human ones. Evil. He would have died if not for his sprinter’s speed and the paranoia already growing in his mind. He slipped away, jumped a fence, found a backyard, and got help.
The murderers were caught soon after, partly thanks to his description. The local news called him a hero. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t feeling very heroic. That was my first visit to the Sunshine State. My memories are fuzzy—the beach, my mother’s family, and the hospital room.
It wasn’t a vacation. Emotions were high. Eric lost the most. His mind slipped further. I rarely saw my real brother again. The real Eric was locked away somewhere inside, and even when the symptoms weren’t obvious, even when he seemed happy, he stayed reserved and distant.
Surviving a pack of drug-crazed killers changes anybody. But I think Eric was more afraid of himself than of anything done to him.
And I wasn’t a perfect little brother either. When his schizophrenic episodes hit, he terrified me, and I couldn’t trust him when he seemed normal. We kept each other at arm’s length.
One of his lessons was accidental, but it’s one of the most useful things anyone has ever taught me.
I learned to read a face. I learned to watch his eyes and know whether he was “home.” We’d be mid-conversation, and he would change, and eventually, I could see the exact moment it happened.
There was nothing I could do about it. It was creepy as hell. I knew what was happening inside him, and it scared me.
I’ve never walked into a room without reading it first. That skill made me a very good chef and an extremely effective liar, and I learned it before I was ten, watching my brother disappear behind his own eyes.
Eventually, Eric came home, and my little world went back to normal. We had an Amish family in Martinsburg pressing some of our apples into cider, and I always had a great time at the Yoder farm. We sold that cider on the side of the road at first, and eventually out of an old converted gas station in Dresden.
My mother is genuinely artistic and could sell like a pro. For a few fall seasons, we opened the farm stand and sold the fruits of our labor.
Apple farming leaves a farmer with plenty of free time in the winter and some in the summer when chores are light. During those stretches, my mother worked briefly for Longaberger Baskets and sold water softeners for a couple of years.
With both of them working part-time and farming the rest of the time, I had a ton of freedom. I rode the bus to school in Dresden and mostly enjoyed the ride. I excelled in science and was selected for the Olympics of the Mind—I chose structural design and built small balsa wood structures.
They’d set your submission on a pedestal and add weight to the top until it failed. I loved it.
During our second spring on the farm, my father’s brothers came to help build the new house. Uncle Donny and Aunt Mary slept in a tent with a waterbed in it, which struck me as the most sophisticated thing I’d ever heard of.
They were from Chicago, and he was a contractor. Uncle Chuck came up from Florida to handle the concrete. The house sat at the highest point on the land, with its foundation cut into the hillside.
From the front, it looked like a one-story ranch. From the back, you could see the second level.
One afternoon, a violent storm darkened the southern horizon.
The sky went black, and from that high ground, we watched it advance like a wall. The men were setting windows on the back of the house.
The roof was decked in plywood, and tools were scattered everywhere.
When it hit, one of the men on the roof was nearly pulled off the edge, holding a windowpane that whipped horizontally like a sail. Everything not nailed down began to fly.
We got inside safely. Plywood and insulation turned up miles away. Some sheets bulldozed apple trees behind the house, among the oldest on the farm.
The rain came cold and torrential, and the unfinished basement staircase became a waterfall. Hail hammered the bare roof deck. Then it was gone. The structure survived. The farm took a hit it couldn’t afford. I stood in the mud afterward and thought it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.
I’ve noticed I have a lifelong habit of finding destructive storms exciting.
The mailman didn’t service our road, so our box sat at a crossroads half a mile away.
One fine summer day, I put on a brand-new baseball uniform. It was stiff and itchy, and I didn’t care.
Before we left for the game in town, I jumped on my bike to grab the mail, with Sandy in tow. The road ran downhill in both directions from our house, so leaving was always the easy part.
I stood up on the pedals to gain speed as I went down.
Then Sandy cut right in front of me. I hit him and went over the handlebars, face-first into the asphalt.
When I came to, my body was screaming. As soon as I could breathe, so was I. My beautiful new Goldenrod uniform was ruined. Knees torn out, shoulder scuffed, blood everywhere. I had road rash on my face and most of the rest of me.
And I refused to take it off because doing so meant no baseball game. So, my mother patched me up, and we drove into town.
There was no chance the coaches were letting me play. I sat on the bench, as usual, in a bloody uniform. The other kids sat as far from me as they could get. I must have looked ridiculous.
Before we lost the farm, I decided to ride down the other side of the hill. Bad decision. I coasted about two miles to Wakotomika—a place with a great name and not much else.
To an eight-year-old, that hill was a mountain, and I was lost. Crying, I knocked on a stranger’s door, and he got hold of my parents.
My father was furious, and he whipped me. It’s the only time I can remember it happening. It could have been much worse. My sister Cindy swears that’s when I started rebelling.