Volume 1 – The Apprentice

Dismissing painful details started out as a defense mechanism, I suspect, but quickly became a genetic trait as ingrained as my black hair, hazel eyes and crooked smile. Much like the anger and alcohol that would rise up to defend me when those repressed details came bubbling back to the […]

At three and a half, I decided it was time I lived with my dad and set out to make it happen as soon as possible. That he lived hours away in Denver didn’t deter me in the least. That I was watched both night and day made no difference […]

One thing you need to understand about my family is the oddity of our collective tale. We are an eclectic and eccentric bunch on all the branches of our many trees. Some of the yarns are too fantastic to be believed, creativity and emotion playing out in a chaotic symphony […]

The small apartment was in a sketchy area of Anchorage where my 25-year-old dad Gordon was already living and working at something or other to make ends barely meet. I was just a kid, so I don’t know the exact economics, but I assume based on current knowledge that my […]

Our would-be stepfather needed a new spread for the family when his house started to fall down. Literally. It was built on an unstable hillside in a subdivision of custom homes where dozens of other would-be masters of the universe also built their starter kingdoms without knowing a huge fault […]

My second escape attempt came during our second year in lovely Shangri-La. My stepfather became especially heavy handed as the winter months settled in. Twenty hours of darkness makes a person cranky and what better way to beat the doldrums than by beating your kids? I suspect he took out […]

Mom turned 29-years-old near the end of 1978 with very little fanfare and without having ever lived a life of her own. Two young children counted on her for everything while their father, recently released from prison, kept popping by to snort coke with her psychopathic husband. Spending ten, eleven […]

Fall of 1980 was a strange, misplaced spring with rain and warmish weather right up until the end of October. Before the mutant winter set in with heavy snows and ridiculous lows, bad things happened in our little corner of Anchorage. Two women were raped in the dark track of […]

I don’t remember the exact reasons, but after a single year at North Star, I went to live with my dad and his new wife, Sharon, changing schools to attend Willow Crest Elementary for fifth grade. The house is gone now, the enormous lot turned into a condo complex, but […]

I was nearing my eleventh birthday when I moved back into my mom’s house. She was hugely pregnant with our little brother Jon, who would arrive in a month and a half while I snored on a beanbag chair outside the special birthing room at the hospital. I arrived near […]

One of my best moves in showing up to a new elementary school (something I had done seven or eight times by sixth grade) was challenging the cool kids to smoke a cigarette or some other deviant act. It was a tactic that delivered numerous strategic benefits. Would-be bullies are […]

If you’ve never tried going to sleep with the sun still in the sky despite it being ten in the evening, then you haven’t been to Anchorage in the summer. I was back on the seedier side of town in a one bedroom apartment with two twin beds requiring me […]

I arrived back in Colorado to find my mom, Abby and Jon still living in a huge apartment complex near my grandma with tons of amenities. My sister had a small group of friends she had cultivated at nearby Edgewater Elementary, where I had spent an ill-fated few months getting […]

We moved from the “haunted” house on Harlan to a townhouse near Kipling just before my thirteenth birthday. I was able to finish the school year at Wheatridge Junior High since the new house was still in the same geographic area. Mom had a high-pressure job as a paralegal in a […]

I “finished” ninth grade at Bear Creek High School with a report card full of Fs and Ds that would need to be made up the following year if I wanted to move on to tenth grade. First, though, was summer 1985 and an epic three months of nonstop partying […]

My dad “lost” his condo before summer ended, so it was another round of domestic musical chairs that found my sister back with mom while I stayed with dad in an apartment he shared with an old friend from somewhere or other. The guy drove a 16-wheeler and was rarely […]

Mom followed the $12,000 rehab with a transformative five-day Outward Bound experience for me and Abby in the rugged mountains outside Leadville, Colorado. I’m not sure how much that one cost her, but it couldn’t have been cheap. Mom’s instincts were spot on and it should have worked given who […]

We hit the road well before the sun came up with all my worldly possessions tucked safely under a tarp in back. Dad put in six solid hours of driving and was able to keep a couple McDonalds cheeseburgers down before chemotherapy caught up with him not far outside of […]

Anyone familiar with the 1980s remembers crotch-rocket motorcycles and every teenage boy’s need for speed. I don’t entirely blame Tom Cruise, but it was probably his fault when Joey asked his doting mom for a Kawasaki Ninja to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. My dance with death was amped up a […]

The last day at Albert Powell High School in 1987 was also my last day of school in Yuba City for good. I decided not to go back for my senior year, effectively dropping out without much of a plan for what I would do next. Abby moved in with […]

Abby was also on break after her first few months at the San Bernardino Job Corps Center where she was being subjected to a much different experience from a program efficacy standpoint as well as a demographic one. Like me, she dove in head first and was making the best […]

November of 1988 found me mostly healed and ready to tackle life as carpenter’s apprentice on large commercial construction projects around town. I secured my first apartment at a rate of $475 per month in a small building a short, scruffy drive from downtown. I bought a used waterbed on […]

The beginning of the end in Reno started with getting laid off from the middle school job. Once again, all that remained was the fine finish work to be handled by the journeymen and master carpenters, so the apprentices were let go and I started looking for a new gig. […]

The only thing worth mentioning from my next three months in Orlando was the mile and a half long walk from the recruit barracks to the student barracks where I would live while I learned how to function aboard a ship. The heavy canvas straps of my dark green seabag […]

Our defining moment on Hunley began innocently enough in August of 1992 when a rare training cruise took us up the coast to Halifax, Nova Scotia for four days in port after practicing General Quarters drills all the way there. Caleb and I served on the damage control teams, so […]

Christmas turns stateside Navy installations into ghost towns as mass leave sends sailors home for long family visits. To prepare for my 3,500 mile round-trip drive, I took my burgundy 300ZX to the base automotive shop for new tires and a tune-up. My sea-bag was stored in the hatchback with […]

Just after the holidays, Caleb was released from Hunley’s deck department to live and train with the SEAL teams stationed at the amphibious base in Little Creek, Virginia. He explained the whole routine to me, but it sounded like a lot of jumping and running and swimming and hooyahing, all […]

The Boeing DC-10 banked hard to the right and then hard to the left before coming to a landing at an extreme downward angle, aerial acrobatics courtesy of the fine line between Cuba and the 45-square mile Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, leased as part of the Cuban-American Treaty of 1903. […]

Caleb was pretty stoked when I returned to the states via Gainesville, Florida where he was living. I was planning to buy a car and drive to San Diego by way of Colorado to visit the family I hadn’t seen for a few years. Caleb decided to move with me […]

Deep Submergence Unit (DSU) at Naval Air Station North Island was the public-facing operational arm of Submarine Development Group 1 where the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles, Deep Submergence Vehicles, Advanced Tethered Vehicle and other specialized gear was stored and maintained by a group of divers and submariners. One of the […]

JO2 Kent Dupree had showed up a couple months earlier to serve aboard the USS Constellation in San Diego. He described the plight of the JO2 in charge of their broadcasting operations who had recently welcomed a new son to world. Shipping out for a six-month cruise is something many […]

The room I vacated the previous April was no longer available to me and the rest of the barracks had filled up to the point that all E-5 and above were being asked to find civilian housing off base to make room for junior sailors. With the financial incentives making […]

Combat Camera Group Pacific at Naval Air Station North Island was (and presumably still is) as good as it gets for journalists and photographer’s mates in the Navy. The best of the best are hand-picked to serve and many spend the rest of their careers there and CCG Atlantic in […]

Thanksgiving holiday is a four-day event for most of the military if you don’t have to stand duty. I was hanging with IC3 Justin Scott, the guy who went to SERE school with me and was one of the few single sailors at Combat Camera who would party without apology. […]

I wasn’t sure what I would find once I hit northern Virginia, but the task at hand definitely required my undivided attention given the wicked crosswind hitting I-70 as I took the onramp east from I-25 south. The dry snow from the storm earlier in the week was now blowing […]

The small production company was in North Hollywood and appeared on my radar by way of an introduction to the young guy running it from his mother who worked with my mother as a paralegal for a small firm in Loveland. It was an apt example of how shit gets […]

The place smelled of cigarettes and desperation. My dad’s own ten-thousand watt smile never dimmed, but the fear was a living, breathing entity behind his dark brown eyes and the relief at my sudden appearance was palpable. My grandfather’s chair still sat in front of his old color television. A […]

I was wrapping up my first year in graduate school and preparing for a summer semester that would find me completing an independent study project rather than going to class with the rest of the cohort. This was another of those decisions that would come back to haunt me as […]

Our first major decision as a couple was leaving our apartment when the lease expired at the end of April. We decided buying a place was a much better plan given the market and our long-term goals. We were also going a little stir crazy from being in such tight […]

As much as we brought out the best in each other, it was apparent early on in the marriage that we brought out the worst in equal measure. My life didn’t give me a docile enough nature to be the proper foil for whatever demons were trying to get out […]

Before the hammer could drop at TAD in May of 2013, Megan felt optimistic enough about our future prospects to plan a vacation that would take a large chunk of our savings to pull off in the style to which we had become accustomed. She secured a passport not long […]

When Megan told me she was pregnant, I had forgotten we started trying back in April before my professional world came apart and her fear response went into overdrive. None of that mattered in the moment as my bullshit meter was instantly reset to zero and I gathered her in […]