Chosen

man¹

CHAPTER ONE

My mother was fourteen when I was born. She was the daughter of an abusive, alcoholic mother. I heard rumors of beatings and burnings. I have a tattoo on my left leg that depicts her leaving me at the police station when I was one year old.

The heart of winter, the shuffle of people, officers booking offenders, the low murmur of activity. Did I watch the only love I knew walk away from me? Did I call her name? Did I cry, overwhelmed by fear and panic? Where was she going? Why would she leave me here? Just because I couldn’t speak the words doesn’t mean that the questions and feelings weren’t real and present.

She was a very young mother and part of a tiny percentage of girls her age who decide to deliver a child; only 5.8% of mothers under sixteen ² did. She lived close to Charlotte, NC, and a short distance from the area known as the Piedmont.

Once I was processed through DSS, the Department of Social Services, I was placed with a well-to-do foster family in the greater Charlotte area. They eventually adopted me when I was eight years old. For the first seven years I was passed between my foster family and my biological mother. I remember walking into my foster parents’ bedroom one night and turning on the light just to see if they were still there. Even though I had many visits with her, I only retain a single memory from my childhood of my biological mother. I remember a small fire truck she gave to me during one of our visits, and that memory is mainly of the fire truck itself and not the woman who gifted it to me.

My biological father was 15 when I was born, and I am told he is what some call a 1% biker or 1%er. The one percent are the rough, violent, Hell’s Angel type, often in and out of jail. They make up a very small percentage of people who love to ride. I never met him, never even saw him, and only know about him from a few passing comments my biological mother said when I met her again as an adult. As an avid biker today (not 1%er), I wonder if I got my love of bikes from him.

At eight I was legally adopted by my foster family. We lived in a one-story brick house on five acres. They were good to me. My new mother had a heart the size of Alaska. She was the most compassionate, giving person I had ever met. Words like benevolent and genuine were created to describe her; she was the living example of them. She loved me the best way she knew how, but at eight I was a messed-up kid and I think she was in an impossible situation—trying to handle me, her husband, and her three biological sons.

My mother was the daughter of a prominent cotton mill owner. My father went into business for himself buying byproducts from cotton mills and reselling them. For example, when cotton is combed in a mill, it is divided into long and short fibers. Long fibers are spun into thread for items like sheets and shirts, and short cotton, or combed cotton, is considered waste. That waste, if harvested, can be sold to companies like Johnson & Johnson for cotton Q-tips®, and that’s exactly what my adoptive father did. He slowly built a thriving business for himself and when I arrived he was on the cusp of sitting back and enjoying the life his hard work had won him. I was quite a disruption to that newfound freedom, to say the least.

CHAPTER TWO

I was dealing with fear, abandonment, and anger, and they ran through me like a freight train. As a young boy I certainly didn’t know how to properly handle such strong emotions. At that time therapists and psychologists weren’t used often and I was on my own to process the emotional struggles I was having.

I think I was eight or nine years old when I smoked my first cigarette which was fairly normal in the South, as crazy as that sounds. People smoked in the house, in the car, everywhere. Even my social worker smoked as she drove me around in her giant 1970s boat of a car. Before the adoption I was ferried by her back and forth between my biological mother’s house and my foster parents’ house often. Somewhere deep in my child’s mind I decided that I was not in control of those trips and that they did not have a positive outcome. When I’m not in control, bad things happen a voice whispered to me.

Because of this I became physically ill sitting in a car for any length of trip, and continued to become sick when riding in a car until my early thirties. So, even as a two or three year old, I had to stand in the front seat of the car to avoid being sick. There I was, standing in front of the bench seat of my social worker’s car while she drove and smoked. She was always ready to fling her right arm out to keep me from hitting the dashboard every time she touched the brakes.

Besides riding in any car by standing up in the front seat, I also coped with my need for control by creating an exit strategy for every situation. It was a way of protecting myself from the unknown. I always took notice of where a physical exit was in every room and never stood or sat with my back to a door. I grabbed control wherever I could.

I also tested people and relationships to the breaking point, pushing them to prove that they loved me and that they wouldn’t leave me. Unfortunately, I think that I would often test people that I loved to the point that I did break them, most of the time irrevocably. I broke people into tiny pieces because they said that they loved me and I wanted them to prove it. I asked until they couldn’t prove it any more. Sadly, this included my adopted family, a story I’ll tell in coming chapters.

I started doing crazy stuff pretty early. I smoked, sneaking upstairs with my brother to have a few cigarettes, and I started drinking at an early age because everyone else in my family did.

Somewhere around 1982, when I was nine or ten years old, one of my brothers got married. I wore a three-piece suit and did break dancing moves on the dance floor. I also drank enough bourbon and Coca-Colas to get stump drunk. I didn’t get in trouble for it; in fact, no one even mentioned it. It was the culture of our family. I knew where the key to my dad’s liquor cabinet was and my brothers and I would sneak in and drink a bit and then fill the bottle back up to the previous level by adding some water. He’d get so ticked when he’d drink that diluted whiskey!

When I was in military school for a few years, one of my brothers would come and pick me up for the occasional weekend. He drove a 1985 Z28 Camaro, Motor Trend’s Car of the Year in 1982. He’d speed along I-77 from South Carolina at eighty or ninety miles per hour. We’d stop and pick up a six-pack of beer for him and a sixpack of Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers for me and we’d drink them together. I was only twelve or thirteen.

CHAPTER THREE

One healthy thing in my adolescence was my induction into the Santee Sioux Tribe. My adoptive mom was fascinated by Native American culture her entire life, having been introduced to it through a local museum. In 1985 or maybe 1986, when I was twelve or thirteen, she and I were adopted into the Continental Confederation of Indians. The name they gave me was Standing Soldier because I stood up for what I believed in. And my mother they named Washakie which means one who cares for tenderly. That described her to a tee. We joined the tribe, whose history reaches back to four bands of American Indians that lived on the plains of the Northwest —ranging from Minnesota into Montana and Nebraska . My mother and I were inducted by Chief Red Dawn and Blue Eagle.

The peace and welcome I felt with the Santee Sioux Tribe was a stark contrast to my home life. I was always scared of my adoptive father. He was tough, of Scotch-Irish descent. When I came into his home as a foster child he had pretty much raised his children, and I think he resented my appearance and the time and focus that I required of my mom. We struggled from the start, butting heads constantly with only the buffer of my adoptive mother between us.

My adoptive father had osteomyelitis as a kid and had his hip fused at a Shriners hospital in South Carolina in 1944. That meant that he had very little range of motion and suffered pain, like many who have undergone this procedure. He was a tough disciplinarian; that was how he was raised and how he grew up.

He couldn’t bend me no matter how hard he tried, and he tried hard. I went to school more than once with bloody welts from my knees to my lower back from a hickory switch. He carried anger and frustration around with him like a heavy briefcase. I now recognize his actions as a mask for the pain of his own past and an emulation of the values he had been taught as a child. I recognize it; I don’t condone it. He was tough as hell on me but I still respected him and wanted to be like him. He always put a huge emphasis on telling the truth.

It was a lie that I caught him in that was the beginning of the end of our relationship but that was still several years down the road. For the time being I lived in our house and picked at my parents, brothers, and house staff with pre-teen expertise.

CHAPTER FOUR

My parents had other adults who worked as house staff in their home and these men and women were constants in my life. Nancy was an old black lady who nicknamed me P-A-I-N. Chris, you’re just a pain boy, was a statement she was particularly fond of. She cooked the best fried chicken and I made it a point to