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         Born to teenage parents who quickly divorced, my story is like many of my generation. In the interest of a ‘better life’, my brother and I were adopted by different families. When the family which chose me divorced, my mother took me back, figuring that if I was going to come from a broken home it might as well be hers. I saw my dad in supervised visitation a few times, but he quickly tired of having someone watching over him as he tried to interact with his first born son. His attempts at having some privacy with me were a series of abductions; two or three, I’m not sure the exact number. This all happened before my third birthday, and fortunately, my young mind didn’t retain any of it.

         The next time I heard from my dad was when I was eight. It was a hot July day, my birthday, and I had presents, cake, and partying on my mind. The telephone rang and it was for me. It was him. I protested, but it was recommended (in the way only a mother can) that I talk to him. This I don’t remember either, but I’m told I cried while on the phone. My mind, though still young, should’ve retained this momentous event-the first time I ever talked to my father. However, through the merciful ability of the human brain to censor traumatic events, I can’t even remember where I spent that birthday, what I received as gifts, which friends attended the party, or anything he said to me. It’s as though I suffered (or enjoyed) head trauma and the day was lost.

         Now in my thirties, when someone asks about my father, I say that I didn’t meet him until I was sixteen. With what you already know, that’s a false statement in the literal sense. But due to my repeated acts of cerebral self-defense, the summer I spent in Eugene, Oregon with my dad, I consider to be the first time I ever met him.

         As my sophomore year of high-school ended, and as my rebellious teenage attitude spun wildly out of my mother’s control, when she’d ‘had enough of my shit,’ as she was fond of saying, I stepped onto an Amtrak train in Auburn, California. I stepped off in Eugene, Oregon the next day for what was supposed to be the rest of my life, or at least until I turned eighteen and could decide for myself what to do.

         He was waiting for me at the outdoor station, and when I saw him, I saw myself, my genetic reflection in a Harley Davidson tee-shirt and dirty blue-jeans. I think we shook hands; I’m nearly positive that we didn’t hug. Ironically, it was Father’s Day. Fifteen years later, I still smile at that. I brought him a card. I don’t recall what it said, but I remember every word I wrote as a message. I wrote, I can’t say thanks for always being there, so I’ll just say, Happy Father’s Day. Brutal, but true, spoken with the bluntness of youth. I wonder now if those words didn’t act as a catalyst for the awful summer to come.

         We hopped in an old Ford pick up truck, worn silver in color with badly dented right front quarter-panel. Before then I didn’t know what that piece of metal sitting above an automobile’s front tire was called, but now I know that it’s called a right front quarter-panel. My dad taught me that.

         As we drove home we passed lush, seemingly endless forests of pine trees which were in the process of being cleared so as to become the state’s largest export. We traveled for some distance on a two lane road passing large fields and intermittent houses. Inside one of these houses, I met his common-law wife and her three boys, my brothers, at least for the summer. The woman’s name was Juanita. The boys were: Dennis, sixteen; Michael, fourteen; and the youngest boy, whose name has become part of what’s left behind in my mind, was ten. 

         Dennis had his own room, I can’t remember where the ten year-old slept, and Michael shared a room