ROLL CALL ~ A Prison List (True Prison Story) (2 page)
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Authors: Glenn Langohr
I am Benny Johnson and my childhood got sideways in the eighties. I’m still trying to sort through the detritus my mind has accumulated. Although, some of the trash in there is life’s lessons I do not want to forget about. I fast forward this story into the California Prison system and then bring you back to show you how that journey took me there. It turns out that the saying; “Truth is stranger than fiction” holds a lot of merit.
Like a bunch of us in these times, I grew up through a ruptured home. Standard issue these days, right? Through my parents’ divorce all these years later I have come to realize how blessed I am. I had two good parents. My Dad came from a family of athletes. He himself was a pro golfer, and his father was a pro baseball player. Too bad they didn’t make the kind of money they do now because money has always been a focal issue and a weapon in my family. Actually that wouldn’t have changed it, only magnified it. My Dad comes from one generation after another where negativity rules, or rather dictates the family into submission, or better yet, subservience. It’s that unhealthy kind of competition where they have to win at everything to earn your respect. That means they’ll set you up to fall just short of expectations, and put you down in the process to keep their title. The only time I measured up in my Dad’s eyes was playing baseball. I was a natural with God given talent. He couldn’t hit a ball by me, but he took it as his duty to break me and the rest of my family down in all of the other areas of our lives. I now realize he was just doing what his father bred in him, and his father bred in him. It was a multi- generational curse that had to be broken.
My Mom was the opposite spectrum. She comes from an Italian family that migrated from Sicily a couple of generations ago. From generation to generation, her family made it through the hard times with love and support. There were some hard times. Her father earned the nickname Pistol Pete and had one of those last names that end in a vowel. He raised my Mom as a single father while owning and running his own bar in New Orleans, Louisiana. He literally had to live at the bar and work it almost twenty-four/seven to stay on top of things. My Mom’s mother took off for an easier life, leaving Pete to handle it solo. The D.A. made it their business to intrude on those kinds of living arrangements and took my Mom from her father. My mother also had a medical condition in her early childhood that had to do with weak tendons and ligaments. For a while, she couldn’t walk any better than a fawn taking their first few steps. My grandfather did what he could. He put her in foster homes and found some nuns to raise her. He realized that the foster homes he put her in were after the money the state provided. Every time he noticed she wasn’t getting the same milk, food, or anything else that resembled caring, he stepped in and tried another home! This kind of powerful love that acknowledges your circumstances and pain, along with the love the nuns showed her comes from God, was bred into her and she blessed me with it. Now I understand that, like a diamond has to go through a lot of fire to become one, the depth of real love is proven by how far it’s been tested.
Prohibition put my grandfather out of work. Facing poverty even harder he continued his trade in the alcohol business. He began to associate with others whose last names end in a vowel. He facilitated liquor in a ring of facilitators who took care of the elite who still wanted to sip. Among those were the same D.A.’s who separated his daughter from him, judges, police, feds and underground establishments. The feds got pressured into pushing the prohibition issue and people had to fall to make it look like business was getting handled. My grandfather was one of the most recent to enter the ring with a racquet in his hand so he earned some points by taking a fall for the benefit of the whole. The judge that sentenced him to a year and a day was another component who sipped from my grandfather’s deliveries. How could you not appreciate these kinds of genes?
My parents moved to Orange County, California in 1979 and bought a house in Lake Forest. I realize now that the only influence my Mom had in her marriage had to do with her three kids getting into a Christian school similar to how her Daddy had done for her. Everything else in her marriage with my Dad was all him. Her opinion didn’t matter because he was the bread winner and provider and he held her under an iron fist, and squeezed. He told her what to cook for dinner, where to go during the day for errands and like I said, nothing was ever good enough. He was like a drill sergeant. Just like an addiction, it was a progression that just got worse.
I saw and felt all of this in so much detail because my Mom was such an affectionate angel. Her love was so pure and strong; you felt it in hugs, kisses, deep smiles and the need to feed you such good food. She even wrote songs for each of her kids. The song she wrote for me goes like this: “Benny is a boy, he loves his toys, and lots of good things to eat. He goes Yum Yum Yum give me some, sweet little Benny.” It might sound corny but I can still hear her voice. My heart was being filled with something so pure it was overflowing and I was all ears for her best advice. “Everything is in God’s Hands honey and everything happens for a reason and He has a purpose for you. He will get you out of any darkness you wander into… Just ask Him for help and He will be there… Help others in need and He is using you as His instrument… He will never give you more than you can carry… Always stay grateful for what you have because all you have to do is look around and you can see those who have it worse than you do.” As a kid hearing this advice being whispered with more passion and frequency, I knew my Dad was going to lose my Mom. At first I thought this was a good thing because I’d surely be going with her. That’s not how it worked out.
When you truly love someone, you walk in their shoes and feel their pain and frustration. I can remember waking up suddenly one morning at about four a.m. I felt my Mom’s anguish before I heard the coffee cup drop on the floor and walked down the hall from my bedroom to see her having a nervous breakdown. She was crying and shaking uncontrollably and I kept asking her what was wrong. She shushed me and told me nothing was wrong and she knew I wasn’t buying it but she wasn’t ready to tell me anything. Being powerless to help someone I loved planted an angry seed inside of me. My Dad had plenty of water for it.
My Dad had controlled my Mom so strictly, for so long that she was like a bird without wings. The straw that broke the camel’s back and brought on that nervous breakdown was his refusal to let her get a part time job. The excitement she had for getting one must have scared him into thinking he’d lose control of her and then lose her. With that nervous breakdown also came her decision to leave him. When she told my father she was leaving him he analyzed and strategized. He treated it impersonally as you would if you were a business acquiring another business. The dictator pattern that took everything for granted, didn’t allow an opinion without shooting it down with patronizing tones, and always had to win was magnified further and drove the nail in the coffin with even more clarity. He tried to compromise without recognizing anything and came up with a list of his pro’s to represent himself as a good provider, father, and husband. He bartered with her until he was blue in the face, betting on the fact that she wouldn’t actually leave. He knew how much she loved her kids and there wasn’t any way she’d break that up. Therefore, he played on that strategy and made it even worse by telling her if she wanted out that bad, she’d have to leave without the kids. He convinced her that she couldn’t provide since she’d never worked and didn’t have any job skills. My sister was already in high school and getting straight A’s and was heading for Berkeley, so how was she going to provide for that expense? My Dad convinced her that if she tried to take care of us on her own we’d live in a dirt shack, and is that what she wanted? When my Mom brought up visitation rights, he convinced her it would be better for us if there were a clean break so we could get on with our lives.
She left with a small car with over a hundred thousand miles on it and some clothes. Just before she left she talked to me. She explained that she just couldn’t win with my Dad and that she’d lost her identity and had to get away to find herself. She explained that my father told her that she couldn’t have any contact with us at all or he’d take drastic measures to insure that she never saw us again. Those were the conditions. He was betting that her love for us would pull her back to him within the week.
Once our Mom was gone, I couldn’t help but study my Dad through angry eyes. He’d just made an angel flee from our house. From that point on every time the phone would ring my younger brother and I would look at each other wondering if that was her. We’d run to the phone expecting to hear her voice telling us she was right down the street asking us if we wanted to live with her. When we got to the phone and it was one of those crank calls we’d be left wondering if that was her. I can remember that Lionel Ritchie song with the lyrics that went, “Hello… Is it me you’re looking for? Because I wonder where you are, and I wonder what you do, are you somewhere feeling lonely, or is someone loving you.” It was okay for me to feel the tears running down my face because I could grit my teeth and feel the pain building something that felt indestructible. It wasn’t okay to see my brother crying himself to sleep at night. My Mom had showed me some Christmas presents she’d left for us under her bed hoping my Dad would soften his heart, so I brought my brother to see them the next morning. They were gone.
The next day a U.P.S. deliveryman came to our door. My brother and I stood there looking at a package with our Mom’s handwriting on it. I grabbed the pen to sign for it right as my Dad got to the door. He took the pen out of my hand and sent the deliveryman on his way. As the door closed my Dad yelled,
“This is my house! I pay the bills, feed, and clothe you and what I say goes or you can hit the road! You’re not to have any contact with your mother or you’ll never see her again!”
I yelled back, “That might have worked on my Mom but it doesn’t on me! I’m not scared of you!”
The argument continued for a while until my Dad grabbed some alcohol and went in his room to fume. My brother and I ran to the garage for our bikes to try and catch the U.P.S. truck. We pedaled as fast as our little legs could and posted up at one of the two entrances to our community. While we sat there waiting we realized he might be exiting out the other entrance. I volunteered to race to the other one about a mile away but my brother didn’t want me to leave him. After about twenty minutes we knew he’d left out the other entrance and my brother blamed me for arguing with our father. He said it delayed us from getting to our bikes. I realize all of these years later that he was right, I shouldn’t have argued. I also realize that my reactions to the injustice of our situation had me calling my own shots, self-destructive ones.
Those phone calls we expected to come never came but we were listening to my Dad’s conversations. He had an old military buddy calling who was trying to help him through the divorce. We listened to him lash out about what a whore our Mom was for leaving him and her own kids. He’d yell, “She doesn’t even care about her own kids! What a piece of trash! I never expected this out of her… Piece of shit!” The rest of the conversation would be him justifying what a good husband and provider he’d been so it must be her fault. Then he’d turn the conversation toward how my brother and I didn’t stand a chance because of her. We weren’t going to amount to anything because of the whore. It seemed like it was going to be his mission to prove that fact and lay the blame on her to drive the point home.
As the weeks went by and Christmas had come and gone my Dad drank more and more and the mood got a lot darker. Before my Mom split the discipline in our family was of the belt variety. Now we were graduating to the fist and brute force. I wasn’t the type of thirteen year old to sit there and take it though, I’m a runner. At least until enough anger builds up in me that I have to get my own vengeance. My Dad ran a territory for the newspaper in Santa Ana and would be gone from 1 a.m. until the morning. He’d often take my brother and me to work with him for free labor. I remember one time in the back of the Buick throwing papers he was talking bad about us and our Mom and I told him how I felt and hopped out the back and watched him drive away. Another time at home he caught me and hit me so hard in the back that my spleen busted and I was stuck in the fetal position for a couple of days. Another time he caught me and picked me up and carried me like a sack of potatoes and threw me into a tree in the backyard. I bounced up and did my fake left go right move to escape the rest of his wrath and took off running. Down the street wiping the blood off of my nose I wondered if I could call my grandfather up to have my Dad whacked. The next day I looked for his phone number.