Today, I put my smart-ass humor on hold to write about a tragedy. News accounts describe my neighborhood as upscale. It is a small golf community located off the beaten path 35 miles north of the urban violence that has made Baton Rouge among the murder capitals of the nation. Homes range in price from the 200’s to the low seven figures. My abode on the 16th fairway is at the low end. We live in a place where people say, “You don’t have to lock the doors.” 

Despite relative seclusion from the hustle-bustle of city life, my community is relatively diverse. The president of our homeowners association is African American. Our next door neighbors are Jewish, and the folks across the street are Peruvian—all considered upper middle-class. So it was stunning last week when a sixteen year old honor student murdered a child half his age on a walking and bicycle trail that threads though the woods adjacent to the residential area.

I can only guess at the overwhelming shock and heartbreak the victim’s family must feel. They had dropped by here from a nearby town to visit friends. The eight year old and his twin brother were adopted from Russia. The victim had lagged behind his brother and mother, a physician, on the bike ride when the gruesome attack occured.  She doubled back and discovered her son bleeding from a slit throat and other wounds. She administered CPR, but to no avail.  

Although the 16-year-old and his family live around the corner a few hundred yards from my home, we are not acquainted. Nor do I have a clue about the circumstances of their home life. However, I have a sense of what they are now going through. As the father of a son who committed a horrendous violent crime, I’ve been there and experienced the emotions that are probably similar to those faced by parents of the teenager. Readers of my book are aware of the guilt, recriminations and humilation I felt in the years following my son’s arrest and incarceration. The victim of the crime did not die. Still, she lives with the trauma of being assaulted. 

For years after turning from U.S. 61 onto the winding, blacktop road that dead-ends at the gates of the Louisiana State Penitentary at Angola, I replayed over and over again the mistakes I made as a father. And there were many, beginning with Michael’s birth when I was an immature seventeen-year-old father, and continuing through the worst years of my alcoholism. Did I grease the path that led my son to “Camp J’ in the worst section in a prison once considered the worst in the United States? It is moot question? I accept 100% of the blame, or any portion thereof. But no matter, that doesn’t change Mike’s circumstances.

His time in “Camp J” was the genesis of a transformation that has fostered our reconcilation and resulted in his transfer from Angola to a less intimidating prison. Sometime in 2011, Mike will be released after nearly three decades behind bars. It will be a difficult adjustment, but he has the advantage of a family support system that will help him in the transition.

In addition to Mike’s transformation, I have come to grips with my own failures as a father—a gradual process throughout my 39 years of sobriety and an ongoing challenge. At the time of his arrest, I was eleven years sober. As I write  in my memoir, the emotions that flooded me made me aware that I still had much more work to do in honestly facing my past and reconciling with Mike, as well as with the other children from my first marriage.

 A phrase in Alchoholics Anonymous—the so-called “big book” from which the fellowship gets it’s name—states, “We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it.” I don’t believe I’m committing heresy in saying that I deeply “regret the past.” Otherwise, I would be devoid of conscience.

I interpret the word “regret” to mean not dwelling in the past. It is necessary for me to remember with “regret” that Mike and his three sisters were witnesses to appalling incidents like my arrest on Christmas Eve, 1969, when I went into a drunken rage in our our home and the family had to bail me out of jail on Christmas morning. I cannot afford to forget those times when alcohol controlled my life.

In my early months of sobriety after I stopped drowning my guilt with booze, I had gained a tiny bit of perspective listening to the late Chuck Chamberlain, one of the early “wise men” of AA. His talks have been combined into a well-known recovery book titled A New Pair of Glasses.  In 1971, he was a speaker at an event signifying an anniversary of the alcoholic treatment program at the East Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson. And in the course of his talk, Chuck focused on the guilt that most alcoholics deal with in recovery. I don’t recall the exact words, but he said in effect that in the modern era of discovery and inventions, nobody had come up with a device that could change what happened yesterday.

At a critical time in my sobriety, Chuck’s wisdom gave me a foundation to begin dealing with the heartache I caused and start repairing the wreckage of my past. An important part of my recovery has been the willingness to share my experiences. That is the reason I wrote a book and write this post today on my blog. I hope it will help others go “through the valley of the shadow” of shattering tragedies—especially those tragedies that cause parents to live with unanswerable questions. “Why did my child commit this crime? Am I to blame?”  

My heart goes out to the parents of the victim, as well as to the family of the teenager who committed the terrible crime. The experiences of my life have taught me to look beyond newspaper headlines and “judge not.”

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. The book is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.