All My Dad’s Sons

My dad used to take me to work with him. He worked at a group home for juvenile delinquents. I remember playing on the floor of a windowless office one afternoon—zooming some toy cars around—when the door kicked open and a teenager flew in. The kid smacked hard against the polished tile floor with the weight of two grown men on top of him. They were trying to calm him down, and his face was pink and wet with tears. He was screaming. I was five years old. I scooted my cars back into a corner and went on playing. Such scenes were part of my childhood. These were pretty desperate boys, twelve to eighteen years old, ten of them living together on the grounds of an old tuberculosis hospital. I remember a redbrick home with many rooms—what used to be apartments for nurses—way up on a hill, the path to it winding through the trees. Sometimes the new boys—orientation phases—would tear off down the hill on foot and try to make it into town. This was eastern Kentucky in the eighties. Near the home was a highway, a gas station, and a rundown motel where a man had murdered his wife. That was about it. Dad was pretty good at finding the boys who wanted to be found, but if you stole a car or broke into somebody’s house, he couldn’t take you back. It was a community-relations issue. Two boys stole my mom’s car once and drove it into a ditch, totaling it. Another boy ran off and no one ever heard from him again. He was fourteen years old, but it said in his file he was a prostitute, and everyone was pretty sure that was the life he’d gone back to—that he’d made it down to the highway and caught a ride. There were worse places to be than a group home—you could be locked up in a camp, a hundred serious delinquents out in the middle of nowhere, staff not at all hesitant to put their hands on you—but some of the boys didn’t know this yet. My dad was the youngest treatment director in the state. He took his boys everywhere—to movies, baseball games, five hundred miles away to the beach. Some of them had never been out of the projects except to be sent to a home. They thought Louisville was the world. Dad would load them into an old Ford Econoline van and the boys would tell their stories, what they called their “past histories,” and I would wedge in beside them and listen. At a very young age, I learned a lot about how life can go wrong. It put things into perspective, even if that perspective was a little warped. I remember a friend of mine—I’m guessing we were eight or nine years old—came to school upset because his mom and dad were separating. I looked right at him and said, “Jeremiah Witt’s mom set herself on fire.” “What?” replied my friend. “Why?” Of course, in the back of the van, I learned other things, too, like who the Geto Boys were, what a 187 was, and that you could make a lot more money selling crack than working at McDonald’s. I also learned about my dad, seeing him run group counseling and coach basketball and tell stories. Back then he drove a little blue Chevette hatchback, wore jeans and white Reeboks. He was smart and charismatic, short, freckled, and quick, unafraid to jump up in somebody’s face. It didn’t occur to me, when I was a child, that he was one of them—one of the boys, just a few years older. His mother had abandoned him, though only after filling the formative years of his childhood with drunken stepfathers and boyfriends who broke her nose and threw her out of cars and assaulted her on the kitchen floor. Once, while being beaten up, she screamed for my dad to go get the shotgun. In a rushed panic, he got the gun, but he couldn’t find the shells. Both his brothers ended up in prison. The man said to have been his father was barely literate. He wore a flannel shirt to a factory job up in Mansfield, Ohio, got his sleeve caught in a belt of some kind, and was yanked into the machinery. The accident damaged his brain in a way that rendered him quiet and ashamed of himself. Having played essentially no role in his son’s upbringing, he resurfaced years later at my dad’s wedding but wouldn’t get out of his truck. So that was how Dad came up, his basic training in the childhood traumas of abuse and neglect. I suppose his work with troubled teenagers had something to do with wanting to be the father he had never had, but also I think he liked the challenge. His favorite boys were the most delinquent—street-smart sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, drug dealers, usually, who had adapted to the world around them but were kids still, and in group would ask the sort of questions no one had any answers to. Questions like “If my mom doesn’t want me selling drugs, how come she takes the money I give her?” These were boys from just outside Cincinnati, from housing projects in Lexington and Louisville. Dad’s roots were hillbilly, but in a group home none of that mattered much. Some of the boys had major mental health issues. Some were capable of cruelty, but others—despite whatever else they’d done—had held on to their humanity in remarkable ways. When my sister was seven years old, she was hit by a truck. We were about to cross the road after the boys’ softball practice. She got excited and took off on her own. She made it across a lane or two, and then we heard brakes and a thump and she was skidding and scraping along the asphalt, knocked out of her shoes. Dad ran to her, which left me alone with the boys. I was five years old, my sister in the street. A kid named Chris grabbed me. There wasn’t anyone watching him—he could have gone AWOL, or he could have gone on observing a spectacle, what everyone thought was the death of a child. Instead, he picked me up in his arms. He ran me back into the park to get me away from it all. My sister survived, but Dad blamed himself for her injuries. He’d poured so much time and attention into his boys, it had nearly cost him his daughter. But nothing changed. He went on working, and it nearly cost him his marriage too. When he was thirty-one years old, he left the group home for someone else to run. He wanted to do something bigger. He took over another redbrick house on another hill, this one with even more rooms. He started out with two poor country boys, Jackie and Odell. I remember a plaque, their names etched into it after they got their GEDs. Jackie had run off from another placement once and stolen a four-wheeler. He was picked up with three hundred dollars’ cash in one pocket and three hundred dollars’ worth of weed in the other. He hadn’t been gone but a few hours. He was a great kid, though—they both were. Years later Jackie called from prison and said to tell everyone hi. Two boys became about fifty boys or so, and the home became a business. Some of the people over my dad—his board—gave themselves contracts to feed the boys and clothe them and whatnot. They had a financial interest in the home’s success and believed that, as the director, Dad lacked polish. They flew him to business seminars and told him he needed a better car. He sold his little four-speed Chevette and was leased through the home a Pontiac Bonneville that had leather seats with nine unnecessary adjustment buttons. He occasionally wore a suit, shaved off his mustache, and for the first time in his life began to blow-dry his hair. They asked him to take over another home at the same time, a place no one else could run. Of course he said yes, and the boys kept coming, seventy, eighty, a hundred of them. I remember a boy who’d been shot in his feet. He had ripped somebody off on a drug deal. When his feet got better, he ran away. Another kid went AWOL in the middle of a basketball game. He jumped up off the bench in his uniform and took off into the night. The game stopped and everyone went quiet. A boy named Richie, pudgy and solemn, skilled at stating the obvious, spoke up and said, “Sir, George is goan.” With this fact acknowledged, the game resumed. Basketball was a way of bringing the boys together. I remember them winning a tournament,…