The Failure of Family
For many years now, I have held the controversial view that our society needs to be reorganized around something other than biological family. For most people, this idea conjures images of a dystopian science-fiction world where babies are grown in laboratories and no one knows who their parents are, and there are no real social bonds of any kind. But that isn’t the kind of world I mean.
I contrast biological family with a term I created, “natural family”. Sometimes people feel close to their biological family members, sometimes not. I assert that, outside of mother-child and twin relationships, biology just isn’t as strong a bond as we pretend it is. But nearly everyone has the experience in life of meeting certain people that they feel drawn to, whether as a friend, or a lover, or a business partner. It is these relationships that produce some of the most profound positive movements in society. These people we meet with whom we share closely held ideas and values, to whom we feel drawn in some hard-to-define way that is stronger than biological relationships, this is what I call natural family.
My general view on life is that we need to be pro-choice on more things. For all our talk of individualism and freedom, in my view, America is a deeply and often brutally conformist society. If you have a great family, and biological family works for you, I don’t want to take it away from you. You’re lucky and I envy you. But what I want is for society to make changes so that the many of us for whom family has failed will find it easier to form social units to replace it. We need to make the “natural family” a social institution of equal validity with biological family, and erect measures to allow a “natural family” to share the same rights and privileges.
I hold the belief that our society is pathologically dishonest, and that most people are living a lie. While people lie about practical things to try to gain an advantage, I think they lie to themselves even more, as a way of coping with a world that increasingly heaps unbearable pressures on us all.
One of the main lies that I think most of us tell ourselves is the lie that our family is good for us. Nearly everyone says they love their family, but when I think about my own experiences, and the experiences of people I know well, and the casual anecdotal stories I overhear, more than anything else, family seems to be a source of CONFLICT for most people. My case is extreme, but even for the average person, family seems to be a constant source of low-grade irritation. Family is supposed to be the “resource of last resort” for us all when we’re really desperate, the thing we all can count on when we need it, but yet it seems that in desperate situations, family fails most people.
There certainly are great families out there who really love and support one another. I know some. And I can see it in the interactions of certain families of strangers I encounter. I particularly notice this with Jewish families. But the percentage of us for whom family is a constant source of frustration and rarely or never provides the support we need is much greater than anyone is willing to admit. But we don’t want to admit it because society offers few viable alternatives to the biological family lifestyle, and most people end up concluding that maintaining frustrating, unfulfilling, dysfunctional family relationships is better than being isolated in a world that is organized around biological family relationships.
It wasn’t until I went to jail that I learned what I think is one of the most important facts about our society that most people may have heard, but that we do not take into account in our actions. We have a pathological fear of strangers in this society. We almost always regard people we don’t know with skepticism and suspicion. We have a national obsession with serial killers, mass shooters and other very rare types of wackos that leads us to distance ourselves from one another over the most irrational fears, while thoughtlessly driving drunk, smoking cigarettes, taking illicit drugs, shoveling half-pound burgers down our throats and doing hundreds of other things more likely to kill or harm us than a random stranger. Most strangers are apathetic at worst, and at best, most of us are looking to make positive connections with other people.
The statistic I learned in jail is that you are overwhelmingly more likely to be murdered by a family member than a stranger. I knew husbands killed wives in domestic violence situations a lot, and that abusive parents killed children. But I had no idea of the prevalence of siblings killing siblings, children killing parents, cousins killing cousins. And even apart from family killings, the next most likely person to kill you is someone you know well.
In jail I further learned that a lot of the small number of “random” murders are not random at all. If a person stole money from a drug dealer and then the drug dealer kills them, neither the murderer nor the victim’s family has any incentive to tell the authorities the reason for the killing. The family pretends that the victim, who they knew was a criminal, was actually a random innocent, and the killer, knowing “he stole from me” is no defense in court, says nothing. But in the prison cell blocks the killer will tell other inmates what really happened.
So in the overwhelming majority of cases, murder victims are killed not only by someone they know, but by someone with whom they had pre-existing conflict. But our societal fear of being a victim of a Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer has enormous influence on the way we interact socially, when the people closest to us present a far greater danger, and I believe this fact reveals the hidden toxicity that underlies the idyllic myth of biological family as the best unit around which to organize a society.
The relevance of this in my life is that I was supremely naive about the reality that my family and some of my friends might actually have BAD intentions toward me. I convinced myself that no matter what they did, no matter how obviously pathological their actions toward me, deep down they really loved me and it was all a mixup. Sure, I knew that family members did horrific things to one another, but MY family would never do that to me. I knew that “frenemies” existed and that people often formed relationships with others for the sole purpose of using or sabotaging them, but MY friends would never do that to me. I attributed my conflicts with family and friends to misunderstandings, miscommunication, the general disagreements of life. I blamed myself, often accepting the charge I got from my siblings—but never from others—that I was arrogant and selfish. I never considered bad intentions on the part of those around me as a contributing factor. During the endless days and nights of reflection that I had in prison, my eyes opened.
There was an argument I used to have with my sisters on a regular basis, and it shocks me now that I didn’t realize the obvious implications of it. My sisters would always argue to me that there was no such thing as a good person. I always engaged in these arguments from the perspective of defending myself against what I saw as an attack on my character. But it never occurred to me to think, “Wait a minute. The person making the argument that there is no such thing as a good person is confessing to being a bad person!”. Like Maya Angelou said, believe people when they show you who they are! I should have started distancing myself from them back then.
When I was in jail awaiting trial, one of my closest friends from Stanford said something interesting. This was a highly placed individual in society who had closer relationships than I did with powerful Stanford alums who could have facilitated the immediate dismissal of the charges against me. Asked by a mutual acquaintance why he hadn’t done anything to help me, his response was, “Well, I was waiting for his family to take the lead.”.
As a society, if someone is accused of a serious crime, and their family seems unwilling to advocate for them, others will be suspicious and back away. Just as our society doesn’t trust single men over 30, it also doesn’t trust people who have strained relations with their families. I believe that a big part, though not all of the reason none of my friends or professional colleagues came to my defense was the fact that my family never came to my defense and behaved, from the day of my arrest until the present, as if I was guilty. This made no sense to me at the time, but now I believe the truth has come clear, and I must now go back decades and delve into my family’s dark, mysterious history...
Now that I can see clearly, and lift the veil of more than three decades of denial, I can admit that my relationship with my family was always emotionally, intellectually, and on a few occasions, physically abusive. At 44, I am in many respects like a child emerging from an abusive home, because my relationships with my family remained close into my adult years and I continued to allow them to abuse and control me psychologically without even realizing it.
This is not the time to recount my whole ugly family history, but I will hit a few lowlights to show the general character of how my siblings treated me, behavior that my parents had to be aware of and took no action to stop.
My earliest memory of the younger two of my three sisters is being blackmailed by them. When I was four or five years old, a little girl of about the same age who lived next door took me to play doctor on the back seat of our family van. I didn’t know anything about sex so I was just following her lead. We hadn’t done much before my oldest sister caught us.
Thereafter, for a while my younger two sisters, around 12 and 13 at the time, blackmailed me into doing their chores or cooperating in whatever random orders they chose to give me by threatening to tell our parents “what I had done”. I knew my dad was a Christian preacher and I already knew that in his world sex was bad, so their threat that I would get in trouble seemed credible. And this was back when my parents were still spanking, my father with his belt, and my mother with tree limbs and blood blister-creating fingernail pinches.
It wasn’t long after this that these two adolescent blackmailers began to tease me with the age-old taunt that I wasn’t a real member of the family, that I’d been left on the doorstep. Because I already felt so different from my family and so out of place, I actually considered back then that it might be true. It wouldn’t be until in my thirties that I would recognize the hilarious irony of this...
I look so much like my father that on a number of occasions, I’ve been recognized cold in public as his son by people who knew him but had never seen me before. Now, my father and his brothers all share a certain physical resemblance, so it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that my father could have been my uncle. But there is no doubt if you look at me—I was sired by a Boyd.
On the other hand, if I showed you pictures of my two younger sisters, and my parents, you’d say, “No fucking way. Genetics don’t work that way!”. To use celebrity examples, my dad was of the general type of physical appearance of Terrance Howard, my mom of the general type of physical appearance of Halle Berry, and my two youngest sisters, often mistaken for twins when they were teenagers, are of the general kind of physical appearance of Viola Davis. It doesn’t add up.
Any reasonable person asked to bet in Vegas would say there is no way those two girls are the children of our apparent parents. No way. Genetics can do some strange things here and there, but both my parents had thirteen siblings, and thus I have thousands of cousins I’ve seen. My two younger sisters don’t look at all like ANYBODY within either of our extended families. But they do rather resemble the children of one of the long-time assistant pastors at my father’s church...
It is only now as an adult that I realize that people MUST have talked about this when we were growing up. Their taunting me was an obvious case of Freudian projection. They didn’t look like they belonged in the family, so they teased me that I didn’t. Nobody ever said anything to me, but the probability that things were said to my sisters and perhaps to my parents seems very high.
My sisters’ resentment was further deepened by the color and appearance politics of the Black community. Things are changing now, but back in the 80s when we were growing up, and before, many light-skinned Black people looked down on darker skinned Black people. From my sisters’ perspectives, I had inherited the “good looks” of our father’s family—light skin, green eyes, straight hair—while they were of a physical profile that was widely mocked in the Black community back then.
Ironically, I’ve always wanted to be darker if anything. Years of living in California has given me a permanent tan I’m comfortable with, but I hated being “high yellow” as I was as a kid and I always found darker skinned Black women more attractive. Viola Davis and Lupita Nyong’o are hotter to me than Halle Berry and Vanessa Williams. But I have no doubt that on many occasions in their youth, my sisters, who were also very large back then, were taunted as “fat, black and ugly”, something that had to hurt all that much more when your parents and siblings are thought to be very attractive.
In any event, I have become convinced that there is some secret surrounding my sisters. Either they were adopted and my parents decided never to tell them, or they are not my father’s children, which might explain why my parents’ relationship went haywire within a few years of their births.
Indeed, I actually wonder about all my siblings now for a few reasons. While my oldest sister and brother have the right skin tone, they don’t really look like my parents or other relatives either, and we don’t really look like each other. It would be pretty easy to find five strangers who have more of a family resemblance than us. My mother would have spent nearly four years pregnant if she’d borne all five of us, but I’ve never seen a picture of my mom pregnant nor heard anyone ever talk about remembering her pregnant. There are no baby pictures of ANY of us.
Could all my older siblings be adopted? Could I be the son of my father’s brother Bob who died in prison in California in 1980? One of my earliest memories is being at Uncle Bob’s funeral in LA...but I don’t remember traveling TO it...
My parents got married in 1961, but didn’t have their first child until 1966, an unusual thing for a conservative religious couple in that era. I asked my mom about it a few years ago, and she gave me an answer that I didn’t consider credible. Could it be that my mother is actually infertile and my parents decided to adopt a family and not tell any of us? People have done that. My siblings are close enough in age for none of them to know if that was true, for it to have happened before any of them can remember. My three sisters were born almost exactly one year apart, and then my brother was born twenty months later, so my oldest sister was still three when my brother was born. So they could have all been adopted and not know. But they would obviously all know if I was adopted.
I remember reading a news article some years ago where a DNA study had found that an alarmingly high percentage of kids in what appeared to be ordinary nuclear families, 11% I think it was, were found not to be child of the man they called dad who was married to their mom. And it has long been a practice some believe in to not tell children adopted at an early age that they were adopted. I think this is wrong and I believe that a properly structured study would find that things like this lie at the root of a great many domestic problems.
Humans have a hard time with the idea of whether we are animals or not. Most animals can recognize their kin by scent and possibly other means. It is foolish to think humans don’t have the same capacity. Perhaps the reason my siblings never really acted like siblings is that they are not biologically related to me, and instinctively if not consciously, they know it. It isn’t just me versus the others. Besides my two youngest sisters, who have always been relatively close, there has been constant conflict, and some instances of physical violence, between all of us. Maybe secrets about actual parentage are the unseen factor tearing a lot of families apart.
Despite the statistics on familial brutality, and the widespread prevalence of deep animosities within families, murder is still a relatively rare event. So to suggest that my siblings and possibly even my mother might want to see me dead is an extraordinary claim that requires justification. A reasonable person would ask for a motive. There is one.
In the fall of 2011, I entered something of a mid-life crisis. I took a deep and sober assessment of my life, and in particular my relationships with my family and those I had called friends. It was then, almost a decade ago, that I began to lift the veil of denial that I had been living under and recognized that I had surrounded myself with people who had never had my best interests at heart.
I began to challenge those people strongly to explain their past behaviors and none could, leading to the severance of the bulk of my personal relationships. It started a narrative amongst many who knew me that I was having mental health problems because people are very uncomfortable when someone they have known for a long time begins to change. But I was as clear-headed as I’ve ever been. What was crazy was back when I was the easiest person in the world to deceive and manipulate and had an army of toxic snakes as my traveling circle. One of the quickest refrains of a guilty person who is caught is to accuse the person who brought the truth to light of being crazy.
In early 2012, shortly before my kidney failure, I sent a letter to my family where I confronted many of the aspects of our family history that I’ve mentioned here, and others, making a plea for truth and reconciliation. It may have been a foolish thing to do, but I confronted my two younger sisters and my parents with my suspicions that my sisters had at least one different parent from me. All of them responded in such a way as to make me believe that I was right. My father, a professional public speaker remember, went silent and then stumbled and stammered through his denial in a way I never heard him do. My mother became hostile and defensive, which she often was with others but almost never with me. My sisters responded by trying to have me committed, and when I wouldn’t answer their phone calls, they mounted a kamikaze attack on my public Facebook page that left friends and professional colleagues thinking I’d gone mad.
It was at that point that I attempted to completely sever my relationships with my siblings, but my arrest brought my sisters back into my life. My parents being older and somewhat physically and mentally diminished, my oldest sister being a nearly catatonic shut-in, and my brother being one of the most unreliable people in the world who cannot be trusted with money, my sisters were the only ones I could turn to for help handling the administrative tasks that had to be handled while I was incarcerated.
In hindsight, I should have let those tasks go unhandled and toughed my way through the consequences. But I was desperate and naively believed that the seriousness of my situation would trump the differences we’d had. And the alternative of continuing to refuse to talk to them was also problematic because they had gone to clear out my apartment after my arrest and so my sister had my celllphone, computer, wallet and control of the storage unit where all my belongings were taken.
My youngest sister would eventually wipe my hard drive, destroying over twenty years of my writing work. She claimed to have made a copy then denied doing so. If there is a copy, she will no doubt hold on to it for future blackmail/extortion purposes. She stole my TV and Blu-ray player and gave them to her daughter. When I retrieved my belongings from storage after my release from prison, I found that a lot of my stuff was mysteriously broken in ways that do not result from moving transport or storage. After I gave her access to my Gmail account to send out some messages for me while I was in jail, I later found that she had forwarded some of my potentially embarrassing personal emails to herself, probably to try to blackmail me with them later. My youngest sister has been a regular practitioner of blackmail since she was a teenager and I have no idea how much of it she may have done and to whom.
While I was in prison, I was reading an interview with prison abolitionist activist Maya Schenwar. In the interview she mentioned that at one point, she and her family had believed that her sister, who got into legal trouble because of substance addiction, was BETTER OFF in jail! I wondered, did my family feel the same way, though for very different reasons? I don’t want to run down all the details at present, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest they did. Their complete refusal to take any meaningful action to assist me in my legal fight, at the time baffling, now makes perfect sense.
Both my mother’s family and my father’s family are considered “good families”. Both have a number of successful and prominent members in the communities where they are clustered, my mother’s family in Houston, my father’s in Denver. Both also have a lot of people who are thought to be attractive. The remarkable strength of the green eye gene in the Boyd family seems worthy of genetic study, that such a trait could propagate through so many generations of Black people despite marriages to people without colored eyes.
But I’ve always felt that both families, my mother’s in particular, had dark, hidden secrets. For example, I mentioned on my old blog that two of my father’s brothers were probably child molesters. One of them died in prison forty years ago and my father said after viewing his body that it looked like he might have been beaten to death. The other was a rootless drifter who worked construction for my father for a brief time and died of a heart attack, I think still in his forties. These are not facts the Boyd family of Denver wants publicized.
My mother is not the only one in her family who has suffered with mental illness. She had a sister, now deceased, who had even worse issues. The family generally seemed to turn their back on both. This is not something the Eagleton family of Houston wants publicized.
Other than my middle sister, who dropped out of high school and I think would IQ test below average, all of my siblings are fairly smart. But none has anywhere near the talent or intelligence that I have. That isn’t arrogance, it is just a provable practical reality. I was fortunate to be born with some special capabilities that they were not and I’ve cultivated those capabilities. This fact lies at the center of much of their resentment for me, even though, apparently unbeknownst to them, it was always my goal to try to use my talent to elevate my entire family. My goal was always to be the scion that would make us the first Black family in America to be like the Kennedys or the Bushes, to give everyone in the family a chance to pursue their highest ambitions. So in sabotaging me, my siblings actually sabotaged themselves.
But the result of all this is that it is far more important to my siblings to be able to maintain the perception that they come from “good families” since they don’t have the same talents to work with that I do. And my parents, being children of the 1930s, fear nothing more than having to face their humiliating secrets. Instead, they are in a race to make it to the grave before those secrets are revealed. My father made it. And my recent conversations with my mother have convinced me that whatever secrets she has, she’ll never tell.
One of the unique aspects of being a late child is that your parents and your older siblings can tell you any lies they want about the family history before your birth. I never thought about this fact until recently and in the past, I accepted everything I was told about my family’s past without stopping to consider that much of what I was told didn’t make sense. I believe that back in 2011, when I began to confront and question these issues, it shook my family to the core and left them all terrified that I was going to destroy the conspiracy of silence that kept our dark family secrets hidden. My curiosity about these issues, combined with my tendency to be open and honest, combined with the fact that I am a writer, made me extraordinarily dangerous to them.
So is it possible that my father would have rathered see me spend the rest of my life in prison than see me ask questions about what was really going on during his glory days as a preacher and his possible history as a philandering hypocrite or worse? Yes. Is it possible that my mother, my own mother, a woman raised in the South in the 1940s and 50s, would rather see me die in streets than have it revealed that she had borne children by someone other than her husband? Yes. Is it possible that my sisters would rather see me die than confront the fact that they are not who they’ve always been told that they are? Yes. Is it possible that my brother would rather see me die than to have our father’s legacy and reputation called into question, ending my brother’s efforts to push forward his anemic ministry trading on our father’s name? YES.
Now it makes sense to me why in my early adulthood, it started to feel like my family didn’t want me to succeed at the level of my ambitions. Oh, they wanted me to graduate from Stanford, and get a good upper middle-class job, but they did NOT want me to follow any path that led to being a prominent person. Why? Because if I were to become notable in entertainment or academics or in business or any other public field, it would be inevitable that people would dig into our family history and find where all the bodies are buried. And being the way I am, I wouldn’t run from any of it. So to keep THEIR secrets, my family had to try to keep me under control by throwing cold water on my dreams and making me chronically doubt myself. It is the classic abuse pattern.
For decades, I had hopes to tell my family’s story one day. The ironic thing is that, now that I see my family story as one defined by dark and ugly things rather than being a story of triumph, I have little interest in telling it. It is dramatic to be sure, and perhaps historically significant, but it all leaves such a bad taste in my mouth that, at least at the moment, I want nothing to do with it.
Even knowing, or at least suspecting the possibility of such sinister motives amongst those closest to me, I STILL harbored hopes of bringing my family and old friends back into my life. Even after the appalling behavior of my sisters after my release from prison, I STILL had hopes of reconciliation. But in these last several months, it has finally all come to an end...
As a Black man in America, I always knew that it was possible, no matter how careful I was, that I might end up being sent to prison. Since I’m not a criminal, I identified a false sexual assault allegation as the primary reason that might happen and it turned out to be true. But the one thing I never expected to happen in my life is homelessness. The psychological effects of that for someone like me? Well, I’ll have to write you a whole book to explain it to you.
Most people who are homeless don’t really have anybody, and certainly nobody with resources. But I have uncles, aunts and cousins who are millionaires. My family has social and professional connections to some of the most powerful people in the country, as did I at one point. But yet, here I am sleeping on the streets during a global pandemic, sick with a variety of serious illnesses, my health in constant decline facing the real risk of death every day. Each year, more than 1,000 homeless people die in the streets in Southern California. Most of them are men between 45-65. I’ll be 45 in three months. Most of them have pre-existing medical problems. I have kidney disease and now I believe that I may have serious heart damage from my probable COVID infection back in October. I worry that any day may be my last. And my family, a family of means and resources, has done nothing but watch. A family that doesn’t come to your aid in THIS situation is useless.
At first, I thought their failure to assist me was just because of our disagreements about how I should handle my situation. But now I know that was a ruse. They WANT me to die. All the evidence is there. If they cannot control and manipulate me like they used to—and they cannot—then they would rather see me die in hopes of keeping their ugly secrets buried. But I’ve already made sure that it is too late for that, no matter what happens to me.
I can never go back now. I can never forgive a family that stood idly by to watch me die in the streets during a pandemic. These relationships are over, once and for all and forever. I have no family. I’ve never had one. Like my girl Marilyn Monroe, I’m an orphan.
So where is my natural family?
I was recently watching “We’re The Millers”, which is actually a great movie. It is one of those films disguised as a raunchy comedy that actually conceals a profound social message underneath. It is a message you may not relate to or even notice if you are one of the lucky ones who have a good, stable family unit. All four of the main characters in the film are people who are socially and culturally homeless, with no meaningful bonds in their life. They cross paths with each other and it is clear that they are natural allies.
What the film illustrates so brilliantly is how our insecurities and defense mechanisms make us resist forming new social bonds even when it is painfully obvious that we should be eager to do so. And it brushes by, though it doesn’t delve deeply into the ways in which society disdains the idea of a non-biologically based family. If we looked a little deeper as the characters in the film eventually do, those of us without meaningful bonds in our lives would find people all around us who can fill those voids. But it requires a leap of faith we’re all reluctant to take. It is only through an unlikely series of Hollywood movie events that these four bond into the natural family that they represent.
This is not something you see much in real life because the structure of our society is designed to discourage the formation of strong social bonds unless they conform to a certain set of unwritten rules. They must be biological, or romantic, or between people from the same general social peer group. Odd couplings and groupings make our society very uncomfortable. We’re uncomfortable if an older person has a close relationship with a young person that they are not related to, even though relatives pose by far the greatest danger of abuse to young people. We’re still uncomfortable with interracial relationships. While the acceptance of the gay individual or couple is now broadly mainstream, we’re still uncomfortable with family units that involve a gay couple. And romantic relationships that involve more than two people are frowned upon to such an extent that they are practically criminalized and usually must be kept secret to avoid social ostracization and even law enforcement scrutiny.
The idea that the basic social unit should be a man and a woman of the same race and roughly the same age, and their children, is still a very strongly enforced point of social conformity in American society. All relationships that fall outside of this are subtly or sometimes not-so-subtly condemned. The effect of this is to force people to cling to biological family as their social center, no matter how harmful or dysfunctional those biological relationships may be, because the only alternative in many cases is total social isolation. I believe this drives the prevalence of cults and organizations that have a cult-like atmosphere in our society. People are searching for something to replace dysfunctional families, but our society doesn’t present any healthy alternatives.
One of the things I noticed as a child was what a high percentage of entertainers seemed to be estranged from their biological families. The popular explanation was that it was the fault of the celebrity, that they had “gotten big heads” or “let the money and fame change them”. For years I accepted this explanation without much thought. But as I entered adulthood, and began having serious problems with resentments and jealousy in my own family, I began to take a closer look at this issue and my views changed.
Having the opportunity to interact with a number of celebrities was another part of this change. Entertainers are by-and-large intelligent, sober, hard-working and gracious people. Depending on what kind of background you are coming from, trying to become a success in this world is like trying to launch a rocket out of the atmosphere—you have to achieve a certain escape velocity or you won’t make it. Our society is so insecure and resentful and selfish that those around talented people, oftentimes their own families, will hold them back from success, and those who are really driven to make it have to make the tough choice to break with those toxic roots, only to be criticized for doing so.
While I’ve loved music and movies since my earliest years, in my youth, I never took entertainers seriously as people. Inventors, scientists, engineers, businessmen, political leaders, academics, those were the serious people. Entertainers were empty-headed, moody, entitled prima donnas blessed either with uncommon beauty or one spectacular talent who were underdeveloped in every other area of life. I admired their talent but I’d have never imagined they were a group of people I’d ever want to meet or socialize with. I’d have never imagined they were people like me. If as a high school student, you’d offered me a ticket to either the hottest Hollywood Oscar party, or the Nobel Prize award ceremony, I’d have taken the Nobel tickets without thinking about it.
But as I learned more about the entertainment industry, and had the opportunity to work on the fringes of it, I began to see something I’d never seen before. For all the celebrity media feuds and tabloid trash, the entertainment industry seemed to be like a surrogate family for a group of people whose families had largely failed them. Indeed, most of the major Hollywood studios started out as family businesses, and those families embraced, you might say ADOPTED, the talented, lonely young people that arrived by Amtrak trains and Greyhound buses to New York and Los Angeles in search of their dreams.
It’s never been an easy club to get into, and for good reason. Unlike any other industry, entertainment is selling personalities along with their arts, and thus, an entertainer’s personal conduct affects the bottom line in a way that isn’t true in any other industry. Nobody really cares what Mark Zuckerberg does in his downtime, and if he got busted driving drunk at 150mph with a bag of cocaine and a loaded Glock, number one, he’d beat it and number two, it wouldn’t affect Facebook’s bottom line. But I can guarantee you that Mel Gibson’s unfortunate DUI rant cost a lot of people a lot of money, from commercially hurting Apocalypto to causing the unraveling of other projects he may have been involved in at the time. That’s why the industry sets such a high bar for admission and puts you through so much shit at the outset to make sure you can be trusted. It isn’t easy to get into a family, and in the Hollywood family, one person’s mistake can bring down the whole show.
Of course, entertainment has its dark corners, in the past and today. Sure, we can talk about Harvey Weinstein and the hundreds, perhaps thousands of others like him who have used positions of power in the entertainment industry to exploit and abuse others, whether sexually, financially or emotionally. And we must continue to keep the pressure on to clean up these problems. But in the end, in terms of what the entertainment arts and the people who work in those industries have given our society, the light far outweighs the dark.
But my perceptions of actors as individuals didn’t begin to change until the 90s when I started to learn that so many of them were academically distinguished people who had attended Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other such schools. I learned how many of them had side endeavors as writers, researchers or entrepreneurs that I never knew about. And it wasn’t until very recently that I considered the fact that the requirements of their job would make a certain group of actors share a very important trait with me...
Intellectual curiosity is central to my identity. I was a kid who read the encyclopedia, who caught the bus to spend entire Saturdays at the public library, who has surfed to the ends of the internet. It never occurred to me that Hollywood actors would have to develop a similar type of intellectual curiosity. Screen acting is fundamentally different than stage acting in many ways, one of which is that in stage acting, you tend to play a single role for many identical performances over a period of time. But in film acting, you play a different character in every performance, unless you’re exclusively starring in a single movie franchise. When talking about starring roles, to be able to convincingly act something, you have to learn a substantial amount about it. To play an astronaut, you’re going to have to learn a lot about being an astronaut. To play a lawyer, you’re going to have to learn a lot about being a lawyer. To play a geologist, you’re going to have to learn about geology.
So when you consider someone like Brad Pitt or Natalie Portman, Bruce Willis or Scarlett Johansson, stars who have been working a long time and have done a diverse collection of different types of roles, you must realize that they are people who have spent the last two or three decades standing around movie sets being taught stuff by professional consultants in just about every arena, scientific, military, political and so on. They’ve been personally tutored by martial arts instructors, physics professors, weapons experts, political operatives, animal trainers, and engineers. They’ve had to travel to and work in every corner of the world and learn about the realities of those places. And the Hollywood productions they star in being huge multi-million dollar ventures, those consultants they interact with usually come from the very top of the fields in which they work.
So in a certain sense, your favorite Hollywood stars are actually the ultimate lifelong students. Because of the nature of the work, they have the time and resources to literally go to the ends of the earth and gain access to just about any person to learn what they need to know for their roles. It’s almost like they are getting a college-level education in a different discipline every few years for decades. Given that they were people with a high intellectual capacity to begin with, it’s scary to think how smart some of them must be. If I’d ever considered that aspect of the job, I might have thought about acting as a career.
But the end result led me to the shocking conclusion that, after striking out in my efforts to join the scientific and technical world, if I was looking for people like me, Hollywood might be where I’d find them. I started to realize that even though it should have been obvious, I’d never noticed how much I had in common with actors and filmmakers, even as I was pursuing work in their industry.
After living in California for a while, I couldn’t help but notice how often I saw celebrities, actors in particular, around the same places I went, doing the same things I was doing. I generally avoided celebrity haunts, but they turned up in the unlikely out-of-the-way places I wouldn’t expect. Not followed by entourages or making a spectacle of themselves. Just being normal people. My interactions with them were almost universally positive. They’re mostly really nice people, nothing like the popular stereotypes. But they’re all just so cute! I don’t fit in.
All these ideas came together in the months after my release from prison as my relationships with my family and my friends from before disintegrated into nothing. I wondered, could Hollywood be the surrogate family I was looking for, the natural family I’d never had?
I don’t know. There are times when I think I’ve been permanently barred from that industry because I kept myself surrounded by toxic people for so long, both my family and my friends. Even though I’ve broken those ties, perhaps I’m still seen as having dangerously bad judgment. Time will tell. But I know one thing for certain. I can’t do anything more in this life alone, and I must find my natural family wherever they are.
My dreams used to be real to me. I could feel them, inside, like a bright warm light pushing me forward. The hell of the last eight years dimmed it, but even as of a year ago, I could still feel it. But now, things have changed. I’m in such a state of isolation and desperation, and have been trapped in it for so long, my dreams are too faint and distant to feel. That warm light is gone, replaced by cold, empty fear that life will never be good for me again, that I’ll soon be found dead in the street or in a cheap motel room, and I’ll never have the chance do something meaningful with my life. I cling to hope as an intellectual concept, but it takes the greatest struggle to FEEL even the faintest wisp of it.
The dream that drives me now is the dream of that moment when I finally, for the first time in my life, find someone who truly loves me—the first member of my natural family. The person who will put their arms around me and say, “I know you’ve been through so much, but we’re going to fight this together.” and I’ll know that they really mean it. The person who is Two-Glock Lucy angry about what has happened in the last decade of my life. The person who doesn’t just talk about caring, but shows it. The person who understands that after all this, I’m weak and I need someone to lean on, but that once I’ve regained my strength, I’ll be there when they need to lean on me. The person who actually enjoys spending time with me and is willing to make the effort to do so. The person I know I can trust, as they will know they can trust me.
Ideally, I want to find more than one. A family of two can still be pretty lonely. Stay tuned for my upcoming ruminations on the holidays and a glimpse of the shape of my natural family dreams. But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. All I need is a single true ally. And then I know I’ll win...I know we’ll win.
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