The Truth of My Life (long read)

Cover of the print edition of this text

Table of Contents

1. The Pumpkin Eater

2. Something About a Writer

3. Ask Doctor Science

4. Crisis

5. Backlash

6. The Judas Horse

7. The True History of Twitter

8. Journalism 101

9. Free Reading

10. The Molotov

11. “What’s Wrong with Being a Zombie?”

12. “They Don’t Want Me to Get Out of This Life”

A Note to the Reader

Sometimes families keep secrets, and sometimes governments do, too. There are reasons for keeping secrets, and I have considered them, and weighed them against my own experience: sometimes secrets that stay secret grow so foul in the shadows that no disinfectant but sunlight will do. 

So, in pursuit of sunlight, in the spirit of community awareness, and much later than I should have, I offer this report to the public. Decide what it means for yourself, but please do not make up your mind unless or until you have read it.

Reader discretion is advised. This report is concerned, in part, with events that are shocking to conscience. I wrote it with as much care as I could, but I do not expect it will be easy to read. Just about anyone will find parts of it upsetting. 

Read it if and when you’re ready.

As always, thank you for reading. 

Chapter 1

 The Pumpkin Eater

I remember being a kid, in our red Honda Civic with my mom, Carolyn, and my brother, Ben, in his car seat, in the parking lot of Larry’s, which is Wildberries now. I was just learning to read, and I was reading out loud from a book of rhymes from the library at my school. “This one has dad’s name in it,” I said.

Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater

had a wife and couldn’t keep her

put her in a pumpkin shell

and there he kept her very well

“Don’t ever say that to your father,” my mom said. 

“Why not?” I said. 

“Just don’t.”

Years later, she said something to me that stuck with me, because I didn’t understand it: “When you have kids, you realize how alone you are.” What did she mean by alone? Alone with Peter?

I didn’t find out about my dad’s first wife until I was eight years old. My brother Ben and I stayed for about a week with my dad’s sister, Nancy, and her husband, Mel, and their four daughters at their house in Rutland, Vermont. My cousin Stephanie showed me an album of family photographs, she turned a page and I saw a younger version of my dad, at a wedding, marrying a pretty, dark-haired woman who held her chin high. The photos were dark, taken with a flash, indoors and possibly at night, and already a little faded with time. 

“That’s Carol, your dad’s first wife,” Stephanie said. 

“No,” I said. I couldn’t believe it, that this strange woman I’d never seen or heard of before, who had almost the same name as my mom, had been married to my dad. But Stephanie insisted, and there were the photographs. Did I have any brothers or sisters I didn’t know about?

“No,” Stephanie said. “It’s ok. She died in a car crash.”

Later, my mom told me that when Peter and Carol lived together in Berkeley, where Peter was a postdoc and worked at Berkeley National Laboratory, Carol rejected him and got together with his best friend at the time, and the two of them slept for a while in a tent in the backyard of the house she had shared with Peter. 

“You shouldn’t have found out about it like that,” my mom said. “He should have told you.” 

After they moved out of the tent and got their own place, things got weird for Carol and her new partner, my mom told me, I don’t know where she got the information. She said Carol and her partner grew increasingly paranoid, thought people were bugging their phone and following them. They were killed in a single-car accident at a high rate of speed. 

The last time I ever talked with him, on the phone, Peter insisted that he is a good person. He was saying it over and over, “I’m a good person! I’m a good person! I’m a good person!”

To interrupt him, I said, “What was your first wife’s name?”

There was dead silence on the phone for several seconds. Finally, he spat her name out, “Carol.” Then he said, “Why? Are you going to dig her up, too?”

“She died in a car accident, right?”

Another long pause, and Peter said, “I have no fucking idea.”

My brother and I didn’t have an easy time during our visit in Rutland. My aunt and uncle largely ignored us, and our cousins seemed to resent our presence after the first couple of days. Ben and I spent our time in front of the glow of the television in the den, where our cousins had cable and an Atari gaming console. I was particularly drawn to a show on the Nickelodeon network, called You Can’t Do That on Television. Kids on the show would have green slime poured on their heads at random moments, which was weirdly relatable. 

We got into an argument with one of our cousins, over turns on the Atari, I think, and she slapped Ben and bloodied his lip. When we saw my mom again, she said, “Your father is very angry about the way you kids were treated,” and we wouldn’t have to stay with my dad’s sister again. 

A little while later, Mel was the target of a federal prosecution related to the way his pharmacy billed Medicare. He lost his pharmacist’s license, went to federal prison, had to give up his guns, and Peter seemed to take particular pleasure in telling us this, had to resign from the volunteer fire department. 

“He got what he deserved,” Peter said.   

My dad, Peter Alan Lehman, was born in the summer of 1944. His parents, Giska and Arthur Lehman, were refugees from the Nazi regime who met, the family story goes, on the docks in Philadelphia, where their ships landed. They married and settled in New Jersey, where in time Arthur owned a chicken farm and an HVAC contracting business. 

All of Arthur’s immediate family were able to escape from Europe. This included his elderly parents, and his sister Martha, who was in prison in Germany for being a Communist and had given birth to a son in custody, Ernie, who went on to live in various European cities as a union representative for the teachers at the special American schools the State Department operates for the children of diplomatic staff, “opened a lot of doors” in Peter’s career, and retired to northern Virginia. There was also Uncle Jules, who deserted the French army with a horse and went on to work as an engineer for NASA. 

They left after Kristallnacht, when according to the family story, one of Arthur’s brothers, Siegfried, went out to fight on the streets of their town, Reinheim, and was beaten almost to death. At that time when it was very difficult for Jewish people to leave Nazi controlled territory or enter the United States, and when, as a kid, I asked Arthur how they did it, he grinned and said, with his accent, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” From what I have since learned about my family, I think it’s likely money had much to do with the “way” he spoke of. 

I was told that around the end of WWII, Giska learned her entire family had been killed in the Holocaust, and she took Peter, who was an infant, and barricaded herself in a bedroom, and refused to come out for many days. Peter became badly dehydrated and almost died. 

Peter went on to take an undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD in chemistry from the University of Chicago, where he said he carried a holstered slide rule on his belt and worked in a lab that had a sign on the wall that read ‘If you don’t come in Sunday, don’t come in Monday.’ He told me he’d gone to school on a National Merit Scholarship, and part of what he had to do to secure the scholarship was meet with Edward Teller, a well-known government scientist called ‘the father of the hydrogen bomb,’ in a hotel room. 

“I had to meet Edward Teller in a hotel room,” was how he phrased it. 

Though I was later to learn there was much about his life that he concealed and lied about, Peter talked openly about having worked for the Department of Energy, one of the agencies that contribute to the American intelligence community, at Livermore and Berkeley national laboratories, and before that for DuPont. 

Peter once bragged to me about how during his time at Berkeley National Lab, he had a midnight meeting with Ken Kesey’s merry pranksters, whose bus pulled up in the parking lot of the lab. 

“Johnny’s in the basement, mixing up the medicine,” I said, quoting the Dylan lyric, and Peter smirked and gave me a knowing look.

Chapter 2

Something About a Writer

My mom, Carolyn Paula Polese, was born just after Christmas in 1947, and grew up in Menlo Park, in the South Bay. 

Her dad, my grandpa, Jim or James Polese, was an Italian immigrant who “served in the merchant marine on a minesweeper” in WWII. My mom told me that despite never having graduated from high school, Jim had a job as an engineer, working on secret government projects. By the time I was a kid, Jim lived in a house built on a leased inholding inside Point Reyes national seashore, and there was a photograph in the entryway of him with Ronald Regan. During the first Gulf War, Jim claimed to have been part of the development the Patriot missile. He had a brother, also an Italian immigrant, who my mom called “the brains of the outfit,” and was employed as a civilian procurement officer for the Navy. Once, when I was a kid and we were in downtown San Francisco, she walked me past the Olympic Club, and said, “Your great uncle was a member here, and you might be too someday.” 

When my mom was a girl, she won an essay contest by writing about how much she loved her dog. She showed me her trophy from the contest, a small brass cup on a wooden stand, much heavier and nicer quality than trophies nowadays, inscribed with her dog’s name, Puck. She’d saved it for all those years. A little while after she won the contest, Jim ran over Puck in the driveway, killing him.

My mom went on to be an art history major at Berkeley. Even though it was outside her major, my mom said she “just felt like” taking an introductory chemistry class. As she told us this at the family dinner table, Peter smirked and said, “She was there to get her M. r. s. degree,” a stale, misogynistic joke about women going to college to find husbands.

On the first day of Carolyn’s chemistry class, the professor asked if anyone was taking the course just because they were interested, and in the whole big lecture hall, my mom raised her hand. She said the professor, George Pimentel, took an interest and got to know her. He was a research associate of Peter’s, and introduced my parents to each other, and they later married at a wedding chapel in Nevada, and took teaching jobs at a college in eastern California.  

My name is Jacob Michael Lehman. I was born in the spring of 1978, in Bishop, California, the closest town with a hospital to the college, which was called Deep Springs. It was a small, private college in a remote high desert valley, below a range of tall mountains, called the white mountains, which turned green at higher elevations as the snow melted. The college was approached by a straight dirt road, through an avenue of tall cottonwood trees that led off the state highway. The buildings, a main structure with offices and classrooms, a dining hall, and small houses like the one my family lived in, formed a circle around a lawn. Our house was heated by a diesel stove, and my whole life, I’ve always liked the smell of diesel exhaust. Behind the buildings was the flat sage scrub of the valley, which would smell wonderfully complicated after a rare rain shower. There was also a barn, and outbuildings, and irrigated fields where the college grew feed for its cattle. 

Deep Springs functioned as a dude ranch as well as a two-year college. The students, all male, would go on to finish their undergraduate degrees at other schools, often elite, ivy league institutions, and held various agricultural jobs in addition to their studies, and dairy and beef from the ranch were served in the dining hall. The most coveted student job, my mom told me, was to be a cowboy, students selected to lead, on horseback, the school’s cattle up to the mountains to graze.

Students at Deep Springs were forbidden from drinking, smoking, and having sex. “No alkie, no nickie, no nookie,” was the phrase my mom repeated to me later. “Though of course,” she said, “that sort of thing went on, but no one ever talked about it.”

We left Deep Springs when I was a toddler, and spent a summer living in campgrounds out of Peter’s Toyota Land Cruiser, which he had assembled from a kit, and rattled something awful. It had a vanity plate that read ‘WT WOLF,’ because, according to Peter, he’d discovered that a white wolf was his “spirit animal.” 

Whenever there was a mechanical problem with his ride, Peter would become suddenly, violently angry, and I’d already learned to be afraid of him. The worst times were when he would stop the still-running vehicle to lift the hood and tinker with something that made the problem worse, while my mom and I waited silent and rigid in the cab, afraid his anger would fall on us. 

Peter secured a tenure-track position at Humboldt State University, and we moved to Arcata, where he bought a victorian mansion. He got a mortgage for the house, I don’t think he really needed it, but he always took care to conceal his wealth. My mom would fret over expense when we were shopping for food or clothes, but if there was something Peter wanted for himself, he bought the best of everything, as long as it wasn’t flashy, like our new Subaru off the lot in Eureka. He’s smirk and say we weren’t rich, but “we’re not going to the poor house.”

For two years I went to a preschool at Humboldt State called Child Development Laboratory. I didn’t know it at the time, but there were one-way mirrors all along one wall, and microphones hanging from the ceiling, and a room behind the mirrors where academics could sit and observe the children . . . developing, I guess.

Peter also bought, with a partner who he later quarreled with and bought out, a second large victorian house divided into apartments, and a third, smaller house, to use as rental property. Even though he hid the extent of his wealth, Peter seemed to enjoy having more than other people. There were coin-operated laundry machines in the larger rental, and Peter would sit at our kitchen table counting the quarters from the machines on the days tenants had to knock on our kitchen door and hand over their rent checks, until my mom told him it “wasn’t politic.” After that he paid me a few quarters to do the task, count and roll the quarters and collect the checks, which always made me feel terribly embarrassed.

My mom stayed home and wrote. She’d already published a book of young-adult fiction called Something About a Mermaid, and in the early ‘80s she wrote and published another YA novel, Promise Not to Tell, about child sexual abuse on a dude ranch. 

She worked on a Morrow personal computer that had a black screen and monochrome characters, and connected to a dot-matrix printer that made repeated screaming sounds when she printed out her manuscripts. There was a poster that came with the computer, advertising the reliability of the Morrow’s floppy disks, that showed a picture of an elephant’s face, with the words ‘Elephants Never Forget.’ My mom pinned it up inside the door of the closet in her writing room. 

When her manuscripts finished printing, my mom put them in envelopes which she weighed on a postal scale, and then applied the appropriate quantity of stamps. I remember walking with her to the mail box on the corner to send a manuscript to New York, and we both kissed it for luck. 

For a while she was working on a novel about Earth First!, but  stopped after the Judi Bari bombing, because, she told me, “The things I wrote in my novel kept happening in real life.”

Chapter 3

Ask Doctor Science

Peter didn’t like laughter unless the jokes were his. His rage could be triggered if any of us showed some moment of independent spirit, or found humor of our own.

After he screamed at my mom and I for singing along and dancing to a Carole King record in the kitchen one morning before school, we stopped listening to music on the hi-fi or the car stereo. “We lost music,” was how my mom put it. We’d listen to NPR news instead, and Peter would scoff at the ignorance of the newscasters.

If we were in the car when he got mad at us, Peter would go silent and drive faster and faster and more recklessly until we were all crying and begging him to slow down. 

There was one day he trapped my mom in the kitchen, standing in the only way out, screaming at her, as I hung on to her legs, and then he picked up a big cast-iron frying pan by the handle and threw it at us, and it flew past my mom’s hip and hissed just over my head, and smashed into the cabinet behind me. 

Another time, when I was in second grade, my mom, who usually drove me to school, had a phone call about her writing career, and asked Peter to drive me, and he was seething mad and silent about having his morning routine disrupted, and I was afraid of him, and slow getting into our old Honda Civic, the car my parents had brought me home to Deep Springs in when I was born. A pickup truck came down the hill towards us, and the moment I got in the car, Peter started our engine and immediately pulled out in a U-turn in front of the oncoming truck.

I’d seen the truck coming before I even got into the car, and I was shocked he’d driven right in front of it, and I barely had time to fasten my seatbelt, the click of the belt registering a split second before the bang of the impact of the truck, and I saw the safety glass in my window turn opaque for a moment as it shattered, and then broke like a wave over my head, and our car spun around a bunch of times and landed in a neighbor’s yard. I think I would have been thrown out of the vehicle if I hadn’t got my belt on just in time. Peter had put his on lickety-split as he started the engine. 

I got to stay home from school that day, and Stan Schmidt from the Arcata Police Department looked in my mouth very carefully to make sure I’d spit out all the chunks of safety glass. Fifteen years later, I wrote a profile of him in the Times-Standard when he retired. 

The Civic was totaled, but when I was in high school, my dad bought another red Honda Civic. 

Peter had other moods. He cultivated an image of honesty, and would look right at you with his icy hazel-blue eyes as he lied to you. He would always say that his frankness, his willingness to say unpleasant things, was proof of his integrity, and he fished for compliments about his honesty from his captive-audience family almost as much as he fished for compliments about his thinness. 

Sometimes I’d hear him talking to himself in the shower, carefully going over conversations he’d had, repeating phrases, getting his story straight, criticizing himself for saying too much. 

My brother, Benjamin Andrew Lehman, was born at Mad River Hospital in the spring of 1981. Ben, my only sibling, had red hair and freckles, and was gentler than I was, and I mean that in the best way. We slept in bunk beds, and for a long time, Ben listened to the same cassette tape every night to fall asleep to, a recording of the original BBC presentation of A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, until we both had it memorized. 

There was a show we both liked that used to come on KHSU, called Ask Doctor Science. It took the form of a short comedy skit. There were two guys, one had an innocent radio announcer voice, and he would introduce Doctor Science, and read a letter supposedly from a listener, asking a science question. Then Doctor Science would come on and give a completely preposterous answer in a serious, authoritative scientist voice, the kind Peter used on us sometimes. 

Peter didn’t like Doctor Science, and switched off the radio in the car when he came on. Or, depending on his mood, he would say the show’s tagline in a deep, scary voice. “He knows more than you do.” 

Most of the letters Doctor Science got seemed fake, but the announcer would give out an address where you could write with your science question, and Ben did. His question was, ‘Why do kids get scared in the night?’

They didn’t read his letter on the air, but Ben got a handwritten letter back in the mail from ‘Dr. Science,’ who answered his question by writing that kids get scared in the night because Hollywood producers need new ideas for movies, and they steal them from the dreams of kids. My parents framed the letter and put it up on the wall of our bedroom. 

I should explain that Peter always expected Ben and I to follow in his footsteps and become scientists, and this wasn’t something we were allowed to question.

Late one night, after the Doctor Science letter had been hanging on the wall for a little while, Ben climbed down the ladder from his bunkbed, very quietly, and crept up to where my head was lying on the pillow.

“Jake,” he whispered. “Are you asleep?” 

I kind of was but I whispered back, “No.”

Ben had been crying, tears were still running down his face. “I don’t think I want to be a scientist,” he said. 

Chapter 4

Crisis

When I was eleven years old, my mom, Carolyn, said she had something important to tell our whole family, and sat us down at the kitchen table. I remember it was a winter evening, and the darkness outside the kitchen windows seemed immense. My mom told us she was cutting off contact with her parents, to protect herself, and us, because she’d become aware that they had been abusing her and us in some really weird ways, sexually and otherwise. In time, she said, Ben and I might recover our own memories of the abuse, which might corroborate hers, and eventually that did happen.

As we knew, she said, she’s been in therapy for a while. My mom had been inspired, as had many others, by a book that first came out in ‘88 called The Courage to Heal, which was based on the experiences of women meeting in groups, and said it was natural and commonplace for people to block out the memory of highly traumatic events, particularly when they included an element of the bizarre and occurred or began occurring in early childhood. 

My mom said her parents, and the people collaborating with them, had sexually abused, pimped, and used her to make child pornography, exploiting the natural human tendency towards traumatic amnesia by reenforcing it with drugs and psychological techniques collectively known as “mind control.” Other abuse survivors had also reported these same techniques being used on them, and survivors of this pattern of abuse called it “ritual abuse.” 

My brother and I were very serious, and pledged to support my mom. Peter was quiet, sitting at his place at the table, watching our faces as my mom talked, occasionally making mild comments that had nothing to do with his eyes. He had discouraged my mom from getting into therapy. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” was what he said. 

But my mom kept insisting, she told me later, that something wasn’t right, and she wanted the truth. She found a therapist through Peter’s contacts at the university, and kept going to sessions, even though she said they were like emotional torture. The therapist taught her to say “my truth” instead of “the truth,” but she kept going, recovering more memory. 

Carolyn went to survivor meetings and conferences, and subscribed to and wrote for a newsletter called Survivorship, using a P. O. box and a pen name, Kerrie Ellison. She and the other ritual abuse survivors she met, many of whom came from high-ranking military, political, and diplomatic families, were surprised when they compared notes and found out how similar the abuse had been for all of them. “Cookie-cutter,” was the phrase my mom used. Like a formula, a program. Organized. 

My mom told me she’d met one survivor from a powerful family in India, who described almost exactly the same abuse, except that in her case, the ritual aspect of the abuse focused on manifestations of evil in the Hindu tradition, as opposed to the “satanic” rituals my mom and other American survivors reported. 

My mom was suspicious of Peter at first, for a long time he slept on the living room couch because she didn’t feel safe sleeping with him, but she said her therapist slowly and painstakingly helped her to trust him again.

What is “mind control?” That was a question, that I, as a sixth-grader, wanted to answer. I wanted to know what we were up against. 

I went up to the HSU library, which had the most books. In those days the library’s card catalogue was stored in wooden cabinets in the open space on the southern side of the ground floor, where, 35 years later, I am typing this zine at a computer terminal. The catalogue listed subject headings in all capital letters, I looked up ‘MIND CONTROL.’ The books I found were based all on the subject of government mind control research, and based on declassified material, so this was a story the government was telling about itself.

The story in the books went that the CIA had experimented with mind control, utilizing psychological techniques, sexual abuse, and torture, in the period following WWII, originally under the codename ‘Project Bluebird,’ and this research had been advanced significantly by the discovery of LSD, which the CIA experimented with weaponizing in other ways, such as the dosing of the water supply of an entire French town. There were multiple stated goals of these early mind control projects. One was to make ‘super’ soldiers, by brainwashing subjects to have increased aggression, pain tolerance, and motivation. Another, and yes, the books really said this, was to create sex slaves. And somewhat ancillary to this, another goal was to brainwash people to be spies, without consciously knowing they were spies. What could be a more perfect cover? No indication was given that these techniques were or were not practiced on children. The books also stated that the CIA had completely halted all mind control experiments. What they didn’t say is that there are several other agencies within the intelligence community that carry out classified research. 

I think it’s worth noting that the Department of Energy, despite its benign sounding name and involvement in civilian infrastructure projects, has a history of secret research at the highest levels of government, including the development of the first nuclear weapons. 

In hindsight, I think ‘intelligence community adjacent familial abuse’ might be a more accurate, though less wieldy, term for what we experienced than ‘ritual abuse.’ 

The next few years were a period my family called, in the therapy-speak we were learning, my mom’s “crisis.” The kitchen always seemed to be full of the smell of Tension Tamer tea. My mom took benzodiazepines, went to therapy two or three times a week, and had wild mood swings. Sometimes she would “regress,” become like a child, and weep, sobs of panic from a lifetime of pain, while I held her hand and tried to comfort her. Other times, she would put on her sunglasses and a shirt Peter had bought her at an Italian restaurant in San Francisco, and be cruel to my brother and I. And sometimes she couldn’t get out of bed. I started doing more of the cooking. Peter would show up for meals, but he was absent more and more, always saying he was working, or flying to conferences and meetings of his own that were never thoroughly explained.   

Spooky things started happening. My mom said they were very similar to the harassment other “ritual abuse” survivors had told her about, after they cut off contact with their “families of origin.” Hang up calls, relentlessly, and not just at home. We’d walk into a shop in town and the store’s phone would ring, and the salesperson would say, “Hello? Hello?” Supposedly crazy people would shout weird, threatening stuff at us in the street, stuff that seemed just a little too personal and specific.

The summer after I was in sixth grade, Jim, Carolyn’s dad, drove up to Arcata, looking for her. My family fled to the house of friends of my parents in Blue Lake. Once we were there, Peter claimed he had to work and left. Then Carolyn insisted she had to go back to our house alone to get something she’d forgotten, but she wouldn’t tell us what it was. She returned hours later, with a big black eye she didn’t know she had. Once she’d looked in the mirror and seen she really did have a black eye, she couldn’t explain it, didn’t remember how it happened. 

I had grabbed my Walkman as we ran out of our house, and there was one tape in it, Highway 61 Revisited, which I kept flipping over and listening to again.

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is

Carolyn later said her therapist convinced her the black eye had been a “spontaneous body memory” generated by the stress of Jim looking for her.

Peter came back to Blue Lake with a story about Jim coming to his office at the engineering department on campus, where Peter said he yelled at Jim and told him to go away. He went out of his way to mention, more than once, that this confrontation had been witnessed by the department secretary. 

When, several years later, I asked him again about that day, he repeated his story about confronting Jim, using almost the exact same sequence of words he’d used originally, which struck me as unusual. When people recall unplanned events that really happened, they are able to emphasize different details, add the perspective of time, and rebuild the story from memory. Peter didn’t do that, instead he said exactly the same thing as he’d said the day he said it happened.

Peter would leave the house early and come back late, always saying it was work, and when he was home he would avoid us, go into his study and shut the door. “I just live here,” he said over and over, smirking like it was a joke. And sometimes he’d coax his cat into his lap, and stroke him until he purred, then look him in the eyes and say, “what do you know?”

Carolyn and Peter started going out on a date night every Friday, to reestablish trust between them. I took care of my brother when they went out, and we would walk up to Larry’s to get fried chicken and jojos, and rent VCR movies from the newly opened Figueiredo's. Those were good times, the two of us creating a little bubble of normalcy, with the strangeness and horror of what our mom was going through and what out dad might be up to howling in the void outside. 

Ben and I both started seeing a therapist who worked in the same office collective as our mom’s therapist. We were told not to discuss the specifics of any memories of abuse we recovered, because if we remembered the same details independently it would make us more credible in a court case against Jim. I resisted recovering memory of the abuse, something about the therapist’s voice spooked me as she was taking me through a relaxation exercise. Ben did recover memories of the abuse, and it seemed really hard on him. One day at school, he climbed up a Monterey Pine tree in the parking lot and refused to come down or talk to anyone all day long. 

One night at our family dinner, I’d cooked steaks, and as we sat down I said, “Try it first before you put salt on it. I read somewhere you can’t trust a man who salts his meat before he tastes it.”

Peter looked around the table at us all, and very deliberately picked up the salt shaker and salted his steak with exaggerated motions, and sat merrily eating and smacking his lips as the rest of us sat in front of our plates. 

We also had family therapy sessions with the same therapist Ben and I saw, where we would argue, this was the therapist’s idea, over the terms of a “family constitution” that we never actually wrote down.

Ben wrote and self-published a book in the early ‘00s, a table-top roleplaying game called Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North, that to me captures the spirit of that time. I think it’s the best thing he ever wrote. In the game, the players are knights of a civilization carved out of ice at the north pole, but the ice is melting, because a fissure called The Mistake has opened, from which demons emerge. The politicians of the ice civilization sit around arguing about procedure while their world melts around them. The rules of the game are that it always ends in tragedy, it’s only a question of how. Each knight ends up betraying either their cause, their country, or their family. 

Chapter 5

Backlash

My mom, Carolyn, talked openly with many people in the community about the abuse she’d experienced and healing she was undertaking. The survivor movement gained a lot of traction in those early years, my mom and others like her had widespread understanding, acknowledgment, and support. There were several successful prosecutions of ritual abuse perpetrators, criminal convictions in jury trails. I think that might have been how my mom originally met John Jackson, who I write about in another chapter, because he covered the McMartin preschool trail for his newspaper. 

But then the empire struck back. ‘Since 1992 we have watched with growing concern the emerging backlash against survivors of child sexual abuse, their supporters, and the significant social progress they have made,’ authors Bass and Davis wrote in the 1994 edition of The Courage to Heal, in a new section of the book titled ‘Honoring the Truth: A Response to the Backlash.’ 

The ‘backlash’ was shockingly well funded, well organized, and well connected. Carolyn said she’d heard that bad, weird things, sometimes terrible things, uncanny, “unlucky” things, were happening to survivors and people connected with the court cases, witnesses, prosecutors, judges, jurors, journalists, and supporters. Carolyn also said she’d heard that perpetrators were being tipped off to search warrants. 

My mom said she’d met with men who identified themselves as FBI agents to talk about pursuing charges against her dad, Jim, in a meeting arranged by her therapist, who had law enforcement contacts and consulted on child protective custody cases. What Carolyn said the FBI said was chilling: she said they acknowledged what had happened to us, they knew about it, they’d dealt with it before, it was a real thing, but if she pressed forward with her allegations, she and her kids and people who helped her would be harassed, and the harassment could ramp up to unbelievable levels, and if it got to the point where she was testifying in court, she would be killed. So they couldn’t help her make a case, because it was too dangerous. That’s really what she said they said. 

An organization emerged representing accused perpetrators of ritual abuse, called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, advanced a spurious, pseudo-medical theory that the abuse wasn’t real, but had been imagined by hysterical and malintentioned therapists. This theory was used to sow doubt in court cases, and was amplified by the mainstream media, both liberal and conservative, without question, reflection, or space for other voices. Saturday Night Live debuted a character called Stuart Smalley who made fun of the way people who’d been in therapy talked.

Eventually, the survivor movement was reduced, in the mainstream media, to a mocking catchphrase, “satanic panic.” It rhymes, so it must be true, right?

A later edition of The Courage to Heal left out the section on ‘Honoring the Truth,’ said less about taking abusers to court, and softened its language, using more phrases like “your truth” instead of “the truth.”

I always believed my mom. More than believed, really, I had examined my own experiences and addressed my doubts, and I was confident she was telling the truth about her dad. 

Chapter 6

The Judas Horse

I got to know Elijah because I was friends with another kid in sixth grade who was friends with him. There was one day, someone’s birthday, we were all going swimming at what was then the Ramada Inn in Valley West, and we were all piled in a car, Elijah, and his mom, Sue, and a bunch of kids, and we were all laughing our heads off, actual uncontrollable laughter rolling through us. It sounded so different from what I was used to, but I knew it sounded good. 

I was also friends with a kid in fourth grade who became Elijah’s stepbrother when Sue married his dad. When I knew Elijah in high school, his family lived in a house his stepdad had hand built in the redwoods in Freshwater. 

My parents and some other people (including Joyce and Evan, who I write more about in another chapter) got together to form an alternative high school, which was held in the former elementary school in Manila. The Northcoast Journal published an article about it at the time that was still floating around the web the last time I checked. We called it “a school for weird kids,” and that’s what I always said about it, until one day I was talking with a friend and she said, “Don’t you mean a school for kids with weird parents?”

I didn’t think Elijah’s parents were weird, or if they were, it was in a good way. He started going to our school, and he and I were fast friends, the way you maybe only can be at that age. We played tackle football on the beach with some of the other kids every day on our lunch break. Elijah and I had our own way of talking to each other, and the other kids at school imitated us. On a field trip one day, he said to me, “We’re the kings of the school,” and I said, “No, you are.”

At Elijah’s parents’ house, Sue made young people welcome. Elijah’s stepdad was always in his shop, slowly building wooden cars. I mean, the mechanical parts were metal, but the bodies of the cars were made of sculpted wood. He owned an extensive collection of VHS movies and a bunch of old records, ‘60s rock, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Toots and the Maytals, Townes Van Zandt, Leo Kottke. Sue would play guitar and sing sometimes, Kate Wolf songs or old numbers about pirates and ghosts. There was always food to eat around a warm wooden table, and in the winter a redwood fire in the woodstove, with old dogs laying around it.

Elijah and I were in some environmental protest campaigns  together after high school. Headwaters, and Warner Creek, and guarding Yellowstone buffalo on cross-country skis in western Montana, which is where I first started working for newspapers. His sister Maya, and a kid from our high school, Vernell, made headlines after they sued the Humboldt Sheriff’s department for putting liquid pepper spray in their eyes with a Q-tip during a Headwaters protest. While we were in Montana, Elijah was always coming and going, mostly going, he had some intense issues going with his girlfriend at the time, Kendall, that he wouldn’t talk about. 

Elijah went to the Heartwood Institute in SoHum to learn holistic healing, and while he was there, he was in a bad bike wreck, he said, and it took him months to recover. When I saw him again, he’d changed, he was much thinner, walked with a cane for a while, was more prone to irritation, and worried about money. 

One afternoon while we were hanging out at his parents’ house and got wicked stoned, Elijah gave me a strange rap about how the Bureau of Land Management, when they round up wild horses for slaughter, employ a trained horse to go in among the wild horses and lead them into a corral. All the horses get sent to slaughter, except the Judas horse, he lives another day.

“Yeah,” I said, “but the Judas horse has to be the Judas horse.”

“The Judas horse gets extra hay,” Elijah said. 

Looking back, it seems apparent to me what we were talking about, but at the time, I didn’t get it. Elijah was one of the best friends I ever had, and I don’t think I wanted to get it. 

Around that time Elijah got chummy with my dad, Peter, which was a little strange. I usually tried to keep my friends away from him, he would say horrible things about them behind their backs. But in those days when Elijah stopped off at my parents’ house he would chat and laugh with Peter. 

I write more about what happened with Elijah and myself in another chapter.

Chapter 7

The True History of Twitter

I wrote this chapter before the others, in the summer of ’22.

I pulled into Amherst on a Friday night. From a payphone at the edge of the common, I called my friend, but he didn't pick up, and I realized I didn't know where he lived.

The air was hot and muggy. Mosquito wings refracted in the headlights of passing cars. Down Main Street light was spilling out of storefronts, and there were people on the sidewalk, and I walked toward them and into a bar.

There was a tub of beer bottles floating in ice water, and I drank one almost in one go. He carded me for the second beer. The old wooden barroom, doors open to the night, was packed with people, most of them young. They wore baggy pants, and some of the girls had on short tops that showed their bellies and the tops of their hips.

A man at the bar started talking to me. He was about the age I am now, maybe a little younger. He wore a white polo shirt and was drinking from a small, stemmed glass.

He asked where I was from, and I said I'd driven across the country to help my friend with his software company, but he wasn't picking up and I didn't know where he lived.

"You just drove across the country, and you didn’t have anywhere to go, so you walked into a bar?"

"Yeah."

"Do you want another beer?"

I tried calling Evan again. I could hear the bell inside the heavy, touchtone phone as the bartender lifted it clear of its cord and stowed it away.

Evan Henshaw-Plath. History has him down as the original lead engineer of the company that became Twitter. That's about to happen, not far from here, this sweaty tavern in the year ‘99.

We grew up across the street from each other in Arcata. Evan was a year and change older, and I was fascinated by his projects, which he tackled with single-minded enthusiasm, building a spaceship out of an old potbellied stove, or digging a hole in the basement.

We lived on a street of old wooden houses, tall trees, and droning lawnmowers. As soon as my legs could carry me, I was over at his family’s house all the time, to get some relief from my own. Their house had dark woodwork lathed by a previous generation near the ceilings, and near the floors a maelstrom of toys and objects that were soon to be pressed into service as toys.

Evan's dad, George, had a marvelous leonine mustache. He'd attended an English public school and spoke with a beautiful crisp accent. Evan told me he was distantly in line to succeed the British throne, although there were complications related to injustices against their ancestors. Joyce, Evan's mom, kicked him out of the house when Evan and I were still small. The house became a haven for neighborhood kids, and sometimes other single moms and their kids who needed a place to stay.

Joyce had phone skills. If someone called looking for a woman who didn't want to be found, Joyce would smile into the receiver, stonewall, misdirect, lie, bluff, intimidate, and, if she had to, drop the precise coup de grace of moral fury she'd had ready the whole time. The sound, through the line, of a man fumbling the receiver as he hung up.

If the caller was a parent checking on a kid, or whose kid had come home bloody from the running, semi-serious war between shifting factions of neighborhood kids that was our ground state of being, Joyce would cuss us like a sailor until we were quiet, and then, picking up the receiver, would say the kids were fine. Wonderful, actually. Engaged in some educational activities at the moment.

One of the neighbor girls busted the side of Evan's face open with a brick. He called me and asked me to come over when he was back from the ER with stitches, and equipped for his convalescence with an unlimited subscription to America Online on a new home computer. He wanted to share the rush he was feeling, of opiates and connectivity.

After his head injury, Evan spent a lot of time in his room with the blinds down, hacking an evolving series of computers, listening to NPR sometimes. By then I'd found a new place to hide, a used bookstore downtown, built in the shell of an old bank.

The dome of a head, face lowered, eyes lost behind transition lenses and white eyebrows, pipe smoke in sunlight broken by the shapes of potted plants in the atrium. The building is from a time before architecture adapted to electric light. He's listening to classical music on a magazine-fed turntable, and only barely notices when you come in the store, the stately doors of the old bank. Cats range around him in erratic orbits, through handmade wooden stairways and cubbies. Other customers, if there are any, pick up the vibe, and no one ever enters a cubby someone else is in. You can sit and read as long as you want, with the voices of thousands of years waiting quietly around you.

He didn't stock porn or hate but there was so much else, as the private libraries of the college town ebbed and flowed through the cubbies: pulp sci fi and fantasy and cyberpunk, slim volumes printed by west-coast poetry presses, military and counterculture history, mysticism manuals, underground comix, fanzines, early self-published role-playing games, compendiums of old political cartoons, forgotten tomes with hand-cut pages and print you could feel with your fingertips, no jacket copy, no blurbs, no way to know what was in them but to read the pages.

In all the years I spent in the store, I only remember him saying something to me once. He tapped the paper cover of a book I was buying with his finger as we stood at the counter. He said, "You're reading Elie Wiesel. Good.”

I let the guy in the white polo buy me a beer. He told me he was wrapping up his life, getting ready to enter a monastery. Really? Really.

"Seven Storey Mountain," he said. "You should read that book. I dare you to read that book."

"Do you need a place to spend the night?”

I glanced at the bartender, who was half-listening to our conversation, and he relayed the information I needed with his eyes, 'Yeah, he's a regular, I know him, he's OK.'

We walked a few blocks to his apartment, on the ground floor of a nice complex. I can't remember his name now. We sat on the patio and drank beer and smoked cigarettes as the night got pleasantly cooler. He told me about his struggle with faith and decision to devote his life to spiritual practice. I said I was a reporter and it was hard for me to kick against the pricks, because the public service mission of the newspapers I'd worked for was actually the public face of a commercial mission, and decisions about what people did and didn’t get to know flowed from that. So now I was going to try something new, get in on this internet thing, see what that was all about, maybe start an internet newspaper.

We went inside and he went to his bedroom and I lay down on the couch, and we slept like monks. In the morning we drank coffee and ate bread and oranges and filled the sunlight over the table with cigarette smoke. I showered off the road, and when I came out, he was sitting at an old upright piano, painted white, that was crammed into a corner of the living room, and he played.

I'm sure I haven't it heard again. There was sheet music on the piano, but he didn't turn the pages. There was space between the notes, and like an old song it was all melody, translucent music with sunlight pouring through.

I called Evan again and he picked up. I walked back to the common and got my car and drove over to his place, which wasn't far. He was living on Pleasant Street, an old saltbox quartered into rentals and painted gray. He joked about the way the town named the streets as north or south of Main, and abbreviated the street signs, so depending on where you lived, it was either 'SO PLEASANT' or 'NO PLEASANT.'

His apartment was almost empty, hot sauce in the fridge, a mattress in the loft, a laptop charging on the carpet. I put my sleeping bag down in a corner and we took his car to the MetaEvents! office, which was in a new development near the Stop 'n' Shop in Hadley. He led me through a labyrinth of offgassing corridors to the upper floor. All around us, the eerie made emptiness of the unused commercial space. People must have stocked the vending machines and maintained the floors, but I never saw anyone in the building except the guys in Evan's company.

Two of them I knew already, Gareth, with ‘90s sideburns, and Kellan Elliot-McCrea, with a big three-dimensional head of hair, and there may have been one or two others, from computer science programs at nearby colleges. The office was one rectangular room, a conference table in the center and computers on tables along the walls. One wall was the edge of the building, and a bank of windows looked over the gentle greens of the Pioneer Valley, small fields, lines of trees, traces of sprawl. To my horror, I discovered there was no coffee for the coffeemaker. They offered me caffeinated mints as an alternative, and I ate too many. The next day I bought coffee and filters and cleaned out the machine.

We sat down at the conference table and had an intake meeting. Kellan asked me what I wanted to work on. I said I wanted to make software to put a community newspaper on the web. At the time you had be able to code to update a website, which was something very few editors, who were already, so to speak, specialists in writing code for humans, knew how to do. But if you had software that was easy to use, and easy for readers to read, you might be able to dispense with the dead tree edition altogether, which was by far the biggest expense and barrier to entry in the whole enterprise.

Evan and I said we'd work on it together, he'd think about the software and I'd think about the interface. He maintained a website on the side called Protest.net, which announced anti-globalization marches all over the world, and which he was getting tired of updating as more people sent in content. That was what the web was like back then, you waited for a page to load to see if it had been updated. He wanted to code a way for users to add their own updates, he was already thinking about it from that direction.

Don't worry about the money, Evan said, there'll be plenty of money, it's really about the stock options. They could write me in next round with the bean counters.

We never had a drink together. Most of them didn't drink or smoke, except Gareth smoked Parliaments. Evan was a teetotaler, or a Mountain Dew totaler more accurately. Their drug of choice was in the computers along the walls, and they introduced me. Civilization II: The Test of Time. My experience with video games up to that point was mostly as pieces of furniture you put quarters in, or console games that attached to a low-definition TV. You could beat them by memorizing patterns in the software environment and behavior of the automated enemies. But Civ took you deeper, deeper into the machine, if you will, a mentally immersive environment such as I'd never experienced. It seemed real enough when you were in it, and while you were, nothing from the outside world could matter, which for me, and I suspect, others, was accompanied by strong feelings of relief. I've been addicted ever since, and have used versions of the game off and on, sometimes for days at a time.

The room hushed, overhead fluorescents off, blinds down against the summer light. Young men checked out of their bodies, mentally welded to the terminals.

The company wasn't about forcing production, doing just to do, it was about making the space to really come up with something. And the null space of the game, or surfing conceptual art websites, or doing whatever, without intention, was part of that. In my memory it was Kellan who set that tone, his laid-back California cadence integrating terminology from his east-coast education. Don't let anything I say persuade you these weren't all very intelligent and perceptive guys. They were out for a big win on the electronic frontier, and they didn't trust conventional means to get it. There were no conventional means, anyway.

In the mornings, while Evan was asleep, I'd walk to a cafe and spend the money from my most recent reporting job on a ruinously expensive spread: a locally-sourced Danish, fair-trade coffee, and a crisp New York Times, and I'd smoke and read the paper in the sunny courtyard of the cafe among the chic denizens of Amherst.

On the drive to work one morning, Evan mentioned that Gareth had Heather's new phone number. When we got to the office I got it from him.

Heather. Go back three summers and draw a card. She was a physch major at Hampshire College, wanted to work with adolescent girls. One of the first times I saw her, not the first, but one of them, she was sitting cross-legged on a picnic table in a quad of one of the dorms, surrounded by other students, admirers, men and women. She's laughing, her eyes are almost black, her long hair flashes where the wind and sun catch it together, and the whole circle, all around the table, are all trying to talk to her at once, she's turning her flashing head to share it with each of them.

I never would have had the guts to talk with her if I'd known how beautiful she was, but I didn't, because we met online.

Late spring of the year I turned eighteen. I'd left home for the first time and was hitchhiking around the country. And like I did when I got tired, I went over to Evan's house. He was living, not in a dorm, but a "mod," a campus apartment shared with four or five other students, and a living room couch to crash on, at the edge of Hampshire's sprawling grounds, where there were old oaks and crumbling stone walls in the woods. Squirrels everywhere. Evan was playing an away game with Hampshire's ultimate frisbee club, The Red Scare, and I had his room, his desk, and his keyboard to myself.

Sunlight soaked the room through a big, clean window facing east toward campus, but you couldn't see the buildings, the modern tower of the library in the center, because of a rise of bright green grass and a few big oaks. As a hacker courtesy, Evan left me logged in to all his accounts, and I was exploring a chat server called Hamp on the campus intranet. It was different from anything I'd experienced because it was so much faster, practically instantaneous, which made a huge difference conversationally, chats over modem tended to take on a double-helix structure of each person replying to slightly obsolete replies. I could type faster, and more gracefully, than I could talk, so for me the speed of the intranet was like a pair of seven league boots. Heather and I made each other laugh through the machine, and then we met in person and smoked some cigarettes like cool ‘90s kids, and then Evan said his modmates kind of wanted their couch back, and Heather said I could stay in her dorm room. 

I lost what I'll call my voluntary virginity with her. Sex, especially then, produced a strange reaction in my body. What would begin in pleasure would quickly change to frozen trembling. I didn't think about where it meant I'd been, I just thought there was something wrong with me. Heather lay down beside me on the door room floor, kissed my cheek and held my hand. I don't remember what she said, but I remember the kindness in her voice, and she led me past where the ice melted.

She'd been in love before, she wanted me to know that, a steady boyfriend in high school, the singer in a grunge band. She had other suitors, but I felt what we had was deeper. I don't know, maybe it was because I felt safe with her. I went back west, applied to Hampshire, wrote my essays, and got my transcript. I’d gone to a small alternative high school held in a disused elementary school on a spit of Humboldt Bay. Evan went there too, we were more rivals than friends in those years, and played tackle football on the beach with some of the other kids just about every lunch period. 

I went to see my civics teacher to get a letter. Tutor, I should call him, I was the only kid in his class. John A. Jackson was his name, he lived in an apartment in Trinidad with Pam, his wife. They’d worked for small newspapers in southern California for most of their lives. John was near the end of his watch when I knew him, retired to a weekly column, his body destroyed by tobacco and cola soda, the lifelong stimulants of his mind. One bedroom in their otherwise neat apartment was choked with books, boxes of files, stacks of loose papers, and loud, bulky computers and modems. Maybe a half-played game of kriegspiel competing with everything else for horizontal space. 

You might think you live in a democracy, he taught me, but you don’t, you live in a republic. Franklin called it and that’s what it is. There’s only been one democracy, and that was ancient Athens.

Wait, I said, what about the Iroquois? The Althing? Burnaby’s Code? 

Ok, fine, he said. Athens is the one I know about. But let me tell you about Athens, because it’s worth hearing. They were different from the nations around them, because all citizens held sovereignty, and when they made decisions they got together in an amphitheater, as a city, as a country, and talked it out, sometimes at great length, and when they had to, they voted. He held up his hand, I know you’ll object to this next part, he said, but hear me out. Citizenship was limited to property-owning males. And some of the property they owned or believed they owned was other people. And that was probably their undoing, because the rich men in the amphitheater lost touch with the actual conditions of the country’s farms and military.

John though the problem was they just didn’t have a big enough amphitheater. If they’d listened to women, to workers, to soldiers. Listening to people, that was his newspaper creed. He told me when he was an editor he used to let the homeless come into his office, sit by his desk, and tell him their crazy for hours. 

“Why did you do that?” 

“It was my job.”

He was crazy about the nascent internet, which he called the “World Wide Wait.” Because now we finally almost had it, see? An amphitheater big enough for everyone.

When I went to see him to get a letter of recommendation for Hampshire, he asked me, in his earnest newspaper way, “What is it you hope to find there?” His eyes were clear gray. I said whatever I said and he wrote whatever he wrote but later, after I’d gotten an acceptance letter for the spring semester and was packing up to drive to school, I had a dream that was like a deeper answer to his question.

A summer night, the black sky of late summer, all the stars clear as life. The green muggy heat of New England around us, green grass, like and not like a football field, like a bowl, all grass, with a fire burning down in the center, and there were lots of people around, kids my age, mostly, in groups or talking across groups, some of them sitting on blankets. Like a music festival, but with a different energy, they were here, we were here, not for a show, but for each other.

A kid by the fire started speaking in a clear voice that filled the bowl, and people turned to listen. Then it was someone else’s turn. As the speakers who had finished made their way back uphill into the crowd, we felt like we knew them, because we’d heard them, and there were backslaps and handshakes and hugs. My turn came and I went down by the heat of the fire and said what I had to say, and was embraced as I had embraced others, and we knew each other, and the city knit itself together. 

That summer I went back east to see Heather, I rode freight trains with a kid I met at logging blockade in Oregon who called himself Marlow, who turned out to be a student at Amherst College. Heather was living in an apartment in Easthampton with another student, waitressing, working two or three jobs, trying to make as much as she could. She took a morning shift at Burger King and had nightmares about the machines. I thought it was all right to hang out and read library books and play video games at the pizza parlor while she worked. From an old blue-collar Maine family, she was in danger of being financially maimed for life by Hampshire's tuition. Mine was paid for. Did I really not see she was treading water as hard as she could while I floated nearby?

I think it's more accurate to say I couldn't face it. Money seemed so cruel and preposterous, and damaging to the people who got involved with it. But you have to have it to not think about it, which is part of the cruelty. It's one of the things I wake up at night regretting: that was my shift at Burger King, my share of the rent. If I'd behaved like a partner, I might have won her.

I moved into my dorm room in February, and Marlow invited Heather and I over to his girlfriend's family's house, an old place in Amherst not too far from Emily Dickinson's, not a party, nothing like that, but people from the village might drop by, it was that kind of house. Marlow's family was well-established in the valley, I'd stayed a night at their house after our freighthopping trip, it was a well-appointed old farmhouse on land delineated by stone walls, and inside there were original oil paintings on every wall surface. After the train, the people who had nothing who had helped us along the way, I recognized Marlow's embarrassment at his family's comfortable circumstances. I was glad we weren't staying at my parents' house.

Anyway, we were walking through town in the cold night air, at Marlow's girlfriend's parents' house there would be a woodstove in the kitchen and people from the village dropping by, and we would drink beer and hang out. I can't remember her name, I only met her the night I broke my skull, and all memory around that event is strange and lit with pain. But I think Heather recognized the pattern in her sweater, not just what it was called, but what it meant, and they were fast friends, walking arm in arm ahead of us under the streetlamps. Marlow was sporting on the sidewalk ice, running and sliding, and I joined in and flew into the pole of a street sign with my face.

We got to the house, there was a fire in the woodstove in the old kitchen, I took one sip of beer and felt very bad. Heather drove me a long way to find an ER, it was late by then, we had to go all the way to Easthampton. Closed skull fracture, nothing we can do for it. But the next day a clinic had a new painkiller "that's less addictive."

"You've changed, Jake," Heather said. I spent most of my time in my doom room with the blind down, sleeping or listening to music. Classes intimidated me, more than once I spoke up and found myself saying something foolish. I said something sarcastic to Heather and she broke it off formally. 

Marlow came to see me in my dark doom room. He told me gently he was disappointed by my drug use. He said I wasn't respecting my capacity as a person or an activist. His is one of the faces I sometimes think I see in a crowd, but of course he wouldn't have the same face now.

I kept going to doctors who would say there was nothing they could do, and write another prescription. Eventually the pharmacy flagged me, and I made a jagged transition to buying weed from campus dealers. There are some friends and neighbors I remember well from that semester, but when it was over, I had no desire to return. I went to western Montana and ended up working for a small-town newspaper.

I waited until Evan left for the office and called Heather's new number. She answered, she was doing well, transferred to a state school, she liked it there, she was with a new guy, it was pretty serious, she'd moved on. We said goodbye and I cried a while and then drove to the office.

Was it that night? Evan came back to the apartment late, when I was already asleep. I dreamed my grandma Giska, who'd died a few years earlier, was crouching over me, gently smoothing back my hair, but of course I also knew it was Evan touching my face and buzz cut and I moved and heard him go up in the loft.

Next night I went back to the bar, but the monk drinking from the funny glass was gone, packed up and gone to join his order, probably. "Yup," the bartender nodded when I asked. That was exactly what had happened. Out in the crush of the street, I found a weed man in front of a cafe. Flat brim hat, gold grill. He pushed the bags into my hand. Sweet.

"How's your night going?"

"How's yours?”

"Want to smoke one?"

I miss that since Covid, and maybe it'll never be the same again, like sex was never the same after AIDS, but I miss sharing cannabis and conversation with strangers, the simple pleasure of passing a joint. Or a blunt, excuse me, Willie smoked blunts. He cracked me up doing voices, imitating his customers, the college kids, all the bullshit they put him through.

I stayed out in the muggy nights, drinking cold beer dressed in paper bags, sharing the blunts in Willie's circle, buying a bag for the morning. Did I know I was waiting for Evan to fall asleep before I went back to the apartment each time?

One night we were smoking behind the CVS, the same pharmacy that flagged me for opiates during my trainwreck semester. Wait, the cops are here, cars converging fast, lights flashing, the old round halogen lightbars, Willie's friends take off, and here getting searched it's him, me, and a young woman in a stroller who Willie has been pushing around and who seems very high. She's also wearing a fur coat despite the heat. Cop finds my knife, a lockblade I always carried.

"I'm taking this," he says.

"Why?"

"Because it can hurt me."

Our IDs clear and Willie has not a speck of dope on him. We were walking back to Main Street and I said I'd catch up with him, I'm going to the cop shop to get my knife.

Willie looked at me like a snake he'd almost stepped on. I'm not a cop, I said, I'm just not afraid of them because I worked for newspapers. They can't just take your shit, that's the Constitution, and I know it's a legal carry because I looked it up on the internet.

He looked unconvinced.

"That’s a thirty dollar knife," I said.

"OK, Captain America, go get your knife."

I was afraid of him now. We were both still feeling the encounter with the police. He turned back toward me midway across the street.

"Hey," he said. "What are you? Writin' a book or something?"

"No. I mean, I don't know. Maybe. It's possible."

He squared up in his dealer stance, grill flashing in the sodium streetlamp. "If you are, make me look good."

The foyer of the police station in Amherst was a brightly lit glass cube. I went in, picked up the phone, talked to the dispatcher, the desk sergeant came to the window, listened while I asked for my knife, ran my ID again, told me to wait. Half an hour later he came back, handed me my knife. "I don't know why he took that from you," he said.

I saw Willie the next night, no hard feelings, but I bought twice as much and we didn't smoke together. I rolled my own joint and smoked with some kids behind the CVS. "Hey," one of them said to me. He was a local college kid with a Massachusetts accent, and I guess he knew the cops. "They want you to know. Willie's dangerous. They think he's killed people, they just can't prove it yet."

I was almost out of money, anyway. I asked Evan if the company could pay me something, but he said this wasn't a good time right now with the investors, and it didn't help that I was hanging around the office all day playing video games, they might drop by. The next morning I asked him in front of the others if he was ready to work on that project we'd said we do. He was, actually. He'd been thinking about it from his end. I'd been thinking about it myself, mornings at the cafe with the paper, and browsing news sites on the office's superfast internet connection.

We stood at the whiteboard. The others swiveled around to listen. I picked up a red marker. "OK," I said. I drew the screen of a desktop computer monitor, wider than it was tall. "Here's your news website," I drew a browser window inside the edge of the monitor. "Up here, your name, the date, your motto, whatever you want," a long box across the top of the screen, "display ads over here," a column on the right, "you can crop them out by shrinking the browser window, which is nice for reading, but advertisers still get their money's worth, because local newspaper advertising is mostly an economy of goodwill, people want to see the ads sometimes."

I drew a square in the remaining space. "Here's your news, this is the part that changes all the time. This is the part I've been thinking about."

News websites at the time were nowhere near as pleasant or coherent an experience as reading the paper at the cafe. Some newspapers put images of their print pages on the web, you could walk to the corner and buy a paper before one loaded. Others had headlines you could click on, but one missed or foolhardy click could mean minutes of waiting just to be able to go back and try again, glitchy display ads trying to load coming and going. Watching myself read the paper and browse the web, I'd noticed that the headlines alone weren't enough information to make a good decision about whether to invest attention in a story, I explained. With the physical paper, my eyes would see the headlines, and photos, of course, and when one of them caught my eye, I would scan the first paragraph of the article, called a lede in newsrooms. I told them a lede was supposed to encapsulate the newest and most relevant information in a story, and a good one will generate interest or even suspense to draw readers into the details.

I drew a field of boxes in the news space, wider than they were tall, about the dimension of a newspaper lede on the page, each with a few lines of text inside, each a link to a full story. As an editor, you had to be able to plug in different ledes and stories, and move them around, your most important story in the upper left, probably, where the eye goes first for most people who read left to right.

"And you want to be able to update it from anywhere, right?" Evan said.

"Well, yeah.”

"See, I think it should look like this," he took the pen and drew a single column of boxes. "I can tweak Calendrome to do this. The newest update just pushes the others down one."

"But the newest information isn't always the most important."

He waved his hand, "We'll fix that later. This is good, I'm going to work on this." He went back to his computer, started typing.

A couple of days later he called me over to his workstation. He seemed excited. "You can update the stack with a text message," he said. "I think this is a Protestnet thing."

He said he saw it as a tactical tool for protesters, an equalizer. I still wanted software for an internet newspaper, but he said he was too busy with the texting tool now.

I think I called my mom to get the money to drive back across the county, either that or I mooched it from Kellan. I got to California and started working for a paper in Garberville, (a part of my life I expand on in the next chapter.)

A few years later I saw “Biz” Stone on TV calling himself a founder of Twitter, and I thought, 'I didn't see you around the whiteboard.' 

Despite all the work Evan and others put in to making the idea a reality, I was disappointed that they sold the company without consulting me, and were less than forthcoming about its origin.

Chapter 8

Journalism 101

When I got back from Amherst, Peter wanted to send me to NYU to study journalism. We flew out there to visit the school, and stayed in a hotel in lower Manhattan, where if you put your hand to the wall, you could feel the vibrations of trains deep underground. We sat in on a class, which was good, in a nice building, and the students all seemed very polished. 

Peter was anxious about my application after I’d bailed out of Hampshire. He wanted me to take a semester of journalism classes at Humboldt to show I could get good grades, and I was duly enrolled and took photojournalism and newspaper lab, which was writing for the Lumberjack on a credit/no credit basis. 

Midway through the semester, I started working for the Independent in Garberville, delivering and writing, commuting in my parents’ old Subaru. I have to say I loved that car. By the time I drove it, Helmut at German Motors had rebuilt the engine, turning it into an inconspicuous, front wheel drive hotrod. 

The Indy had just been purchased from the woman who founded it by a local family, the Kirbys, and the new editor, Ted Kirby, was a kid my age. The commute and delivery run gave me an excuse to take caffeine pills, down through the Eel River canyon in all kinds of weather, and east to Lakeport, with its bowling alley full of video games, to drop off the pasted-up newspaper pages (they were too much information to email in those days) and pick up the printed papers hours later, reeking of warm ink, and delivering all the next day, out to Shelter Cove and along the Avenue of the Giants and up 101 to Arcata. 

Around this time I also wrote profiles of local environmentalists for the Econews in Arcata. Sid Dominitz was the editor then, and he didn’t pay me, but gave me journalism advice and told me stories about his days working for a wire service in London, and “the real ink-stained wretches of Fleet Street,” when I visited him the warren of offices and library shelves and tacked up old political cartoons that was the old Northcoast Environmental Center.

I got credit in newspaper lab, but didn’t follow the assignment for the final project in photo-j and got a ‘C.’ My transcript was never sent to NYU, and my application was declined as incomplete. I think I was too afraid of Peter to admit to myself that I didn’t really want to go. Journalism was something I’d found on my own. I was getting paid to write, in a way that could potentially be helpful to my own community, what could be better than that? If I went to New York, maybe I could get into it at a higher level, but then it would be because Peter had paid to send me there. I hadn’t figured out everything he was up to, but I knew I wanted to have as little to do with him as possible. 

My brother, Ben, did more of what our dad wanted. By this time he’d taken physics at Humboldt and graduated high school and gone on to Brown University, where he was getting into string theory and a table-top roleplaying game scene. Carolyn told me that something had happened to him there in his roleplaying club, people were really awful to him, she said, but apparently he’d given few details, and she wouldn’t say more.  

One morning at the Indy office, Ted said he’d heard at the coffee shop that a body had been found in Redway. I was in town to drive the pages down to Lakeport after Ted finished laying out the week’s issue, our paper came out the next day, so I only had a few hours to get the story. I got to Redway, and by asking around, found the place the body had been found, the loading dock of the Redway post office, and talked with a first responder. I looked around, lifted the lid of a nearby dumpster. It has just been emptied, there was nothing inside except a rubber glove. A homeless-looking guy came up to me as I was looking in the dumpster. Did I want to know what happened? Yeah, I did. He told me drunk kids from a house party had beat another homeless man to death in his sleeping bag for no real reason. 

I drove to the cop shop in Garberville, a Sheriff’s substation, and Estelle Fennel was there, on the same story, she was the anchor for KMUD News for many years, and went on to be a County Supervisor for a while. She got us in to see a Sheriff’s lieutenant, and I told him what I’d heard and he confirmed a lot of it, and added some new details. Back at the Indy, I wrote up the story and Ted put it on the front page. Just as we were wrapping up, the press release about the homicide from the Sheriff’s office came through on the fax machine. I went off on the delivery run, and the next day the Times-Standard had only a brief mention of the crime, based on the press release, and the Indy had the story, we’d scooped the big guys. 

After the story ran, someone left a wreath of flowers where the body had been found. A kid from a prominent family in Garberville went to prison for the killing.

A few weeks later, I was driving the delivery out of Garberville towards Redway, and I saw a homeless-looking guy being hassled, it looked like, by Sheriff’s deputies, who backed off as I drove by, and the guy stuck out his thumb and I pulled over and picked him up. Back then, I picked up just about every hitchhiker I saw, hitchhiking was pretty common in SoHum, and since my job was to listen to people, it seemed like a good opportunity for that. 

The guy I picked up that day, his last name was Blevins on the court paperwork, talked an incoherent blue streak on the way to Redway. He dug into his bag and pulled out a small grocery sack stuffed with fresh psychedelic mushrooms. Want some? Sure, I said, and took a mushroom and put it in a compartment in the car. As I pulled up for my first delivery in Redway, a Highway Patrol car rolled up behind me, lights flashing. 

The cop said he pulled me over because I didn’t have a seatbelt on, and announced he was going to search the car, because, if I remember right, Blevins announced that he had drugs on him. The cop popped into my car and pulled the mushroom out of the console without bothering to notice my weed, which was also illegal at the time. We were arrested and handcuffed, and I watched the cop search Blevins and pull out an impressive parade of drugs and paraphernalia, which he lined up on the hood of my car. I convinced the cop to let me use his cell phone to call the Kirbys to let them know their papers were on the way to the tow yard. Blevins was even more incoherent on the long, handcuffed ride in the back of the patrol car up to jail in Eureka, where I spent that day and night and the next day until Peter hired a lawyer and bailed me out. 

I was originally charged with felony transportation of controlled substances. When I met the lawyer, he asked me what happened, and I told him. 

“Sounds like a setup,” he said, and thought I could fight the case. But the next time I talked with him, he said, no, no, he could get the case diverted to drug court, and I should do that. He was a private attorney, and a trial would have been expensive, and I didn’t want to ask Peter for money.

The Kirbys, to their credit (in my personal opinion,) didn’t fire me, and I went through Judge Watson’s drug court, stopping off at the courthouse a couple of days a week to have a probation officer watch me pee into a cup. Blevins, who I saw in the court paperwork had a long rap sheet full of prostitution and vagrancy arrests, was to my knowledge never charged in connection with the incident.   

I sold a few spot news photos to Michael Hughes, the photo editor at the Times-Standard. He was kind to me for the most part, and taught me a lot about newspaper photography, even though he didn’t talk much. Sometimes his forearms were red or purple from the darkroom chemicals.

That spring Connie Rux, who was the editor of the Times-Standard, got in touch and asked me to come in to her office. I’d already met her once, and the editor before her, by walking into the newsroom and asking for a job. But this time, she called me. She’d noticed her paper, which was a daily at the time, had been scooped more than once by a weekly out of the hills, and offered me a job covering public safety countywide. I gave notice at the Indy and started working in the big, windowless newsroom on the second floor of the TS building, where all the desks were equipped with new, candy-colored Mac computers, but more than half of them were empty due to staff cuts. There was a lot of spot news on my beat, and sometimes I’d write a story up against the evening deadline, hearing and feeling the rumble of the press machinery starting on the ground floor as I typed as fast as I could. 

I sat next to John Driscoll, who was only a little older than me, and went on to work in U. S. Representative Huffman’s office. Other people in the newsroom when I was there included David Anderson, who was old school, he’d been in the Army and to Harvard, and answered the phone at his spectacularly cluttered desk with a polished tone. There was Rhonda Parker, a veteran courts reporter, and Ben Hoffman, who wrote a music column and went on to work for the New York Times, and David Jervis, a copy editor who also did layout and rented from my parents, and there was Glenn Franco Simmons, the city editor, which made him like second in command in the newsroom. 

Glen badmouthed Connie every chance he got, as well as the publisher and the corporation that owned the Times-Standard at the time, it had recently been bought and sold more than once. “They trade us like baseball cards,” David Anderson said. 

  Meanwhile, Peter had planned a backcountry canoeing trip in Alaska that summer. He liked to organize backcountry trips, hiking in the Trinities or Sierras, or canoeing in the far north. He seemed particularly interested in the logistics of what he called “wilderness expeditions,” and in buying and preparing the equipment, which for this trip included a shotgun in case of bears. 

Peter was bringing another professor couple, and some people, I think, from his lab on campus, the Schatz Energy Research Center, which was funded, he said, by an eccentric old businessman from Palm Desert, L. W. Schatz, who made his money in “plastics.” 

To entice my brother and I to go on the trip, he told us each to invite a friend, and I invited Elijah. But then I got the job at the Times-Standard, which had been unexpected, and I didn’t want to ask for time off right after I’d started, and I liked what I was doing better than spending any more time around Peter. Because I wasn’t going, Elijah got uninvited from the trip, and understandably, wasn’t happy about it. 

Around this time Peter got friendly with Rob Arkley, Sr., a prominent local businessman, they both lifted weights at a quiet little gym in the basement of the old Stewart school. It seemed an unlikely alliance, Peter presented himself as a liberal and environmentalist, the Arkleys were, and are, conservative Republicans who publicly acknowledge their wealth, are involved in local politics and finance, and, especially before the ‘08 financial crisis, local property development. For a while Peter was talking about building a new Schatz “center” on the balloon tract or track, a property behind Nilsen Feed in Eureka that the Arkleys wanted to develop, but it didn’t happen. 

I think it’s possible that after his dad, Arthur, died in ‘98, Peter had a lot, lot more money than he let on. That was around the time the Schatz lab started getting a lot of money, too.

I remember Peter saying around that time that you couldn’t let money sit around or it would shrink, you had to do things with it, but I thought he was just talking about buying mutual funds or something like that. I could look on our family AOL account anytime and see my parents’ supposedly modest investment portfolio fluctuate with the markets. 

Someone whispered to me that new restaurant chain Chipotle was actually a less spicy clone of Hey Juan’s (before they changed their recipes), the burrito shop in Northtown Arcata, where Peter’s softball team would eat and drink beer after their games.

Peter was flying to Washington D. C. for “conferences” more than ever in those days, and I think it’s possible he began making major political donations. He told me he’d met Al Gore, and he was a super nice guy. Peter was bitterly disappointed when Gore conceded the ‘00 election. Later he told me he’d declined the presidency of the National Hydrogen Association, because if he’d accepted, he might have ended up having to shake George W. Bush’s hand.

Peter also told me stories about “foreign dignitaries” he’d met, supposedly about hydrogen research. There were Russians who entertained with caviar and cigarettes and vodka like it was water, and a Chinese guy who visited Humboldt and said, according to Peter, “Every house here is like the emperor’s.” Peter also mentioned visiting the Cabazon reservation is southeastern California several times.

Back in the newsroom, Glen said he was friendly with the Arkleys, too. He’d worked for them for a number of years before transitioning back to journalism. Glen was a force of personality in the office, he flattered as much as he backbit. He seemed a little paranoid, too, he was always warning me about being fed false information, always on the lookout for what called setups. He would whisper, very secretively, that the Arkleys were going to fund a new paper, that he, Glen, would run, that would put the Times-Standard out of business.

Glen eventually did get his paper, it was called the Eureka Reporter, and it competed with the Times-Standard for a few years before going under.

Connie sent me to cover an event held in a classroom at the Trinidad school, a presentation by a group called Friends of Afghanistan, spearheaded by retired international aid workers who were trying to get the word out about recent political developments in Afghanistan. I think I was the only journalist there. I took notes and watched a slide show about the political history of Afghanistan, which focused on some bad dudes called the Taliban who were beginning to interfere with international development. 

I leaned against a gate outside the classroom, in the low, salt-mellowed evening sun of the approaching autumn of ‘00, and had a long talk with two of the presumably retired international aid workers. They were very, very, nice and normal seeming, well dressed and groomed and spoken, almost motherly and fatherly in their solicitude as they asked me why I liked journalism, and about my plans for the future. They told me they needed crusading journalists, or words to that effect, to get people in America to care about the awful things that were happening to people in Afghanistan, some of whom they knew personally and cared deeply about. Was I up for something like that? I said I’d think about it. 

Back at the office, I went through my notes. There were a lot of interesting facts and some useable quotes, but something about the vibe at the whole event seemed off to me, as if everyone there hadn’t been quite what they seemed, or meant quite what they said. I didn’t turn the story in, and Connie let it slide.

Not long after that I was using the bathroom at my parents’ house, and Peter walked in and said he was really impressed by the job I was doing at the Times-Standard, and it would be great if he and I could work together someday, presumably at the Schatz lab. 

“I don’t think we do the same kind of work,” I said, and he grimaced and walked out. 

A little while after that, I wrote a story about a man who’d been arrested after allegedly brandishing a knife at a Sheriff’s deputy. I’d talked to the Sheriff’s department and gotten some good details, and I wrote that the man had advanced on the deputy, and before the deputy disarmed the man, he was ‘running out of room.’ Somewhere between when I turned in the story for Glen to edit and when it was printed and distributed countywide, ‘running out of room’ was changed to ‘running out of the room.’ See how adding that one word, ‘the,’ changes the meaning of the phrase?

Word came back to the newsroom that the whole Sheriff’s department wanted me fired because I’d called one of theirs a coward in print, which hadn’t been my intention at all, and I said so. I didn’t get fired, but Connie changed my beat from public safety to small city governments, and I had to write a letter of apology to the deputy. Glen told me what to write, and I signed it and walked the couple of blocks over to the courthouse and asked for the deputy at the Sheriff’s counter and gave him the letter. 

“Well,” he said. “I guess it took some balls to come over here in person.” I guess he assumed I’d mail the letter. 

Not long after that, I wrote a story, an interview, of a person who was embarrassed by one of the things I’d quoted them as saying, and claimed they hadn’t said it. They had, it was right there in my notebook, which I showed Connie, but she said it didn’t matter if they’d really said it, because it was poor judgement to include a quote that ended up embarrassing them, and she was firing me for that. 

Sid thought I should fight it, that it was bullshit, I was being railroaded, he said I should make it a “cause célèbre,” but I said if they didn’t want me there, then I didn’t want to be there. Not long after that the NEC burned down in what Sid called a ‘suspicious fire’ in an issue of the Econews. The NEC moved around a few times after that, but it was never the same kind of hangout space the old office had been, and I didn’t write many more articles for the Econews. 

Chapter 9

Free Reading

I started going to San Francisco State in the spring of ‘02, and I started thinking about starting my own paper. I figured I’d seen it done enough to handle the business of a small paper. My concept was a community literary journal, with poetry, comics, art photography, clearly labeled fiction, and especially literary nonfiction. True stories that weren’t all about the politicians and supposedly important people who filled the pages of mainstream newspapers. I’d use the business model of an urban alt weekly, funded by advertising and free to readers, and eventually, because I couldn’t think of a better name, I called the paper Free Reading. 

I sent out an email to friends and family asking for content, printed a mockup of the first issue, and sold ads that summer, mostly in Humboldt but also in the city, I had the idea that my paper could be like a cultural bridge between the two. I should say the I wasn’t the first or only one trying out different ideas with newsprint in that era. There were already papers around like the Steelhead Special, Comic Relief, and Greenfuse. Savage Henry came along a few years later. 

Peter had a lot of questions for me about my paper. What was I going to publish, and where would it be distributed, and who was I going to send it to? He was especially concerned about me writing about our family, and told me not to. I said I’d write about whatever I wanted to. 

Elijah had questions too, he was more focused on whether the paper would take a political stance. He was more interested in politics than ever in those days, reading or at least carrying around serious nonfiction books about revolutions, occasionally dropping hints about acts of sabotage claimed by the Earth Liberation Front. 

That summer the strangest thing happened to me, which I didn’t understand until many years later. I mostly slept at my parents’ house while I was selling ads in Humboldt, and I started thinking . . . about molotov cocktails. Not about violence, or fire, or historical WWII battles, but very specifically about molotov cocktails themselves, gasoline in a glass bottle with a cloth wick. I couldn’t make heads or tails or it, tried to shake it off. I knew molotov cocktails weren’t something I was really interested in.

In high school, probably influenced by my parents’ interest in radical environmentalism, I’d talked with Elijah plenty about radical politics, monkeywrenching and revolution. He still hung out with people who were into those things, but I was a different person after I’d seen some of the world and worked for newspapers. I believed then and still believe now that conflict can’t really change the world, but communication can.

I delivered the first issue of Free Reading in the fall, and a second issue over winter break. In January ‘03, Elijah and I and another kid from our high school, Jared, who I might write more about later, took a road trip down to southern California, distributing what was left of the papers along the way. We stopped in the Los Padres national forest to drop Jared off for some solo hiking. Sitting around a campfire in the sagebrush, Elijah said his ELF friends had scouted the perfect target, the headquarters of an evil corporation, Occidental Petroleum, which was housed in a wooden building that would be easy to burn down. I said that sounded really fucking stupid and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. 

Elijah and I drove down to Joshua Tree national park, where he wanted to meet some people who were staying in the campground, but they weren’t there when we arrived, and there was no note for Elijah, even after he’d checked all the campground bulletin boards, and he seemed sad, and the drive back north was kind of quiet. 

Elijah bought some land in Alaska, a few acres in a place called “hippie cove,” near the town of Cordova, where he’d commercial fished out of for a few seasons. Him and a bunch of kids who were all a little bit cooler than me, like Olin, who’d grown up in SoHum and was a performing musician and drew some great comics for Free Reading, were all going up to Elijah’s land in the summer of ‘03, to help him build a cabin and live the dream. He invited me up there too, and I was super excited about it. 

Chapter 10

The Molotov

I didn’t get to go to Elijah’s land that summer, which he sold not long after. Instead, I was in a conference room in the federal building in San Francisco, trying to explain to an assistant U. S. attorney how I’d been caught with a molotov cocktail at an antiwar demonstration in the spring.  

Her name was Elise Becker. I have no idea what became of her because it does not do to google one’s prosecutor. But I remember her as one who held up a lamp during my journey through the system. 

She was short, she wore heels but she was only as tall as me. We were both younger and smaller than the cops and my lawyer, beefy middle-aged men, the two ATF guys who first led me into the federal building in an orange smock with hands cuffed to a leather belt, through a secure vehicle entrance in the basement, up an elevator to a holding cell, and then to a magistrate judge reading “the United States versus Jacob Lehman,” and then my parents, and then the halfway house. But that day, I took BART from where I was living, by that time, in the East Bay, and we walked down the hall together, all in our clothes. I think I wore a plain dress shirt and slacks. This was a plea deal in progress, I was supposed to tell them what I could and they would make an offer, or possibly they wouldn’t. We sat down, and my lawyer, Doron, opened his briefcase on our side. There wasn’t much in it but a Beatles songbook. “For one of my kids,” he said. His belches smelled like margaritas. 

I’d wanted the federal defender, but Peter made sure that didn’t happen, hired a lawyer real quick, the first lawyer pulled up to where I was living right after my arrest, and said from his car, “no interview.” 

One of the cops arresting me said, “That your lawyer?”

“I guess,” I said.

Doron was the second lawyer Peter hired in the case. During my initial interview with his assistant, she said I had a great case for jury nullification, which basically meant that while I’d broken the law, I hadn’t hurt anyone, and a San Francisco jury probably wouldn’t send me to prison. 

But when I met Doron, he was all about me pleading guilty. 

“What about a jury trial?” I said. 

“With what money?” Doron said. Peter had already given him a very large amount of money just to begin the case, and wasn’t going to pay for a jury trial.

Doron said the feds might let me off with a misdemeanor if I named the people I’d been with in the antiwar protest. Elijah made it clear to me that doing so would be a very bad idea. 

So, there I was in the federal building, trying to explain myself without naming any names. 

“I was having a tough semester,” I began. The second semester of O-Chem, tough stuff. For spring break I wanted to go out in the wilderness with my chemistry book and study.

“That’s always been a source of strength for me,” I said. There Elise nodded, looked at me warily, I hadn’t really seen her eyes yet. The cops and Doron were bored, waiting for the crime.

I didn’t want to go out in the wilderness by myself, I said, so I tried to get a friend (Elijah) to go with me. My friend, up in Humboldt, he had spring break too. But he said he wanted to come to the city and protest the war, so I said OK, I’d do that. I drove up to Humboldt when? The weekend before, probably, and met with my friend and a circle of people who wanted to come down and protest. I said they could stay at my place in the city.

Was it the second day or the third that I made the molotov cocktail? I don’t know, check the dates. They kept waking me up and I didn’t get any sleep.

“Wait, back up,” Elise said. “Where did you get the gasoline?”

They brought it down, two guys, they said they hadn’t had time after work to put away their brush clearing things. “Can I leave it in the backyard?” The older one asked, a middle-aged guy (who gave his name as Peter, same as my dad) and was already lugging the gas can. 

“I don’t care if you make a molotov cocktail with it,” he said, and smiled winningly.

(The younger guy said his name was Doc, and he was in a Humboldt County band called Rooster McClintock. He told me about a band called the Be Good Tanyas, and played ‘Lakes of Pontchatrain’ on my guitar. After he’d won my admiration, he talked about molotov cocktails on a regular basis over the next couple of days.)

Yes, I said, some of the other kids were talking about burning things. Going out at night and starting trash fires, (Olin said he was “setting a bad example,”) they were talking about molotov cocktails like they were the coolest thing, yes, they brought those rubber gloves, no, I didn’t use them when I made the molotov cocktail, no, I don’t know why. Yes, I wanted to impress them and fit in. No, no one told me to do it. I made it in the kitchen after they’d all gone downtown on the train. 

I don’t know why I lingered, I told her, but remembering now, I remember feeling terrible indecision in the pit of my stomach and going through with it to relieve the tension. Did they really not tell me to make it? Only not in so many words, only indirectly, only maybe you should. I remember asking Elijah, point blank, he was the last one leaving with the group for the train, “Should I really make a molotov cocktail?” And him saying nothing at all, shrugging his shoulders, then saying “See you later,” as he walked out the door.

But I didn’t tell them all that. The ATF guys wanted a lot of details about the device, as the law has it, the molotov cocktail, and then Elise got into what did I intend to do with it?

I didn’t really know, I said. But I decided to get rid of it while I was riding the N-Judah downtown, and we came out of that tunnel by that park, Duboce Park, Doron supplied, one of the very few things he said during the whole interview. Yeah, I said. I didn’t want anything to do with my molotov cocktail after that, that’s why I tried to ditch it. 

“What did you see?” she asked. 

“Just people in the park, having a normal day.”

  “What were they doing?”

“I don’t know, you know, playing with their dogs, hanging out, just having a normal day.”

“What else did you see?”

I wonder if she was trained to do this, to take me back to the moment, kind of like a therapist would, but of course this was an interrogation. 

I saw it, and I said it. “Little kids, right there where the train comes out, you know they have that playground right up against the tracks and there are windows. I saw little kids, playing.”

That was when I saw her eyes. She raised her hand off the table just a little.

The federal mandatory minimum sentence for using a molotov cocktail would have been 30 years without parole.

In February ‘04 I started a six-month sentence at a federal medium-low security prison in southern California. As this was happening, my mom had been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer. She and Peter went into a kind of emergency mode, he carried around canned protein shakes that he made her drink to keep her strength up, they researched treatments and flew to all the most expensive clinics to consult with doctors. Eventually my mom was accepted into an experimental immunotherapy trail. The treatment she received was ruled a failure because my mom was the only one who survived, and the doctors couldn’t explain why. Over twenty years later, as far as I know, she’s still in remission. 

Nothing was the same for me after I got out of prison that summer, people just didn’t see me the way they had before. I transferred to Humboldt State, published a few more issues of Free Reading, was production editor of the Toyon one year, didn’t graduate, worked for Paul Giuntoli for a summer, pulled brush in SoHum, worked at Sun Valley, got older. 

In ‘06 a bunch of indictments came down for ELF arsons that occurred in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. The FBI called the case ‘Operation Backfire.’ Backfiring, by the way, in forestry, is a technique of controlling wildfire by deliberately setting fires. Elijah’s ex-girlfriend, Kendall Tankersly, aka Sarah Kendall Harvey, and several other people went to prison, but Elijah wasn’t named. I haven’t spoken to him in years, since I sent him an email that said I couldn’t trust him. Kendall did her time, and went on to open an ice cream shop. 

Chapter 11

“What’s Wrong with Being a Zombie?”

Ben worked as an undergraduate in a theoretical physics lab. He got his degree, but was bitter about the experience. First of all, he said, the professor had stolen his ideas and put his own name on them. What was worse, the theoretical framework of string theory was probably bullshit. It was all based on math that was accountable to itself rather than empirical or experimental observation, and the math was so complicated that very few people actually understood it, but the academic world was full of people who were invested in having an intelligent persona, people like peer reviewers at scientific journals, or people involved in funding research. Once they’d decided to bluff about understanding the math, you could pretty much tell them anything, and the whole thing was basically an “emperor’s new clothes” situation. 

“It’s no better than a mystery religion,” he said.

  Ben also took some Asian studies classes at Brown. After he graduated, he went to an accelerated Chinese language program at Cornell University. One day when we were both at our parents’ house, probably for a holiday, he showed me a huge book Peter had given him, a Chinese-English technical and scientific dictionary, published in Hong Kong. 

Ben was an exchange student in China while I was in prison, and my parents visited him in Beijing in the spring of ‘04. I would have insisted on going on the trip if I hadn’t been locked up, I’d been talking about wanting to go to China since before Ben got interested in the language. 

It may be interesting to note that in the summer of ‘03, according to news reports at the time, the CIA was essentially routed out of mainland China when Chinese counterintelligence got inside CIA coded electronic communications, killed agents and expelled officers.

In the period after Peter returned from China, Humboldt State, which had been a quiet campus where nothing seemed to change much, started building a bunch of new buildings.

Writing this, I’m reminded of how Peter used to like to play SimCity on one of the old Mac computers my family had when I was a kid. Peter currently has a seat on the Arcata Planning Commission. The last time I talked to him, he hinted that he is involved with many local development projects, including building a highrise neighborhood in Arcata, a public transit hub in Old Town, and offshore wind turbines. 

Peter used to gripe about KHSU, the college public radio station. Back then it was a super local community station, like a KMUD of the north county, but Peter thought the volunteer DJs presented the wrong image for the university. Later, the university fired the KHSU staff, locked out the DJs, and transitioned the station to an all-NPR format. Peter also used to talk about how he thought Humboldt should transition to being a polytechnic university. He’d gone to a polytechnic after all, and the designation would draw the kind of students who would be interested in what the Schatz lab was doing. 

Except it was hard to tell what, exactly, the Schatz lab was doing. Peter kept getting more “funding,” hiring more employees, flying to conferences and meetings, often in Washington, D. C., and hosting visitors, but the lab never seemed to produce anything except a portable demonstration fuel cell, which they called “stack in the box.” 

In mid-March of ‘06, my brother Ben, on break from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was an Asian studies graduate student, came back to Humboldt, and while he was here, my mom and brother told me, he got into a terrible argument with Peter, in which they both got very angry. Ben told me he was trying to express something along the lines of what he thought he understood from reading a Chinese classical text called the Laozi, that engaging in the world’s conflicts wasn’t a way to solve them. Peter in those days was fanatical about opposing the Bush administration.

“So you’re just going to be a zombie, then?” Ben quoted Peter as saying. 

My brother replied, and as he was telling me about it, he emphasized, for reasons I didn’t understand at the time, that this is exactly what he said to Peter: “What’s wrong with being a zombie?”

On March 25th, 2006, there was a mass shooting in Ben’s neighborhood in Seattle, Capitol Hill, at an afterparty for a zombie-themed rave. Reading about the life of the shooter, there are in my view indications that he was brainwashed in a way similar to how my mom, brother, and I were brainwashed. 

Ben was different after the shooting. At the time, I didn’t know what was eating him, but I was worried about him. I went to visit him in his apartment on Capitol Hill that he shared with his girlfriend at the time, Alexis, who he’d met in his Chinese program, and was also an Asian studies graduate student.

Alexis had Southern manners, she was the daughter of a Green Beret turned death penalty lawyer and a federal prosecutor. There was kind of a heavy vibe in their apartment. The bathroom was so moldy I cleaned it when I got there. Even the cat seemed a little sad. Alexis seemed genuinely upset when I put mushrooms in some pasta sauce I was making, and we got takeout instead. 

In the sunlight the next morning, getting coffee and walking through a park, Ben was his old ebullient, intelligent self, but it seemed to be coming from further inside him, and with greater effort. He seemed to be under some terrible strain he wouldn’t talk about. But he did ask me if I’d ever read That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis. He said it was a good fictional-artistic representation of what he’d learned about the way the world really works. The main character is a British academic who gets drawn into an institute in a manor house where all kinds of weird government research, espionage, and cult stuff is going on. Ben mentioned one scene in particular where the character tries to walk away from the manor, realizes he has nowhere to go, and turns around and walks back.

Even Ben’s ebullience had taken on a darker edge. Now there were times when sadness would close over him, and to cover it and avoid any questions, he would just talk on autopilot, saying things he’d already said, effectively ending any real conversation, like a filibuster in Congress. 

A while after that, I think it was one of the times he was in Arcata, Ben told me that Alexis had hit him. He said they’d been having an argument in the kitchen and she slapped him across the face.

“Well,” I said, “Don’t put up with that.”

“No,” Ben said. 

I told him he should break up, try again with someone new. But they stayed together, and then Alexis got hit by a car, a hit-and-run driver, and had badly broken bones and was in the hospital for a while, and had reduced mobility after she was discharged. 

“Yeah,” Ben said the next time I saw him, in a flat, unexpressive voice that was like the thing that wasn’t sadness anymore closing over him, “Alexis got hit by a car.”

Vernell, who I’d gone to high school with, called me for a “let’s catch up” type of conversation. By then she’d been living with a guy in SoHum who, like Elijah, seemed adjacent to, but was not charged, in the ELF arsons of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. 

During our conversation Vernell told me she’d met Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books, and he was “a dirty old man,” but he would probably publish my poetry if I wanted her to hook us up, and then she went out of her way to tell me about what had happened with Evan and his company. Evan and some other guys had a startup in San Francisco, working to develop the idea that became Twitter, she said, and they hired this “sharky” entry-level guy named Jack Dorsey, who by scheming and manipulation eventually took control of the company and forced Evan out, and “screwed” him out of his stock options, by convincing him to sell them just before they became valuable. Evan got a little bit of money out of the company, but not much, and to get it he and others had to sign nondisclosure agreements, she said. 

After I wrote and started sending out ‘The True History of Twitter’ in ’22, my brother, Ben, and others told me that “Jack Dorsey” is an alias used by an associate of my dad, Peter.

Ben and Alexis were still together in ’09 when I visited them again in Seattle. By then they’d moved into a shared house further from the city center. Ben was on new medication, he’d put on weight, and was seeing a therapist he liked at the university. Alexis was moving around fairly well, and they had more cats. 

Ben and I took a walk to the grocery store. On the way he said, “So, I was thinking of joining the CIA.”

“Don’t,” I said. 

“Why not?”

“They’re the same people who brainwashed us.”

“No, they’re not.”

“Yes, they are. Jim was all hooked into that government shit.”

We didn’t speak about it again, at least not directly. 

When Ben took out his wallet, I saw a playing card, the nine of spades, in among his ID and money cards.

“Why do you have the nine of spades in your wallet?” I said. 

“I found it on the street,” he said. “I felt like I just had to pick it up. It’s the nine of swords, don’t you know that tarot card?”

“Yeah, and it’s a terrible fortune. So why pick it up and carry it around?”

“I just felt like it had to.”

Ben started publishing science fiction and fantasy stories in magazines using the pen name ‘P. H. Lee.’ One of the first stories he published under that name was called ‘A House by the Sea,’ written as a continuation of the Ursula K. Le Guin short story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,’ which is about a society that keeps an abused child trapped in a basement. 

In ‘09 or ‘10 Ben published a game on his website about being trapped in a basement. I can’t find any traces of it on the web now, except for maybe the first paragraph using the Wayback Machine. 

In the game, you, the player, have been locked in a basement and forced to do evil work by a long list of federal agencies and politicians, I don’t remember the whole list, but the last two names on it were President Obama and your father. In the game, the people holding you captive expect you to keep up the appearance of a normal life, and the goal of the game was to use your social media and online presence to signal to your friends and the world that you are trapped and need rescue without alerting your captors, who of course monitor all your communication, and will punish you in terrible ways if they catch you speaking out. I think it was a problem Ben wasn’t able to solve in real life, so he made the question into the solution by writing it as game. 

He got a lot of criticism for it online from his indie games community friends. ‘Innovative like the Tuskegee experiment,’ one person wrote about his game, and he took it down from his website. 

When I saw him a few months later in Arcata, I asked him if the game had been more than a game.  

“No, no, no,” he said, waving his hands. But he seemed quietly happy that I’d at least noticed, and I think that was the last time I actually saw him smile. 

The last time Ben and I had what I’d call an actual conversation was in December of ‘11. He was visiting our parents, and walked over where I was living. He stood in the entryway of the kitchen and told me about a dream he said he’d had. It was like a fantasy roleplaying video game, and you could play either as a good witch or a bad witch, but it didn’t matter, the game had the same ending either way. 

“Which way are you gonna go?” I said. 

My brother stopped moving his hands, which he used to do all the time when we talked, I did it too, and he stood still and looked at me intently. He didn’t say anything, just turned and walked out of the house.

I think Ben’s life got darker after that. “He calls when he needs money,” my mom said. He published a series of despondent single player roleplaying games with inevitable endings. One was set on a lost spaceship drifting through deep space. Ben himself was like that, occasionally on his socials he’d write something that was just like his old, real self, like a burst of clear radio signal from a spaceprobe sailing away from the sun, and then it seemed like darkness would close over him again, and each time it lasted longer. 

Ben started working for a forensic accountant in Portland, Oregon. I was surprised to hear it, because he’d never seemed interested in the financial world. But in hindsight, I think Peter needed someone close to him who could manage and launder money, especially any he and Ben had received or were receiving in connection with their visit to Beijing in ‘04. A while later, Ben bought a house in Portland. He stopped working, and was living on “savings,” my mom said. From his socials, I could see he was flying to creative writing conferences and taking international trips. 

I was still reading my brother’s socials, but there were more posts I didn’t understand, or when I did understand them, wished I hadn’t, because they creeped me out.

Chapter 12

“They Don’t Want Me to Get Out of This Life”

 In the late ‘00s, I started seeing a new therapist, who had been my parents’ marriage counselor for a time, and who Peter paid for. The therapist eventually got me to trust him enough to recover some memories of early childhood abuse, using a technique called ‘EMDR.’ What I saw changed my life, because I saw my dad, Peter, enthusiastically participating in the abuse. 

The therapist said that the kinds of behavior I’d seen in my recovered memories were corroborated by other survivors, and things that my mom and brother had told their therapists, supposedly my therapist had talked with them and seen their notes, but he attempted to introduce some doubt as to whether I’d really seen Peter there.

It took us a few sessions to talk over the implications. The therapist kept asking if I was sure of what I’d seen. I was sure. Once the suppressed memories returned, they seemed as real as any other memory to me, and they were like a missing puzzle piece you find under a couch cushion, they fit together with a lifetime of observation of small details.

So, the question was, what was I going to do about it? The therapist advised me to get some distance from my parents and just try to live a normal life. That sounded all right to me, but I didn’t have any money to move. I’d been living in one of my parents’ rental houses, and stopped paying rent. They’d threatened to evict me but hadn’t done it. Then I got an email from my mom which said there was some money Arthur, Peter’s dad, had left me that for some reason hadn’t been available and they hadn’t told me about until now, but now I could have it. So I took the money and left in the spring of ‘12, lived in a bunch of different places and did a bunch of different things, looking for a normal life. 

I talked to people about the abuse I’d survived, and sought out therapists I thought might be able to help me. I’ve never believed the abuse was something I should have to be ashamed of, but that Peter, Jim and their collaborators are the ones who should be ashamed of themselves. After I started talking, harassment like we’d experienced during my mom’s crisis started again, with a supposedly crazy guy yelling threats outside my window that were just a little too specific as I was waking up each morning.

I built a cabin in the woods in the fall of ‘13 and started writing a memoir about the molotov cocktail and the time I’d spent in federal prison, emailing the sections of my draft as I completed them to a writer friend, a journalist on the East Coast. The prison/molotov memoir was the first time I’d worked on a long piece of nonfiction. It was nice to reconnect with the writer friend I was emailing the sections to, and writing everyday felt good.

There was more harassment, a lot of weird stuff in the woods at night. Weird things also started happening with my email, and I received explicit threats via deniable online communication. 

Then one day, I was driving on the interstate, and a compact sedan pulled up behind me, going around a big curve, and suddenly I was paralyzed, couldn’t move at all as my truck drifted out of my lane toward the trees on the side of the curve. Then the paralysis stopped as abruptly as it began, leaving a feeling of heat in my head and a ringing in my ears I still hear, ten years later.

I corrected the trajectory of my truck. The sedan behind me pulled up next to me, and the driver looked a whole lot like my brother Ben, who I hadn’t seen in years, and I didn’t know knew how to drive a car. He gave me a look and sped off, going well over a hundred miles an hour, faster than my truck could follow.

I didn’t tell my writer friend about what had happened on the interstate, because I was worried he might not believe me. I did tell him I’d been getting some threats, but they only strengthened my resolve to keep writing.

On March 23rd, 2014, I emailed a section of my prison memoir to my friend, which included the following scene:

A kid from the unit came up to me while I was reading in the TV room. “Do you think I could go to college?” he said.

“Yeah, but you can’t get financial aid with a drug felony. (This law has since been changed.) So, in California, you’re gonna have to come up with at least five grand a year on top of living expenses.”

“They don’t want me to get out of this life, do they?”

“No,” I said. “They’re trying to kill you.”

On April 10th, 2014, news came over the NPR update of a bus crash that killed students and chaperones on their way to Humboldt State University. They were visiting Humboldt as part of a program for low- income and first-generation college students. 

On Interstate 5, a FedEx tractor-trailer crossed the median and collided head-on with their charter bus, and both vehicles burned. According to news reports at the time, witnesses said the FedEx truck burst into flames moments before it struck the bus, but an NTSB investigation could not account for this and ruled the crash an accident. 

Among those killed was an admissions counselor who worked at Humboldt.

The bus really got to me. The cruelty of it, the contempt for people’s lives. I couldn’t know for sure if it had been intentional or had anything to do with me, but the particulars of the crash, and the hints Ben dropped online, were asking an awful lot of coincidence. And the possibility that it might have been an intentional attack stopped me from writing, as I think it was intended to. 

I’d made up my mind I wasn’t afraid to die, but it turned out, it looked to me, that my family had something worse they could do, murdering innocent people. I emailed my writer friend and said I was giving up the memoir project. I quit writing nonfiction, wrote poetry instead. It took me a long time to come to grips with the idea that my dad’s and brother’s crimes aren’t my fault. 

In ’22, after I wrote and started sending out ‘The True History of Twitter,’ my brother Ben claimed responsibility for the bus crash to me in deniable communication, in what I think was an effort to intimidate me. I should say I believe Peter was also responsible for the deaths on the bus, as well as many other acts of domestic terrorism, and I hope this report has shed some light on his methods, motivations, and patterns of behavior. 

I intend to write and publish more about the ongoing activities of my family. Until they face justice, this is

not ‘The End