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It was a mistake when the guidance counselor placed my honors student mother in Basic Sophomore English with my father, who happened to be repeating the class. It was there they met, setting into motion a series of mistakes leading to my birth, and ultimately to my death.
Once they began dating, my mother’s grades suffered until her aspirations matched those of my unmotivated father. Jenny’s parents disapproved of Jason and forbid her from seeing him, but both worked and were unable to keep tabs on their daughter. For a year my mother’s life spiraled out of control, culminating in the second mistake—alcohol after prom followed by condomless hotel-sex. My father always bitched about that night, the one that resulted in my conception. My mother, a Junior, and my father, still a Sophomore, were nowhere ready for parenthood.
It was a mistake when my mother’s parents blew up upon discovering their daughter’s pregnancy. My mother compounded the mistake by promptly moving out and into a dive apartment with my father, who’d just turned eighteen. My mother’s parents went to court, forcing their daughter’s return home. But Jenny and Jason abandoned everything, hopped a bus out of town, and never looked back.
It was a mistake when my parents both quit school and took jobs at a diner, she as a waitress and he as a dishwasher, to make ends meet. Predictably, Jason fell in with the wrong crowd, dragging Jenny down with him. My father began selling drugs, mostly marijuana at first, to pay the bills.
My mother smoked her first joint while five months pregnant. It was a mistake—along with morning cigarettes and caffeine-laden coffee following nights of hard drinking. When he wasn’t out running with his boys, my father cursed and slapped Jenny around for drinking and pot smoking behind his back. His abuse was a mistake as was her refusal to leave him. Instead, Jenny sought out even harder drugs, and her crack addiction caused my premature birth.
It was a mistake when my mother ignored the hospital social worker’s advice, and my father’s demand, and refused to put me up for adoption. So began my life, subjected to poverty, crime, neglect and squalor.
An undercover cop arrested my father for drug possession with intent to sell before I was six months old. The lenient judge made a mistake when he suspended my father’s sentence. He compounded the mistake by assigning Jason to a burned-out parole officer already struggling with an overwhelming caseload. That allowed my father’s return to his escalating violent and criminal behavior.
A concerned neighbor in our project apartment called social services on my mother for child neglect. The investigating caseworker recommended my removal, but Jenny pleaded her sad case. She promised to follow through on the court-mandated drug treatment program—as soon as an opening became available. It was a mistake when my custody was returned to my mother. Within an hour she left me stuffed in a black closet piled with filthy clothes, greasy pizza boxes, and empty beer cans crawling with roaches. The neighbors couldn’t hear me screaming for my mommy, while she raced off to feed her drug cravings.
That night my mother overdosed on heroine. I liked to think it was a mistake. Child Protective Services found me the next day and assigned my custody to my father’s parents. It was a mistake that anyone at the county offices could’ve figured out if they’d have spent ten minutes with them. My grandfather was a loud, rampaging alcoholic living off disability and my grandmother was a poorly self-medicated bipolar mess. After two years of neglect accented with frequent bouts of beatings and abuse, and with my father drifting in and out of jail and my life, the courts finally placed me in foster care. That might not have been a mistake if they’d have stuck me with a decent family.
My first foster parents took in kids for cash rather than love or a desire to care for children. They fed and clothed me, barely, along with two other foster kids and their own two brats, until the landlord finally took notice and booted them. I guess he didn’t care for my foster parents’ eight scrawny cats pissing and spraying all over his house. Maybe more than a single litter box cleaned more than once a month would’ve helped.
By the time I was old enough to count and add, I’d lost track of how many foster families I’d stayed with. I’m sure they blamed everything on me. I was mean and out of control. I spent my time tormenting family and neighborhood pets, especially cats. Everyone said I had anger and attachment issues. The string of families ended when a foster parents’ teenage son tried to get frisky with me. I took a butcher knife after him, but of course nobody believed me.
I ended up stuck in a run-down orphanage. Everyone there was either a mentally screwed-up hardship case or a juvenile delinquent destined for a cell number. I guess I was both. Maybe it’d have been different if the orphanage hadn’t been staffed with ill-trained house parents, over-worked therapists and god-complexed psychiatrists. Probably not.
At school, it was a mistake for me to steal, fight, and cut classes. I got suspended and eventually expelled from every school district they sent me to. I never learned to read much past the fifth grade level, and I couldn’t tell a fart from a fraction.
Out of the blue, when I was sixteen, a foster family took me in. They were pretty decent with me, even though I treated them like crap. They had no pets and no children. The mom was smart and tried to home school me using computers and dragging me around to libraries, museums, concerts, zoos—everyplace. But those foster parents figured on rules and curfews, and tried to enforce them. So I stole their jewelry and old collector coins and skipped town, on a bus like my parents did, never looking back. It was a mistake.
I kicked around from state to state, busting into houses, robbing a gift shop here and a hardware store there before moving on, always keeping one step ahead of the law.
It was a mistake when I quit working alone and began running with a couple of crack-heads, Pillbox and Ricky. They were clowns, but Ricky always knew where to fence stuff and Pillbox knew where to find girls needing a fix. Most of them weren’t too pretty, but flashing a few bucks got me anything I wanted.
One night Ricky wanted to stop at some carry-out to get some smokes. Once inside Pillbox decided to rob the place. He pulled a knife on the wrinkled old man behind the counter. The old fart pulled a gun and stuck it in Pillbox’s face. That was a mistake. He should’ve shot me first. Being a loud-mouth wuss, Pillbox was too chicken to stab anybody, anyways. And Ricky was so high he couldn’t even find the safety on his prissy .22 caliber pistol. Me, I didn’t hesitate shooting the old bastard. Got him right between the eyes with my 9mm Beretta I’d stolen back in Arkansas.
I made a mistake not skipping town that night. I thought Ricky and Pillbox were dead, but I was wrong and they ratted me out, trying to save their own asses. Cops broke into the motel room the next morning while I was showering.
It was a mistake when I didn’t take my thick-lensed public defender’s advice and plea bargain. I didn’t want to spend no twenty-five years in prison. Cussing and spitting at the cane-shuffling widow when she pointed at me in the court room, calling me a murderer, was a mistake. The jury came back with a conviction on all counts after deliberating all of two hours. They recommended execution. The judge agreed.
My appeals failed and the governor didn’t even feign consideration of clemency. It was a mistake to spit in the priest’s face, even as he prayed for my soul. Not until the first injection, to relax me before the lethal dose, did I come to realize the blurred line where the mistakes of others, those that’d placed my life on this dead end-road, had become my own.
I looked up at the priest clutching his worn leather Bible while praying for me, and said, “I’m sorry, Father. It was my mistake.”
“It Was a Mistake” first appeared in Rubber Lemon, Issue 2, September 2010
