I Knew Peter Pan

Dedicated to Hannah

I spent 20 years running and gunning across this country. I’ve lived in 16 cities in 7 states. I’ve driven ‘borrowed’ cars and stolen cars from S. Carolina to Florida to Oregon to Minnesota and back with another dozen states in between, all without a license.


For work I’ve stolen, bought, used, and distributed everything from drugs, to guns, to women. I used lies, violence and crime as tools pulled from my pocket without a second thought just to get ahead, get laid or get out. In my more stable years I ran bars and strip clubs in Minnesota, Florida, Washington and a whorehouse in Mexico.


Through it all I never really thought of myself as being a bad guy though. In fact, most people who've known me say I’m quite charismatic with a generous personality. I have been known to be a little temperamental.


Tonight I was talking to one such friend who’s known me for 15 years. She put it best when she said, “You’re just not a stay-at-home kind of guy”.


As I was tripping through those fun-loving decades, I envisioned myself as a sort of Peter Pan fighting off pirates in squad cars. Women loved the way I could find romance in any dark alley or fluorescent-lit train station as a sort of 'happy-thought' in an urban never-never land where all the lost boys thronged to me as their inspiration to stay young by staying out, staying free, and never touching the ground. I was the party that never ended.


As I rounded 30 on two wheels and watched a few friends fly off the track by either dying or going to prison, I did finally begin to question my own immortality. "I better kick it down a gear", I thought to myself so I don’t have the same embarrassingly untimely end they do.


That led me from the limelight of Main streets on Saturday nights into the flickering, smoke choked late night dark bars on weeknights where I was ‘one of those guys’ who’d be sitting by himself with a triple Jim Beam in a large glass and an overflowed ashtray pinning down a hundred dollar bill.


I heard a story once how Dean Martin just before he died could be found in a particular restaurant bar most nights where he would order tall glasses of whiskey, one after another, and just sit alone until having to be carried out by some cheap bar staff and put into a taxi. Well, I was not yet as old as Dean but it was looking like that was going to be the rest of my life as well.


To be honest, I had nothing left. My body couldn’t handle the drugs anymore. The decades of dealing with strippers had left me too mean and vengeful to be charming to anyone. Even my once heroically prolific sex life had dwindled to complete impotence from all the damage whiskey causes. Even the blessed V-pills weren't enough after awhile leaving me to stumble out of hotel room’s ashamed, enraged, and back into bars for another large glass.


By now, the romance had drowned completely. My Peter Pan syndrome had become a kamikaze’s last flight. Now I was just circling around looking for something large and dramatic to nosedive into. I was 35.


With no money or job or home left, my mom finally pony’d up and moved me back to Idaho where I could be closer to her. I did my best that first year to live what I’d heard was a normal life. I got a semi-steady job as an overnight office janitor and learned to make sugar-based moonshine on weekends to supplement my drinking costs.


The janitor job paid nine dollars an hour and half the shine I made was mine to drink. But I always had another couple gallons in quart mason jars to take to the country bars and sell out back for twenty-bucks apiece. That’d pay for the rest of my drinks inside.


Within a year, I was being launched from my new apartment with multiple eviction charges and was now working as a day labor temp for a wax warehouse. Then those pirates in squad cars finally caught on to me. I ended up in jail with 2 DUI’s within 10 months. Sitting in the holding cell with handcuffs on, I was really starting to question my immortality now and whether or not I had any chance at a future left at all.


After being bailed from jail the second time and brought home by a caring girlfriend ten years younger than me, I finally went to an AA meeting down the street from my Mom’s house. As I walked in, I grabbed a luke-warm cup of bad coffee, politely smiled to all my new lost boys and introduced myself as “just John”.


I've been sober now for one year next month. I've quit smoking. I’ve leveled off financially so my bills are getting paid. I’ve got steady work as a forklift driver. I’ve begun reading the bible and believing what I read. I’ve made friends with a few pastors who help me pray and I’ve began talking to my family again daily.


I've had counseling, imprisonment, probation, and fines all taken care of responsibly as week-by-week my life begins to resemble something of societies normalcy. All of these things I’ve done happily just to leave behind the life of death I was beginning to spiral in.


But still, you can’t just expect me to be a “stay-at-home kind of guy”. In this last year I’ve also fired my AA sponsor because he was moving too slow. I turned my daily prayer into a three hour daily bible study which twice a week becomes a group study I attend as a student and once a week becomes a group study I teach.


I attend church; I attend two churches. One at 9:30 and one at 11, every Sunday. I volunteer once a week to feed the homeless. I volunteer once a month to help the elderly. I volunteer as a beginner’s alcohol and drug councilor. I sponsor 3 impoverished children in 3 countries through online International organizations.


I've also requested to begin working with a teenage youth ministry which has just been approved.


I've begun working out, eating healthy, and biking. I’ve stopped dating altogether till I can find some positive counseling group or literature on dating responsibly.


I write essays (like these) every week and email them to everyone I know and for those I don’t know, I've begun publishing all my work on a Blog. Oh, and I have a cat.


So do I still smell the whiskey, gun powder, cigarettes and cheap perfume at night as I sit in bed beside my energy-saving lamp while reading my bible? Yep.


Do I ever wish I could go back to the beginning and do it all over again the exact same way? Yep.


Is that an option? Nope.


Fact is, I’m lucky to have lived through it. And now I kind of feel like the guy who knew Peter Pan just before he took that last flight and never returned. I’m sure even my old friend of 15 years still wonders if she’ll ever see him again...


Yeah, he’s still out there. But he’s probably about 18 years old tonight. And me? I'm just a middle-aged guy sipping coffee at the window with a dreamy look and a few wild stories.


Unlike old Dean or even my imprisoned friends, I've been given a new chance to live a second life as a sober adult. Maybe to repair some damage I've caused. Maybe to build some hope in others. Or maybe just to finally touch ground and walk barefoot back home.