Stealing From Prison

After he met my mother and before they got married, my stepfather went to prison for a year or so for a variety of mostly petty crimes. This chain of events begs the question: Why would Mom commit to a man she barely knew, who had lied about his very identity, been banned from several states, and been convicted of multiple crimes? To this day, I can’t answer that! The only explanation anyone in the family has ever proposed is this: he loved her. For her, that was enough.

I've written about visiting Jerry (the stepdad) in prison in Chapter 3 of Wreckage, "My Trip to the Pen," and about my mom's interesting history with men in another essay I call "My Mother and the Art of Ignorance." They tell the tale!

I also write about Jerry's sticky-fingers tendency; he pilfered things whenever he could. Petty thievery was his M.O. before he went to jail, after he got out of jail...and pretty much his whole life. He stole from his father and his uncles, his ex-wives and various other women he encountered along the way, my mom's boss (!), his own stepchildren (my brother and sister, for example), and many others I'll never know about.

Chapter 18, "The Disappearing Hippie" is about one of his capers that went awry. That one involves my brother and a stolen car.

While I've written quite a bit about Jerry's misdeeds, one piece of strange (and almost amusing) information didn’t make it into the book. It’s the fact that Jerry somehow even managed to steal things from prison…and bring them back as “gifts” for the rest of us.

What kinds of things?

One of these purloined items was a carved bust of what looked to be an Asian man. Jerry claimed he had carved it from a manzanita tree knot during the lonely months he spent in prison. He had never been known to carve prior to or after his stint in jail, but we were gullible as kids, so we believed him. At least I did, as a 9-year-old desperate for a dad. I wanted to see the best in him. It wasn’t until later in life that my sisters and I all came to the realization that he had either stolen that bust or swindled someone out of it.  When I was a teenager, Jerry “gifted” the hand-carving to my aunt, who had traveled throughout Asia and collected art. I’m not sure what she made of it.

Other trinkets he came home with were several scorpions encased in resin, like something you would see in a desert gift shop. He had maybe half a dozen of these. As a kid, I thought they were creepy and wanted nothing to do with them. Jerry delighted in terrorizing us with them, which, admittedly, was kind of fun. He claimed to have made these as well, after catching the critters, somehow euthanizing them, and then artfully preserving them for all time. No such hobby or artistry was ever seen from him again.

The last gift he brought out with him wasn’t stolen but was bestowed amidst lies and misrepresentation, just like the wood carving and the encased arachnids. This was a beautiful, colored pencil drawing of my mother, conceptualized from a photo of her Jerry had kept with him. In it, she was wearing a floral housecoat-like flowing robe he had presented to her early in their courtship. (He must have shoplifted this too. It was expensive. He was unemployed.)

Jerry claimed to have created the artwork, but Jerry had no discernable artistic skills. This was confirmed a few years later when he took up paint-by-numbers as a hobby and produced some truly awful clown portraits. I remember wondering how he could be so good at pencil drawing and so terrible at a paint-by-numbers kit. In reality, we believe he had somehow convinced another inmate artist to fashion this colorful portrayal of our mom, then claimed it as his own.

In my more charitable moments, I can feel some compassion for Jerry and the emptiness he must have felt. I also sometimes mildly admire his industriousness and creativity. His harmless antics, though, don’t seem so funny against the backdrop of the chaos he wreaked.