REALIZE, MY FRIEND, THAT I write this tome in segments of time, disjointed and unplanned. You will therefore see commonality and repetition of concepts throughout. Please bear with me and consider the underlying intent more than the delivery.

On this day of writing, I’ll describe some aspects of human behavior and misbehavior. Yet, I must start out with this thought: the human mind is a raucous jumble of things. Electrochemical signals firing off, sometimes seemingly at random. Good thoughts, great thoughts and concepts, kindness, positive potential. Similarly, our minds can, with no conscious effort, instantly shift from virtue to that which is evil, self-centered, violent, abusive, and pleasure-seeking.

Corralling all thoughts, managing them, allowing some to blossom and others to wallow or disregard or dissolve, is a thing most humans are unable to do at all. As you pass through time, distinguish well which thoughts to act upon and which to discard. In other words, don’t judge yourself for your thoughts, but manage them appropriately.

What makes certain people, usually men, by the way, so evil? Could it be a combination of genetic predispositions, life experiences, laziness, or discipline? Is it their inability to manage negative thoughts? I don’t know. At my age now, in my mid-sixties, I find myself being less accommodative to those who seem to be irredeemable.

In other words, some people are simply evil for whatever combination of reasons, whether they choose to blame an external concept like a devil or not. In my experience, many who are that way currently will always be as such, irrespective of any self-initiated actions, attempts at resolution with the help of friends or family, or society-enforced attempts at punishment and redemption. Tigers and stripes, leopards and spots.

Speaking of the devil, I don’t recall when I first met Chuck. It may have been in the grocery store where my mother was a bookkeeper, in the days of manual, tape-fed adding machines and green ledger books. My father had died not long before, and she had taken a job in town to supplement our household income.

My father was an auto dealer, but nothing like those auto dealers you see in today’s media squawking away about their latest models. He partnered with an investor, a partnership forged in purgatory for both. Williams was no large town, and its economic vitality depended mostly on its gateway status to the Grand Canyon, forestry, and paper mills.

I imagine he had few options to find investors to realize his vision for a new kind of dealership. He had been operating his own smaller, used car lot for some time and wanted to build one of the town’s first larger auto dealerships, much like we see today. As the dream became reality and was in the final stages of actualization, the tensions between him and his financing partner spun out of control.

His new dealership was open for only a few months when he surprisingly quit to take a job as a used car sales manager at a competing lot. I’m not sure how you simply quit the business you just built with blood and sweat, then end up working for a competitor. But he did it. Three days afterward, I awoke to the family being gathered in the living room. My father was not present, but a hastily cleaned spot on the carpet was.

Earlier that morning, he was lying face down on that carpet when his aorta burst. A surge of blood from the damaged vessel poured through his mouth.

My mother was giving him a backrub at the time, assuming his complaint about a sharp back pain was from a muscle strain. He was forty years at death, only forty years. On the flip side, he was heavy set and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day just like my mother who died a decade later.

In those meager days, you’d buy a starter house for ten thousand with a plan to scrimp and save for thirty years to pay it off. Since it was the one major monthly expense, other creature comforts that are taken for granted today were rarities or simply didn’t exist. I don’t recall any families possessing obvious wealth in town beyond the few pharmacists, attorneys, and a family with distant oil well holdings.

What remained of the family after that day in 1964? A woman in her late thirties. Nice looking. Recently widowed, multiple kids at home, and life in the epitome of a 1960s small-town. That implied mostly married couples with many kids and a regular stream of town gossip. Her newly deceased husband was a half-owner in one of the town’s most obvious and potentially successful businesses. What could go wrong with that picture?

Chuck. Chuck went wrong. He was from a town outside Williams, and he met my mother at the grocery store as a cigarette salesman. Not the most prestigious job to have, but one that probably paid the bills for his family. By his own words, he was a good Catholic and didn’t believe in divorce.

Following a string of bad personal luck, including the death of my father and brother, which I’ll discuss later, my mother moved the family to Phoenix in 1966. She was tired of being the focus of town gossip, and her relationship with married Chuck was heightening the tensions. A native of Los Angeles, she wanted to return to the relative obscurity that a larger city provided.

When our family moved. Chuck unfortunately tagged along. It wasn’t that he lived with us at the time, but he stayed at our house on occasion. His wife and family presumably believed he was staying in Phoenix on business.

By summer 1967, we had settled into our new home in the desert. I was barely beginning to comprehend things that were happening beyond the limited range of my daily life.

“Why is Aunt Chonia coming?” I asked my mother one morning after burning my fingertips on the cherry strudel that just popped from the toaster.

“It’ll be good for you to see her, and your dad would have been pleased she’s coming. Besides, she wants to visit you guys. She’s afraid of losing touch, given the way things are now. And Dahlia and I are going to Vegas for a few days. We really miss each other since the move and need to get reacquainted and have some fun.”

I shrugged, assuming an entire week might be wasted because conservative Aunt Chonia would force me to stay indoors. It was early summer, after all, and being outdoors was everything to me.

Exploring the desert. Riding bicycles miles and miles through undiscovered neighborhoods and new home construction sites. Hopping onto the back seat of my best friend’s Honda motorcycle and gliding across the flat, hot landscape of northwest Phoenix, swaying and swerving to avoid cacti, creosote bushes, and palo verde trees.

I didn’t want to be cajoled by my aunt into sitting around the house and watching the lame content the three TV networks provided. Cable as we know it today did not exist, nor did the endless Internet. But my mother was insistent on her ‘visit,’ which was a catchphrase for babysitting her pre-teens. Given the inevitable visit, I tried to recast my vision of the week as one where I could listen to my 45’s or growing collection of 33 RPM LPs, or occasionally sneak out to watch TV after Aunt Chonia consumed her daily fill of soap operas.

Before I knew it, my mom had disappeared and Aunt Chonia would arrive late in the day. There was no formal handoff of any sort, just a ‘she’ll arrive this afternoon.’ Looking back on that rationale, I now understand why.

My sisters and I were well-accustomed to living largely unsupervised. Due to a working mother and no father, we were among the first poster children for suburban latch-key kids.

My older sister often filled the role of substitute mother, reluctantly ensuring that we stayed out of serious trouble and received a modicum of daily caloric intake. To this day, I’m not sure I could eat another meal of aluminum-tinged turkey TV dinner, cheese sandwiches on white bread, or oven-baked fish sticks and fries with ketchup.

Our kid lives were simple. Walk the half-mile to school. Home in the afternoon to an empty house since my mother was worked as a teller at a downtown bank. Chips for a snack, then leftovers, pot pies, or some other frozen food for dinner. Friday was our great treat where frozen pizza and chocolate ice milk malts replaced the boring weekday supper fare.

Aunt Chonia was mostly Spanish-American, and I assumed she would prepare some great recipes handed down by our ancestors. But upon her arrival, it became clear she didn’t sustain the extended, twelve hour train from Los Angeles to coddle and spoil us. I sensed the visit was forced.

She left after four days, not even waiting for my mother to get back from Las Vegas. “Your mom is driving home tonight,” Aunt Chonia concluded as she exited the front door into the waiting cab.

I had wiped that uneventful visit from my mind, at least until I visited her in L.A. for the final time in the early 1990s. Salted within her platinum-encrusted hypochondria-speak, and without a moment’s hesitation in our conversation, she casually mentioned the reason for her visit some thirty years’ prior.

Aunt Chonia was scratching at her crinkly, dark-skinned forearm as if a horde of fire ants had attacked it. “You know, I came on a train all that way to Phoenix. Took my own personal time to get out there and missed a few critical doctor appointments. It was sweltering that summer, and I still suffer from hot flashes as a result of that week in Hades. As you know, your mother told you kids she was going to Las Vegas to get married. But did you see her come back that way?”

I shrugged, barely recalling the event.

Aunt Chonia frowned scornfully. “It was never her intent to get married. Now, maybe that was her surreptitious plan. Maybe she thought her pregnancy could be used to convince Chuck to finally divorce his wife and marry her. I don’t know how often they ‘did the dirty deed,’ obviously, and I hate to even think of that heinous act between those two. But he’d been promising to finally cut ties to his wife for three or four years by then. She used to call me about it, crying and crying. Now, I realized from her first call that the big bastard was busy burning his puny candle at both ends. What’s the saying? Something like ‘why commit if you already get’ – the sex benefits, I mean. Besides, I’m sure he was taking normal liberties with his wife whenever he wasn’t ginning-up an excuse for coming home days late to the poor creature and her family, or not at all.”

My jaw dropped but she took no notice. I had no idea my mother had been impregnated with the demon’s issue. She was in her early forties at the time, which seemed to me to be too old. I remained silent and stunned as she continued.

“I don’t remember how long she was gone or if she spent extra days in Las Vegas gambling or carousing. What I do know is Chuck did not ride along with your mother on that long drive. He didn’t have stones big enough to be there with her. I’m sure he considered this abortion to be her problem to manage, and hers alone. Knowing the bastard’s odious ways from her forlorn calls she forced me to endure, I imagine he was concerned that her innards, if you understand me, might be damaged by the procedure. If they got damaged, he wouldn’t get his manly jollies taken care of as appropriately as before. Then he’d be forced to find a new, witless matron for his repulsive activities. Anyway, instead of Chuck riding along, that good-looking woman friend from Williams went with her for the abortion.”

I couldn’t figure out if my aunt was just insensitive, unaware, or thought my mother had previously informed me about this event.

She continued. “I had the worst corns on my feet at that time, and I put off getting an operation to have them taken care of so I could babysit you kids. You’ve seen the way I hobble around my house. I should have just told her to find another babysitter and gotten my feet fixed properly. You know I was a dancer, right? Quite famous in my circles. You get a lot of foot damage from years of doing that. Unbelievable pain and related problems from feet to spine. So I now pay a price for my talent, but people loved me.”

I suddenly felt guilty and shameful like I should have known, should have talked to my mother about her difficult experiences with Chuck. I also felt guilty for being one of the reasons my poor aunt suffered all those subsequent years, and stupid for being such an innocent kid when the world around me was far from what I perceived.

And now, a moment about Chuck. From my perspective, he was resolutely unholy in every sense. I can’t say anything good about him, except that because of him, I quickly realized some people are evil and always will be.

Damaged due to a tough childhood? Poor upbringing? Uncaring or abusive parents? Genetics? Ultimately, an excuse is only an excuse and convenient self-rationalization for horrific, entitled behavior. Nothing else. Nothing else.

From the start, Chuck was about Chuck. He initiated his relationship with my mother on a lie. “My wife and I don’t get along. She’s a horrible person. She does this to me. She does that. She’s inconsiderate. I never should have married her, but . . .”

And there’s always the ‘but . . .’

“. . . I was brought up a strong Catholic, and I take divorce very seriously. She does as well and won’t grant me a divorce, or it could take many years. Look, I’ll do my best to work with her but it will be costly and painful and may end up unsuccessful.”

Not long after they finally split up, my mother told me some of what she should have been realizing for a long time. A self-absorbed guy will say or do virtually anything for a few minutes of sex, and he will continue to do so as long as the assurance of repeated sex exists. For a guy, the personal cost of doing this is low and temporary, but the reward is high and temporary.

His rationale? ‘Success. I goaded, pleaded and lied, then got away with it. How easy was that? Did you see how well it worked? Did you see how I manipulated her and forced her to do as I demanded? Then I got my reward. What power I have! Power over another. Power to gain pleasure from another. Power to maintain this beneficial livelihood I’ve created. My successful creation! My wizardry at conniving and convincing!’

In the initial stages of Chuck wooing my mother, he also developed a strange connection with my younger sister, a pre-teen, overwhelming her with special attention and gifts. Where she was praised, I was derided. My older sister and I thought this was perversely strange, though I’m unsure if my mother saw it as such. I have little doubt he would have expanded into forcing other evil things upon the poor girl had he been allowed.

***

The story about Chuck does not end there. No, unfortunately, there was much more. Months after the Las Vegas trip, and a few months before my mom and Chuck finally married, she was driving us kids home from a long trip to visit my grandmother in California. A wild thought popped into my head.

“Mom, I think we’re getting something important in the mail, like a big check,” I prophesied. Within an hour of arriving home, my mother was sifting through the mail. Excitedly, she called me away from the television to sit at our counter.

“Greg, you must have ESP. Take a look at this.”

It was a cashier’s check for fifty thousand dollars.

I was dumbfounded. “What? Is that a fake sweepstakes check from the magazines?”

She shook her head. “It’s not fake. This is ours, all ours, and we need to decide what we’re going do with it.”

In a state of disbelief, I uttered, “Well, Mom, you better sleep with it under your pillow then take it to your bank and deposit it tomorrow. Also, don’t tell a soul. Why would anybody send us that kind of money?”

She looked at me a bit sheepishly. “You know, your dad had that car business. He was a fifty percent partner. Here we are in Phoenix, and I don’t know anything about running a car dealership in Williams. They agreed to pay me this money to sell our share to them.”

“Does this have something to do with that money they were sending you every month?”

“Yes. Five hundred dollars a month. I’d rather have this money in the bank, however, than assume I’ll keep getting that monthly check. Now we can do whatever we want with it. You aren’t mad, are you?”

“Why would I be mad?”

“Because you might have thought you’d be running that dealership one day, maybe in ten or fifteen years. You’ve always had a strong affinity to cars.”

The thought had never crossed my mind. What did I know of my father’s business? I was only nominally aware of my dad’s half ownership and simply assumed his partner took full responsibility once he died. I thought she was receiving monthly checks due to the sheer generosity of the dealership.

The sale of the business, however, had nothing to do with generosity from anyone. Instead, it had everything to do with coercion and malcontent by the evil one.

A few months after she received the money, Chuck was suddenly able to evolve beyond his deep and substantial reverence for the ‘no divorce’ dogmas of Catholicism. He quickly divorced his wife of twenty years, then he and my mother immediately eloped in Las Vegas.

A few weeks after that startling event, my mother told us we were going to move soon into a new house that was under construction. It was one she and Chuck had apparently been considering for some time.

I was none too pleased at that prospect. I loved our current house. It was only three years old, and it seemed wasteful to go buy another of similar size and quality two miles away. Of course, I was too young to understand the implications of the evildoer’s unfolding plot.

Chuck’s master plan was now nearly complete, but there was one more critical step.

“Mom, I think we should take all that money from the car business and buy land around here,” I advised one day. I had been outdoors constantly, playing and carousing in the flat, undeveloped desert. One couldn’t help but notice the slow, steady conversion of nature’s landscape into repetitive tract homes and neighborhoods.

“Phoenix will continue to grow in this area,” I surmised, “and there’s no place else for expansion in the valley but west and south, farther away from the city center. Ten miles north of here, you hit the higher elevations and the end of the Valley. Land will be scarce one day and is only going to increase in value. That fifty thousand could buy a good chunk of land around here, then we could just sit on it, wait a few years, and get rich.”

“Interesting idea, but,” she paused, “the money is already spoken for.”

“What?” I responded, concerned she had not at least mentioned her decision to me. I assumed any discussion on how to use the proceeds from my father’s business would be a family one.

“Yeah, we spent it all,” she claimed with forthright confidence.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re buying a convenience store.”

I didn’t understand the ‘we’ part. I thought she meant herself and us kids.

“But you work at the bank and like it there. Why would you want to work at a convenience store?”

“It’s not that I’ll be a worker there, Greg. I’ll quit the bank. This will be our convenience store. Maybe you can work there at times, sweeping, cleaning, and stocking liquor when nobody’s there. It would be good for you.”

My mother had never previously spoken about a desire to own any business. In fact, she knew little of business aside from her bookkeeping and teller activities. She could tell I was upset.

“Why a convenience store?” I persisted. “Don’t they get robbed a lot?”

“Well, Chuck . . .” she started, then reconsidered. “It seemed like the right place to put the money for a while rather than leave it idle in the bank. Besides, Chuck quit his job selling cigarettes to stores, and he’s not doing so well in this new job he took.”

“But I’m confused.”

And I was confused. My father’s business had been sold. We were buying a convenience store with the proceeds. We had moved from a barely lived-in house to a brand new, just-constructed one in which we’d all live – Chuck, Mom, and my sisters. And Chuck had just bought a car for himself.

My early teen mind must have known these new financial arrangements smelled rotten. Adding to this were the other uncomfortable aspects to the Chuck beast. He continued with his odd, ‘goopy’ attraction to my little sister. Conversely with me, he was gruff and never said a nice word, so I avoided him around the house. My simple and joyous world of early teendom was getting thick and murky.