In my teenage years I was never one to hang out anywhere, except maybe the swimming pool at North Park in Provo during the summer months, and a bowling alley or pool hall was definitely the last place I would have ever found myself. Desperately needing a job, however, I found myself accepting work doing mechanical work on automatic pinsetters at a bowling alley on the extreme east side of Salt Lake City. I found this job in June 1977, shortly after returning from my ordeal in Idaho. I was open for any job at the time, and since this was the first one that was offered me, I took it. I distinctly remember walking into the bowling alley and up to the front desk that very first day of work. The lady at the desk looked up and asked me if I was the new mechanic. I told her I was. Then she asked me if I was married. I again answered in the affirmative. She then stopped what she was doing, looked at me intently for a few moments, and then said something to me that took me very much by surprise. She told me that if I really decided to work there then I should expect to become divorced very soon. I asked her why she said that, and she told me that it seemed to happen to everyone that worked there, like the place was jinxed or something. The following year Susanne and I separated and prepared for the divorce. It was finalized in February of 1979. Within that short time my son Ryan would be born, in December of 1977, less than a year before I would find myself single and off to myself.
Starting work at a bowling alley, I found, was like starting a whole new life. A bowling alley becomes your second home. In the four and a half years that I worked there I found a second mother in Evelyn, two close friends with whom I would share first a house and then an apartment as well as a friendship that would last continuously into the future, a roommate/best friend, several love interests, one of which would almost become my second wife, and countless other friends and acquaintenances of all ages and lifestyles. It would be during this time that I would buy and ride my first and only motorcycle, a 1974 Kawasaki 500 "Screamer." I would go through four different cars, all of them old and beat up except one, and that one got that way before I was through with it. I would, once again, grow long hair and a full beard, take up drinking beer and smoking pot and cigarettes, and revert almost back to my hippie days.
I would also become involved with a bookie operation as the operator of an offset press that would print out the weekly football betting cards. This somewhat shady operation would bring me hundreds of dollars that would be used for some nice things and some very fun times. The manager of the bowling alley was the bookie, and his ties reached into what I suspected was the Las Vegas mob through a very enigmatic "man with a cane" that would come into the bowling alley from time to time. I was paid, if I remember right, a hundred fifty dollars over and above the cost of the card stock and ink to produce the cards, and for about four hours work to print, cut, and deliver the cards by a certain time every Monday evening. On "good" weeks (when people lost a lot of money to their bookies) my "boss" would flip me a hundred dollar bill as an added bonus. This happened rather often. This operation suddenly ended after about a year when the manager/bookie called me into the front office and asked me if I would quietly take him to the airport and not tell anyone he had left the area unless someone specifically asked me. He didn't even tell me where he was going, but he called a few days later to see if anyone had asked about him. They had, but they were his friends who asked me to urge him to come home and help them straighten things out. I assumed that he had gotten into some trouble with some of his clients, but I never learned any of the details. In any case, the operation came to a halt, and shortly thereafter I quit the job and went to work for Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. There is much to tell from these four years, but if I ever get to tell any of it, it will have to be covered in the "People" section. However, the bowling alley meant people to me, and it also meant the greatest turning point in my life. The experiences I had there would change me completely. I would finally discover who I was meant, or destined, to be, and I would never look back again on who I had been in the past, and never wish I could ever go back to the person I left behind.
I had been working at the bowling alley for about a year when my marriage with Susanne ended and we separated. I lived once again with my sister, Jeri Ann, for a couple of months until I could afford to get into a small apartment just west of the Cottonwood Mall. It was in an apartment complex called Shangrila (misspelled Shangrla on the front sign), and the rent at the time was $180 per month. I rented all the furniture in the apartment, and I started a very interesting life there. During the week my apartment slowly turned into a "gathering place" for not only friends of mine, mostly the high school kids that I had hired to work the back end in the evenings at the bowling alley, but their friends as well. It wasn't long before I began to lose all sense of privacy there because of the frequent visits, and I had to put the word out that my apartment would no longer be open to unannounced guests.
I was given the job of hiring the part time help for the up-coming evening league season, and I was given the okay to hire high school students for this purpose. Rather than formally advertise these openings, I simply put the word out to people of that age group that I noticed frequented the bowling alley, and those that were interested came in and talked to me on their own. One of them, a nice looking boy named Doug, came in and asked me if I would consider giving him a job. I said, "Sure." Then I told him that I had noticed him several times and liked his very friendly attitude, and especially his nice smile. He immediately gave me one of those smiles, then quickly turned and literally ran out of the bowling alley. Several years later, after we had become quite good friends, he told me that was the first job he had ever tried to get. He said he had sat out in front of the bowling alley in a car with his friends and was very afraid and nervous about going in to apply. His friends finally convinced him to be brave and do it. He said that when I told him I liked him and hired him on the spot, it had been the most exciting day of his life, and he rushed out to tell his friends that he had already been hired. He turned out to be a very good employee and an even better friend.
There were others. There was Mark, a fourteen year old boy who would eventually come to live with me and my friends, Chris and Sherrie. He never became an actual employee, because of his age, but he spent a lot of time in the back with the other employees, when no one saw him sneak back there. Bruce was another one of my best employees, and he also had a motorcycle. On one occasion we went on a very fun overnight motorcycle trip up behind Mount Timpanogos, and, later on, he became a pilot with Delta Airlines. After he got his pilot's license he took Mark and me on a ride around the Salt Lake valley. We flew over Kennecot Copper Mine, and Bruce dipped the plane down and circled the open pit almost within the pit itself. K.C., the friend of Mark, was a very unusual and likable person, and it was always fun to be around him. Pat, one of the most interesting people I would ever meet, thought the bowling pins looked like tiger teeth when he was stoned, and when things were slow he would perch himself on the front counter and become mesmerized by all those teeth at the other end of the lanes. We would eventually throw him a huge beer bash for his nineteenth birthday, after which he put an end to his partying and got himself ready to go on an LDS mission. There were many others, and this group of high school kids would make my life very interesting and give me a feeling of worth that I needed very much in my life at that time. All these kids were also "adopted" children of Evelyn, the second mother to us all. Evelyn, a lady who would eventually replace the first desk lady I met, the one that correctly predicted my coming divorce, was the mother of Chris, and also the mother of the girl I nearly married a few years into the future. Again, many of these people will have their names placed in my People list, and I will try to expand on them there sometime in the future.
I Lose My Children
Unfortunately, as Susanne met the man that would become her second husband and then married him, she began to hold the kids back from seeing me so often. Eventually, it became very difficult to see them at all. And over time the demeanor of especially Heather began to change greatly. She started to show more and more dislike for me, and I realized that her mother was working on her, probably very subtly, but constantly, to change her feelings toward me. By the time she became a teenager she was very difficult to be around. I tried my best to make her times with me happy and comfortable, but it seemed the more I tried, the worse she became. She became known as the "sour little brat" to my friends and extended family, and few of them liked her very much during those years. It hurt my mother greatly to see Heather treat me the way she did during those times, and I had to keep telling her that Heather was just going through a difficult stage that would pass, hoping that I was right myself. Through all these years, I loved her with all my heart and tried my best to win her back to just liking me. I always tried to hold my tongue at her obvious dislike of me, but nearly always, after I dropped the children off at their house after our few and far between weekends together, I would wipe the tears from my eyes as I drove away, partly because I hated to take them back, and partly because of the way Heather had treated me.
To jump way into the future in order to complete this story, after my marriage to my second wife, Renita, my daughter started to change her attitude. She started warming up to me, and especially to Renita. My step- daughter, Melanie, was overjoyed to have a big sister, since she was the only girl in her family. Though Melanie was still very young, she looked forward to the time when she and Heather would start doing sisterly things together. Heather and I started enjoying the things we had in common, especially music and playing the piano. I started feeling that all my strivings with her and all my tears over her were beginning to pay off, and that Heather, as she matured, was finally beginning to see me and like me as the person I was, in spite of what she had been told by her mother, and in spite of my being something different than what Heather herself would have preferred me to be as a father. I was starting to feel a renewed joy in my daughter, the daughter that was finally coming back to me again. I never wanted or hoped that she would turn against her mother in any way; I just yearned for some place in my daughter's heart as her father. She started having talks with Renita, and I felt very happy that she had discovered how wonderful Renita could be as a friend and step-mother in relating and empathizing with Heather in those few years. But as Heather turned 18, graduated from high school, and received her $1,000.00 "end of childhood" gift from me, something happened. I can only assume that when Susanne somehow discovered that Heather was warming up to Renita and myself, she worked extra hard to get her to change her mind. I also found out later that Jeriann had talked with Susanne about certain elements of my past, and I strongly suspect that Susanne used this information against me with Heather. But whatever it was that Susanne did, or said, to Heather, shortly after Christmas of 1992 Heather told me she didn't want to see me anymore, and she had come up with some kind of a memory from her childhood that had either me abusing her in some way, or that I had allowed someone else to abuse her. When she told me this I was totally devastated. She was very vague and uncertain about what it was that supposedly happened, but I assumed that over the following months she probably formulated and then set the details in place and then came to believe these false memories in order to push all the bad things in her life onto me. Less than a year later Heather married, and two months after the marriage, she sent me a wedding announcement, in which there was no mention of the fact that she had any father but her step-father. With the announcement she had written a short note apologizing for getting married without my involvement in any way. She even wrote the words, "Please understand." That was the last I ever heard from my daughter directly. A year later I found that she had given birth to a son, so at least I knew that I was a grandfather. I can't help but doubt at this writing that Heather will ever realize her mistaken memories of her father and find her way back to me, and though I will always carry hope that there will someday be a reunion between us, I have had to accept within myself that I will probably never see my beloved daughter again in my life.
Writing about this now in September of 2015, a few years ago I was able to find Heather, her family, and Ryan on Facebook, and since then I have been able follow their lives quite well without them finding out that I found them. Heather ended up having three boys, the oldest one having recently returned from his LDS mission in Mexico City. Heather got several degrees in music at the University of Utah, and she now teaches piano in her home studio. I've also been able to find and collect many pictures of her family in different stages of their lives, and I'm not only overjoyed to having found them, even if I'm secretly watching them and their lives, I'm also overjoyed that she is doing so well, She is a beautiful woman with a radient smile, and I'm so happy that her life is going well.
Likewise for Ryan. However, a few years ago, about 2004 or so, I was able to find and contact him, and for a little over a year we occasionally got together, going to dinner, and spending time at my place. When I found him, I sent him his "end of childhood" money, adding an additional $200 to account for inflation, money I discovered he really needed badly, and I think this helped him wanting to get together with me. But he met with me only if I his mother didn't find out about it. My mother, his grandmother Stevenson, was so happy to see him again, too, and she greatly enjoyed our visits to her. However, later on, Ryan backed away from me again without telling me why, so I lost him again until I found him on Facebook, too. He is also doing well and having a happy life, which is all I care about. He has never married, meaning he was smarter than I was. I never knew him to have a girlfriend, so I wasn't surprised that he was not interested in marrying.
Jumping now back to the earlier timeline, Ryan, when he was younger, was the spitting image of me when I was his age. He walked like me, and he especially thought like me. In my second marriage he became very good friends with my step-sons Marcus and Jason. My step-boys fell in love with their new older brother and looked forward to the weekends that Ryan came over. As soon as Ryan walked in the door, Marcus and Jason would take him over and spend many happy hours with him. There was always much laughter in the house while Ryan was there, and during these weekends my fatherly feelings were at an ultimate high, even after the loss of Heather. Renita and I took Ryan on one of our trips to Las Vegas when the other three were with their dad. We felt this was a great opportunity to have Ryan feel he was truly part of the family, having his own special place with both of us, even without the others. I never dreamed that Ryan would ever change his mind and turn his back on us after what we thought was a very loving and accepting experience he was having with us.
But in the fall of 1995, Ryan, just as he was turning 18, decided that he also no longer wanted to see us any more, and he announced this in a letter to us, which had obvious earmarks of the way Heather wrote, telling me that she must have helped him compose the letter. For the second time my life was devastated by my own child. His mom, Susanne, probably had a hand in it, too, as she did with Heather, to turn Ryan against me. For one thing, Ryan tried to get his "end of childhood" gift much earlier than I intended to give it to him, and within two weeks of refusing to give it to him before I was ready, he had written his letter to us. The excuse he used for no longer wanting to come and visit us was that our home was not conducive to his preparing to go on an LDS mission. He totally disregarded the fact that when there was mention of a possible desire to go on a mission, there was much support and sincere excitement with him and a promise to even help financially, though I always told him I would not send money to the church, but directly to him. When Ryan came to visit us he often came with much pent-up stress that needed release, and this was often released in language and behavior that was inappropriate even in our rather relaxed home life. Nevertheless, he wrote in his letter that we were bad influences on his life, and that was that. Until the time that I mentioned above, Ryan totally disappeared in my life. However, with the help of a good friend who had connections with church headquarters in Salt Lake City, I have yet to learn that Ryan ever went on a mission. At the time of this writing, and if he had followed the normal course for all "worthy" young Mormon males, he would have gone and come back already. When I found him on Facebook I saw that he is living a life much more like mine, and not being a good Mormon boy. I even have a picture of him drunker than a skunk. I know that look because I have had it myself many, many times.
Losing my children is something I have never yet gotten over. The sadness never disappears; it has embedded itself deeply within my soul. It changed my life permanently, though on the outside the evidence of that change is no longer as apparent as it was when it first happened. Every morning, as I climb into the shower, I wonder to myself if today might be the day that my children will wake up to what really happened to them and start retracing their steps back to me, and I go through the never changing daydream of how I might handle meeting up with them again. Why I do this I'm not sure, but somehow it keeps at least the memory of my children alive in me, when everything else about them is gone. I will never stop loving my children as long as I live. The memories I have of my children are very precious to me, and I will always have these memories in my heart. At this writing, in my present family, I still have three step-children that treat me as a father, and though my step-children have no genetic link with me, my love for them is as great as if they were my own flesh and blood. They gave me the true gift and the true feeling of fatherhood.
