A Man Named Dave

bad posture. As a foster child, I had to learn to focus and walk upright. Whenever I became nervous, I stuttered or slurred every word. It would take me forever to complete one simple sentence. My foster mother, Mrs Turnbough, spent hours with me every day after school, teaching me phonics and helping me to imagine my words flowing from my mouth, like water cascading over a fall. Mrs Turnbough’s valiant efforts were perhaps her undoing. Within a few months, I was driving my foster parents up the wall with all I had to say. They had all they could do to shut me up. I wanted to show off my new form of communication to everyone, every minute. But my mouth soon became my Achilles’ heel. Because I was so skinny and awkward, I became easy prey for others, and my only form of defense was my mouth. Whenever I felt backed in a corner, words of intense anger and hatred seemed to erupt before I could analyze what I was saying or why.
    The only way I felt I could make friends was stealing for acceptance or doing whatever else I could to gain recognition. I knew that what I was doing was completely wrong, but after years of being an outcast and totally isolated, the need to fit in was too powerful to resist. My foster parents struggled to keep me on the straight and narrow, and teach me the seriousness of my decisions.
    On the lighter side, they were dismayed at my naivete and ignorance. The first few times I took a bath, I filled the tub to the rim before stepping into it, causing water to spill over the sides. I would then squeeze every drop I could from what I thought was “fancy-smelling bubble bath” into the tub, then stir the water like a whirlpool trying to form as much lather as possible. As much as my foster parents laughed at my water frolics, my foster sisters were not amused and hid their bottles of Vidal Sassoon in their bedrooms. Up until then I had never heard of the word shampoo.
    I thought that in order to survive, I had to work. Early on as a foster child, it was drummed into me that foster kids –labeled as “F-kids” – never amounted to anything, never graduated high school, let alone go on to college. I also discovered that by the time I turned eighteen years old, I would no longer be a ward of the court – a minor that was provided for by the county – and since I didn’t have parents to rely on, I would be all alone. The closer I came to reaching adulthood, the more I became terrified of being broke and homeless. Deep down I feared I would not be strong enough to make it on my own. As a frightened child living in my mother’s garage, one of the promises I had made was that if I ever escaped, I would always have enough money to eat. So, as a young teenager, I abandoned my Lego and Erector sets and my Hot Wheels toy cars and focused on earning a living. By the age of fifteen I was shining shoes. I lied about my age to get work as a busboy. I did whatever I could to put in at least forty hours a week. As a freshman in high school, I slaved six days a week to put in over sixty hours. I did anything I could to squeeze in an extra hour a week to earn an additional $2.65. Only after I’d show up to school and collapse on top of my desk and get sick from total exhaustion did I begin to slack off. On one level, thinking that I was ahead of the game, I was proud, almost to the point of being cocky. But on the inside I felt hollow and lonely. As other boys my age were dating beautiful girls with short dresses and fancy makeup, driving their parents’ cars and whining about their ten-hour work weeks, I became increasingly jealous of their good fortune.
    Whenever I felt a little depressed, I would bury myself even more in my work. The harder I applied myself, the more the cravings of wanting to be a normal teenager disappeared. And more important, the inner voice bubbling inside me, fighting for the answers to my past, remained quiet.
    For me, work meant peace.
    In the summer of 1978, at age eighteen, in order to further my career as top-rated car salesman, I decided to drop out of high school. But months later, after a statewide recession, I found myself as a legal adult, with no diploma, no job, and my life savings quickly draining away. My worst nightmare had come true. All of my well-thought-out plans of getting ahead and sacrificing while others played vanished into thin air. Because of my lack of education, the only jobs available were at fast-food restaurants. I knew I could not make it by working those jobs