"A Wretch Like Me"

Chapter 1: Where do I begin?

As far as my family history goes I am not 100% positive about all the details. I will just tell you the parts I know. There are probably a lot of holes, but... welcome to my life. I am not going to waste anyone’s time, especially mine, grueling over non-important details. So, if something is a little off, I’m sorry. It isn’t intentional. I’m not that smart.

So, it is my understanding that Mary, Queen of Scots (Bloody Mary) is somewhere in my ancestry. Not really that important, but kind of interesting. Some great grandfather of mine during the civil war days invested some money in the railroad at the right time. He made some crazy amount of money like $800,000,000. I honestly don’t know if that is in today’s money or in real money back then. Either way, I mean, Wow! That’s a lot of money. So, rumor has it that NOBODY in my family worked from then until my grandfather.

My grandfather was a foreign ambassador. He has been all over the world, he speaks at least 7 languages fluently, he is very decorated, and very intelligent. He divorced my grandmother when my mom was 14 years old right after her little sister was born. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually forgiven him for that. It is pretty sad really. It kind of made a mess of everyone. Who knows, maybe we were all a mess anyway.

When my mother was growing up she never lived in the same country for more than two years. She is also very intelligent. She speaks at least 5 languages fluently. She knows something about everything. I have to interject here and say that my mother is the most selfless person that I know. She truly has a good heart. I respect her more than anyone I have ever met in my life.
During the late 60’s and early 70’s she got involved with the hippie movement. At some point she met my father and she dropped out of college. They decided to backpack across Europe and Asia. I was conceived in India on their journey through the wilderness.

Apparently, she got pretty sick when I was in the womb and we both almost died. My parents got stuck in India for considerably longer than they wanted. My grandfather had to pull some strings just to get them out. So off they went to America. I was born at home in the woods in Seattle, Washington on April 5th, 1973 at 2:17 AM. My father had given himself and my mother hippie names. He was Sky Sheppard Surefoot. I think he had a bunch of other names in there too, but I don’t know all of those. My mom became Dolphin Sheppard Surefoot. And I was born Sun Elk Sheppard Surefoot. His real name is Steve Sheppard. My mother’s real name is Pam.

Around that time my father was trying to dodge the draft so we kept moving around. My parents hitchhiked all over the place. I honestly don’t know all the places we went. I do know that we had residence in Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, then back to Washington. Then my younger brother River Wisdom Sheppard Surefoot was born.

We moved around some more. My parents did a lot of drugs. We lived on a bunch of hippie communes. My father’s mother committed suicide at some point. He got a little bit of insurance money, $10,000, and wouldn't spend any of it on us kids. Instead he had found a pseudo-guru named Ocean who had a harem, claimed to be a God, beat his women, and did a lot of drugs. They both squandered the money. They had a lot of free love and a lot of acid. At some point Sky became violent.

Somewhere in the middle of this my younger sister was born, Wonder Faye Sheppard Surefoot. The last thing I remember about my father was a fit of rage that he had where he started throwing my blocks around and swinging a broom. I think he hit my mother. It is actually the only memory I have of my father. I told my mom about it a few years ago and she told me that that was the last time we ever saw Sky. I was about three years old. I never held it against him. I was never one of those kids that were mad at their dad for abandoning them. I never let it bother me. I was taken care of, and I figured that he had made some mistakes that could have happened to anyone...maybe even me one day. Who knows?

We went to visit my grandmother in Virginia and never came back. We just left everything and because of this we don’t have any baby pictures or childhood memories. Once again, I never really gave it a second thought. I think we stayed with my grandmother for a little while. We must have had a falling out or maybe my mom just had gypsy feet from her upbringing. We moved to some hippie commune in Tennessee and then we moved to another one in Kentucky and then we moved to another one in Florida. At some point in all that I remember smoking pot. There was lots pot everywhere. Stoners always feel like they are somehow being cool to get animals and kids high so it probably happened more than I can even remember.

My mother finally got burned out on the hippie lifestyle and moved in with my grandmother and aunt who were now living in Florida. In her defense, I really think that she embraced the free lifestyle, the healthy food, and the love and peace part of the hippie movement far more than the drugs. Once again, I could be wrong, but that was always the impression I got. So, we went to live with normal people for the first time in my life. That was a real adjustment for me. I was used to absolutely no rules at all and all of the sudden I was caught up in a completely uptight environment. I remember getting in trouble for peeing on the floor all the time! What can I say? I was a baby still, kind of. I was five.

My grandfather paid for us to get a condo in West Palm Beach, Florida. It was a 2-bedroom quadplex for my single mother and her three kids. The oldest of which was me and at the time I had just turned five. I started kindergarten at a Catholic school a half a year late. It was no big deal because my mom had spent a lot of time with me already so I could already read and was way ahead of the game. The teacher used to leave and have me read stories to the other kids. At this point I had never had a haircut, so my hair was down to my waist. All the kids called me a girl and they made fun of my name a lot. I guess it bothered me enough that I got some gay-looking little boy’s haircut.

We went to day care for a year or so. I got picked on a lot because I was different. I don’t know if money ran out or if I just volunteered for it, but pretty soon I was at home alone watching myself, and River, and Wonder. After another year or so it was decided that our lives would be easier if we had normal names. My grandfather’s name is John William Shirley so I became John and River became William. Wow! We were original, huh? Wonder Faye became Ann. I don’t know why.

In the second grade I moved to a different school. School was always really easy for me. I was the kid you hated in school. The one who never seemed to have to study, but always got straight A’s. Yeah, that was me. I’m sorry about that. Even nerds have to have their achievements. River was decent in school, but not amazing. I don’t know if he ever even cared.

Ann wasn’t so good in school. She was held back in Kindergarten and then again in first grade. I think she was socially promoted after that. I could be wrong. If I would have known I was going to write a book 25 years later about the whole thing I might have paid more attention. I think my problem is that I am so completely self-absorbed that I don’t pay much attention to all the details of others around me.

Anyway, Ann took the whole “not having a dad thing” worse than any of us. We were pretty mean to her when we were growing up. We always wanted to do boy things and we didn’t want to be playing with Barbie dolls and stuff like that. We wanted G.I. Joe and Star Wars action figures. We wanted to make bike ramps and tree forts and play in dumpsters. We wanted to run and play until we hurt ourselves or we absolutely had to go home. As a result I am sorry to say that we were very mean to our little sister. I think it did permanent damage to her, and I am sorry for that.

Right before I started the fourth grade my mom started working as a secretary for this guy who was about to be a priest in the Catholic church. He came over to our house a few times and the next thing you know I was in public school. I had been wearing a uniform to school for the last three and a half years and we just wore hand-me-downs to play in. I didn’t know the first thing about dressing myself or social interaction with really “normal” people. And by really normal I mean cruel, heartless people. I was the biggest nerd in the world in the fourth grade. I was the nerd that even the nerds made fun of. Everyone else knew it and most importantly... I knew it. My self-esteem was shattered.

I got picked on every day. I didn’t want to fight. I just wanted to go home and play outside. So this guy my mom was seeing (Chris Tunnell) had also been a marine for a lot of years. His dad had retired from the Army. They had been all over the world as well. He was a know-it-all. He was a bully. He was a hypocrite. He told me I had to defend myself. He told me to beat the bullies bloody. He told me to leave marks and do it in public where everyone can see. He told me to never stop hurting them until I was dragged off, and even then to keep trying to fight. He told me to fight dirty and mean. He told me that if I didn’t fight back then I could expect a fight from him when I got home. He scared me, so I fought and I fought and I fought until the bullies stopped bothering me. In fact, I got in a lot of trouble and I think a lot of the kids thought I was crazy.

After 6 weeks in public school in Florida we all moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Chris Tunnell married my mother at the Justice of the Peace. Me and River and Ann were there. We moved into a tiny two-bedroom apartment. Chris worked as a manager at Wendy’s making something close to nothing. There were chemical plants nearby. They had sirens that would go off when there were too many hazardous materials in the air. Once again I got picked on a lot, so I got in a lot of fights. I got in a lot of trouble. Life was not good for me at all.

We lived in Lake Charles for a few months and then we moved to Georgia. This was now the third state that I had residence in and the fourth school I had gone to in one year. We moved to some white trash apartment complex. I got in fights all the time. Chris Tunnell became more and more intolerable to me. From the time I was very young I was told by everyone that I was the man of the house. I was told that I had to keep it together for everyone. So, I did... as well as I could, being a kid and all.

Chris drove me insane! He was uptight all the time. He was a neat freak. I have no problem keeping things clean, but I couldn’t care less if I can bounce a quarter off of my bed when I make it or if my underwear is folded into perfect six-inch squares. He was strict about the stupidest things. He came in and immediately wanted us to call him Daddy. I was like “Who are you again? Oh yeah, the guy who is married to my mom now. I’m not impressed. I’m the man here, not you.”

There were problems right away with Chris Tunnell. So, to prove that he could be a good dad he adopted us. We had already been going by normal names for a while. But now because our names were going to change we could change them to anything we wanted. So in the fourth grade I was adopted and my name was legally changed. Of course, I wasn’t too creative. I just stuck with the name I was already being called. The last name was a given, Tunnell. We got to choose our middle names. River chose Francis after St. Francis of Assisi because St. Francis liked animals and so did River. So he became William Francis Tunnell. Ann took my mother’s middle name as her own, so she became Ann Mary Tunnell. I, on the other hand am an idiot! I had a monkey doll named Joe so I said just name me John Joe. They insisted on lengthening it so I am now John Joseph Tunnell. Yee-ha!

Chris Tunnell had a lot of what I considered to be stupid hobbies. He lifted weights. He knew everything about every battle and war throughout history. He knew karate. He read a lot! He was a pseudo-intellectual. He loved old black and white movies. He knew lots of details about the Catholic religion, since he had almost been ordained as a priest (until he met my mother). The worst hobby was that he played with these tiny little army men. They were each less than an inch tall. He would take pieces of plywood and put fake grass on them. Then he would make lakes and hills and battlefields with trees and brush and cannons, horses, and the like. All that by itself is cool, I guess. But we lived in a two-bedroom apartment and I was 9 years old, River was 7, and Ann was 6 and we all stayed at home by ourselves after school until they got home from work. It was pretty hard to avoid these huge freaking pieces of plywood in the living room with tiny delicate men balanced all over them.

We messed those things up more than once and we had hell to pay every time. The really cool thing was that I still got to be the man of the house when it came to responsibility, just not when it came to authority. So, it didn’t matter who did what while my parents were at work, I got the blame for it because I was the man. I was the one in charge. I remember one time in particular when Ann hadn’t cleaned her room and I didn’t make her. I went out to ride my bike. When I came home Chris grabbed me by my throat and lifted me up and threw me against the wall. He said “Why isn’t your sister’s room clean?” The whole time I was just thinking, “Who cares? It is going to be dirty again. Just lighten up a little. Is it really worth all this?” Stuff like that happened all the time.

So in the fifth grade we moved to Powder Springs, Georgia. We actually lived in a house for the first time in our life. It had a neighborhood and everything. Chris wanted to impress everyone. He re-enlisted in the Marine Corps. He got a bunch of credit cards and maxed them all out. We got all new furniture, new bedding, a new car, video games, stereos, TV’s, all kinds of stuff. It was nice for a little while. I had a nice bike. That Christmas was probably the best in my life. We got so much stuff it was ridiculous!

The school I went to ironically had bullies in it as usual, but I just went for the biggest one in the school. I beat the piss out of him in front of everyone. I went ballistic. I beat him from one end of the hall to the other. I got him down on the ground and was just punching him over and over and over. I got dragged off by some of the guy teachers at the school. I got a few kicks in as they took me off of him. No one there ever messed with me again. I really didn’t like fighting, but I had gotten pretty good at it. I realized that most of fighting was in the talking before the actual fight, not in the actual throwing of punches. The real goal was to intimidate the other person and make them feel inadequate. This way they would either back down, which means you win or they wouldn’t fight as well because they were intimidated so you would probably win. Even if you lose everyone still respects you for not giving up. After you beat someone up they usually respect you and want to be your friend and so does everyone else. It is stupid, but true.

(OK, this has nothing to do with the story, but it is funny. One day I was at the bus stop by myself. There was some construction going on in the neighborhood. I saw a piece of lumber and a rock. I looked at the curb and thought, “Hmm, I could make a cool catapult.” So I put the 1x4 on the curb. I put the rock on the bottom end of the board and I stomped on the other end of the board. Well, it didn’t really work like I planned. The rock flew straight up and smacked me in the mouth. It chipped a piece off of one of my front teeth. I was so embarrassed I just spit it out and never told anyone about it until I was well into my twenties. Pretty funny, huh? Ok, back to the story.)

Pretty soon Chris had a dream of owning a mobile home. What a retard! We bought some land way out in the middle of nowhere. We paid way too much money to dig a well several hundred feet deep that never struck water. He dumped all kinds of money into this trailer idea. It never happened. We moved to Marietta, Georgia (the armpit of America as we called it.) Amazingly enough I had to deal with bullies again. Nothing new. We moved into another two-bedroom apartment. I think we actually stayed there for almost a full year, which in case you haven’t figured it out by now was monumental for us. River and I experimented a little with smoking. Nothing big, but it set the stage for what was to come. I started getting interested in girls. No big shocker. I was hitting puberty. I won a CD player from a radio station and I won some movie tickets. I thought I was pretty cool. I wasn’t. I got to go up to the radio station. Yee-ha!

So, then we moved into Chris’s sister’s rent house in Fayetteville, Georgia. My mom thought that maybe if Chris could have a baby of his own then he could understand what being a father was really like and maybe he would be nicer to us. My mom got pregnant with my little brother Chris. He was born Feb. 8th, 1985. He was a lot of fun. I learned a lot about babies and children because of him. So my mother quit her job and started babysitting kids out of our house. Lots of them! I helped, because it was a lot of work for her. That poor woman was worn out, but she never gave up. I have always respected her.

Fayetteville wasn’t all that bad really. Not too many bullies or maybe I was just getting used to it. Either way I was happy. There were some woods behind our house with a creek. We built forts, dug holes, swung on vines, swam, jumped in piles of leaves, played war, built ramps for our bikes and did every dangerous thing we could think of. It was great! I kissed my first girl. Also great! We played a lot of neighborhood sports. Nothing on a team, but still lots of fun! I spent seventh grade and part of the eighth grade in that house. That was a really long time to be in one place.

Half way through the eighth grade we moved to Kennedale, Texas (a small, inbred town in the Dallas/ Ft. Worth area.) By this time I was actually being seen as kind of cool, which was nice. Nobody really messed with me too much. I started playing the guitar, which I loved (and still do). I noticed that everyone there seemed to do drugs. We had a rent house in a decent neighborhood. Chris Tunnell was now a Gunnery Sergeant in the Marine Corps. He still drove me insane, but every once in a while he would do something kind of nice and I would think “Well, maybe he isn’t that bad.”

When I was younger and Chris would do something mean I would tell my mother and she would go to him and yell at him for it. I remember at some point I told her something he had done and she stopped me. She said something along the lines of “John, at some point you have to grow up and be a man. At some point you have to learn to stand up for yourself. You can’t always hide behind me. And if you keep fighting Chris then you are in for some hard years ahead of you.” That was the best and the worst thing my mom ever did for me. It was the worst because I used it as an excuse to do whatever I wanted. It was the best because it made me a man inside. I finally got cut loose and had to stand up for myself. I couldn’t cower under my mother’s wing any more. It was sink or swim. I cut the cord.

As I started getting older I started getting all the speeches about sex and drugs and drinking and all that. Chris would always brag about all the drugs he had done and all the bad things that he had done. He bragged about all the girls he had slept with. It always sounded cool to me. Then he would change his mood and say that things were different now and that if I ever did drugs my life would be over. I could never get a job because they do lie detector tests now. So I would throw my entire life away, he would disown me, and he would beat the piss out of me. I was scared. I mean, I didn’t want to do drugs anyway or any of that other stuff so it wasn’t a big deal, but I knew if I ever did that it would all be over!

Well, as fate would have it I started hanging out with all the cool kids. I discovered heavy metal music. I loved it! I started growing my hair out. At first I just listened to the innocent stuff like Bon Jovi and Stryper, Europe, and Cinderella. But I quickly moved to Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, etc. As a young man I believed what I was told and I believed anything these bands said in their music. It consumed me. I held out for a few months, but one day River and I went out to a field with some of our friends. They had stolen cigarettes from their parents and we smoked them. So, I started smoking. I didn’t even really like it. I just did it to be like everyone else. Tobacco is STUPID!

My parents started to accuse me of doing drugs and drinking. I really wasn’t. I tried to defend myself, but they didn’t believe anything that I said. So, finally I thought as long as I was getting accused of this I might as well do it.

So, I started drinking. This wasn’t a big jump for me because Chris Tunnell would drink all the time and he would insist on us trying beer and wine. I always thought alcohol was nasty, but it was different when you were with friends your own age. New year’s eve, 1986 I got drunk and ended up in the bathroom with all the stoners, who were all my friends. Someone pulled out a sack of weed and everyone started getting high. So did I.

The first time it didn’t really do anything. The second time it didn’t really do anything. The third time I fell in love! I got high everyday after that. It was all I lived for. I became trouble overnight. First of all I hated my step-dad. School wasn’t the least bit challenging. And I figured that since I had already thrown my life away and now I could never get a job or have a real life that I might as well learn to live like a criminal and enjoy myself. I cast off all restraint. I tried anything and everything that came my way. I was afraid of nothing and no one. I became the bully. I became everything that I hated.

I was never home. I always made lame excuses as to where I was. We would say we were staying at our friend’s house. He would say he was staying at another friend’s house, and that guy would say that he was staying at our house. My parents were having marital problems and they were busy with themselves so they didn’t do much to stop me. Plus River and I shared a room that was a converted garage and it had it’s own door to the outside. We would just say we were going to sleep and then sneak out and stay out all night. When my parents would find out about something they would try to put me on restriction or take something away. I couldn’t have cared less. I had already given up on there being any hope of me being anything more than a drug addict. I figured I would die young, but I would have fun until then. I thought that when I died I would either cease to exist or be reincarnated as something. I couldn’t control it so why bother even trying?

Somewhere in the middle of all this I died inside. I had been a straight A student my whole life. I had always been smart and good, but all that was gone now. This began the quick decent for me. River fell too, but not as hard as I did. I think he was just following his big brother and having a little fun. I actually believed what I said, which is what made me dangerous.

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