Arthur Bundy

My mother was in the Army from Kansas. My father was in the Air Force from Alabama. They met in Tokyo, Japan, in the early 50s during the last stages of our Japanese occupation. I was conceived in Japan and born in the United States in October of 1954. Namely, Maxwell AFB in Montgomery Alabama. This was just north of where my father grew up in Andalusia.

The environment I was born into was one of major adversity. Ideologies in my household stood on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line. My father was a Southern Democrat turned Republican over the Civil Rights issues of the 1960s. The notion that equal rights for minorities got too liberal for southerners still angry over losing the Civil War. Not to mention angry over the punishment of Reconstruction perpetrated by Republican radicals of the same period who turned one of the richest areas of the country into one of the poorest areas of the country to this day. 

He was an alcoholic from early in his life, who lived in denial of his addiction to the end of his life. A man who spent so much of his time living in the past, that he ultimately wasted his life reaching for dreams that he really didn't believe could be his.

He at first, resented his father for abandoning him and his mother, at an early age. His father started another family in another area of the State of Alabama. And, then came back some five years later to reestablished himself as head of the household. Or, more to the point, take what he felt was rightfully his. My father watched as he was demoted as head of the household himself, and his mother was ordered into submission. A flaw he saw in his mother that he resented and reminded her of, until she passed in 2002. A man my father would grow to admire, for reasons I will never be able to understand.

My mother on the other hand, is still something of an abolitionist even though she does not think very much of President Obama. Had we still lived in Montgomery Alabama in 1965, she would have marched with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery.

She was born in Kansas just as the Depression was getting into full swing. Raised on a farm. A country girl who rode a horse before she could walk, and shoot any gun handed to her like an expert. My uncle describes her as the only woman he ever knew who could fight like a man.

She was raised to make the best of her circumstances no matter how tough those circumstances could be. When it came to dealing with the disappointment of loving and then divorcing my father, that attitude saved her life. 

She is a woman my father first admired because of her backbone. Because, as I said, he was ashamed of his mother for not standing up to his father. She intimidates me at times even though she is 82. Not that she scares me, but I can see in her what my father could not handle. A determined will that was not to be denied or easily pushed aside. My father grew to resent that about her, because she was not the type to let anybody walk on her. My father eventually divorced her because he was intimidated by her and too proud to admit it to himself. The irony being, that she is the best organizer I have ever seen, and raise as a farmer's daughter with a very sound business ethic that my father ignored. She would have earnestly backed and supported any dream my father chose to pursue. 

So, I grew up a military brat. I am one of the few people I know who can honestly say my mother wore combat boots before it was as fashionable as it is now. I was educated in Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. With Colorado becoming the first real home I had ever known. I would not trade this place for any in the world. 

I am the oldest of four children. Because of the constant volitile nature of my parents relationship our's was not a household in harmony. My father used the silent treatment alot to punish my mother for not seeing things his way. My mother therefore found herself in need of someone to talk too. She described it to me once as, you were the first to come along who could talk.

This relationship that developed between me and my mother, my father used as a catalyst to drive a wedge into all the household relationships. He pitted his children against each other to drive us apart in an irrational attempt to seaze control over the household and therefore my mother.

What I turned into was a total idiot. I treated my brother and sisters like crap, or like they really didn't exist. I went out of my way to play up my role as the example to the others that an older brother was supposed to be, and paid dearly for my arrogance. I showed signs of the volitile nature of my temper long before I was to become a threat to other people. Ironically, the only times the household was ever at peace, was when my father was on some remote military assignment.  

I graduated high school in 1973. From LT. General William Mitchell High School in Colorado Springs. The history of Mitchell in the form of the movie about his court-martial where Gary Cooper portrayed him, was the spark that started me on a long love of history.

And it was during my time at Mitchell, that our school drama department did a play called "Inherit the Wind", which lead me to question religion a well as politics. 

After graduation, I joined the Navy. Actually, I had joined the Navy before I got out of high school. I remember the spring of 1970 when my father came back from Thailand after having suffered from a heart attack. This was in the days when a heart attack was a long and dangerous ordeal. That sight of watching him being carried off the MEDVAC basically vulnerable and helpless was a sight that was shattering to me. The thought that someone who I thought was invincible and was not was hard to take.

But, more than that was the sight of so many young men not much older than me coming off that plane is varied stages of mangled and broken. One in particular was bandaged from head to toe with his arms wired such that he looked like the mummy with his arms extended and his fingers seperated from each other. It was clear that he was some kind of burn victim.

At Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver there were men with one arm, no arms, one leg, no legs, no legs and no arms. What I saw made it clear to me, that if I was going to war, I was not going to allow myself to end up like one of these guys. So, instead of waiting for the draft to catch me, I joined the Navy. I figured drowning from having the boat shot out from under me, was better than being a giant target on the battlefield. And, ironically, it was in March of 1973, that the draft ended because of the peace agreement signed in Paris. I would never have been draft anyway.

So, I joined the Navy. Six weeks into my naval career, I call home one night to find out that my father was moving out of the house, and that he and my mom were going to get a divorce. The worst possible scenerio I could conceive of for my life, had just played out.

Going back to eighth grade I knew that divorce for my parents was a very likely possiblity, but not one I wanted to face. It was the beginning of a downward spiral that would put me in prison eighteen years down the road. And why,... because I decided at that point that the world I knew was over and so was my life. I refused to just focus on living my own life, I chose at that point to engage in a long slow road of self-distruction and self-angrandizement. Wearing myself importance like a chip on my shoulder, and reveling in a past, that demanded my parents get back together so I could justify moving on with my life.

Then after I got kicked out of the Navy for being what they called unsuitable for military service, Richard Nixon abondoned the White House and the Presidency. The country, my parents, and the world were filled with hypocrits, and I with all my grand delusions I was in reality the worst of the them all, all by myself.

I spent the next 18 years going from job to job, and woman to woman, reveling in the idea as Dirty Harry put it in the movie Sudden Impact that I... was a legend in my own mind. I became a drug dealer for a short while, and a drug addict for most of that 18 years. I dreamed of a greatness that was both an illusion and a very bad joke, because the potential existed without the will or the desire to see it through. My father would tell me, "you can do anything you set your mind to do". Right...I wanted to feel sorry for myself, and my life showed me that I was very good at it. I was even once in a tv studio in Los Angeles where the head cameraman came up to me and offered me a job at a time when I thought I could be a star. When what I really was was a wantabe homosexual and a pathetic prostitute who thought of the casting couch as my way in.

Bottom line, I didn't want to work any harder than I absolutely had too. Because as I saw it I didn't see the point. Besides, I was entitled to greatness, because my world so horribly sucked.

Not unlike my father, I was a reasonably charming man who used that socalled charm to be a master manipulator and sexual abuser of women. I was God's gift to sex, and nobody knew it better than I did. I even had children through some of those women I played to go to bed with me. Children that I denied were mine, and avoided like the plague.

Then in 1984, I met the woman who would become my wife. I was tired of the senseless BS, that had been the story of my life, but had not yet learned not to lie to myself. I wanted to loved her and wanted to take care of her, but I really didn't understand, that if I didn't love myself or couldn't take care of myself, I could not really know what it means to love someone or anyone else, or...take care of them.  

I really had no business involving anybody in my life. I was the true measure of the phrase "Misery loves company". And her life with me was not always misery, but misery was never very far away. I made a point of letting my ego do my thinking for me. When she became pregnant with our son, I was happy as a clam. But shortly after he was born I saw myself taking a backseat to him. I resented that our sex life was suffering because she was too busy for me. And, not that I hated my son, I adored him. He was the first real good thing to come out of my sordid existance, but I didn't really appreciate that fact. I was just too self absorbed to see what I was doing to her because of my own petty needs. and certainly had not yet become the man I was capable of being.

Eventually, my wife did, what my mother had been too stubborn to do, she decided the time had come to divorce me. She had come home from work to find that I had fallen asleep and that our son, all of five years old had left the house. Only to be found just down the street at a friends house. I had become so selfish, that I had even lost sight of my responsibility to him.

So, how did I pay her back for my sense of betrayal, I committed a brutal and very psychlogically based sexual assault on her...A crime that would cost me the next 18 years of my life.

Of course, at the time I felt justified. My life sucked, and it was the world's fault. I was a loser, and that was my parent's fault. I was going to prison, because my wife did not love in the way I expected I had the right to be loved. And all this coming from a man, who clearly had no concept of what it meant to love himself.

But there was something else that was happening as well. I had finally hit rock bottom in my life. I had been blaming my existance and the form it had taken on everybody but the place it had always needed to be placed, and that was on me. I could say that the world had put me in prison, but the reality was, I had put myself there. And, I had no one else to blame for how I had gotten myself there. But, I was not quite ready to take the steps necessary to admit that to myself.

I read history and classics for the most part, and have a real understanding of the law and the U.S. Constution. I am called liberal, but I am not sure that really has any relivance today, because I am American first, last, and always.

Which means whether I agree with you or not, I respect your right to agree or disagree with me. Just as long as we can find the means to keep the peace, and develope a workable solution to our issues.