The Most Dangerous Animal of All Read online

  On June 1, 2002, Zach and I drove to New Orleans International Airport and boarded an airplane bound for Oakland, California. I sat quietly, my stomach in knots, looking out the window at the fluffy white clouds below while Zach talked with Joe Dean, the athletic director for Louisiana State University, who was seated next to us. Zach sensed how nervous I was and left me to my thoughts. As the plane made its way across the country, I became more afraid and excited.

  Although I had experienced unconditional love and acceptance in my adoptive parents’ home, the knowledge that my biological parents had not wanted me had plagued me throughout my life. In my mind, I had always been John Doe, a boy who had been discarded and given a new name by adoptive parents. As a result, I had trust issues during my adolescent years and then later in my adult relationships. I lived with the fear that I could be rejected at any moment because I could never be good enough that someone would want to keep me around. Loyd and Leona did everything they could to make me feel loved and wanted, but all of my adult relationships with women were destined to fail as long as I remained John Doe in my heart. My fear of being discarded rendered me incapable of loving fully, because I felt like I didn’t deserve to be loved. After all, how could anyone love me when I didn’t even know who I was?

  Although I was divorced from Zach’s mother, my relationship with Zach was quite different. I might not know myself, but I knew my son deserved better from me than I had received from my biological parents. I dedicated my life to ensuring that he would never experience the horror of feeling unwanted and that he would always understand how much his father loved him.

  Now that I knew that Judy had been a child when she gave me up for adoption, I had no residual bitterness as I mentally prepared for our meeting. My excitement began to build as I realized that I would finally have answers to the questions that had accumulated over my lifetime.

  When the plane finally landed, I wiped the sweat that had beaded on my palms onto the legs of my pants. I had yearned for this moment my entire life, and now that it was here, suddenly I was torn.

  I wanted to run away.

  I wanted to meet my mother.

  A few minutes later, I saw her at the far end of the terminal, standing with the man in the picture she had sent, and my heart began pumping furiously. She was tall—taller than the man next to her. Her hair was shorter and blonder than the picture had suggested. She was looking around anxiously. Even from a distance, I could see the same fear and excitement that I felt reflected in her face. I broke out in a cold sweat, but my steps quickened when our eyes met for the first time. From the moment I saw her eyes—clear blue like mine—I had no doubt. This woman was my mother.

  When I reached her, I dropped my suitcase and gathered her into my arms, hugging her tightly to me.

  “Mom,” I whispered into her hair.

  Judy stepped back, her hands on my shoulders, searching my face. Tears filled her eyes as she took in every detail of my appearance.

  “Gary,” she said, her voice trembling. “My son.”

  Those words sounded magical to me.

  With one arm still around her, I turned to introduce her to Zach. While they got acquainted, Frank held out his hand and introduced himself to me, then ushered us outside to his car.

  As Frank drove from Oakland to San Francisco, I couldn’t stop stealing glances at my mother. At fifty-four, she was slender and youthful, her beautiful eyes and hair enhanced by flawless, tanned skin.

  Before long, we arrived at Fisherman’s Wharf. Zach marveled at the huge Dungeness crabs that filled aquariums in front of Alioto’s restaurant, where we were to have dinner. Men, mostly immigrants wearing white smocks, fired the cauldrons while tourists sampled crab cocktails served in paper cups.

  “Can we get one, Dad?” Zach said excitedly. He had never seen a crab that big in Louisiana.

  “Maybe later,” I laughed. “Let’s eat at the restaurant first.”

  Once seated, we looked out the window at the colorful fishing boats lined up along the dock, their hulls rocking back and forth to the rhythm of the bay. The menu, featuring seafood brought in on those boats, reminded me of home.

  “What looks good?” Judy said.

  “Everything,” I laughed, “but we definitely have to order calamari. I bet it’s much fresher here than in Louisiana.”

  “Sometimes squid will school into the bay, but mostly they’re caught just beyond it in the Pacific,” Frank said.

  We kept the conversation light throughout dinner, each of us wanting to say so much but realizing we had to get to know one another slowly. After dinner, we walked along the wharf, peeking in shop windows and watching street performers dance and hula-hoop for passersby.

  “It feels so good here,” I told Judy, enjoying the cool breeze that swept along the bay. “At this time of year in Louisiana, you can’t even breathe because it’s so hot.”

  “It’s like this all year round. We love it,” she said, reaching for my hand. “I’m so glad you’re here. I can’t wait to show you San Francisco.”

  It was late when we arrived at the apartment Judy and Frank shared. After Frank and Zach fell asleep, Judy and I stayed up until three in the morning, sometimes talking, sometimes just staring at each other, neither of us really believing this was happening. Finally we could talk no more, and for the first time in my life, I kissed my mother good night.

  The unfamiliar roar of city buses on the street below woke me the next morning. Zach was still sleeping on the couch when I walked into the living room, and I leaned down and kissed him on the cheek before walking to the sliding glass door of my mother’s third-story terrace overlooking the city.

  The view of San Francisco was beautiful. Straight ahead, I could see Noe Valley, a working-class neighborhood filled with Edwardian row houses colored in pinks and blues and greens. In the midst of the valley, the twin steeples of St. Paul’s Catholic Church climbed high into the sky. Just across San Francisco Bay, I spotted the hills of Oakland. To the right, Candlestick Park carved an oval into the landscape, and to my left, cars moved quickly across the upper and lower decks of the Bay Bridge. Between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge, Alcatraz appeared hauntingly serene. I stood there for a moment, taking it all in before getting dressed.

  Judy and I had agreed to attend church that morning, and later that afternoon we drove to Benicia, a tiny fishing village that had grown into a thriving city thirty-five miles northeast of San Francisco, to see the corporate headquarters of a company that had recently offered me a position.

  My seventeen-year career as an electrical engineer had been an unsteady rise up the ladder of success. I graduated from Louisiana State University with a bachelor of science in 1985, and over the years I’d advanced with one company and then another, working my way into management before becoming vice president of industrial services for a large company. As often happens in the boom-and-bust industrial cycle in Louisiana, that company started showing signs of downsizing, and I began to worry about my job security.

  A month before Judy called my mother, Delta Tech Service, in Benicia, had contacted me. The company was looking for someone to open an industrial service location in Baton Rouge. Fatigued by the ups and downs of the oil business, I turned the offer down and accepted a job as plant manager at a plastics manufacturer. I was supposed to start that job the Monday after Mother’s Day, but then Judy entered my life and everything changed. I accepted the position with Delta Tech, excited about the prospect of being able to travel in and out of San Francisco. It seemed like divine intervention that the job offer had come so close to the time I needed to be in California as often as possible. It was perfect. I could visit my mother whenever I was needed at our company headquarters.

  Judy and I rode together in her sporty red Grand Am while Frank, wanting to give us some time alone, followed with Zach in a blue Mercury Sable. As we rode, I absorbed the landscape—the colorful Victorian houses climbing one after another up the hills, the unfamilia
r shrubs and trees, the golden wild grass. It all seemed so surreal—a lifetime of emotions and experiences being crammed into a few short days. For a while we rode in silence, Judy wondering when I would start asking the tough questions and me trying to figure out what to ask first.

  “Isn’t this where the bridge collapsed during the 1989 earthquake?” I said.

  “Oh, yes. In fact,” Judy said, pointing overhead through the windshield to the bottom of the upper deck of the Bay Bridge, “right here where the red markers are is the exact spot the bridge failed.”

  “I remember seeing that on TV like it was yesterday,” I said, before spitting out the question I had been dying to ask. We had been dancing around it since I arrived.

  “So, Mom . . . who is my father?”

  Putting both hands on the steering wheel, Judy cleared her throat and straightened in her seat. I could see she was nervous.

  “You remember when we first talked on the phone, and you asked me to be completely honest with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I promise you that I will always tell you the truth. We have to build our relationship on love, truth, and honesty. But, honey, it’s been so long now, and you have to realize that I was forced to forget everything about your father and about you. My memory of that time is severely repressed.”

  Judy began sharing with me some of her recollections of my father, which were sketchy at best. “His name was Van. I don’t remember his full name,” she said, before explaining that they had met when she was very young and had run away together.

  “Anyway, we ended up in New Orleans, and I ended up pregnant. One day, I think when you were about three months old, your father took you to Baton Rouge. I remember he took you by train, because we still didn’t own a car. He took you to a church. When he returned without you, I left him,” Judy continued. “Your father got mad at me for leaving and turned me in to the authorities.”

  I struggled to comprehend what I was hearing. I had been brought to a church?

  “So my father took me to Baton Rouge and turned me in to the authorities at a church, and then he turned you in to the authorities?” I queried, wanting to be sure about every detail.

  Judy hesitated and then nodded her answer. “Yes.”

  I sat quietly for a moment, taking it all in. Finally I said, “You know what, Mom? I really don’t think I want to know any more about my father. I have a wonderful family back home in Baton Rouge, and my dad is the best father in the world.”

  Judy’s relief was visible. She obviously didn’t want me to find him, either.

  I wish that would have been the end of it for me, but over the next few months, the more I thought about my biological father, the more I wanted to meet him, to learn his side of the story, maybe even forgive him and begin a relationship. My mother’s memories were limited. Maybe his memories would be better, and he could give me a reason why he had brought me to Baton Rouge and left me there.

  I decided I would try to find him after all. I wanted to learn the truth about him—what kind of man he was, why he didn’t want me. I know now that sometimes things should be left in the past, that knowing isn’t always better. Sometimes the truth is so horrible that it must be uncovered in bits and pieces, snippets here and there, absorbed slowly, as the whole of it at once is simply too shocking to bear.

  And sometimes the truth changes everything . . .

  1

  October 1961

  Earl Van Best Jr. sat on a bench in front of the bookstore across the street from Herbert’s Sherbet Shoppe. He was waiting while the owner of the store tallied up his earnings for the antique books he had brought back from Mexico City. While he sat there, he watched intently as a beautiful young girl came bouncing off the school bus that had just stopped on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Judah Street. As she walked, her blond hair shimmered, reflecting the afternoon sun. He stood up and stepped directly into her path, stopping her before she could cross the street.

  “Hi,” Van said warmly, flashing the charming smile that made him a good salesperson.

  “Hi,” she responded, smiling back before turning to walk toward the ice cream parlor.

  He followed her.

  “I’m Van. What’s your name?”

  “Judy.”

  Van opened the door for her, and they made their way across the beige mosaic-tiled floor to the glass-framed counter. Judy scanned the selections of sherbet before deciding on a plain vanilla ice cream cone. My father paid for her ice cream and asked if they could share a table. He looked like a nice fellow, very neat and polished, and Judy nodded her agreement, flattered by the attention from such a well-dressed, older man. They walked to a table in the corner, near the black-and-white-checkered wall.

  Van sat down and gazed into the clear blue eyes that stared back at him so innocently. He loved beautiful girls, the younger the better, and this one was prettier than most.

  Employing the British accent he liked to affect, he asked, “How old are you?” She looked like she was about twenty, but he was aware that she had just gotten off a school bus.

  “Almost fourteen.”

  Van didn’t believe her. She was much too mature, too pretty to be that young.

  “Impossible,” he murmured.

  “Yep,” she giggled, licking her ice cream, before adding, “My birthday is October eighth.”

  He sat there for a moment, wondering if he should stay, but one look into her smiling eyes convinced him that her age did not matter. Although he was twenty-seven, it was, for my father, love at first sight, total and complete. He had to have her. She was young, innocent, malleable.

  To Judy, Van seemed worldly and wise as he told her stories about trips to Mexico, about growing up in Japan. He talked about music and art and literature, things the adults in her life didn’t talk about.

  “Where do you live?” Van asked.

  “By the park,” Judy replied, “on Seventh Avenue.”

  “With your parents?” Van pressed.

  “My mom and stepdad, but I don’t like him. He’s mean,” Judy said.

  “I have a mean stepfather, too,” Van said, adding softly, “I would never be mean to you.”

  Judy giggled and stood up. “I’d better get home before I get in trouble.”

  Van followed her out the door and watched her walk up the hill until she was out of sight before he headed back into the bookstore to collect the money owed him. Satisfied with the store owner’s estimation of the value of his books, he headed back to the Castro District, just around Mount Sutro, where he lived with his mother and stepfather.

  The next afternoon, Van stood in front of the ice cream shop waiting for the school bus that hopefully would again deliver to him the loveliest girl he had ever seen. He watched as some pedestrians walked out of an Asian market and into a nearby Irish pub. Others stopped at the sidewalk cafés, enticed by the aroma of coffee streaming from their doorways. The Sunset District was always filled with pedestrians, mostly young college and high school students and older locals, businessmen who had helped develop the area, believing America’s promise of a better life for hardworking immigrant entrepreneurs.

  My father wanted that entrepreneur lifestyle, and he was smart enough to have it. He had graduated from Lowell High School, a school that catered to gifted children, and attended City College of San Francisco, but his grades belied his intelligence. B’s and C’s lined his transcripts, except in English and ROTC, where he excelled. Those were the only subjects that really interested him. He had spent much of his life reading everything he could find, but he especially enjoyed literature—the kind that bores the presumably less intelligent.

  He soon spotted the school bus coming up the street and watched as several children climbed down the steps. Then there she was again . . . beautiful and sweet.

  He called out to her when she turned to walk up Judah Street. When she saw him, she smiled a big, happy smile.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” she said.r />
  “Waiting for you. Let me walk you home.”

  “Oh, no. My mother would be mad if she saw me walking with a boy.”

  “Well, then, we won’t let her see us,” Van grinned, taking Judy’s arm and steering her across the street. “We’ll cut through the park.”

  Judy felt a quiver of excitement as they walked past her street and into Golden Gate Park. Her experiences with men throughout her life had not been good ones, but this man seemed different. Her mother, Verda, had divorced her father a few years before, because he was a strict disciplinarian and had treated his daughters cruelly. He had spanked Judy and her sister, Carolyn, often, leaving red welts on their backsides that made sitting down unbearable. Those spankings had finally ended with the divorce, but sometimes Judy missed her father.

  Verda had moved with her girls to San Jose, where she had tried to pick up the pieces and make a new life, but things had not been much better there. Her first date resulted in rape, and Verda soon discovered she was pregnant with her rapist’s child—a boy she named Robert, who was born May 28, 1961. Verda knew she could not keep the child. He would be a constant reminder of what she had suffered, and she already had two mouths to feed. She put her son up for adoption immediately after his birth.

  Rebounding from that experience, Verda moved back to San Francisco and married Vic Kilitzian, a marine electrician who worked at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. An Armenian from Greece, Vic did not speak English well. Judy could barely understand the words he spoke, except when he hurled insults at her mother. Although he did not hit the children, he made sure everyone knew that he thought Verda was stupid. In its own way, that was as bad as the spankings for Judy, who couldn’t bear to see her mother treated that way. For Verda, life had become worse than ever. She worked hard at Crocker Bank to help support the family and then returned home each afternoon for another round of belittling. Depressed and hopeless, she had little affection to give her daughters.

  At thirteen, my mother was starving for love, and Van was eager to give the innocent girl the attention she sought. Judy smiled happily, feeling special and grown-up when Van tucked her arm into his. Her smile widened when he kissed her hand before leaving her at the edge of the park, six houses from her home.