Cereal and Ivy League

It's April Fool's Day, 1995, but this is not a joke. I'm 15 years old. A tall, lanky kid with hair gel running through spikey blonde locks. Kinda funny, maybe cocky. My jeans are actually women's jeans, but I didn't know it for the first few weeks after buying them from the cheap fashion store, sort of an afterlife for rejected clothing. Initially, I wondered why they didn't fit well in the butt. In fact, they drooped like the skin of an elephant. A few hand-sewn stitches in the crotch solved the problem, so long as they don't bust open in the middle of church or something. The flannel was my first crack at a collection, with new editions hopefully coming soon when the Salvation Army replenishes their inventory, and if I'm lucky.

The corroded cinder block walls and bare wood ceiling are not enough to block the screaming. What's happening two stories up sounds gruesome. This has been going on all day, but it's getting worse as we get closer to midnight. My bedroom is in our wet basement, which is also our laundry room and the drain for the house. I'm listening to the situation taking place in the bathroom above, worried this time that it's really bad. I feel like I'm old enough to fill in as the man of the house while Dad's preoccupied, leaning over the bathtub, hoping things don't get worse. The house is dark, and we're all supposed to be in bed, but of course, I'm not. Sarah's not. The younger ones are undoubtedly awake too.

The drafty basement walls always seeped with moisture from the rain. It's usually wet for days after a good rain and worse when the rain really pours. The carpet smelled like an old warehouse, with wet cardboard and stale cat urine. I wear shoes all day to protect my feet from the dirty floors or the splinters from the planks of the staircase leading out of the basement. The shag carpeting in my room has started to dry, so it feels more crusty than soaking wet under my worn-out tennis shoes. I clenched my sweaty hands as I paced the room, praying for a breakthrough. Unfortunately, the screaming never seemed to end, it just got worse as the day went on, except for a moment at a time when Mom paused from exhaustion.

Honestly, she sounds like she’s barely hanging on, and I'm trying not to think about that, but I can hear the alarm in Dad’s voice. I've not really heard such desperation before.

“Come on, stay with me!”. He’d quickly transition into an angry preacher voice, filled with panic, “No! Wake up! She will not die! Death cannot have her!”

I spent most of my time back and forth, quietly sneaking up to the main floor, the halfway point between my bedroom and my parents, so I could hear what was going on. I'm a night owl, but who could sleep through this? Pacing back and forth keeps me occupied and allows me to keep track of what's happening.

My sister's intermittent updates are good. I feel less helpless if I know what's going on. Her bedroom is upstairs, so she can't get away from the sound of the screaming and labored breathing. She's in and out helping as needed, but there isn’t much she can do. Earlier in the night, I'd creep toward the stairs as she crept down to tell me the latest. “Nothing yet,” she told me. It had been all day with this and, to some degree, all week. But now it's bad. Real bad. Dad's determined to save Mom's life, and the baby’s too, but the baby's not breathing, and Mom's gone pale, barely responding, Sarah says. She actually doesn't seem that worried. Maybe she's naive, or maybe she's just holding herself together. I never show emotion, so maybe she's thinking the same thing about me.

Mom was lying in the tub, stripped naked, losing blood, and the baby was not yet through the birth canal. Her moans of agony sounded like something I had never heard before, or after, for that matter. I'm not supposed to come upstairs, but it isn't a good scene to walk into anyway.

I've seen some version of this already. They've had ten other kids at home, with me, the second oldest, being the only exception born in a hospital. I’ve actually watched several of those births.

Don’t worry, we're all fine. Sure, there were many scary moments, but all of us, up to this point, had survived. Something about this particular time seemed a lot worse. Worse than the breech birth and worse than the twins. Dad's voice was different. Mom sounded weak, more like talking in her sleep, if she spoke at all. I'm starting to realize that she and the baby may both die from this much blood loss and the baby’s lack of oxygen. All without medical help.

So far, I'm the only one with any medical records at all, which is a record of my birth in the hospital. My hospital birth was due to some complications, but not because my parents would have chosen it. After that, I would never see a doctor again as a kid. The rest of my siblings had never even been to a doctor’s office. My parents' faith is important to them, and they would never compromise it by putting their trust in a doctor instead of trusting in God. This was what we’d always been taught.

As the second oldest of 11 siblings, and one on the way, my sister Sarah and I helped with the duties of raising the kids, and eventually, some of them were old enough to help raise the younger ones. Today, things just got harder.

Always Cold. Never Christmas.

The twelve of us were born over the course of 17 years to the same two parents (people always ask). My parents are former hippie types. Not so much the drugs and laissez-faire sex type of people (obviously they did like having sex, though), but the version they call Jesus Freaks, coming of age in the Jesus Movement, a religious counterpart to the Woodstock types from the 70s. My parents and their community embraced a very tight-knit church life and sometimes extreme charismatic beliefs. They tended to be anti-establishment, avoiding doctors, government intervention, and for a large part of my life, even holidays like Christmas. They didn’t trust the public schools either, so education was also something they took on for themselves. We were homeschooled because our parents wanted to protect us. To keep us sheltered from harmful teachings and the influence of the world.

Mom and Dad didn’t love us. Just kidding. Maybe they did. They didn’t really tell us they loved us, but I’m sure they probably would say it if you asked. One of the ways you would know is that they put themselves through hell to provide for us while putting us through hell to make sure we didn’t become worldly. I just wanted to get the chance to do something outside the house to experience life. We could rarely go to a sleepover at Grandpa's house or a friend's house. We weren’t allowed to get jobs, driver's licenses, or go to most events or outings. Even events put on by the church youth group, sometimes, if our behavior that week wasn't good enough.

You know, it really doesn’t matter if they told us they loved us or not. When they called us names, left marks from spankings, or made us skip meals as a punishment, they did it for our own good and told us we'd thank them one day. I don’t totally understand their parenting decisions. All I can say is that they did not express their feelings of love or pride, but they did express their disappointment. They did what they felt was best. I did my best not to feel at all.

I got pretty good at not feeling. I listened to music and sat in the basement with the lights dim or went on long walks in the neighborhood, talking to myself or whatever I thought God was at the time. This coping mechanism became useful in adulthood, but the negative side is that I was numb. Speaking as a numb person, this is also a positive. Everything feels much better when you don't give a shit. It feels like nothing. I went through meaningful life events, knowing I should feel something, but I just didn’t.

It seems like most of my siblings had a period of time when they contemplated suicide; at least the ones who would open up to me said so. I never did, though. I always knew tomorrow was coming soon, and I looked forward to tomorrow for all of 18 years. When it finally came, I seized it.

Sure, every kid has an emo stage where the whole world sucks, and no one gets them. But not every kid has to potty train their brother while going through puberty. I potty trained two brothers, starting when I was as young as ten. I did all the other stuff, too: bathing, feeding, changing diapers, and so on.

I managed to get out of having to help with my youngest brother, and I don’t know how. I never asked why, for the same reason I never asked why one year we suddenly started celebrating Christmas. I didn’t want to ruin it.

My parents did eventually tell me that they loved me, by the way. Several times, actually. This was usually in a chat message on my birthday or something, but this was after they had banned me from the house, so the message comes across a little differently.

Alright, the kicking me out thing is not fair without context. First, it started with me having to throw out my water bed because it caught on fire. Then I had to sleep on the couch. Then, in a moment of frustration, they threw away their couch to spite me. So then I slept on chair cushions for a couple of days and moved out on my own, and then, when I was visiting, they kicked me out, banning me from the house for months.

About This Very True Story

As you can tell so far, this story recalls a lot of my childhood, and it’s going to take some explaining, so it all makes sense. So please bear with me. It took me some time to make sense of it all, too. For the record, everything in this book is true. That is, except for the dialogue I made up because I couldn’t remember exactly how someone said something that was otherwise an important conversation to me. Oh, and also the kind of but also kind of not embellishing of events, which I’ve included to help you understand how it felt to be in that moment. When you understand how memory works, you’ll find that humans do a really bad job of remembering facts and details, like the dialogue in a conversation. You’ll also find that humans do a really good job of remembering feelings and emotionally impactful events.

One more thing, if anything in this book makes someone look bad, their version is probably more true than mine, but I’m not going to provide you with their contact information to get their side of the story. I'm also not going to use their real names out of respect. To hear the more true version, you’ll have to wait for the apology in my follow-up book, “A Better Life Had No One,” subtitled “The true story behind all the not very favorable things that were said in a previous book that was just MADE UP”. The summary on the inner jacket will say, “‘A Better Life Had No One’ is the tell-all (again) book about the life of Daniel Herndon, the very normal person who had a very, very good life. In this story, he recalls in better, more accurate detail all the ways that life was very positive, and he felt fine the entire time in spite of the reflections of his previous book.”

I originally had no intention of writing this book. For the most part, I tended to think of my life as pretty ordinary. To me, it was not exactly a campfire story to talk about the time when one sister sliced her leg open, with muscles pouring out, after which the only treatment was clear packing tape holding it together (pictures of the scars are available in the follow-up book). The period of time when I routinely snuck into the kitchen and stole raisins out of the economy-size box didn’t seem like enough of an addiction to join an AA meeting. It didn’t even seem like something to talk about in therapy, either.

The raisin thing did end up coming up in therapy, though. Like any good therapist, mine simply said, “Tell me more about that?” with a curious voice. I assumed that she was trying to probe to identify how this raisin obsession was alluding to some kind of life metaphor about my desire for a deep relationship where blood was thicker than water, which of course, is silly. I think I was just trying to talk about my feelings about having to steal food to get enough nutrition. I must have been low on iron.

My exposure to the outside world, while it was tightly controlled, was still pretty diverse. How else would you cast demons out of a schizophrenic homeless guy if you were sheltered? Later in this book, I will provide you with a detailed lesson on how to cast out demons should you be faced with a demon-possessed person at some point in your life journey. Anyway, this brings me to my point. It’s not that I was sheltered. It was more like selectively sheltered. I was sheltered from things like formal education while being exposed to things like semi-homeless people having seizures in your house while they are ordering a cup of coffee from your nonfood-safe kitchen concession stand. I was exposed to plenty of traveling preachers who called each other “brother” and lots of Christian music concerts, but I was not exposed to things like, say, medicine or steak.

The mentally unstable visitors came in a certain phase of life from the early 80s to about 94, when we lived at the Sonshine Inn, the Christian Coffeehouse (lots more on that later). To give you some context for the phases in this book, I’ll separate them by the places that I lived, which are as follows:

• Three Fountains East. Characterized by brown carpet, free HBO, and neighbors with stringy hair. This was mostly during my toddler years. I remember a lot about this place, which includes eating what I thought was a cookie, but it was actually a piece of solid dirt.
• The Sonshine Inn. This was a big blue house that was also a coffeehouse and an inner city mission with a pun for a name. My parents volunteered to run the coffeehouse in exchange for free rent. It was fun living here except when the possum died in the crawl space, then again when the furnace went out in the winter, and also several other times.
• Colorado Avenue. This was my teenage years. If we kids ended up committing any crimes, it would have been during this time, and this was a great neighborhood to commit a crime in, but for now, I won’t give away the whole book.

Life wasn’t just about demon possession and co-parenting siblings after literally watching them be born. It was also about the struggle to have enough. Enough food, enough clothing, and enough opportunities to find my way out of poverty.

For nearly eighteen years, I was bored. In an effort to address my boredom, I trespassed on private property to build clubhouses, and I invented games to play with the neighbors, like one called P.O.W., which stands for ‘prisoners of war' – an acronym I made up. I later learned this acronym already existed in real life, and the game was exactly like a game that also existed called capture the flag. The point is that most of the time, to have fun, we have to create it.

On a rare occasion, I might get the opportunity to stay the night at a rich friend's house (that is, someone whose household income is over $35,000 per year), usually because of some kind of emergency that had taken place at our house. I’d get to do stuff that rich people do, like eat cereal or go to restaurants that aren’t buffets (or ones that are, which is fun and lavish too).

All my friends were rich, actually. They had VCRs, they had name-brand shoes, and their cars had working radios and air conditioning. And cereal – they ate cereal every day. Not just any cereal. I’m talking about cereal with colorful marshmallows in it, frosting, or maybe two scoops of raisins. This was not your basic toasty o’s or generic flakes. And this was not a treat. It was any time they wanted to eat it, as far as I could tell.

When my friends weren’t having cereal, they did other interesting things. Some were involved in sports teams like “Little League,” and some had SEGA or Nintendo game machines – or both. Another thing I noticed about these wealthier kids is that they showered every day and brushed their teeth, sometimes as much as twice a day. For a time, I thought it was pretentious, but eventually, I figured out that this was actually pretty normal.

Although if I tried to take a shower every day, I probably could have gotten away with it, I just never thought of it. The only person in our house who showered every day was Dad, and that was because he came home from work dirty and smelly, with pit stains and grime in his work uniform. The only thing I can figure is that my parents didn’t want us to catch on to the idea of daily bathing for fear it would impact water bills, supplies of soap, and possibly the wait time for our one whole bath.

Daily bathing was a different lifestyle. The people who showered daily were, in most cases, the same people who would use fabric softener in their laundry, and as I’ve already mentioned before, they brushed their teeth twice per day. I found it intriguing, but also, frankly, I found it unnecessary. It wasn’t that I was against it. I just thought it was excessive.

I’ll admit I was at least a little bit fascinated by the lifestyle of my friends.

While my friends did invite me over from time to time, I think my parents were testing themselves for how many times they could tell us ‘no.’ No, you can’t get a job. No, you can’t get a driver’s license. No, you can’t eat breakfast. No, you can’t go to a church youth group canoeing event at 17 years old because you are too young in spite of being the oldest student in the youth group.

In a moment of weakness, they would occasionally say yes, in which case our friends would have to pay for everything. I once went to an Indiana Pacers game and didn’t bring a dime for food. I enjoyed what seemed like an unlimited supply of lavish foods provided generously by my friend’s parents. It didn’t once cross my mind that I could have been taking advantage of them.

You can’t get away with that every time, though. I joined an outing with other kids my age once, in which case I was required to bring a sack lunch. Mom prepared lunch for my sister and me for this field trip to a museum with other homeschooled kids, wealthier than us.

Mom prepared the following:

• One wedge of red cabbage
• One wedge of white cabbage
• Two whole carrots
• Two apples

My friends thought this was weird, which sort of embarrassed me a little bit, but not really until they made a comment about us being rabbits. I played it off as though it was normal, and I was cool with it, and they didn’t know what they were missing.

To be fair, I thought they were weird for having packaged goods like “Oreos” and “Doritos” with their nicely prepared sandwiches with the crust cut off. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted those Doritos, but I knew that they were pretentious for insisting on extravagant things, and we were normal and more down-to-earth.

Our typical daily meals at home had a sense of glamour as well. We would make dinners that involved ingredients that you could buy in bulk and then cook in a giant pot. The goal was to make way too much of something with as much filler as possible and eat the leftovers for the coming days. Common meals for our family included the following:

• Goulash
• Sauerkraut and Sausage
• Spaghetti and tomato sauce
• Green Beans and Rice
• Vegetable soup (add water to reach volume requirements)

My parents were great at branding these meals to make them seem more enticing than they were. Step one was not to let us go to other people’s houses very much so that we didn’t have a point of comparison. Then they would say stuff like “It’s Spaghetti Monday!” a declaration that made the idea of having canned tomato sauce on plain pasta something you would anticipate all week long, even though we never added any kind of protein. Going back even further, Mom would offer me some “ice cold powdered milk,” which is another way of saying “powdered milk,” which is another way of saying “the milk you can afford”. That practice of creative names for meal experiences was my first lesson in branding. It’s great because it makes someone whose life is absolutely miserable think that it’s actually pretty cool. Even the name goulash is a marketing term; macaroni with canned beans, ground chuck, and tomato juice could be called lots of things, but when you call it goulash, to a young, sheltered child, it sounds like something you would have on a royal cruise. If I’m being honest, for the first twelve years, this menu tasted pretty good, but over time, the likability degraded.

Breakfast was another story. Well, actually, it was the same story, reheated in the microwave. We didn’t really do breakfast. We called it breakfast, but it was not until about 11:00 AM that we were allowed to start eating. Our morning routine was to wake up at about 8:00 or 9:00. Dad left for work before we ever woke. All the siblings would then wait in our rooms and the adjacent hallway, waiting to see when Mom got out of bed. After about three hours of passing the time, she would emerge without a word and go watch daytime television shows.

Once Mom came out from her dark bedroom, we were then allowed to go downstairs and prepare our first meal of the day, generally the leftovers from dinner the prior evening. Occasionally, leftovers from so many days would accumulate that we would play “restaurant” and have a buffet of meals to choose from. There were things like “sauerkraut with no more sausage” or “spaghetti without sauce” and occasionally a fully intact meal that held up in the fridge after a day or two. We had ways to make these meals more desirable to us, but not to our friends. They could not be pleased by humble things like leftovers because they were pretentious rich kids having cereal and orange juice every day.

Boy Tries to Meet World.

Because of my parents' lack of funds to buy a curriculum, I never completed high school. In an effort to check the box for my junior and senior years, I was given free rein each day to select any article from our old hand-me-down encyclopedia set from the 60s, after which I would briefly rewrite the article in my own words. Learning about the vibrant USSR, reading about the popular use of iron lungs, and the recent medical advancement known as open heart surgery was interesting, but this only went so far in preparing me for the modern world.

I’ve never been good at complying with requirements or rules that didn’t make sense to me, so on my 18th birthday, I just stopped doing those reports. The timing was arbitrary, but it was the month of May, so since there was no such thing as a final or graduation, it was as good a time as any to be done with school. After my sleeping surfaces were all thrown out, I went ahead and moved out just four months after my 18th birthday.

Crashing at a friend’s parents' house worked for a little while, but doing chores to offset the rent felt like trading one set of parents for another. I stayed until I could pull together enough money for a security deposit on an apartment. I worked full-time, making $7 per hour, and lived in a studio apartment in downtown Indianapolis. After my first car’s engine locked up on the highway, I drove a Honda CRX with a broken side-rear window. That brought on a little ridicule from my coworkers, but I was living on my own, and I was getting by.

Growing up in poverty, with a stunted high school education, can stall someone’s potential, but since entering my young adult years, I managed to find my way to opportunity. In my college years, I went to Yale University. This was right after a stint at the Big 10 school, the University of Connecticut. I really enjoyed my time at both universities, but it was hard work, and it was a week of my life that I will never get back.

Oh, no, I never enrolled or attended classes. I visited the Yale University campus to sell and then again to deliver dorm furniture for a 200-student dorm and at UConn, a 400-student dorm. I can also add Cornell, Brown, and many other very nice schools to this list that I did not attend. And, of course, as much time as I spent on college campuses, I never completed a college application, much less attended a class. I did, however, get turned away when I attempted to apply for classes at a state school.

Generally, I would keep this kind of detail vague since most people like to hire people who have graduated from something. It was clear to me that this was not the kind of story one expects to hear from a successful entrepreneur, especially if they’re considering hiring their marketing company for specialized services (pricing and contact information is in the follow-up book too, plus also Google).

On the rare occasion that someone asked me directly, I would spin the story in an attempt to make myself sound better, like “I was already deep into the start of a great career,” which, if I am being honest with you, is bullshit. The truth is, I didn’t have the money, and I didn’t know how to get it. Furthermore, I didn’t even know how to fill out the application. When I met with the admissions director at a very well-known, unnamed college, I was turned away. They told me that before they could process an application, I first needed to bring “transcripts” of my schooling. Since I didn’t know what that was, I figured my parents didn’t have them. Of course, if by transcripts we mean records of my schooling, the answer is pretty clear. Those do not exist.

I didn’t get into a lot of detail explaining this to the admissions advisor. The main reason is that I was already removed from his office and assured that he appreciated my time. He said he was looking forward to me reaching back out when I had more information to share with him, and since there was no such information, I figured it made sense to go ahead and never reach out again.

Since my attempt at getting into college was not much of a success, I figured it would be a good idea to keep the whole high school dropout thing under wraps for a bit. That is, unless I was at a party and needed to keep people’s attention for longer periods of time. It works best if you present your story as if you are trying to “one-up” another person, except that they are talking about actual academic achievements, and I have none. Instead of making me seem like an idiot for not finishing basic schooling, I come across as some kind of prodigy because I managed to get invited to a party with a bunch of college graduates.

Our society is built around the assumption that successful people and most other people went to college (invariably after finishing high school). National income statistics will back up that you need to go to college to move away from the block I grew up on. The first line on every job description is “Bachelor's Degree Required,” and it’s likely to be the first question in many interviews. An employer once told me that they look at a degree as a way to demonstrate that you have finished something. I see it as a way to confirm that you had school transcripts.

Some would consider my brief pursuit of higher education a failure, but you have to look at the bright side. To get into college, you may have to have a high school diploma and some sort of records showing your academic performance, but you also have to have time. You have to have a place to live. You’ll need time to take classes, study, and the ability to take time off work consistently over the course of years while still maintaining housing, food, and transportation. By this point, my parents weren’t providing this to me, so I had to take it all on my own. By giving up, I saved myself a world of stress, debt, and the risk of having to drop out just to make ends meet.

Going to college seems to be working out well for a lot of other people. College graduates get more interviews, and studies show that they make about twice as much as people who don’t. But the ticket price is pretty big, and it would have required a lot more than a full ride to make it happen.

This whole book isn’t just about surviving on reheated food and poor schooling; it’s about a culture that eschews the other half. In a culture that is overlooked by society, receiving whatever is left over after the best is all taken by the better off.

The Leftovers.

A common thread you see with the poor is malnutrition. Another is the lack of access to better education. For the culture that I was raised in, which I highlight in this book, poverty was not just our lot, it was one that was accepted as just the way it is. My family often refused opportunities to better their lives, shamed those who were of means, and embraced religion above responsibility, leaving an uphill battle for their children.

It’s common to see that people in the grip of poverty may not know how to take advantage of the resources that are offered to them, which can aid in lifting them out of poverty. Furthermore, we see that there is a certain bias against the poor, creating further roadblocks should one take it upon themselves to better their lives. Still, for some religiously principled poor, those government resources are an intrusion that is imposed upon them, forcing them to live the way the government demands of them. Sending their kids to government schools to indoctrinate them, submitting to government compliance, and being logged on the government grid – this is all a risk.

I’d like to invite you to take a look with me at another side of society. Through my story, we’ll examine what perpetuates traumatic poverty and what it means for the rest of us. Life is hard for those in abject poverty, and the path out of it is even harder. But it is due to a complex combination of internal and external forces. Those chosen and those that are imposed upon them by natural laws or man-made laws. The lack of opportunity, the biases of the privileged, and the inability to take one's attention off their short-term survival to do anything about it. As a result, the only thing left for them is not much more than leftovers.

In our society, they are The Leftovers.

Read Chapter 2: Six Stitches