For the next couple weeks, I’ve decided to share an excerpted chapter from the book I’ve been working on (and off and on again…), “Life Sentences”. These are mostly accurate, 100% true, thoroughly unbelievable, and I hope both funny and touching stories of a life lived weird.
I’m breaking it into sub-chapters, a little more bite-sized, and I’ll try to share a new chunk every few days. I would really love to know what you think, and if you enjoy it, please feel free to share the link with your friends.
Anyways, without further ado, allow me to present:
HOW I SPENT MY 17TH BIRTHDAY POSSIBLY SHIFTING UNITS FOR THE SINALOA CARTEL
by Derek Sheen
My day started earlier than usual. At 6a.m. I roused myself out of bed, got showered and dressed without waking my mom. The night before, I’d cancelled my birthday plans with her for later today, and if she discovered that I’d blown her off for a chance to meet my biological father, Michael Sheen, it would’ve crushed her.
Cue wavy flashback Theremin riff…
It was June of 1970 and Seattle was just starting to dry out from a particularly long, wet Spring. Michael Sheen was sitting in a cell in the King County jail, awaiting processing for narcotics trafficking. At the time, Michael was an associate of a well-known Seattle crime syndicate (a local family who ran construction, gambling and prostitution, with close ties to the Genovese and Bonanos crime families). The King County prosecutor’s office, headed at the time by Chuck Bailey, was engaged in a full-scale investigation into the head of the family, his multiple businesses and anyone in their influence. The intense pressure coming down from the prosecutor’s office resulted in the arrests of several key, low priority figures that included my father. The hope was to scare them enough with the threat of sentencing that they might break and turn state’s witness in return for reduced sentencing or dropped charges altogether. Michael was caught in the wide net they’d cast, and 19-year-old Barbara Ellen was about to discover how very little she knew about the man she’d recently married.
Michael said that when he first met her, he assumed she was older because, for starters, she was his bartender. Of course, he had no idea she’d lied about her age to work at Torchy’s, where they met: at the time, Barbara was supporting herself after running away from home four years before.
Prior to the bartending job, she was a live-in nanny and housekeeper for a family of Hungarian immigrants. She started that job at the age of thirteen and she would live and work for the Repas family, helping raise their three girls until she turned 16.
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My mother wasn’t as much a runaway as she was a refugee: her mother, Margaret, suffered horrific abuse at the hands of her father and it filled her with a rage that she visited upon her own children. Barbara once told me she feared if she’d stayed even one day longer than she had, that would be the day my grandmother finally murdered her. My aunt and uncle stayed far longer and wound up living very haunted lives.
My aunt eventually committed suicide, and they found my uncle after a neighbor complained about the odor coming from his apartment. He’d struggled for years with his anger and pain, eventually pushing everyone he loved so far out of his life that, if it wasn’t for his neighbor calling the police, he might have sat on that toilet in his studio unit for months before anyone ever noticed he was missing. The day my mom got the news, she joked to me that ‘at least he died doing what he loved most: being left alone’.
Barbara only dated Michael for a couple weeks and was actually planning on breaking up the day she’d stopped in to visit her dad.
Charles Eyers, my grandfather, owned and operated Eyers Automotive in the city of Burien, just west of the Seattle/Tacoma International airport. Most of the immediate family was employed there as well. This included his brother Doug’s kid (much to his displeasure), also conveniently named Doug. Doug Jr. was and still remains an unlikeable, loudmouthed asshole whose only gift, it seemed, was getting the shit kicked out of him. Charles only brought him onboard after a pressure campaign from his own father and Doug Sr.
Doug’s mouth got him fired everywhere else and he needed the job. Of course, on this particular day, Doug Jr. would introduce me to the timeline after calling Barbara a whore.
A little backstory: when Barbara ran away from home, her parents realized they couldn’t tell their friends and family that it was due to Margaret beating her kids nearly to death every day. That could be potentially bad for business. Instead, they told their friends and family that thirteen-year-old Barbara was so promiscuous she’d become pregnant, and they had to send her to a home for wayward girls. By the time she was 17, she’d temporarily moved back home, and a whisper campaign had begun. The rumors started picking up speed and velocity, which explains why, when she visited her father that day, Doug Jr. felt the need to alert everyone within earshot that he had it on good authority, from two of his closest friends, that she was “givin’ it away for free, behind the Dairy Queen”.
Barbara immediately shot back, “That’s not possible, Doug. You don’t have two friends.” This made all the fellas in the garage burst into laughter and Doug, Jr. was unable to contain his rage.
“Fuck you, whore!” he spat.
The laughter stopped immediately, and Charles hollered at him from across the bay.
“Goddammit Dougy! The fuck is wrong with you?” The other men put their heads down and pretended to go back to work as Barbara ran from the garage, humiliated and on the verge of tears. She ran to a payphone and, not knowing who else to call, dialed Michael to come pick her up. He came as fast as he could and when she told him what happened, Michael put her in the car and drove back to the garage. He didn’t say a word when he walked in and pulled Doug Jr. out from underneath a car, dragging him across the asphalt by his feet. The whole family rushed outside to watch as he demanded Doug Jr. apologize. Of course, Dougy took the opportunity to yell “Fuck you, cunt” and that’s when Michael beat him unconscious. No one stepped in to stop the walloping Michael delivered on him. Everyone had been quietly expecting this to happen for some time now, so they all watched with unspoken satisfaction. Ironically, Michael broke Doug Jr.’s jaw in three places and he ended up having his mouth wired shut for almost two months…much to the approval of nearly everyone who knew him.
Needless to say, Barbara decided not to break up and instead, that evening, surrendered her virginity to him.
It was also the same night she became pregnant.
(more to come…)