Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [147]
But within a few years, he lost his job because of a back injury. Kueck started taking painkillers, got divorced, and moved into an apartment in North Hollywood. For the next thirteen years he had no contact with his family. He worked a series of jobs that led nowhere. When he could no longer pay his rent, he moved into his van, parking it next door in a friend’s driveway. “He would come in and shower every couple of days,” recalls the neighbor, Barb Oberman. “He was like a brother.”
The two delivered telephone books together, but Kueck wasn’t interested in the money. “It was this spiritual thing,” says Oberman. “He could make or fix anything. He made some kind of back brace out of rubber bands. He made a telescope from a cardboard tube and lenses that he put into it. He talked a lot about wanting to live in the desert.” After Kueck found a place in the Mojave where he could park his van, he moved. But he kept in touch, sending photos of the animals who trusted him and became his friends—the ground squirrels that danced on his head, the raven that would alight on his arm, the jackrabbits that gathered every morning for breakfast at the table Kueck had set for them in the greasewood.
In the late 1980s, Kueck’s family tracked him down through a friend who was a cop. “My brother and I were teenagers, and both having a lot of problems,” says his daughter, Rebecca Welch. “My mom knew we needed him.” At the designated reunion time, Welch and her mother sat in a Bob’s Big Boy in Riverside, California. “My dad came in, and I was crying,” says Welch. “He said he knew I was the one who would be the most hurt by his abandonment, and he had stayed away because he didn’t want to deal with my sadness and anger.”
From then on, Kueck was back in the lives of his children, trying to make up for lost time. His teenage son, Chuck, who went by the nickname Jello, came to live with him in the desert in what Kueck called his “anarchy van.” “My dad was very happy when my brother was out there,” Welch recalls. “They were anarchists together, living free, in control, with no government in their lives.” But the relationship was volatile. Jello was addicted to heroin, and Kueck would lock him in the van sometimes to get him to sober up. Kueck himself was degenerating, strung out on painkillers and sinking into a deep depression.
Jello finally split for Seattle. In the city, the good-looking teenager defended younger street kids, attended anti-globalization rallies, played in a band called Fuckhole, and spare-changed female tourists with a line so smooth that one, from Romania, took him back home for a month-long affair. Jello managed to kick junk a few times, but in 2001, at the age of twenty-seven, he returned to Southern California. “He was very intelligent, witty, and passionate,” says Fritz Aragon, a musician who knew him at the time. “He was an incredible storyteller, like his father. He was also a compulsive liar, the biggest cheat, always in need of attention.” Jello fought with skinheads over his anti-KKK tats and did time for assault. Soon after, he died of an overdose in an abandoned Los Angeles warehouse. “He had been