Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given - Duane Dog Chapman [29]
The day he came over to say he was quitting work once and for all, he actually threw a twenty-pound patio chair across the pool in a fit of anger. He was spiraling out of control. Drugs had to be a factor, because he was filled with so much rage.
When drugs get ahold of you, they take over all reason and rational behavior. There’s nothing you can do to take back your life except to get off of them. My son didn’t even admit that he had problem, which is always the first step to recovery. In truth, even though I could see what was happening to him, I still couldn’t admit the extent of the trouble he was in, a mistake I will regret for the rest of my life. Beth knew what was going on from the very start. Somehow I put my head in the sand to pretend it wasn’t happening…again.
The thought of Tucker being hooked on drugs upset me more than I can ever put into words. I should have stepped in to intervene, but I didn’t. In the meantime, Beth had even threatened to call Tucker’s parole officer to tell him he was using drugs and using a prosthetic penis to pass his urine tests, because she knew he was in too deep to get off the drugs himself. I had been getting Tucker out of bad situations for years, but this time it felt like a betrayal to rat out my own kid. Since Tucker was on parole, an infraction like this would surely send him back to jail, something I didn’t want to be responsible for, so I chose to do nothing. After losing Barbara Katie to drugs, I swore that I’d never allow another one of my children to make the same mistake. Everything inside me knew what I had to do so I wouldn’t lose Tucker too, but still, for too long, I chose to do nothing.
When I finally decided to call Tucker to tell him how I felt, I really believed he would understand that what I was saying was for his own good. Like any hands-on parent, I wanted to help Tucker get away from the girlfriend I was convinced was adding to his problems.
That now infamous conversation lasted a solid twenty-five minutes, not the eight minutes or so that were leaked to the media. The call started off calm and cool, but the more I pleaded with him to leave the girl, the harder he pushed back, until I finally lost my temper. I became so pissed off that I couldn’t get it through his thick head that I believed everything I was suggesting was for his own good. Tucker kept trying to convince me that since we never allowed his girlfriend into the house, we never spent the time to get to know her like he had. But we did know her, well enough to know we had to keep someone we were certain was out to hurt our family out of our home. No way, that would never happen. Not in my house! That’s when I began saying things about Monique I now regret.
“I’m not taking the chance on some motherf**ker. I don’t care if she’s a Mexican, a whore, whatever…it’s not because she’s black. It’s because we use the word n***er sometimes here. I’m not going to take a chance ever in life for losing everything I’ve worked for thirty years because some f**king n***er heard us say n***er and turned us in to the Enquirer magazine. Our career is over. I’m not taking that chance at all, never in life. Never. Never.”
Beth was standing in the courtyard outside our bedroom telling me to be quiet. She kept saying I needed to stop talking and hang up the phone, but I didn’t. Nope. I kept right on talking. When I look at those words in print, it hurts my heart to think they ever came out of my mouth. It’s obvious that I wasn’t talking about the color of Monique’s skin so much as the character,