My Brother and Me
I have a brother that’s 3 years older than me. He’s been older than me my whole life if you can believe it. The gall.
Our parents were divorced when I was two years old. I have no memory of life during their marriage. Saying “mom and dad” in the same sentence always sounded foreign to me later in life when I would hear my friends say it in conversation.
Over time my brother and I had seven parents - our mom and dad and five step parents.
We lived with our dad until I was in second grade, in a manner of living adjacent to feral children. We had the run of the woods around our house. We once destroyed as much as we could destroy of our neighbor’s shack for repeatedly running over and killing our puppies when I was five or six years old. I’ve told this story of vigilante justice in The Shack Across the Street.
At any rate, we spent a fair amount of time with our paternal grandparents, and maternal grandmother. But no matter where we went, who we were being subjected to, under the authority of parents and grandparents, and under the faux authority of some step parents who were sometimes petty tyrants, my brother and I were the only constants in our young lives.
When I was in second grade our mom got full custody of us, and shortly thereafter she was married to our first stepfather, Ken Jackman, who turned out to be abusive in the marriage, and a stalking nightmare for years after mom divorced him.
There’s a lot to this chapter of our lives that lasted from third grade through my junior year of high school. But I’ll keep it to a few stories that epitomized our situation and are good examples of how my big brother would protect and look out for me.
When we were in 7th grade, I was about 12 years old, and my mom, brother and I came back home after being out running errands or something, just in time to see this strange man jump out of the back window and run across the backyard and hop the back fence. It turns out that our house had been robbed.
We were shaken by the experience, and mom called the police and filed a report. Ken then filed an insurance claim for the stolen items.
Let me back up in the story. Ken was a repo guy for work and would repossess vehicles. After he would repossess a vehicle, he would approach the bank and make an offer to buy the vehicle for some cheap price, and the bank, I’m assuming that the bank considered the vehicle a loss, would sell it to him. Strangely, the vehicles would get stolen, and Ken would cash in on their insurance policies.
After the house was robbed, mom was approached by detectives who were asking about the nature of all of these insurance claims, that they looked fraudulent, and wanted to know if mom was involved in these schemes. She wasn’t, and thankfully the detectives believed her. Mom discovered that Ken hadn’t been making house payments and that the house was about to go into foreclosure. She found out that Ken was spending his days with his ex girlfriend doing drugs and not working. At this point mom left Ken and we went to live with a friend of mine’s family, who I’m still indebted to for their support (thanks Chris Breckeen). But this started the beginning of the four years of stalking.
(It turned out that Ken had been committing insurance fraud, and staged the robbery with someone that he knew. Ken used us as pawns to add credibility to the “robbery”. The guy wanted us to see him and call the police on our own.)
When we got better established and on our feet, we were living at an apartment complex in Arlington, and I was 14 at this time. My dad had moved to Houston when I was 10, and never actually tried to help protect us in person. When the stalking got bad, he just gave my brother and I guns, and we had to fend for ourselves.
Well it just so happened, that at this same time that we got the guns, my brother and I started seeing this really strange and creepy guy everywhere we would go. This guy would be at the grocery store, at the mall, at the park across the street from our apartments, and so we came to realize that he was stalking us too, surely on behalf of Ken. He started getting more bold and brazen and started parking right outside of our apartment, sitting in his car, watching us. Let me just say how disconcerting and destabilizing it is to have a stranger watching you, and making you feel like a prisoner in your own home. We were apprehensive to even go outside. Ken was so unhinged we never knew what his endgame was, or what he was trying to accomplish by our surveillance.
One day, after my brother had picked me up from school during this time (I was in 9th grade), we got back to the apartment and there he was, sitting in his car watching us. We walked into the apartment, Bill grabbed a pump action shotgun, and I grabbed a .30/.30 rifle, and we walked outside and walked straight to his car, Bill pumped the shotgun to load it, I cocked the lever action on the .30/.30, and we both pointed them through his driver’s side window right at his face.
He squealed the tires leaving and we never saw him again. We did some sleuthing and discovered that he was Ken’s next door neighbor. We saw his car in the driveway of the house next door to Ken’s house.
So that was some of what we were dealing with when I was in 9th grade. But I have another story that happened at the same time.
During the second semester of 9th grade my last class of the day was Psychology, taught by a Miss or Mrs. Prestridge. The class was in one of those temporary buildings in the parking lot of the school. 9th grade was still held at the junior high, and 10th grade was when we would move up and attend the high school, which was a different school altogether in a different part of town. My brother was a senior in high school at this time.
One day I came into Prestridge’s class, and she gave me a folded, handwritten letter. So I sat down and read it. The letter was very flattering, telling me that I was such a joy in her class, that she couldn’t wait for me to come to class, that I lit up the room, and that sort of thing. You have to understand that teachers were just something that I tolerated at this point in my life, they were background noise that I had to make an effort to listen to. I had no special rapport with any teacher, I had much more on my plate than academics, and so this letter struck me as all the more odd given that I hadn’t even given this teacher a second thought in any meaningful way given my complete indifference.
So I just shrugged it off and thought maybe this was her attempt at positive reinforcement. Sometime not long after she gave me the letter, we were working in groups in the class, and the teacher got angry at us for being too loud and made us return to our assigned seats. Well I had snagged my friend Togg’s pencil before going back to my seat.
Prestridge was lecturing the class on our bad behavior when I got my friend’s attention and broke his pencil for a laugh. Apparently Prestridge thought that I was laughing at her, and she got pretty angry and told me to go to the principal’s office and not to come back until I had been punished.
I told the principal the truth about the pencil, and he told me to wait until class was over and talk it out with her.
Given that this class was in a temporary building in the parking lot, my brother would pull his truck up to a spot outside of the building and wait for me to leave class to pick me up.
Well on this day, I waited until class let out, and went in to talk with Prestridge. At this point Bill hadn’t pulled up yet.
She immediately asked me what punishment I’d gotten. I told her I didn’t get a punishment, and that the principal told me to just come back and talk it out with her.
This enraged her. She started screaming at me saying things like I’m the stupidest student she’s ever had, she can’t stand seeing me, I’m never going to amount to anything in life, I ought to be ashamed of myself, when all of the sudden, the door bursts open, and I hear my brother, voice raised in anger, saying “You can’t talk to my brother that way! Who do you think you are lady!?! You’re teaching a class in a parking lot!! Jake, get in the truck!” He had heard her yelling from inside of his truck, and assumed it was at me.
The look on this woman’s face was a dumbstruck, mouth agape, astonishment. I didn’t say a word, I just walked out and we left.
The next day I was called to the principal’s office, and I was told that I was no longer going to attend that class and I was put into another class, which was computer science. The first day I attended my new class, I was handed a test, on which I got a score of 0, because I didn’t know the material at all. I suppose the powers that be decided that it was futile for me to be in that new class, and apparently had no other class in which to put me, so they didn’t put me into any class and told me to just leave school an hour early.
A few days after the altercation with Prestridge, my brother was called to the principal’s office at his high school, where he was met with two detectives who handed him a restraining order. Prestridge had actually filed a restraining order against my brother under the false pretense that he had threatened her. So Bill wasn’t allowed to come onto my junior high school’s campus any longer. So he would park in a neighborhood across the street from the school, and I would get out of school an hour early and walk across the street to catch my ride.
You have to understand, we had been dealing with a psychotic stalker for about two years at this point. And had endured abuse for the previous 4 years during the marriage.
There comes a point where you’ve had enough, and it ends now. Even if it means you put yourself into danger, so be it.
At this time, there were no anti-stalking laws. It took a poor lady being killed by a stalker after trying repeatedly, in vain, to get help from the police before the state clued in that stalking was a real danger and enacted anti-stalking laws. Mom had filed many restraining orders against Ken, and when he would be at our house in the middle of the night revving his engine, playing music really loudly, banging on the doors and windows, threatening to kill us and kill himself, and we were huddled with guns waiting for the firestorm, when the police would finally come, they never arrested him, not once. I would see Ken glad handing and good ol’ boying the police, and them shaking hands while they laughed as Ken said things like “You know how these broads overreact, maybe it’s the old lady’s time of the month…” in their idiotic mutual misogyny. It didn’t matter that this happened over and over for years. It also didn’t matter where we lived, as a repo man, he found people for a living. There seemed to be no escape.
One day my brother came out of school and his truck was gone, and it was obvious that it had been repossessed, and it was obvious who did it. My brother was livid, because the truck belonged to him. The high school security guard told Bill that he watched it get taken by a repo truck.
Well, the backyard of Ken’s house was adjacent to an open field. So my brother and I devised a plan. Ken had this dog named Hagar that he loved. So we waited until it got very dark, and mom drove us to the field, and we crept across it and called Hagar over to us and snatched him. The next day we got a call from Ken, asking if we had Hagar, to which my brother said “Yes, I have him, and I will hang him from the neck in a tree if you don’t give me back my truck. Leave my truck in the parking lot of Wal Mart, tomorrow, and your dog won’t die.” And sure enough, Ken did, and Bill got his truck back. We waited a few days and let Hagar go back into Ken’s backyard.
I had nightmares for a good while that I was in 3rd grade and that Ken had kidnapped me and I was a prisoner in his house.
It was around the same time as the Prestridge incident and the stranger stalker scare that another story happened that’s worth telling for posterity’s sake.
My brother, my friend Anthony, and I went to a convenience store so Bill could get some chopped ham and maybe some other items. We lived on ham sandwiches in those days. So we walked in, Bill headed to the back to get his items, while Anthony and I went to a magazine rack, and grabbed some magazines off the shelf and started flipping through them. For some reason this really set the cashier lady off, because out of nowhere she starts yelling at Anthony and me, saying, very angrily, “This ain’t a library!! You can’t come in here and grab whatever you want and just start reading!!!” I looked up from the magazine at this lady, and out of the corner of my eye, coming from the back of the store, I see this object flying though the air, and before I knew what it was, it hits this woman square in the face, and I see that it’s a package of chopped ham. I saw it bounce off her face. I will never forget it. The look on this woman’s face was the same as Miss or Mrs. Prestridge, a kind of stupefied shock or dumbfounded astonishment.
Their faces honestly looked like they were in pure disbelief that someone would respond to them so unexpectedly and decisively.
Prestridge couldn’t believe that someone came to defend me so adamantly out of nowhere. She thought it was just the two of us in that temporary building and that she had carte blanche to say whatever she wanted, and right in the middle of her exercising it, the door opened…
The look on the face of the stranger stalker, as you could imagine, was sheer panic when we drew down on him.
The stalking from Ken slowed down considerably after we ran off his hired hand. I can only remember one more incident where he kept trying to run us off the road, and Bill told mom to pull over into a convenience store, and Ken pulled in also, and Bill jumped out and ran over to his truck as Ken was rolling down the window and Bill punched the driver’s side window and shattered the glass all into the truck as Ken sat there. We had grown up enough to fight back, and it turned out that he was a coward. He got out of the truck and Bill thought the fight was about to be on, but Ken went into the convenience store and didn’t do a thing. He was a maniac when he was trying to run us off the road. But man-to-man, he was a coward with a shattered window.
Usually bullies and stalkers are cowards who pick on women and children or people smaller and weaker than them. I know that y’all know this and that this is a worn out motif. But sometimes it bears repeating. Always stand up for yourself and your brother or sister. That goes for you too Jude Bishop and Willa Kate.
