Fallen star
It is January 1977, my father, Jimmie Baker Jr., has just awoken from a week long coma in a hospital bed in Philadelphia. His last memories were of being 5,000 miles away on the Big Island in Hawaii. He didn’t know it yet; but, his life had just changed forever.
My father was a professional basketball player. A former first-team high school and college All-American, he had been MVP of the Dapper Dan Classic (the McDonald’s All American game of its day). Jimmie averaged 36.7 points and 22.4 rebounds a game in freshman ball at UNLV, and was the only college freshman invited to try out for the 1972 Olympic team. He was drafted by the 76ers in the NBA and the Kentucky Colonels in the ABA a year before the two leagues merged.
Jimmie developed his basketball prowess as a teenager by staying at his local park and rec center. He chose these spaces because he was too afraid to spend much time at home. My grandfather, Jimmie Sr. was an alcoholic and extremely abusive. If he wasn’t being physically beaten with switches, cords, or even hammers, my father was likely being cursed out and berated. When he did decide on a college to go to, he chose the farthest one from home he could find: UNLV.
1970’s Las Vegas was not a conducive environment for a 17-year-old to suture emotional wounds. My father began drinking heavily, then using cocaine. Eventually he became addicted to heroin. Coaches, teachers, and mentors tried to intervene. He made a habit many addicts do of making excuses and lies to mask his behavior. As a testament to his own skill, he was still drafted in the second round for the NBA and ABA. However, his rookie season was cut short due to a knee injury. While rehabbing in Hawaii, and still using, he had aninelegant encounterwith a local drug dealer’s wife; and a hit was put out on his life.
The day before his 23rd birthday, December 24th, 1976, my father was ran over with a car, shot, stabbed, and left for dead.
He was medically transported back to the East coast. By divine grace he survived; but he would live the rest of his life with a severe limp and without the use of his left arm.
Just a few days earlier my father had been a basketball star. Now he was a broken and disabled addict. Before he used heroin for periodic-but-temporary highs. Now he used for near-perpetual escape from reality.
He would tell me years later that he couldn’t stand to walk down main streets because he couldn’t stand to look at his own mangled reflection in shop windows. One night in a particularly dark fit of rage he broke all of the fingers on his paralyzed hand one-by-one, futilely wishing to feel anything.
He moved back in with my grandmother. He’d promise her and anyone who’d ask that he was getting clean, and this time would be different – shuffling off to rehab only to be back a few days later. My grandmother was the most saintly person I’ve ever met. But after years of lies and broken promises about getting sober even she had to ask him to leave.
It was only then, at rock bottom, when my father was homeless and without anyone else to lie to or rely on, that he checked himself into rehab for the last time.
My father has been sober now for over 40 years. He went on to become a social worker, addictions counselor, and even founded his own non-profit to help out other people struggling with the same issues and demons he fought in his life.
Free will
The fall of man imparted all humans with the double-edged ability of free will – this gift and burden affords us to change our actions no matter the situation.
In spite of this, many default choices in our lives today allow us tooutsource responsibility- handing off personal decision making to institutions and experts. This outsourcing place even in our most intimate decisions: how to maintain our health, what we are allowed to say, how we raise our children. Deviance is socially stigmatized, if not legally persecuted.
People are viewed as too irresponsible to be in the driver’s seat of their major life choices – better to defer to those with the proper credentials. Of course there will always be someone more knowledgeable than you or me in a particular field. How can that not be the case, when many people dedicate their life to the unenviable tasks of seeking to understand protein synthesis or the market dynamics of used cars?
Yet, overreliance on outside authority – the sloughing off of free will – focuses on what is efficient for the mythological “average person.” This focus washes away thousands of truths, intimacies, and realities that only exist for each individual.
The downside of outsourced responsibility is most prevalent when things go awry. Once people have externalized the nexus of control of their lives, they fall into a trap of learned helplessness – expecting others to correct their issues for them. Whether said help comes or not is at the whims of outside forces. Many come face-to-face with an unpleasant truth: nobody is going to save them.
When my father had no more friends and family he could rely on, when he didn’t even have a roof over his head, that was when he realized he had to take back control of his life.
The lesson of outsourcing responsibility is ground into us. Pressure mounts in school, in media, and (perhaps most resolutely) in employment. My job was where the groove was worn most deeply in myself. Despite the lessons of my father always somewhere in my mind, whenever I found myself facing issues at work I would habitually begin looking for outside help or blame. Already in my brief time pursuing this entrepreneurial adventure, I have found a rude awakening.
Finish the job
It is 12:30am on a July night in the parking lot of a local private school. We won this striping job after a series of cold calls. It is our largest job yet; over 8 times as big as any done previously. It’s an huge opportunity for us to take a step-up in client base.
My other crew member and I have been working since 10am in the Florida summer heat. We are purposefully being meticulous – we need this to be flawless. I estimate that we only have about another hour left. As we paint a stop bar near the main entrance, there is a loud bang and our striping machine suddenly goes haywire. Paint sprays out the side of our machine non-stop covering the ground with white. I shut the motor off immediately.
My brain fills with panic. I will have to stop for the night, take the machine back to the shop and work on it for several hours in order to fix it and come back later to complete the job.
I have worked for over 14hrs. I am covered in sweat and dirt, and smell of exhaust fumes and acetone. I feel like crying. When I had worked as an employee, if something went wrong I could shift blame to our back office staff for mishandling a trade and drop work on a junior analyst to clean up the mess. No matter how bad it got, I knew I would have an amount more than double the price of this job deposited in my checking account biweekly. Now, as a small business owner, I am tight-roping without a net. If I fail, if anything goes wrong, it is on me.
Was I crazy? Had I walked away from a prestigious career, and moved my family a thousand miles away, for this? In the dead of night, dirty and exhausted, it is easy to fall into a trap of self-pity...
But when you have nothing left to fall back on – when you realize nobody is going to save you – those thoughts do not last for long. I gather our tools, clean up the splattered paint, pack our machines in our truck and head back to our shop. I email our client: we have run into some technical difficulties, but we will be back tomorrow morning to finish the job.
