My Life, Deleted (20 page)

Chapter 20

W
ITH MY PERMISSION,
Lisa's husband tipped off the
East Valley Tribune
about my injury, and a reporter came to the house in August to interview me and Joan. Although it was getting easier to tell my story, I was still somewhat distracted and self-conscious. But it felt good once I got going, especially knowing I shared the same condition with someone else in the valley. Who knew, maybe the article would turn up some more of us.

We picked up several copies the morning it ran and also viewed the story online, where we were pleased to see a number of comments from well-wishers noting how devastated we must feel. As friends called and emailed with their support, I felt so revved up, I wanted to be a voice for everyone in the country who was struggling through life with a brain injury.

A few days later we came across a negative comment online from an anonymous reader who called me a liar and said I was faking amnesia for financial gain and to get out of lawsuits. I was shocked. Clearly this person had no idea how much pain my condition had caused me and my family. Our friend Johnna responded in our defense.

“Is this negative feedback going to happen a lot to us?” I asked Joan.

“I hope not, but people are going to think what they think and we can't stop them,” she said, quickly guiding us off the website and on to more positive topics.

Curious about these lawsuits, I asked her about those as well. “Lawsuits are part of the aviation business,” she replied. “We've been involved in several of them.”

Seeing how much this negative comment had bothered me, Joan tried to protect me from any repeat occurrences by reporting this and any other nasty posts to the paper so they would be deleted, as this one was. But she couldn't be everywhere, and things soon took an unexpected turn for the worse.

Mattie pulled me aside after the next Brain Injury Association board meeting to say that she'd received a call from the same
Tribune
reporter. Apparently he'd gotten an anonymous letter claiming that I'd had a felony charge against me, that I was faking amnesia to get around a lawsuit, and essentially that I was a liar. I didn't even know how to react, so I just listened. From what Mattie described, the author sounded like the same anonymous critic from the newspaper's website, but I was stunned and embarrassed nonetheless.

Is this even true? It can't be. A felony? That sounds serious. I can't believe I could have done something like that. But even if I did, it couldn't be anything like rape or murder because Joan wouldn't have stuck by me. It would have to be some kind of other crime.

Mattie said the reporter asked if we vetted our board members and if she thought I was faking the amnesia.

Oh, my God, does this change the way Mattie thinks of me?

“Do you believe what this reporter says?” I asked.

Mattie assured me that she didn't and said she told the reporter that she couldn't talk about specific board members, but she didn't see why anyone would fake such a condition.

I apologized, saying I would certainly understand if she wanted to reconsider having me on the board, but she said that had never entered her mind. I was volunteering my time, she said; what did I have to gain by lying? She told me not to worry and to try to forget it. She'd only told me so I would know the reporter had called her.

After our conversation I was hurt that someone—even a reporter—would doubt me, but I was also relieved that Mattie trusted me and had chosen to stick by me. Still, I was frustrated and confused by the news, running over the conversation in my mind until I got home. When I walked in, Joan knew me well enough to read the angst on my face.

“What's wrong, honey?”

“Nothing,” I said.

But Joan knew better. “Come on, did something happen?”

As I relayed my conversation with Mattie, I could see her temper rising. “I cannot believe he called Mattie and didn't call to ask our side. What mean person would call the executive director and question your integrity?”

“I don't know, but I just want to forget about it.”

Joan, however, was not about to let this go. The next evening she told me she'd called the reporter from work, reminding him that we'd invited him into our home, even told him about Grant's heroin addiction. He replied that he was just doing his job, checking things out. When he asked her about the felony, she acknowledged that it was in the court records. We weren't trying to hide anything, she said, and would have explained if he'd asked us about it. Ultimately, he told her that he hadn't found any evidence I was lying or faking, so he wasn't going to pursue the matter further.

This being her first interview with a reporter, Joan told me that she never suspected the media would go digging into events from eight years earlier, looking for information that they would use to question my truthfulness about my amnesia. Nonetheless, I still felt protected by her and began to understand how she must have felt when I'd been in that role, protecting her, knowing that I wouldn't let someone hurt her without fighting back. Watching her, I was relearning the importance of sticking up for your loved ones.

But that didn't ease the pain of also learning that I'd been accused of breaking the law. I wasn't looking forward to hearing about it, but I did want to know the basic facts, so I asked her to explain. “Can you tell me about this felony charge?”

Leaning toward me from the ottoman in front of my chair, Joan took my hands in hers. Her eyes were drooping with compassion, and her lips were tight with the pain of having to deliver news she knew would be difficult for me to hear. “Are you sure you're ready for this?” she asked, giving me one last chance to change my mind. “Because I don't want to upset you.”

I'd been driving myself crazy with the possibilities for the past hour, and I just wanted her to blurt it out and get it over with. “If I'm going to move forward in this new me, I'm going to have to know about the bad things that were part of my life as well,” I said, bracing myself for the impact.

Reluctantly, Joan told me about the series of events leading up to the conviction eight years earlier that had haunted me ever since. I leaned back in my chair as she talked, feeling as if I were taking a new punch with every sentence: After having a falling out with a business partner and friend for whom I'd been managing jets, I withheld his aircraft's logbooks, hoping to force him to pay me what I felt he owed me, and his response was to file the lawsuit that Joan had tried to tell me about several months ago. He and I negotiated back and forth, and when he finally agreed to pay me a partial sum, I held out for past commissions and management fees as well. According to the paperwork I later found in my desk, I met with him and he gave me a check in exchange for the logbooks. But instead of walking away happy, I was arrested for theft, among other charges, by an undercover officer he'd brought along.

It was extraordinarily difficult for me to hear all of this, so much so that I glazed over as Joan was talking. I felt truly sick to my stomach. All I wanted to do was withdraw into myself to deal with the emotional heaviness I felt as I tried to process this development. It didn't help that Joan started crying as she watched me struggle with the news.

How embarrassing this must have been for Joan! I wonder what she thought of me when this happened. How could I have done something that must have disappointed her so much?

I knew what a felony arrest was from watching
Cops,
The First 48,
The Sopranos,
and
CSI Miami,
but I didn't understand much else of what Joan said, only that it sounded really bad.

“Why would I do that?” I asked.

Joan said I'd consulted with an attorney about the problems I'd been having with this partner, and although I'd told Joan some of what was going on, I'd largely acted on my own. Obviously, things hadn't worked out as I'd anticipated. Because we didn't have the money for a protracted court battle, I took a plea bargain in the criminal case and agreed to settle the civil case. At the time, Joan said, she and I felt our best option was to avoid going to costly trials in both cases.

All the criminal charges were dismissed but the theft, and even that was downgraded from a Class 2 to a Class 6 felony, which, she explained, was far less serious. Bottom line, she said, was that I served no jail time and got two years' probation, from which I was released a year early after doing one hundred and fifty hours of community service. The whole episode caused significant financial and emotional damage to my family, enough to cost us our house and force us into bankruptcy, but at least we were able to move on with our lives.

“I'm sorry that I put us in that position,” I said. “It must have been difficult for you as well.”

“It was horrible,” Joan said, still crying. “What was most difficult was that you took things into your own hands—and I understand why; you were trying to protect me from the legal issues. If you'd told me your plan, I would have said no, no. But you made an error in judgment, and you've regretted it ever since.”

“How did everyone else react?” I asked.

“No one else knows except you and me, and I think Mark may know, but I'm not sure,” she said, explaining that we'd both wanted to keep this private because we saw nothing to gain from sharing it.

After we talked I found some court documents in my file cabinet and Googled some of the terms she'd used to try to better understand how this must have affected our lives together. Although I didn't have the emotional strength to read the paperwork carefully, I did notice that it said I had expressed remorse at the time.

Well, the remorse I'd felt then must have paled in comparison to the regret, embarrassment, and anger that I was feeling now.

What kind of man had I been to bring such devastation on my family? I must have caused pain to these other people involved as well.

I felt the utter stupidity of what I had done, but I also knew that I was going to have to be accountable and hold myself responsible for these events, even if I had no memory of them.

Later, as I was writing this chapter, I realized I was going to have to tell my family about this episode so they wouldn't learn about it for the first time in the book. And with that realization came the dread of having to reveal the shame and humiliation of the secret Joan and I had kept hidden for so long. How would I tell Taylor, who looked up to me so? How would I tell Grant, for whom I was trying to serve as a role model, and whom I was encouraging to clean up his own act? How would I tell my mother and father, who still saw me as their little boy and who were so proud of all of my accomplishments? And Joan's parents? I had no idea how they would react.

I resolved that the best tactic was simple honesty, to admit that I couldn't explain my past behavior—I couldn't even see how the old Scott could have gone there in the first place. If the same situation came up today, I knew history wouldn't repeat itself because I no longer acted alone on anything; I always consulted with Joan first.

I only hoped that my kids would appreciate the lesson that I'd taken away from all of this, that even adults make mistakes, and if we support each other as a family while we face such errors in judgment, we can overcome them and make our family even stronger. I was learning from my past poor decisions even now, using them as a guide on what
not
to do in the future.

As for my parents, I certainly didn't want to bring them any pain, but I hoped they would simply say, “So what. We know who you are, and this doesn't change that. We love you anyway.”

By September, news of my accident had spread by word of mouth to my former coach and other alumni via my former teammate Phil, with whom I had spoken a couple times now since the accident. Joan still answered the phone, though, because I continued to be scared to talk to people I'd known in my previous life. When Coach Bill Mallory called, I wouldn't come to the phone, so he gave Joan a pep talk, offering us both words of support.

Joan had told me that I'd always been intimidated by my coach and held him in high regard, and perhaps I'd retained this emotion somewhere in my brain. The idea of having a conversation with him unnerved me, so I needed to know more about him before I felt I could even try. The articles I read described him as a strict and demanding disciplinarian, so when he called again some weeks later, I was surprised to find that he didn't fit this profile.

The compassionate retiree on the other end of the line gave me some heartfelt encouragement that was both touching and motivational. “I'm thinking a lot about you,” he said. “You've always had a place in my heart, and I've always had great respect for you. You were always a hard worker and determined to succeed, and that determination is going to allow you to overcome this injury.”

Some of the emails from my teammates, however, proved more difficult to process. I felt sad to read such kind words because I couldn't remember any of these men who had such strong memories of me and our time together on the field. Even though I appreciated the memories they shared, some brought me to tears.

Terry Clemans wrote that he'd been three years behind me in college and that I'd taken him under my wing. We were roommates for an away game in Lawrence, Kansas, during a brutally hot and humid Labor Day weekend in 1983. I was pissed, he said, when I saw trucks bringing in giant fans and blocks of ice to cool off the opposing team while we baked in the sun. But on top of that, it had rained like hell the night before so the Astroturf was holding water like a wet carpet. As we rolled around on it, we got more drenched with every play.

“I think that actually worked against them as it motivated you (and others) more than ever to kick their chilly Big 12 asses!” he wrote, referring to the Big 12 Conference, a league of college teams in the central United States.