Against All Odds Read online

  Against All Odds

  My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances

  Scott Brown

  Dedication

  To Gail, and to Ayla and Arianna,

  forever and for everything

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  By the time I turned eighteen, I had moved seventeen times and lived in at least twelve different homes. Most were rental apartments, second-floor walk-ups in slightly sad and dilapidated converted houses, where walls had been added and the rooms and floors chopped up one by one.

  My bed, when I had one, was invariably under the hard slope of the eaves. I also made do with couches and cots, and there was a time when my mother, my sister, and I all slept in the same small room.

  When I was twelve, our apartment’s backyard stood at the edge of a thick tree line and was so damp and dark that the dirt ground stayed bare all year round. Of the five houses I knew, one was a doll-sized rental in the backyard of another home and the other four belonged to relatives or to whatever man my mother happened to be married to at the time. We were visitors there; they were never our own.

  At school, I was often a free-lunch kid, ravenous for whatever hot food came out of the cafeteria line. Constrained by her choices, good and bad, my mother worked hard, often at multiple jobs, to keep a roof over us, put clothes on our backs, and pay babysitters, and she bought food and a few extras with whatever was left over. I remember days when the largest things we had in our fridge were milk and blocks of yellow government-issue cheese.

  My dad was largely gone from my life before I turned one. He materialized only on rare weekends, a smooth talker with his foot on the gas and the convertible top down. A couple of times when I ran away, he was my destination, but even then, I never stayed long.

  Looking back, what saved me was basketball—a game, ironically, that was homegrown, invented in the Western Massachusetts city of Springfield in 1891 by a YMCA instructor who was looking for a way to keep his gym class busy during a bout of rain. He started with a peach basket, a soccer ball, and borrowed rules from a kids’ game known as “duck on a rock.” I doubt Dr. James Naismith could have pictured me, as a kid of twelve, thirteen, or fourteen, riding my bike several miles after a snowstorm with a ball cradled under one arm and a snow shovel clutched in my hand to clear off the courts so I could shoot hoop. Not just for ten minutes, but for hours on end, until my fingers got so numb that I could no longer feel the ball balanced between them.

  What saved me too were my friends, my teammates, my coaches, and even the cops and a judge, and later the military, although I didn’t quite know it all then. I could have easily been the kid with the rap sheet and the long record, rather than the accolades and the record high scores.

  I look back on my life now, though, and I can honestly say that there isn’t one thing I would change: not the arrest, not the violence, not the hunger, not the beatings and the brute struggles, not even cleaning up someone else’s vomit in the stairwell of my dorm at Tufts for $10 in quick cash from the resident adviser because I had no money for extra food. I wouldn’t change my decision to pose for Cosmopolitan magazine, which helped to pay my way through law school, forced me to grow up even more quickly, ultimately led me to meet my wife, and also slowly led my father back toward me.

  Whatever the widest boundaries are for a Wrentham selectman, a Massachusetts state senator, or a United States senator, I am sure that my life lies outside them. But I wouldn’t change any of it, because while it was too often hell as a boy—and I myself was at times a hellion—those years and that life made me the man I am today. I hope, too, they made me a better man.

  Chapter One

  Busted

  The Liberty Tree Mall was our last stop. It sits right off Route 128 in Danvers, Massachusetts, its big anchor stores rising up flat and square, like stackable Lego blocks. At one end was a Sears with tools and tires, appliances and overalls, and at the other, a Lechmere store, with displays of shiny new luggage, sporting goods, and jewelry, as well as an electronics section and, most important, a record department. We pulled into the lot, away from the hum of highway traffic headed south toward Canton or Braintree, or looping around toward Boston itself. One of my good friends was riding shotgun in the car; one of his buddies was driving. Both were a couple of years older than me and both were basketball players. I was sitting in the backseat. I was thirteen, a few months shy of fourteen, but I was already closing in on five foot eleven. My hair hung long, skimming over my shoulders, drooping into my eyes.

  I was lucky in that moment, not lucky that I was along for the day—I had been hanging around these guys for a couple of years, shooting hoop, going to their parties, sipping their beer. That afternoon, I was lucky I wasn’t the one driving.

  We parked, rolled up the windows, hit the locks of the car, and then shuffled across the baking asphalt. The air was hot, that sticky, humid July heat, where the sky turns thick and white and presses back down upon you until each breath seems liquid, like sucking pool water into your lungs. The weather was why we weren’t on the basketball court; another reason was that when both guys woke up in the morning, they had decided that they wanted some records. I wanted some too. I had a few records, but all my friends owned dozens and dozens.

  We had already been to two record stores that day in another mall, but there was one more inside the sprawling sections of Lechmere, beyond the luggage displays and jewelry counters that beleaguered husbands crowded around when it got close to the holidays. We ambled through the store in the air-conditioned cool, beneath the bright fluorescent lights, which made it impossible to tell afternoon from evening. I had on overalls, blue-and-white railroad stripes with a big front placket. I called them farmer pants, but my mom or I had most likely found these in a surplus store or a discount bin. On top, I wore my junior high basketball jacket, a bright red nylon with a heavy lining for the damp, bleak Massachusetts winters. It had our team’s emblem, the Wakefield Warrior, a big Indian chief in profile with a full feather headdress, stamped across the front. If there was a moment when life became premeditated, it was when I got dressed that morning.

  We walked into the store and went over to look at the music, arranged alphabetically, A for America, B for Beatles or Bee Gees, C for Creedence Clearwater Revival, D for the Doors. There were the small 45s with one song on either side, but we wanted albums. Although the radios played Elton John, Steely Dan, and the Steve Miller Band, our tastes ran to hard, searing guitar rock, like Bl
ack Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple, or the pounding, mournful songs of Jim Morrison. Morrison’s “Riders on the Storm” echoed in my mind. I followed, and after they had thumbed through the stacks, I noted what they had chosen, what was cool. My friends headed off to another area of the store, but I stayed behind. After checking around, I leaned in, unfastened the two side buttons on my overalls, and slipped an album behind the jacket. Then another and another, and another after that. I could comfortably carry five. The cellophane covers slid easily against each other, and the thick mass came to rest on my stomach. Trying to look nonchalant, I popped the metal buttons back through their holes, zipped the jacket, and began to amble out of the store. The other guys had already left, and they were waiting for me in the parking lot. I was almost to the doorway; perhaps I was even grinning.

  Suddenly a man’s hand reached out and patted my back. Instinctively, I stopped and that same man said, “Hey, it’s awfully hot out today.” I tilted my head, which was angled down, and looked out through the thick fringe. He was wearing regular street clothes, but still my heart began to pound. “Yeah, it is,” I managed to reply.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me. I mumbled, “Just hanging out.” Then the man’s hand slipped around my shoulder and gave three hard pats on my stomach. There was no mistaking the clean-cut cardboard edges or the hard feel of the album covers. “I’m store security,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me?” I had the sickening feeling that he had probably been watching me, in my winter jacket, the entire time.

  He led me out through a side door, away from the bright lights, to the concrete back corridors of the mall, where everything was gray cinder block and the ceiling lights were skinny tubes that flickered and hummed. I had never been in the bowels of a store before, where stock was rolled on dollies off the loading docks, where employees entered and exited, and dull doors opened into backroom offices. I walked wordlessly, head down, afraid that I might see someone I knew. The soles of my sneakers made squeaking noises on the hard, flat floor. He led me into one small room, which housed the security office. It was sparsely furnished, with nothing more than a metal desk, an industrial chair, and a telephone. My friends were still waiting for me in the parking lot, having no idea that I’d been caught. The guard told me to unzip my jacket, and I removed the records, the bright cover art already peeking up from behind the placket of my overalls. He looked at each album and then began asking me questions, including, “How did you get here?” When I told him that I had gotten a ride, he asked me to take him out to the parking lot, where my friends were leaning against the sides of the car.

  Once we reached them, the guard told the driver to open the doors and then the trunk. There were twenty or thirty other records inside, all still tightly wrapped, from other stores where we had stopped earlier that afternoon. I don’t remember whose idea it was to boost the records, probably mine, but the other guys had gone along. In that moment, I think I took the blame for everything.

  The guard picked up the records and we walked back inside. I returned to the solitary room. He asked me for my parents’ phone number, and I gave him my mom’s number at work. I didn’t even consider giving him my dad’s. I never knew on any given day where he was or if he would come.

  The security guard called my mother and then he called the cops. The other guys were older, but I was a juvenile, and I had been caught with the records, so it was easier to pin the entire haul on me. At that moment, it wasn’t as if I saw my future flashing before my eyes, but I was definitely scared. I was thinking: What about basketball, what about school, what would my punishment be? The guard was lecturing me about stolen property and then I saw the dark blue uniforms of the cops. They looked at me with inscrutable stares, asked some perfunctory questions, examined the albums, and wrote a citation and court summons on a thick pad with layers of carbon paper. I was, they said, remanded to the custody of my mother until my court appearance, two weeks later. My mother came straight from work, her face red, her leather purse clutched like she might at any second smack me with it. I braced myself for the car ride home. Not only had she left work early today; she would have to miss work again to take me to court. And I had been caught stealing. I sat in gloomy silence as she yelled at me the whole way, her hands intermittently flying off the wheel. When I managed to get out a word, she immediately cut me off with another volley of screaming. “How could you do this?” I heard that line again and again.

  How could I do this?

  I did it the same way that I stole a three-piece suit from Park Snow, the stand-alone department store in downtown Wakefield, because I had nothing to wear to a school dance. I had walked in, carrying a duffel bag, tried on a suit that was right against the wall to make sure that it fit, then inside in the solitary confines of the dressing room, stuffed it in the bag and sauntered out.

  And I did it the same way I stole food.

  That had started earlier. I was eleven or twelve and hungry all the time. Ravenously hungry, to the point where my stomach would often ache, and I would sit on the couch with my knees drawn up to my chest, as if I could physically shrink the space between my lungs and my abdomen. There were long stretches of hours when my mother was not home; she had office jobs, hospital jobs, and many stints as a waitress. It was only my half sister Leeann and me, and a babysitter who was there mostly for Leeann. In the late afternoons, I would go on my bike, a rusty, secondhand blue Schwinn, down to the A&P in the center of Wakefield, a couple of stores away from Park Snow. Sometimes, I went straight after basketball practice. If it was after practice, I had my gym bag with my sweaty tube socks and clothes. Otherwise, I wore my railroad stripe overalls. I would grab a cart and meander through the store aisles, picking out a loaf of bread, maybe some juice. The mothers with their cranky toddlers or trailing grade-schoolers were too busy to notice when I lingered by the meat case. There, under tight plastic wrap, were piles of freshly ground hamburger and rows of thick-cut steaks. I would pick up one or two packages, examine them, and then pop the button on my overalls and slide them in, or drop them into my duffel, and fumble for a second to slip the sweaty clothes over the top. There was so much meat, I reasoned, how would they miss a package or two? They could never sell it all. No one would buy every last hamburger package. I was saving it from the Dumpster. And I was starving. Most times, I did not have to suck in my belly to feel each individual rib.

  After the meat counter, I would push through the aisles, maybe snag some milk, which I could down by the gallon, and then head past the cereal boxes and white rice to the registers. I always bought some of the cheaper items, but first, I had learned to hang back for a minute and analyze the checkout clerks. I never went to the middle-aged ones; I always chose the line with the teenage kids working after school, kids whom I sometimes knew, who sullenly punched the numbers on the register, who would never look at my now-bulky overalls or gym bag. What sixteen-year-old kid imagines a twelve-year-old stealing food? Certainly not in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a pleasant middle-class town, a commuter town on the railroad line into Boston, a pretty quiet place back in 1971.

  I would ride home, clutching the grocery bag in my right hand, feeling the jolt as it bumped against my legs or swung against the wheel. With my left hand, I steered the handlebars. The meat was always in my duffel, slung over my shoulder, messenger style, or tucked safely behind the placket of my overalls. We lived in a second-floor walk-up apartment in a converted house. My room was what had been the attic. It was a long, narrow house, completely unadorned. The backyard was so dark from woodsy overgrowth that nothing grew and the ground was usually brown. I would ditch my bike in a shed out back and carry in my haul.

  I didn’t even bother putting the meat in the fridge. I dropped it on the counter, pulled out an old, scratched aluminum pan, and flicked on the range. Sometimes I slit the cellophane with a knife; other times I just tore it with my bare hands. I panfried steaks or burgers, listening to the si
zzle of the meat, feeling the quick splatter of hot grease across my knuckles as I flipped them. I learned by trial and error, trying to remember the early cooking lessons from my grandmother, to get the blue flame of the burner just right, so the steaks or burgers would not be charred by the time I turned them, or still be so raw that the outside layer stuck to the bottom. Sirloins were the best, the tenderest cut. Burger meat was hit-or-miss; some bites were gristly with the remnants of tendons and butcher scraps cut too close to the bone.

  When at last they were hot and dripping pink juice on the plate, I would cut up the meat or serve the burgers, giving some to Leeann, who was six. She hardly ever asked where it came from or why I was cooking it, but if she did, I would just say it was in the fridge. She would nod and start eating in silence. I ate my own portion in gulps, not bites, until gradually the stabbing sensation in my stomach would give way. Then I cleaned up, scrubbing every pan, every plate, opening the windows even in the winter, wiping the stove, the counter, pumping a quick spray of room freshener, so that there was no trace. Mom would come home to the often barren fridge, her shoulders slumped and aching from a long day at work, and ask what I wanted for dinner, and I would say, with complete truthfulness, that I was OK; I was full.

  That seemed to satisfy her. Once in a while she might ask what I ate, and I would mumble about grabbing something after practice. And that was all. There would be the clink of ice in the glass and the splash of vodka, followed by the scrape of a match on the back of a free book from one of the restaurants, bars, or lounges that lined the highway known as Route 1. She always lifted the matches they kept in bowls by the door or dropped in the center of amber glass ashtrays for the patrons. The match head would hiss, and she would light a Marlboro Light and draw in a deep breath and then exhale streams of gray smoke in a long trail out of her mouth and nose. She might ask me about basketball or school. I kept the answers short. Or she might hassle me about dirty clothes or a messy room, and I would match her word for word. Whatever she threw in my face, I lobbed right back. It was the dance we did, with the television droning in the background. She came home tired in a used car to an apartment where there never seemed to be enough cash; she was thirty-four, and in fourteen years had married and divorced three husbands.