Part 2: I Hated My Biker Father for 35 Years Because He Went to Prison When I Was 5 — At 40, a Court File on My Kitchen Table Showed Me Why
To understand what was in the tin, you have to understand who my mother was.
Diane Halloran grew up in Bisbee, Arizona, in a family of copper miners. Her own father had been an alcoholic. Her mother had died when Diane was fourteen. By eighteen, Diane was working full-time at a diner. By twenty-two, she had met my father at a Sonoran Iron MC fundraiser. By twenty-three, she was pregnant with me. By twenty-four, she was married.
She was, by any measure I have used as an adult, a remarkable woman. She raised me alone. She worked two jobs. She did not drink. She did not smoke. She went to my parent-teacher conferences. She kept the lights on.
What I did not know — what I am embarrassed to tell you I did not know until April of this year, at the age of forty-one, with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and a six-figure salary — is that my mother had a problem with cocaine in 1988 and 1989.
It was hidden. It was small at first. It got bigger. By the spring of 1989, she had developed a habit serious enough that my father had to start dealing — yes, dealing — to keep her supplied so she would not, in his words from a letter I read this past April, “go down to that man on Speedway Boulevard and put herself in danger.”
He was not selling for money.
He was selling so my mother would not have to buy from a man who, by every account, was dangerous.
And he was using their kitchen — our kitchen, on East Drachman Street, with a faded yellow tablecloth and a magnet of the Grand Canyon on the refrigerator — to keep the small quantity he sold to the small list of people he sold to.
On April 17th, 1989, the DEA executed a warrant on our house.
The cocaine they found — six ounces — was on the kitchen counter when they came through the door.
It was, technically, possessable by either of my parents. Both of them were in the kitchen at the time. Both of them were arrested. Both of them were taken to the Pima County Jail.
I was at school. A neighbor named Mrs. Esposito picked me up.
Within twenty-four hours, my father had given a statement — a sworn statement, signed and witnessed — that the entire operation was his. That my mother had no involvement. That the substances belonged to him, that the sales had been conducted by him, that my mother had been an innocent unaware spouse.
The DEA knew this was almost certainly not the full truth. They knew, from informant testimony, that my mother had used the substance herself.
But my father’s statement — combined with the fact that her name was on no transactions, on no recorded calls, on no surveillance footage — gave the DA enough to drop the charges against my mother.
She walked out of Pima County Jail on April 19th, 1989. She picked me up from Mrs. Esposito’s house.
My father was charged alone.
Possession with intent to distribute. A felony. Seven-year sentence. Plea deal. Federal facility in Florence, Arizona.
My mother went home with a five-year-old son and a seven-year promise from her husband that he would take all of it.
The first sentence of his plea statement — the words I would read thirty-five years later at my own kitchen table — read:
“My son needs his mother more than he needs me. Whatever the court is going to do, I am asking you to do it to me alone.”
He was twenty-nine years old when he said that.
I was five.
He went to prison so I could have my mother.
In the green tin in my mother’s closet were three things.
One: a manila folder containing a copy of my father’s full plea statement, certified by the Pima County Superior Court. Forty-seven pages.
Two: a stack of letters from my father to my mother, written from Florence, Arizona, between May 1989 and November 1993. Forty-one letters in total. All of them sealed in the original envelopes. None of them ever mailed back. He had given them to her during her visits.
Three: a single hand-written letter from my father to me, dated April 17th, 2009 — the twentieth anniversary of his arrest — sealed in an envelope addressed “To Mark. To be opened when you are ready.”
I read the plea statement first.
I sat at my kitchen table in Tucson at 11:14 p.m. on a Tuesday in April. I was wearing the gray sweatshirt I wear when I work late. Jennifer was asleep upstairs. Sophie was asleep upstairs. I had a glass of Buffalo Trace in my right hand.
I read for an hour and forty-five minutes.
I drank the bourbon.
I poured a second one.
I read the forty-one letters from prison next. They took me until 4:30 in the morning.
The letters were ordinary. They were not literary. My father was not a writer. He was a mechanic and a biker who had gone as far as eleventh grade.
They said things like: “Tell Mark I’m fixing the carburetors here. Tell him I think about him every morning.”
They said things like: “He hates me, Diane. I know he does. That’s the deal. That was the deal.”
They said things like: “Don’t tell him. He needs you. He doesn’t need to know who you were when this happened. He needs to know who you are now. Please. That was the trade.”
He used the word “trade” in seventeen of the forty-one letters.
That was the deal he had made with himself.
He had traded his relationship with his son for his son’s relationship with his mother.
He had decided — at twenty-nine years old, in a holding cell in Tucson, with my five-year-old face in his head — that I needed her more than I needed him.
And he had taken every consequence of that decision for the next thirty-five years without ever once telling me what he had done.
He had let me hate him.
He had earned my hate, in his own mind, the only way he could have earned it. By being absent for the right reason and never explaining the reason.
I sat at my kitchen table at 4:35 a.m. and I cried for forty-five minutes the way I have not cried since I was fifteen years old.
I did not open the third letter — the one addressed to me — that night.
I was not ready.
At 7:00 a.m. that morning, I sent Jennifer a text.
It said: “I’m going to Flagstaff. I’ll be back tonight. I love you.”
She wrote back: “Drive safe. Tell him I love him too.”
I did not ask her how she knew.
She had been telling me for sixteen years that I needed to talk to my father.
She had been right.
I drove three hundred miles north on I-10 and I-17. I did not stop. I did not eat. I did not put on music. I drove in silence and watched the Sonoran Desert turn into ponderosa pine.
My father lived in a small one-bedroom house on a dirt road outside Flagstaff. He had moved there in 2005, after his second divorce — yes, second, he had remarried briefly in his fifties — to be near a Vietnam-era buddy who had a workshop. He worked part-time fixing motorcycles. He was seventy years old. He had had two heart attacks. He was on disability.
I had been to his house exactly once. For Sophie’s birthday visit. I had stayed forty-five minutes.
I pulled into his driveway at 11:42 a.m.
He was on the porch.
He was holding a coffee.
He was wearing a flannel shirt and his old leather cut over it. The Sonoran Iron MC top rocker was faded almost gray. The patch over his heart had three letters on it in red thread, hand-stitched.
“DAD.”
My mother had stitched it for him. In 1986. Before everything. When I was two years old and we were a family.
He had worn that patch for thirty-eight years.
He stood up when I got out of the truck.
He did not say anything.
I walked up to the porch.
I stopped at the bottom step.
I said, “Dad.”
He said, “Mark.”
I said, “I read the file.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
He set his coffee down on the porch rail.
His hands started to tremble.
He did not say anything.
He just nodded once.
I walked up the three porch steps.
I hugged him.
I have not hugged my father since I was four years old.
He weighed almost nothing in my arms.
He smelled like motor oil and laundry detergent and the inside of a leather cut.
He held on for a long time before he let go.
When he did, he said, very quietly, “You weren’t supposed to find that file, son.”
I said, “Mom told me about it. Three days before she died.”
He looked away.
He said, “That woman.”
He laughed once, soft.
He said, “That woman.”
Then he turned around and walked into the house.
He came back out a minute later with two beers.
He handed me one.
He sat down in his chair.
He said, “Sit down, Mark. I think you got some questions.”
I sat with my father on his porch for nine hours that day.
I learned things I will not be able to put into a single account. I learned why he had pleaded. I learned what my mother had been like in 1988. I learned how hard it had been for her to get sober — she had been sober from May 1989 until the day she died, thirty-three years and nine months — and I learned that one of the reasons she had stayed sober that long was a promise she had made to my father in a visiting room in Florence, Arizona, in 1990.
She had told him, “If you take this for me, I will spend the rest of my life being the mother our son deserves.”
He had told her, “Then we have a deal, Diane.”
She had kept it.
She had kept it for thirty-three years.
She had raised me — the working two jobs, the saving for college, the showing up at every track meet, the buying me my first suit when I graduated high school, the helping me move into my dorm at the University of Arizona, the standing at my wedding to Jennifer in 2014, the holding Sophie the day she was born — all of it had been her keeping a promise to a man I had spent thirty-five years hating.
He had taken the prison sentence so I could have my mother.
She had taken thirty-three years of sobriety so I could have a mother worth keeping.
They had built me out of a deal.
I had not known.
I asked him about the patch on his cut. The DAD patch.
He looked down at it.
He said, “Mark. I wore this in prison every day. They let me keep it because the warden was a Vietnam guy, and he understood. I wore it for four and a half years inside. I wore it for thirty more after I got out. I wore it on every ride. I wore it the day I met Sophie.”
He paused.
He said, “It’s the only thing I had to remind me that the deal had been worth it. I would look at it. I’d think — somewhere, my boy is being raised by his mother. That’s what this patch is for.”
He looked up at me.
He said, “Don’t ever take it off the cut, Mark. When I die. Just keep wearing it. Keep telling Sophie why.”
I told him I would.
I asked him about the third letter. The one addressed to me. Dated April 17, 2009.
He said, “Don’t open that one yet.”
I said, “Why?”
He said, “Because I’m not dead yet. Open it when I am. That one’s for then.”
He took a sip of his beer.
He said, “I wrote that one on the twentieth anniversary of the arrest. I wrote it because I figured if I died before you ever forgave me, you should at least have the explanation. Now you’ve got the explanation. So save the letter for the next thing it has to do, which is help you say goodbye.”
I said, “Okay, Dad.”
I have not opened it. It sits in the green tin in my closet.
He’s still alive.
He’s seventy-one now.
I am in no hurry.
I have been driving up to Flagstaff one Saturday a month for fifteen months now.
Sophie comes with me sometimes. She is nine. She calls him Grandpa Russ. She lets him show her how to clean a carburetor. He has bought her a child-size pair of mechanic’s gloves. She wears them when she helps him.
She does not know the story yet.
I will tell her when she is older.
Jennifer has come twice. The second time, she sat with my father on the porch for two hours while I went into town to get groceries. When I came back, they were laughing about something I never asked about. She has not told me what they talked about. I have not asked.
My father comes to Tucson for Christmas now. He sits at our table. He says grace if I ask him to. He doesn’t if I don’t.
On the back of his cut — the same Sonoran Iron MC cut he has worn for thirty-eight years — I noticed last December that there is a new patch on the inside lining, opposite the DAD patch.
It is small. Hand-stitched. Red thread on black leather.
It says: MARK & SOPHIE.
He had Jennifer stitch it for him. She did it on her grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine in our garage. She had not told me.
I noticed it when he hung the cut on the back of a chair at our Christmas dinner.
I did not say anything to him about it.
I did not need to.
My father is going to die before me.
Probably soon. Probably in the next ten years. Maybe sooner. He has had two heart attacks. His back is bad. His hands shake. He is still riding a 2008 Heritage Softail he is not really strong enough to ride anymore. He still wears the cut every day.
When he goes, I am going to do three things.
I am going to take the cut off him at the funeral home.
I am going to wear it home in the truck.
And I am going to open the letter dated April 17, 2009, in the green tin in my closet.
He told me last month — over the phone, on a Sunday afternoon, from his porch in Flagstaff — that the letter is short.
He said, “It’s three sentences, Mark. That’s all I needed to say. By the time you read it, you’ll already know the rest.”
I said, “Okay, Dad.”
He said, “You riding up next Saturday?”
I said, “Yeah, Dad. I’ll be up next Saturday.”
He said, “Good. Bring the kid.”
He hung up.
I sat in my office for a long time after.
I looked at the photograph from 1987. My father at twenty-eight, holding me at three, on the seat of the 1989 Low Rider in front of our small house on East Drachman Street.
I’m wearing the tiny denim jacket.
He’s smiling so hard his eyes are almost closed.
I pulled the photograph out of the drawer.
I framed it.
It sits on my desk now.
Where I can see it.
Every day.
If this story moved you — follow the page. There are more bikers out there like my father. More fathers who chose silence over explanation. More green tins in closets. More photographs in drawers. There are more stories the world doesn’t see, and I’ll keep telling them as long as someone keeps reading.
