Recipes for Living James Patterson

The last 20 years of his life, he was a deputy building inspector, inspecting the reinforcing steel, taking samples of concrete and other forms of cement and turning them over to laboratories to test for strengths and weaknesses. After an illness of about two years, he died of cancer on January 4, 1989. He and I had a strained relationship from the time I was 13 to about two and one half years before he passed away.

My parents had met when my father worked for my mother's father in the general contracting business. Mom was a year older than my father. For the most part she was a homemaker and caretaker of children. In the mid-'60s my father's business went bankrupt and she became a bookkeeper for my father's brother. This was probably the only job she ever had except for baby sitting when she was a girl. Since my father's death she has been living in Salem, Oregon, at my brother's house.

On the day I was born, my parents made the final payment on a home in Pacific Palisades. I read several years ago that this was regarded as the second wealthiest community in the country. Our neighbors were corporate attorneys, CEOs, movie and TV stars -and there I was, the son of a contractor. I went to school with the country's wealthiest children and was teased about how much more their parents made than mine. I was acutely aware of the Mercedes and Cadillacs in their garages, while in ours was my father's old beat-up Chevy pickup. It didn't help that my father's business went bankrupt when I was eight or nine years old. The low self-esteem that resulted from all that may be understandable but was hard to bear.

The home I grew up in was a violent one. This had been the case on my father's side of the family as far back as I know. My great-grandfather beat my grandfather, my grandfather beat my father and my father's concept of discipline was to beat his children. It was more than a punching. He would use a belt or strap or whatever was handy. My oldest brother probably got the worst of it. He took the brunt not only of my father's discipline but, in his case, it was just plain anger. It happened sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, and went on for years. I only experienced the strap two times that I can remember.

I have a feeling that the reasons why my father abused his family were a mixture of the pressures he faced - his attitude toward wealth compounded with the violence he faced from his own father. However, violence begets violence and the result of my father beating my oldest brother was that my brother became a violent person. Beginning when I was about eight and continuing until I was about 13, when he was drafted during the Vietnam War, I experienced that violence first-hand. When my father died, my brother expected to inherit some things he didn't get and we had to get a restraining order to prevent him from beating up my mother. I haven't seen him for about seven years.

I attended pre-school at my home church (Community Methodist) and kindergarten through 6th grade at Palisades Elementary; junior high school at Paul Revere Junior High in Brentwood, California. My high school education was at Palisades High and Pacific Palisades. I was a two-year letterman in football as a middle linebacker. Our team went into city play-offs both years. It is ironic that the year after I graduated the team played in the all-city championship in Los Angeles. They did not win it but went all the way.

When I was about 13, I went through confirmation and, because of my personal beliefs, I chose to be baptized fully immersed, probably two to three months after the rest of the class. A problem with the senior pastor of my local church had developed and a week before I was baptized the congregation decided to ask that he be replaced. The very morning I was to be baptized, the pastor had a nervous breakdown. The date had been set. Relatives had come from Oregon and Arizona to attend the service so I had to be baptized by another pastor.

Everything seemed to become compounded about this time. I had built a strong relationship with the pastor and was really troubled over his removal. As I look back on it, I feel that it all contributed to the fact that at about that time (age 13) I began smoking marijuana. By the time I was 14, I was smoking it after school almost daily and was addicted.

When I was 16 and on the football team, I started drinking. We had parties after our games on Friday nights and I started drinking beer. I drank it almost exclusively until after I got out of high school. I should have known at that time that I would have a problem because, the first time I tried it, I drank too much, wound up in my own bed at home, my face in my own vomit and didn't know how I had gotten there. That became a pattern every time I drank too much. What is "too much" for a 16-year-old kid? I can say with absolute conviction that any is too much.

I don't think that all that abuse to my system affected my grades until my senior year and I nearly didn't graduate with my class. The way it came about that I got my diploma is almost amusing. I had a really bad relationship with my auto shop teacher. I found, when we got our report cards, that he had failed me. I went to him to remind him that if I didn't pass I would be back in his class and he changed my grade to a D. That allowed me to graduate.

I began driving a tow-truck for a living when I was in my senior year in high school and continued until I was 21 years old. In 1974 being a tow-truck driver and an alcoholic seemed to go hand-in-hand. Every driver I knew drank and smoked marijuana, so I fit in real easily.

While I was driving, I explained to one of my friends that I had a drinking problem. He gave me Benzedrine tablets and told me that if I took two or three of those before I drank it would keep me from drinking too much. That led to about seven years of addiction to speed, which is a stimulant, and other types of uppers. By the time I graduated from high school, I was a full-blown alcoholic, using alcohol and marijuana, stimulants and hallucinogenics.

When I was 21, I decided to go to school to be a court-reporter. Two years later, six months before I was to get my license, the school went bankrupt. In the meantime, I had met and fallen in love with a young lady and we planned to marry. At Thanksgiving of that year we were in a bad automobile accident which took her life and that of her seven-year-old son. I somehow lived through it.

During that same period of time, in October, 1979, my grandmother on my mother's side passed away. These deaths and the school going bankrupt caused me great emotional pain and the only way I knew to handle pain was to drink and use drugs. Six years later, I wound up with about $1,000 day cocaine habit and drank a case of beer and a fifth of hard alcohol daily.

In 1986 I was arrested for possession of five different kinds of drugs and for drinking while driving. Since I had a rather clean arrest and conviction record at that time, the judge who arraigned me sent me to what is called a drug diversion program. I was required to attend a county-run chemical dependency program. Along with eight or nine other men, who had recently been arrested on drug charges, I met weekly with a trained psychologist in a six-month program. The drug diversion program also required that, while I was on the program I must attend six monthly cocaine-anonymous meetings.

It was a mystical experience that brought about the change in my life. I was visited by the Spirit of Christ and was told by the Spirit that I had to stop doing these things or I would die. I decided that the people at cocaine anonymous had the right idea of how to stop drinking and to live drug-free. It was the last night that I drank and used drugs.

My first day of sobriety was Sunday, October 26, 1986. The 12-step program in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) demands that you form a relationship with a Power greater than yourself. This, for me, was the God that I had known in my youth at the Methodist Church. This was what I thought of on the day my life turned around. There were no AA or CA (Cocaine Anonymous) meetings held on Sundays, so I went to church.

About a year into sobriety, as a result of working the 12-step program and my involvement in the church, I received my call into the ministry. That meant that membership in my home church needed to be reinstated. The pastor required that I attend an adult membership class along with about seven or eight other adults who wanted to join.

I regard it as divine intervention that one of the visitors to church, on the day my membership was reinstated, was the mother of a friend. At this time she lived near Reno, Nevada, but "just happened to be" visiting our church on this particular morning. She had been very active in my youth and, after the service, she reminded me that when I was about 13 I had thought of going into the ministry. I had decided later that was just a romantic notion that would never happen to me so I hadn't thought more about it.

About this same time, my sponsor in the AA program gave me an assignment to write a list of things I might want to do with my life. I came up with a list of five that included working with youth, doing outreach and/or missionary work, and cooking professionally (in a restaurant or something like that). One morning about 4:00a.m., it hit me that I could do nearly all of these as an ordained minister. It was the combination of the lady asking me about my former desire and realizing that I could do many things on my list that made me serious about becoming an ordained minister.

I approached the senior pastor about this possibility and he had me make an appointment with the district superintendent of the Los Angeles district to find out what I would need to do to become ordained. He told me all that I had to do and I began the process immediately.

It took me two years to go through the candidacy procedure with my counseling pastor and become a certified candidate. I was certified in April, 1990. I graduated from Santa Monica Community College in the fall of '91 and from the California State University at Northridge in May, '95. All the time I was going to school, I continued to drive a tow-truck. In fact, during most of my college career, I worked 60 hours a week at night and attended classes in mid afternoon. Between calls at work, I slept in the front seat of my boss's tow truck.

In '91, a year before I graduated from Community College, I took a trip around the country and visited five of the 13 United Methodist seminaries. Out of those I chose St. Paul School ofTheology because of their field education program, which provides the opportunity for students to work in ministry while attending classes. The school aids their students in finding ministry positions in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, or Nebraska.

I applied for positions in all four states and the only response I had came in May '95 from Rev. Tompsie Smith, formerly Creston district superintendent. She offered me two ministry positions in Murray and Osceola. In September of that year, I began attending St. Paul Seminary in Kansas City. I am now taking an average of nine hours each semester, which means that I will graduate at the end of the spring semester, in the year 2000.

This book is to be about "recipes for living", how people have coped with the situations in their lives. How have I done that? I have meshed the teachings of AA and the Christian church to come to grips with life on life's terms. The program of AA has required me to make a list of all the people whom I have harmed and make amends for the trouble I have caused them. This ethic of making amends is what has set me free from my former life-style of drinking and using drugs.

On the other side of the same coin Christ teaches us to be compassionate to other people and I find that it is when I am not being compassionate that I am causing harm. Then, again, I have to make amends to folks I have harmed.

As a result of the AA program, I have not only found God but have been able to define more narrowly who God is and how God in Christ is at work within my life. In times of trouble, I find that God is my refuge and I try always to turn to him for support and comfort.

Morning devotions and meditation is how I maintain a conscious contact with my God. I also find that the times when I am not doing these disciplines, are times when I am backsliding. Then I am not being the compassionate, loving and caring disciple of Christ that I believe I was born to be.

At 40, when I reflect on my life, I am nearly overcome with the contrasts - the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, the exposure to ridicule and violence, the 180 degree turn around I made in 1986. All of this strikes me as no less than miraculous that I am alive. There were many times when I could as easily have lost my life from overdoses, the violent nature of the characters I associated with, or the accident which took the lives of my fiancée and her son. All of this makes me believe that God has been there all through my life and has a plan for me.

I remember that after Jesus told Peter that he would deny his Lord, Jesus said, "When once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers" (Luke 22:32). This makes me believe that the atonement we find through the death and resurrection of Christ makes forgiveness possible. It is assurance that our mistakes are not the last word, but that even they can strengthen us and give us the compassion to help others.

I am grateful for the people I have met in southern Iowa, for their acceptance of me, and for the work we have done together. The difference between this area and the one I had known is extreme. My first surprise, when I arrived in Murray, Iowa, was that I had to drive 10 miles to the east to buy groceries, whereas in L.A I never had to go for groceries more than two blocks from my home. Everything is open 24-hours a day in L.A Groceries are cheaper here, but heating bills are killing me. I expected everybody to be very conservative, right-wing politically and religiously; but, granted that people in California are more liberal, I find Mid-Westerners less conservative than I anticipated. Definitely they are friendlier. My first week in Iowa, people, whom I had never seen before, were waving to me. That is definitely not the case in L.A. I like the Mid-West!