Mission of Mercy

Mission of Mercy

By

Jamey O’Donnell

As a boy growing up in Glendale Heights, I remember the house I grew up in always smelling like piss and cheap wine, due to my mother’s uncontrollable addiction to alcohol.

Too many days to count, I came home from school to find my mother passed out on her bed in a puddle of piss, drunk from the day’s drinking.

My father had Multiple Sclerosis, so he was a beta male that did the best he could under the circumstances, but there was never anything he could do to stop my mom from drinking once she got her mind set on it.

At 2 years old, I remember seeing my father carried out of our Chicago apartment on a gurney to be loaded into an ambulance, then taken to a hospital to be treated for a stab wound to the ribs, delivered by my mother on one of her benders.

There were many other ambulance trips for my dad due to physical attacks from my mother, and many nights for me and my brothers spent in foster homes and juvenile halls, because we had been taken away from our parents and made wards of the court. Our relatives on my dad’s side of the family that lived close by never seemed to step up to the plate to take us in, so the courts had no other choice but to place us wherever they could.

This was my childhood and it set the stage for who I am today.

I could have gone in any number of directions.

I could have ended up spending the majority of my life in prison as a result of turning to a life of crime, or I could have killed myself.

What I chose to do instead was turn to alcohol and drugs at the tender age of 13, choosing a form of slow suicide that lasted up until my mid 40’s.

I tried to feel normal whenever I could, and dope seemed to be the easiest, most pain relieving thing I could do for myself, and it worked for me for a long time, until it didn’t.

I was the oldest of three boys, and it seemed to wear on me the hardest, as I had seen the psychodrama from as early as I can remember.

I was the one our neighbors’ parents warned their kids about.

I was the son of that 2-bit drunk the cops were always being called about.

My brothers saw their fair share of heartache and sorrow, more than any child should have to see, but whatever they saw, I saw double.

We were always poor and lived month to month, barely making ends meet, but we were always fed and never went hungry, but there were no allowances to be had, so if we wanted money of our own, we had to work outside of the home for it.

In summers I would mow lawns, and in the winter, I shoveled sidewalks and driveways.

When I became old enough to have a paper route, I got one and delivered the Chicago American in the afternoons.

At the age of 8 years old, I built a shoeshine box and shined shoes on the weekends in a little Italian barber shop for 25 cents a shine.

The biggest thing for me was to be able to hide my money in such a place where one of my parents didn’t find it and steal it from me, which happened more than once.

To make things even more complicated, and here's where it gets weird and I may lose you, but I believe I have been abducted numerous times throughout my childhood by some sort of alien presence.

I must have been 2 years old when I was discovered walking down the train tracks by the Chicago stockyards, very close to where we were living at the time, through the snow and barefoot, very early in the morning. I remember taking those steps and remembering how I could not feel my feet. My next memory was sitting up on top of a precinct desk of the police station, eating an ice cream cone given to me by one of the officers on duty, waiting for them to find where I lived. I presume my parents called the police when they woke and found I was not home, then picked me up. I also presume my mother must have been sober at the time, otherwise I would not have been released to them.

Another time a few years later in Glendale Heights, I woke the neighbors a couple streets over at 3 AM, screaming and crying to be let in, freezing and once again in bare feet, only this time I remember being high over the neighborhood in some kind of vehicle, and could see the tops of my home and the others around us.

Being from the city, my parents always locked the doors and windows before going to bed, so there was no way I could have gotten out by myself. It’s what you did when you were raised in the big city.

My escape from all the hell I was surrounded by was sports.

In the summer, I would leave the house before anyone woke with my bat, glove, and baseball to play pick up games all throughout the day in the neighborhood. If there were even only 4 or 5 kids ready to play, we would find a way to have a game, or at least play 500.

For those that don’t know how 500 is played, there is one hitter, and the rest are fielders. Every fly ball caught is worth 100, one bounce 75, 2 bounces 50, and the rest 25.

The first one to get to 500 takes his turn to hit.

Many summer hours were wasted away playing 500, that I can assure you.

In the winter, it was hockey.

At the local drugstore, I can remember buying a hockey stick for a dollar, then bringing it home and wrapping it with electrical tape, to provide protection and durability.

The hockey skates I had were a couple sizes too big for me, as they were given to me by an old man that lived down the street. They were the skates his son used to use, and he kept them in the crawl space. They were definitely old, didn’t fit right, and were covered in mildew from being under the house, but I was glad to have them just the same, and they enabled me to join many a pickup game at the frozen pond over next to the cornfield at the end of our neighborhood.

Some days I would go there to find a game, but no one would be there, and I would stretch out on the ice and lay there, skates on and ready to play. It was those times in particular I would feel my loneliness, and sometimes cry to myself on the ice, longing for a life I had no idea how it was supposed to look, but I knew it had to be better than the one I was living.

In those early years, I prayed to a God I barely knew, to give me different parents, parents that loved me and knew I existed. Sometimes the pain of being invisible was too much to bear, but somehow, I found a new reason to put one foot in front of the other, even if it was something make believe made up in my head.

I needed a mission of mercy. I needed someone to save me, but no one ever came to the rescue. As I got older, I toughened my veneer and became a fighter, because had I not, I would have succumbed to the wasteland of my existence, and no matter how bad things felt to me, I could not surrender my life to the status quo of what had been thus far.

I knew deep down that I was more than an equation of nothingness.

I amounted to something, though I had no clue as to what or how much, but I knew that someday I would find my paradise and solidify my place in it, and it would be beautiful.

The trick would be to find it.

At 13, everything changed for me because the way I saw things changed.

I was first introduced to LSD and for the first time in my life, I felt the world had lifted off of my shoulders.

I wasn’t afraid, embarrassed of who I was or where I came from, and had no fear that the world would find out I was a phony living amongst them. I felt free because I had arrived.

Drugs would carry me through my teenage years and my 20’s, and then I plateaued in my 30’s, ending right back where I started as a child, but possessing half a lifetime of building up my protective weapons of disarmament and the experience of using them in the battle of life.

I have come out the other side of my pain and today I relish in the joy of living.

So many before me have fallen to much less than I went through growing up as a child, so I feel fortunate to have made it here to where I stand now.

I have gratitude for the things I have and the people I love, but mostly for this life that God has given me.

There is not a day I wake up and forget to thank him for the new day I have woken to.

Each day is a gift, and if I could change anything in my past, I would not.

Every single thing has led me to this moment in time, and if I were to change just one thing, if I zigged instead of zagged, I may not be here today, nor would be my beautiful son.

Life is what you make it, and what you possess is what you perceive.

I think back many times to my childhood, and sometimes I tear up, thinking how alone me and my brothers were, and how we all somehow made it to the other side. It looks different for each of us, but we all made it just the same.

I mostly think back to my hours laying on the frozen pond, how the cold of the ice felt on the side of my face, how I felt so desperate and alone, and if I could talk to that sad lonely boy on the ice, I would tell him to hang on and do exactly what he’s doing, that everything will be all right.

Today I have found my paradise and its wherever I'm at, and I have solidified my place in it, and it is beautiful.