This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.
How did we get here where I've quit a job in law enforcement that once was my dream? How did I get to a place where crime and deviance and insanity were normal?
In high school, I took a secret clearance test. I marked no on every single thing. I hadn't done hardly anything you would call crime or maybe a few little deviant things like playing with myself, masturbating a little bit too much.
Other than that I had taken a purity test in high school, I scored almost towards the top. I had hardly done any of the things we are not supposed to do.
That was a little under 20 years ago. I'm 34 right now. At 18 years old, I was fresh. I guess that's 16 years when you do the math. I was brand new. I was pure.
Well, I was pure on the outside and in my activities that I had done, again, if you overlook the masturbation thing. But we are just going to move right past that.
I hadn't broken any laws that I knew of other than maybe the very tiniest ones. I worked with my mother at Walter Reed, which is an army base when I was 18 and graduating from high school. I needed to take a secret clearance test while I was there. I put no on everything. I could hardly imagine why people would have to check yes to things like illegal drugs. I was so pure that you might say it was just asking to lose my innocence
going to college.
How did I go from a place where I had no interest in crime, or criminal justice or criminality, into wanting a career in law enforcement?
These are some of the most interesting questions because we see a lot of other people in our society doing this and it might not make sense if you haven't been through it yourself, and maybe listening to this will help.
I am grateful to share this from a place today where I relate more to how I was in high school than I do to anything that happened since then.
Today I live a pure, sober, healthy, happy life. I'm a parent. I have a family. I am a family man. Again, as I'd say it was in high school. I lived with my family and was well connected in life in terms of feeling like I knew my place. I belong in a healthy, happy family. That's what feels normal to me.
I'm grateful today that I don't do the crazy stuff I've talked about in this book and in fact, it is one of my biggest challenges today as I wake up here at four in the morning to step up here and narrate some of these things that I might often just prefer to sweep under the rug since I don't do that stuff anymore.
Why should we bother talking about it today?
What I've learned is that I've got out of that crazy place by listening to how others got out of their crazy place. If we go through our crazy times and people help us out, and then we just want to sweep it all under the floor and say, "Oh, well, yeah, just let us pretend like that last 15 crazy years or whatever it was in my life didn't happen."
I live a nice life today, I'm not out breaking the law and acting crazy. Let's just forget about that I ever was different, and then look around and act like
I don't understand people who are in the middle of that today.
What I seek is to understand and what I find is others' experience may help. Therefore, let's explore the gateway. The stories today of how I got into law enforcement, how we got here because when you see this amount of change in one person, it provides hope for anyone and everyone that's a member of the human race.
In fact, none of the cells in my body according to science are even the same as when I went to high school, and even in law enforcement, none of the cells, my entire body has flipped over cells if you will. I'm not even the same physically as I was from that time before.
Therefore, change is normal. The idea that somehow people stay the same is only something we perpetuate in our minds and that often holds people back from really changing.
Therefore, if we want people to change, one of the things we need to do is understand that all of us change, and change will happen often faster if we just let it instead of trying to force it.
"Let's go way back, Jerry."
When I was born, my mother and father were going through big changes. My father and mother met at the racetrack. They lived a pretty crazy lifestyle at the racetrack. My father was an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sex addict, and a gambler.
My father got into just about everything and he got into everything so much that his family finally kicked him out for the last time, it was just my mother and me when I was an infant, living with my father's family.
We met him down in Texas after he had been down with his aunt and uncle trying to stay sober and getting his life together. My mom went into
the army and she moved down to Texas, which was her first station thinking that we could start our family life back again.
After Dad having some time to detox things would be just fine. Dad met her at the airport and immediately had a couple of beers to let her know everything was all right and we were off to the races for five years more of that, of Dad drinking, life being crazy with him coming home late, Mom being in the army.
Then, my brother decided to join us after a year or so because he also wanted in on the fun.
Thankfully, my father got sober at about 40 years old after seeing he didn't want to live that way anymore and getting a look at himself in the mirror as my kindergarten teacher, whom he really respected, gave him a slight look of disgust one morning seeing him with yet another hangover.
He tried to quit drinking, he tried to sober up a bunch of times, and finally one day he just had enough of it after the night before drinking 40 rum and cokes and not being able to get drunk.
I'm grateful that my father got sober at 40, but it was difficult to grow up with the guy who refused to go to Alcoholics Anonymous and just did it all on his own. He was restless, irritable, and discontent very often.
I remember spilling a glass of milk and he would flip shit, "What the fuck.
God damn it. He spilled his fucking milk. Go over and clean it up."
He might bang the table, just fly into a rage at any time.
That said, Dad did absolutely amazing compared to how he grew up and I'm very grateful. I love him and chose him as my father. Let's not get it twisted, right?
We went through many places while Mom was in the army, going to Germany as a teenager where I unlocked this massive amount of pain in puberty of hating myself, my body and life, and feeling like everything was all backward and starting to feel lonely.
While I was at home living with my family, this wasn't too big of a deal except for some depression and a little bit of acting out and frustration here and there. My dating didn't go too well with girls that I mostly stuck to playing video games at home.
I was very concerned with being a good son. I didn't want to do anything that might upset my parents, such as getting drunk and I knew better. As long as I lived at home and living near Dad, I knew that alcohol was not a good idea. I also had no interest in doing anything deviant or criminal because I didn't want to disappoint my parents and that stuff didn't attract me.
The idea of smoking weed in high school or anything deviant just didn't excite me because I already knew from my masturbation habits that having things like that you do by yourself, that you don't want to talk about, feels miserable and shameful, and you feel like a nasty piece of shit.
Why would I want to do anything else?
I felt like I had to deal with my body's needs and I wasn't getting any help from any girls. While I had to deal with that, I certainly wouldn't want to pick up anything else that might have similar properties. I had a certain degree of sanity, you might say, living at home with my parents about doing the right thing and being a good boy.
That's how I got to 18 years old having done very few things wrong and therefore, I didn't have much of an interest in crime or policing, or law enforcement. I was intending to be an engineer in the army because I
basically took my brother's and my mother's interests and called them my own.
My mom was in the army, that's what I knew, so I thought I would do that. My brother was getting into engineering, I was naturally and still very good at math, and I thought that I could just do engineering in the army.
That sounded like a good enough career for me.
I applied to do scholarships with Army ROTC and thankfully, my father and I went to visit Virginia Tech together and stayed a night at the Army ROTC program. The first thing I learned there was FTC, which is Fuck The Core.
Now, I grew up in a pretty restrictive environment where my father was there all the time. All day, every day, my father was home. While he wasn't around much for his three oldest children, he was there for my brother and I all the time after he got sober at 40 years old.
He, in fact, would not leave us alone. You came home from school, Dad was there. You didn't dare not to come home from school because Dad would be out looking for you. Dad was always there, which is probably a big reason why I didn't get into doing delinquent stuff in high school because my father was there and I knew I always had Dad to come home to every day, for better or worse.
I'm grateful now for that incredible level of present parenting. 90% of success is just showing up and my father showed up a lot as a parent. I grew up with that level of restrictive environment where Dad was always home and I practically had to sign out to go to the bathroom at home.
I certainly wasn't going to go to college in an equally restrictive environment. I did want to get out and explore and be free.
In other words, I was looking to take the journey of the prodigal son. I was looking to leave the safety of the nest. I was looking to get into the insanity of the world.
There, you could look that I did make a choice. I made a choice to move out. My parents also said that I needed to move out when I was 18. I guess they were on the same page. You behave yourself, then get the hell out and try to do your best in the world on your own.
That's what I did.
I ended up going to the University of South Carolina as my last backup plan because I didn't realize when you signed a letter of intent, which means I intended to take up a scholarship at Virginia Tech, then I withdrew from that everywhere else, by those two series of events would withdraw their scholarship offers for ROTC.
The only one that hadn't placed their scholarship contingent on ROTC, which is what I had applied to for all the colleges I had considered was the University of South Carolina. They just gave me some other non-ROTC scholarship and I ended up accepting that as the best option I had.
I remember one of my first impressions going to South Carolina was what a back ass word redneck place this is. I grew up in the army, and I grew up with parents from up north and going down to South Carolina in a lot of respects just seemed like hell.
It's a bunch of people who don't know what they are doing, probably racist perverts down here.
My first impressions of South Carolina were not that great. Driving down I-95 getting off at random gas stations, I didn't feel like I fitted in, in South Carolina with my northern parents and my worldly point of view.
When I went to college, that feeling of not fitting in was the exact same way. In my dorm, I roomed with all people I didn't know and for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people I did not know, and man, it was uncomfortable. I didn't even have the little bit of privacy I had at home with my own bedroom sharing a room, and I remember doing pretty well with it, but it didn't take me very long before I started forgetting what I knew to be true from living at home.
In fact, I was impressed I made it through the first three quarters of freshman year without drinking, saying that I didn't need alcohol to have fun, which is the same way I feel today.
However, I ended up believing I did need alcohol to have sex because whatever was going on with me sober, things were very incompatible when it came to girls. I was too safe, too sober, too stuck-up, too much of a pain in the ass or they were, I don't know.
Whatever it was, I ended up believing the lie that alcohol would help me have sex, and while alcohol can help you have some really regrettable irresponsible sex, I would say sex is much better without any alcohol involved as is dating.
If you need a glass of wine, a beer or eight shots of vodka to loosen up a little bit around someone else, maybe you should get that looked at, maybe there is another way. Maybe you can just be yourself and loosen up a little bit without those training wheels.
That's my opinion, after trying it all the different ways you could do it, and thinking at one point I had to have alcohol to have sex.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.