Walking on Eggshells: Discovering Strength and Courage Amid Chaos (7 page)

My brother Tucker had recently been back in Alaska with Barbara and our mother, but had gotten into some trouble. After he was expelled from school there Dad brought him home to us in
Hawai’i. I had missed him and was so glad to have another kid in the house. Life was almost ordinary, or as ordinary as it would ever get for the Chapman family.

The biggest problem we had at that time was money—or lack of it. The years of Dad’s heavy drug use had taken a toll on his business. With Dad not paying attention, several of his employees had mismanaged “powers.” In bail bonds, you and the company you work for guarantee that you and the bonds office will be responsible for the amount of the bail if the accused person defaults on the bond.

For example, if a person is arrested and then released on $10,000 bond, he or she might not be able to pay that much, so they go to a bonds office and pay 10 to 15 percent of the bail (depending on individual state law). The bonds office gets to keep most of that money as compensation for the service. To make this happen, bonds agents have agreements with local courts. They also have an arrangement with an insurance company, bank, or other credit provider. This eliminates the bondsman having to deposit cash with the court every time a defendant is bailed out.

If the defendant fails to appear in court on the designated day and time, the bonds agent is allowed to bring the defendant in to recover the money paid under the bond, usually through a bounty hunter. In most jurisdictions, bond agents have to be licensed to do business.

In the bail bonds business, we pay the courts with checks that are called “powers,” which is short for a power of attorney for that
person for the specific alleged offense. At some point Dad realized that seventy-five to a hundred of the powers were missing. Dad was audited, and the state shut him down and took his license. This meant that he could no longer do business as a bail bondsman. Dad was sober but completely broke and up to his neck in debt with the insurance company.

But life wasn’t all doom and gloom. With his mind functioning again on a more regular level, Dad took Tucker and me to the beach every day. We had so much fun! Dad began spear fishing again, and Leland began coming around more often. It was so great to see him and baby Dakota. Plus there was a spark in my dad that I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Life was good and I was happy.

We had also gotten a dog for Tucker and a cat for me. If you are not a pet lover you might think this was a financial extravagance, and in a way it was. But on the other hand those pets provided us with so much love that they were well worth whatever we had to do to keep them happy and healthy—and we did.

With little money to buy food, I began eating dry cat food as if it were cereal. I remember one day about this time Dad cashed in all his change and got about fifty dollars. I told Nathan about it, because I thought it was so much fun changing all the money. But Dad got really mad at me. I was too young to understand my dad didn’t want others to know about his financial troubles, and I remember him trying to cover up both the story and my confusion.

Dad was so sad the day he took us to the welfare office to get food stamps so we could eat. There was a look on his face that I
hope never to see again. No matter what, until this point he had always been able to provide for us. I am sure that it broke his heart to take charity, but we had to have food.

One day after school I grabbed some change from a drawer at home and went to buy a Welch’s strawberry soda. This was something I did every day, so I didn’t think I had done anything wrong. But on this day when I came back with my drink, Dad was furious because I apparently had just spent all the money he had saved.

I knew we didn’t have a lot of cash, but I didn’t realize we were that bad off. The fact that the only money Dad had was a bit of change in a drawer unsettled me. I wasn’t prepared, however, for the news that greeted me when I came home from school one Friday afternoon shortly after that. Dad told Tucker and me that we were moving back to Colorado that coming Sunday, just two days away.

We spent the next day and a half packing up what little we had. Although we had moved many times, I was devastated that we were moving again. I loved my school and new friends. I loved going to Manini Beach, and honestly, I barely remembered Colorado. This move would bring me back to a home I didn’t even know.

On the other hand, I was so relieved that I wouldn’t be going to Nathan’s house anymore that I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from me. As Dad stopped using drugs and broke up with Ginny, Nathan’s presence in our lives had became less and less, although I still saw him far too often for my liking.

I also cried huge crocodile tears when we had to give our dog, cat, and Paco away. They were family. Dad told us that we’d be back for them soon, but it turned out that it was many years before I again set foot on Hawai’ian soil, and I never saw those particular pets again.

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I don’t remember the actual plane trip across the ocean, but I do recall the culture shock that I felt when we first drove through Denver. The buildings were so tall and there were so many cars driving way too fast on the highway. The past few years we had lived in a more rural section of Hawai’i, and big-city life was new to me. Now I smile to myself when I think of this, but I was also shocked to see that so many white people lived in Colorado. I had gotten used to seeing the friendly brown faces of islanders, and looking at people with white skin like me was very odd.

Once we got to Colorado, Dad, Tucker, and I moved into one room in a Motel 6 near Denver. Barbara was living with our mother, and frankly, she and Tucker were back and forth between Alaska, Hawai’i, and Colorado so often that it is hard to remember who was where at any particular time.

Dad then went to work for his older sister, our aunt Jolene. I thought Aunt Jolene was super square, and in reality she was the total opposite of my dad. She never swore and was appalled by my dad and his ways. Her husband worked for the federal government, and all in all, they were a very conservative couple.

Aunt Jolene was also in the bail bonds business, and Dad had no trouble performing his duties for her company. Because he and Jolene were so very different, however, they had a contentious relationship. This was probably something that started when they were kids and decades later had gotten only worse.

She was kind enough, however, that when Dad caught jumps (people who had jumped bail) for her she sometimes babysat me. Jolene lived on Denver’s “Bail Bonds Row,” a quirky street of old homes near the courthouse that have been converted into bail bonds offices. Jolene and her family lived on the top floor of one of the houses and did business on the ground floor.

I remember that Aunt Jolene had a son around my age. I was a little jealous of my cousin, because he had every toy you could imagine and the loving parents I always wanted. He and I did not get along, so the two of us carried the familial dislike of each other from one generation to the next. I am not sure why he didn’t like me, but I didn’t like him because he never let me play with his toys or games. Instead, I had to sit on the floor and watch him play.

I also thought that Aunt Jolene acted like she was helping us out of pity. At the time I didn’t understand how we went from one extreme kind of lifestyle to the other. When we lived on Puuwai Alii in Kailua Kona with Ginny we had a pool, a dumbwaiter, and we each had our own bedrooms. Now we were all crammed into one room at a Motel 6. The only thing exciting about our living situation was that there was a pool. But the pool was covered for
the winter, and I remember staring day after day at that pool cover, wishing it was time for it to come off.

My aunt paid for our room at the Motel 6. I remember that the cost was $39.99 a day, because it was posted on a card on the inside of the door. That, among other monetary things, was a source of much argument between Dad and his sister, and I remember trying to stay out of the way as they had one fight after the other. Standard bounty hunter fees are 10 percent of the bail amount. If Jolene needed Dad to catch a $10,000 bond who skipped, then Dad’s pay should have been close to $1,000.

I think Aunt Jolene felt that if she paid for the room, watched me, and gave Dad a little money for gasoline and incidentals, that was all she needed to pay. There may have been other factors I was not aware of, though. I am assuming that she paid our airfare from Hawai’i. She may even have paid off some of Dad’s debt, so what she didn’t pay to Dad may have been going to repay his debt to her. But what irked me was the air of superiority that she lorded over us.

This may be why Dad began taking me on some of his bounty hunts rather than have his sister watch me. Although Dad has told me that he first began taking me on bounty hunts when I was about two, my first memories of this happened in Colorado when Dad had no one to watch me. I was very curious about the fugitives Dad captured, and I remember asking them things such as “Why are you bad?” and “What did you do?” I also remember that after one catch I accidentally got one of my suckers stuck in a fugitive’s
hair—he was in the front seat with Dad and I was in the back. I can just imagine what the guy thought!

Dad always instructed the “bad guys” to be polite to his children, and for the most part, they were. Just as it was shown on the show
Dog the Bounty Hunter,
Dad always talked to the fugitives he caught and tried to encourage them along a better path. “Find them and fix them” has always been his motto. Not all bounty hunters are like this, but Dad has such a good heart that he always wants to help someone if he can—and if it’s in their best interest that he do so.

I can attest that while you hunt a person you become infatuated with them. You learn about their families, habits, and hobbies, and when you finally meet them and the cuffs are on you almost want to hug them in relief and sympathy.

When I wasn’t on a bounty with Dad, I hoped he would remember to buy something for dinner. He often worked long hours, and when I wasn’t with him he couldn’t always get away to see that Tucker and I were fed. I knew Dad was trying to dig himself out of a huge financial hole; essentially we were starting over. Because of that I was glad that he was working so much, but it made our mealtimes very irregular.

After a number of weeks or months, Dad had enough of the fights with his sister. That’s why Dad jumped at the chance when Beth Smith (now Barmore, as she had married—and divorced—Dad’s friend Keith Barmore) asked Dad to house-sit and watch her daughter, Cecily, while she was away for a few days. We packed
up our things and moved to Beth’s house, which was nearby. I had bumped into Beth a few weeks earlier in the back alley of Aunt Jolene’s shop. Beth worked for another bonds company on Bail Bonds Row and gave me a toy, a magnetic drawing board. Beth was very nice to me and I remembered her stay on the Big Island and how much she didn’t like Ginny. That alone made her good enough for me.

While I remembered Beth, this was the first time I had met Cecily, who was three or four at the time. I thought Cecily was by far the cutest little girl I had ever seen. I wasn’t the only one who thought she was adorable, though, as Cecily had just won the Little Miss Colorado pageant.

Beth’s house was a nice three- or four-bedroom home with a basement and a huge yard. The house was full of toys and food, and compared to the Motel 6 I felt like we were living in a castle.

The few days quickly turned into a much longer stay. One reason was that Tucker and I had not been enrolled in school in Colorado, even though the weeks or months we spent at the Motel 6 were during the school year. Beth lived in Green Mountain, which is a nice Denver suburb about twelve miles from downtown. They had great schools and Beth convinced Dad that we needed to be enrolled there.

Shortly after we settled in with Beth, Barbara got into a spat with our mother and was sent back to Dad. I was so glad to see her, but I was soon to find that when she came back our nice new life would change dramatically. Tucker had his partner in crime back,
and he began to go off track again. Then Barbara tried to slit her wrists over a boyfriend. She had not wanted to leave Alaska, and the boy she had been seeing was the reason.

I remember being downstairs and hearing Beth and Dad screaming as they held Barbara down to get the knife out of her hands, but not before she had cut herself multiple times. My sister wore long sleeves for a month or so after that.

I am still a little amazed that Beth allowed a man with a drug problem and three troubled kids into her home. She must have been quite overwhelmed! Despite Dad’s continual womanizing, Barbara, Tucker, and I had no doubt that Dad loved us more than any girlfriend, but I got the feeling that that idea did not sit too well with Beth. I believe that back then she might have been insecure about the relationship Dad shared with us. For example, Dad always wanted us to go to movies or out to dinner with him, but Beth preferred to have one of her girlfriends watch us when they went out. As far back as I can remember, other than getting high or working, Dad never went anywhere without us—until Beth.

I’m not sure how it began, but at about this time someone started supplying Dad with drugs again. He was not using as often as before, but after the drug use started Dad and Beth began fighting—something that still happens every day. The two of them screamed loudly at each other, and Dad was at times violent toward Beth. I remember him calling her a slurry of names, everything from A to Z. The fights were horrific and showed Dad in a light
I had never seen. He and Beth even broke a number of household objects as they argued for what seemed like hours.

In one instance we were packing our stuff to move back into a motel when Beth angrily tried to open a screen door, but instead smashed her hand through the glass part of the door. There was blood everywhere, and rather than going to a motel, Dad went with Beth to a hospital. Beth still has the scar from that fiasco.

At other times Dad and Beth fought over pills. Specifically, they’d fight over the fact that Beth would not let Dad have any. One time he threw something out of their bedroom and into the hall. In the process the light cover in the hall shattered. I poked my head out of my room to see what was going on, saw hundreds of shards of glass on the floor, and retreated into my room.