From Bastard To Believer

By Ronald Dunham

This is a story about growing up in the 1950's and 1960's and how the social attitudes of the day made it impossible to come to terms with one's sexuality in light of those attitudes. It is also the story of reconciliation of one's sexuality to the true belief in the existence of God and how that reconciliation made me a better person, both in terms of my personal journey and how I interact with others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronald Dunham
• Release date: Jun 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9780692688304

Ronald Dunham

Born in 1946 to a mother who could be best described as a "part time whore", musician and author Conan Dunham has been across the street and around the world in an effort to find reconciliation with his sexuality to his belief in God. He has been associated with some of the biggest names in both the music and political world, and has known some of the most famous people in those fields. He now resides in Tampa, Florida with his partner of 36 years, Rusty Lewis and his four cats, Bird, Judy, Hannah and Molly.

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PREFACE

I will begin by saying that indulging in mental acrobatics of dancing around the sometimes, treacherous realities and the circumstances surrounding each of the many situations, I have found myself. Sometimes I brought on these circumstances. Other times, I found myself in many bizarre or morally questionable situations, not of my own accord, but by simple luck.

I am writing my story, focusing on the extreme changes I’ve endured during the four seasons of my life.

WINTER: Conception to going out into the world on my own, 1946-1966.

SPRING: From manhood to finding love, 1967-1980.

SUMMER: From love to paradise, 1980-1998.

FALL: From paradise to the present, 1998-present.

I was born in Marysville, California, in the year 1946. One of the first words that comes to mind when I think about myself is the word bastard. My mother once confided to me during a drunken binge, that Clarence Dunham, who was her second (or was it third?) partner, and who was named as my father on my birth certificate, was not my real father.

It was at this time that she told me in a crying fit that I was a real bastard, (born without a legal father), but at the time I really could not care less. In the dictionary, bastard meant a child without a father. On the street, it means a person who is to be detested by some and perhaps hated by others. I’ve am a child without a father and have been despised as an adult, so bastard fits me just fine.

I’ve been working on this book for now for more than twenty years, adding, changing, trying to think of where I should begin, where I’ve been, who I’ve been, and where I am still headed. I’ve been called a lot of things, from good to bad. I’ve had so many legal name changes since my birth; I guess that’s where I will begin.

This pretty much matches my menagerie of name changes over the years and the different names I’ve been called. I have been called both friend and foe by the curious in between observer.

I’ve been a loner most of my life, making sure I did not get hurt by anyone or taken in as a fool. I stayed to myself, and was only ready to share when I got acquainted with sharing people. I also made it evident that if someone were going to attack me, either physically or verbally, I would not hesitate to defend myself.

Some people liked me, some didn’t. But everyone who knew me knew I went beyond an eye for an eye. If you crossed me, or tried to hurt me, it would be both eyes for an eye.

I’ve thought a lot about how to live a good life. I’ve consulted the I Ching, psychics, I’m Ok, You’re Ok psychiatrist Gordon Heiberg, who specializes in TSA, or transactional analysis.

Heiberg did me some good in helping me reconcile my life as a homosexual with my ambitions, which was a difficult endeavor, since having gay sex was a criminal offense in all fifty states. What I came to understand was that I lived in a multitude of closets, sexually, in religion, music and in employment.

Over the years, things began to change. My music was taking hold in many venues, and even before being gay went mainstream, there were gay circles around the world.

My sex life was nothing less than totally try-sexual. I would try anything if I were horny enough and worried about it when I sobered up. Reflecting now about my mother, who was what I labeled a part time whore, she pales in comparison to what I have been in my life.

During the 1970s, I spent a few years living very loosely in Hollywood with the male and female prostitutes of the streets.

My sexual promiscuity ended beginning on June 7, 1980, when I met my partner and now spouse, Rusty Lewis, the love of my life and now my best friend. We met in a Greyhound Bus station in Sacramento, California. That particular day started out as probably the worst day in each of our lives, but the rest of 1980 was nothing but a dream come true, in love, relative success in music, and worldwide travel.

One

MY MOTHER & EARLY LIFE

Marysville, California, 1946-1958

To know me, you have to know my mother. She was born into a family of nine children, seven girls and two boys, to a strict Pentecostal father and very demure mother. In the Pentecostal belief system, girls and women were second-class citizens. Simply put, the boys came first. The girls were supposed to work and serve the household. My mother, by all accounts, was mischievous, promiscuous rebellious and aggressive.

Her first marriage was at age sixteen to a man who was some in the family would call a homosexual. Having sired four children and spending most of his life in one marriage or another, it is arguable that he was bisexual rather than homosexual. It was revealed later in life that my mother was also bisexual.

The early period of her life after the first marriage was followed by a collection of live-in beaus. The first one was with Hershel Williams in Wheatland, California in a one-room shack with a dirt floor, located on the edge of a peach orchard.

There was an irrigation pump next to the place, which provided us with our water. There was no electricity and no running water. I was two years old at the time. She must have known him for a while, because my middle name was listed as Hershel on my birth certificate. Hershel evidently care about me, as evidenced by many pictures my mother took of him and me on his tractor. He continued to send me cards every Christmas and on my birthday until I was in my early teens.

My mother then got hooked up with Clarence Dunham, an employee of PG&E Electric, and we were living on 811 Bandy Way, Marysville, California. When I was born, she listed Clarence Dunham as my father. Interestingly enough, she chose Hershel as my middle name. My name became official as Ronald Hershel Dunham.

When I was two years old, my mother left me on a honky-tonk barstool in Marysville, California and took off with a new man, relying on someone at the bar to take care of me. This resulted in the authorities removing me from her custody. I then lived with my maternal grandparents, Grover and Viola Holt.

I know my mother felt robbed. In later years when I either lived with or visited her, she would complain how the Holts had lied and stolen her children from her. She would eventually have five children, all told.

One of the reasons my grandparents gained custody of the oldest three children was because my mother had been arrested at a hospital in Oklahoma when she tested positive for gonorrhea. At that time, if a woman had a social disease, she was arrested.

That reflected the huge gap of accountability between men and women of the time. Men, of course, would not be arrested for testing positive for gonorrhea or anything else. My mother, by her own admission, had sometimes been a whore. My mother could have a very crude mouth and I use her own words when quoting her as saying, I only sold my pussy when I couldn’t make a living no other way.

My mother’s version of the incident was that she was in Oregon looking for work and left me with Hershel Williams, whom I believe was her third live-in beau. Others said that she had run off to Vancouver with her latest fling.

Two

A NEW LIFE WITH MY GRANDPARENTS

Monett, Missouri

One of the most horrible times of my life was when I first arrived in Monett, Missouri, to live with my grandparents after my mother left me on that barstool. At age four, I contracted polio. One night I woke to find I could not move my left leg and had a raging fever. My grandparents called an ambulance, which took me to Springfield, Missouri, where the doctors immediately put me in an isolation ward. Even though I was highly infectious, my grandfather, who was a minister, insisted on accompanying me to the hospital, fifty miles away.

None of my earliest recollections of life were joyful. They were horror-filled. Sometime later, when my grandfather retired from the Gulf Oil refinery, we loaded up his 1950 GMC pickup truck and hitched it to our thirty-five foot travel trailer. We then headed off to California to preach the gospel.

Hanford, California

When we got to California, the first place I remember was a church camp meeting in the Fresno area. We spent months there, going to church on an almost daily basis. My grandparents were devout Pentecostals, and the ministry had become their lives. The next stop was in Hanford, where my grandfather opened a church in a storefront. This is what he eventually became known for doing.

When we first moved to Hanford, we were living in the thirty-five foot trailer in a trailer park on the edge of town. It became the base of operation from which Dad, as I had come to call him, began with the first order of business, that of starting a church. He started a church in an old storefront in the downtown area of Hanford. My grandfather became known for this process, one of which he had used in starting many other churches in Oklahoma and Missouri, before moving to California. He would canvas the area during the day, going house-to-house and knocking on doors. He was truly a foot soldier in the army of the Lord.

11532 5th Place, Home Garden Tract

After Dad purchased the church building and had gathered a sufficient number of people for weekly services, he turned his attention to finding a piece of property on which to build a house.

There was a section of town on the west edge of the city limits in a poverty-stricken party of the city called Home Garden Tract. It was right on the edge of the county fairgrounds and a rural airport that accommodated only small planes. Home Garden Tract was typical of the areas my grandpa would select for building. It was in a poor area, so the price of the land was within reach of his modest income from his Gulf Oil Company retirement pension.

That was about 1954. Each day he, my grandmother, and I would to help with building our new home. There had once been a home on the property that must have burned down. The most important asset on the property when we arrived was a deep well with a tank and an electric pump, which all worked efficiently.

The building of the house at 11532 5th Place was all accomplished with hand tools. Grover neither had, nor wanted, power tools. It was the old hammer, handsaw, level and other necessary tools with which all three of us built the house. Sometimes on weekends, different family members might drive the several hundred miles from the San Francisco Bay Area to help us.

The first and most important structure at the time was the building of a two-seater outhouse on the rear of the property. Since we were going to be there working most every day except when church was being held, the outhouse was the crown jewel of the project. As I remember, most outhouses of that time period always had toilet lids from regular toilets nailed to the top of the crudely formed holes. Grover was not a man of comforts. Our outhouse was quite uncomfortable at times whenever our derriere would come into contact with an unseen splinter. Old newspapers and Montgomery Ward catalogs were the substitute for rolls of toilet paper.

During the years in Hanford, I would have two major surgeries on my left leg. A tendon transfer is a horrible ordeal to go through when you are eight years old.

When I was eleven years old, my grandmother was stricken with acute arthritis that left her screaming and crying in pain. The doctors advised her to move to the desert where the climate was hot and dry. This presented a problem, as they were growing too old to be taking care of a young teenager.

Three

LOS ANGELES, 1958-62

From Grover and Viola’s to the hell of Los Angeles

Mom and Dad decided they would move to Twentynine Palms, California, located on the edge of the Mohave Desert. My Uncle Tom Holt and his wife Velma had offered to take me into their home in the Los Angeles suburb of Norwalk. I would be the son Tom could never sire, as he was sterile.

The truth about Tom and Velma and their alcoholism and anger would not surface until I had already made the transition to their home in Norwalk. The reality soon set in that Tom’s biggest thrill in life appeared to be taking off his belt, grabbing me by one arm, and whipping me until he was out of breath. I would be left lying on the floor in a heap, crying. Sometimes Velma would intervene when she thought I had enough, only to get slapped across the jaw herself.

Tom’s Abuse Begins

When I was age twelve, Tom walked into a storage shed, catching my best friend Ron and me, doing what every twelve year old boy has done since the dawn of time: experimenting with sex. At this point, Tom’s hatred for me intensified. He was not raising the son he never had; he thought he was raising a queer. The beatings intensified in both number and strength.

Ron and I had become inseparable. We both attended North Downey Junior High, riding our bicycles together, or shagging golf balls at the Downey golf course. We also liked to have sleepovers, before getting caught in the act.. We both joined the Boy Scouts. It became our escape from home with weekend camping trips and we always shared the same pup tent. I still have photos of the two of us crowded into one of those old photo booths where you have could have four pictures taken for fifty cents. We cut school and took the bus to Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica to spend the day. That too was discovered and brought the big reward of another beating.

I had run away several tines on my bicycle, keeping score at the local bowling alley and sleeping in thrift store donation boxes for warmth. Every time I was caught, I begged the police not to release me to Tom. I told them about the beatings to no avail.

Honesty Becomes a Casualty

After about three years of Tom’s abuse and getting no help, I finally told the police after the arrest, The next time you catch me, it will not be on a bicycle. That was one promise to myself I kept!

The first fourteen years of my life had already been littered with the quirks and changes of:

Abandonment by my mother

New guardians at the age of two.

Contracting polio at age four

Adjusting to my life as a vagabond, living out of a thirty-five foot trailer and traveling cross-country with my Pentecostal evangelical grandparents

Settling down in Hanford, California, from trailer living and into the stable environment of a new home I had helped my grandfather build.

Seven years of being in a home with my grandparents, who by now, had become Mom and Dad. I enjoyed complete stability for the first time since I was two years of age.

Disease had now brought my stable life in Hanford to a screeching halt. My grandmother was struck with crippling acute arthritis. Because of this new development, my grandparents were now unable to adequately care for their adopted son. I was about to enter an epic three and a half years of turmoil. It would be a time of unpleasant self-awareness of my budding homosexuality, and the emotional and the resulting physical abuse from my new guardians.

Up to this point in my life, I had absolutely no control over any aspect of my life. My various guardians had made all decisions after I was removed from my mother’s custody. Those decisions up to this point had been made with only my well being in mind, because of the deep love my grandparents had for me.

Now I was determined to change my environment at any cost. This change would come, regardless of legality or what it might cost anyone but myself. Honesty and morals had now become irrelevant to the picture. I believed that by now I was the only one who cared about me. All my ensuing decisions would reflect that position.

Buzzy

By this time, I was living with my Uncle Tom in Downey, California. We lived on Pellet Street, between Old River School Road and the concrete-bottomed Rio Honda River. I had a sleepover/jack off friend named Buzzy, who lived with his divorced father in a two-bedroom cottage on Pellet Street, one block from where I lived. Buzzy had acquired this nickname from his hyper reaction to the prescription of Ritalin he was given. Ritalin was a fairly new medication given to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

Buzzy and his father lived in a house with a detached garage twenty feet from the main house. Buzzy’s bedroom was an added on converted room at the back of the two-car garage. Occasionally on weekends, I would spend the night with Buzzy. In the morning, Buzzy would catch the bus for school and his father would drive to work, leaving the house empty.

As I was coming home from North Downey Junior High School one afternoon, walking on Dinwiddie Street, I noticed a 1951 Mercury parked in the driveway of a house I passed every day going to and coming home from school. The owner always left the keys in the ignition. This planted the seed of an idea in my mind, an idea that quickly developed into a plan. This was going to be my escape from hell, and this time it was not going to be on a bicycle. I had located a getaway car.

I showed up at Buzzy’s house, telling him I had run away from my uncle. I told him that I had met a gay man from nearby Pasadena, and this man had promised to hide me out until I turned eighteen. I reassured Buzzy that I would be staying with him for only two nights, and then I was going to Pasadena.

The next morning, after Buzzy had gone to school, and his father to work, I crawled through a rear window of the house. Once inside, I found a Remington .270 rifle and a Remington .22 caliber semi automatic pistol, along with boxes of ammunition. Now, I had the getaway car and the guns necessary to survive in any wilderness area where I might have camped when I was a Boy Scout. My escape plan was complete.

I carefully hid the guns and ammunition in a shed behind the garage apartment before Buzzy and his father returned home. That night, I waited until we had gone to bed and I pretended to go to sleep.

When Buzzy began to snore, I quietly got dressed, slipped out the back and walked the one block to where the old Merc was parked. As usual, the keys were in the ignition. I put the car in neutral so the car would quietly roll out of the driveway and into the street. I then started the car and drove through the back alley between Pellet and Dinwiddie Streets behind Buzzy’s house. I quickly loaded the guns and ammunition and drove away. I was on my way!

Joshua Tree National Park

At first, I was headed for Joshua Tree National Park in the Mohave Desert, where I had previously stayed while on a Boy Scout camping trip. The park is located approximately one hundred and forty miles away from Downey, California, and five miles east of he desert town of Twentynine Palms.

I had to find my way through the maze of Los Angeles freeways leading to Twentynine Palms. There, I took the exit that leads you directly east to the park. This road winds around the park, taking you completely through it, over the Mojave mountain range and down the backside of the mountains, to the west exit from the park.

Looking back on the entire venture, I am amazed that at my age, with absolutely no driving experience, that I was able to navigate the maze of freeways in Los Angeles. I was about five feet six inches tall and weighed ninety pounds. I had to sit in a pile of clothes just to see through the top half of the steering wheel, much less over it. I made the decision to only travel at night so no one would notice that a fourteen-year-old boy was driving.

I also had no money for food or gas, and I was afraid to go into any public area lest I be recognized as a runaway in a stolen car. My plan for getting the gas was to keep my eyes open for tourist vehicles pulling trailers with motorboats on them. I also kept my eyes open for camping areas around any of the rivers, boat docks and restaurants where boaters on their way to the Colorado River would stop to eat and rest awhile.

I could jump into any boat and usually discovered there would be at least one, and sometimes two, five-gallon cans of gas. If the owners were en route to the docks, they were usually filled somewhere before they left town. I would quickly cut the rubber hose attached to the motor with my Boy Scout knife, or simply grab cans there weren’t connected, then run like hell back to the old Merc. I would drive away before the travelers knew the cans were missing. They wouldn’t find out until they were miles away.

As for food, I became like Yogi Bear, stealing picnic baskets from the campers. When people were off boating during the days in a river or lake area, I would raid their camp food stash and then quickly depart.

The old 1951 Merc was, in its day, a mid-price large family sedan. An ugly sight of the early 1950s, it resembled a giant, upside down, round bottomed bathtub mounted on wheels. Inside, there was enough room that I could stretch out completely in the back seat. It could also carry a large number of five-gallon cans of gas on the floor between the back and front seats.

Colorado River Resort

I spent two days resting up in an out of the way campsite in the middle of Joshua Tree National Park planning my next move. I took off as soon as it was dark and headed for the Colorado River. I knew there would be a lot of boaters and campers who would unknowingly supply me with all of my needs.

By daybreak, I had reached my destination at a camping and boating park on the banks of the Colorado. Now it was time to sleep all day, away from any prying eyes.

The following night I hit the road again, crossing the Colorado River into Arizona, headed for desert beyond Kingman. My thought was that if I were in another state, the police wouldn’t know I was in a stolen car.

Right outside the city of Kingman, the car began to cut out on me. I knew it wasn’t out of gas, but the trouble was getting worse, forcing to stop at a remote gas station located along the road next to a large field of fully grown wheat.

In desperation, I asked the mechanic there if he would repair the car in trade for the stolen Browning automatic. He agreed, and then told me to go rest in a shaded grass spot under a canopy while he repaired the car.

A few minutes later, I noticed deputy sheriffs and Arizona High Patrol cars coming from both directions. I realized my brief period of freedom was about to come to an end. I took off running into the wheat field. After a hundred yards or so, I dropped to my knees and began crawling through the wheat until I found a small ditch.

Ten minutes later, I heard the loud voice of one officer directing the other officers to begin the search. I also heard dogs barking. They had brought several Doberman Pinschers that were trained to track fugitives. Within five minutes, I was looking up into the eyes of a very serious Doberman attached to the leash of a Arizona Highway Patrol officer who instructed me at gunpoint to get up very slowly with my hands in the air or he would let the dog loose and/or shoot me.

Four

KINGMAN, ARIZONA COUNTY JAIL

After the police captured me, they transported me to process and book me at the Kingman, Arizona county jail. This would be the beginning of a two-week period feeling I was trapped physically and emotionally in a frightening time warp. Mentally, I was in Westworld; physically, I was in the setting of a Vincent Price horror movie titled The Pit and the Pendulum, a movie I saw in 1961.

This was an old jail, resembling the ancient castle in the movie The Pit and the Pendulum. It was a large neoclassical stone fortress built in 1910. The jail was constructed from native cut stone encased with reinforced concrete. There were no juvenile facilities for fleeing felons such as myself, so I was put in an isolated cell on the second floor. There was a three by four foot of block of cement adjacent to the back wall, which was for sleeping or eating my meals, a plain porcelain toilet without a lid, and a small drinking faucet for water. The guards gave me a small packet of tissue for toilet paper each morning when they delivered my breakfast.

The only time I saw any jail personnel was in the morning when they delivered breakfast, and again when they retrieved the metal trays and utensils. This was repeated again at supper, a total of two meals a day.

All of the lighting came from electrical conduits fastened to the cement ceilings on the outside of the cells. For ventilation, they had punched a three foot round hole through the massive floor. Below me was a cell with four other prisoners.

Each day of the first week seemed to drag on forever. There was no sense of night or day, except when they lowered the lights. Every time a guard would bring my food, I would ask them what the status of my case was. When they first booked me, they told me that within a week there would be two policemen from Los Angeles who would transport me back to California for my trial.

Mentally, I was tied down to the floor as I watched a great pendulum moving down towards my chest, coming closer with each pass. Each day seemed to be never ending. By the end of the first week, I was becoming more and more alarmed. Where were they? This would continue for seven more days, each day worse than the last. And the pendulum kept dropping closer.

I was a smoker in my younger days;