Ten Twenty Ten: Sobriety & State Forty Eight

By Stephen Polando

In this raw and compelling autobiography, Stephen Polando details the seven-year climb of the iconic Arizona clothing brand State Forty Eight from 100 T-shirts sold out of a home to a multi-million-dollar enterprise.
But before that could occur, his two future partners, younger brother Nicholas and childhood friend Mike Spangenberg, had to help lift Polando from the dark abyss of alcoholism.
"Ten Twenty Ten: Sobriety and State Forty Eight" is Polando's accounting of the sorrow of
personal losses and his slow dive into depression in his early 20s, leading to addiction, a DUI,
desperation and jail. He spares no detail in describing the lengths he would go to feed his dependency and to hide his alcoholism from his family and himself.
The title refers to the date he found sobriety – the book was published on his 10th "sober" anniversary –which ultimately led to the three young men combining their talents to create eye-catching T-shirts symbolizing Arizona pride.
This story details the company's meteoric rise that brought together State Forty Eight's tens of
thousands of friends and followers and some of Arizona's most prominent companies, sports teams and charities to truly make a difference in the community.
It concludes with Polando's decision to move on from the business to use his platform to educate
people struggling with addiction, to spread humor and positivity, and to make the most of the time each of us has on the planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649693334

Book preview

One

Do you ever know when it will be the worst year in your life?

It was February 2009 and my mom had gone back to Michigan to celebrate her 50th birthday there with her brothers, sisters, and other family and friends. The party was on Valentine’s Day, because it was a Saturday, and I was in Tempe.

Late in the afternoon I was on my way to pick up my brother, Nicholas, at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. I was still hung over from the night before and had also spent the afternoon drinking.

I made it one mile from the apartment before I rear-ended somebody. I had also almost rear-ended somebody else, just before the actual accident. It might have even been the same person, I don’t even really know. I smashed into the back of a car as I tried to pass them and ended up out in the intersection of Rural Road and Rio Salado Parkway in Tempe. That didn’t seem like the place to stop, though. So I continued north on Rural looking for the next chance to pull off onto a side road.

Unfortunately, that’s the Salt River bridge, which was about a quarter-mile away. When I tried to turn right, the car didn’t do so effectively because of the first accident, so I went turning into oncoming traffic before swerving left onto the sidewalk. I came to a stop by slamming into a fire hydrant and knocking it down.

I sat there for a moment then panicked. My first action was to pour out the beer I was hiding in an iced-tea can in the center console. A very destroy-the-evidence move. As if that was going to save me from all the carnage I had just caused over the last quarter-mile. I got out of the car and just sat on a wall. I waited for the police to show up.

I was trying to compose myself as a lady approached me with an aggressive combination of Are you okay? and What the fuck were you doing? The only thing I remember her asking was if I had been drinking. I said no. Shortly after that the cops showed up.

I would be arrested, then pass out in the back of the cop car, and then booked. For the entire evening, all I could think about was how was I going to tell my mother.

It came with a level of anxiety I had never experienced before.

She had lost her sister because of somebody like me, and her ex-husband had accumulated three DUIs, which no doubt affected her child support. This is the one mistake I should never have made. I was convinced she would rather be told I was suspected of shooting somebody rather than be told this information. I expected the absolute worst. Like, she might never talk to me again. Finally, about 24 hours after the accidents occurred, I grew the balls to call her.

Did I mention this would be the worst year in my life? And it had only started.

Two

My name is Stephen Polando. It is pronounced Stefan because ph always makes an ef sound, as I learned using Hooked on Phonics as a child. The only time ph ever makes a vee sound is when people misspell their own kids’ names in hopes of just making up some phonetic rules that do not exist. This leaves people like me to be called Steven every day. It is a laughable and vastly underrated social injustice.

I am 6-foot-4 and weigh an imposing 160 pounds. I have olive skin, brown hair that I brush back to the left, and waves in the front. I slouch a little so I’m rarely a full 6-4. People have told me way more than a few times that I look like James Franco. Perhaps because I squint. I know this because people also used to say I looked like Josh Hartnett, and that squint is something all three of us have in common.

The most important thing to know about me as a person is that I desperately want to make the people around me laugh. Like Robin Williams, I find the laughter of others to be a drug, and I need it. The second most important thing is that I am exceptionally kind, and I want to help people in need, as badly as I want to make them laugh.

I was born in Detroit, Michigan at 5:58 a.m. March 14, 1985, in the same hospital that Harry Houdini had died in 59 years earlier. Most of my extended family still resides in the suburbs of Detroit. Some have scattered around the country. We spent a few years in the rural town of Urbana, Ohio, during which my parents had my brother, Nicholas -- three years, six months, and six days after my birth. He doesn’t remember Ohio at all.

Our family ended up in Chandler, Arizona. The nation’s forty-eighth state has been his only real home. Nicholas is about 5-foot-10 with light brown hair and green eyes, which he is very proud of. He is shorter than me, and also a bit stockier than me, but, then again, that’s not really saying much because, who isn’t? He’s about 180 pounds with round John Lennon-like glasses. He also has a mustache, so he kind of looks like a walrus. He is a few shades whiter than I am. People rarely think we are brothers. They also consistently think he is older. He prefers Nicholas, but people shorten it to Nick anyway because nobody likes him. Just kidding, he’s actually the best character in this story.

At the time we moved to Chandler, there were about 70,000 residents. It’s a city southeast of Phoenix that was created in 1912, founded by a veterinarian by the name of Dr. A.J. Chandler. Chandler High School has iconic pillars in front and one could easily argue that, despite being one of the oldest, it is the most beautiful high school in the state. I graduated from Chandler High in 2003.

Today, Chandler has about 270,000 residents. So I got to see a small city get built up around our family as we settled in. I grew up at 1413 North Bullmoose Drive. It was a humble one-story, three-bedroom home, with a palm tree on each side of the driveway and an island of grass in the center of the front yard. We were the fourth house on a street of eight houses that looked at a large park at the center of our neighborhood. The park shared space with our elementary school. The view from our home was South Mountain to the west. It was truly picturesque and my mother often mentioned never moving from this house.

Make no mistake, Arizona is the sunset capital of the world. In large part, that’s because it gets more than 300 days of sunshine per year. With so many sunsets, you’re bound to have the best odds. It’s just simple probability.

My mom was born Jean Dembowski, the fourth of six children, in Redford, Michigan, which is about 15 miles outside Detroit. She is 5-foot-3 with light brown hair. She looks just a little bit different from all her brothers and sisters but in a picture they are all very clearly related. Her closest sister, Jan, was killed by a drunk driver on March 4, 1983, almost exactly two years before I was born. She was 21 years old. The driver was an ex-boyfriend of hers, who also happened to be a cop. He was fine, but she died on impact. He slammed her side of the car head-on into a pole. It was still crooked when I was younger, and I’m not sure if it’s ever been fixed. He received a slap on the wrist, because he was a cop. Truly an injustice for my mom’s family.

This was around the time Jean met my dad, Ross Polando, as well. They had worked together at a Bill Knapp’s Restaurant in Dearborn, Michigan, and fell in love. They got married on April 6, 1984. This first little blessing was born March 14, 1985 -- after Jean endured three-and-a-half days of labor. (It’s important I mention that because I’ve heard it about 7,000 times in my life and it would be a disservice to my mother’s account of my birth to leave that out.) Nonetheless, it was a pretty eventful two years and 10 days for my parents. 

Jean is one of the nicest and hardest-working people I know. She is also one of the most social butterflies among all the butterflies. She is exceptionally supportive and, at the end of the day, the reason she enabled me through my addiction for so long is because she was hoping it would somehow help. She was not naive to the fact that I had a problem. She, just, like most parents when confronted with this dilemma, didn’t really know what the fuck to do.

She also really believed in my ability to figure it out. Because that’s who she is as a mother. She empowered my brother and me. She always believed we would do something with our lives, even when we struggled. Eventually, she was going to be rewarded. Like most things in life, though, it ended up being a far more difficult process than she imagined. Kind of like when she had me. She thought the three and a half days of labor was bad, but I bet the 25 years after that were significantly more challenging. No situation was more challenging for her than my drinking.

My mom is actually older than my dad. When I was born, she had just turned 25, and he was 23. Jean always said that my dad was amazingly supportive after she lost her sister. I can attest that he is extremely emotionally intelligent. I believe that quality, along with his quick wit, are the two characteristics I got from him that I am most thankful that I have. Ross is so funny when he is playful and I have always tried to do my best to find my playfulness as well, to bring out the best of him within me.

My parents ended up divorcing when I was a freshman in high school. It probably should have been sooner than that. They often kept me awake arguing. Not nasty stuff, just passionately raised voices. They fought over money, religion, drinking, and my grades, among other things. When my dad left the house, as much as it feels shitty to say this, our lives at home got better.

I now had full control of the TV at most times. As a 14-year-old, that felt like a big deal. My dad quickly jumped into a relationship with a woman who lived literally three blocks away. Her name was Jan. So from Jean to Jan and it only changed his location less than a quarter-mile. Jan was nice, never had kids, and her parents lived on her street as well. What we really liked about her was that she had four dogs. We had never been allowed to get one, so her three labs and what could only be described as a coyote were pretty great for us. Also, Ross was now giving us like $50 a week in allowance. So he was really making moves to win us over. Jean just stayed the course and worked hard and kept being a mom. In the end, she would win.

My dad ended up getting 3 DUIs in the course of a couple years. He would spend a few months in jail. Jan and my dad went out drinking a lot. He was kind of able to let loose, with no responsibility of being a father to kids in a home. I’m sure that given the option he would have loved to have more custody, but I think it was just Thursdays and every other weekend. Either way, it was cool at first, but ultimately I just liked being home more. Jan and Ross also started fighting. He would have a toxic relationship of his own before I had even met Tiffany. 

For most of my youth, my mom was a Realtor. But she also worked as a postal worker for a time and now works for DHL. She left real estate after the market crashed in 2008. She wanted a steady paycheck. My mother became a very devout Catholic over the last few years of her marriage. In fact, I would personally say the reasons my parents divorced were because my dad felt my mom got too religious and my mom felt my dad’s drinking was a problem. The reality is that they were both right. Church gave my mom a place where people shared her views about life and supported her. Every Sunday my mom would talk to friends she had made for an hour while my brother and I would wait impatiently, squirming and complaining about how bored we were.

My dad grew up going to Catholic school but he always felt religion was forced down his throat and didn’t want the same for us. I can definitely relate to that. I can say that I found times when church was enjoyable, but I never wanted to go. I never truly bought in. That’s not to say I didn’t believe in God. I would never go as far as to say that; I just probably believe more in the universe as a whole. I simplify it to this: if you’re a good person, who works hard and treats others well, I tend to think life is going to work out favorably for you. It is not lost on me the fact that some people do this and still lose their life tragically. I have no answer as to why, because none of us does. No matter what religion you adhere to, some things cannot be explained in life. Religion gives people purpose and direction in life, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I saw the support a church congregation can give to members of their parish, and it’s powerful, especially in difficult times.

One thing dominated my youth more than anything else: Sports.

Early on it was baseball, basketball, and football. Football was probably my favorite. My dad would throw passes to me as we drove down the field in the final minute of the fourth quarter to lead Michigan over Notre Dame or Ohio State. I was always emulating Desmond Howard or Derrick Alexander, famous Wolverine wide receivers. I loved Michigan football more than anything else early on in my life. To this day, I still love Michigan football. The maize and blue uniforms, with the winged helmets. (I will never be convinced there is a better uniform in all of sports, nor