Food Stamp Warrior: A Memoir

By John Deaton

JOHN DEATON'S RAW AND COMPELLING MEMOIR

From brass knuckle beatdowns on the schoolyard to showdowns with the SEC on the national news, every second of Deaton's life has been a fight for survival. This book is the raw, wild John Deaton story, straight from the source. Born in one of the worst neighborhood

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brass Knuckle Books
• Release date: Sep 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798989155941

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Copyright © John Deaton 2023

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Every effort has been made to trace creators and copyright holders of the photographic material included in this book. The publisher welcomes hearing from anyone not correctly acknowledged.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author or Brass Knuckle Books.

Cover design & Typesetting: alexrosscreative.com / Brass Knuckle Books

Typeset in Adobe Garamond

All images are supplied by the author unless otherwise credited.

Cover concrete background image: Derick Daily/Unsplash

Polaroid frame / knuckleduster icon: Shutterstock

Foodstamps: Alamy

Chapter 1: Ford Museum / Hemmings / Google

Chapter 4: Google

Chapter 8: Model D Media / Google

Epilogue: Google

Contents

PROLOGUE Opening Statement

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE Another Ghetto Bastard

CHAPTER TWO Little Mary Mills

CHAPTER THREE Sibling Survival

CHAPTER FOUR The Poop Incident

CHAPTER FIVE my little white nigga

CHAPTER SIX Monsters Walk Among Us

CHAPTER SEVEN Hillbilly Roots

CHAPTER EIGHT Don’t Kiss & Tell in the Hood

CHAPTER NINE No More Monsters

PART TWO

CHAPTER TEN A Heroe’s Goodbye

CHAPTER ELEVEN Outrageous

CHAPTER TWELVE What An Asshole

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Sorry, You’re no Eminem

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Some Scars are Worth It

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Never Quit

CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Combat Zone

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Candidate Deaton

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Bury Me Upside Down

CHAPTER NINETEEN Not the Horse Case

CHAPTER TWENTY Highland Park Syndrome

PART THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Fatherhood

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The End of Things

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Therapy is a Good Thing

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Right Thing

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Today & Decentralized Justice

EPILOGUE Closing Argument

PROLOGUE

Looking back, it just doesn’t make much sense. I remember where I started. I know where I’m at now.

But it’s like looking at two different realities. When I wake up in my home in Rhode Island, smack dab in the middle of suburbia these days, my past could not be further away.

All the same, it’s still there: the streets, the struggles, and that empty feeling, that yearning hunger that drove me forward through the decades that should have left me dead. How in the world did I make it through?

That’s the heart of my story: survival itself.

Maybe you’re my friend or part of my family. You may know me from my law practice. Maybe you know me from my Twitter following. Maybe you don’t know me at all. But know this:

Everything you’re about to read is the truth of what I’ve lived. From the things I’ve done to the things done to me, it has not been an easy road.

The nice home, the fancy car, the wonderful kids I now have of my own…my purpose here is to scratch away that surface to show you the raw, real me.

Ever since I was a young boy, I refused to allow my destiny to be determined by the circumstances surrounding my birth or my upbringing. My destiny would be self-imposed. My parents, guardians, and siblings alike, always seemed drawn back to some destructive force or another. Our circumstances, our personal struggles, our own failings…all these swirled together into the fabric of the environment that surrounded us. I internalized the feeling of this, to the point where it became invisible and inevitable to me.

But then it became unbearable. So, this is the true story of how I untangled it all and got to where I am today.

Throughout the process of writing this memoir, I’ve sometimes asked myself: Why? What compels me to dig back through the past? To others who have lived a life like mine, perhaps you know that urge to push it all down, to live in the better days of the present and forget what you wished you didn’t recall in the first place.

Raw determination is just one half of survival. I tell my story now because I know that a lot of others out in the world also hide from themselves. In the end, there’s no hiding from it. Not forever. Trust me on that one. Self-discovery is not complete without the journey inward. On the other side of self-discovery is where real freedom lies.

You’ll have to understand my neighborhood, where I’ve come from, and the people who lived there with me. You’ll need to experience all it took to break free from that dead-end place and make a name for myself in this world. You’ll have to feel the same burning desire I felt as I clawed myself into the world of law, and the need I had to create the security and comfort that I never experienced as a child.

I’ve been many things throughout my life: a son, a brother, a hustler, a victim, a fighter, a cancer patient, a Marine, a lawyer, a husband, a father. So many faces it might seem suspect. I’ve asked myself: Which face is the mask? One of them must be, right?

Maybe. Maybe not.

What I know is that I was a street kid first, and it prepared me for everything to come. There were many times when it might have destroyed me too, and either fate or sheer human willpower carried me through.

Even when I thought I left the hood behind, it followed me. It became a part of me. To success, to money, to fatherhood. Until I accepted my life—all of it—I would never be able to fully live it. What’s the point in surviving then?

That’s what I decided to tell here.

First, I will take you through the same gauntlet I walked through every day on the mean streets of Highland Park. It won’t be pretty. It will likely not conform with the way you see the world or your own experiences. All I ask is that you listen, take it in, and understand for many of us out there, my story really isn’t that uncommon. One man’s nightmare is another person’s childhood.

After that, you’ll experience the steep climb I underwent to escape the gravitational pull of Highland Park and the people who surrounded me there. Love, heartbreak, disease, betrayal—and all of that before I even stepped into my first courtroom. After the trials and tribulations of my young life, I want to show people that survival is possible—no matter the odds.

Finally, you’ll learn the hard way, just like me, how those who climb the highest can still end up falling just as far. But you can learn from my example and just maybe save yourself by facing that dive head-on while reaching a place you never knew even existed.

When I reached middle age, I thought I’d seen it all. I wasn’t even close. Surprisingly, though, this last revelation turned out to be the most important lesson I’ve learned.

This world is much more than it appears, and so is every life lived in it. While this memoir speaks of the only life I’ve known, it touches upon the struggles we all face. Race, poverty, abuse given and self-inflicted alike—these are cycles that repeat everywhere across the globe.

I think my life shows how these cycles are created—and answers the question of whether they can be broken. Trust me, they can.

The book that follows is a map of my experiences, good and bad, transcendental and tragic, warts and all. I’ve told it the only way I know how—from my birth ’til now, though not always in that order.

Love me or hate me, believe it or not—take a seat. Imagine you’re in my courtroom now. Let me lay out my case, show you the evidence, and you can even be the jury too…

But my fate is my own. So, get ready for the opening statement.

Welcome to Highland Park: my own personal hell on Earth.

Home sweet home.

PART ONE

Every one of us is born to a place…

Do we have to die there too?

CHAPTER ONE

I was born and raised in Highland Park, Michigan, the epitome of tragedy, racial tension, and white flight. It’s a case study of how quickly cities that once functioned as a mecca during the industrial revolution can be forgotten and left to rot as abject poverty and crime hollow it from the inside out.

Highland Park is a sub-section of Detroit. During the early 1950s, the neighborhood was plastered on magazine covers and described as one of the best places to live in the United States. In 1907, Henry Ford purchased 160 acres within Highland Park, between Woodward Avenue and Oakland Street. By 1913, Henry Ford opened his company’s first assembly-line plant in Highland Park, which caused Highland Park’s population to explode from 4,120 to 46,500 by 1920. Highland Park became the birthplace of the Model T – the first affordable automobile – but its claim to fame didn’t stop there. In 1925, the Chrysler Corporation was founded in Highland Park too, and their World Headquarters would occupy 150 acres off Oakland Street, just one block from where I called home for my entire childhood.

Between the 1920s and 1950s, Highland Park became a hub for many industrial headquarters, and not just for motor vehicles. Companies such as Sears and Roebuck, which represented the fulfillment of the American Dream through consumerism, also called it home. Filling the offices around the greatest companies of the twentieth century were lawyers, doctors, and other important people with important agendas whose income tax dollars kept the streets repaired and the trains running.

Of course, Highland Park wasn’t immune from the influence and infiltration of those determined to keep the neighborhood not only rich, but white. As the century’s industrialists cashed in on this explosive growth, racism permeated the City’s infrastructure. In 1931, Highland Park’s Arthur Lupp founded the Michigan branch of the Black Legion, a white supremacist terrorist organization spun off from the KKK. The Legion, as it was commonly referred to, opposed all immigrants, especially Jews and blacks. These people weren’t on the fringe. When I say that racism infiltrated the infrastructure, I mean members of the Legion included the Chief of Police, the Mayor and City Councilmen.

In a crowning achievement of its industrial status, Highland Park opened the Davison Freeway in 1944, the United States’ first modern depressed (below grade) urban freeway. But everything changed in 1959 when the Ford Motor Company decided to close its assembly plant.

This eliminated thousands of jobs, forcing people to seek employment elsewhere. This great migration tipped off a domino effect that scattered the city’s population and signaled to other companies that Highland Park was dying. Before long, the once-vibrant city became littered with vacant storefronts, decaying infrastructure, and a population of unemployed residents who couldn’t afford to leave.

To say Highland Park was no longer an industrial mecca by the time of my birth would be the grossest of understatements. From 1972 to the present, Highland Park consistently maintained one of the highest crime rates in the United States when compared to communities of all sizes, from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. Anyone walking alone would be a target. By the time I was ten years old, I walked with a bullseye plastered on my back.

I was born in Highland Park on June 3rd, 1967, eight years after the Ford plant closed and during the tensions leading up to the Detroit race riots. The summers in Detroit were oppressively hot and humid.

It had a way of rubbing people the wrong way, especially those who couldn’t afford air conditioning…which was almost everyone. Highland Park was a couple miles north of a neighborhood called Virginia Park, home to about 60,000 low-income residents packed like sardines in cramped, sub-divided apartments covering less than one square mile. Virginia Park was a hotspot during these riots. The police force was overwhelmingly white and actively engaged in acts of harassment. Precincts were a lot less concerned with public relations back then, so the profiling and constant harassment of black residents pushed people over the edge.

It got so tense that sometimes when cops went in to make an arrest or raid a business engaged in illegal activity, it ended in bottles being thrown by an unruly mob growing to a riot as people poured out of their buildings to see the commotion. In response, cops made mass arrests and killed, or I should say executed, young black men in the streets. In the span of about a decade, the whole place became an echo chamber for hatred, racial divide, and violence. Inevitably, the ones who could afford to do so left the city in what was called: white flight.

Much like how New York numbers its streets, Detroit divides its city blocks with the Mile Road System. This means the major roads spanning east-to-west have a number corresponding to how far north or south they are in relation to the city. The numbers get higher as you go farther north, as does the general income level of the residents. Eminem made 8 Mile Road famous, and it’s true that was a divisional border. The farther north you went from Eight Mile, the whiter people got. Now that’s not to say that they were wealthy. I lived about two and a half miles south of Eight Mile between Five Mile/Fenkell and Six Mile, between Woodward Ave and Oakland Ave, right smack in the center of Highland Park.

By the time I started kindergarten, racial tensions were incredibly high because of the riots. I soon realized how the world in which I lived was pitted against me, despite the color of my skin. My school system was kindergarten through eighth grade, and out of everyone, there were only three white students, me included.

White flight was not an option for my mother. Mary was a single mother on welfare and food stamps with, at that time, four children under the age of six. We were stuck in the hood, but I didn’t think anything of it because it was all I knew.

Despite being extremely poor, there were always other households poorer, which made me appreciate what I did have: a Mom who loved me. Growing up poor is its own culture. As much as it can bond you to other people in tragedy, it can be just as unforgiving and dog-eat-dog. I remember, for example, how the kids in the neighborhood would ride the ones who were even poorer whenever the ice cream truck came around and they couldn’t afford anything. They’d lick their Popsicles and give each other shit for this kid’s dad losing his job, or that kid’s drug-addicted mom blowing all the food money on crack. My father Troy Deaton was a degenerate gambler and never around, so I got my fair share of ridicule. Looking back, it’s funny (in a fucked-up way) how pecking orders just scaled down like that. There would be weeks where I was the target of other kids’ cruel ridicule, and others when I got a Popsicle. I guess it all evened out.

If you drove through my old neighborhood today, you’d find a mass of empty greenery, cratered concrete, and decaying homes, like a flood came through and carried half the houses away. About a third of the ones still standing are abandoned and falling down. To visit my old street is to forget that you are in America, the richest land in the world. You would swear that you were visiting Ukraine after the rampage of a Russian convoy.

What’s crazy to me is how many memories could be stuffed into a few city blocks of overgrown lots and razed houses. Those few square miles taught me what kind of man I wanted to be and what I’d have to face if I expected to get where I wanted: far, far away, from Highland Park.

It became obvious to me at a young age that my birth was not planned. In fact, my origin was perfectly summarized by the rap group Naughty by Nature at the beginning of their song Everything’s Going to be Alright.

When I was born the Doctor said, It’s a boy, let me go tell the father.

The nurse replied, There is no father, doctor.

The doctor sighed. Another ghetto bastard, huh? Put him with the rest of the born losers.

CHAPTER TWO

My mother, Mary Mills, born near a place called Stinky Creek, Kentucky, will forever be one of the strongest people I’ve ever known. She filled in whatever lessons the streets failed to impart about survivability and making things work, all by example.

In total, Mom had six children (I was number four) with four different men. By the time she was 25 years old, mom had a six-year-old (Todd), a five-year-old (Tina), a four-year-old (Toby), and a newborn (me). Five years after me, she would give birth to Norma. My mother’s last child is my sister Michelle, who arrived twelve years after my birth. Until my youngest sister Michelle was born, all the father’s left my Mom to care for us on her own, but she never complained or held it against us kids the abuse she faced, from verbal to physical. Without fail she’d soldier on, put her children before herself, and do her best to try and shield us from the toxicity even if it meant making sacrifices to make ends meet. Despite Mom’s best efforts, the toxicity of extreme poverty and everything it brings—drugs, alcoholism and violence—would find us.

Mom’s crowning accomplishment was getting her driver’s license when she was fifty years old. Not because she had always wanted to drive, but because of what it represented. Receiving her driver’s license meant she finally achieved a degree of independence. When I was growing up, Mom always relied on men like my father for rides, but that clearly left her wanting most of the time.

When my mother set out to take the DMV test, she not only passed the driving portion but the written portion, missing one question in the process. The last time my mom had ever taken a test would have been in junior high, so passing with a score that close to perfect meant the world to her. Her passing that simple driving test gave her more pride and satisfaction than most experience earning a college degree. When you are subjected to extreme poverty, success becomes a relative term.

My mother had a remarkably difficult life. By the time she was fifteen, she had lost her father, mother and big brother. All three were dead. She had five other siblings, but it was every man and woman for themselves. My mother graduated the eighth grade, never going back to school. At fourteen, she immediately entered the workforce as a waitress. At eighteen, she lost her virginity and got pregnant at the same time. The man who impregnated her told her to take care of it and leave me the fuck alone. Nine months later, my brother Todd was born.

The wild turns in her life were far from over. When Todd was only two weeks old, my mother was working as a waitress at a truck stop near Barbourville, Kentucky. Although a simple woman, my mother’s beauty and spirit made her stand out from all the rest who occupied that country diner. She immediately caught the attention of an older handsome man, wearing a suit, who walked in like he owned the joint and ordered himself coffee. This man played the pinball machine as my mom brought him dimes, coffee, and banana cream pie. After about two hours, he looked my mother in the face and told her, I’m going to marry you. That man turned out to be my father, Troy Deaton.

Troy didn’t seem like such a bad catch. He worked at RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company and was on the fast track up. In fact, there’s zero doubt in my mind that had my father stayed with RJ Reynolds, he would have become CEO and Chairman of the Board—and mind you, RJ Reynolds would eventually turn into Philip Morris.

Almost twelve years older, and born with a silver tongue, my father appeared to be the most sophisticated man my mother had ever met. Of course, he neglected to tell her that he’d already served two years in prison. Pop had some college behind him—theology of all things—but he was a scoundrel at heart and my pretty hillbilly mother from Stinky Creek, didn’t stand a chance.

When I call her a hillbilly, I mean hillbilly. My mother’s family, living in those Kentucky hills, didn’t have indoor plumbing until the 1990s. My father was one of the smoothest bullshit artists you could ever encounter. He was such a good talker he could convince people to do whatever he wanted.

Mom summed it best in her own words, decades later. Your father looked me straight in my eyes and said, ‘Little Mary Mills, if you marry me, I promise you, you’ll never want for anything.’ I married that man, and I’ve been wanting ever since.

Before my mother had a chance of finding out who my dad really was, they were married within a couple weeks. And as would become tradition, my sister Tina was born nine-months later, one week before my brother Todd’s first birthday.

My family multiplied quickly. Todd was born in 1961, my sister Tina in 1962, and my brother Toby in 1963, meaning, at the age of 21, Mom was juggling a two-year-old, one-year-old, and a newborn all at the same time.

Four years into their marriage, my dad found himself in deep trouble with some loan sharks. There was a contract put out: break both of his legs in several locations on the bones, if possible. My dad got word of this, and, to his credit, took it quite seriously.

That night, he came banging up on the front door. "Pack all the clothes for the children now. Be ready to leave in an hour."

Mom wasn’t catching on just yet. Where are we going?

She thought maybe they were finally getting that new home in a nicer part of Kentucky that Troy had been promising for years. An hour later, my father, mother, and my three oldest siblings were in the car driving up I-75 north, out of Kentucky, through Ohio, straight to Detroit. To say my mother was surprised is to put it lightly.

Troy was all promises, like always. It was the height of the automotive boom, and he found quick work at Ford Motor Company, as the family moved into Highland Park right before baby number four arrived: me. My father worked on the assembly line, quickly moving up the ranks, becoming a foreman, then a supervisor. But it didn’t matter what his job title was, or how quickly he moved up the ranks, or how much money he made, every week was the same thing: my mother struggling to feed us, pay the rent, or keep the heat on. By the time I was four, my parents were separated, and my father stopped paying child support. He served thirty days in jail and lost the job at Ford in 1972, when I was five. He moved to Chrysler after that, but his problems continued unabated.

As a kid, I only ever knew my father as a degenerate gambler. The few times he showed up to visit me, he would take me to the track and teach me how to pick the ponies. That was our quality time together. What’s even worse is that the man was making great money, he just had the habit of losing it all before he got home. It was simply the Troy Deaton way, and it was that addiction that landed us all in Highland Park, on the run from loan sharks out for blood.

My mother didn’t get her driver’s license until she was fifty, so she was completely dependent on my father or friends to drive her to and from work, or she walked. Prior to leaving my father, my mom would be working a late shift at whatever diner she was waitressing at and would tell my father, Don’t forget about me.

Her dinner rush would come to an end, and she’d be standing out in the cold with him nowhere in sight. She’d desperately try to reach him but there were no cell phones back then, so all she could do is call the house phone from the diner or use a pay phone. But he’d be where he always was, at the racetrack.

When she confronted him about abandoning her, he’d say, Just walk or find your own fuckin’ ride home.

On the surface, this was inconsiderate, but it’s so much deeper than that when you consider how dangerous our neighborhood and the surrounding city were. He genuinely didn’t give a shit about her wellbeing. Not to mention the cold, a lone white woman walking home in Highland Park in a waitress uniform that implied a pocketful of tips might as well have had a neon sign around her neck screaming, Mug me. Walking in Highland Park was the last resort and it meant taking your life in your hands.

Now my mother was a very attractive woman, so it was no surprise when she caught the eye of Sam Abelson. Sam would visit the diner often, always asking for my mother to be his waitress. Whenever she was stranded, Sam would give her a ride home, and the next thing she knew, he was trying to convince her to leave my father. I don’t think this was a hard task, considering how my father treated her. Let’s just say that the life my father promised to my mother was very different than the life she was living.

I remember my mother telling me about the time she stole my father’s check in order to pay our expenses before he pissed it away. Remember, there was no direct deposit back then, so she would walk away with money in hand once she cashed his check for a hefty fee. There’s a reason you always see Check Cashing businesses in the hood.

My mother knew this when she went down to Frank’s Party Store. The guy working charged her a high rate to cash it, 10-15 percent, but she didn’t care. She signed my father’s name, then took the money and paid the rent, along with the light bill before going out and buying us groceries. My mother really had some nerve to do that, and my father thought so too because that night he came home and beat the living shit out of her. He kept kicking her even when she was down. He kicked the side of her head so hard that he busted her eardrum. I was too young at the time to remember this as I was only one or two years old, but I know it’s true because my father admitted it when I confronted him years later.

Shortly after the eardrum incident, my mother left my father and started dating Sam. It didn’t take too long for Sam to reveal himself as similarly temperamental, no different from my father. Mom