Absolution: The Dark Path to Light

By Scott Allen Curley

Scott Allen Curley, self-made millionaire and one of the nation's most unlikely and successful businessmen, was born into the world unknown by his father and unwanted by his mother. Adopted by the Curley family, Scott recognized from an early age the conflict between who he was and the person he was expected to be. To fill this gap, he created an alternate persona of confidence and popularity while secretly questioning his own identity and self-worth.

The struggle beneath this contrasting and conflicting identity crisis eventually leads him down a dark path of drugs, criminal activity, and ultimately a decade of incarceration on some of the most dangerous and violent prison units in the country. A roller coaster of abuse, drugs, prison, sobriety, determination, relapse, homelessness and, ultimately, absolution, Scott Allen Curley's journey from darkness into the light is a true story that proves it's never too late and no one is ever too lost to turn tragedy into triumph.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889607090

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Absolution

The Dark Path to Light

Scott Allen Curley

Copyright © 2023 Scott Allen Curley

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88960-695-6 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88960-726-7 (hc)

ISBN 979-8-88960-709-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Epilogue

Special Thanks to Minette Bryant for helping me through this journey and keeping me sane along the way.

About the Author

To Mike and Betty Alspaugh…

I am here because you were there…

Prologue

August 16, 2022, 11:00 a.m.

He sat alone in his office. Being alone was unusual for him, closing the door on the world outside, the world full of people waiting to hear the news, watching for the turn of the doorknob. Or even the further world outside the building, waiting for their phone to ring, to see his number on their caller ID.

But he needed to be alone today. Just for this brief time. He needed to have his own private reaction to the news before sharing it with the others. He needed to sit quietly with his head in his hands, listening to the strangers who spoke cheerfully from his computer; people he'd never met who were counting down to the biggest moment of his life so far.

This was a time, if there ever was, for introspection. A time to look back on the path, the often-broken paving stones, which led him to this place. But before he could fully examine the past, he had to first fully accept the present. Was any of this real? Was this happening?

He knew they were about to begin the countdown of the five thousand fastest-growing companies in the United States. He already knew he was on the list, but he didn't know at which number they would place him. He would have to listen, with everyone else, to the countdown on the closed-circuit link he'd been given for this occasion.

He could be streaming this out on the sales floor. Maybe that would have been the right decision. He knew that without his sales force, the company would never have reached this level. But he needed this time alone, to process, to grasp the reality.

Have I really reached this level of success? he asked himself, just to feel the surreal thrill of the answer in his own mind. The guy who once sold his shoes for crack cocaine? The guy who spent ten years in prison behind nine felonies? The guy who was homeless and desperate and stealing food to survive?

Before beginning the countdown, the announcers were interviewing past honorees, and he listened closely, wondering what their stories were. What paths had they taken to success, and what might he learn from them? What might they learn from him as well?

What would his father think of this moment? His father whose love had always seemed conditional on how his son's accomplishments might feed his own ego. His father who had loved him when he was winning medals but who had abandoned him when he was in prison. Were he still alive today, would his father be proud of this accomplishment?

He closed his eyes for a moment, knowing this was a wound that would never heal. But this was a day for celebration, not sadness, and so he shook off the heaviness and returned his attention to the broadcast and carefully unwrapped a Blow Pop.

Chapter 1

Man, I love Blow Pops! This love affair goes back almost as far as I can remember. It's hard to pinpoint the one thing I love most about them. It's the bright flavor of the candy. It's the knowing that the bubble gum is waiting there inside. It's the ritual of unwrapping it in just that special way so that the whole wrapper comes off clean, the squeaking sound the plastic makes as I twist it just right.

Ultimately, it's that final crunch of candy as my teeth sink into the gum and then chewing the gum with the crunch of candy mixed all inside it until finally it's just gum and the last of the candy crunch is gone, and the flavor of the gum lasts just a few more minutes before it's time to start the ritual all over again.

The internet is happy to tell me that Blow Pops were first released in 1973, which means they were released about six years after I was released. I wish I could remember my first one, the Pop that got my cherry, as it were…but no.

I do have a very clear first memory though. I've read that psychologists say your earliest memories are not truly about how far your brain goes back but about specific things that imprinted on you, which have some import as to who you will become.

My earliest memory is of my little sister, Tonya, having a dirty diaper. Tonya was a few months younger than me, a little light-skinned girl, probably mixed race like me, and we were adopted together. Though we were not biologically related, we probably could have passed for siblings, especially since the couple who adopted us, Lester and Annie Curley, were also mixed. A beautiful family, they probably thought.

But I only had a little sister for about a month; I don't know if you can do this now, but back then, when you adopted a child, I guess you could get a refund. I was only eighteen months old, so I don't remember any of this; but apparently, Tonya was sickly or something, so my parents decided not to keep her. Doesn't that sound strange? Their baby girl wasn't good enough, so they gave her back. Maybe I internalized that and spent most of my life trying to be sure I was good enough for the Curleys.

I don't remember those circumstances, but I do remember Tonya, and I especially recall the moment with the dirty diaper. I must have been in diapers myself at eighteen months, but perhaps I was old enough to know that other people shouldn't be pooping their pants.

I could smell it. I knew what a dirty diaper was. I remember reaching out and pulling back the waistband of her diaper and seeing what looked like a squished hamburger patty inside. That's what I related it to. I ran and told my dad.

So tattling on the child who was only briefly my sister…that's my earliest memory. What does that say about me? I hope it says that family is so important to me. My memory reaches as far as it has to in order to make even the slimmest connection.

I don't know what became of Tonya. I have no way of knowing whether she got adopted again or where she wound up or how her life might have turned out…whether she remembers me. It would be more than half a century before I had another sister.

It was never kept secret that I was adopted. As soon as I could read, I was given the photocopies of the redacted adoption papers, and I labored over them, fascinated by my own secret origin.

I was put up for adoption the day I was born. My birth mother was a white woman named Marcia (her last name was redacted) who gave birth to three children: first, she had a white daughter, who she raised, and then two mixed children with two different black men over a two-year period…both of whom she gave up for adoption. I have no solid evidence of this, only a gut feeling, but abortions were illegal during the mid and late '60s, so I'm somewhat confident that neither my mixed sister nor I would have survived the pregnancy had Roe v. Wade been the law of the land at that time. She chose not to raise two mixed children and put us both up for adoption on the day we were born.

Regarding the adoption process, there was a famous politician named Barbara Jordan; she was the first black person elected to the Texas senate and the first southern black woman elected to congress, and she played some role in my adoption back in 1969. Her name is actually on the paperwork. I learned a lot from studying those papers, but I don't think I ever found what I was looking for. Nowhere in the papers, not even under the magic marker redactions, did it say who I was supposed to be…and that struggle haunted me for the vast majority of my life.

For a long time, I thought I was supposed to be Lester Curley, my adoptive father. He was an imposing and well-respected figure. To me, he was like Malcolm X, the way he spoke, the way he carried himself. Nobody disrespected Lester Curley…ever.

My father was the grandson of a well-known land baron in Grimes County, Texas. In fact, if you visit Stoneham, Texas, well—that's my great-grandfather, John Stoneham, Sr.

Now this is where the story gets a bit interesting, to say the least.

Back in the 1930s, the land baron's son, John Stoneham, Jr., had a long-term fling for a few years with one of the black servants, a young woman named Cynthia Durst. By the time I knew her, the whole family called her Mama Cynt. This is Lester Curley's mother, my grandmother.

Mama Cynt was black as the ace of spades, a jet-black woman, and John Junior was a redneck white boy. She already had one child, a black boy about five years old who I later knew as my uncle Robert. Mama Cynt was working as a field hand, doing hard labor, while she and the young Stoneham heir were carrying on, and that's how her second child—my father—Lester Curley came into the world.

Incredulously, even after Lester was born, the Stoneham family reluctantly kept Mama Cynt in their employ. But two and a half years later, when John Junior became a daddy again, this time to my Aunt Birdie-Jean, the family decided this was just too much. The Stoneham family with all its influence, power, and respect could not stomach the idea of having not one but two black children associated with their namesake. Consequently, Stoneham Senior packed Mama Cynt off with a few dollars, a one-way bus ticket to Baytown, Texas, and a stern demand (a loosely veiled threat actually) to never return to Stoneham, Texas. Herein begins the legend of Cynthia Mama Cynt Durst.

To this day, Mama Cynt Durst is still remembered as a folk hero and carries legendary status in Baytown, Texas. She came to Baytown with three kids and nothing else, but she never took welfare, and she raised those kids to be hard workers and neither of them did drugs or ever got into any trouble…as you will soon understand why.

My grandmother has a story that is so outrageous and amazing and funny and scary that it could be a whole other book…probably will be. She sold bootleg whiskey and alcohol after midnight as a little hustle to put food on the table, and she took care of those children with an iron fist. If you've seen the Tyler Perry Medea movies, that is the PG version of my grandmother. The only difference is Medea shot her gun in the air; my grandmother shot people in the chest. Literally. She wasn't a murderer, but she was so loyal and loved her family so much that if anybody threatened her family, they were absolutely risking their lives. If you wanted to see the true legend of Cynthia Durst come to life, then mess with her family.

As much as Mama Cynt loved her family, she did not love her family name. She chose not to pass the Durst name to her children. My uncle Robert has the last name Daniels, and I don't know where that came from. But by the time Lester was born, she decided to give him, and subsequently Birdie-Jean, the last name Curley after a friend of hers. Her name remained Durst, but she wanted it to end with her.

The Durst family—back in those days—could be extremely vicious. There's just a streak in that bloodline, and back in the thirties, they were known for being straight up hard-core gangsters and murderers. They had this Billy the Kid persona where it was just known the Dursts would kill you. If you look at them wrong or step in their way, they will stab, shoot, or beat you in the blink of an eye. I remember hearing that fighting breeders will sometimes feed gunpowder to pit bulls to make them more aggressive and explosively reactive in a fight. I don't know if this is true, or if it actually works that way, but I've often thought about that when considering the Dursts of the early and mid-1900s. It's like someone, somewhere along the line, fed them gunpowder, and that was carried on for generations. By the time I knew Mama Cynt, she was already a sweet old lady, but I heard the stories. And I could see it in my aunt and some of my cousins…and yes even in my father. I wasn't very old the first time I thought to be grateful that, even though I was Lester Curley's son, I didn't have any of that gunpowder blood in my own veins. Now to be clear, my contemporary Durst cousins are all amazing, good, God-fearing people. Many of them are preachers and seem to have atoned for the sins of their forefathers. The Durst name is now associated with Godly love and respect…today.

But for all that I just said, Mama Cynt was a good woman. When she moved to Baytown, she knew nobody, or only a few people, but she was such a proud woman that she just did not believe in taking handouts; she believed in making it happen and providing for yourself. You just had to do it. She was not willing to accept government aid or ask people for help; she just wasn't wired that way. She taught my father to be this way as well, and he passed it on to me.

When she moved to Baytown, mind you, she had a third-grade education. My grandmother was barely able to read up until the day she died. I've heard her try to read. She could read a little bit, but not well at all, and I think she learned to read better as she got older; it's pretty safe to say that she wasn't able to read at all during those days. From what I understand, she worked in a little café, and she waited tables during the day; and at night, she sold bootleg liquor to take care of her children.

Have you ever heard the term I love you to death? Well, my grandmother lived that cliché out in a very literal sense. She loved you so much that if you fuck up, she may have to kill you. She once shot her nephew in the chest with a .22 because he talked back to her after she questioned him about putting his hands on her daughter, Birdie-Jean. She didn't kill him but shot him point-blank (while holding her eighteen-month-old granddaughter in her other arm, by the way) for disrespecting her and hitting her daughter. Although his wound eventually healed, that act created a wedge amongst the Durst family that never completely mended.

Another one of her infamous displays of family loyalty occurred when one of her nieces got hit by a man at a local juke joint in the neighborhood. Mama Cynt—in her forties by now—struck out to the juke joint to confront the fellow with her niece timidly following behind…surely knowing what was about to happen.

Upon having the man pointed out by her niece, Mama Cynt approached the man and said in her soft voice, Are you the man that put hands on my niece in here a little while ago? The man only got so far as to say Bitch… And before he could utter the next word, Mama Cynt pulled out a knife and commenced slicing him up like a fish on the filet board. As she proceeded to carve the poor guy to shreds, the woman who was with him tried to jump in to help him, which was a very bad decision. Upon her interference, my grandmother turned her attention to the woman and proceeded to gift her with the same degree of Mama Cynt Justice that she delivered to the poor fella who is now lying on the floor of the juke joint struggling to hold on to his life.

My dad told me this story a hundred times. He was on leave from the military, and he went to the hospital and asked, Where are the people Cynt Durst cut up? They showed him the rooms, and Dad said Mama Cynt had sliced them both up everywhere except the bottoms of their feet.

This reminded my father that years before, while he was still a young teenager, Mama Cynt killed his stepfather. One of her husbands. His stepfather came home late one night, drunk and loud. He'd been cheating on her, and in a moment of poor, fatal judgment, when confronted by Mama Cynt about the tryst, he responded belligerently and indignantly. What was he thinking? Had he forgotten who he was married to? Mama Cynt pulled out a knife and, in one smooth motion, fatally stabbed him in the neck. He ran off and made it to a neighbor's doorstep before he breathed his last breath.

They did arrest her for that, and she spent a night in jail; but back then, it was just another dead nigger. They held a kangaroo court, and Mama Cynt had some low country lawyer who made my dad chew on some kind of leaf to bring them luck. My dad would say, Man, I was in court twelve years old chewing on that damn leaf.

Apparently, it helped because she was never convicted and only spent the one night in jail. And to the day that she died, she never acknowledged that she had actually killed him. What she said is I didn't kill him. I was gone take him to the hospilla…he just took off running! He killed hisself! He wouldn't have died if he didn't take off running. I was gone take him to the hospilla!

I think it really hurt her, actually considering that my grandmother only knew one way to love…hard. She couldn't wrap her mind around the fact that she had killed her husband whom she truly loved. So she created an alternate reality in her mind: she didn't kill him, he killed himself.

*****

As years passed, the killing of Mama Cynt's husband settled into the distance as a disturbing memory that was rarely mentioned. Into his mid to late teens, my father began to develop into a movie-star-looking young man. He was very light-skinned with soft, curly, jet-black hair. He looked like a combination of Elvis and Muhammed Ali. He was a pretty man. Actually, too pretty for being raised in an all-black ghetto neighborhood with gangsters and hustlers on every corner.

When my father was in high school, the girls obviously loved him. My dad mingled with white women when a nigger got hung for messing with white women, and I say it like that because that's how it was. My dad had beautiful young women who loved Lester Curley, but the guys were very jealous of him.

Uncle Robert and Aunt Birdie-Jean told me this story on several occasions over the years: he was at school and these guys, black dudes, one of them jumped on him and had him pinned down and was gonna start beating on him, but another guy ran up and said, Man, you better get up offa that dude. That's Cynt Durst's son! He was like Oh, shit!

As the story goes, not only did the dude help my father up, but he straightened him up and said, Man, I'm sorry, didn't know that was your mama. It'll never happen again. Please don't tell your mama!

That's Mama Cynt. Had anybody messed with her boy, it would have been a wrap…and they all knew it.

My grandmother did not believe in drugs at all, zero, that was a cardinal rule; she didn't believe in stealing, she didn't believe in taking handouts, and you're gonna make your own way. That's how she raised them. So despite the fact that my father and his sister and brother were raised as deep in the ghetto as you could be, they never did drugs. They never went to jail; they were hard workers. My uncle was self-made. My father probably never missed a day of work. I don't ever remember my father missing a day of work, period. He may have, but I do not remember that. That's how she raised them. I've also never seen my father ask anyone to borrow anything. If he needed it, he would either go buy it or he would do without it. He would not ask anybody for help with anything. His work ethic was over the top, unmatched, and that spilled over to me. That's how I was raised.

As a kid, I never missed a day of school because they wouldn't allow me to. I missed my first day of school my senior year in high school only because I got kicked out for three days for fighting. And I didn't even start the fight! Had I not gotten suspended that one time, I would have gone all the way from kindergarten through graduation without missing a day because they would not allow me to miss. In fact, I remember being sick in first grade and my mother, Annie, took my temperature. It was 101 degrees, and by today's standards, I probably would have been required to stay at home. But nope! I had to get my little sick ass out of bed and go to school. My parents were all about work ethic and taking care of business.

This is a good point in the story to introduce my mother, Annie May Curley, who was also mixed. She was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, and was raised in New Glasgow. She met Lester when he was in Montreal while in the military and after a two-year courtship, they married in October of 1958.

My mother is the third oldest of nine children. Her mother was a white woman who, again, had very little education and was married to a half-black, half–Native American man who was like one of those winos that you see on TV. Throughout my mother's childhood, he literally was known for pissing himself in the streets and often my grandmother, with my mother in tow, had to go find him lying out in the street drunk somewhere. That was my mother's father. My mother's name was Florence, and we called her Granny Jewel. Granny Jewel was solely responsible for eleven people: her nine children, her good-for-nothing wino husband, and herself.

As we'll discuss later, my mother and I had a terrible relationship. That dynamic developed as a direct result of the way she was raised. She was verbally and emotionally abusive, and as a child, I hated her. I literally felt like I hated her. I remember at one time I prayed out loud for God to kill her. Not to jump too far ahead, but when I was twelve years old, I prayed intently out loud for God to kill my mother because she was so outrageously harsh with me and verbally abusive. Much later in life, I came to understand that she was only able to give me what she was given. She had very little to work with. I forgave her because she was never nurtured herself, so she didn't know how to nurture. You can't be nurtured by a mother who has to take care of nine children when she was only a child herself. My mother was trying to help her mother, Granny Jewel, raise all those kids. She was never coddled or anything. It was like, Hell, you need to help me put food on this table, little seven-year-old girl! Her way of showing love was to make sure that you had food on the table and clothes on your back. There was no time nor space for any of that coddling lovey-dovey bullshit!

By the time my parents adopted me, they'd been married for eleven years and living back in Baytown in a little neighborhood called Central Heights. Mama Cynt still lived there in Baytown, just a couple miles away. Although her heyday was over, her legend lived on.

Coming down from Canada to Baytown, Texas, was probably a big culture shock to my mother, and that may have contributed to all the difficulty, but she never talked about that. I just think about it now when I consider her life in retrospect.

They had a nice little wooden house in which I was raised. Because of their upbringings, they were both neat freaks; everything my parents possessed was immaculate. The house had three bedrooms, one bath, kitchen, living room. Probably 1,200 square feet. It was modest but immaculately kept. It was a gem amongst all the other houses in the middle of the hood.

West Gulf Street was all black, so when I came along, I was out there in the streets with my little friends, all black, and you know there's a slang that's used in the hood, little black kids, you know, we talked kind of ghetto. That's just how it is, so that's all I heard.

There are no words that can describe how appreciative I am of my mother today for what she did for me back then though I didn't appreciate it at the time. I'm in the hood, around all this slang ghetto talk, and my mother absolutely would not have it. I was constantly teased for being the only little black kid out there who spoke like a white boy.

There was a day I was out playing ball in the street, like kickball and stickball with my friends from across the street, Claudie and Nicky Caldwell. Without me knowing that my mother was in earshot, she heard me ask one of the other kids, Where your mama is? Oh my god! You would have thought I had burned down the goddamn neighborhood with the way she reacted when she heard me say that!

She came marching out there and said, Boy, I told you, you will not talk like that! Talking like a little dumbass nigger!

I was known for my long curly hair, but it worked against me that day because she grabbed a big ol' handful of it and nearly broke my damn neck. She hauled me in the house all the while admonishing me, I told you, you ain't running around here talking like no dumbass little nigger! Get your ass in that house!

I know better now, but back then, the kids would say, Oh, listen to this boy, he think he white. He talkin' like a white boy. Of course,