Odom Lamar - Darkness to light: a memoir

DARKNESS TO LIGHT

This book is based on notes and recollections of Lamar Odom. Some names and locations have been changed or omitted to protect the privacy of individuals. In passages containing dialogue, quotation marks are used when the author was reasonably sure that the speakers words were close to verbatim and/or that the intended meaning of the speaker was accurately reflected.

Copyright 2019 by Nunnbetter Productions.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

BenBella Books, Inc.

10440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 800

Dallas, TX 75231

www.benbellabooks.com

Send feedback to

First E-Book Edition: May 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2019002815

ISBN 9781948836081

ISBN 9781948836203 (ebook)

Editing by Joe Rhatigan

Copyediting by Scott Calamar

Proofreading by Laura Cherkas and Lisa Story

Text design and composition by Aaron Edmiston

Cover design by Sarah Avinger

Cover image by Scott Hebert

Printed by Lake Book Manufacturing

Distributed to the trade by Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram brand www.tworiversdistribution.com

Special discounts for bulk sales (minimum of 25 copies) are available.

Please contact .

To Cathy, Mildred, Liza, Destiny, and Lamar Jr.

L.O.

To my parents, Ransford and Sally

C.P.

CONTENTS

T his is where I was born.

This is where she died.

I can close my eyes and still see it.

Its cold outside. There are no leaves on the trees.

The concrete is cracked and broken.

Cathy has to take the bus.

She doesnt know where Joe is.

The bedroom is empty.

I am alone.

I am Lamar Joseph Odom.

And I am alive.

I was born in the autumn of her twenty-third year. She had always wanted a child. A boy who would grow to be handsome and tall. When she got pregnant, she was living with her mother in an upstairs bedroom and working for the New York City Department of Transportation in Queens.

Joseph Odom was a charismatic Vietnam War vet who worked as a janitor in the Woodside Houses projects in Queens. My mother was visiting a friend there when Joe first noticed her and won her over with his good looks and an easy brand of charm. She liked his smile; he liked her round, pretty eyes. He was twenty-three. She was twenty-one and just finding her way in the world.

Shortly after their first encounter, Cathy Mercer, tall, lithe, and beautiful, was walking by Woodside when Joe saw her again. He was cutting the grass, and his boots were stained green. He shut off the mower and met her at the sidewalk.

Whats up, Slim? he said. Thats what he would call her. A cute nickname to break the ice and set him apart from the other guys.

Nothing, just trying to get home, Cathy replied. But I dont have a token. She needed to jump on the 7 train. Joe had but one subway token in his pocket. He needed it to get home.

Take mine, he said. He reached in his pocket and placed the token in her palm. Cathy smiled and gave him her number.

You gonna call me, right? she asked.

I got the number memorized.

My father walked the seventy-two blocks home. He repeated her phone number the whole way. That token, something so small yet quintessentially New York, is the beginning of my story.

Joe grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, long before the hipsters invaded.

We was on the block, my dad told me, years later. We had to do for ourselves. It wasnt pretty like it is now. We had drugs and temptation. We were young and innocent. Our lives were at stake.

My dad first tasted marijuana at fourteen. From there he dove headfirst into hard drugs. He hustled on the block. He dealt to pimps, gangsters, and bangers. Hed get a fix from a neighborhood dealer with the promise of more to come if he could sell on the street.

He often found himself holed up in an abandoned building getting high. His parents were furious when he dropped out of high school his sophomore year. When Joe finally told his father, he ordered Joe into the family car, a 1968 Cadillac Eldorado. They drove for two hours, talking about repercussions and dreams and where Joes life was headed.

Back in the driveway, my grandfather put the car in park. They sat in silence for ten minutes. He looked at Joe and saw himself in the youngest of his five children. This boy, who was bright and tall and strong, began to cry.

Im a drug addict, Joe said.

I know, son, said his father.

The next day my dad enlisted in the army. There was a recruitment office near their apartment. Two weeks later he was shipped to Fort Dix in New Jersey to begin his military training. Shortly after, he was deployed to Saigon. He reached the rank of E-4 Specialist and trained with M16s.

The experiences in a foreign land traumatized him.

He returned to Brooklyn a broken man. He was introduced to heroin in Vietnam. Many soldiers used it to deal with the stress of taking human life. It was how they coped. They were made to kill people they didnt know. They pulled the triggers and stood there as the bodies dropped. It destroyed my father psychologically. Any empathy he had evaporated.

Joe moved back into his parents apartment. He was twenty-two and paranoid, depressed, anxious, and without direction. He looked over his shoulder on the rare occasions he left the apartment. And he only left in search of a fix. Within the year, Joe contacted a Veterans Affairs administrator who had one arm and an addiction of his own. He helped my father get back on his feet. Thats how Joe got the job at the Woodside Houses.

Cathy and Joe didnt know each other very well, and in many ways, they never would. But Joe said they would give birth to a prince.

The things a man will tell a woman.

So, love blossomed in the ghetto. Concrete gave way to something softer. Joe loved her. Cathy would tell her friends about this guy from Woodside. She wanted a husband and a son and a home. They had started something that could not be undone. Their lives would take disparate paths, but ones that would forever be bound by me... the only thing they truly had in common.

I weighed seven pounds, fourteen ounces when I came into the world. Man, he is long, said Joe at St. Johns Hospital just past noon on the first Tuesday of November. And he looks just like me. We done good, babe.

I would be at once precious and tormented. Cherished and forgotten.