Clay Tumey - The Blue Chip Store: How Bank Robbery Changed My Life

The Blue Chip Store

Copyright 2015 by Clay Tumey

Published by Lucid Books in Houston, TX.
www.LucidBooks.net

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copy-right law.

ISBN 10: 1632960591
ISBN 13: 978-1-63296-059-7
eISBN 10: 1632960605
eISBN 13: 978-1-63296-060-3

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To my mother, Sherrie. You are love personified.
To anyone named Olesek, especially Rick and Susan.

*

To the incarcerated fathers, mothers, sons,
and daughters who are looking for a way out.

You have a voice in your destiny.
You have a say in your life.

You have a choice in the path you take.

Max Lucado

To the editor, Laurie Waller. Your insight has been a blessing to me. Thank you for helping me transform a mere collection of stories into the message I most wanted to communicate.

Additionally, there were those who supported this endeavor in some exceptional way that warrants special recognition. Larry Smith. Russ Hudson. Lance, Diane, Ben, and Zach White. Claus Roager Olsen and Enneagramstedet Denmark. Marion Gilbert. Deborah Ooten. Gayle Scott. Susan & Rick Olesek. David & Sherrie Lee. Eric Schwandt. Maggie Simpson-Crabaugh. Maryanne Colter. Alexander Berezkin. Henriette Kildegaard Svenssen. Kim Bornstedt Vring.

To Joycelyn Jones, for never leaving me alone about finishing this book and for shamelessly promoting it anywhere and everywhere. To Roger Sanchez, for having an impact in my life on the inside and again on the outside. To Dave Ramsey, for exposing me to a whole new world of support and encouragement.

First of all, I am thankful for Candice. In addition to being a complete godsend to our children, shes also the reason I was able to spend so much time at my desk writing this.

The book transitioned from a mere idea to a completed project thanks to the support of the following: Adam & Kim Stipanovich, Audrey Fernndez, Bill Skaer & TJ Grifin, Brian Fong, Christi Wright Elkins, Dorothy Hatic, Hilary Langford, Jenny Campbell, Jeremy Gregg, Jillian Gilliam, Josh Kieschnick, Katherine Chernick Fauvre, Kathi Overheul, Kaye Bernard, Kristy Nissly, Kyle & Tara Copeland, Laura Valtonen, Laurens van Ovost, Lisa Phelan, Marcus Hill, Matthew Oastler, Michael Price, Michael Whitfield, Orlando & Gina De Dominicis, Patrick & Sara Henagar, Paulo & Alaina Franco, Sara Stockwell, Sarah-Anne Falcon, Sherry Pfaffenberg, Steve McGraw, TJ Dawe, Trina Anderson, and Zack Hill.

For the majority of my time writing this book, I listened to a repeating loop of a 28-song playlist consisting of music by The Illustrated Band, Victor Wooten, SRV, Yiruma, Mogwai, Richard Elliot & Rick Braun, Eric Johnson, and a 41-second version of Fr Elise by Trans-Siberian Orchestra. During the editing process (which lasted two months, by the way), the repeating loop was reduced to two Grammatrain covers (Wake Up and God).

When Jett came to visit me, he was too young to know where I was. During the first four years of his life, I was incarcerated all but a few months. He loved Cool Ranch Doritos, but as a small toddler learning to talk, Cool Ranch Doritos can be a mouthful. Instead, he opted for the simpler term blue chips since they were chips that came in a blue bag.

For Jett, Im sure part of the joy in visiting me was that he got to go to the vending machine and get those same blue chips over and over. Eventually, he determined that I actually lived at the blue chip store because that was the only place he ever saw me.

During the first few years following my release from prison, Jett never asked many questions about my time away. But at the age of seven, while munching on chips and salsa at a favorite restaurant of ours, Jett suddenly recalled the days when he came to see me at the blue chip store, and he asked me if I still worked there. I told him no and waited for his follow-up question.

Staring into the bowl of chips in front of him, he searched for the right words to ask what he really wanted to know. It was like watching a child prepare to ask if Santa Claus were real. I didnt want to rush the conversation, and I wasnt sure I even wanted him to ask, so I just waited silently.

After a few seconds, he finally looked up with a mixture of confusion and curiosity and asked me, Daddy, what was that place really called?

Relatively speaking, I was not locked up for an unbearable amount of timeMay 21, 2007 to August 31, 2010. In prison, some would call that short-timing. For me, though, those days were more than just squares on a calendar. For starters, I was not at the hospital to welcome my niece into the world. And I was not at the funeral home to say goodbye to my uncle who passed away just a few weeks before I got out.

I was not there when my son took his first steps. I had no part in teaching him how to talk. I still dont know what his first word was, but I know for certain it wasnt Daddy .

For that span of nearly 1200 days, I was not a part of my own family. Sure, they tried to include meand that helpedbut nothing can take the place of actually being there, and nothing will ever undo the pain of being absent for so many good memories that my family made without me.

As an inmate, you no longer get to choose when you wake up, eat, or go to sleep. You no longer get to choose what kind of clothes you wear or how often you go outside. The guards will open the rec yard when theyre ready, not when youre ready. If you dont like it, so what? Nobody cares.

Under normal circumstances, freedom and prison are polar opposites. Basically, if you have one, you dont have the other. Simple enough, right?

B orn on the Fourth of July, my birthday has never been my own. Perhaps being born in another nation would have allowed me to have that special day all to myself, but I had no such luck in The United States of America. In my country, I was born on the very day we celebrate our independence.

True freedom, however, was a concept that would take decades for me to understand.

Some of the tales told in my family are taller than Big Tex himself, so when I was born two weeks past my due date, I was basically a small toddler already, and I may or may not have taken my first steps right there in the nursery at Baylor Medical Center of Dallas. Rumor has it I even offered a polite nice to meet you to my fellow newborns before subsequently rolling my condescending eyes when I realized that the other babies could not yet speak.

Less than a day old, I was already a grumpy old man.

One of my grandfathers convinced me at an early age that the fireworks on Independence Day were specifically for me. He reinforced his outrageous claim by nicknaming me Firecracker. Yes, it seemed farfetched to me, but my skepticism was not fully developed at an early enough age to address Grandaddys declaration. Or maybe it was just fun pretending that an entire nation celebrated my existence.