Where is mikel jollett from

Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. Mikel Jollett, left, with his brother Tony and their father. By Bethanne Patrick. Celadon Books. Mikel Jollett, left, with his band the Airborne Toxic Event. Books Music. More From the Los Angeles Times. Books Nikole Hannah-Jones became a political target.

Obituaries Sylvere Lotringer, intellectual who infused U. Books Veterans of fruitless wars: Two Marine Corps memoirists share their gratitude and dismay. I think anyone who claims to be too sure about the facts of their childhood is stretching the truth. Memory creates a fog, time stretches certain moments, compresses others, colors everything.

So when writing about lived events from childhood, there are a few ways to engage this fog of memory.

I admire people who do this. In my book, I say things as a child that are demonstrably wrong. I later found that these are the early narratives common in emotionally abusive homes, and I had internalized them already at a young age. We were abandoned, neglected, abused, left in a cult. Did writing Hollywood Park change any of your perceptions about your family?

Did you come to any insights that surprised you? I came to understand my brother much better. He was always the angry one. I was the good one. Those were our roles. He became an alcoholic at thirteen, a drug addict by 15 and eventually moved on to heroin, crack, you name it. I think I resented all this as a child. But revisiting it with the perspective on NPD and the fact that we were orphans I came to empathize with him. His story as a child is so incredibly sad.

He was made into an orphan at six months old and lived alone as one until he was 7. We saw our kind roommate get beat nearly to death by men with clubs from the cult. We then ran away to Oregon where we lived on government assistance and killed rabbits for food. We never had any therapy. No one ever asked us how we felt about anything. They beat him unconscious, nearly to death. He spent a month in the hospital. He was in a coma. It was really bad. Later on, he moved with his mother and brother to Salem, Oregon.

Jollett would visit his father and stepmother, Bonnie, in LA in the summers. They often went to watch the horses race at Hollywood Park, which inspired the name of his memoir as well as the lyrics in his songs. She was later diagnosed with severe depression, but Jollett says he and his therapist think she also suffers from narcissistic personality disorder.

He says she always insisted that a son's job was to take care of his mother, not the other way around. What was in those barren corners before you arrived? When we took him home, he filled the quiet hallways of our house with his cries.

My eyes lingered on those fingers and counted his toes. It feels magical to me, this gift I never thought I would have: a family. To simply be a husband to a wife, a father to a son. Our wedding day was a beautiful promise, but I think I became a husband not by wearing a tuxedo and reciting those breathless lines but later when I was able, finally, to add new features to the landscape of my mind: a quiet stream of patience and acceptance, a shady grove for tolerating the fear that once prompted me to run, an open valley of forgiveness, loyalty, belief in her and, above all else, a warm field we try to visit every day, joy.

I love my wife with a deep passion, but after a short time I realized that the heart of marriage is an epic friendship. When my son reached six months old, the age at which Synanon children were taken from their parents, the thought occurred to me how monstrous it would be to give him to strangers. How devastatingly hard on him, on us. It seems so much clearer to me as a father than it did as a child. This was abuse. It was wrong. It was violent and destructive.

It left every child this happened to a lifetime of insecurity, a fear of closeness. They left a hole too big to fill.

But it was a cult. Cults make people do bad things. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.