Narrator (22:24)
Thank you. So like most young men, I adored my father. I think he was a hero. He was absolutely fantastic. I remember him waking me up early so that we could play. There was this old video game system made by Magnavox called Odyssey. He would wake me up so that we could play this pixelated golf game that he really enjoyed. I remember him also waking me up so that we could watch Lone Ranger cartoons on Saturday morning. I remember his diesel powered car like he allowed me to unplug it from the wall because that's what you needed to do to let this car run. I remember when he got an injury on his elbow, an unexplained injury. I remember walking in on him in a garage, in our garage. Really dark denky garage. Suddenly the bright light of that day cutting right through that and seeing him at a table with a scale in front of him and all sorts of little bags and boxes all around him. I remember him chasing my mother's car as she drove away right before they got a divorce. When I was about 8, my parents separated and they divorced like most kids in that situation, you spend the week with your mother, you spend the weekends with your dad. And I used to love those weekends. He had a collection of GI Joe toys that, that was superior to my mother's collection of GI Joe toys, which made going to his house that much more enjoyable. So my brother and I would go every weekend. What I noticed is that also during this time, the old diesel car was replaced by a really nice gold Lincoln Continental. Much nicer, right? Just a smoother ride. Then one day, one weekend, my father didn't pick us up. He just didn't show up. And my mother said, well, he's away, but he'll be back. I'm like, okay, all right, so I'll wait a few days. The next weekend he didn't show up again. The weekend after that. Then a few weekends passed by and it was excuse after excuse after excuse. He's away, he's visiting your family, he's in Texas, he's visiting friends. All of these different things were being said every single week. Eventually my uncle pulls me aside, my mother's brother, and he says, I think you should know. And this is. Imagine a nine year old me, not that much shorter than what I am now, but imagine a nine year old me. And he said, I think you should know that your father is in prison. He was going to be away for a very long time. And I had all sorts of questions, trying to figure out, what does a long time mean? What happened? Why is he away? Nobody really knew any of these details. Eventually, I started to sink into my mom's new life. You start calling your stepfather dad. You start calling your new step grandparents Grandpa and grandma. You start to make a new life for yourself, right? Then sometime when I was about 12 years old, something happened. It might have been the smell of my favorite Mexican food, or it might have been because I was watching a White Sox game. But something happened that triggered the memory of my father. And I said, you know what? I need to find out where he is. I need to know what is going on. The only thing I could find out from anybody is that he was at a penitentiary in Minnesota. So I start calling state penitentiaries in Minnesota. Now, you couldn't Google this back then, so you just have to pull out all sorts of phone books and have 411 operators forward you to other 411 operators. But eventually you get some phone numbers of different state penitentiaries in Minnesota. I start asking them, do you have a prisoner called William Lewera? William Lewera? Eventually they're like, ah, yes, there was a William Lewera here, But he's been transferred over to the Illinois State Penitentiary in Chicago. Now, I was in Chicago. That's where I grew up. So now my father was a couple of miles away from where I was. So now, and I knew the exact penitentiary. I had a phone number that they gave me, and I called, hi, I'm looking for William Lewera. Hold, please. They come back to me. They're like, all right, could you tell us a little bit more about him at that age? I didn't really have that many details. I provided what I can, but I guess it was just they had to fact check my story. And then they were going to call me back. They call me back and they're like, okay, we found your father. Could you give us a phone number where he can call. Call you at? So I passed that phone number on. A few days later, the phone rings. I pick it up, and sure enough, it's that familiar voice. Now, I don't think anyone here has ever talked to my father, but my father, his English is pretty good. I mean, it's great. He was born in the States, but it's still. It has a touch, a flare of a Mexican accent across it. He was born on a border town in Texas. So it's got this touch of a Mexican accent that I remember picking up on immediately, right? You know, and he's just like, mijo, son, right? And I'm like, oh, my God. Oh, my God, it's my dad. And we just start catching up on everything that the last three that we've lost the last few years. I start telling them about what I'm, you know, the high schools I'm thinking about going to and, you know, what's going on in my life. I catch them up. My brother, he starts telling me about everything that's going on in his life. He's telling me that he is now the head chef of the prison kitchen. This was a big deal for him. He told me that people loved his cooking. He told me about bookshelves and bookends and things that he was creating in his carpentry class. He was telling me about wallets that he was making in his leather class or something, right? And he's like, I'm gonna make a bunch of wallets and I'm gonna give them to you when I get out of here. I'm like, yeah, that's great, dad. That's great. Then we. We started to write each other. So now I had letters from him. We Were finally reengaged. He then tells me a few months later, he's like, they're letting me out early on good behavior. I'll be getting out in about another year. So by the time I was 14, my father, who I'd not seen for a few years, Was reintroduced into my life. This was no longer the same man that I saw before. This man was much skinnier. He had less hair, and he was afraid. He was afraid of everything. He was afraid of crossing the street at the wrong time. He was afraid of making eye contact with anyone. He was afraid in stores of saying the wrong thing. I also remember that his sunglasses were smaller. He used to have big sunglasses. Now he had more modest ones. My dad had been taken down a few notches. No more nice suits or snakeskin boots. It was now polo shirts and khakis. The one thing about my dad, though, is that he was determined. Now, I should share here that my father went away to prison because he was a major drug dealer in Chicago. Okay, if that wasn't clear, the injury on his elbow was actually a gunshot that he received. The new car was probably bought with drug money. He was caught with about $100,000 worth of cocaine in his trunk. So at this point, I'm starting to learn all of these details, and he's trying to now make a new life for himself again. My father, being the determined man that he is, he buys a car. And then I noticed that about a week later, he has a new car. And then about a week after that, he has another new car and another one in a garage. So what I was noticing is that what my father was doing was just flipping cars. Right? He was your standard flipping car thing, Right, Is what my dad. He would buy old car, remodel it, and sell it. And he was slowly rebuilding himself. He was slowly rebuilding his life. Suddenly, the khakis and polo shirts went away. He started to get nicer clothing. He started to get nicer sunglasses. Now, the jewelry that he lost when he went away to prison, now suddenly, again, with the gold chains and the watches and all of that. I remember one day he picked me up, and he's like, hey, I've got something to show you. Come with me. We get into a car, a different car. It was like a different car every week. And we drive up western avenue in Chicago up to about 60th, 70th street, where there's a lot of other used car lots. And he's like, I know. I have something to show you. And we pull into a lot where there's about a dozen cars and there's all these streamers and a big Mexican and American flag. Two flags right, one right next to each other. And on it there's a little trailer that says Rainbow Auto Sales. And my dad is like, this is mine, this is mine. And he's showing me that he has made it. He has rebuilt himself. A couple of years out of prison. He has now been able to continue his American dream. And he was so proud of showing me all of his used cars that he had. I was so, so happy for him. And I was so happy that my father was back in my life. And finally there was some semblance of balance. Over the next year, as I was prepping to graduate from high school, things continued to change. When I met with my father, it would be over dinners at restaurants where I would not see him. We would go in, he would go into a back room with a couple of other guys. He'd be gone. I'd eat by myself. He'd come back and then we'd leave. Mexican restaurants, Korean restaurants, Chinese restaurants, Indian restaurants, all types of different restaurants. Clothes started to get nicer. The nice boots started to come back. The big belt buckles, the big sunglasses, the huge cell phones, beepers, all that, it all started to come back. And I knew what was happening. As soon as he bought his first nice big house, I knew what the path was that we were going down. Here's a man that I love and love to this day. This guy is incredible. But he was doing this again. When I started to apply for school, I wanted to get away from all of this. I wanted to get away from home. I needed to get away from the tension of a drug dealing dad. So I applied to schools far away from Chicago. The school that gave me the best deal was Boston College. And I said, okay, I'm going to Boston, I'm getting out of here. So I go and communication between my dad and I just is now more over telephone. I eventually drive from Chicago to Boston with as many belongings as I could bring with me, trying to get myself away from Chicago. The summer after my sophomore year, I go back home and my father and I go see the movie True Lies. I'm sure folks remember this movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Arnold. It was a Bill Paxton, right? And I'll never forget this one scene. My father frickin loved it and lost his shit in this one scene where Bill Paxton and is being held over the dam when he's pretending to be Carlos the Jackal, right? And then he pees himself. And I'll never forget the way my dad was laughing. I mean, he thought this was the funniest thing in the world. And he's like hitting me. He's doing one of these things. He's like. He's like, look, he's pissing himself, right? And he's like, laughing, doubled over. He just. Absolutely. And I remember just looking at him and loving it. I mean, that moment, I could still feel him hitting me on my shoulder and me just enjoying the laughter that is so unique to my dad. And I just felt great that night. After we have some dinner, we go back to his place and I just say, all right, dad, that was a lot of fun. I'm going back to school in a couple of weeks, so let's just hang out a few more times before I leave. We say goodbye the next day. I don't hear from him. I don't see him. He's gone. You see, leading up to this night. And in fact, the summer leading up to this day was a very difficult summer. When I had come back from B.C. to visit him, the man had become a lot more agitated, a lot more paranoid. He was constantly looking over his shoulder. He would sit at restaurants whenever he did see with me and making sure he was at a place where he could see the exit. He would always be screening phone calls, never take anything. Whenever he drove me home, it would never be the straight way. It would be a bunch of side roads and alleyways. We would stop extra long at red lights. We would take expressways that would go up north and then back down south just to get me home. At the same time, my aunt who lived with him would be crying tears, telling me, they're outside, they're looking at us, they are looking at us. And sure enough, there'd be cars outside of his apartment, lights down. You could see two figures that were just staring at us at all times during that summer as well. I remember going over about $10,000 worth of 50s and hundreds, making sure that they weren't counterfeit. I remember taking boxes to friends restaurants. My father was kind of innocently pulling me into this. Never knew what I was doing. But again, it's her dad. It's like, what do you do? Your dad is asking you to do something and you do it. He was gone. I didn't know where he was. And I played it all off as if it was normal because all my family members knew nothing. All of his brothers and sisters had also been gone. No one knew anything. No one could tell Me, anything. I went back to B.C. playing off as if I would talk to my dad every weekend and whatnot. The next year, after the final exam of my junior year, as I'm walking up the stairs with my girlfriend, we're about to have an end of school year night out, I hear footsteps behind me coming up the same stairs of my apartment building. And I thought it was unusual because they were so close to me, but I thought it was maybe somebody from another apartment. As soon as we get into my apartment, I hear a knock. They have a picture. Do you know who this man is? No. Do you know who this is? Look at it closely. No. They're like, this is your father, and we want you to tell us where he is, because we know you know where he is. We're U.S. marshals, and we're going to find your father. They immediately separate my girlfriend and I and they question me for a couple of hours. The first thing they make you sign, whether or not this is legit or not, is a piece of paper that says that if you're lying, you're going to pay a $10,000 fine and go to prison for five years. That's a lot of pressure when you're under questioning. They don't give you a place to sit, and you just sort of standing there fielding all of these questions. He wanted to know where my father was. I told him everything I knew, which was nothing. This continued for a few days. I would go back into the U.S. marshal's office in Post Office Square. In fact, whenever I walk through there now, it makes me nervous. And I told them everything. I shared phone records with them. I gave them everything they wanted, and they saw that I had nothing to hide. A few days later, I would find out that my mother back in Chicago, who was divorced from my father for years, got the same visit. I found out that relatives all over the country were getting the same visit. I would later find out that my father was caught with about $250,000 of cocaine and other drugs in his trunk. So he was going to go to prison for a long time. And they were fining him because he was a connection to some higher network. My dad was high up in the Chicago drug cartel, and this was important. They needed to find him. After A while, the U.S. marshal stopped visiting. After a while, the call stopped. I remember that night that they came was the first time I peed my bed since I was about 12 years old. But we would not hear from them anymore. I would often question, you know, what am I becoming what part of my dad am I going to take on? What mistakes am I going to make? My time with my dad was brief and spotted, right? Never continuous. But what I said at the top about loving your dad, I absolutely still, to this day love my father. He was not a perfect man. He made a lot of mistakes and he probably hurt a lot of people. But the lessons I took from my time with him. I love my kids and I will do anything for my kids. He taught me how to be a gentleman with women. And now I have a beautiful wife. He taught me that friends always come first. Regardless of what you're doing, you gotta take care of your friends. He taught me to be a White Sox fan, thank God, not a Cubs fan. And he taught me how to. How to appreciate moments, however briefly. A few months after the visit from the US Marshals, I got a call. I didn't have any. I didn't have a cell phone. I just had a landline. I pick it up and I hear a lot of background noise, cars, ambiance of like a city. Spanish. Now this next part I'm always reluctant to share because I'm not exactly sure of the legal implications. Not for any of you, but more for me. But the voice on the other end was recognizable. I knew the voice. And the voice just said, hey, I just want you to know that your dad is okay. Where is he? Just want you to know that your dad is fine and he's okay. Will I see him again? Your dad is very proud of you. And he wants you to know that he's happy. Then the ambiance stopped. The phone clicked. And I have never gotten another phone call since. But I am at least at peace. And I know that that story has ended and that chapter in my life and his life is now closed. And what I feel is a happy, unsure but still happy ending. Thank you.
