Ten Twenty Ten. Stephen Polando
were asking, “What are you going to do now?” People were hugging me and saying shit about everything being okay, but I didn’t care. I vividly remember Luis hugging me and crying that day. I got to a point where I just wanted to find my mom. I was so sad. I finally remember finding her at a neighbor’s house. She was already on the phone with the insurance company. I remember hugging her tightly. That was the first piece of normal I felt that day. That was what had survived the fire.
Love.
I have digested this day for 15 years now. Here is what you need to know about a house fire:
Nothing that burns up or gets destroyed matters. It is all just shit. It is truly irrelevant. What you really lose, or what I feel like I lost, is the setting of so many memories. The setting of my childhood. It is wiped off of the earth, never to be replicated or returned.
That fucked me up for a really long time. I moved out of the house to my first apartment only a month prior to this day. I was undoubtedly the luckiest of the three of us. I had my bed that night. Most of my stuff was out of the house. The stuff like my clothes, my TV, my Xbox, the stupid things you think are important as a 20-year-old. However, it was actually none of my important stuff. Not the things that mean so much that they belong in the family home.
There was a video of me playing as child, afraid of birds while on the neighbor’s lawn in my diaper. That single video is the only thing I truly want back. It was a precious memory. I wanted my wife and kids to see it one day. All of my mom’s photos, and there were tons of them, were recovered and only slightly damaged. That is what I am most thankful for.
The most important thing I can share is this: What makes a home special is the unconditional love that lives inside of it. The place doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have the love to give it such importance. That’s why the memories are cherished. Because they are full of love and laughter and happiness. The very best part about this otherwise catastrophic family experience is that love cannot be burned down. Its transferable from one location to the next. So very little of actual importance was destroyed the day our home burned down. It certainly doesn’t feel that way in the moment. It takes years of reflection to gain this perspective.
The first question to this story is always the same: “How did it happen?” In what can only be described as a truly fluke accident, my mother was smoking a cigarette on the back patio. To put my mother’s smoking in perspective, it was about a pack per week, from age 43 to 46. She smoked an ultra-light cigarette. So, on the spectrum of smokers, she was in the “I hardly ever smoke but sometimes I want a weak cigarette” category. Anyhow, she ashed the cigarette out, and talked on the phone for 10 more minutes. Then she dumped the ashtray into a trash can. She went inside for another 10 minutes and then left the house. She received a phone call about the smoke about 30 minutes later. The coals smoldered in the bottom of the trash can for well over a half an hour before catching everything else.
My mom took it pretty hard. For many years, she claimed to have burned the house down. But let me tell you something about Jean Polando. She is an absolute saint. People often say that about their mothers, but Jean is friends with nearly everyone she has ever known.
When our parents got divorced, I was a freshman in high school. I would argue that my dad had a midlife crisis. He definitely did not bear the burden of responsibility after the divorce. Jean, however, busted her ass and had her best years as a Realtor to provide for us. She gave us a very good life when I was in high school. I was not oblivious to the fact that once my dad left, it seemed like we suddenly had more money than ever before.
If Jean wanted to burn the house down, well, it was hers to do so.
Obviously she was mortified that this happened. Nicholas and I never once felt any type of resentment toward her. You could never in a million years convince me it was her fault. Frankly, I got very upset when she continued to blame herself. The house was meant to go – to keep her from smoking and to teach us the most important lesson about the irrelevance of material objects. You can’t really pay for that kind of education.
It was a big price to pay for a lesson that has made us better people and brought us a lot closer together. Maybe not right away, but over time it has been a source of love and comfort just to be able to talk about it together.
The night my house burned down was the first time I ever got drunk to cope with sadness. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.
The Tempe apartment complex I lived in was filled with drug users. Weed, meth, cocaine, and alcohol were everywhere. I was dating a girl named Tiffany, and it was hands down the worst relationship I have ever been in. Fully toxic, and so I managed to drag that out for a little over four years.
Tiffany liked to drink nightly. When we met, I was really an only-on-weekends kind of drinker. However, by the time we started living together in this apartment, I had fully committed to this new lifestyle. I was smoking weed as well. That allowed me to not go to bed sober, but not always be hung over from drinking. I liked to drink, but I also know that at this time I was not really wanting to drink every night.
My first apartment was on the second floor of a two-story complex. A couple of doors down lived a black guy with glasses named Manny. We quickly connected, as he was a huge sports fan. He is actually a cousin of boxer Floyd Mayweather. They were also from Michigan. So to put it in perspective, I met a guy who smoked weed and played Madden every day, that loved sports as much as me, and was also from Michigan, and he lived two doors away. Clearly, we were going to spend a lot of time together.
He also had all kinds of wisdom and we shared a lot of our perspectives on life with one another. Manny and I are still friends. We recently reconnected after about 10 years of not being in touch, and we picked up right where we left off. Aside from Manny, we also had some friends move into the place right next door to us after a couple months. So it was like our own version of the show “Friends” on the top floor of this apartment building … if the friends on “Friends” had gotten drunk most nights and used recreational drugs pretty often.
I never used anything more than marijuana and alcohol. The only other thing I remember being prevalent was Xanax. I’m sure cocaine was used occasionally. I just never had interest in coke. I saw the movie “Blow” when I was 18 and immediately became obsessed with the topic of cocaine. I realized that, based on my addictive personality, it was best if I never tried it. I never did any hard drugs; in my head I was too smart to go down that road.
Many of the books I had read to this point involved a lot of hard drug use. The book to “Blow,” obviously. “The Dirt,” a four-way autobiography of Motley Crue, and several books about the very obvious murder of Kurt Cobain. In hindsight, drugs were all I read about. But I had a good head on my shoulders. I had no desire to be a drug addict. Although most people are curious, and I was for sure, I just didn’t think the pros could outweigh the cons.
I had worked at Albertsons in Chandler from age 16 to 22. I started bagging groceries, became a cashier, and later bounced around the service deli and produce departments, before ending up on the night shift stocking. Right around the time I got to the night shift, the store announced it would be closing. Which was great, because I needed to get the fuck out of that job. I hated it, and although I was a really dependable and reliable employee for a long time, I was no longer motivated there. I had been passed up for some promotions that I felt I deserved. So what I did was, I started stealing a bunch of shit pretty regularly. Mostly booze when I wasn’t of age to buy it. I never would have been the kind of person to steal from a friend or any average person. I definitely wouldn’t have ever considered shoplifting from another store.
It’s just that when you work somewhere, and you know how to cheat the system, there is no real chance of getting caught. There is very little to risk and seemingly a whole lot to gain.
After Albertsons, I moved to delivering pizza for Papa John’s. I delivered in the smallest delivery area of any Arizona store. It was on the campus of Arizona State University and the surrounding area. I worked this job from age 21 to 24, and to be blunt, it’s a fucking great job for a college-aged kid. A sense of urgency goes a long way when you deliver pizza. If you get pizza to its destination quickly, you will probably