Cold-Blooded Kindness: Neuroquirks of a Codependent Killer, or Just Give Me a Shot at Loving You, Dear, and Other Reflections on Helping That Hurts by Barbara Oakley

Author:Barbara Oakley [Oakley, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781616144203
Google: lC8nc-xBvVAC
Published: 2011-04-01T00:41:42.371891+00:00

Part of Marty Sessions's charm—the charm that wooed the many women he happily flirted with in his jail correspondence—was that he was a born storyteller. He liked to tell people, for example, that he was actually the great-grand-nephew of the Apache war chief Geronimo. But, as was often the case with Marty's stories, truth was stranger than fiction. Marty did have a Native American heritage, but it certainly wasn't Apache.2

Marty's Native American grandmother was around seven years old in 1900—that was about the year she was traded for a mule and two sacks of grain to a Mormon family near Moroni, Utah. The girl came to be called Winona—all she could remember was that before she was traded, she had been walking with her father, mother, and two younger brothers by night for three moons, headed from Idaho toward Mexico. Her tribe's name has been lost in the mists of memory—it was thought to have been either Nez Perce or Blackfoot. Wherever their ultimate destination, trading their little daughter gave Winona's birth family the resources they needed to continue their journey.

Although happy with her new family and Mormon beliefs, Winona tried to keep her heritage alive with occasional furtive smudges and the odd ritual as she grew older. By the time she'd reached her late sixties, when Marty knew her, she was a stern old lady whose demeanor masked a warm and caring heart. Denny, Marty's closest brother, remembers traveling back to Idaho with his grandmother when he was about seven as she fruitlessly searched for her long-lost little brothers—the ones her parents had kept.

Tom, Marty's brilliant, obsessive father, then, was half Native American. In the 1950s, when Marty and Denny were born, a Native American background was nothing to be proud of. This explained why, though Tom's hair was black, he would insist to his sons it was brown. Later, in the 1960s, when an Indian heritage began to become admirable, both Marty and Denny began wearing their own dark hair long, taking pride in their heritage. The two men also had handsome physiques that showcased their inheritance: strong, muscular builds, broad shoulders, wide foreheads, high cheekbones and ready, natural tans.

Marty being Marty, however, a relationship with the illustrious Geronimo wasn't all he made up. To cover for his dozen or so stints in prison, which totaled over two decades altogether, he told people that he had been in the army and had served in Vietnam. In reality, he had joined the army—but he'd served only four months, all stateside. Right after basic training he cut off his right ring finger in a hatchet accident and was consequently given a medical discharge. (The finger was sewn back on, leaving others to wonder about what kind of strange axe cut would take off a ring finger.) But Marty embellished his war stories with a slew of realistic certificates and commendations he hauled out to show people, telling them he thought his military years were the best of his life.

The real

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