I turn 30 years old today, with some amazement at my dumb luck in making it this far. There were times in my life when many of you who are closest to me (admit it!) did not believe I would live to see the 21st century. But here I am, on the cusp of my fourth decade, stronger than ever, and I want to thank all of you who stood by me through all the shit, through the drinking and hard drugs, the brigandage and warlording, the legal troubles, the bankruptcy, the Comeback Tour — everything — to see me through (even
carry me through, at times) to the other side.
There comes a time in a man's life when he finally understands that he has to take control of his future. That time came for me three years ago, while I sat in a South African prison awaiting extradition to France for trial on gun-running charges.
What is this? I asked myself.
What am I doing? I'm killing myself, and I'm tearing the guts out of the people who love me. At some point during that long week in Solitary, I vowed that I would stand up on my own two feet and turn my life around.
And my old nemesis, Inspector Desailly, who for so many years played Javert to my Valjean — oh, the dances of intrigue he and I danced, the cat-and-mouse games we played in the early 90s! — he must have seen something different in my eyes on that sunny afternoon in October 2000, as he watched the authorities lead me down to the tarmac at Charles DeGaulle airport. He put his job on the line for me, recommended leniency to the prosecutor-judge, and I was able to plead down to money laundering.
There would follow eight months of soul-searching in Luynes, then a year of study and deeper introspection in Tibet after my parole restrictions expired.
I write to you today a changed man, thirty years
wise, from my desk beside the window of my bucolic Appalachian homestead, the cheese farm that I've chosen to be the succor of my middle age. As I type these words, I watch little Bartolocito (my love-child with Phillippine president Gloria Arroyo) milk the sheep after school, and I want only the simple things from life. More than anything, I want to be deserving of the love of those closest to me — my beautiful wife, who gave this broken-down and rebuilt man a second chance at happiness, and who opened up her heart and home to a small boy from a distant land, because it meant so much to me to be his father. And my son, God love him, so innocent,
so real. I can only hope that the next thirty years of my life will pass like today, in peace and quiet, without the turmoil, anxiety, addictions, and compulsions that battered me through the 1980s and 90s.
But once I hit 60, look out, world, because it's back to hellraisin' for your devoted correspondent,
Phutatorius.
