From Gunslinger to Monk

After a short break from the computer, I’m back with another controversial interview. Ken Goldberg has gone through many phases in his life from runaway to lawyer, and yes, Buddhist monk. With all the violence in his life, it’s amazing that he’s still here at age 58. Ken is proof that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself if you really want to.

Jennifer Barry: Thanks for agreeing to the interview. You’ve had an amazing life, starting at a very young age. I know that you spent a lot of time on the streets in Chicago.

Ken Goldberg: I started out in an affluent Jewish family, and I started running away when I was 13 from a physically abusive dad. I tried to poison my father when I was 10. I finally left home on a regular basis at the age of 15. I would come back home when I was too sick to cope with the streets anymore. At 17, I moved out for good.

I hung out mostly in the ghetto in those years because white, middle class families didn’t want a runaway hanging around. But black families said, “Don’t make any trouble or any noise, and you can go to sleep in that room over there.”

I lived in basements, churches, fraternity houses, and with this other black kid who was a runaway from the gangs, and his family. We thrived. He taught me how to burglarize and I taught him how to deal drugs.

I remember I was 17, I had long hair at the time, and I was brought to the Cook County Jail on a drug charge. The cops told me I would be sexually assaulted that night. That was a pretty safe assumption. But my mom bonded me out in time so nothing bad happened.

The same kind of thing happened to me in high school. I went to a pretty rough school, one guy was trying to extort money from me. My friends told me, “When he comes around, you just jump on him.”

I said, “Can’t we come up with a different plan?” He was pretty big, and I was the smallest boy in my school.

All the gang bangers told me, “If we’re there, we’ll help you man, but if the boy comes up on you and you don’t got anybody, that’s what you gotta do.”

So the guy finally corners me in the lunchroom, and 30 black kids who didn’t even know me stood up and told him to f*** off. They all circled him and asked why he was bugging “this little white boy.” So I got bold and told him I wasn’t giving him s***.

The gangs finally told him to leave me alone. They protected me until I was large enough to fight for myself.

That was my life. It was messed up. I was around violence all the time. Then I met a social worker who got me back on the right track. I started trying to act like a normal human being. At 23, I became a social worker myself.

I held it together until age 29 when I became a drug addict.

JB: When you were a social worker, you were working with gangs, right?

KG: Correct. The first few years it was almost exclusively gangs and street kids. Then I went to work in a South Side neighborhood, which was very heavily Irish. I was working with Catholic priests there. At that time there was a serious racial violence problem. My focus became dealing with teenagers trying to kill each other because they were black or white.

It wasn’t so much a gang thing. It was more like white flight. That was the last neighborhood where Chicago police could live before they had to move to the suburbs. Most of them had moved once before away from black neighbors. They had dug in. They were not going to be moved. The parks and schools became a battleground, and the YMCA hired me to try and keep it all civil.

So I did that for a couple years. Then Reagan was elected president and social services were gutted around the country virtually overnight.

Then I went to work for my dad in his lumber business for one year, and I ended up in drug treatment for cocaine.

JB: Was that the first time you went into rehab? You had used drugs before that, right?

KG: Yes, but I had stopped most drugs by age 18. I’d stopped the LSD, stopped the weed. I quit drinking at age 21 because it wasn’t fun to sneak into bars anymore. I was the kind of kid that would buy a quarter bag of cocaine, the dealer would say, “Don’t even tell anyone I’m selling you that small a bag. I don’t need anyone else hassling me for that.”

I would have some a couple of days later when the dope man would call me and ask if he could borrow some.

While I was still in social services, I broke up with a woman I was really in love with. I’d heard that time heals all wounds, and since living was so painful, I figured I would stay stoned until the pain had passed. No one told me this was b.s. Then I started using cocaine, and that didn’t work, so I ended up in treatment.

When I cleaned up, I went to college. I was a high school dropout. I eventually got my GED, but I was a social worker without any college. I went to a special program called University Without Walls. I got a degree without going to classes.

I was working on my social work degree, I was also working at a hospital in a detox unit, when my family offered to pay for a law degree. I took them up on it, even though I had rejected them in large measure up until then.

Part 2 of this interview is now posted here!

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