Confession—I
have thought of this, and in fact came to the conclusion (helped greatly by a
very adolescent brain) that if I simply stopped calling, my parents would
forget about me.
I tell you
this as evidence that under some emotional pressures, you don’t think very well
or logically. I was maybe 19 or 20 at the time, I was gay, and I believed it
when my eldest brother wrote, “you must never tell our parents this; it would
kill them.” So the answer was to distance myself, geographically and
emotionally. It would make it easier for everyone.
Somehow, my
parents weren’t buying in….
For Myers,
it was different. There was the Evangelical thing, which I didn’t have. There
was getting married, which he had to do to try to convince himself that he was
straight, and that he could pray it away if he were in a “normal” relationship.
So though it was a decade or two after I had faced coming out, Myers was facing
what I had faced, but much more.
His story
is that he had a fugue state—what used to be called temporary amnesia. He
remembers leaving Arizona—his home state—and arriving in San Diego, but he
denies remembering checking into or out of the hotel.
And this
was a different era, Dear Reader. There were no Internet traces, there was no
GPS, no security cameras to speak of. So, the next thing Myers knew, he was in
Cabo San Lucas, where he fell in love with Sean Lung, a Canadian tourist. After
four months, they moved to Palm Springs, later they moved to Canada—where Myers
assumed a false identity and gave himself a fake degree from Princeton.
Well,
things were good, right? Except, of course, for that little eight-year old girl
who was crying and screaming for her daddy, who had been frolicking in luxury
pools and resorts with his boyfriend. Then there’s the wife, who had to put her
family back on its feet. And the aging parents, of course, who were still
wondering where their child was.
At a
certain point, Myers was declared legally dead, but never given a funeral or
memorial service. So the family collected $800,000 from a life insurance
policy—which didn’t give them back a father, but did take a bit of the sting
out of the loss.
So the
family had the money; then they got a shock. Because in 2007, Myers returned,
still with the Canadian guy he had met in Mexico. His mother gave him a big hug
and took him back immediately. The rest of the family?
Well, his
brothers and sisters came around as well. But his wife stated that she thought
the antichrist had returned. And the eight-year old?
Well, she
had turned to alcohol and then poly drug abuse in her early teens. So she had
kicked the pills and the booze, gotten her life together, and started a family.
And no, she hasn’t seen her father and doesn’t want to. Here’s what she told
ABC News.
"I know
how much I love my children," Ruggiano, who was 8 when Myers vanished,
told ABC News.
"And if he loved me even half as much as I loved them, there would be no
situation where he would ever think that it was okay to leave me."
And here’s
more:
"I
know a lot of [gay] people who would never do this and absolutely never blame
it on their homosexuality," youngest daughter Kirsten Myers Ruggiano told
ABC. "I don't believe that he is capable of love ... toward anyone but
himself."
Here’s
what Myers says:
"I'm
sitting there, saying, 'You can do this and still go back. You can still do
this and still be OK. Maybe a week. Maybe two weeks,'" he said.
So the
question becomes—how much of Myers’s story is real? Do you buy in about the
fugue state? And how do you get in and out of three different countries without
legal ID? And is the pressure of living a lie and feeling that you are damned
and possessed by Satan a sufficient excuse for abandoning a wife and five
children? Myers said that he tried not to think of his kids—those 22 years he
was on the lam—because it put him in a bad place. Probably, but not as bad as
the place his kids were in.
Two
thoughts occur to me—the first being that Myers never at any point told himself
that he was going to disappear for 22 years. He believed he could go back
tomorrow, or next week. And those tomorrows became 22 years, the way just one
more drink becomes cirrhosis.
Second?
Could it have happened to me? Had I had the pressures that Myers faced, could I
have ended up in Mexico in the arms of a lover, forgetting my grieving family
back home?
‘They’re
going to be better off without me’—I told myself when I was going through that
patch of drifting away. Did Myers reason the same thing? He wasn’t abandoning
his family—he was in exile, or so he might have reasoned.
And is
still in exile, as far as his kids are concerned. And his wife, as well. Oh,
and the insurance company?
They want
their money back….
