The First Annual Story Awards – La Familia

My Mom The Cokehead
When I was eight years old my mom started getting into coke big time. She went from a little-town shitty job to a big-city executive job for a huge company and I guess it was too much for her. In less than two years, she got divorced from my father and started fucking around like there was no tomorrow. She met this guy from Norway and they got married. Both were doing tons of coke every day. My mom got fired from her job because she stole a lot of money. The Norwegian never had a job to begin with, so we ran out of money and they started selling everything: First the jewelry, then fancy clothes and furniture. Eventually, they basically sold everything we had, so we were living with two sets of clothes each and a bed. We ate nothing but potatoes for months.

Then the electricity was cut so we were living in this flat that looked to me like a medieval castle (at least that’s what I thought in order to maintain some semblance of sanity). One day I came back from school and I realized something was different. The house was full of candles and smelled really weird. My mom and her husband took me into the master room and told me how they’d figured out what was happening in our lives. Cocained out of their fucking minds, they explained that they were Jesus Christ and St. Michael reincarnated and everything was a test from God to see if we were able to understand the sublime life that was waiting for us after this hard period. They then told me to keep it a secret because the CIA was on our backs. According to Jesus, aka my mother’s husband, there was this big plot wherein the US sent the CIA to kill Jesus (him) because he knew about all sorts of national secrets and conspiracies. Apparently, they had installed cameras and microphones all around the house and secret agents were following us all the time. Their solution was that we had to stay confined in that room waiting for the miracle to happen—basically until some magic stuff came to rescue us.

All presenter photos by Patrick O’Dell. Styling by Sara McCormack. Isabel: Saks Fifth Avenue dress, Toujour Toi earrings, vintage pin. I decided straight away that I was moving to my father’s, but they wouldn’t let me out of the room. After some verbal violence, Jesus and my mother realized that I had been working for the CIA since the beginning, so they kind of let me leave on the condition that I would never see them again. I still keep it this way and, besides the occasional panic attack, I’m doing pretty well.

TELIS LANKERG


Glasgow Brothers
About 40 years ago I went out drinking in Glasgow with some friends. When I got home my older brother Allan was there smoking and watching TV. He was 22 and I was, I guess, 21 at the time and, though he was a year older than me, he was much smaller. I was always fighting his battles for him.

For whatever reason I started niggling Allan and calling him a poof and doing whatever I could to get a rise out of him. The more I annoyed him the angrier he got until finally he threatened to hit me. I laughed and said, “On you go. Take a swing.” He stood back and swung as hard as he could and bashed me right in the face. I was quite drunk so it really didn’t hurt. After I got up, I laughed again and told him, “That was pathetic.” Then I taunted him some more and added, “Come on, you can do better than that.” He did. This time he ran at me and used the entire force of his albeit slight build to knock me over. I got up rolling my eyes in disgust. I was getting a little bit sore at this point, but not enough apparently, and so I told Allan I hadn’t even noticed his last attack. He punched me again, this time right on the tip of my nose. I don’t remember it breaking or much else from that night, but my sisters told me it went on for at least twenty minutes.

The next morning I woke up with my face stuck to the pillow. He had pulverized me—at my insistence really. My entire face was a bloody mess of pulp and hardened scabs. I had two black eyes that were almost completely swollen shut. My ears were encrusted with blood and my mouth didn’t even look like a mouth. It was more of a swollen hole. Evidently Allan was not the wimp I thought he was.

That afternoon I had a date with a girl I’d been seeing (who is now the mother of my two grown boys) and I had no idea how I was going to conceal the damage. I tried sunglasses and a hat, but it didn’t do much. She was mortified when she saw me and wanted to end the relationship right then until I explained that a gang had attacked me. It worked.

Later I told Allan I was going to murder him in retaliation. I didn’t actually intend to do anything, I just wanted to worry him. It was a cruel sort of mental torture but I felt he had taken advantage of me. I was an asshole. I guess I still am.

JIMMY ROAN


Corpse Prank
My great grandmother on my mom’s side grew up in the late 19th century in Columbia, Missouri, where the University of Missouri is. When she was around 16 or 17, there was a slightly older guy named Robert she was courting or whatever they called it who had come into town alone a few years earlier and become the apprentice of the local undertaker.

It’d been legal for anatomy schools to perform dissections on human bodies since the 1850s, but corpses had to come from people who specifically willed themselves to science or who were indigents with no next of kin. While this might have satisfied demand at, say, NYU, keep in mind that Missouri in the 1890s was still basically the frontier, which meant there wasn’t exactly a steady glut of tramp stiffs for med students to practice on. So, every so often right before a burial, Robert’s boss would get a coded note from one of the professors at the medical school expressing his “sincerest sympathy” for the bereaved, hint hint hint.

After the funeral, they’d lower the coffin and start filling in the grave like normal, but as soon as night fell they’d clear out what they’d put back in, pop the corpse out of its box, slide it into a long burlap sack, then deposit it right outside the cemetery fence at the top of a hill right above the road to the college. Then one of the school custodians, an old black guy called Ol’ Tom or something similarly patronising, would ride up in a cart, drop a little bag with the payment by the fence, then haul the body down the hill and back to the school.

One night after setting up a body and heading home (and probably drinking a shitload), Robert decided to be hilarious. He snuck over to my great grandma’s, woke her up, then brought her and another buddy of his over to the drop spot under promise of the funniest prank they’d ever see. His buddy helped him get the corpse out of the bag and hid it away behind some shrubs or whatever, then helped him get all sacked up and laid out proper.

When Tom came up to get the body, Robert held his breath and stayed as still as possible until he’d picked him up and started walking back to the cart. At that point he started thrashing around and saying something corny like, “Put me down easy, Tom,” or “Don’t go rattlin’ my bones” (accounts vary).

Scared absolutely shitless, Tom flung Robert—in sack—down the hill, breaking both his legs. Robert died a week later from the injuries, and Tom somehow got pinned for the entire operation and sent to jail. Oh, those gay 90s.

TED BURTON


Great-Uncle Lutrow
My great-grandfather was named John Wilson. After fighting in the Spanish-American War with a hundred other John Wilsons, he decided none of his kids should be forced to bear the indignity of such a common name, so when they were born he assigned each one the last name of his favorite war buddies. As a result, I have great-uncles with first names Gernt, Merchasen (or Mert), Ellison, Lyman Dollar, and Lutrow.

Lutrow was the oldest and fought everybody all the time, which his father shrugged off as the inevitable result of his being a redhead. At the beginning of the 30s, the family decided to move from Tennessee to West Palm Beach, Florida (which at that point was just as backwoods as anywhere in Appalachia, if not more so), so they sent 19-year-old Lutrow and 18-year-old Mert down to scope it out.

On their way back, the two got stopped by the cops in Macon, Georgia, for speeding. The officer who pulled them over made some remark about hillbillies, Lutrow decked him, and he and Mert were hauled off to the local jail.

Once they got them both in the holding cell, the officer Lutrow had punched went into the hallway and came back with the emergency fire hose. He said, “You mountain folk want to be fit for this here city, we’re a need to clean you up,” and let loose with the spray à la Planet of the Apes, blasting them against the back wall. While Mert was just yelling and getting pummeled, Lutrow flattened himself on the ground then crawled under the spray to where he could grab the bars on the door. He pulled himself up right in front of the cop, grabbed the nozzle through the bars and wrestled it out of his hands, then turned the stream on each of the officers.

While both of them ran back into the hallway to cut the water, Lutrow used the hose to soak every inch of the station within his range: All the furniture, the desks and paperwork, the shotguns, etc. So instead of just messing with them for a night and letting them head home, the cops decided to hold onto Mert and Lutrow for a solid 30 days, during which they got no phone calls. By the time they got out, my great-grandmother had already started making preliminary funeral arrangements with the local preacher.

Once they moved to West Palm Beach, my great-grandfather started up a garage at which my great-uncles all worked when they weren’t in school. In typical Southern-sheriff fashion, the town sheriff kept this really nasty hound-mutt mix which he basically let run wild through the poorer and less white neighborhoods. One day my great-aunt Thelma was on her way home from high school and got chased down and bit by the dog on her ankle. It wasn’t a really bad bite or anything, but Lutrow threw his revolver in the garage’s truck and peeled out to hunt the dog down. When he finally found it, it was with the sheriff right outside the station, so Lutrow just rolled down the window and shouted, “If that thing touches my sister one more time, I’m going to put five slugs in it and save the last one for your sorry ass.” To which the sheriff replied, “Get on out of here, boy,” and did one of those really hearty fat-guy laughs.

A few weeks later Thelma got run down and bit again. My great-grandma bandaged her up, then had her put on a really long skirt so that Lutrow wouldn’t notice it. Later that night though he found out, got really pissed for a couple minutes, then suddenly calmed down and was like, “Well, what can you do?” which put the rest of the fam at ease, but also kind of weirded them out. The next morning he got up before everyone else, took his dad’s car to the garage, grabbed his gun, and drove down to the police station. He slid in the door with the gun behind his back and said, “Morning, Sheriff,” then walked right up beside his desk where the dog was sleeping, put his gun against the top of its head, and blew out its brains.

The whole thing had happened so quickly the sheriff was still just sitting at his desk dumbfounded. Lutrow turned his gun to the guy’s face and pulled back the hammer, then said, “Well, looks like I’ve got four more rounds than I planned on. How about I hold onto them and we call this a done deal?” He let him walk out of there.

Later in the morning, the sheriff pulled up to the garage with a posse of ten or so guys. He explained to my great-grandfather what Lutrow had done and how they’d have to take him in, to which my great-grandfather just nodded his head and said, “Well, what do you expect from a redhead?”

THOMAS MORTON


I Bit Off My Bro’s Finger
What happened in a nutshell is that it was New Year’s Eve, we were hanging at the house, had a few people over, everybody’s drinking, there were some extracurricular activities going on, and basically everybody was doing their own thing. Around two o’clock that night, me and my girlfriend went upstairs and went to bed. Kevin, my twin brother, him and a group of people stayed up and they continued partying. There was a lot of drugs and a lot of alcohol, and so I woke up about six o’clock in the morning to get some water and I noticed he wasn’t there, the truck wasn’t there, and everybody was gone. That was a work truck. We were air-conditioning contractors, and so all our tools, everything we needed to do the job, was on that truck. I just thought maybe he went out partying further or whatever. I went back to bed. Then I get a call from the Houston Police Department, this was about 7 AM, asking if I owned the truck. They said that they had found it, and that it looked like it had been stripped. I said, “Yeah that’s our truck,” so he said to come and get it. We went down to grab the truck, and it was stripped—the toolbox was gone, everything was gone. Just stripped. So we get the truck from the impound, get it back to the house, and just as we’re getting home Kevin shows up. Some black dude dropped him off. I’m sure he was amazed to even see the truck in the driveway. So I confronted him when he got in the house. Basically, he had loaned the truck out for drugs. Went on a stem bender and loaned the truck out. So me and him got into an argument, he pushed me, and we just started fighting. He wound up on top of me and he was trying to rip my eye out. He had his fingers in my mouth and in my eye, and I couldn’t get him off of me. So I fucking bit down on his finger, and I wasn’t trying to sever it, but the adrenaline was pumping and I bit his finger off. So anyway, after that everybody is freaking out: My girlfriend’s freaking out, he’s freaking out, I’m freaking out—and he goes and calls the cops. The cops come and they arrest me for aggravated assault with bodily injury, which carries about 2 to 20 years, depending. I get to sit in the Harris County jail for 27 days. My brother lied to the cops and told them that I attacked him and all this stuff, and really blew it out of proportion, so they ended up arresting me. Well, long story short, he had to go in front of a grand jury and testify that he attacked me and all the charges got dropped and everything was over at that point. They couldn’t save his finger. They’d had it in a bag of ice, but I guess it was too long before they got him to the hospital. Anyway, I ain’t proud of doing it, it was just that there was a bunch of shit that added up and I just exploded. We both did, he just ended up on the losing end of the stick.

JOE FARE


My Mom Stole My Identity
My mom and dad had two main topics in every one of their millions of fights: She didn’t fuck him enough and she spent way too much. But, really, it was mostly about the money. He would cut up her credit cards, so she started memorizing the numbers. He would force her to get a job, and she would use her employee discount to raise bills above her meager paycheck.

Finally, my dad saw the nearest escape hatch and grabbed the golden parachute for most middle-aged, low-income men of minimal will to live: He died of a massive coronary.

My brother and I signed over our inheritance to our mom’s care. Joint custody. She took our money on trips to the salon—she couldn’t hold my father’s memory with unkempt fingernails. She took our money to Florida where she bought a house with a pool so that my dad’s memory could finally retire and go swimming. She also took our money to meet its new stepdad Alan. And Alan, like any insecure stepfather would, tried his hardest to impress this money. He took it to the car dealership and the motorcycle dealership and to concerts. He quit his job so he could wine and dine my mom with our inheritance full-time. Soon enough, the money was all gone.

The thing is, I couldn’t have cared less about that money. It was, in my mind, blood money, earned at the grave of my father. And, although I am certain my mom and Alan had no right to it, I am equally certain neither did my brother or I. However, I do believe we should have had claim to our identities.

After Mom pissed away $100,000 of each of her sons’ inheritances, she began flirting with our credit limit. She took out one card in my name and then one in my brother’s. She took out more. She missed a payment and then she missed several. She of course knew our names and birthdays and social security numbers. She forged addresses and signatures and put our finances in such disarray that when we finally uncovered the fraud, we were both paying nearly 50-percent interest charges on purchases made more than five years prior.

I only learned of this rape and pillage when I got a court summons hand-delivered to me. It said, in no uncertain terms, “Either pay $20,000 in debt or be jailed.” A call to a credit agency later, I’d gained a rapid education in finance and betrayal. I confronted Mom and she cried and cried. She divorced Alan and told us it was all his fault. She blamed us for enabling and blamed my dad for dying. The one person she never got around to blaming, and still hasn’t to this day, was herself.

But, the irony of life’s stories demands that each climax be followed by an anticlimax. So I live with her as my mother to this day. I didn’t cut off ties with her. I do have an incredible desire to fuck her over for all that she has done to me, however. Hopefully some day I’ll get my chance.

ANTAGIO NIST


That is some very exciting stuff. The winner is… Thomas Morton for Lutrow!

WINNER: GREAT-UNCLE LUTROW

Thomas Morton: “Oh, man. Wow. Just wow. You know I’ve always been glad to have sprung from such a rich and storied bloodline, but never did I imagine it would bring me to this. I’d like to thank Vice for taking a chance on what must have seemed like a rickety old go-nowhere tale of hose-theft, dog-murder, and redemption; my uncles for drilling it into me at countless dinners; and of course Lutrow, for being the violent upstart his hair color made him. We made it baby!”

ISABEL

I’m from Ecuador.

How hard was it to get to New York?

I came to Miami first, 14 years ago. I had a friend who lived there, but she wouldn’t let me stay with her because her husband didn’t want me around. So I traveled to New York, where I didn’t really know anybody and had nowhere to go.

How’d you find work?

I tracked down a friend who lived here and she found me a job in two days, cleaning for a family in Queens. They gave me $120 a week.

Was that the worst job experience you’ve had?

No, I had a job in Connecticut where I had to take care of a girl with mental problems on top of cleaning for the family and everything. They paid me $60 a week. They put a small bed in the girl’s room for me to sleep in, and when I told them I was leaving to come back to New York, they told me that the rent for the room was $100 a week and I actually owed them $40 for each week I worked. So they didn’t pay me.

That’s terrible. How’d you get out of it?

One of my daughters back in Ecuador called a friend and she helped me find a job at a factory in Manhattan. But then it shut down after three weeks and none of us got paid.

Jesus Christ. Have you had any good jobs?

I was a dog walker for a family in Manhattan. It wasn’t that hard and I got $12 an hour. They had two cocker spaniels named Spicy and Lucky. I’d walk them three times a day, then clean and feed them.

How do you like America?

I don’t like living here that much. Life in Ecuador’s a lot different, and all my friends are there. It’s very harsh here, and hard to make honest friends. Americans think immigrants are like machines or something—that we never get tired. And they only value us because they believe we’ll do the most difficult jobs no matter what.

What do you think of Americans as compared to Ecuadorians?

They’re more practical, but less humanitarian. They don’t waste their time as much as we like to. We’re a lot more sentimental.