[My father and I had never managed to figure out our relationship. When I was 10, my mother ran away with me to rural Virginia, where I learned he’d been a bank robber. Obsessed with crime, I went back to him five years later, to Vancouver where he ran the seafood business he’d started after prison. He worked hard while courting ruin with reckless spending, reminding me of how, in a story he told, he pulled a near-perfect burglary but later got arrested for a bar fight. The only crime he had left was buying illegal salmon from Native Americans, which he had me do in the dead of night. When I thought I was a badass, he gave me a baseball bat and sent me to collect money, just to prove I couldn’t. I ran away to Virginia, went back to him nine months later, fled again, and finally returned to live with him after graduation.
But in the weeks before the Christmas dinner, he was different. If he drank, he talked of death. He made me promise to bury him in the mountains overlooking the ocean. He told me to lead a better life than he had. I suspected that the dinner was an attempt to keep me from traveling, but maybe he really wanted to offer me a better life.]
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/my_father_the_bank_robber/
http://www.lyricstime.com/the-clash-bank-robber-lyrics.html
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