Excerpt From
Son of a Preacher Man:

My father's going to prison would mark the start of my own journey in the wilderness. Here I was, this 13-year-old skateboarding kid who had spent his whole life growing up at PTL. Suddenly, at the exact time that the country entered the recession, we’d lost everything. My dad was in prison. We were moving all over the place. I didn't understand what was happening. And I reacted badly.

I had experimented with alcohol and pot for the first time some months back. Despite my youth, those would quickly become the rule, rather than the exception.

Carl Jung is supposed to have said that alcoholism is a low-level search for God. Well, I was sure looking for Himæin all the wrong places and all the wrong ways.

The heavy partying that would characterize the next seven years started the night my dad was sentenced. I was hanging out in front of my house with a friend, Steve, chewing Ban Smoke gum in an effort to quit smoking. (Having found out about the cigarettes we used to sneak together, our parents had forbidden us to continue smoking.)

Across the street, a party was in progress. A group of guys smoking cigars and drinking beers walked up to us.

"Lord, what do these guys want?" I thought.

"Hey, we're having a party. You guys want to come?" asked a tall, stocky 16-year-old jock named Brett Wilkes, who lived in the house across the street.

Then his friend, a preppy all-American type with brown hair and an easy smile, introduced himself.

"My name is Bo. I don't know if you know me, but my mom owns the house you are renting."

His mother had mentioned Bo Foutch to me, and my mother had told me that I should hang out with him.

"But what if this guy's a dork?" I had challenged.

Actually, Bo had said the same thing to his mother. Who would have guessed that he would become my best friend, protect me through high school and wind up a groomsman at my wedding?

At the party, there were girls everywhere. Our new friends mixed us a drink and gave us smokes. So much for our resolve on that front! The whole scene struck me as the epitome of popularity and coolness.

"Wow, this is the kind of life I want," I thought. "I want to hang out with these people.”

"Hey man, we've got to do this again," I told Bo later that night.

"Yeah, sure, give me a call," he said.

For the next two weeks, I called Bo and left messages on his machine.

"Hey Bo, this is Jamie. What's up man? You want to hang out," I'd ask.

He didn't return the calls. He saw me for what I was: a little dork skater kid.

At his mother’s prompting, Bo finally called during the middle of the week and asked if I wanted to go to the movies. I couldn't believe he was allowed to go out on a school night.

"Hold on a second," I said, running across the house to my mom to ask if I could go.

Even though my academic problems had me on the verge of dropping out in favor of home school, my mom quickly agreed. I couldn't believe it. In hindsight, I figure that my mom had called his mom to say that I was depressed and needed a friend.

While Bo was on his way over, I remembered his preppy, cool look. By contrast, I dressed like a skateboarder, in raggedy old pants, with whatever shirt was laying around and a ball cap. For years, I hadn’t cared about what I had on. All of a sudden, however, I desperately wanted to be accepted by Bo and the cool crowd he hung out with.

So I took the only tailored shirt I could find in my closet, buttoned it up and tried to look as cool as can be.

"What's up, Prep?" Bo asked when he came to the door.

Embarrassed at being caught trying to fit in, I blamed the change of clothes on school pictures.

After the movie, we went for pizza. Despite the age differenceæhe was entering the 11th grade and I was still in 7thæwe hit it off. It was as if God had given me favor with this guy, because I wouldn’t have made it though my teenage years without him.

For the first time in my life, I felt accepted immediately.

“I don’t care that you’re 13,” Bo told me. “And I don’t care about who your parents are. Actually, it’s kind of cool.”

As we drove back home, I decided to go for broke.

“My name’s Jamie, but I’ve always wanted go by Jay,” I announced. (My dad's secretary, Shirley Fulbright, had a son named Jay who was about six years older than I, and one of the coolest guys ever.)

"Let's start now," Bo said. "We'll call you Jay."

Changing my name was just part of finding the new identity I coveted.

“What about my clothes?” I asked.

“We’ll go to the Gap,” he replied.

At this time that was the place for any preppy kid to go. The next day, armed with a couple hundred bucks from my mom, I bought a bunch of plaid shirts, along with khaki pants and some white ones trimmed with pink and blue. Southern preppy at its worst!

A lot of the kids who ran with Bo were leery of me because I was so young, but they accepted me because of him. It also probably seemed like a novelty to have Jim Bakker’s kid hanging out with them.

Suddenly I had a whole new persona. I was done with the old Jamie Charles and PTL. I had lost everything else. The church had turned its back, but these guys were willing to embrace me.

Popularity and attention from cool new friends not only made me feel better, it seemed like the answer to my problems. I thought I just had to change who I was to earn their love.

It would take me ten years of floundering to figure out that I had to come to terms with my past before I could become the man I wanted to be. It would also take me that long to figure out that in looking for myself, I was really looking for God.

At the time, however, I was so desperate to be accepted by Bo's older crowd, that I would have done anything. Soon I was partying every weekend to fit in. "I'm going to drink just as much as they do, and go as far as they go," I decided.

The third party I went to, these guys were bonging beers one at a time. They filled a 16-ounce plastic cup for me.

"Why don't you pour another?" I suggested, figuring that if I hit two to their one, I’d really prove myself.

I threw up quite a few times that night.

“You’re real cool now, Jay,” one of the guys said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “Look at you, you’re all throwing up. How cool is drinking now?”

His words only made me mad. I knew that drinking was the way to be accepted in this new life I had created for myself and to cope. But instead of heeding his warning, I drank and partied more.

Partying didn't heal the pain. I solved that another way. With my dad in prison, I didn't know how to feel. So I just tried to cut off feeling altogether. That may explain why at one of the worst periods in my life, I felt as if I were finally getting things together. Being liked and accepted was like a drug, a natural high. I wasn’t the chubby little Bakker kid everybody made fun of any longer. I was this cool kid. Of course, despite being confronted with tabloid headlines every time I went to the market, I was still in such denial about my dad’s being in prison that I hadn’t even been to visit him.

My dad had felt blessed all his life. I knew he had to be suffering. I just didn’t know how much. All that God had provided was goneæthe houses, the cars, the staff, the stuff, the money, the friends and the platform.

“Was God gone too?” Dad wondered.

Eventually, being stripped of all the trappings would lead him away from the prosperity message he had once preached to a deeper truth. But at this stage, it just filled him with despair.

“There’s no sign of You,” Dad cried out to God from his cell. “If You’re there, shake the leaf of this artificial plant. Do something to let me know You care.”

And now I was gone too. But I simply couldn’t face confronting this new reality firsthand.

"Do you want to see Dad?" my mother would ask each time she went. Each time I refused.

"Well, eventually, you're going to have to go see him," she countered. When I finally did go near the end of 1989, the long-postponed visit confirmed the suspicion I’d tried so hard to escapeæthat life really was still hell.

Mom and I had waited in line outside in the freezing temperatures before being admitted to a locker room, where we had to take off our jackets, and put our shoes through an X-ray machine. After walking through a metal detector, we filled out all this paperwork, which we would have to fill out each and every visit, and had our hands stamped. Then we passed through these huge brown steel barred electronic sliding doors that crashed behind us as they closed. Caged in a small, over-packed walkway, we stuck our hands under a neon light to show the stamp. Then we just sat there with the tons of other visitors, until it was time for the group of five to ten people we’d been lumped with to be called.

I cried the first time I saw him in his prison khakis. He looked like himself, but faded, his complexion and his hair both lighter than I remembered. Even his expression and his manner seemed worn and washed out. And though he looked happy to see me, I couldn’t help feeling that he was putting on a positive face for my sake.

It was scary. The prison guards showed no respect for the families, even though none of us had committed any crime. With our loved ones imprisoned, we were going through our own hard time. The guards just made that worse.

Our first Christmas was a real bottom moment. It was freezing cold and snowing, and the waiting line that snaked around the front of the brick prison was extra long because of the holiday. From where Mom, Tammy Sue and I stood, you could see the two fences topped and separated with coils of razor wire. As usual, few words were spoken, though our shared crisis created a kind of silent, automatic bond between us.

As a concession to Christmas and the crowds of visitors, we all met in the prison cafeteria that day, though it took another couple of hours before we were allowed in. Once inside the orange, yellow and brown walled cafeteria, we found Dad and lined up for food. Presents were handed out to the kids. I thought they were from the prison itself, but it turned out they came courtesy of one of the prisoners’ groups.

We had barely started our dinner when they announced that time was up and we had to leave. As my mom and sister hugged my dad goodbye, I just sat there, paralyzed with fear, confusion and sheer terror. How could this have happened to my family? How could this be Christmas? Finally, I slammed my fist down into the cafeteria table. Despite its being bolted to the floor, all the trays jumped.

“Jim, hug your son,” Mom said.

As he put his arms around me, the tears streaked down my face. It seemed as if the little boy inside me was slowly being killed, a little more every day.

I watched my dad file out with the guards, then threw away the present I’d been given.

“I don’t want anything from this place!” I screamed.

On the way out, I guess I didn’t quite get my hand under the neon light that sat in the steel cage we had to pass through.

“Put your hand back underneath there,” a guard yelled.

“I did,” I snapped, shoving it back under angrily, looking as if I were ready to bite his head off.

“You have to sign out,” another guard commanded when we got to the main room, even though only kids 16 or older got to sign themselves in or out, or even visit unaccompanied.

“I’m only 14,” I replied, with a fresh round of tears. “I can’t even sign out. Leave me alone,”

A couple of days later, I found out that the guards took issue with my behavior.

“If your son ever raises his voice or acts up again, you will never see him the remainder of your prison term,” they told my Dad.

The only way I could deal with Dad’s being in prison and my life being turned upside down was to escape reality whenever possible. So I indulged in whatever I could to do that, especially upon my return from those visits to Rochester. One night I drank a whole bottle of Vodka mixed with Gatorade. Eventually, I blacked out after going into some guy’s lawn and cursing at the top of my lungs at a kid who had made a crack about my parents.

The next day, Bo came by.

“All the guys, we’ve talked,” he said. “They wanted me to come by and tell you we’re not going to buy you alcohol anymore. You need to calm down.”

That lasted maybe a couple weeks. Before I knew it, we were back in the saddle again, partying.

Having been placed in a class for kids with learning disabilities, I once again felt like an outcast. I could barely stand to be at school. When I was there, the reality of my dad’s being in prison, and how my parents' life had changed, seemed to haunt me. Like any kid who doesn't like going to class, school just seemed to amplify my problems.

So I skipped class at lot. Aware that I was suffering, my mom took me to one counselor after another. She couldn’t afford the expense, but I needed to go. I wanted to go. The sessions didn’t help. Things got so bad that my mom, who hated conflict and did what she could to avoid it, actually confronted me about ditching.

"What's wrong with you?" she demanded one day while we were in the car. "Why won't you go to school?"

How could I tell her that I was simply in too much pain?