Killing time in Commercial Art, with Don Terrell

The Texas artist and podcast host has the origin story of what makes Donny run

My Houston homey Don Terrell, 58, is a helluva graphic artist. As you’ll read in this Q&A, he thinks I’m a bit of a nutter.

But if I’m the nutter, how come he was the one playing street football in half a scoliosis cast, half healed and going against his mother’s explicit orders?

Terrell and I grew up in a small town in ways that were equal parts at-risk and Rockwell-esque. Only in a world where the crack cocaine epidemic was still be unimaginable would our upbringing be considered wholesome.

Probably the through-line of this week’s dialogue is the tension between our respective sense of our hometown upbringings. Don appreciates Sandusky, Ohio and the ways in which we were raised more than I do. It’s interesting that even my bad feelings about the town don’t damage individual memories.

And I would be lying if I didn’t say that talking to one of my oldest friends—who happens to be starting the fourth season on his Color of Motion podcast—hasn’t got me thinking of mining Ohio for more material.

[Sandusky] seems smaller now, because I’ve been here in Houston for so long. You go home, the streets seems smaller. Everything seems smaller. But back then it was a huge world.

What follows is adapted from this weekend’s podcast discussion. My guy laughs a lot, and I’m not even going to represent all of the times Terrell broke up. Just dial in that laughter’s happening in places where you think it might be happening.

Donnell Alexander: We’ve got one of the most esteemed guests we’ve ever had in the esteemed history of this podcast, a guy I’ve known longer than anybody I’ve talked to on this podcast. He knows the old days. The artist from Houston, Texas, from DG Graphix: Don Terrell.

Don Terrell: Hello, hello. Good to catch up with you, Donnell. Like I said, you and I go way back. I’ve been looking forward to us doing something for a while.

Don Terrell — DG Graphix/Color of Motion

DA: Well, we’ve been having conversations for such a long time. If I may go back, before we even go into the artistic stuff of it, I remember when you had scoliosis and you were in a foul mood for a year! I came over every day and was crackin’ jokes and you gave me nothin’ for like six months and then maybe you cracked a smile.

DT: I’m paying for it now, with back issues.

DA: We can come back and talk about scoliosis back in the day, but let’s talk about your career. Back in the early 80s, you and I used to kill time at the end of the [high school] day, before I’d do my sports stuff, I would hang out with you in the commercial art department. What was that teacher’s name?

DT: Mr. Heulings.

DA: I used to kill time with you, the late Lisa Johnson. I think Mike—Mike Braden, yeah. Tina Bellito

DT: Bill Hill. Tina Bellito-

DA: A lot of names that mean nothing to the people watching.

DT: Mike was in there, too.

DA: That’s right, our very good friend Mike Amolsch. I was thinking of Mike Amolsch because literally minutes before I came in to record I heard “Daydream Believer.” And our good friend Mike Amolsch, we ran a little foursome on the Southside of Sandusky, Ohio back in the day—the nerd patrol—and he loved The Monkees. You could not tell him there was anything wrong with The Monkees, that they were a knockoff of The Beatles. He knew that, but he loved them.

DT: Hey, I loved The Monkees, too.

DA: It was a strange period, you guys. Tell me about your life in Houston. What’s it like being an artist down there?

DT: It’s great. Houston, like California, is way different from Sandusky, because it’s so much bigger. I love being an artist down here, it’s really diverse. Our culture is really great. There’s a lot of creative people here, doing some amazing things. It’s been really good.

DA: I dated a woman from Houston. She always trumpeted the diversity of Houston and I appreciated that, but there’s also a lot of money in Houston. Are you able to see any of that? Or is it just tantalizingly hanging out there?

[Laughter]

DT: Like a carrot in front of me. Because Houston is such an economic center and there’s a lot of industry down here—oil and gas, energy, tech—the revenue is a lot down here in Houston, in Texas really.

DA: I know your emphasis is graphic design. How has work evolved for you over the years? Are you still tracking trends?

DT: I’m always keeping up with what’s going on in the industry. In my industry, AI is really big right now. My focus is now on motion graphics and video animation.

DA: You have a podcast about it, right?

DT: It’s a livestreamed show that I do every Saturday afternoon. 3 pm Central time, where I interview People of Color and diverse backgrounds in the industry of motion graphics, animation, digital effects, cartoons, comics. I’ve had a lot of amazing guests on the show, made some amazing friends from Netflix to Pixar to Sony, Marvel, DC. There are so many talented people out there—People of Color—who are doing some amazing projects.

My guest last week—have you ever seen Underworld? I had Kevin Grevioux on my show last week. He was the big Black actor who played Raze, one of the Lycans? He co-wrote Underworld and he’s a big comics book writer, along with being an actor and director. I so enjoyed doing the show. He kicked off Season Four, so I’ve been doing that show for four years.

DA: What have you learned over the time that you’ve been doing it?

DT: Getting more comfortable on camera. And interviewing. I’m not the best interviewer. I’m still learning. Still growing. (The best way to become a way better interviewer, hella fast, is here.)

How to produce a show. Constantly working on making the production quality better. Making a show the best possible thing… doing the livestreaming and putting together the shows has been the biggest learning thing for me.

DA: What do you want to ask me?

DT: I’ve had this conversation with a lot of creatives and a lot of guests: How do you keep yourself motivated during those times when things aren’t working out well as you would like them to be and you’re struggling with this, struggling with that? It’s easy to get off track, especially when you have people around you that aren’t necessarily getting what you’re trying to do.

Everybody, especially in my family, is, “ya need to get a 9-to-5 job, benefits,” all that kind of thing, It’s a different kind of mindset from where you’re trying to build something yourself. How do you keep yourself on track and inspired and motivated when you’re trying to carve out your own path?

DA: I’ve got the tried and true remedy: I get divorced.

[Laughter]

DA: I’m kidding only that much.

After all these years, people kind of realize what they’re going to get with me. For better or worse, I’m pretty wedded to the work. And I’ve definitely had relationships suffer because I have tunnel vision about work. I can be at a place where they take the house from me, they strip my clothes off me and I’ll be naked, writing.

[Laughter]

DA: No, it’s hardest for me when I can’t figure out what the story is and I don’t know what to do. I move more slowly than when I was thirty, and moving more slowly is beneficial. I rush things less and less. I’m struggling to sell this story right now about reparations. White people with money are not trying to hear about reparations, and I’m trying to write for someone who can fuckin’ pay me. So, the sales part is harder than the writing part and the reporting of it, and I think I get frustrated with that point. Earlier today I was like [which editor] do I know? Who do I know? I thought long and hard and figured, Oh, wait, there’s this person. And that person led to five other [contacts]. It’s obvious—some might say simplistic—but staying with it tends to be the remedy to so many things.

DT: For me, it’s key that I surround myself with people who are going in the same direction as I am. Do you find that you do this as well? Most entrepreneurs, creatives, I’ve found it’s crucial that they surround themselves with people who are like-minded, who keep themselves encouraged. Or do you look inward?

DA: I find that I look inward. There are these very few people who can relate to what we go through, and then there’s this next tier of people who pretend they’re doing what you’re doing. But they really aren’t doing what you’re doing. My adage is basically from Master P: Don’t talk about it, be about it. Remember bout it, bout it?

DT: Yeah, bout it, bout it.

DA: Not a lot of people are bout it, bout it. And at this point I am so experienced that I don’t trust most people. You have to prove it to me. So I do things alone. I’ve run into trouble for having my singular vision and having to compromise. In my old age that’s going to be one of the last lessons, learning to compromise.

I was in LA last month with one of my old radio producers. I do these radio narratives sometimes—and I should probably explain what I do—and I was complaining about somebody who lives in some town that wasn’t New York, LA, or San Francisco. I caught myself saying, “Ugh, those people—they’ve never even had agents!” [Laughter] That’s the worst LA cliche in the world, but that’s kind of who I am at this point.

That was the thing where I was trying to see nudity and I accidentally fell in love with foreign films. There were all those foreign films on late at night! We had cable when people in our class should not have had cable.

You go through these things and you’re at the dinner table talking about what’s happening with you, they don’t know about rewrites and they don’t know about all the clean-up work you have to do. I don’t know about motion graphics, but… at this point I’ve given up any pretense that anyone knows what I’m going through.

DT: I would figure other journalists, writers, they’re obviously dialing down into more specific things, but [share] just the general struggles that you are going through. Like you said sales, connections, those types of things. I would figure that other writers in your space would kind of get it.

DA: Of course. When I did that this morning, I of course reached out to colleagues and peers to help sell this thing. I don’t know whether I need to tell your audience, but journalism is in a really bad place. It’s a hard place to make a living, independently, and the number of journalists is waning.

I went to the journalism awards in LA about 18 months ago. Everyone who won the awards—all of the freelancers—they all had day jobs. These are the top journalists in LA doing the best journalism they can—after work, on top of everything. I know a lot of people do that.

There just aren’t that many Black freelancers, period. A lot of the companies have snatched them up, and I guess I’m a bit long in the tooth to be snatched up.

[Laughter]

DT: That’s a good point about age. I know that’s kind of a thing that I struggle with: Am I too old to have the success that I’ve been wanting to have. Should I have made this decision, that decision… where I am now.

I’m a spiritual person, a religious person. I believe everything has its time—I’d have preferred [success] much earlier [laughs] but everything has its proper time… and not getting caught up in anybody else’s race. I know it’s easy for me to do that, especially [with] social media, where you see other people having success and you’re struggling. Or your pace is a lot slower than what you would like it to be. Is that something you think about?

DA: I had a lot of success early at 19 and 20 and 25 and 30, everything thrown to me.

DT: I lived vicariously through you.

DA: And I don’t have that anymore. You get my point—all of that can go away. In that time I’ve watched a lot of people who really seemed like they had their lives peak at 35, 40, 45, and—I could be lying to myself but I really don’t think so—but I feel like I’m getting better every year. For writers in particular, if you’re going to be an author, the traditional wisdom is that it takes until you’re 50 to get really good. And I have been on that trajectory.

Well, people will say, you’re not an author. At down times in my career—and I’m not in a down period right now—I’ve been told “you’re delusional” [to think] that you even have a career. Those are the times you have to have that self belief.

I don’t know man. I’m not in a race with other people. Social media can affect people’s moods. I feel like they’re lying, sometimes. The fact is that when people have career successes they have problems at home. You can’t just gauge how “well” someone’s doing, because there are so many facets to life. Even when you’re having professional successes you can be struggling artistically in another way. The thing you’re being recognized for now you finished a year ago and the thing that’s due in two days you’re struggling with. People don’t see that. That’s why outside voices are only so valuable.

DT: When we were back in Sandusky, running up and down the street… when I think about the four of us—

DA: Me and you, Mike and Brian [Rohrbacher].

DT: Of course you’re not thinking kids, wives, just being an adult… how did you see yourself as an adult?

DA: I’ll answer that question, but I wanted to ask if you had this specific memory. We were just starting high school and we were talking about our dreams in your bedroom. I told you that if I didn’t get all of my success—and my success was a million dollars and living like Hugh Hefner—that I was going to commit suicide. [Laughter] Suicide at 30 if I didn’t have it. That’s where I was coming from.

Clearly, I did not commit suicide.

DT: Which is a good thing.

DA: But I expected everything to come really fast. My mistake, when I lived in New York and I was 32, I was in GQ Magazine and there was all this stuff about me. I thought that’s just how life was going to be from now on. It couldn’t be taken away, and that was definitely youthful folly. I definitely thought I was going to be someone who got a lot early.

The stuff with the kids is pretty on track. I didn’t realize that people made choices, like career or kids. And I tried to have the kids early and that really put a strain on both the [marriage] and the professional stuff. If you’re trying to be great, it’s hard to be the most present parent in the world, too.

I feel like you’re lucky in a sense. Maybe you will have kids.

DT: [Shakes head] That window’s closed, people. I mean, technically, I could, but I am not trying to have a child at 58 years old.

DA: If I was a wealthy man…

DT: I don’t even know if I was wealthy I would want a child at 58.

DA: Robert De Niro just became a father.

DT: That’s a star… I always saw myself with a little girl at least.

I wanted to be a comic book artist, but life just takes you down a different path. Fortunately, I’ve been blessed to have had jobs and the jobs I’ve had have been in the industry—graphics and art—just not the direct path to take. Now with this show that I’m doing, it’s brought me back to this space that originally got me excited about doing art and graphics and it’s allowing me to make the connections and the friendships that are in the industry for me to feed off of as well.

DA: You can’t really plan your career. There are things I haven’t done that I still intend to do. I feel like I’m going to be able to write and tell stories for a very long time, but I have my eyes on one project that I hope in my sixties I get to complete and make this amazing, special thing.

There’s a book right now I’m working on that I think has a lot of commercial potential. Maybe it’s not the thing I’ve dreamt of doing my whole life, but I’ve dreamt of having money my whole life, so there’s that. But it’s completely unpredictable. I knew I’d be in California.

DT: Yeah, you always loved California, for some reason. I liked visiting, I’m not sure I’d ever want to live there.

DA: I’m in Portland right now. I’m not actually in LA, but I knew that was going to happen. I just didn’t know what form anything would be in. How we’re talking right now, that wasn’t a reality.

Did you catch the Katt Williams interview?

DT: [Laughs] Yeah.

DA: Something he said that really resonated with me, he said, What I wanted to be, there wasn’t a name for it when I was growing up. I buy that—our dreams were so limited, but also the technology has changed. Don, cable TV changed our lives—

DT: I don’t mean to cut you off, but do you remember that you used to have Showtime, and I used to come over to watch late-night movies?

DA: Yeah, that was the thing where I was trying to see nudity and I accidentally fell in love with foreign films. [Laughter] There were all those foreign films on late at night! But yeah, we had cable when people in our class should not have had cable.

That’s what I want to ask you about: In retrospect, we were super poor, weren’t we?

DT: Financially, we weren’t the richest, obviously. We didn’t have a lot of money. But I always feel, especially as I look at today and how kids go through school, my childhood was really great. Despite the little things that went on with my mom and dad and family stuff, it was a pretty good childhood. Sandusky was a really great place to grow up in.

DA: We grew up in a relatively calm time. I want to be clear, I haven’t been back since 2002. When’s the last time you were back?

DT: Probably before that. The only time I really went back was to go visit my sister, Teresa, who lives in Toledo. I would just run to Sandusky to kind of look around. Since my aunt who lived down the street from us passed away, she was the last person I’d go to visit. My mom moved away to Detroit. I had family, but not family that was close that I visited. So it’s been a minute since I’ve been back to Sandusky.

DA: Where I was going with that is, when I went back it was pretty trashed. Crack was not that far in the distant past. It was maybe over, maybe some people were still doin’ it, I don’t know. The Southside where we grew up didn’t seem as lively. I mean, it’s like that everywhere; kids don’t play outside.

DT: Not like they used to. The house I used to live in isn’t there anymore. It’s a vacant lot.

DA: Oh my god.

DT: It seems smaller now, because I’ve been here in Houston for so long. You go home, the streets seems smaller. Everything seems smaller. But back then it was a huge world.

DA: If you were to go back over the professional adventures of my lifetime, since we stopped hanging out when I was 18—that first plane ride—Don drove me to Cleveland, drove me to the airport, man. What’s been the craziest adventure? Top 3?

[Laughter]

DT: It’s been too, too many for me to even remember. I will say this though: I was a little envious of the life and adventures you got into. I consider myself a little more reserved than you are. And your capacity to get into a lot of things.

When you started getting into a different crowd, we all kind of ventured off, I think, in high school. We all remained friends, but we started branching off into our own other groups of friends.

DA: The big turning point with me was weed. Let’s face it.

DT: Yeah.

DA: It was Before and After. And you weren’t immediately on board with all of that, and we don’t have to talk about your position on weed.

DT: No, I don’t have a problem with it. Yeah, I had my period. And to be clear about it, you were the first person to get me to smoke weed.

[Laughter]

DA: Do you remember where it was?

DT: I think we were on our way to The Afro Ball.

DA: That is one of the turning points of my life, man. Do you think they still have The Afro Ball?

DT: They do. I remember seeing in our Facebook group that they had an Afro Ball event.

DA: I got Don to smoke pot at the Afro Ball. Was it junior or senior year? And I flipped out. In retrospect, I know I had a sativa moment. I should not be smoking sativa, I’m more of an indica person. I panicked and ruined The Afro Ball for both of us, didn’t I?

[Laughter]

DT: Yes, you did.

DA: I went home and told my mom I was having an episode she said, “You better go in [your bedroom] and pray to God!”

[Laughter]

DA: I loved your mom. Your mom was somethin’ else.

DT: Yeah, you, Mike, and Brian really shaped a lot of what, of who I am, what I thought about, what I wanted to be moving forward. Specifically you, because you and I talk more than I communicate now with Mike and Brian. I had a real good appreciation for the zest you had for life.

DA: [Holds up fist in silence]

[Laughter]

DA: I had fun man. I still do. I think I talked to you privately about this adventure I had last year that went horribly awry, just horribly awry. I was telling a friend what I’ve been saying for the past couple of months: I’m done with the crazy adventures, and they were like, “I don’t believe you.”

DT: [Laughs] I would have to say the same thing, Donnell. I don’t believe you are, it’s just a part of you.

DA: Like a sentence.

DT: It’s interesting though. I don’t really talk about this stuff, but I’ve had my moments as well. For me, there was a period where I was smoking a lot. I was just given weed. I used to work for a print shop, doing t-shirts, but he also sold weed, too.

DA: Of course.

DT: That was his big thing, and he used to just give me weed, for the day. That was probably my heaviest period. I can’t do it like I used to, I’ll admit. My tolerance is just way low for it. Not like it used to be.

I look back on Sandusky with fond memories, for sure.

DA: I don’t know that I do. I realize it was a safe way to go and in retrospect I realized that the education was very good. And I think that’s why I want to go to the reunion this year, because I can’t justify my negative feelings about it. I’m going to say a name, and I try to avoid saying names. Remember Stephanie Bolden? She was a big girl, over six feet—fair to say over two hundred. Sent me a Facebook friend request, and I was like, No.

There was a moment in speech class. We had to go through and say our favorite songs in class. I’m not sure why we did that, but we started with A—Alexander—and I was in a rock phase and I couldn’t think of any [contemporary] Black music and I was like, Fuck! What am I going to say? Because I’m not going to say… The Doors. [Laughter] I’m really into Bruce Springsteen right now. And I was.

I remembered George Benson’s “Give Me the Night,” because I never really stopped listening to Black music because I was in this rock phase. So, I said, “George Benson, “Give Me the Night” and she’s right behind me. She jumped up and said, “Nuh-un! You like that white boy music, don’t you!” I was in the front row, my ears were burning. My neck was burning.

]Laughter]

I tried to deny it, but I couldn’t deny it. And that’s how I’ve thought of Sandusky. It had that straight jacket. There were always these expectations. I’d go to these parties. Do you remember Donald Clark by any chance? He went to Perkins and was on the track team. He’d be at these parties, at these keggers. We’d be the two Black dudes at the keggers, trying not to look at each other. And I remember thinking, This is no way to live.

Now I know so many different kinds of Black people. Hundreds if not thousands of people who are so different, it just makes me think of that box they tried to put me in. Or, I felt like I had to be in a box back then. I want to go to the reunion because I want to bury my sense about that time.

I’ve been dealing with my whole sense of what it meant to be a Jehovah’s Witness, that whole spirituality. I’ve been thinking about a lot of these things lately, and I don’t want to go into my sixties with all of this baggage.

DT: That was the sort of thing I thought about as I started getting Friend Requests from people that we went to high school with. I’m thinkin, We didn’t even talk in high school. Or, You were the worst to me in high school. It made me think about that as kids we’re jut going through our kid stuff. And people change as they face adulthood. I try not to look at it as, Okay, you did me wrong.

I’ll tell you this. Tracy Steele. He was probably the worst tormentor during school.

DA: I felt like you had a dynamic between the two of you.

DT: Yeah. It wasn’t really a great dynamic. [Laughs]

DA: I should explain that Tracy Steele was the greatest athlete in the school.

DT: He was just a jock in every sport. And he wasn’t in any of my classes, because I was pretty much in accelerated classes, but he was in my home room. And you have the same homeroom all the way through. He had this nickname for me. He would just go through this rant, “Meatnose. Meat! Meat!” You know how kids can be. And the fact that his name was Steele and mine is Terrell, he was always right in front of me.

I say all of that because it’s interesting as I go through the Facebook group and see everybody comment and message each other. We change as adults. We grow up. A lot of people leave the little kid stuff behind. Of course there’s the few that never grow up or are just that type of person.

For me, in the neighborhood, Sandusky was a pretty great place to grow up. I come from a big family. Basically everybody on my street had a lot of kids, so there were always kids there, people to play with, hang out with.

DA: Why am I thinking of that time that guy fed a kitten to a dog?

DT: You have to take those moments. [Laughs] We grew up in a great time. I tell young people especially, because they’re born into this time where they have a cell phone right in their hands. I tell people, I love the fact that I’m old-school. I can remember before computers, before email—all of that stuff. So, I have a good idea of going outside, creating your own world—with your toys, with your friends—instead of being mesmerized by this screen. Communicating with someone through a screen when you’re sitting right next to them.

I’m so thankful of the time I grew up in.

DA: We played football in the street, and it was glorious. I think about the people who don’t get to do that. Pick-up basketball still happens to a lesser extent, but the baseball games would go on for nine hours with people cycling in and cycling out. My kids had really beautiful childhoods—they were in Richardson, Texas for a while, but mostly suburban Pasadena—very quiet, very nice. And I was the one who organized the pick-up football games, because the families weren’t doing that anymore.

So, I have a lot of gratitude for having grown up through that, I’m grateful for starting to write on a typewriter and not a computer, because I know the consequences of an error. A cursor does not erase everything. I know Wite-Out, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.

DT: It was a good time when we grew up.

DA: Beneath the surface a lot of terrible things were happening, but it there was no overt violence, crack hadn’t come yet. I was worried about the Murschel House; there were things happening inside the Murschel House, but the Murschel House wasn’t coming out to get me. It was a little whorehouse/bar in our neck of the woods. Actually my first bar. No, my second. First bar was the Bucket of Blood, second bar Murschel House.

DT: Somebody got killed with a cross-bow.

DA: Who uses a cross-bow in a whorehouse? We’ve got to go, dude. This was so fun. More fun than a cross-bow in a whorehouse. [Laughter] That sounds so misogynistic.

DT: Yeah it does. Like I said, that’s not leaving you, Donnell. Try as much as you want, it’s not going anywhere. It’s just you.

DA: And on that note…

DT: Like I said, this has been great. I will say this. I was a big fan of the fact that you had a gift for words and you could write. That’s the one thing that I wish I had more of, this ability to sit down and write and get good at writing. I always appreciated that about you, that you were a great writer and you were able to sit down and articulate your thoughts through words.

DA: Thanks. I tell my kids that I’d never want them to be writers, but I encourage them to use it in what they do with their careers and they are using it. I just wish I’d done something more with it. There’s a film I want to make, I feel like I’m going to get to do it in my sixties, but maybe it could have been something I did in my forties. Looking back like that is such a loser’s game. I’m looking forward to what I get to do.

And I’m really glad that we got to do this, because it’s just like old times.

DT: I want to ask you one question. You wrote your biography Ghetto Celebrity, and if you haven’t read it you should. What was it that you pulled out of it about yourself, writing that book.

DA: That’s a good question. I was definitely chased by what I didn’t know about my father and I filled that in with a lot of negative stuff. I learned some things on that book that didn’t really make my life easier. But I learned about myself.

It was more the aftermath. The aftermath was really amazing, because there was a blasphemous line in there that made my mom put the book down. So she never finished it, but she stuck by me through that whole enterprise. People asked her to take me out of her life because I wrote that book, you know? People in her Jehovah’s Witness faith.

It was like a rite of passage. When I finished it I was a different person, unburdened. And I knew how to write a book, so that was something.

DT: I would love to sit down and write a biography. You have to write about things and people that you may not name, per se. But you have to write about the things that shape your life. That’s what an autography is. But how does it shape your relationship once you were done?

DA: I lost about a half-dozen really close friends from that book because I did talk about that stuff. You can triangulate, figure out names, and I didn’t hold back. I always refer to that particular book as the thing that ruined my life, exquisitely. It ruined my life so beautifully, but it fuckin’ ruined my life.

DT: I think the opposite. It was probably the best thing to do, to find out you. Who you are. Your thoughts—get that clear. Obviously, a lot of people on the outside of an autobiography—especially if you’re talking about them in a negative perspective—they’re going to take it the wrong way. But it’s really a self-actualizing, cathartic thing to do.

DA: I had read a lot of autobiographies, because there had been like a spate of Black, young authors—especially men—telling their stories back then. A lot of them were just bullshit. I won’t say any names, but there are some famous people who wrote some bullshit memoirs. And I said, I’m not going to write one of those.

It was cathartic. I was able to go on with the rest of my life—the next phase of my life—and I didn’t think about my father that much. I had thought I was destined to be my father, and that’s just not the case.

DT: We’re going to have to do a Part II, because there’s just a lot of stuff that we didn’t dive into.