This is the true story of a good dad with a bad problem.

​

My father, Jerry Kahler, was a respected international educator from Arkansas who raised a family in five countries and once played bridge with John Wayne. But he suffered from a severe type of bipolar disorder that caused extreme manic episodes lasting months, and this got him into every kind of trouble imaginable. 

​​​

Every two years like clockwork, Jerry experienced a profound change of personality — he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t shut down the geyser of ideas constantly flooding his brain. In public he spoke to everyone who crossed his path, sometimes launching into speeches in front of crowds. He was supremely inspired, utterly confident and absolutely fearless. He came to believe he was God’s personal emissary on Earth, and he answered this call with the devotion of a saint and the fury of a demon.

​

His self-assurance was heavily laced with paranoia, especially of the police, and he was arrested more than once for running from the cops when they weren’t even chasing him. He was wary of robbers, too, and to deter them he was usually armed to the teeth. And because his aggressiveness toward imagined enemies sometimes earned him real ones, his paranoia wasn’t always delusional.

​

He was arrested perhaps 20 times, convicted of felony charges twice and served seven years in prison in the United States and Costa Rica. Yet he was the uncommonest of criminals, a man who broke the law only when he believed it was the right thing to do — for self-preservation, for retaliation against wrongdoing or in pursuit of a higher good. His repeat offenses included disturbing the peace, making threats, fleeing the police and resisting arrest.

​

Convicted of growing marijuana in 1993 and sentenced to five years without parole, he escaped from a federal prison in Texarkana and fled to Costa Rica. A year later, he was arrested for something far more serious, shooting a police officer in the back, twice, though he says he did it to stop the cop from shooting him. He spent a year in Costa Rican prisons awaiting trial, at first manic and banished to solitary, then recovering his sanity to find himself in his right mind again but sitting in a third-world prison, possibly for life.

A fascinating exploration of the manic condition, this compulsively readable memoir is a harrowing descent into madness, and a son’s uncommonly intimate portrait of a troubled father.