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Chip’s Justice It’s not what you say, it’s not what you do It’s a feeling comes over me I just can’t explain When the heart is wounded, and love walks in For a feeling comes over you you just can’t explain And you fly where the eagles fly Tonight the moonlight lights up a dark sky For a feeling comes over you you just can’t explain And you fly where the eagles fly, (Words and music by Rita MacNeil, used without permission) The sleek red Corvette convertible glided into the driveway at 101 Empress Drive, then paused briefly as its driver operated the remote that opened the door of the three car garage, then slid gracefully into the third bay and shut down. The young driver pushed the button again to close the door, then he and his attractive young companion sat there in the car, in the dark, whispering to each other, kissing, embracing. “Hey, you two!” a portly, cheerful man said as he opened the door that led into the house, flooding the garage with light. “Have a good time?” “Any problems with the kids?” Chip asked as he and his surrogate dad hugged warmly. It was Friday evening, late. Chip and Kim Stockdale had just spent the evening celebrating Chip’s 30th birthday. They had taken what Kim would be quick to tell you is her husband’s first love, his brand new red Corvette, in the middle of the afternoon and gone for a long drive with the top down. After they had driven over two hundred miles they had returned to Raleigh where they had gone for a very nice meal, then attended a play at Raleigh Little Theatre, one of the many traditional institutions in the beautiful southern city. “I think Scott is still awake,” Virginia Whitcombe said as the happy couple entered the palatial kitchen of their home. “I’ve never known him to have a good night’s sleep without a hug from his dad.” “C’mon in, dad,” a melodious teen voice invited in response to the light knock on his bedroom door. Chip opened the door and entered the bedroom of his son, then walked quickly to the bed and sat on the edge. “Have a good evening?” He asked, though he already knew the answer. The other children, all six of them, were fast asleep. There were seven of them all told: three girls and four boys, all of whom Chip Stockdale, Attorney at Law and Dr. Kim Stockdale, Pediatrician, had rescued from various horrendous home situations. They all adored their parents more than words can describe. Chip’s appeal, his efforts to have his name removed from the Registered Sex Offenders’ Database had been successful, but only after a very nasty year long battle during which his wife, Kim, would accept nothing but total victory. They had been offered a plea bargain in which Chip would have been classified as neither guilty nor not guilty, but Kim had flatly refused. “He’s not guilty,” she had said adamantly. “He was coerced, influenced by his sister in whom he had total confidence. He has done nothing wrong and he deserves nothing less than a totally new trial! Then we’ll let a jury decide.” “I assume you want me to try to get your sister charged then?” Hugh asked as he scribbled more notes. After listening to all the tapes that Ed had hoarded for five years, then listening to testimony from five young ladies, including Kim, which corroborated all that Chip had said on the tapes, the judge had simply shook his head and thrown out the entire case, challenging the District Attorney’s office to level the charges once again if they thought there was a chance of conviction. The frustrated prosecutors had declined, stating that justice had been served. Not satisfied with the final decision, Hugh Montgomery had once again filed suit, stating that Chip Stockdale’s life had been irreparably damaged as a result of having been incarcerated during the most formative years of his life. Now, he told his clients, was the time to bring out the fact that Chip had been castrated and he had done so, citing the extremely traumatic therapy he had endured plus the fact that he was a convicted felon in the first place as the most probable causes. The result was that Chip’s convictions had not only been overthrown, but it had been done with the apology of the State, along with another very lucrative financial settlement. Possibly the most important result of all the court proceedings was that Chip, totally in awe of Hugh Montgomery and all that he had accomplished, had decided that he could do a lot more with his life as an Attorney than a Pediatrician, and had again changed his major. Seven years later he had graduated with highest honors as an attorney with majors in family law, criminal law, a minor in business law, an MBA for good measure, while Kim went ahead and pursued her original goal as an MD and a Psychologist, specializing in pediatric medicine. Chip has already made something of a reputation for himself as a very formidable defense attorney, especially when defending youthful alleged offenders. He doesn’t take every case that comes to him, but when he does accept a case everyone involved had better be ready. First he questions his client mercilessly until he is satisfied he has all the information he’s going to get. Then he follows leads, badgers any cops involved in the case to death for evidence and background information. Once in the courtroom the Prosecutor had better have dotted all his i’s and crossed all his t’s; if not, if there are any flaws in either case preparation or evidence, Chip Stockdale will find them. If Chip has anything to do with it, there will never be another case like his. After graduation, and for several years before, Chip had attached himself to the attorney who had made it all possible: Hugh Montgomery. He had started as little more than an office boy, then quickly progressed to assistant to Hugh as he learned more about the workings of the firm. He had worked for the lawyer for two years after graduation, then had started his own firm when Hugh had stated regretfully that he was more than ready. Meanwhile Kim, after graduation, had opted to work for Dr. Murdock instead of doing all the residency processes that were normal for an aspiring doctor. Kim remains associated with the fine doctor, but in a decreasing role as her work with her husband intensifies. Kim was the Physician, the Psychologist, who analyzed and evaluated the candidates that Chip nominated from his duties as a family law attorney and child advocate. Nominated for what, you say? Well, for a number of things. In the first place, Chip spends a lot of his time these days roaming about the youth prisons of the state, checking records, interviewing inmates to assure that in all cases justice has been served. He also has a very close relationship with the Social Services department, trying everything possible to be aware of every possible case of child abuse in the state. As a result of his tireless probing Chip finds himself with more children and teens than he can possibly house in his own large home. Those he cannot take home for one reason or another, he takes to the shelter he and Kim built with their first ten million dollars: The Andy Whitcombe Chldren’s Center in Chip’s home town of Creedmoor, North Carolina. Chip even tried to get his friend Dennis set free when he first began to experience success, but Dennis himself rejected his efforts. “I’m better off where I am,” he told his young friend personally. “I am just conceited enough to believe that I had some small part in helping you become what you are now; and maybe, just maybe if I’m lucky I might do it again some day. I’ll be your in-prison liaison, Chip. It’s enough for me to know that if I send up a flag saying that I’ve encountered someone in here who shouldn’t be here or needs help, there’s someone on the outside I can count on to listen. You just do what you’re doing, Chip. It’s enough for me to know that some small part of what I told you back then, of the time we spent together, just might have helped you in some way.” I mentioned young Scott at the beginning of this chapter. Yes, Scott is still very much alive, still healthy, and very much his father’s son in spite of the lack of any direct parentage. Chip and Kim discovered after taking their little boy to the doctor the day after he arrived that Scott didn’t have AIDS at all. Yes, he was HIV positive and still is, but there had been no lasting symptoms. The little guy was suffering from one infection, cold, or illness after another not because of AIDS, but because he was undernourished and not kept clean. The doctor told them it’s a miracle he hadn’t already died from AIDS, but so far it hadn’t seemed to affect him. Scott responded well to the care and medication provided by Dr. Murdock, to say nothing of the love showered upon him by his parents. When it was time for Scott to start public school, his parents discovered that he was to be singled out, prevented from playing sports or any other activity that could possibly result in injury or other exposure by the other children to Scott’s blood or other body fluids. Scott and Kim didn’t like this form of prejudice, but they understood, so they chose to home school their son with the help of the Whitcombe’s. By that time Scott had a brother and a sister; the little girl, who was 9, was also HIV positive. The home schooling project lasted until Scott was in the third grade, which was when Chip’s first big endeavor was opened: a school and activity center for HIV Positive Children. Here all kids could be normal because they were all the same. Here even kids with full blown AIDS could come to school and be assured that their medical needs were understood and met. The facility was a joint venture of Chip, Kim, Ed, and Dr. Murdock. It’s headed now by Alan Whitcombe who also teaches, as does his wife. Next year Kim’s parents will be retiring and moving back to North Carolina, and they too plan to become involved with the school. Unfortunately Laura, Scott’s first sister, had already contracted AIDS when she was adopted, and she died just before her 12th birthday. That was a difficult time for Kim and Chip, but in all honesty not the least unexpected. Scott is almost 15 now, and still appears healthy and happy. He knows of his background now and how Chip’s name came to appear on his birth certificate. He still has no idea who his biological father is and says it doesn’t matter to him. He says that he doesn’t remember how he came to be HIV positive in the first place, only that he remembers an experience with a man whom he didn’t know, and that whatever happened was extremely painful for him. But no matter, he says, all that is in the dim dark past now and doesn’t matter. Scott begged his parents to castrate him a year ago, and Chip considered his son’s pleas very seriously as the boy’s sexuality began to awaken, but eventually decided against it. “In the first place,” he told Scott, “you never know when they might come up with a cure - a way to kill the virus in you. In the meantime you’re still healthy and happy, and you might just meet a young lady some day and want children. It would be a shame to shut all that down at this point.” Scott hasn’t got to this point without problems. His first year in his new home was a stormy one. He was rather undisciplined, whiney and hard to handle, to say nothing of all the illnesses, poor eating habits and total lack of toilet training. He had to be taught how to give and receive love; it seemed it was a new concept to the little boy. He developed a keen interest in sports as he grew, but most of that activity had to be curtailed because of his condition. In spite of Chip and Kim’s assurances that they would take every precaution, other parents simply did not want their children playing on the same team with the infected boy. So Scott had to be content with playing tennis with his family and friends, and basketball and baseball with his school mates. His one chance to compete with other kids, all other kids, was swimming, and in that he truly excels. Kim, an excellent swimmer herself until her cancer killed her chances in competition, had taught her son to swim by the time he was 5. They learned that chlorine is very effective in killing the HIV virus instantly, so young Scott was soon enrolled on a swim team where he really shines. He finds that swim training and his school work take so much of his time now he has little left for other sports. He knows he will never be as good as he’d like to be, because the medications he has to take every day tend to drain him of a lot of his strength. But no matter, he still does a very respectable job, and has made some very good friends on the team. Chip never did get his sister into any sort of therapy or other help. She eventually got so strung out on drugs she couldn’t function at all, and she died of an overdose when Scott was 7. Chip and Kim chose not to tell their son what had happened to his mother; indeed, Scott seemed to have blocked her out of his memory entirely. He knew that Kim was not his biological mother, but he either didn’t care about his past or if he did, he hid it well. When he turned 12 and seemed mature enough to handle it, they told him the whole truth not only about his history but Chip’s as well. “It don’t matter,” he said simply. “I remember my mother, kind of; and I remember how glad I was to get away from her. She made me do things I didn’t want to do.” What precisely Janet had made her young son do remains locked in Scott’s memory. He has spent time with Ed Barker, and Ed has assured his anxious parents that he seems to have dealt with it, whatever “it” is, and so they are content to make sure the boy is happy and well cared for, and to accept him for who and what he is, the exact same way he accepts his parents. So how in the world did Chip come into all that money, you may well ask. Well, it’s a funny thing about that. They received a rather nice settlement from their original lawsuit, most of which was spent on Chip’s appeal of his convictions. But in the meantime he and Kim had invested in two state of the art laptop computers which they needed for school, but Chip reserved an hour each day, plus a few thousand dollars, to begin playing the stock market on the Internet. But like everything Chip does, he didn’t go at it half cocked. He analyzed, studied, watched trends. He invested millions in “virtual” money and than watched the hypothetical results. He never invested real money in a stock without learning something about the company behind it first, and he absolutely never invested everything in any one place. He bought some very sophisticated investment software to keep track of the stocks that interested him, and he was patient. At first his gains were a dollar here, ten dollars there. For months at a time he lost almost as much as he gained. But by now Chip was a graduate student, well versed in basic corporate law and business principles and practices. He applied his knowledge to analyze this and that stock, having built his investment pool now to the point that he could invest large sums without fear of losing everything. Investing heavily in the stock market requires nerves of steel and a knowledge of the market and the business in which you are investing. Chip made sure he had all of the above, and before long he was making millions. As the market began to fall, Chip’s keen mind saw that there were incredible opportunities amid the chaos, and he took advantage of them. Chip and Kim are very wealthy now, but they remain just “simple folks.” Their neighbors all love them; their children, all of whom were rescued from a situation not unlike their eldest son Scott’s, adore them. Chip’s law firm is lucrative in itself in spite of the fact that Chip’s primary objective remains to apply his considerable legal skills to assure the rights of all children he encounters, and his fees are always commensurate with what his clients can pay. Chip and his parents never did form any sort of meaningful relationship, and for that Chip offers no apology, no remorse. Chip tried once more after his adoption of Scott was final, but once again the senior Stockdale’s had only criticism, stating that he had no right to restrict Janet’s access to her son. “She allowed one of her boy friends to bugger a very little boy!” Chip told them in no uncertain terms. It could be said that Kim and Chip had deprived their child of loving grandparents, but that’s only because you have not seen any of the seven children in the presence of the Whitcombe’s, or the Nelson’s, Kim’s parents. They are every bit the doting, spoiling grandparents that every child needs and loves. The Whitcombe’s could not possibly love their surrogate son’s adopted children any more even if Andy had lived and had fathered them all himself. In the opinion of Alan and Virginia Whitcombe, their beloved son Andy has indeed lived on in the body of his one and only lover Chip Stockdale, so Chip’s children are indeed their grandchildren as surely as if he had sired them all himself. George and Andrea Nelson have come to admire their son-in-law even more, if possible, and are proud to call the children he and their daughter call their own their grandchildren. Chip has finally taken his place as a musician, and a good and effective one. He sings for his children now: the seven children who bear his name, the countless children in various wards of the hospitals around the Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill area, and the hundreds of teenagers who are behind bars in the various prisons around the state. He writes some of his own material and sings and plays many of the songs by others that have touched his heart in various ways. He still wonders now and then what it would have been like to be a star, to be a famous recording artist; but in all honesty he cannot imagine that a life on the road in a bus, performing by night and sleeping and rehearsing by day could be anywhere near as good as the life he now lives. He had never in his wildest dreams thought that his entire life would be spent as an entertainer, but still it would have been nice to be able to make that decision himself rather than having it imposed upon him because of something he had done, or allegedly done in the past. Be that as it may, Chip cannot imagine any reward greater than what he experiences every time he takes his guitar out of its case: the eyes of happiness and wonder on the faces of happy children as they listen to him play and sing of love, magic fantasy, and a life of renewal, of hope, or just plain simple comedy. Chip is a performer now, an artist in every sense of the word; but now it is on his own terms. His performances are not driven by money or agents or publicity or cheering crowds, but by need; and the happy young faces that he leaves behind are far more important to him than any amount of platinum records, public accolades or financial reward. As idealistic as he is, Chip has come to realize that he can’t fix all the legal problems, can’t undo all the physical and emotional damage, and his wife can’t cure all the diseases. So the pain he cannot take away he relieves at least with his music, at least for a little while. Oh yes, the matter of Chip’s sexuality and his marital relationship with Kim. Well, they are both eunuchs, and nothing in the world can ever change that. Kim has been denied hormone replacement therapy because the threat of cancer is ever present, ever waiting to spring and attack. Chip could have had HRT, but he refused, saying simply that if Kim can live her life as a eunuch, there is not reason whatsoever why he can’t do the same. But that wasn’t the main problem anyway, was it? The primary reason why there was absolutely no sexual activity between a young man and his beautiful wife was because any sign of erection, any hint of arousal, any thought of sex with a woman, any woman, was extremely painful for Chip. After all parties realized what was happening and why, it was a simple matter of reverse therapy to undo what had been done, right? Or perhaps it wasn’t that simple. Ed worked with his friend tirelessly, selflessly. Once his favorite couple’s financial state began to improve, he referred Chip to the best psychologist he knew, and Chip underwent the most intensive, most painful therapy of his life. Eventually it paid off, and Chip was finally relieved of his guilt, his burden, his pain. After more than four years of rather intensive laborious therapy, Chip could finally have a painless erection and put it to use. At first he merely went through the motions because it was expected of him; but before he even realized it himself he was enjoying it, looking forward to it. Chip and Kim will never have a normal sex life. Indeed they never did. When they first met they were mere children and shouldn’t have even been thinking of sex, yet it had been sex that had drawn them together that first time. Given a little more time there is evidence that the young couple would have figured it all out and put their sexual activities in their proper place and had a meaningful, loving relationship that could well have developed normally; but that’s not what happened. Now they were both adults, albeit very young ones with a great deal of responsibility, and they had a lot of history to deal with that no one should have to handle as part of their marriage adjustment. But they were in love, and someone once said, and very accurately at least in some cases, love conquers all. It’s taken a few years, a lot of tears and more than a few arguments and downright fights, but Kim and Chip have finally come to the point where sex is a real and rewarding part of their relationship. They don’t have sex nearly as often as one might expect for two such attractive young people who are very much in love. More often than not, when one or the other wants intimate contact, Chip is unable to “get it up.” At first such incidents resulted in frustration, depression and all too often an angry argument. Now they both laugh, then agree to try again some time soon. But when it works, it works like something you have never before seen in your life! The end.
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