A couple years ago Jude sent me his father’s wallet. Someone had given Jude the wallet about a decade after his father died and Jude mailed it to me for the documentary. Jude left his family and home as a 16-year-old to live in a psychiatric hospital across the lake where he finished high school. He went to LSU and then moved west, never to see his father again.
These are a few of the pictures that were in Julian Acers’ wallet:
In 2011, Jude told me:
There’s only one thing I remember when I was two or three or four years old. I remember a ship, a monstrous battleship in the distance, in the fog, I must have been two or three. That’s all I remember. And I remember also my mother, I didn’t know my mother was a drug addict but somehow my mother was taking care of me, and I remember we were going somewhere and the cab went down these long streets, I remember that, and strangely, I remember my being lifted upside down by my father or mother and given some kind of bath, I hope they weren’t sexually molesting me or whatever, but they were bathing me. I don’t remember any pain. But I remember being given a bath of some kind, held by my feet, it could’ve just been normal cleaning. It’s all I remember. I remember it for five, ten seconds.