EVERY TRAGEDY HAS A BASELINE. A "BEFORE"

If you want to understand the machine I ended up fighting, and the invisible war that waged inside my own head for decades, you have to understand that I wasn't born into it. But I wasn't born into a fairy tale, either.

David A Johnston (aka The Buffalo Bandit)

6/1/20265 min read

If you want to understand the machine I ended up fighting, and the invisible war that waged inside my head for decades, you have to understand where I started. You have to know who I was before the wiring broke.

My early years weren’t normal, and they weren’t easy. I spent my childhood bouncing back and forth across the border, split between my mother’s place in Toronto and my grandparents’ house in West Seneca, New York. My mother didn't much like little kids, a fact she made pretty clear. She scared me, honestly, so my grandparents' house became my refuge.

The instability was a constant hum. When I was just a little kid, my mother left me with a friend for seven months. Then came the marriage, the separation, and the rotating door of boyfriends.

The first major hit to my trust happened when I was only four or five years old. There was an older, married man named Gord who my mother was having an affair with. I didn't know the reality of the situation; I just knew him as "Dad." I called him Dad. I believed he was my father.

One day, I came back to Toronto after staying with my grandparents. I looked around the house and asked where my Dad was. My mother looked at me and coldly delivered the news: Gord wasn't my Dad, he was gone, and I would never see him again.

I felt like the entire world had played a sick joke on me. Every time I had called that man "Dad," every adult in the room knew it was a lie, and nobody told me. That betrayal did a number on me. It permanently altered how I process trust, and a short time later, the echoes of that lie would cause me to unknowingly sabotage myself and hurt one of the few people who actually, truly cared about me.

But I didn't let the chaos break me. In fact, it did the opposite. It built my armor.

I wasn't an average kid floating through life. I was fiercely independent, highly motivated, and absolutely relentless. I had been working jobs since I was 11 years old. By the time I was 14, I was living on my own. When the local school told me I couldn't attend due to taxes, I didn't quit—I paid for it myself. I excelled at my jobs. I played sports. I was a force of nature, building my own momentum.

And my mind was a steel trap. I could remember everything. I still have vivid memories going as far back as when I was two years old. I can perfectly recall the layouts of all the places I lived, and every street I lived on. I remember my first phone number from when I was five (416-499-5703, living at 30 Godstone Road, Apt 407 in Toronto), and my next one (416-822-9160 at 2340 Bromsgrove Rd #10 in Mississauga). My brain was sharp, fast, and reliable.

I was so driven that the summer I was 14, I rode my road bike 180 kilometers just to get to a job where my family was moving. That same summer, I rode all the way to my grandmother’s place in Orchard Park, NY with my best friend.

I had the world at my feet, and I knew there wasn't anything I couldn't do if I put my mind to it.

Then came Friday night. January 27, 1989.

I was fifteen. It was 6:30 PM, the streets were busy, and I was riding my bike, heading to the bank. I was pedaling west on Fowler Drive, approaching Erin Mills Parkway—a massive six-lane road with a speed limit of 70 km/h.

I didn't stop at the red light, I always stopped at the red lights.

I rode directly out into the intersection, straight into the flow of high-speed traffic. A Bell Canada van heading south slammed into me. I smashed into the windshield with terrifying force. The driver hammered on the brakes, and the momentum launched me approximately 70 feet through the air.

Seventy feet. I landed directly on my head on the asphalt.

The physical damage was catastrophic. I sustained multiple broken bones in my right wrist, my leg, and my hip. A piece of metal or debris tore a puncture wound straight into my left calf muscle.

But the real damage—the damage that would silently wreak havoc on the next three decades of my life—happened inside my skull.

The recovery was a long, brutal six months. It wasn't just about waiting for bones to knit back together. I was incredibly, violently sick. While I was lying in the hospital bed, the nurses were constantly having to pick pieces of road gravel out of my head.

Even when they finally sent me home, I was trapped in a body that didn't feel like my own anymore. My senses were entirely warped. None of the foods I used to love tasted the same. I developed a sudden, intense aversion to salt. I suffered from insane, room-spinning dizzy spells, accompanied by a thirst so deep I couldn't ever quench it. Sometimes the spells were so severe that I would just pass out cold.

My body deteriorated. I lost around 50 pounds during that recovery. The short-term memory that used to be a steel trap was ruined. I was a ghost of the kid I had been.

But that fierce, unstoppable motivation I had built as a kid? It hadn't completely burned out yet. The very first day the doctors finally let me off my crutches, I didn't rest. I didn't take it easy. I got right back on a bike and started riding.

Looking back, that was probably the very last bit of real, raw determination anyone ever saw from the old me. I managed to keep riding for about another year. But once the physical wounds healed, and I stepped back out into the world on my own, the timeline officially split.

There was a real, deeply noticeable difference in who I was. If a kid exhibited those behavioral changes today, after taking a 70-foot flight onto his head, it would set off massive medical alarm bells. Neurologists would intervene.

Within 6-months of returning to work I was written up 3 times for being drunk and insubordinate. New Years day 1990, 11 months after the accident i lost my job at both of the Keg resturants I had been working at. Within 6 months after that I had totaled 2 vehicles and the world got their first glimpse and the person I had become. It wasn't pretty, and it would take roughly 22 years before anyone at all realized what was going on.

But in 1989, and through the 90s and even today people don’t understand Traumatic Brain Injuries. They didn't understand processing delays, or sensory overload, or the mechanical failures of a damaged mind. My daughters mother who works in health care doesn't believe in mental illness at all, if you can believe that. It's pretty amazing how ignorant some people really are.

So in 1989 and into the 90's they didn't see the highly motivated, fiercely independent kid whose internal wiring had just been shattered on the pavement. The truth is that kid, he died on the road that night. What replaced him was someone completely different.

Nobody gave anything a second thought, they just assumed I was an asshole.

And so, the invisible war began.

I'll be back soon,

The Bandit