Rollin

By Monte Crosswhite

Know someone who is an addict, dealing drugs, or in prison? No matter what the circumstance, there is always hope. Don't ever give up no matter how bad it looks. 

From star athlete to drug dealer, from New York model to a 6x9 cell, Rollin tells the story of the life of Monte Crosswhite. It shows how he was transforme

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Sep 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887384405

Monte Crosswhite

Monte Crosswhite grew up in the small town of West Point, Mississippi. He started getting into sports and martial arts at the age of twelve to thirteen years old. He immediately was a sports star because of his athleticism and rose up to the top of every sport he played in school. After graduating, he went on to Mississippi State University where he quit second semester and came back home and found life waiting on him. Back home, Monte ended up getting into heavy drugs, eventually becoming a drug dealer and ending up in prison. Monte got busted for the last time in 1996, after which he totally surrendered his life to the Lord and never looked back. Monte has been serving the Lord for twenty-six years to the date of this writing. Today he is the pastor of the Movement Church in Hoover, Alabama, and a traveling evangelist.

Book preview

Foreword

The majority of the book is centered around an era in my life that spreads across about a ten-year span. This book is not intended to uplift the outlaw life in any form or fashion. The intent is to give people hope that no matter how bad someone’s loved one gets, there is always hope. Don’t ever give up on them—tomorrow could be the turn-around day. It is to encourage people that they or loved ones that have gone astray can change for the good and that God can change anyone. It shows: how I was from a good family and a star athlete in school; how I had everything going for me in life; how I was led into the dark underworld of drugs and crime and how deep I went; and how God got me out of it.

There are so many people that I want to thank for being conducive to me being where I am today. There are so many people that have helped me that I cannot even name them all. I hope no one gets offended that I didn’t name them. First of all, I want to thank Jesus Christ, who never left me and has been and will always be there for me. I want to thank my mom for never giving up on me in all those years and believing in me. My late dad was always there for me and believed in me no matter how bad I got. I want to thank my baby sister, Susan Ware. I’m thankful for Zane Crosswhite, who made me want to change and be a better father. I want to thank all my immediate family for not turning their backs on me and treating me different after I went astray. I want to thank my wife, Mechelle, for always believing in me, having faith in me, and being a positive impact on me and our ministry. I also want to thank my bonus sons, Brandon and Brady Merchant, for their support and my in-laws, Paul and Carol Barham, for being such a positive influence in my life. I thank God for my granddaughter, Rhylen Faith Crosswhite, and my two grandsons, Kaiden Brady Merchant and Kody Sutherlan Merchant. They are all such joys in our lives.

I want to thank Mike Norwood for being there for me and doing Bible studies with me back in the day and sharing the Word while I was messing up, and never judging me. I want to thank Jeffery Copeland for keeping helping us in our church and keeping us going while we were in Bessemer. I want to thank Brother Robert Raleigh for helping me and actually pushing me out in the water to start preaching. I want to thank Rev. Buck Buchanon, my mentor, for always being there for me. He has been and still is so helpful to me in my walk in so many ways. I want to thank the late Kenneth Pete Williams for praying for me to come into the kingdom. I want to thank Robbie Robinson, my God-send, for looking out for me and protecting me the last time I was in.

I want to thank God for all my tennis students. They have literally been my life over the years, who I have looked forward to seeing every single day like a parent to their children. They have taught me so much about people and how to be a good leader.

I want to thank Davidson and Jennifer Kozlowski for really helping me out when I first came to Birmingham in many ways. I would also like to thank Davidson’s father, Dave (the Koz) Kozlowski, for helping when I first moved to Birmingham.

There are so many people that have been instrumental in me being where I am that are as equally responsible as the people that I have named. So many that I couldn’t count. If I tried to name them, I would run out of paper. I hope no one gets offended that I didn’t.

Prologue

The gunshots echoed through the cool October night. The bullets smoothly passed through the back window and out through the windshield without shattering either. They hit right on target. I laid the high-powered rifle down, and Jessie and I rolled the truck down a small embankment into the murky water. It rolled slowly through the shallow water and came to an abrupt stop about half-way across, half-way submerged, slightly rocking back and forth as the front wheels got stuck on something. I had a moment, staring in amazement at all that was happening. I quickly got myself together, and Jessie and I turned around and hurried back to our meeting place, hoping that no one would see us.

Chapter 1

The awards just kept coming at the 1986 West Point High School Athletic Banquet, my senior year. I didn’t have enough hands to hold them. I received first-team all-conference football and first-team all-conference soccer. I received the school MVP in soccer. I also received the Army National MVP in soccer. I was a four-year letterman in football, soccer, and track, so I received my letters in all of those, plus a one-year letterman in tennis. I was overwhelmed, and then, totally to my surprise, they called my name and said I was the recipient of the John A Cantrell Award, the school’s highest athletic award. I didn’t even know that award existed. At that time, and may still be, but I was the only person in the history of the school to play four sports in a year. Staying straight, all my work and all my practices had paid off.

My whole life had centered around sports of some sort. From a small kid, if I walked outside and there was a ball of any kind laying in the yard, I would gravitate toward it. I was totally addicted to sports. School had never been my focus; sports had.

I came from a long line of good people on both my mom’s and my dad’s side. My parents bestowed good morals and values on me and my sister Susan. They taught us respect, honesty, and not to lie or steal. They gave the necessities of life and practically everything that we wanted. You could say that my sister and I were both spoiled in a lot of ways. What my parents didn’t give us, my grandfather Granville Crosswhite did.

I had a close encounter with God at an early age. I almost died when I was five. I had double pneumonia and German measles at the same time. My temperature was up to 106 for seven days. I remember the nurses putting me in bathtubs full of ice cubes and making me sleep in the hospital room with no covers with the air conditioner on and me in my underwear in December. My mother said she had a talk with the doctor during the ordeal, and he told her he couldn’t guarantee her that I would make it through it. It was serious, and I can remember being really sick. She said that she prayed and cried out to God that if He would save my life, she would get into church and dedicate me to Him. On Christmas Eve night, my fever broke after almost two weeks in the hospital. Strange things happened that night. It was like I was seeing things in the spirit realm, and I was. I literally had a supernatural encounter with God, and it changed my life. I knew that God had touched me. Something supernatural had happened. Right after that, we were in church every Sunday for a while.

My parents were the most loving parents anyone could ask for. Neither of my parents had an alcohol or drug problem. I can count on one hand the times I remember them even drinking. I came from a long line of law officials. My mom’s brother was a constable and deputy sheriff. My mom’s father had been a policeman for a number of years in Indiana and even police chief at one time, and his father had been before him. My grandfather on my dad’s side was a constable for around thirty years, and my dad was a constable for two terms. Most of my family were good law-abiding citizens in the community. I had a lot of good examples to pull from to be successful in life.

When I was in the seventh grade, I used to go to eat dinner at the hotel where my grandmother worked. It was only two blocks from my school. I was in there eating by myself one day when a guy I didn’t know came over and sat down at my table and struck up a conversation. His name was George, and he was probably seventeen/eighteen years old. He seemed like he was a cool guy. He somehow brought up the subject of smoking marijuana. Talking about drugs at such an early age would have scared the average kid to death, but for some reason, I wasn’t. I was intrigued. Something inside me wanted to try it. If he would have had marijuana on him and asked me to, I would have probably tried it that day.

My parents got a divorce when I was around thirteen years old, and my mom, sister, and I moved into an apartment complex in town. It was full of divorced moms and their kids. It was an all-new scenario, but I loved the change. My mom got off late from work trying to support us financially, and my sister and I had a lot of time by ourselves. There were a few wild kids out there, and I got my chance to drink and try marijuana. I liked them both like I thought I would. My best friend, Robert, and I would drink on the weekends and occasionally smoke marijuana if someone had some.

It wasn’t long after I started drinking and partying that I started getting into trouble. I got in trouble one time for breaking the windshield out of a car with some of my friends. I got in trouble again a few months later for tearing up a piece of equipment at a party. It seemed like, at an early age, I was just destined for trouble. By the time I was fourteen, I was on probation.

My mom remarried right after we moved to town. She married a man named James Lloyd Collums. He was an alcoholic from a wealthy family in Chickasaw county. He mostly lived off inheritances. He was known for being mean and dangerous and was a barroom legend around Northeast Mississippi. He would occasionally take me to local honky-tonks with him. And I loved going. I felt tough when I was with him. He had stabbed and shot several people, almost killing them. Some say that he had even killed several men. He had a lot of assault rifles. Some said that he was even a hitman at one time. I thought that was cool. Unfortunately, my stepdad was very influential during these years. My role models went from my uncles, who lived clean, good lives, to this alcoholic, violent, mean drunk, who threw money around all of the time.

James got really mean sometimes when he drank. Several times he had thrown huge hunting knives at the front door that I had just walked into or was walking through. Many times he walked past me with a gun in his hand while looking wild-eyed at me, me not knowing what to do or what he was going to do. One time I had to jump from my second-story bedroom window one night because he thought that I had stolen $5,000 out of his pants pocket. After I was gone, my mother found the money still in the front pocket of the pants that he had just taken off. He was drunk and had forgotten that he had changed his pants earlier. Mother said that he really felt bad about it. He really seemed to have a case on me for some reason. I still loved him and gave him respect, though, no matter what he did or said. All this was happening to me while I was thirteen-fourteen years old; definitely not your typical childhood—to me, anyway. I was really trying to process and deal with all that was going on in my life at that time. One time I even had to stay with a good friend for a couple of weeks. Everyone at school and my other family members didn’t know what was going on. I just kept it to myself.

One day my stepdad was drunk and called out to my grandmother’s house and said he was coming out there with a gun. My grandmother had an old antebellum house in the country and had a huge set of stairs at the back leading up to the house up to the back door. My uncle Jack was and still is one of my heroes and is a real tough guy, someone I’ve always looked up to. Uncle Jack told everyone to lock the doors, go hide somewhere while he met James at the top of the stairs. James had an m-1 carbine army rifle in his arms, and he was extremely drunk (not a good combination). They had words, then wrestled over the gun while rolling all the way, probably thirty-forty steps to the bottom, with my uncle coming up on top with the gun.

Life was really crazy during this time, but I started getting into sports in junior high school. I loved sports. I played football and soccer and ran track in Jr. High and played tennis when I had someone to play with. I was heavy into Karate also. Sports came so easy for me because I was athletic. I was one of the best in everything that I played. My occasional use of alcohol and marijuana didn’t really affect my sports that much because I just did it on the weekends. To be honest, alcohol and marijuana were actually an escape for me from all the things going on in my life.

Right before Christmas of my sophomore year in high school, I got into trouble again with my drinking and partying. I was drunk and high driving one night and clipped a telephone pole right in front of a local factory. I pushed the pole into the ground around twenty or so feet. I hit it so hard that the transmission came up through the floor, and it bent the top of the car; smoke was everywhere. I was lucky to make it out of the accident alive, but I totaled my dad’s new Thunderbird. He didn’t even have insurance on it yet. I was charged with DUI, destroying public property, and leaving the scene of an accident. I was just about to get into some major trouble, but I got out of it all because I was leaving town with my mother. She’d had about enough of my stepdad’s drinking and abusive, violent behavior also. One of the last straws was that he choked my mom so long one night in the parking lot that she fell down face first on the concrete and blacked both of her eyes. I didn’t know about that one until later, or I would have probably tried to kill him. She said another reason she was leaving was because I had started to stand up to him and she was scared of what might come out of it. She was sick of the abuse, so we were moving to Montpelier, Indiana, right outside of Hartford City, to stay with my grandfather.

When I got to Indiana, I didn’t stop partying. I drank alcohol practically every weekend and smoked marijuana occasionally when I could find it. Being involved in sports was the only thing that halfway kept me straight. I ran track that spring for my new school in Hartford City. I won a lot of track meets in the 100 m, 200 m, and some of the relay teams I was on. One of our relay teams won first place in the central Indiana track meet. I respected and admired my coach. His name was Chris Coy. He was really supportive and was really uplifting. He acted like he believed in me, and that meant a lot to me.

My grandfather, Granville Crosswhite, in Mississippi, had had a stroke and had been placed in a nursing home a few months before we moved to Indiana. I came home during spring break for a visit to see everyone, especially my grandfather. Right before I left to go back to Indiana, he cried and begged me not to go back. I promised him that I would be back as soon as school was out. He nodded his head and told me, Okay. He could hardly speak because the stroke had paralyzed one side of his body. My grandfather and I were very close. I hated to leave, but I had to go back and finish the rest of the semester.

Early one Saturday morning, the phone rang. My room was in the basement, right under the living room, and I could hear everything. My mom scurried and picked up the phone. A few seconds later, she said, Oh my God, no, and started crying. I knew right then what had happened. I knew that my grandfather in Mississippi had passed away.

My mom had to stay in Indiana and work, so I caught a plane by myself back for the funeral. His death was a hard blow. My sister and I really loved him and had always depended on him for support in many ways. I kind of withdrew into a shell. That was the first death that I had experienced since I had grown old enough to understand what was going on. I drank alcohol and smoked marijuana like crazy while home. I tried to act like his dying really didn’t bother me, but actually, I was totally broken.

After the funeral, I went back to Indiana and finished that school year out. As soon as school was out, I flew back to Mississippi to live with my dad. I partied hard the whole summer; I had a deep wound, and it hurt badly. I tried to blur the pain of the loss by drinking and smoking marijuana. I partied so hard that summer that by the end of it, I’d partied out. I was ready to try and straighten my life out.

One night at a local hangout, a guy I knew from school asked me to go riding around in his jeep. His name was Greg. Greg was from a very wealthy, prominent family in our town. He and I knew each other, but we had never had any dealings with each other before. We had good, clean fun that night and really kind of hit it off.

After that night, we started hanging out more and more. We eventually started doing practically everything together. He would ask me over to his house from time to time. After a while, I really started getting close to his family and really liked them. They were sincerely nice to me and seemed to like me.

Greg and I both quit drinking our junior year. We were going to see who could outlast the other one and stay clean. I’m very competitive, so I went ahead and set my mind that I wasn’t going to lose. That gave me the drive to stay straight. We went out on the weekends and had good, clean fun. It was actually fun to be straight. We challenged all of our friends to be straight like us.

Because I quit drinking and partying, I excelled even more in sports. I lettered all four years of high school in football, soccer, and track. I even played tennis my senior year. Also, I swam some for the swim team one summer. I was one of the top finishers in the state track meet. Our track team won almost every track meet.

However, toward the end of our senior year, Greg and I both started drinking again. I would have never admitted it, but I am pretty sure that I was the one who started back first. We blew the rest of the school year out, partying and drinking. We went on our senior trip to Fort Walton Beach, Florida, but then we kind of went our separate ways. The fall of our freshman year of college, he went on to Milsaps College, and I went on to MSU.

My football coach had tried to get me to play college football somewhere. To be honest, I was kind of burnt on football, and it wasn’t my favorite sport. I had talked to a few coaches, and I had opportunities to play college football at different schools. I even talked to the University of Pretoria in South Africa about playing soccer there. I was very indecisive and waited until the last minute before I decided to go to Mississippi State University, which was close to home. Twenty miles away, the university would allow me to keep ties to what I was leaving behind. I hated the thought of being away from my family and my girlfriend.

I joined the football team spring of 1987. I had enrolled in school too late to play in the fall of 1986. Coach Tom Goode helped me fill out my SEC paperwork at Humphrey Coliseum. He was an MSU assistant coach and ex-pro football player from my hometown. He talked about how he knew my family well and respected them. He was encouraging, and I liked him a lot.

The only other sport I continued to play while at MSU was tennis. At that time in my life, I was just really having a hard time focusing on anything. It was just too much going on in my life. My mother had come back from Indiana to my stepdad, and I had all that drama going on: my real dad had just filed bankruptcy and lost everything, including our house, and was having to move into a low-level apartment; my long-time girlfriend and I broke up; my grades were terrible due to drinking, partying, and frequent trips home. I had so much going on in my life that I was about to lose it. Then, to top it all off, the defensive back coach and I got into a confrontation in the locker room after practice one day. I was so frustrated with everything that I quit school and football the same day. I left straight from the field house. That was the first time that I had ever quit anything, and it did something to me. I remember driving my 1968 Camaro home that day, and I was so empty inside.

I went back home to West Point and found the cold, hard reality of life waiting on me. There were no more sports, no more spotlights on my life, no glory, and, importantly, no money. There was also the problem of having to find a job, and I didn’t know how to do anything or had ever had to work for anything. The pressures of life had begun.

Chapter 2

All through high school, I’d been popular, and becoming just a normal, everyday person was hard to handle, especially since all my friends were still off at college or in the military doing well. Everyone else was on his or her way toward success, but I found myself suddenly feeling like I was a nobody, and I wasn’t used to that.

The summer after I quit college, all my friends came home from their respective colleges. Facing them was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I felt like such a failure. I felt such a sense of inferiority. I’d never felt that before. I had always been on top of everything. So, I started feeling like I had failed all my expectations of myself and others’ expectations of me, too. My dreams seemed to be fading away. I started trying to convey to everyone how happy and carefree I’d become. And, I did a fairly good job of it too. At times, I was even so convincing that I fooled myself. The reality of the whole situation, though, was that my life was taking a turn for the worse.

I started drinking and partying more and more as time progressed. I rode around every night looking for an answer to fill the void in my life and trying to drink my problems away. Alcohol, women, and partying gave me temporary relief, but it was only temporary. True relief would not come to me, so I drank and partied more.

The one job I had counted on in the past was lifeguarding. I had been a lifeguard during the summers for years. In fact, I was the head lifeguard at the West Point Country Club. That was until I got a better offer. The guy who was over the City Pool told me that I could pocket every cent that came through the gate if I would run it for him on the weekends. That offer sounded cool to me. I quit the Country Club right then and went right to work for him.

I loved working at the city pool. I cleared $300 to $400 a week (which was good money back in 1987) for just a few hours’ work on the weekends. It wasn’t long, though, and I ended that good thing with my drinking and partying. I got caught at the pool after hours drinking and swimming with some friends twice. My boss laughed it off the first time he caught me and just asked me not to do it again. The second time I got caught, though, wasn’t as humorous. He was quite mad and had to let me go. I didn’t hold it against him at all. I knew that I had messed up. After that, I was faced with the thought of finding a real job. I didn’t sweat it too badly; I was about to have to find something more permanent anyway. The summer was almost over, and the pool would have been closing soon.

I put my application in at the employment service and landed a job at Bryan Foods, a local meatpacking plant. Bryan Foods was a place at which I’d always boasted that I would never work. The thought of having to go work there made me feel worse than I already did. I had to get a job, though, and there wasn’t much work going on around the area at the time.

The next day I went on out to Bryan Foods for a tour of the plant and a review of what I was going to be doing. The foreman took me deep into the heart of the plant. The smell was terrible. When we finally made it to the area where I would be working, I was appalled. It was dark and gloomy. Guys were wearing yellow waterproof suits moving racks of hotdogs from point A to point B.

After we got through with our tour, the foreman told me that he would be looking for me the next day. I assured him that I would be there. That was a lie! I couldn’t wait to get out of that dark, gloomy, smelly place. There was absolutely no way that I was going back to work there. The thought of that scenario was totally appalling. It was wet and nasty, and it stunk!

Luckily, my stepmother’s brother was a supervisor at another local plant. He pulled a few strings and got me hired. All I did all day was cut napkins. I didn’t care what I had to do after that encounter with Bryan Foods. Anything was better than that! I worked Sunday through Wednesday nights from 4:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., second shift. I loved the schedule. I was off just in time to start