Crazy Fish May Redefine Computer Industry

In early 1989, Sue called. "I'm going to have your baby in a month, and it's a boy," she said.

"I thought you weren't pregnant," Fish said. "I lied," she responded.

Fish sent her flowers and drove to the bank where she worked. "We gotta get married," he told her. Not only did Sue not want to get married, she told Fish to get lost. (Sue did not respond to requests for an interview.)

Tommy was born on April 7, 1989. After seeing the newborn, Fish refused to disappear. "I was blown away," he says. "I mentally retired. I saw the rest of my life is going to be with this kid."

Fish filed a court action claiming paternity. Sue denied he was the father. It took Fish months to get a court-ordered blood test, which proved he had fathered Tommy. The absurdity of the California family court infuriated Fish. It seemed to him the courts were dominated by feminists and lesbians. Men were demonized and dismissed as probably violent and usually unnecessary, he felt.

"That's probably the time I got involved in the men's organizations," Fish says. He ended up on the board of the National Congress of Men. Fish at times got appointed as a "court watcher" to go along with members to court hearings.

Accompanying a man who belonged to the group to San Jose County court in 1991, Fish was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Several San Jose police officers testified to the same thing: Fish had attacked an officer.

Then his attorney put on a string of witnesses who had been sitting in the hallways. Every one testified that the officer was the aggressor and Fish had tried to back away. The jury acquitted him.

Because this is the life of Russell Fish,that wasn't the end of it. His "not guilty" verdict came within days of the acquittal of Rodney King for attacking Los Angeles cops. Fish ended up on Larry King, CNN news and the Jenny Jones Show talking about police misconduct and men's rights.

A front-page story in the Wall Street Journal in 1992 alerted Fish that Sue's bank was under investigation. He called her attorney to schedule a court hearing and learned Sue had blown town. Fish's son was gone.

"Mr. Fish?" the caller asked. "This is the emergency room at Methodist Hospital. Are you the guy with the poster? We think we have your son."

When Sue disappeared, a frantic Fish hired a private detective who tracked them to Carrollton. For months Fish commuted from California to Texas, pursuing a paternity ruling through a Denton County court.

A judge ruled Fish was the father, ordered that he pay child support and granted visitation rights.

Ecstatic, Fish moved back to Austin and drove to Dallas for visitations. The boy awoke in Fish a powerful paternal instinct. The maverick who at 13 got kicked out of his parents' house for mouthing off to his dad wanted his son to have order, gentle but firm discipline, exercise and exposure to teamwork through sports.

But most of all, safety. Voluminous court records document Fish's obsession with keeping Tommy out of harm's way.

Fish accused Sue of smoking marijuana as well as abusing cocaine and methamphetamine. Unemployed, she was living in Section 8 housing with a series of drug dealers. He approached the problem with the intensity of designing a new microchip and the tenacity he brought to the Air-Enduro, digging up records of the boyfriends' criminal backgrounds.

He moved to Dallas in September 1994 after the 5-year-old boy called him long distance to say his mother had been gone two days and he had no food.

In November 1994, mom and son again disappeared. Fish filed a missing persons report and, fearing Tommy was sick, posted huge pictures of him in hospitals and homeless shelters from Austin to the Oklahoma border. After a month, someone in the Methodist E.R. called Fish.

"He's in the ER and in an oxygen tent," Fish says. Sue had told intake that she had no money or ID and gave a homeless shelter as her residence. She'd left the hospital and hadn't come back.

Fish was awarded custody and had Tommy a year. After he decided he wanted to homeschool Tommy, the court returned custody to Sue.

Over the next dozen or so years Fish and Sue battled in court, accusing each other of assault and each asking for protective orders from the other. He called her a drug abuser; she called him an "obsessive-compulsive liar."

Fish's relationship with Tommy grew more tempestuous as he entered high school. Fish says that he had heard Sue tell Tommy that his dad was a "loser" and that he would do just fine without a college education.

"She said, 'Look where it got your dad,'" Fish says.

A relationship with Tommy was a problem Fish couldn't solve with differential equations.

Back in his North Dallas apartment, Fish pulls yellowed newspaper clippings from one of the banker's boxes stacked on his red bedspread; he laughs at the picture of himself with a luxurious black mustache and wearing a tuxedo. In the picture, he's just been auctioned off for $1,000 in a charity bachelor auction.