"Sucker Punched" unedited

Well, I had no idea how that little loss of control was going to affect me but after work that day I ended up going to some other little dive of a bar, on Leonard Street, Slackers Bar. How appropriate, considering. Stumpy, having just got off of work for the day, had ran into me on the street and wanted to talk, so we went inside and grabbed a beer.

He was in the habit of wearing a black over-coat, like he must have thought he was a warlock or something. It was the kind of coat that you see these wannabe Goth kids wearing or flashers at night on the city streets of Chicago or New York City. His job was working at Louis Padno’s Scrap yard through a day labor company that places like these cheap screws use to undercut their regular wage expenses.

Anyway, while we were sitting there at the bar, the female bartender starts giving me a bunch of crap- an attitude that was almost as big as she was. It wasn’t like me to not say anything to her about being rude to a paying customer when the place was in so dire need of patrons, so I sounded her about it, explaining that the place wasn’t exactly flourishing with business, and that I was a paying, customer who tips, not a punching bag, which was ironic because while I was taking another sip from my mug, a punch makes contact with the side of my head and lands squarely on my ear. What kind of guy hits you in the ear anyway? Sparks lit up in my sight in a blazing flash. This punch was from Stumpy, and it was a big mistake because I was still lit with a good amount of fury still residual from that morning. Maybe he got his ego bruised when I overpowered him. I didn’t mean to do that to him, and was only trying to avoid hurting the guy. I didn’t want to have to hurt anyone, and I never really have before. I only wanted them to contribute or get out. Or maybe he was getting back at me for throwing his friend out or puncturing the tires of the car or for throwing the girls trunks out of the window. Well, upstairs or not, whatever it was, I was thankful I hadn’t seriously hurt one of them or had sex with the girl, for that matter. That would have only added to my serious confusion.

Now, I don’t like getting hit. And I don’t like spilling booze, especially when at a bar with so little cash. And I hate getting wet, unless it’s my idea, so when I got hit in the ear, causing for me to spill my drink on myself, I was firstly- in disbelief, and then feeling violated by someone who I was extending myself out to help. Then I was, though quite rare, in another fit of blinding rage. All three sensations or emotions were easy to lament, denial-violation-rage, even though it was all in under a half of a second. Never the less, I reacted. Bar stools went flying as we were both heading to the floor. Next thing I knew, I had shown him to the Jukebox. Fortunately the connection to my ear was the only one or the only one I noticed. How he faired really wasn’t a concern of mine, not like getting out of the place and disappearing before the cops came as quickly as I could render him motionless.

My ear soon turned black. It must have ruptured a blood vessel or something. I have no clue how long it stayed that way either, since my ear-ripheral vision was out of order at the time. Otherwise I would have ducked when he was about to sucker punch me. The situation was efficacious because when I got home, all three were gone. Now all I had to do was rid myself of the rest of them, little did I realize at the time.

Soon after this came the notice of eviction. Bruce’s spending of the rent allocation had caught up with me, not to mention him showing up on the police radar in the area. I cannot recall how it happened but I think it was a psychotic episode or a senility thing. When the police took him off of the street, asking him where he lived and how long he had been there, he had told them that he built the house and hauled it to it’s location with his car! Though I suspected it before, it comes out that Bruce is out of his mind. How he managed to keep it to himself this long is still a mystery.

All of these people, and the situations around them, just go to show you that you cannot help those who aren’t taking the initiative to help themselves. Helping myself seemed to be a great difficulty but I managed to continue finding work to finance my activities despite my dysfunctions. What would have been smart right about then was to finance a replacement Michigan identification card because being evicted created a bit of a problem.

Why didn’t I call Danny for help? Even though I had just met him, he would have helped me but out of guilt over the situation with the girls, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was forced, or so I thought I was at the time, to rent a storage unit from a place on Leonard, right next to the Arnie’s Bakery, and since I had discarded my ID card, it was necessary for the girls to put their name on the paperwork. They were all to eager to take advantage of that situation, to help, of course. What a costly mistake for me that would turn out to be.

We moved everything but the couch. This couch was a gift from Bob but most likely his wife, Cheryl. When I moved it in, it required some disassembly and was a bit tricky for me because I had no experience with couch manufacturing, and had little clue how to do it. Bruce proved to be handy for this task but it was a bitch, which [ha-ha, bitch witch] is why I bailed on it when it came time to move it. Jens homosexual son, Ethan, drove us around in his little baby blue Ford Ranger until we found a place to rent a room that would charge us on a weekly basis. I think it was the Econo-Lodge near U.S. 131 on 28^th Street. At two hundred dollars a week, it was anything but economical. 

Since we had a storage unit there was plenty of room for my computer, one of many that I lost in the past fourteen years. This way I could continue to write the materials for my books that I fantasized about writing and publishing- mainly as a last will and testament to my children. The guitar I had at that time, given to me by William “Zig Zag” Goode, was claimed to have been given to him by Ted Nugent, along with a beautiful pair of black and white sculpted cowboy boots that he managed to find for me at a garage sale; all probably given to me to insure that I would be providing the booze for a while.

William Goode was a sad case. One night we were out on a walk-about, looking for people who needed help drinking their booze. We must have not had any money because I remember walking with him to the train track crossing on Bridge Street for a nickel that was embedded in the overly tarry blacktopped asphalt. It was about eleven o’clock at night. He couldn’t get the nickel up out of the tar, and with nothing to pry it with but another nickel, it remained embedded in the tar. It reminded me of the sword and the stone. I guess he wasn’t the one that was meant to have it. The back-up plan was to go into a bar called, “Our Tavern”, which we did.

The bar was pretty empty that particular night, all but for two couples, a lone man, and the barkeeper- all sitting at the bar. It must have been fairly busy recently because the tables were a bit disheveled, several having empty glasses and pitchers on them. Bill told the barkeeper that he’d clean them up in hopes he would be rewarded for his efforts with some alcohol. He set right to gathering the glasses and pitchers, emptying the ashtrays and pushing in the chairs as if he worked there regularly. A few of the pitchers had a little beer in them. He poured it all together and set a couple glasses down for the two of us. I could hear them quietly discussing this whole scene- a guy and his wife, who were laughing about it, ordered a pitcher for us. Guilt and embarrassment consumed me- for Bill, for us but mostly for me, I guess, because I wasn’t drunk enough to have no shame. It was probably because of a mixture of Bill trying to help out all of the time, and me having told him earlier that I had no money to buy anything to drink that day. And being his friend when he had so few, he was just trying to help me out the only way he knew how. I mentioned to the people giggling about him, in his defense, that he was hard to reason with, and that since he was drunk I was just trying to keep him company until his wife might let him come back to the house. This should have sunk in as a possible future for myself but maybe I was too preoccupied with my memories of the last and only time that I had ever been to Our Tavern, to see it.

Bill Bolthouse and I had been called out on a service call to repair the bathroom plumbing about ten or more years ago. We showed up there and went inside to the instructions of who ever took charge of the bar at that moment. The men’s urinal wouldn’t flush, only to spill out onto the floor every time someone tried, which, despite the mop bucket and the sign saying, “Do Not Use The Urinal,” they did. We checked every fixture in the room, inspecting the entire plumbing assemblies before we settled down to the one particular object of concern.

One of the toilets liked to run on, and sure enough, the urinal was clogged. With me holding the tool tray up off of the urine stained floor, Bill lifted the lid to the tank on the throne. He burst out laughing, only because it was always comical to find a brick in the toilet tank.

It’s a valiant effort to want to conserve water but regardless of whether or not a brick saves water, the solution is within the mechanics. The float-bulb is in the water tank, connected to the water valve by a threaded rod. The threaded rod is made of a soft copper but sometimes it’s soft steel or aluminum. This bulb controls whether the valve becomes on or off by the downward and upward motion of falling or rising water in the tank. If you bend the rod in the middle so that the bulb sits lower in the tank, it will shut off sooner, using less water per flush. It’s not Rocket Science or Magic.

The urinal, on the other hand, had… an organic problem. When we yanked the urinal from the wall mounting plate, we found out why it wouldn’t drain. Apparently they drink so much beer, so fast, that it doesn’t become digested or broken down by the body. The drain port had a collection of gelatinized residue from the beer clogging it to the size of a quarter when it was a two and one half inch piece of drain pipe. It looked very much like Tofu or maybe even a Jellyfish sewage monster or maybe… well, let’s just move on. It was one of those jobs where you thought your chances of getting a disease were pretty likely. This always runs through my memory banks when I recall anything to do with Our Tavern, and it had to be a distracting thought the night, while I was there with William- distracting me from receiving the messages that were there for me to take in.

Anyway, one, of all the things that I had with me at the Econo-lodge, which were all important to me at the time, was my computer. I cannot remember where I had gotten it from but I do remember it did not like to work with it’s casing on the hard drive. It took me a while to figure out that it quit working when I put it back on but that’s as far as I ever got with it, continuing to use it with the guts hanging out of it. I had written on it with a black Sharpie: “I Only Work Naked.” This computer was nothing to me but a simple tool for writing, for focusing on writing my stories with. The only thing of value in it to me was that which I had written. At this time in the turmoil of the events and people in my life, I clung to the idea of writing but not for the sake of writing, for the sake of my very dear children. These writings were to express myself to them in any and every way I possibly could, to tell them how much I loved them and how much I grieved over our separation. The writings were to share the things I had gone through in my duress and the strange dichotomy between wanting to die to end my pain, and wanting to survive to see the day I had them back in my life. They would serve to be my final testament and an expose’ of the truth of their so-called mother and the terrible thing that she had done. So, when I wasn’t in an alcohol-induced coma, I would write.

Now and again, I would lament a hope that I will be reunited with those songs, stories and morsels that I spilled out through the keys but my perspective of Realism say’s that they are gone forever because the girls would vacate the room, taking the unused payment on the room, along with all of my possessions, disappearing with the entitlement to the storage unit- all of what was left of my entire life, and my attempt to rebuild it.

Of all the things I had been separated from, the one thing I am saddened by the most was a cardboard box that once held Paslode Framing Nails in it, repurposed to hold every photograph I had ever taken of my children. These photos that I took I had to beg Mindy to allow me to accumulate, since she thought nothing for our family’s need for a camera. Other than photos, the most peculiar and significant thing about that box was the actual blood that was sprayed and splattered on it, human blood. It was evidence of the reality of my struggle to find my way back in life.