"Dignity" unedited (squirrels)

Here’s something that still bothers me: Shortly after moving into this house with Groenlier, in the spring, we couldn’t help but notice that there were an awful lot of squirrels in the yard. Well, squirrel is one of my favorite small game meats so; I decided to try to get a few. Now, if I wasn’t so concerned with having money for drugs and alcohol, I’d have just bought a pellet rifle but my priorities wouldn’t hear of it, especially since I could think of a way to do it and spare myself the unnecessary expense. I searched the garage despite it being in the middle of collapsing, and I searched the basement of the house. This led me to a rattrap that hung from a nail on a floor joist but that wasn’t until after I had tried to build a live trap using a five-gallon paint bucket and a refrigerator grate. The wire shelf made a lid that I attached to the bucket with a couple pieces of wire coat hanger for fasteners that also created the hinges. Then I tied a brick to the lid and placed some birdseed in the bucket. I used a stick to prop the lid open, and tied a rope to it- like a box trap from the days of old. It was just like in the cartoons or on the Little Rascals. It worked well if the squirrels just relaxed a bit but they freaked out, shooting out of the trap like furry little rockets with claws. The rattrap was a cartoon moment. Like when you see the light bulb over a characters head appear and illuminate. I tied a piece of heavy yarn to it and tied the other end to a large broken tree branch that laid there on the ground so they wouldn’t run off with the trap. Figuring that peanut butter would be great bait, (and remembering the Planters commercials), I ran in and got the jar, slathering some on the trap. Well, before I pulled the cellar door shut behind me, I heard that awesome, “snap!”, that said I had one. Dragging the bucket with me, I took the squirrel off, dropped him in, and baited the trap again. I was pretty excited! Hunting squirrels with a rattrap! Well, as I put the trap back down I saw the squirrels at my feet. “Wow!” I thought, “This is too easy. I can’t believe I never thought of this before”. In about ten minutes I had five of them. Ron Groenlier volunteered to clean them and cook them. The sounds of him gagging and dry heaving from the act and the smells that go along with it, had me choking on the laughter that was a challenge to keep under my breath.

While he was doing that, I was looking out the window, at the back yard, filled with a sense of pride for having succeeded in trapping squirrels. There was an overabundance of them, which is one of the reasons I even killed them but now I see past our fence, and there is an old woman on her backyard deck. She had a three foot “A” frame, carpet covered perch for them to climb on, where she fed them from her hand and talked to them. These squirrels I just killed had a caretaker, with names and everything. They were more or less pets and very friendly. Suddenly I was sick at heart! I just killed a bunch of tame squirrels and, boy, was I ashamed. To this day I still feel bad about it.

It was only a matter of time before I was familiar with enough addicts to suck me back into the twilight dope scene. My friends lived on Fuller, and I lived off of Leonard and Alpine, so being on foot brought me onto the battlefront.

A five-dollar bill nearly got me killed once by a would-be attacker. My mistake was getting into a car with a stranger who had been out running around chasing his tail for rocks all night. Just because someone has a car, even a nice car, doesn’t mean anything at all when referring to a person’s Principles, Morals or Ethics. Material possessions are very often part of a charade- an Antithesis even. We had met because I was trying to score at the same place, not really knowing where to score, just searching through the city sludge.

Well, after being on foot in the rock scenes royal rat race, a car is a welcome thing- your own mobile dope smoking spot with no outsiders wanting to share your dope. But when the dope was gone, he came up with a plan of his own. Deciding we should do some cruising, he drove us to the Grand River down Butterworth drive, out near the gypsum mines. He knew I still had a five-dollar bill but I needed it for other things. There was a chunk of industrial wire on the floor of the front passenger seat area that was sixteen inches long, and an inch around, sheathed in black plastic casing. It was perfect for bludgeoning with. My spirit already knew what was going on- though in danger, I remained calm. His body language confirmed what his plans were. He suggested we get out and walk around. I really didn’t think much of it- probably denying I was in a precarious, life-threatening position but out of the corner of my watchful eye, I noticed him reach for it. He fondled the item while he worked up the nerve, probably deciding if he could or should do it. That was when I realized it was really about to happen. Pretending like everything was normal, and that we were merely trying to kill time in an attempt to “come down”, I suddenly blurted out, “I just remembered, I have money!” That’s when I gave him an explanation of how I always cashed my checks at Edzu’s liquor store, and that he didn’t have all of the money yesterday, still owing me a hundred and sixty five bucks. This worked like a charm. He drove us back immediately.

When I went inside the store, I told the clerk that someone was trying to rob me, and asked him if he had a back door. There wasn’t a back door. My only chance to escape unseen was to dash out and run west, crossing the street toward the south about a half block down, since the guy was parked on the east side of the building. There was no place closer than four blocks south for me to go to get off of the street. Four blocks is plenty of space to get caught up again. It scared me to death but I had been in several brushes with death before. After managing to escape that situation, I never saw him again, that I know of. One thing I know of, for certain, is that cocaine is a lot bigger problem in Grand Rapids than people realize. I witnessed firsthand, and I am not sure that it isn’t being used as a tool for a variety of manipulation that I’d be killed for suggesting. But how do you get funding for problems? You have to have problems to get funding for them. And if everyone is consuming alcohol, there are just a bunch of crass conspiracy theorists and nobody listens to their drunken tirades. Just look at how they defamed Oliver Stone.

One night, I manipulated Ron Groenlier’s dad into letting me use his car to make a dope run by telling him I needed to run to the store. I ended up with a flat tire and no way to tend to it, driving for who knows how long, maybe six miles until the rubber busted apart and the rim was ruined. Ron fixed it the next day. I contemplated checking in somewhere but lacked confidence in three days of dry-out or confidence in myself to confide in it or even deserve it. I am not sure what happened regarding moving out of the house, whether I was evicted or if I just decided that I needed a different environment. Oh, I remember now. Ron Groenlier introduced me to a bar called The West Side Bar, where we went out for beers and burgers. They made a burger called, “The Hog Burger”, served with bacon or ham on a one-half pound patty. The place was a biker hang out that appealed to me, so started going there regularly, eventually becoming acquainted with the owner.

One day I went in wearing a t-shirt for a bandana. That was the day I met Terry Lynn. As I stood at the serving trough, waiting for my beer, she struck up a conversation with a question: “What kind of a guy are you?”

The next thing you know, I was seeing her daily. Soon after she was served an eviction notice to move from her apartment for non-payment of the rent. She was probably fishing for her next move the night I met her. What a sucker I was, finally figuring out that she was a junkie. I do not recall but I’m sure the dope was brought into view early on. The extent of her addiction was yet to be recognized. Apparently she had blown her money with her off and on again boyfriend a little too often. She was probably led on that he would pay her back for their excursions, up to the point where time lapsed and the rent had been put off too long to salvage. She was quick to play my heartstrings and moved in with me. I failed to recognize that cute little sneeze, though thespian, as an intended tool for her prey. She was a full-blown addict that couldn’t shoot herself up- always needing my involvement.

My first thought about her was that she was okay because she had a job. Well, let me tell you, having a job doesn’t mean much. The important part to take notice of is what gets done with the money. It’s got nothing to do with how much you have, just what you do with it. She spent hers in the bars while looking for places to spend it in the street.

Yeah, things just kept going from bad to worse for me. Shooting up was her thing, and she couldn’t do it alone, which made me the guy since I was preying on her for affection and companionship. She would score whatever she could put in a needle- Dilaudid when she could find it, and crack any other time. She would crush it up, dissolve it in lemon juice, suck it up into a dirty needle, and shove it into her arm. I was baffled. I wondered often, “Is the whole world like this?” It certainly seemed like it to me.

It only made me agonize, that much more, over the reality of what the divorce had done to me. Miserable is one of the many terrible things I was. Was this type of degradation all that I was going to find in my search for wholeness? Death was the one gift that couldn’t be received. And though death was all around me, it wasn’t for me to receive. Why?

One night Terry and I went to the West Side Bar. It was my aim to go either way but she ended up accompanying me for the sake of dope. It was very cold and snowing that night in November. The wind was whipping pretty hard. The West Side Bar was about a fifteen-minute walk, which might have been twelve blocks or more. That was too far, considering the weather. We decided to ride my bicycle but I am sure it was my own idea.

When we finally left the bar it was close to midnight. Holding the bike up, ready to start pedaling, I waited for Terry to get on. After shoving off with my foot I began to crank the pedals. In the next twenty feet we began to fall over onto the right side. Releasing the bike and gaining a hold of the ground, I managed to land on my feet. Terry was not so quick to reflex properly and ended up lying on the ground as if to still be riding the bike. When I helped her up, it was quickly decided that we’d walk for a while.

Many times that night, she had made comments like, “I am living proof that you can live on beer and popcorn alone.” We ended up only walking for a few yards because she kept yelling about her leg. There was no doubt that it was painful, especially after I looked at it under a streetlight. Between the knee and ankle, it was bent like a cheap piece of macaroni or better yet, a banana. I went back inside the bar to make a phone call. Ron Groenlier came to get us with his dad’s car, driving us to the Butterworth Hospital for the broken leg to be treated. She was in the hospital for several days, hooked up to an I.V. pain management system- screaming her fool head off, milking it for all it was worth.

Thoughts began running through my head pretty constant about mu relationship with her. It may have only been a few days before I decided that I’d had enough. One day I told her that I couldn’t take it anymore and that I couldn’t live with the reality of the drug use, the shooting up or the anxiety of whether or not I was going to catch something from her or become a junkie too. So, I left the house I shared with Ron and her so that I could get away from it, and so she could still have a place to stay.

After bouncing around at friend’s houses that I drank and smoked at while lost in the streets for a spell, I went to Mary Doyle’s house in order to spend some time near my oldest child and maybe crash for a while until I could figure out what to do. Mary’s ex-husband, Bruce Vachon, was staying there, living in the garage, which was just a city dump with a roof and a power outlet. Bruce’s state of reality didn’t let him see that and he didn’t seem to mind, as long as he had his tobacco and his forty-ounce bottle of Magnum. He had a small television and a radio that he had managed to find while diving in dumpsters in the neighborhood. He also had a recliner chair that he occupied much of the time. This is also where he slept or passed out in. Little did I know, the house was dominated by a whole barrel of demons, and it was just a short time away from a serious fire caused by the kids cooking hotdogs in the attic space where they had a fort. It wouldn’t be long until the final result of the family’s dysfunctions and standard of acceptable living would be that the City bulldozed the house into the ground. My heart went out for the whole situation and to everyone involved but the only one who responded to any kind of an attempt I made to help was Bruce. There is more Irony because I would inevitably find out that there was no real help for him that would make any sense at all.

Rarely, in the past, did I have a conversation with Bruce, let alone anything in common to talk about, other than a child with the same mother, Mary Doyle. So, now it made sense to me to try helping him. If nothing else, our children would see that I was not the bad guy, as far as failing at a relationship with their mom. Having, once again, regained my employment with Salih, I talked him into giving Bruce a chance at doing some groundwork picking up shingles on our tear offs, for instance. It made sense to me that Bruce would feel a gaining in his confidence and self-esteem if he had a job. And It was another gung-ho push on me getting a grip on my life since I had just been on another binge, being approached by a police cruiser to be asked if I was okay while I stood out on a street corner at five in the morning, waiting for someone to come back with the dope, who was probably watching me from a window while smoking the dope that they had bought with my money. It ended up that I had to accept being robbed and so I started the long walk back from Franklin Street, all the way back to Forty-fourth Street, for the entire world to see.

I guess my desperation was so much that in order to help myself, I had to help someone else but that really made no sense, since I could find no way to really help myself but to try to keep a job. And it was all I could do to do that. I had no business worrying about Bruce, and little did I know he was a lost cause. What I did was open up to Salih. He was the only person I knew who was sober and with a sober mind. Salih didn’t really have any real answers, not any different than the truth of the reality, (quit drinking), but he helped in every way I allowed him to.

Salih gave Bruce a job to do, and he soon assisted us with securing an apartment that one of his clients had available. Part of the deal was that there was a lot of work that it needed to have done to it in order to be rented out by law. The kitchen was in a shambles and the bathroom needed some serious love. The back entrance stairwell needed some intensive care, in addition to overhauling windows and an interior paint job. It was a great relief and I was happy to have it. And I think Bruce was too. This was the McReynolds place off of the southeast corner of Leonard and Alpine. After settling in I went out to a few of my lesser toxic friends houses to brag up my new developments. Now is when I go through the Matt and Sara phase- learning of their divorce, and trying to lend a hand…. Like I didn’t have my hands full with my own rehabilitation and with trying to provide Bruce with a chance to regain his dignity.