"Misery" pt 11

Charles Fizer and I got along really well. We respected each other and became friends fairly quick, while working together at PermaLife Incorporated. He was with me in the beginning of the end, and he’s with me in the beginning of the new ending. He has seen my worst and he knows my best. And I am one of the few people who him and his wife Candice welcome in their home. It would be his friendship that would keep me going when I was at my worst. Without Charles, I would find no one, and anyone that may have been there to help was impossible for me to reach. It wouldn’t be long before I would end up at my mother’s after Mindy left. That wouldn't be before being nearly swallowed up by the demons in the street, and crack cocaine.

The decision to quit my job at Permalife Incorporated was made at Christmas time. The funny thing about that Christmas- the gift-giving season, was that the next shock came directly from my Father-in-law whom claimed to have begged Mindy not to go through with the divorce. Only, his motives of seeming support were resting on a fact that I now learned, and that was, that I was actually renting the house at 738 Rosewood from him, while I was under the impression that he helped me buy it. He was taking a profit from ME, taking away from my efforts, so that he could reduce his own house payment by combining two homes on one mortgage. I tallied him onto my mental list, my “ridding” pile.  My mother would later tell me about Marc offering to buy her a saddle for her horse, and of his desire to wear it while she helped him entertain his fecal fetish.

So I ended up at my mom’s for a while, along with Stan, her worthless man-ling. Stan had been recently fired from the Post Office. His error was his mentality. Not everyone is employable. He constantly proved that. One particular day, Stan took it upon himself to lighten his mailbag the most effective way he could think of, which was by throwing the bulk mail in the trash dumpster behind a McDonald’s. Incidentally, the bulk mail in particularly happened to be the Advo-system cards that have an advertisement on one side and a missing child alert on the other, of all of the things for a person to throw away, especially a parent. An employee of McDonald’s had found the mail when they took out the trash. Man, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall that day! And how often was he doing this?

Stan had a trucking company now, resurrected from one of his earlier home-based business ventures. The transport service was called “Top-Trans”. The irony of that was that he was as close to the bottom as you could get. Rarely could he find work. Nobody could work with him, and nobody could work for him. Anyone that had hired him in the past wouldn’t even consider hiring him again. And that was just sub-contract work. At one time he convinced some poor woman into marriage and breeding with him but that ended with tragedy as a result of his travesty of a contribution as a husband and a father. This young lady tragically left him; killing the children and her self out of the sheer misery he introduced and kept them in.

Our yard often smoldered in spots where Stanley had burned the material possessions that once belonged to his wife and children but that was just because he didn’t want anyone else to have them, especially the very people he was robbing and cheating in every way he possibly could at that moment in time. If he wasn’t burning things, he was chain smoking on the computer twenty-four hours a day in a room that he took over and controlled in the house, even though my mother didn’t smoke or allow it in her house or around her, especially since her father had passed away from lung cancer. When Stan wasn’t doing that, he was filling the property with pure junk at the immediate expense of my mother. It caused property devaluation and numerous complaints along with fines and harassment from the Wright Township office. When he had idle time on his sick hands, he was running the washer and drier with nothing in them, and flushing cigarette butts down the toilet in his campaign to ruin the appliances, cost excessive electricity use, ruin the septic system and dry up the well. I really can’t help but wonder what it would have taken to rid the world of him too.

How fortunate for all of these individuals that I am not a murderer. It would have been nothing to kill them but for my own principles, and added to the misery that would occupy me further with my own destruction. They would lock me up and throw away the key if they knew how angry I could have easily justified being. For I know what the taste of blood is. And I have been licking my wounds everyday of my life.

Now, let me tell you, no prison will ever compare to the prison that a child learns to live in without the inherent affections and nurturing that they didn’t ask to be here on Earth to have the need for.

It’s a curiosity I have. Was he taking shots at my mother for his ex-wife’s actions? Was he punishing her for the sake of making her suffer as he felt he had or was???

Strength is often, if not almost always, misunderstood. The strength that it truly takes to be able to deal with these situations, and the memories- to control the bridle and bit on the beast of pain that runs rampant in the heart and mind, always needing to be channeled, giving energy to art. Giving life to the art that I am living or dying to share. Funny thing is, I go back and forth from wanting to share something with the world, to wanting the world to have nothing. That the world in general does not deserve it but I tell myself that some forms of life on this planet exhaust themselves to give life to just one. If I can just give to one, other than myself, it will be worth the effort to catalogue things but even if I reach out to no one- in the end, at least I found something more to live for, while making myself happy by venting to conquer my pains.

It has been said, (and I am not sure by whom), that he who laughs the loudest on the outside cries hardest on the inside. I have lived, and have to agree this to be mostly truth, for I have, literally, been in hysterics since the seeming subsidence of one of my earlier traumas. 

So many people are in a state of hysteria. Along with the attempts at taking the intentional risks that may cause death to a child, my stepfather invested a lot of time in terrorizing us, especially me. I was often called an assortment of names, not in fun, like “turtle-neck” and “pout face” since I can ever remember, only to have Scoot and Scooter added to a list that would grow over the years. That particular name started when I was learning to read and write, and had been so foolish not to save such an expensive vowel for if I was ever on Wheel of Fortune. My demonstration of what we were learning yielded the misspelling of my middle name. I would be taunted with this up until I was fifteen, coincidentally when he left. 

The hysterics part started in late seventy-four when he took us to Six Flags over Atlanta Georgia, to see Jaws. He always loved to frighten us, genuinely frighten us. Another strange coincidence is my current wife, Jenny, was also traumatized by this film- only it wasn’t intentional. When the diver picked the tooth out of the hole in the hull of the sunken boat, and the decapitated head of a crew member rolled out, I went into shock- hysterical, uncontrollable fits of screaming and laughter. We were eventually ushered out of the theater when it was evident that I wasn’t going to calm down. I would be maliciously reminded for a long time to come, that I pissed myself as well. My childhood from then on (because I only remember the lights on the ceiling from the day I was born) was none, to very small bits and pieces. 

Most of the very few memories I have were mere moments like walking the shores of Georgia’s Blue Ridge Lake, finding line and fishing lures among the rocks. My hopes were to find one with a big fish on the end of one. Another was of playing with my sister at our Aunts hair salon, spending time in the pet store downstairs. The smell of cedar bedding is still in my nose. Everything else has always been a blur- blacked out, though my wet sheets would be a reminder of the damage, and would remain a topic to be tormented with well into my teens.