Part 16

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 that night, while I was there with William- distracting me from receiving the messages that were there for me to take in.

Anyway, one item, 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- Sarah, Cody, and Scarlett. 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.

Howard robbing me for crack after Mindy left.

That little detail just spun the clock back on this yarn to before I lost the house to Minderella’s father. The company I had become associated with led me into a lot of unusual situations that may or may not be typical of the crack cocaine scene. This company went by the name, Howard. I met Howard when I found myself off of Franklin Street between Eastern and Madison Avenue. My mission was to score fifty dollars worth of cocaine. He and an associate of his were working the streets, hustling by hooking people up with dope or taking their money entirely. I was one who got ripped off. Instead of fifty dollars worth of dope I was left with a crack-head who did everything he could to stay by my side. Only in hopes of me buying dope, so he could smoke some. He fed me a bunch of sob stories that caused me to end up bringing him back to my house so he could use my shower and eat something. It wasn’t until much later, steeped in the environment, that I would learn of his social status, and the intentions of an addict for an unsuspecting victim, especially someone love starved, friendless, and being psychologically and emotionally impaired.  

He would coach me on how to smoke the drug, always doing what he could to insure that the next hit he had would be doubled due to the dope I tried to smoke running down the pipe to the other end when it became liquefied from an inappropriate amount of heat being applied. He would shove the screen to the other end, load it with another piece, and blow out a huge cloud of smoke. I got sick of his instruction, at one point realizing what he was doing and why, shouting at him to shut the hell up. “You graduated, baby,” was what he said to me at that moment. I was suddenly disgusted and sickened by what I had gotten myself into, and sickened by the reality of the drug I was dabbling with, and all of the people associated with it. Without anyone from my past around to see, I slipped deeper into the grasp of the Demons that I allowed to torment me. Although a part of me knew it was bad, a part of me still said that I could do anything I set my mind to, which was walking into the caves of seriously dangerous Demons, taking what was mine, and walking back out with my life. 

Despite my anguish and misery I still reached out to help people like Howard, asking them questions like, “Is this how you want to die?” At some point in my delusions I even wondered if I might be Jesus incarnate, coming back to try to stimulate a change in mankind. It’s crazy, I know but I wondered that just the same. I was desperately searching for a reason why I had gone through such changes of events and circumstances in my life. How could I go from being a successful business owner, with everything I always cared to have for myself, to the edge of the grave? There had to be something more to it that I did not understand. I couldn’t just simply be stalling from my death, could I? Kind of like, “Screw it, I might as well, I am dead anyway.”

One night, around nine, we were approached by a group of kids, asking us to buy them booze. Howard took up the collection and went into the store. Moments turned into minutes when the kids decided it was time to vandalize my truck because Howard wasn’t returning. They grabbed up steel pipes from a vandalized chain-link fence and proceeded to trash the cap on my truck. These kids were eventually arrested for the vandalism. Howard had ripped the kids off while they had attempted to buy some booze. The money ran through Howard’s fingers and led him right out the door to the next dope house, which was right around the next corner. My truck paid the fee for the evening.

Howard would introduce me to his child’s mother whom I would find out was another addict. Her name was Selena. A little while later I would end up at her place, where she lived with a roommate named Diamond. There was a man there who had been beating them up but I had no clue why. He wasn’t there when I got there but would be returning soon. She was scared and asked me if I had any friends she could stay with, so I took her out to my truck, which had been idling in the snow and ice covered parking lot for about twenty minutes. As we got to the truck, this guy they called Grey (short for Grayson) saw us and came running toward us. We got into the truck but he jumped into the bed, trying to attack her through the window. I was trying to drive away when he got in the back, opening the slider window. Why she didn’t beat him with any of the tools I had in there, I don’t know. All I could think to do was drive, trying to fling him from the back of the truck without running into any of the other cars or people that were in the parking lot. How he managed to be removed from the truck is not a recollection I have but the truck did overheat in the process, blowing a radiator hose on the top end of the engine. I parked the truck down the street from my house that night, thinking he might come looking for me, identifying my truck at the house. What I didn’t expect was for her girlfriend, Diamond, to rat out her whereabouts for a twenty-dollar piece of dope.

How late it was when I finally went to sleep, I do not know but when I woke up it was due to her screaming. I tried to get up but I was attacked from behind, beaten about the head, and punctured in the upper left side of my back with a shard from a bowl that he had broken when he threw it at me.  Exhaustion was dominated with an adrenalin rush, motivated by the persistent screaming of Selena. I rolled off of the mattress toward the wall, grabbing the mattress and rolling it over with me to stand using the mattress as a shield. Now I got a visual and moved to shove him out of the room and down the staircase with it. When he realized I was coming at him, he fled the scene. That’s when I saw the other guy with a gun in his hand. He fled right behind him after making eye contact with me.

I looked down at Selena, who was still screaming, and now I knew why. Her face was busted up pretty badly. Her top lip was split in two pieces below her nose. Blood was all over her. Blood was all over the entire room. It looked like a slaughterhouse, sprayed all over the floor, walls, ceiling, and us. We must have been having a heart to heart about addiction, life, and kids because my box of pictures was there in the room with us, now splattered with blood.

It was the neighbors who called the cops, bringing an ambulance arrived ahead of them. Selena and I both ended up at Blodgett Hospital, where we received care for our injuries. Both of us needed stitches- her far worse off than I. Mindy showed up to see me, and told me about all of the different chemicals ending with “caine” that were found in my blood. This was how I ended up learning of how many different ways I had been robbed. Robbed by myself, or by others, it didn’t matter. I needed to somehow remove myself from where I was, to elevate my social class but seeing the mother of my children only added insult to my injuries, and was anything but up-lifting.

Now here I am, two years later, coming away from crack but cavorting with heroine and living with addicts all over again. Bob had been entertaining himself under the guise of helping, by finding things for these girls to do for him. In his wife’s eyes, he was a hero but the truth is that he was so miserable in his own silence that he grabbed onto anything that he could gossip about- probably to comfort himself in his questionable sexuality. I don’t believe that the girls having money did anything to offset my financial burdens, ever, even in the slightest sense. It seemed I continued to pay for things despite their working for Bob.

Anyway, Bob didn’t want these girls to work this particular day, and me, being so trusting, even though having trust issues, I left them at the motel without a second thought. I assumed it was so he could bitch at me for the situation that happened a few days earlier, where the girls were painting a gable end on his house but couldn’t reach the peak area, complaining to me about needing me to help them do it. Well, me being a show-off, I went up to show them how, and they went down to the ground without considering the need to hold onto the paint bucket for me. Though I was on an entirely different task in the shop, I took time for this.

On the roof of the garage I am doing my mighty mouse routine, or better yet, my underdog routine, trying to help out a lot lesser than a Sweet Polly Purebred, when in my haste, I knocked over the pail of Cabot’s Stain. This stuff goes running all over the roof, down into the eaves trough, just like it’s supposed to do when it’s spilled on a rooftop. My first reflex was to use a rag to dab at it with, only because it seemed like a splatter but I realized it was not going to work. One good thing about this was, when I sent them up with the paint, I only sent them up with a small amount of it so there wasn’t really that much. This was a job for the hose, only after getting it and trying to wash it off, I realized it was an oil base product. I did manage to rinse it off once I got it loose from the surface but it left a heck of a residue behind. When Bob finally got back he saw the yard was wet, then he saw the stain on the shingles that he had installed with a one inch crown pneumatic stapler- he lost it, mostly screaming and yelling at me for the contamination of his little garden in the clay. This land in Ottawa County is all clay. Hardly anything grows on it at all. And he is the last one to give a crap about the environment but now I have ruined everything for him. If he was a rational person, even in the least, this wouldn’t have been an issue and I would have left the paint on the shingles to be dealt with on another day but since he was such an irrational person, I was too scared to be able to properly deal with it- starting with helping the girls and reading the can to begin with. I was simply afraid of his reaction, which I am sure being abused by my father was a major factor in my confrontational disorder. [Take notes.]

Anyway, Bob and I are almost to the job that day when his phone rings. He answers the phone and then say’s, “I don’t know,” giggling and turning towards me. “I don’t know? Zach? Where do you want your stuff?” It was Amy and Jen. Suddenly I start freaking out, wondering why I would want my stuff anywhere but at the room where I had left it. It hadn’t dawned on me that they would cash out early, taking the money to feed their addiction. They had recently explained to Bob how I was, “A ray of Hope,” in their lives. It didn’t seem like it but I was shooting craps in life again. Here would have been a great time for Bob to drive to meet them in order to salvage my interests but Bob was so pretentious that he didn’t stink, and if he did it was only fitting that everyone else had to smell him because nobody was fit to breathe the air as it was. My days with him were much the same everyday, most likely reserved for him to express his perpetual vehemence at his mommy abandoning him to his hateful father- dear ol’ daddy.

Bobby grew up in a rural setting, on a large farm property that was just another nonchalant junkyard where dreams that were once someone else’s were bought, hauled to, and cut up into bits. It would become a result of old man Smith’s junk in the yard that no one in Wright township could have anything that resembled junk in their yard. Blame cannot lay only on people with the items in their yards, believed to be or expected to become, monetarily valuable. It gets to be distributed as well to the morons who want to take farms and transform them into high density residential property upon them inheriting it, only to bulldoze the farm and everything on it, and cashing it in as a housing development, which happens to be right next to the highway only separated by a parallel running set of train tracks. This would be his last laugh at his dad for not ever showing him love. Funny thing is, Bob has a brother who did not escape the familial devastation, and actually ended up on the worse end of the suffering, having struggled through life in some hard luck situations. Joe would watch while Bob did what he could to dupe a woman from a well off family into believing he was a loving family man, all the while just a thief. And Joe would grab at the world’s straws, trying to find himself a decent life.

Joe ended up in a situation involving cocaine, where he allegedly managed to manufacture some checks, only to cash them in to buy dope. He went to jail and served his time at a work camp, managing to pay the money back. Somehow, his wife lost the kids whom Cheryl spearheaded getting the custody of, leaving Joe to be forced to pay Child Support to Bob and Cheryl. It’s odd how Bob beat his brother up with the system, all the while mean-mouthing the children to me, while at work all day. Bob was such a hypocrite, bragging about his drinking and pot smoking, while humiliating poor Joe over the pitfalls he had found on his search for happiness. Without Cheryl, Bob would just as soon continue in his self indulgence and deviant activities, all the while drooling over other women every other second of his time out in public- a travesty. Frequently, he would have me get him pot, only to throw it in my face that I was a dope-head while he would be drinking and driving. And ridiculing me, on top of it, about my drinking problem and how big of a problem it was for him to have to deal with, while he came to work religiously with a hangover, only to abuse me until he felt better, which was quitting time when he could start all over again. It was the price I had to pay for having an understanding of him. All the while, he remained ignorant of the least of my charity, as well as my forgiveness for him.