Sandy pt 15 from 1A of "A Broken Life" blogspot- real title "Escaping The Despondent Sea"

It would come out later how, Tim Steele, a local Radio Celebrity for WLAV FM, had lived upstairs in the recent past. He had a girl over who had overdosed on heroine and forced him to solve that little problem without drawing attention to his own activities that would surely become strewn about by the Media. The Grand Rapids Press would have had a hay-day with it. It is possible that WLAV would have had their attorneys step in the clean up and quiet down the mess without any attention but who knows what would have been done until it happened. If it were my self in his shoes, I’d be praying that I had a larger than life reputation to pull the real strings on the situation. That would definitely be when a person like him would find out just how important he is. 

Well, you guessed it, being such a big sucker and a glutton for punishment; I brought the girls in to my apartment too. I have no real clue how long it took before everything that could go wrong went wrong at my place. It didn’t help that these girls recruited an ex-girlfriend of Dan’s to “help.” This woman just so happened to drop in to Dan’s a day or two after this all went down. She was an elementary school teacher with a huge drinking problem and no fear or shame with taking it to the streets when she needed money. I can only assume that they bought dope with the money because for some reason we got a hotel on the edge of town very close to Marne. It is easily remembered because this woman and I went there and ended up being thrown out of the Pit Stop Bar by the barkeeper, who was a friend of mine, for dancing without my shoes on. In a few short days she would be gone and I would finally lose my cool with the rest of my strays.

It was a day when I had just gotten home from work. As I settled into my favorite sitting place in the living room I discovered that the girl in the Beret was in the front bedroom with one of the strays, which not only made me angry, it confused me because if he fell into a barrel of tits he’d come out sucking his thumb. They were just using me for my apartment, my money, my property- everyone in the place was. They were there by my undeserving grace and had taken me for a huge sucker. This happened just as I had realized how obvious it was that nobody would be contributing to the household. It would become clear when I found my weed and booze gone regularly. These were items that I shared with them when I was home. They must have figured that it belonged to the house as a part of my unusual hospitality. The world’s biggest fool was my self for the moment but that was about to become an impression that I was going to demonstrate a correction of.

Right about now, I discover that the girl in the Beret was trying to practice witchcraft on me. As I am reading them the riot act and telling him that he was leaving, she came out of the kitchen with a small saucepan that had some strange looking mixture of ingredients in it. There were small vials containing some types of extracts in her pocket of her smock, as well as strewn about and on the counter in the kitchen. It was clear that it was done franticly. She was urging me with a sudden suspicious affection, to ingest the mixture. It wouldn’t be anything but a waste of time and energy for anyone to try to convince me that I may be wrong, for you should always trust your instincts and the messages that you are in tune enough to receive, however late they may come to your attention.

At the very moment, putting words like these in ink, I am curious if a deity of an evil kind wasn’t something that had become a part of my reality years ago, and continues to follow me until I become destroyed, I wonder…?

Where was I, Oh, the girl was a big mistake to bring home. For some reason I decided, in all fairness, to give them a certain amount of time to vacate my apartment then next morning. They must have thought that I didn’t really mean it when I had told them to leave the night before. I was right in the middle of giving them the count of ten to gather their things and leave when Bob pulled up to pick me up for work that morning. Maybe I had already gotten to ten because I recall him mentioning something about the stuff that was strewn about in the front yard, like clothes and hangers, along with a couple of old sea chests and a foot locker… When I had gotten to the count of five, I went to the front picture window and opened it as wide as it would go to let them know it was real. The guy she was in bed with- the stray, I call him, was crying saying, “Why Zach, why?” It didn’t begin to soften my fury and only enraged me that he had the nerve to insinuate that I was in the wrong. When I got to ten I grabbed the biggest package I could find and launched it out the window and into the yard below. Some of the things bounced out into the street among the cars that were parked along the road. Right after launching the second chest out the window, the Beret attacked. She came at me like I would imagine a full-grown lioness, in a wild rage. Wow! She put up a real fight- one hundred times more than anyone had ever came at me with before. All I could allow myself to do was to minimize what harm could come to me by blocking her and wrestling her to the floor in an attempt to restrain her, overpowering her into a nicely rolled up ball. She was like holding onto a huge spring that I had compressed, waiting for the slightest easing up on the pressure so she could fly apart. We were both breathing extremely heavy with exhaustion, hormones and adrenaline flooding through our veins. It was exhilarating, sexual, as if we had been through a series of rigorous sexual acts sought out by those who hungered with lust to make their wildest fantasies come true.

Now, I gave the other guy two weeks to find somewhere else to go but he gets up, as up as his stump of a frame could raise him, squaring off in an attempt to fight me. I really didn’t want to fight with him at all. When he made motion to grab at me I placed my hands at the shoulders along his biceps just above his elbows and twisted him down to the floor like I was laying down a one hundred sixty pound cabinet, saying, “Don’t make me hurt you. I gave you two weeks.” With that, I took a cigarette out, lit it and went down to the van to speak to Bob briefly about leaving for work.

Bob had a nervous air about him, not knowing what to expect, and having witnessed the eruption from the upstairs window out into the yard as he pulled up in front of the house. “I need a couple more minutes,” I said to him, “I’m almost finished.” He just chortled a bit in complete surprise, and with a bit of disbelief over what he had witnessed. As I think about it now, I am wondering if she wasn’t part of the group from the beginning but maybe that’s giving them all too much credit.

Anyhow, on the way out to the van to finally leave, I stopped at their car, finishing my protest at being duped by puncturing all four tires on their Plymouth Horizon sitting behind the house. Maybe I did it at some earlier point in my fit of rage, either way; it sure put a stick in the spokes because now they had no vehicle to leave with.

Lesson learned? Respect the vehicle and learn to recognize what a vehicle for change is. They take many forms. I had immobilized a vehicle for change in my life and now that much-needed change was going to be more unlikely to satisfy my desires.

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.