Sandy pt 9 from part 1a of "A Broken Life" false title.

In the meantime, Bob was on the north end of Grand Rapids, at the real job, installing decorative columns that I had built. His fear was that the builder would recognize who the real Finish Carpenter was, between the two of us. The builder was anxious to meet me but Bob wanted to keep me hidden from view, absorbing the credit for what I had been doing in the recent weeks, the main reason for his efforts at destroying me in my mind, destroying my confidence, the confidence that he wished he had. How sad it is to see the sicknesses of today’s men active. It was easy to imagine the conversation he was having, the same conversations I had heard from him so many times in the recent past of others, and the things he had done directly, and caused to be done, to them. He laughed while hiding his insecurities, reveling in duping the only guy that cared about life’s big picture enough to understand him, to forgive him, to fight back with kindness, while feeling sad for the love his wife must long to feel. Sandy and I would eventually catch him in his deception and lies, red-handed that next couple of days. I kept journals that have accumulated over the years. There are many things in them about my relationship with Bob, lying dog-eared in dark cubbies awaiting my reflection.

The tides and tune soon changed and I ended up working for my mom more often, once again needing to pay the lot rent and to make a trailer payment, and in need of a vehicle since my van had taken the toll of time and wear that I could not afford, especially after it was impounded by the Coopersville Police, whom had a hand in rendering it inoperable, which I found out when I tried to collect it from the impound yard. The van wouldn’t start or respond. I don’t know what they did to it but what they did do was make sure I wouldn’t be sleeping in it anywhere around their little village.

Mom had a house in Conklin that I had been working on for some time, earning myself a bit of money to cover my bills, and eventually giving me a truck that she had for sale. We would finish out the winter at River Pines, enduring a constant battering of the negative energy that started with our own. Mom agreed to help us get another lot at a campground somewhere else when we finally paid the trailer off, ending up at, the “Kozy Kountry Kampground,” north of Ravenna, just over the Muskegon border.

Sandy began working at a nursing home in Coopersville, where the staff would routinely help themselves to the drugs in the cart, and to the belongings of some of the residents. They would come in on their days off and say things like, “you don’t see me here.” We feared Sandy would be implicated when, and if, anyone ever caught on to what was going on there. We felt a felony drug charge always threatening her. She soon decided to quit after only working there about two or three months. Which was about how long we lasted at, the “Kozy Kountry Kampground.”

Sandy had taken the truck to work one day, leaving me there at the trailer with some beer. I am not sure that the place wasn’t haunted. It may even be located on sacred Native American burial grounds. At some point, I began running around the countryside gathering greens to cook up, since it was Springtime and there were plenty everywhere that could be picked. The park management caught sight of me and called my mother saying that I was looking like a crazy man and that he was getting complaints. She came out that night to have me pack up so we could pull out, taking the trailer to my mom’s property until we could find another place to take it.

Since I was already near the Conklin project, I would continue working there. Sandy decided that I had worked enough and demanded that I stop, saying that the truck was more than paid for, and that my mother was taking advantage of me. She would go with me, cleaning up around the living quarters my mom had occupied in the basement at that time, even though my mother told her to not mess with her things. It wasn’t long before Sandy found some magazines of Tom’s, titled “Barely Legal.” She went ballistic, shredding them and throwing the pieces all over the kitchen and sitting area, and screaming at me. We argued for several minutes before she jumped in the truck and left to go back to where the trailer was parked at my mother’s property in Marne.

We had no money to speak of, except for a food stamp card and the empty beer cans around the area. Wright Township, in Ottawa County had an ordinance that may still be effective to this day. It states that you cannot occupy a trailer without a permit, which no permits were being issued for such a dwelling situation. This is probably due to a couple of factors, one being the sewage, and two being that it degrades the surrounding community. The van was the only place we had to stay in that wouldn’t get my mother a fine. Sometimes we would sleep over at a friend’s house, or in parking lots in our van around the local area. One day, the van was impounded because we were busted for vagrancy, Sandy left on foot and I was sent to a shelter in Muskegon. It didn’t take long for me to decide that Muskegon and the shelter was not the right place for me to be, so I set off for very long walk back to Coopersville the very next day.

Sandy and I tried to get the van out of impound but we realized they had disabled it to where I could do nothing with it but leave it there to be scrapped out. My mother finally relinquished the truck to me because of it. That night Sandy and I stayed at the trailer, staying up late in the evening talking about what we were going to do. The next morning I got up and left her to rest a while longer because we had been up pretty late the night before. Quietly, I began sprucing the place up a bit while I waited for the day to begin for us. I took care of everything but for a radio I had sitting on a small storage cabinet. The plug was in the wall socket by the sink, which stretched across the hall from where the radio sat. When Sandy finally got up, she walked to the rear of the trailer to get fresh clothing, stepping over the cord. As she tried this maneuver her foot caught the cord, where she tripped and she fell face forward to the floor.

Still to this day, I can’t say why the plug didn’t just fall out of the wall or any number of things but I suppose it’s all relative to gravity, her footing and the dynamics of weight and balance, along with having slow reflexes. As she fell forward and went down, her arm caught the end of the bed, where a corner of it stuck out into the hall about four inches. I heard a pop sound of bone breaking. She lied there a moment and moaned, “Oh no! Oh no!” That was that. Her arm was broken. Helping her up from off of the floor I could see that, from her shoulder to her elbow, the upper part of her arm had an unusual curve to it. That forced me to immediately call mother because we had no gas or money for gas, and Sandy needed to get to the hospital.

What’s crazy is that we had been fighting for days. The biggest and most recent was over the magazines she had found near the microwave and coffee maker area, in a pile of other like-sized paper items. She went absolutely crazy when she saw them. See, it was her idea to help and clean up all of the time. It was her M.O. to spruce up the house she was at for people. She lacked the perception to take the hints from my mother, not to clean up her messes. And so, she found something that she wasn’t supposed to find. Tom was pretty angry about it, especially since he sold the books to his buddy when he was done with them. It was an effort to get the money back that he spent for them- money he definitely couldn’t afford at the time. He expected me to pay for them because of what Sandy had done. It was a few days after that blow-out, the morning that I drove her to the hospital, that I saw the words written in the dirt on the driver’s side of the windshield: “I Love Pussy Books.” My eyes couldn’t believe it and I wondered how many people might have seen it while I had been driving around to various places in the days between the incidences. I laugh out loud now but it wasn’t even on the same planet as funny when it happened. My mother still thinks I had something to do with breaking her arm.

Anyway, I took her to the emergency room and called Sandy’s son, Richard, only after I realized what they were going to do or not do, in order to get her the help that I was not able to coax them into giving her because of my inability to effectively or cordially, communicate in stressful situations since receiving my closed head injury. Ever since then I have a personality disorder that is aggressive and seemingly violent at times. It would only be about four or five days, after her arm became broken, before we would break up once and for all but that was only because on one of those nights I went to Danny’s loft to sleep on the couch instead of sleeping out in the truck on the street-side in front of the Butterworth Hospital. When I went to the hospital with booze on my breath, boy, was she angry. After explaining that I had stayed at Danny’s, she was even more irate because I might have been doing some greater wrong, like playing music or just drinking without her.

From the first night at the hospital, there was a possessiveness that I had failed to see fully until then. She wanted me to stay with her in the room, which was not an issue for me to do at all. It was the medical staff in her area that asked me to leave, saying, “It’s just a broken arm,” so I went out to the truck and slept nights. After a few of these nights of sleeping in the cab of the truck, I paid the price in pain, not to mention meter fees. My lower back and neck proved to need surgery once I resumed going to doctors a few years later, and little did I know, I was leaking spinal fluid the whole time.

On one of the first nights, I ran into Danny at a liquor store. He was on his way to go back to his studio at the loft in the Gezon Building. This warehouse was only a mile and a half from the hospital that Sandy was at. The hospital was on Michigan Avenue, and the warehouse building was on Plainfield Avenue by the Flying Bridge Fish Market. It was the old Gezon building that Sandy and I had done the late night emergency repairs in. It is amazing that we didn’t run into Danny there that night we fixed the doors. Danny and I talked and drank, laughed, and did some art works, played a little music, listened to some tunes, smoked a puff of grass, and that was where I stayed after that. Unfortunately much to Sandy’s disapproval. Or was it unfortunate?

Danny and I were very close friends. Out of all of the things that happened to me, and out of all of the situations, and people that I became acquainted with and went through in life, Danny was the gem of them all. He would prove to be the one person that I would end up recognizing and give full credit to for my getting my life back to belonging to me, that is, if it ever did.

When Sandy got out of the hospital, I took her to Danny’s place to see for her self. Of course, all she could see was an orgy going on, as if it was a pad of male sirens luring women in with advertisements that “we could be had”, as Sandy would put it. She went right to her son’s house for a place to stay that day. The agreement was made between them that there would “be no more Zach.” That was fine with me since I now hated, loathed, and even despised going out in public with her, only to be accused of looking at other women. I had to be drooling over them. They were there! And she always said so, so it had to be true. It was only too much time wasted before I realized how truly jealous, insecure and paranoid she was. Yeah, if there was a woman within view, I was looking. Funny thing is, out of all the grief I dealt with, I felt sorry for her and women everywhere who had been abused and neglected so badly, starting with their own fathers in their infancies, that they didn’t know how to respond when someone was genuine and earnest. They become so accustom to getting stepped upon that they are always ready for it. And if they don’t actually see it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s always there. I wanted to take all of these people into my arms and show them that LOVE is REAL. It hurts me to see people bare the scars of abuse. It goaded me and fueled my thirst, a thirst that was already overwhelmed with the fuel from my own pains that were much the same, with the same scars that go unseen by the untrained eye and the untrained conscience.

She and I would continue to speak for a little while in between working and living at my mom’s house in Conklin, where I slept in an old camper van that she had in the backyard. It had belonged to my Uncle Bill and Aunt Bernice. It was full of bees but I stayed in it anyway, with my wolf/German Sheppard mix, Dusty, accompanying me. This went on through the Autumn season.

I only remember because one night I was going to the Pit Stop bar for Karaoke but I was going too fast and didn’t see the stop sign coming, missing my chance to stop. The road didn’t go through so there was only the left and right to turn on. My wheels locked up on the slippery surface, sliding through the intersection and ending up stuck head first in the ditch. It was a long walk back to Toms hog farm, where I had just been at, but he came up with his truck to pull me out. What we realized was that the ditch I was in was too deep, leaving only the tail end of the truck sticking almost straight up. He had to go back to the barn to get his tractor.

Sandy had wanted me to give her the truck after she burned a bunch of important things in her friend’s backyard while staying there for a few days. One of these things was the title to the trailer that we had just paid off. She would fight me over my meds, trying to use them for herself. She would fight with me about my mother. She would fight with me about everything, breaking CD's that I liked or smashing things that were sentimental. Hindsight, too foolish to see that a woman scorned has no hope or seems not to, that is until she can get over it. Unfortunately, there are some things that people never get over. You would have to know what being scorned truly is to understand.

We all get robbed in a way, especially robbed by someone who is close to us, but we forgive him or her anyway, for ourselves. It’s the only way we can carry on, fulfilling our obligations to those who are entitled to them, our loved ones. The constant reminders of being victimized by my ex-wife, coupled with the loss of my own family, my identity, my business and my manhood, was the main source of fuel for the vehicle that slowly carried me toward complete destruction- a final release that I miserably sought for subconsciously one drink at a time.

The words of my ex-wife would, and sometimes still, echo in my head like a movie that I am being forced to watch. Visions of her and our children bombard me. Little did I realize it was part of my medical condition, Frontal Lobe Syndrome, compounded trauma, P.T.S.D.- shell-shocked. My days would come and go, unknown to me. I rarely know what day it is or what time it is. My life is sometimes a blur and I am a madman. Some one should have hospitalized me. Alcohol was the only medication readily available. It was as if I was a Marionette. I had little to no control of anything. Food had been, and still sometimes is, of no concern. Bathing and grooming were and still sometimes are of little or no concern. My only concerns were tobacco and alcohol, and weed if I could manage them. I didn’t drink to get high. I drank to die.

Although I couldn’t outright bring myself to die in the here and now, it was all I could hope for because all hope seemed to be lost. My soul was crying nonstop, and I had no one to cling to, no one to call, and no one who would take time to care, except for Danny, when I finally relocated him. That was how I got involved with the people who lurked in the shadows, people who panhandled for change and cigarettes, outside of the college crowd bars, in Eastown, Michigan. This bar area was where I ran to when Mindy announced her plans. These people and their demons latched onto me in their ways. The trials and tribulations of my life that would pose the biggest challenge to my evolving as an individual, and pose the biggest threats to my life, began here, at that point in Eastown, when Minderella destroyed my home, my family, and the futures of my children as they were becoming in that reality that I helped to largely shape.

This trip I went on was a long strange trip, to say the least. I can only describe it at that moment as a round trip that started on Earth and went to the far edges of space to every galaxy at the speed of light. It was extreme misery, a broken heart and failure that never would look away, staring me in the face like a showdown. I pulled the trigger and watched as the bullet hung there before me, taking lifetimes to reach me in order to pierce my heart, so I ran toward it. And it seemed the faster I ran toward it, the longer it took. It was as if it only got further away as I tried to get closer to an end to my life, laughing as it evaded me. Imprisoned in this new reality, nothing could ever really hurt me further. I was mesmerized by it. It would be, what felt like, a lifetime to get through but would only seem as a blink of an eye in my past. It proved that I was not meant to die yet but what was I alive for? I smoked tobacco because I was nervous, and used pot because of my nightmares and anxiety. I consumed copious amounts of alcohol because I was miserable with pains- my back, my teeth, and in my heart and my soul. I used it all to make me feel better, to feel better until I could be dead. And then I found Danny but I’ll get to that.