"Sandy, pt4"

Now, it’s hard to do things when you don’t have a partner that contributes in a 

comprehensive fashion, which is why I took so much clothing and tools that I really had no 

business taking. Like bringing an antique Italian revolver that looked like it was found after 

lying for eighty years in a river somewhere while fishing. It was all rusted and froze up, 

though intact enough to clearly be a pistol. At first glance it looked like you may be able to 

fire it, although for the last time, before exploding in your hands. This was not at all 

practical, and with a clear mind now, it’s easy for me to see- hindsight. Luckily I never 

made it fire or else the demons that Sandy and I had haunting our lives would have forced 

the bullet to find her fate or mine.

We arrived at Crystal Mountain to find a very prestigious little community nicely tucked 

away in a Pine forest. Ski slopes were revealed through the trees, at few points, which 

could be a comfort to people like Judge Power of the Thirteenth Circuit Court or Mr. 

Jarboe- my joke of a defense, since I am sure that there are people who would love to take 

a rifle shot at them. This place would be a secure area in that respect.

My eyes were wide as the log style look of the homes caught my senses with their grand 

features extending out port style over horseshoe driveways like something you’d come to

 expect to find in Colorado. A golf course wound through the forestry that cradled the 

loosely scattered homes, here and there a flag indicating a putting green. It was great. It 

was magnificent.

After several lazy turns of the road, we found the project, easily identified by the two trucks 

and large enclosed tool trailer. The tool trailer was pretentious, yet petty and anal retentive, 

revealing more about Tom. Inside it were nicer kitchen cabinets than the majority of homes 

being built in the affluent communities I had worked on in the past.  These were for 

keeping tools in. I felt it was an example of how important his time with his wife or his own 

children was to him. He probably used it as a makeshift dwelling when his wife threw him 

out of the house, which I am sure happened a lot. He was just another self indulgent 

egotist to add to the list of piss-poor examples of men I had dealt with, and what a list it 

was until I realized it’s a disease of men and that most are afflicted, although willingly. 

I was no exception.

We spent that day building onto the house until early evening when Tom handed me a 

room key, saying something about my probably wanting to “go to the womb.” I am sure it

 had a lot to do with seeing me show up there with Sandy, and the fact that she was so 

much older than I. It seemed clear to him that I had “mommy issues.” And whether that’s 

true or not, the reality was she had issues of her own that didn’t allow for me to be out of 

her sight, however blurry.

 Tom and Johnny had a room down the hall from ours, if not each having their own. They 

came by later for drinks, and then we went outside for a smoke while Sandy insisted on 

preparing something for us to eat. That’s when I took them out to the car to show them the 

stuff I had in the trunk, mainly, the revolver. Sandy’s eyesight came up in conversation, 

saying that she must not be able to see very well. Maybe it was another crack at her age, I 

don’t know but I just replied with that for being the reason I rarely let her clean the weed- 

because she can’t see well enough to get all of the seeds out of it. The three of us laughed 

pretty good at that comment, knocking back the rest of our beers for another round. And, 

Oh man, how we drank that night.

We went back inside to eat some food but instead of eating I broke out the bottle of Cherry

 Kijafa, putting that on top of the thirty pack of Milwaukee’s Best Ice I had been drinking 

on… and the weed… and the gin. As if five point nine percent beer wasn’t enough. After

they left for the night, we started fighting. We fought for much of the night. Management 

came twice or maybe three times, to quiet us down. The police came at one point but 

couldn’t do anything because I seemed to not be a problem when they arrived. At some

point she attacked me and I bit one of her breasts in the scuffle, leaving a nasty bruise. I 

drank so much that night that I passed out and urinated all over the bed, which was a very

nice bed, causing her to get out the hide-a-bed to sleep on.

The next morning we tried to clean the place up. She found the hair dryer and tried to 

clean up the bed but it was useless. I was still drunk but that didn’t stop me from opening

a beer that morning, which must have been when Sandy decided she was taking the car 

and leaving me behind.  She packed up the rental car and took all of my money, leaving me

a twenty-dollar bill that I was too drunk to find in my wallet. She took the booze and the 

pot, except for what I had in my pocket that was rolled up from the night before. My glass

marijuana pipe got hidden somewhere during the drunken madness of the evening with

the expectation that the cops were coming, It was left behind to be found by the cleaning

staff or person who owned the room wherever I had hidden it.



She loaded up the food we had brought, and finished by loading up all of the empty beer

cans. I followed her out a moment later, after finishing my beer, my arms full of my 

belongings. She was already in the car as I set them down to open the trunk. Then she 

turned the ignition, put the car into gear and pulled out of sight. She just went to get gas I 

told myself, expected her to be coming back to hurry me along and take one last look 

around for the pipe or something we may be forgetting. I waited there while drinking 

another beer. I said out loud, “maybe it’s just a threat. What happened last night anyway?”

Moments went by before I realized she had no intention of coming back. I had a 

momentary lapse of reason, deciding that I was in no condition to see Tom and Johnny 

after what had happened last night. I panicked over being seen by any of the resort staff or 

being seen sitting out in the parking lot at all, so I started walking with all of my things. 

Fortunately there were only about one or two hundred people that could have witnessed 

my display, reminiscent of Steve Martin in the Jerk, drunkenly, and slovenly, walking down 

the street with my arms loaded with pure junk- my clothes, my tools, a broken pistol, and a 

Zip-lock baggie full of whatever it was she had made the night before. I wasn’t very happy 

about it.



“Maybe she just went to the store,” I thought. I kept telling myself that she was going to 

turn around and come back for me in a minute but the minute kept renewing itself to a new 

minute that I would have to wait through all over again. 

The thought renewed of what she was doing, like she had just gone to clear her head or 

get some cigarettes.

While on the “heel-toe express” I dreaded every fully exposed and hung-over step of the 

way. As my feet were shuffling, I wondered WHEN she would be coming back for me. And 

if I walked the right way for her to be able to find me when she did. I mean, how could I get 

very far with a big bag of crap and all the rest of the junk I had with me? How far could I 

get before I ran into the cops like this. They would surely stop and ask me why I was in the 

area looking like a vagrant. I had weed on me and was inebriated. I had a gun, working or 

not, it’s still a gun. And I am hiking on a highway with a difficult load to carry. Getting 

picked up was a huge risk and it motivated me to push on quickly. I am sure it was a sight 

to see.

Before too long, I located a gas station in my view up ahead. I recognized the place from 

the day before. We had stopped here and bought alcohol and supplies- as opposed to 

supplies and alcohol. I went in and asked for directions, buying some tobacco with some 

change I had in my pocket- still unable to find the money in my wallet. He pointed me

in the right direction and I left the store, stopping outside to roll some cigarettes.

My arms were so tired I knew I couldn’t keep carrying the stuff any longer, so I took in a 

good visual of my surroundings. Up the road I spotted an intersection with a lot of forestry 

along it. I spotted a good spot to enter the woods, heading toward it with my stuff. There 

was no traffic when I entered the forest but I wondered if hunters would stumble across my 

booty, if this were where I left it. I looked for something that I would easily recognize when I 

came back to the area. As it was, all I needed to do was to find the gas station again to 

locate the spot. Now all I needed was a geographical oddity that would be a good 

secondary marker. I found a large felled tree, knocked over by a storm. There was a 

depression in the dirt with lots of limbs and leaves lying around the area. The bag of 

clothes, the gun, the tools and the food, everything except for my tool belt with my hand 

tools in it, was left in that spot. I buried it in leaves and limbs and left for the road.

Now I was liberated or so it seemed. The leaves of that October crunched under my feet 

as I exited the forest with confidence that I would relocate it. One of my last worries was of 

wolves or coyotes tearing up my buried treasure. After a pretty good handful of miles, I 

happened upon a liquor store where I, finally, was able to find that twenty dollar bill in my 

wallet, so I poisoned, I mean, treated myself to a small bottle of whiskey to find the realm 

of familiarity I was lost in while I was in my abandon.

 

Many cars passed me by on that road, and feeling rejected and helpless, it was easy to 

temporarily abandon my abandonment to take a breather under a bridge where a creek ran 

through. This was a great place to smoke some weed. It was out of the wind, and out of 

view. The sound of the flowing water was much needed, as was the time off of my feet, 

giving me time to think about things and recharge a bit.

The distance I had hiked after that is uncertain, though I am sure it was quite a ways 

because the sun got to a point where it was no longer morning but nearing sunset before I 

finally got a ride from a young couple who happened to be in Traverse City at a family 

gathering. They had a tray of Hors d’oeuvres that they offered me to eat from- finger foods 

like onion wraps and veggies with dip etc… They drove a light blue Blazer, saying that they 

had just left one of their parent’s homes and were headed to the Alpine area off of U.S. 131 

in Grand Rapids. Perfect, exactly where I was going. I thanked them profusely as I climbed 

in, offering to compensate them if they could get me to my trailer, just twenty miles from 

where they were going.

They drove me right to the Conestoga campground, where I found the trailer to be locked. 

It wasn’t hard to get in by climbing in through the utility hatch that was on the side near the 

access to the holding tanks. The hatch went in under the bed and the bed lifted up to 

expose storage space underneath. I still can’t believe I did it. Had it not been for my being 

so thin from drinking so much, I probably would not have been able to do it but I was so 

angry that Sandy had left me behind that anything was possible. Opening the door to let 

them in, a car pulled up just then. It was Sandy.

Sandy was all smiles and cheer when she saw me there, nonchalantly stating how she had 

stopped and got a room at a Motel Six to catch up on some sleep, just as drunk from the 

night before as I was. It was as if we had met back at the trailer after a much-needed 

vacation, like nothing dramatic had happened at all. It was a sticky sweet interlude but had 

I not shown up when I did, the trailer and her would have vanished completely, I am 

certain. 



I had a strange feeling that she was on a trip to somehow get revenge for things that 

happened to her in the past, like losing a mobile home in a bad break-up, something she 

felt she was entitled to. All she needed was the right situation, which I pretty much 

gave her in the events from the night before.

My memory of all of these things may not be as fluid, as far as any time-line or 

chronological order goes but it’s pretty damn good. Actually, I am amazed that it is as 

good as all of these stories make it seem. It should be only a blur from all of the polluting I 

did to myself, drinking some of the worst drink and my using the finest poisons. Oh well, 

call it a gift and be thankful.

So, I’m not sure how things were that next day but I know things were quiet that night. And 

I know that I never worked for Tom Bruin again. It was several weeks before I got paid for 

the work I had done but when I finally did get paid, he had his wife meet me off of Alpine 

Avenue at a Dentist where she was already taking her son for an appointment., in order to 

meet up to get the check. She handed me a check that was nine hundred dollars short, 

telling me that they were forced to deduct it by their insurance company because I had no 

liability insurance policy to cover me being on the project. What good was it to even try to 

argue with her about it? It’s not like I was going to be able to get her to write me a check 

for the difference. Tom had made no mention about this huge detail. Clearly, he sent her as 

a buffer, and I, working paycheck to paycheck, needed the money days ago. It was a 

typical scenario for a sub-contractor in the construction business. But it’s possible that the 

nine hundred was for the repairs to the hotel room and replacement of the bed. We still 

haven’t spoke and I have yet to return for my treasure.



All Sandy cared about was getting some pot, and going back to the camper to pass the 

time by getting high and sucking down some booze, pretending we were all by ourselves 

on the planet. I was fit to be tied. My grief was compounded from all sides and there was 

no place to go to find a single person to confide in over anything. All that my mother would 

say anytime I tried to talk to her about things was, “You people sure have a lot of 

problems.” This from a woman who had a complaint about everything and everyone, 

having worked at the post office for a number of years- the exact kind of person you hear 

about on the news going “postal.” If anyone were ever suspected of “going postal”, it 

would be her though it never happened as far as I know. Yes, that’s what she would say if 

she took time to acknowledge me in my distress. Eventually I ran out of money and 

resorted to my ol’ standby… picking up cans for their ten-cent deposit.

I remembered the night I caught the Allendale grocery store using illegal labor as my elbow 

ached while combing the roadside for beer cans: I had been drinking all day and I was 

fighting the end of it, so I jumped in the van and limped to the store for another thirty pack. 

When I got to the store it looked open but the doors were locked. A young man saw that I 

was trying to get in. He came to the door and opened it with a big smile. As I hurried for 

the beer cooler, I noticed that the store was being cleaned and that everyone was Latino, 

and that they were actually closed. This issue was in the news a lot in the prior weeks- 

illegal labor from over the border. My only concern was with getting a box of beer before 

the store manager realized I was there, planning on swiping my card at a self check out 

and blasting out in a flash. My feet marched me right to the cooler. I grabbed the beer and 

raced back down the aisle to the register but my feet magically slipped out from under me. 

On the way to the floor, I put my hand out to break my fall but had my arm locked, which 

jammed my elbow, slamming me into the floor and aggravating my back injury. The floors 

were wet with fresh wax. The machines that were being operated on the floors shut off and 

several people who spoke no English came to help me up. That’s when the manager came 

around to see why the machines had stopped running. She chided me for being in the 

store since it was closed, asking me how I got in. When I explained that the help had 

opened the door, she ordered me out. She was pretty startled at my being there in a 

precarious position to observe what was going on there with the illegal help functioning as 

employees. It’s too bad I was drunk because I could have blackmailed or outright exposed 

the store for it. Too bad I messed that up. Live and learn, I suppose. 

These things we had of her fathers in storage proved to be valuable, calming our needs 

and wants. After a while went by of pawning things, starting with the two salamander 

kerosene heaters belonging to Tom Bruin, we had a big sale at a friend’s house down the 

road from us. On the third day of the sale a person came by telling us not to sell anything 

until they brought their brother to see about buying some of the stuff, giving us a fifty-

dollar bill to hold it. He came that night, looked around, offered us fifteen hundred dollars 

and bought every scrap. Sandy was relieved to have it gone because she felt it was all bad 

to have versus the money that actually just gave us back what we had spent in storage 

Escaping The Despondent Sea is available on Amazon Kindle Unlimited, and is receiving 5 star reviews on Goodreads.com