Part 21

Salih told me of how he and one of his brothers had been fishing in the Grand River, when they found some small vials among the rocks in the water. Assuming them to be cocaine or morphine, they took it home and injected it into their veins. They discovered that it was not medicinal. It was chemical- better known as stink bomb. It is curious to think of now, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that his brother placed them there to find, and that it was a trick to get Salih to shoot the stuff into his veins. His brothers were deviant and malicious like that.

Salih spoke of this as a reborn Christian, having been devout since the early nineties when he dried out in jail. He explained how amazing the human body is, and that it is a miracle that the body can endure that kind of abuse. It's just an example of immortality, in a sense, or the will to live, if you want to call it living. But he was genuine and sincere, and a person with heart. Though he still had many of the traits of an addict, he did the best he could to maintain his business and his tassel of kids- not to mention his black hole of a wife. If he ever was found dead or just fell back into addiction, she would be the reason.

My efforts to get clean were continuously undermined by Ronald and the fact that I had nowhere to seek refuge. Thumbing through a telephone book, I frantically searched for somewhere that I could get help from. It ended up looking likely that the place to call was The Independent Living Association.  Tina Tilney answered that call. She came to the house, where we discussed what made me eligible for their help.  The idea of being able to get assistance was elevating. This restored my hope instantly. We discussed my having serious issues with managing affairs, no matter how great or small. I had so little awareness of anything that it’s amazing I had the ability to continue trying to stop myself from feeling. It was rarely my idea to bathe or eat, and I rarely knew the date or time. And the truth was that I had become so despondent that my self was lost.

There was no knowledge of the extent of my injuries because the doctor I was referred to by Blodgett Hospital, (Dr. Mervin Smith), provided so little assistance that I stopped going to see him to avoid it triggering my depression. My back and neck hurt constantly. My ears rang almost continuously. I couldn’t sleep because my mind and heart raced. My wrists were sprained and my jaw snapped and locked up sometimes. When I did sleep, I suffered extremely sever nightmares. And making it worse was that just before Mindy had abandoned me, she gathered up all of my meds and threw them away, immediately calling the doctor to complain about them, which made my life hell all the more. Now, with one phone call my problems were compounded.

Calling the ILS was my attempt to help myself.  This was after meeting with me and explaining that she was going to help. She informed me of all of the things they could do, and that I could do, right down to me working part-time as an assistant DJ at a public radio station. Ms. Tilney certainly renewed me with hope.

 Amid the disaster I was left in when Mindy ran off, there was a friend or two left to confide in. One was Ron Vokes, who lived in a house that he owned on the corner of Knapp and Coit. This is where I sometimes had played music during my marriage. It was here that I was last at when I was in the accident that helped to destroy my reality.

One night, Ron’s wife died in their bed. He never seemed to fully recover from that. Come to find out, she had rheumatic fever as a child. This illness left a hole in her heart, which was the cause of her death. He had been maintaining but became in a weekend alcoholic routine, always the same thing every weekend. It seemed normal but the truth was not pretty. No one would recognize it for fear that they would find fault in themselves. While visiting him, an old friend of his, Ron Groenlier, was back from Texas, having recently been released from jail there after a divorce and drunk driving charge. Groenlier was moving into a house owned by his Aunt. This house was a block away from Ronald Jackson’s place. Groenlier said he needed some help with the rent so I jumped at the chance. Talk about being in the right place at the right time… or was I?  

I slipped out of Ronald Jackson’s while he was at work one day. The last time I caroused with him was the weirdest one for me. It became very clear to see how badly the city was polluted with crack cocaine. There was a plasma clinic near the Sixth street dam- the fish ladder, where Ronald gave Plasma in exchange for about thirty dollars. This day he was giving plasma for money to buy crack with. Since I had no identification or documents to become enrolled myself, I waited outside.

 When Ronald came out he already had two cocaine rocks in his hand, having bought them right there, while lying on the table with the I.V. in his arm.  A guy laying on the table next to him had the dope. I kept tossing this around in my head, along with the disgust with myself for associating with any of it. How I got into this situation in life and how to correct it were questions I was too poisoned, and distracted, to answer- disabled by lost love… and love lost for myself. It would be a cold day in hell before I would ever let Ronald know where I moved.

Chapter

Ron Groenlier had gone to Texas to start a family with a beautiful Mexican woman that had become pregnant with his child. We were all at Ron Vokes house the day he was leaving to go to Texas. She was very nice; pleasant, personable and pretty. I was happy for them. That was about a year and a half earlier. It didn’t take long for everything to fall apart. Moving to Texas may have been the problem, only on top of having an ego problem and having a programming history not unlike the one that has misinformed so many men in America, and is only getting worse.

His father happened to be the upstairs occupant on the house we were moving into- helping to care for him being a prerequisite in the scenario. The old man was dying from cancer and needed a bit of assistance. He had meals on wheels coming but I think it only got in the way of his drinking.

Substance abuse smashes everything and is a bigger issue in the United States that anyone is willing to see. Myself, I had no idea that everyone around me was dying from drugs and alcohol.

What I would learn regarding Ron’s Texas experience is that his wife said “no more” and filed for divorce. Ron would have me believe that she only married him to become a citizen so her family could come here from Mexico. He went in and cleaned out the house of all possessions of value, putting everything in a safe hiding place only to end up doing a year in jail or prison. This was due to his alcohol use. It would soon come out that he had been smoking crack cocaine as well.

As we hauled in her stuff, I secretly felt her pain. Having just lost my whole world, I couldn’t believe that someone would approve of destroying his or her own. Denying there was a chance I was making a mistake, I pressed on with moving in and helping to make the home livable. Besides, Ron Groenlier wasn’t a bad guy. We had a lot in common. It was an all out effort on both of our parts to make a home of this place and get on the right track in life… we’d just have to not drink so much, so often.

After getting the house together and the yard into shape, I gave Bob a call. The idea was to show him that things were improving and that I wanted to practice my trade. He was desperate to have my work to hide behind and would work with me on getting to the job. I was right on the bus route, which made it convenient.

These days we were working on Johnny Van Soest’s developments near Rockford, along side Tommy Bruin’s projects, and also another part-time builder that demanded I was working on his projects. These were the days of all-you-can-eat spaghetti dinners at Rinaldi’s in Rockford. And these were the days when VanSoest told Bob he was a hack.

After about six months Bob, knowing I had no driver’s license, left me with his old truck and a list of things to work on at the VanSoest project. Bob was going to Florida for his annual NASCAR event at Daytona, which was a good place for him because he was, once again, wearing away at my last nerve with his constant insults and destructive criticism. He was always bringing up the subject of my ex-wife and kids to humiliate me with. It inwardly infuriated him that I wouldn’t be coerced into attacking him. It also goaded him that I wouldn’t share his diverse guilt. He liked to jab at me in any way he could think of. He knew I was battling with alcohol, and what bothered him was that it made him see the problem in himself that he had with drinking. He’d keep a huge cooler full of beer in the van, all of the time, to drink on the way home. He didn’t want me sober. He feared I would escape his control- a control that he hated to love. I was thankful when he left, thankful to have some peace. My mistake would be to drink after work that first day he was gone. I had been doing so good, paying my child support etc…  Pride, Ego, and a taste of Independence, combined to disable my view of the big picture. This is also when Ronald Jackson discovered where I lived.

The snow was melting away in dirty little piles one spring day. Ron Groenlier and I were in the yard working when Ronald Jackson happened by. Groenlier had said that we lived there, despite my attempts to downplay why we were there working. I tried to pass it off as a yard clean up job that we were doing for someone. Ronald Jackson came by a short while later with a joint to smoke. This was the second day I had been left to use the truck.

The joint Ronald came by with wasn’t your regular ol’ grass cigarette. The joint was a “corn-dog”, having some crack cocaine sprinkled in it. No big deal, I thought. Well, it was just enough to get the demon moving again. It caused me to lose control of myself, which is exactly what was supposed to happen since I had a job. Ronald set me in a position for himself that evening, and I fell right into the trap. He got me started and I ran until all my money was gone- exactly what it is suppose to do to people. I had failed the test of my responsibility by going on a crack binge with Ronald Jackson. Chasing dope all night puts you on the road a lot. What made the last trip, the final trip, was that I had turned onto an on ramp for the highway and lost control of the truck on the slippery street surface- bouncing off of both sides of the embankment with each end of the truck.

The next day, though minimal, I realized the damage. The bumper molding was pinched in the middle of the bumper, causing the plastic to pull away from the surface. With a little panic, and some adhesive products, I glued it and taped it down until the glue could set. Despite my attempts to conceal the damage, Bob noticed it within a few hours of being home. But the bumper wasn’t what caught his eye. It was the bodyline from the bed to the cab that got his attention. I guess it twisted it just a little when I hit. Bob then went out and examined it closer, seeing my failed attempt to make repairs.

Well, with Bob being an expert faultfinder, he found everything but the truth. No matter the situation or how hard he tried, truth was never revealed to him except for the truth about himself that he tried desperately to ignore. These were the truths that he kept others from knowing by keeping them distracted in any way he could manage to, which was not unfamiliar to me being that I was distracting myself from my pain with anyone and anything I could find or afford.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I never touched a lot of other drugs outside of cocaine, muscle relaxers, alcohol, marijuana, and a minimal amount of LSD. While writing down these memories today, I began reading a book written by Joyce Meyers titled, “Beauty for Ashes”. This book is exactly what I needed since what I am attempting to do for myself- by writing, is healing from the years and years (a lifetime) of abuse and pain. My efforts are giving me something that I begged those around me for- closure. Closure is a gift that I am giving to myself, so that I may be able to make the most of what is left of my life ahead, and to be restored as a father and as a man. One of my hopes are that I may continue working on those things that I have worked on in the past in my efforts to want to give something to people- to help them live better. Incidentally, living better was not what I have been writing about. It’s about all of the failures along the way.

Right about now is when I helped someone loot an old abandoned  building. Charles had it all set up, just needing a small amount my help. This small amount happened to be the most critical part of the mission, which was merely recovering his belongings after having lived there.  Why do I help everyone who asks? I do not know. I can only speculate. That’s what happens when an addiction to cocaine corrupts your mind. It get’s it’s claws into you and you’ll do things you never dreamed of. You will do things you will never speak of. And those things will eat away at you inside until you die miserably or wish you would die.

The squirrels chapter

Here’s something that still bothers me: Shortly after moving into this house with Groenlier, in the spring, we couldn’t help but notice that there were an awful lot of squirrels in the yard. Well, squirrel is one of my favorite small game meats so; I decided to try to get a few. Now, if I wasn’t so concerned with having money for drugs and alcohol, I’d have just bought a pellet rifle but my priorities wouldn’t hear of it, especially since I could think of a way to do it and spare myself the unnecessary expense. I searched the garage despite it being in the middle of collapsing, and I searched the basement of the house. This led me to a rattrap that hung from a nail on a floor joist but that wasn’t until after I had tried to build a live trap using a five-gallon paint bucket and a refrigerator grate. The wire shelf made a lid that I attached to the bucket with a couple pieces of wire coat hanger for fasteners that also created the hinges. Then I tied a brick to the lid and placed some birdseed in the bucket. I used a stick to prop the lid open, and tied a rope to it- like a box trap from the days of old. It was just like in the cartoons or on the Little Rascals. It worked well if the squirrels just relaxed a bit but they freaked out, shooting out of the trap like furry little rockets with claws. The rattrap was a cartoon moment. Like when you see the light bulb over a characters head appear and illuminate. I tied a piece of heavy yarn to it and tied the other end to a large broken tree branch that laid there on the ground so they wouldn’t run off with the trap. Figuring that peanut butter would be great bait, (and remembering the Planters commercials), I ran in and got the jar, slathering some on the trap. Well, before I pulled the cellar door shut behind me, I heard that awesome, “snap!”, that said I had one. Dragging the bucket with me, I took the squirrel off, dropped him in, and baited the trap again. I was pretty excited! Hunting squirrels with a rattrap! Well, as I put the trap back down I saw the squirrels at my feet. “Wow!” I thought, “This is too easy. I can’t believe I never thought of this before”. In about ten minutes I had five of them. Ron Groenlier volunteered to clean them and cook them. The sounds of him gagging and dry heaving from the act and the smells that go along with it, had me choking on the laughter that was a challenge to keep under my breath.

While he was doing that, I was looking out the window, at the back yard, filled with a sense of pride for having succeeded in trapping squirrels. There was an overabundance of them, which is one of the reasons I even killed them but now I see past our fence, and there is an old woman on her backyard deck. She had a three foot “A” frame, carpet covered perch for them to climb on, where she fed them from her hand and talked to them. These squirrels I just killed had a caretaker, with names and everything. They were more or less pets and very friendly. Suddenly I was sick at heart! I just killed a bunch of tame squirrels and, boy, was I ashamed. To this day I still feel bad about it.

It was only a matter of time before I was familiar with enough addicts to suck me back into the twilight dope scene. My friends lived on Fuller, and I lived off of Leonard and Alpine, so being on foot brought me onto the battlefront.

A five-dollar bill nearly got me killed once by a would-be attacker. My mistake was getting into a car with a stranger who had been out running around chasing his tail for rocks all night. Just because someone has a car, even a nice car, doesn’t mean anything at all when referring to a person’s Principles, Morals or Ethics. Material possessions are very often part of a charade- an Antithesis even. We had met because I was trying to score at the same place, not really knowing where to score, just searching through the city sludge.

Well, after being on foot in the rock scenes royal rat race, a car is a welcome thing- your own mobile dope smoking spot with no outsiders wanting to share your dope. But when the dope was gone, he came up with a plan of his own. Deciding we should do some cruising, he drove us to the Grand River down Butterworth drive, out near the gypsum mines. He knew I still had a five-dollar bill but I needed it for other things. There was a chunk of industrial wire on the floor of the front passenger seat area that was sixteen inches long, and an inch around, sheathed in black plastic casing. It was perfect for bludgeoning with. My spirit already knew what was going on- though in danger, I remained calm. His body language confirmed what his plans were. He suggested we get out and walk around. I really didn’t think much of it- probably denying I was in a precarious, life-threatening position but out of the corner of my watchful eye, I noticed him reach for it. He fondled the item while he worked up the nerve, probably deciding if he could or should do it. That was when I realized it was really about to happen. Pretending like everything was normal, and that we were merely trying to kill time in an attempt to “come down”, I suddenly blurted out, “I just remembered, I have money!” That’s when I gave him an explanation of how I always cashed my checks at Edzu’s liquor store, and that he didn’t have all of the money yesterday, still owing me a hundred and sixty five bucks. This worked like a charm. He drove us back immediately.

When I went inside the store, I told the clerk that someone was trying to rob me, and asked him if he had a back door. There wasn’t a back door. My only chance to escape unseen was to dash out and run west, crossing the street toward the south about a half block down, since the guy was parked on the east side of the building. There was no place closer than four blocks south for me to go to get off of the street. Four blocks is plenty of space to get caught up again. It scared me to death but I had been in several brushes with death before. After managing to escape that situation, I never saw him again, that I know of. One thing I know of, for certain, is that cocaine is a lot bigger problem in Grand Rapids than people realize. I witnessed firsthand, and I am not sure that it isn’t being used as a tool for a variety of manipulation that I’d be killed for suggesting. But how do you get funding for problems? You have to have problems to get funding for them. And if everyone is consuming alcohol, there are just a bunch of crass conspiracy theorists and nobody listens to their drunken tirades. Just look at how they defamed Oliver Stone.

One night, I manipulated Ron Groenlier’s dad into letting me use his car to make a dope run by telling him I needed to run to the store. I ended up with a flat tire and no way to tend to it, driving for who knows how long, maybe six miles until the rubber busted apart and the rim was ruined. Ron fixed it the next day. I contemplated checking in somewhere but lacked confidence in three days of dry-out or confidence in myself to confide in it or even deserve it. I am not sure what happened regarding moving out of the house, whether I was evicted or if I just decided that I needed a different environment. Oh, I remember now. Ron Groenlier introduced me to a bar called The West Side Bar, where we went out for beers and burgers. They made a burger called, “The Hog Burger”, served with bacon or ham on a one-half pound patty. The place was a biker hang out that appealed to me, so started going there regularly, eventually becoming acquainted with the owner.

One day I went in wearing a t-shirt for a bandana. That was the day I met Terry Lynn. As I stood at the serving trough, waiting for my beer, she struck up a conversation with a question: “What kind of a guy are you?”

The next thing you know, I was seeing her daily. Soon after she was served an eviction notice to move from her apartment for non-payment of the rent. She was probably fishing for her next move the night I met her. What a sucker I was, finally figuring out that she was a junkie. I do not recall but I’m sure the dope was brought into view early on. The extent of her addiction was yet to be recognized. Apparently she had blown her money with her off and on again boyfriend a little too often. She was probably led on that he would pay her back for their excursions, up to the point where time lapsed and the rent had been put off too long to salvage. She was quick to play my heartstrings and moved in with me. I failed to recognize that cute little sneeze, though thespian, as an intended tool for her prey. She was a full-blown addict that couldn’t shoot herself up- always needing my involvement.

My first thought about her was that she was okay because she had a job. Well, let me tell you, having a job doesn’t mean much. The important part to take notice of is what gets done with the money. It’s got nothing to do with how much you have, just what you do with it. She spent hers in the bars while looking for places to spend it in the street.

Yeah, things just kept going from bad to worse for me. Shooting up was her thing, and she couldn’t do it alone, which made me the guy since I was preying on her for affection and companionship. She would score whatever she could put in a needle- Dilaudid when she could find it, and crack any other time. She would crush it up, dissolve it in lemon juice, suck it up into a dirty needle, and shove it into her arm. I was baffled. I wondered often, “Is the whole world like this?” It certainly seemed like it to me.

It only made me agonize, that much more, over the reality of what the divorce had done to me. Miserable is one of the many terrible things I was. Was this type of degradation all that I was going to find in my search for wholeness? Death was the one gift that couldn’t be received. And though death was all around me, it wasn’t for me to receive. Why?

One night Terry and I went to the West Side Bar. It was my aim to go either way but she ended up accompanying me for the sake of dope. It was very cold and snowing that night in November. The wind was whipping pretty hard. The West Side Bar was about a fifteen-minute walk, which might have been twelve blocks or more. That was too far, considering the weather. We decided to ride my bicycle but I am sure it was my own idea.

When we finally left the bar it was close to midnight. Holding the bike up, ready to start pedaling, I waited for Terry to get on. After shoving off with my foot I began to crank the pedals. In the next twenty feet we began to fall over onto the right side. Releasing the bike and gaining a hold of the ground, I managed to land on my feet. Terry was not so quick to reflex properly and ended up lying on the ground as if to still be riding the bike. When I helped her up, it was quickly decided that we’d walk for a while.

Many times that night, she had made comments like, “I am living proof that you can live on beer and popcorn alone.” We ended up only walking for a few yards because she kept yelling about her leg. There was no doubt that it was painful, especially after I looked at it under a streetlight. Between the knee and ankle, it was bent like a cheap piece of macaroni or better yet, a banana. I went back inside the bar to make a phone call. Ron Groenlier came to get us with his dad’s car, driving us to the Butterworth Hospital for the broken leg to be treated. She was in the hospital for several days, hooked up to an I.V. pain management system- screaming her fool head off, milking it for all it was worth.

Thoughts began running through my head pretty constant about my relationship with her. It may have only been a few days before I decided that I’d had enough. One day I told her that I couldn’t take it anymore and that I couldn’t live with the reality of the drug use, the shooting up or the anxiety of whether or not I was going to catch something from her or become a junkie too. So, I left the house I shared with Ron and her so that I could get away from it, and so she could still have a place to stay.

After bouncing around at friend’s houses that I drank and smoked at while lost in the streets for a spell, I went to Mary Doyle’s house in order to spend some time near my oldest child and maybe crash for a while until I could figure out what to do. Mary’s ex-husband, Bruce Vachon, was staying there, living in the garage, which was just a city dump with a roof and a power outlet. Bruce’s state of reality didn’t let him see that and he didn’t seem to mind, as long as he had his tobacco and his forty-ounce bottle of Magnum. He had a small television and a radio that he had managed to find while diving in dumpsters in the neighborhood. He also had a recliner chair that he occupied much of the time. This is also where he slept or passed out in. Little did I know, the house was dominated by a whole barrel of demons, and it was just a short time away from a serious fire caused by the kids cooking hotdogs in the attic space where they had a fort. It wouldn’t be long until the final result of the family’s dysfunctions and standard of acceptable living would be that the City bulldozed the house into the ground. My heart went out for the whole situation and to everyone involved but the only one who responded to any kind of an attempt I made to help was Bruce. There is more Irony because I would inevitably find out that there was no real help for him that would make any sense at all.

Rarely, in the past, did I have a conversation with Bruce, let alone anything in common to talk about, other than a child with the same mother, Mary Doyle. So, now it made sense to me to try helping him. If nothing else, our children would see that I was not the bad guy, as far as failing at a relationship with their mom. Having, once again, regained my employment with Salih, I talked him into giving Bruce a chance at doing some groundwork picking up shingles on our tear offs, for instance. It made sense to me that Bruce would feel a gaining in his confidence and self-esteem if he had a job. And It was another gung-ho push on me getting a grip on my life since I had just been on another binge, being approached by a police cruiser to be asked if I was okay while I stood out on a street corner at five in the morning, waiting for someone to come back with the dope, who was probably watching me from a window while smoking the dope that they had bought with my money. It ended up that I had to accept being robbed and so I started the long walk back from Franklin Street, all the way back to Forty-fourth Street, for the entire world to see.

I guess my desperation was so much that in order to help myself, I had to help someone else but that really made no sense, since I could find no way to really help myself but to try to keep a job. And it was all I could do to do that. I had no business worrying about Bruce, and little did I know he was a lost cause. What I did was open up to Salih. He was the only person I knew who was sober and with a sober mind. Salih didn’t really have any real answers, not any different than the truth of the reality, (quit drinking), but he helped in every way I allowed him to.

Salih gave Bruce a job to do, and he soon assisted us with securing an apartment that one of his clients had available. Part of the deal was that there was a lot of work that it needed to have done to it in order to be rented out by law. The kitchen was in a shambles and the bathroom needed some serious love. The back entrance stairwell needed some intensive care, in addition to overhauling windows and an interior paint job. It was a great relief and I was happy to have it. And I think Bruce was too. This was the McReynolds place off of the southeast corner of Leonard and Alpine. After settling in I went out to a few of my lesser toxic friends houses to brag up my new developments. Now is when I go through the Matt and Sara phase- learning of their divorce, and trying to lend a hand…. Like I didn’t have my hands full with my own rehabilitation and with trying to provide Bruce with a chance to regain his dignity.

William “Zigzag” Goode lived on the block. It was at this time that I started visiting with him and his wife. Just around the corner from the apartment was a party store. It was on the corner and was attached to a row of apartments. I met a guy who lived there while buying some beer one day. He was a very nice guy.

Not to many months back, he had been asked for a ride while leaving Konkle’s Bar. Of course, he said he would help but when he got to his Ford Ranger, the guy pistol whipped him and took his truck, leaving the man lay there with a hole smashed in his skull. This man had just recently been released from residential hospital treatment, having had a steel plate put in his head. He had been in a coma for a period of time. This wasn’t the only man I had met that this had happened to around here. It was a fairly common thing on the Westside of Grand Rapids.

Bruce’s psychiatric issues would finally rear their ugly head, starting with the disappearance of the rent money but I failed to understand the extent of it until it was too late. And although my efforts to keep myself all too busy to drink and use didn’t keep me from trouble, it all added up to a College Education.

What I had learned was a firsthand account about a lot of things pertinent to life in the present-day reality that maybe I was supposed to learn. It makes me feel like it was fuel for something, maybe writing, that will one day help a man… when he decides that it is time to make himself feel deserving of it, starting with myself. Who knows? Was it to build my belief in something more, and my hopes for mankind, and to truly understand the hell my children endured during this time in our lives? That could have ended me up in prison for something violent, which I am thankful never happened. It seems like I was supposed to meet some of these people. I was supposed to meet Danny. Without a lot of these things that happened, I wouldn’t be who I am today, who I am in a relationship and as a father, and as a husband and friend. There is no pride in any of these the things that I’ve done but I am proud of making the decisions that got me where I am today. There is a sense of pride in being who I am, who I have fought to be; resisting to follow others and to become like them, sharing their ideas or lack of, hating the things they hate, reciting the songs they sing- hiding from God and myself.