Part 25 "Parasitic Relations"

My notes and journals are stashed and not at my disposal since I am writing this from prison. When I get back to my life, home and family, I will elaborate on the nastiness and evil that was forced upon me. The fact that I really cannot recall a lot of it may be a natural part of my subconscious warring against depression, fighting to stay in a positive state but I am happy with that. To me, it’s signifies growth on so many levels. Also, it would be a convenient time to “beat up” on Bob, since I am elaborating in a certain amount in this bio but I am not- reinforcing the significance of recognizing that growth. Did I say that right?

One of the assets I acquired was from a painter that worked on Johnny VanSoest’s houses. He was a motor head with a racecar that he ran on the weekends. While working together the conversation turned to motorcycles, and he mentioned a couple old bikes that were for sale. Bob was only interested in old Honda mini-trails, which left me wide open for the Suzuki Stinger. The price was about two hundred dollars. This bike was in very nice condition but it would only fire up on one of the two cylinders. On a Saturday morning, on the front porch of the Lake drive house, I made the repairs that made her run- smoking the front porch out with two-stroke exhaust. Happy, I put the bike in the garage with Joes road bike.

My mind finally snapped, crumbling the walls I had built of patience, understanding and forgiveness- releasing an enormous amount of negative energy and fury towards Bob. I wanted him dead. He had beat me up with his attitude and hatred and nasty statements about me and my ex-wife, my kids, and my friend Danny, to the point where I wanted to see him dead. “Be careful what you wish for”, echoed in my mind, so I didn’t wish it but when Lisa’s neighbor said that he was flying to California to take a job and to live- needing to sell his car and his handgun; the answer to my riddle was revealed. For just one hundred dollars I could wipe him and his negative force clean from the face of the earth, and end my own pain as well. It would be a murder/extermination and a suicide. How could I stand to live with the pain and guilt of killing even a so-called man, on top of all of the grief he had forced back to the surface? The decision made by my friend, to relocate to California, was made while Bob was preparing for his annual NASCAR event that he went to in Florida every year. When he got back he would pay me. The money would go to buying the gun, and it would be over.

The clock was ticking, the guy had a departure time that he couldn’t miss, and Bob had to be back so I could get the gun. But God had other plans or had better plans. Bob wouldn’t make it back in time to pay me, and the job offer in California wouldn’t wait. That was because the Hero in Bob’s world, “the Intimidator”, would die on the racetrack in a, not so nasty, crash. That, to me, was a fair consolation prize since lots of people would now be less impacted with the over-emasculating effects of impressionable men trying on his ego. The man was no Hero and he was no role model. Secretly, I was satisfied with that small amount of pain that Bob was given, and thankful for the psychological and emotional relief that spared both of our lives. Hopefully he learns what’s important in life and discovers how to free himself from his own prison before it’s too late. Knowing and sharing real love, in all its truth and beauty, is priceless. So, myself, I am very thankful to think that I finally have that in my life.

So, instead of inflicting my own brand of pain onto Bob, I wrote him a letter of several pages, which I handed him to read when I met him at our rendezvous for work one morning. It started with, “From the mind of Zachery Polk.”  He voiced his opposition from the start but read it, asking if he could keep it to study. I wish I had made a copy of it. Anyway, he stated that maybe we should part ways for a while- mumbling something about just wanting to help. Him and I knew he just wanted someone to fight with. What made him the most irate of it all was that I could not be provoked to give him the response he sought for. With me, I’m more of an all or nothing type, I guess, or at least I was then. Maybe it’s my own personal growth. Who really knows?

My happiness can hardly be measured today, as I am writing this in April of 2012, and I am so thankful for all of the experiences I have had. The gratitude I have is unexplainable. The peace I am feeling is precious. My intent that I may share my story with someone to impact positively on their existence is a cornucopia of hopes. I am a Father, a Husband, and a Teacher again, and I am truly happy and content.

Anyhow, now I am looking for work again, which is really nothing unusual for any independent labor provider. It’s a good thing, looking for work. The constant change is why I like being a carpenter instead of working in a factory- always having to deal with the same people, places, poisons and perspectives or lack of them.

Danny and I had a few projects here and there but things seemed to be drying up completely. All over the Grand Rapids area that he had been mining, perspective clients would become more and more aware of his drinking and unreliability, and the fact that he was just too laid back for people to appreciate. So, Danny would go back to the places where he had known people, to try to eke out his daily existence. He was, pretty much, just waiting to die. His secret hope had always been to meet a woman who’d impact his world and essentially “save” him from his despair- his plight. Until then, he would bury himself in a multifarious reality as an artist. In all of this, we were alike, for the most part.

An ad in the classifieds of the Grand Rapids Press, for a Trim carpenter, caught my eye one day. The next day the city bus system would take me out to Meijer’s, on Knapp Street and East Beltline, where I met the builder who placed the ad.

Shawn Dusendang seemed pretty even keeled. And between his ego and his character, he was pretty entertaining. The Three Stooges come to mind when I think about him. That was, at first but after I got to know him better he was no different than any other person I had met and became acquainted with. The house he was building was located east of the East Beltline, north off of Three-mile road.

Shawn was recently divorced and had his daughter in his custody. She was a nine-year-old, and was very articulate. It soon became clear that he was an alcoholic when he revealed his ability to suck down a thirty pack by dinner. He would send me to the Marathon gas station, to get the Coors and Copenhagen, in his Ford King-Cab Power stroke diesel. On one of the first trips in his truck to get beer, I got the crap scared out of me when a young guy came tearing into the parking lot, losing control of his vehicle and running into the light pole on the south side of the station- right by where I parked Shawn’s truck, which I happened to be driving with NO driver’s license! The light pole appeared as though it was going to fall on me but resounded only to lean. The car got a pretty good amount of damage, busting up the grill, wrinkling the hood a bit and deforming the bumper. I wouldn’t doubt the light pole to still lean to this day but maybe not.

Yeah, I broke a sweat over that but it was nothing compared to the sweat Shawn broke… that is if he ever stopped sweating. Wow. It had to be alcohol related, and boy, did it smell bad- just like an old dishtowel that was always left in the sink in a crumpled wad. It would eventually come out that he was going to declare Bankruptcy. Thanks to alcohol and Ego, he ran off at the mouth a lot about himself.  The part he didn’t actually tell me with words was that he was a desperate man. He was as desperate as a man can get, which was why he was building the house. The drinking was so bad that, between the smell of stale beer, alcohol, and profuse sweating- you couldn’t smell anything but that. The smells of fresh oak and paint were completely drowned out.

Shawn’s daughter would be around the jobsite, now and again, since there were issues with the sitter quite often. He claimed his wife cheated on him. My guess is that she cheated on his Ego and that the acquisition of the kid was only due to his own selfishness and legal counsel that he only afforded himself out of spite.

There were women he met on the computer- FTF they called themselves, which he’d bring around after hours for show and tell. The scraps he threw to me, I never helped myself to- out of respect for myself. My interest in women wasn’t a casual one. My hope was to find a person worth sharing with- someone to build a home, a life, and a family with. Chasing after a mate had caused me plenty of grief already, and I knew that looking is the best way not to find one.

One day Shawn came to work bragging about a woman he met online- a widow. She was driving up from Tennessee in a Corvette- a red one, no less. Why? It was probably because her husband was dead. Anyone I know who is loaded would fly up and rent a sweet ride but whatever. They jumped right into bed, of course. The next day was filled with stories of their escapades and how she insisted on sleeping with his ‘one thing’ in her mouth- like a pacifier. I wondered how she could stand the smell of him but he must have painted a sweet enough image of his affluence, a circumstance sure enough that would seem to drown out the smell. In reality, she was just another desperate soul, grabbing at the straws in life.

Building an image, being cast of having money, was exactly what the house he was building was supposed to do. He went out of his way to find things that would exact him as my superior- or exact me as inferior, always calling me nigger. Between his condescension and the constant drinking, he was becoming a problem to me but I needed the income and thoroughly enjoyed performing my trade. The act of my performance intended to speak the things to him that I needed to be understood. Whether he understood or not didn’t matter so much. What did matter was that I recognized the possibility that maybe I needed the elements exposed to me as an open lesson for something greater.

It was getting time for the hardware and paint finishes. This was when I got a chance to hook up Joe with some work- painting and helping to build the deck on the backside of the house. It was refreshing for me, having Joe on the job. That took the most part of the aggravation out of my day at work with Shawn. My job, historically, has often been to do the impossible- the stuff no one can figure out, which I can almost always do. The intent of the people I worked for was often to put me on a task that they were sure I would be unable to complete on my own. It did not gain me their respect in most cases. Out of their own insecurity, it ending up that they would despise me even more.

One day, while Shawn was entertaining more of his Internet conquests and other outsiders, he took the belt sander from my hands as I was carefully shaping in a complicated transition in some stairwell capping where there was a step and compound miter detail- only to grind a big gouge in the center of something that I had taken a ton of care to fabricate. It was quite beautiful until he had to “show me” how to do it. This particular spot was right in a high traffic area, where your eye is drawn to the intricacy of the woodwork. It’s a wonder if he looks at that spot today, and remembers how foolish it was to emphasize that he was the King? It’s doubtful since he was a hack when it came down to it. Like, maybe he was really a prop builder for television, not a homebuilder.

He cobbled a bar and entertainment center together as if it was a stage prop, ruining my tools and cords in the process by dragging the sheets of plywood across the floor, cutting the casings and wires of my cords badly. The copper was hanging out on several of them. It was the fine I had been imposed with for having experience enough to see his mistakes- typical male Ego.

A few days later, the winds would pay him back for me, when he instructed me to pick up the yard and burn the trash. The wind kicked up the flames, turning a small fire into a scorcher, which blasted his tool trailer, melting the rubber molding that covered the seams on the side. It was funny watching him try to move the trailer in a hurry.

Maybe it was partly Mother Nature- paying him back for swerving to hit the Mother Goose as she stuck her neck out from the weeds, at the edge of the road, to look before taking her babies back across to their home at the farm. They had been enjoying the pond, learning what to eat, while playing in the water. It was pretty sad to see her lying there, dead, on the side of the road. When I mentioned it, he admitted to killing her with his truck- saying how she shouldn’t have stuck her neck out there to be hit.

He tried playing the religion card, mentioning how his Rabbi had told him about me. Whether or not it was true isn’t the point. The point is being careful with people who want you to believe they are religious, believing in God, implying that they have good, sound, principles and ethics. These are the people that are manipulating you for their own agendas.

Anyway, in a while, things would shift and we would be working on an apartment complex consisting of four-plexes, located across the street from the River Town Crossings Mall. Myself, and one other carpenter, would work on that project for less than two months before Shawn would lose the contract for various reasons. One reason was that he, personally, never showed up. The other reason was due to being caught over-billing for the work done- submitting the bill in twice. It was a blessing in disguise, I’m sure.