"Part 28 Self Embezzelment"

Dan Doyle started picking me up again once he got to the point where he could bring me in on the log home project. We would start the day off by going to a place called, New Beginnings, on Alpine Avenue for breakfast. Eggs over-hard with garlic, fried potatoes with cheddar and onions, whole-wheat toast, ham and coffee was always my order. Dan would keep lamenting his Harley Fatboy that he ordered from a dealership on Twenty-eighth Street, anticipating the call when it was finally delivered, which would be any day now.

The engineered log home was owned by Mark and Connie Minster, and was located on the property that the Adrian’s Romano Terrace occupies. The terrace is a banquet hall used for wedding receptions and business gatherings, and is located off of West River drive on the westward hilltop. It was overlooking the river, on the east side of West River drive, in Comstock Park. The house sits behind it, and is way back in the woods, accessed from a different road off of Pine Island Drive. Connie’s family has owned the property for a long time.

Mark was a nice enough guy, balding and recently receiving hair transplants from who knows what part of his body. His head looked like a grid pattern of planted follicles, where the bald part was used to being. His wife’s family made jokes about him being that his wallet was fat but he never paid for much. The wallet was fat all right, fat with receipts. This was his defense, and his insecurity, over her family being rich, it seems. They had money, and he HAD money, adding it up once in a while to say, “look how much I have spent.” Actually, I can’t say I blame him for it; I would have probably done the same thing.

Sooner than later, I would find out that Dan Doyle was not a skilled carpenter. Working at an hourly rate, he mocked the trade, climbing up and down the ladder for hours, virtually doing nothing but time, and the Minster’s could feel it. When I started on the project a huge contrast began to appear. My intentions were to show my gratitude through my performance, not to make them look like bumblers.

One day, the Minster’s came up to me and put a couple one hundred dollar bills in my shirt pocket and thanked me for being there. That day I told Dan and Bill about it, offering to pay for lunch. The guilt that I felt for being associated with the mess that was being made of the project was too much for me to handle quietly. That was a peculiar lunch.

Chili cheese fries sounded like a calorie packed greasy-ass meal, so I ordered a full order of that. The waitress was having some kind of issue but I really was more concerned with going outside to smoke than to recognize anything more than the time it might take to get our food, hoping it would be a while.

We always went to Brann’s on Alpine for lunch, and my group didn’t smoke. When I got back in to my table, the food was coming. The waitress brought it out and came right over to me. She was so nervous that she almost fell from her legs buckling, dumping the plate on the table at my right. Cheese, chili and French fries went slopping all over my area of the table. A bit traumatized, surprised to say the least, I kept it together, acting natural and offering comfort to her by telling her that it was okay. She was pretty messed up over it, saying that she would get me another order. After repeating that it was okay, I scraped it off of the table and back onto the plate, and proceeded to eat it. The embarrassment I felt for her was so much that I couldn’t go on to humiliate her any more than she already must have felt, by complaining. And I know they get charged for mistakes like that, depending on who’s the shift supervisor. After all, I was partly to blame. If I had not caught her senses, causing her to be light-headed due to my body’s desperate production of pheromones, it wouldn’t have happened- maybe.

The guys told me that she was awe-struck with me but I failed to see that then. It is understandable now but that’s the first time I actually saw someone fall head-over-heels, let alone over me. Dan’s daughter, Mandy, explained it all to me during the time we would work together, thinking that they were all messing with me until it actually happened to me later in life.

Another time we were there, the waitress watched me eat a large wet burrito from an inconspicuous corner, while I was left confused over what they were interested in. Was it that impossible to eat or was my eating it a seductive art? Was it the way I licked my lips? Did someone recognize me from playing music somewhere with Danimal? Maybe I wasn’t ready or healthy enough to understand.

Bill got really bad with his drinking issue. Everything went from bad to worse. He would show up at the job, when we would always pick him up since he had no car or license. He would come in so drunk that he didn’t realize he was at the house that was in front of the job. How he got there or where he’d come from, we never did learn. Dan just hung his head in sorrow for Bill’s struggle with addiction. It was never clear, how often this happened. Coincidentally, I had known Bill and Dan for about the same length of time. Dan would come over to Bill’s and drink with us during the time that I was with Dan’s sister, Mary Beth Doyle.

My mom had introduced me to the Bolthouse family by way of Bill’s dad, Bob. It was a bankrupt plumbing outfit that maintained a customer base from the past, mostly bars, with just enough money coming in to keep everyone high. Bob was always recruiting new apprentices for Bill and Bill hated it. Bill lived in the front portion of the building that the plumbing business occupied, while Bob had a small building out in the back that he used as an office and sleeping quarters. Since the building was paid for, no one had to worry about rent. Bills brother Mike ended up creating a bit of quarters for him self to use when he wasn’t lost in the crack cocaine reality that he had become known to steep himself in. His throat was roached because of it, as if he had chronic bronchitis or strep throat.

Bill and I became very close friends, like brothers we never had but then again it was like me to become close to those around me very quickly, which is strange because I have always had trust issues.

Bill had been in and out of rehabilitation and jail for alcohol and cocaine numerous times, and had been released from prison more recently for drunk driving and battery on a L.E.O. He did three years and was released- with herpes, of all things. Poor Billy. I loved him so much. It tore me apart to see him in the condition I had witnessed at that time working with him and Dan.

Dan Doyle also had a drinking problem. He and I became acquainted because his sister, Mary, worked at Florentines in Grandville, where I met her at the same time my mom introduced me to Bob Bolthouse. Dan had an incident involving his stepdaughters, where he did a year for a CSC charge. He was now a twelve-stepper, sober and married to a school marm. What I would find out is that he wasn’t totally reformed. Suddenly, he couldn’t pay us for our work efforts. He claimed the Minster’s were to blame, and not his purchase of the Harley Davidson Fatboy. He gave me a phone to use that had been his son, Josh’s. It was one of many phones he had as part of his cellular package. It ended up being kicked it into the Grand River, accidentally, while I was fishing on a boat dock about a year later (alcohol related).

Somewhere along the line he had told my daughter, Sarah, who happens to be his niece, that he paid me six hundred dollars a week, and that they should have money from me by way of child support because he paid me that much. This wasn’t true but I would soon hear of it from Sarah, in a short while.

Why don’t adults think about what they say to kids and how, and what, it will affect before they say it? Is ego and pride more important than how a child views their parents? What a selfish, selfish man. Little did he realize, he would pay for the wrong doings he did to those that trusted him so much- causing him a grief that he would have to have in his mind for the rest of his life…

In the meantime, the job was grinding to a halt. Dan had been telling us that he had a draw coming up- only paying us change to keep us hanging on. After all, Bill was satisfied as long as he had money to support his habits. As for me, it was easy to get by since I had no real demands of myself, financially, getting by on the change he gave me. It was going to work out better for me, since I had addictions I was battling that would steal away the money just as fast as I could get it. More money later was better that no money tomorrow because it got spent on booze or dope. And it was typical to get paid out when the draw came sometimes.

Before this all came to a head, my job had grown to working with Mandy, training her how to work with the power tools and offering her the guidance and patience that her own father seemed incapable of. He would soon stop her from coming to the project because of our becoming close. His story was that she had school, college but the truth was that her image of me became much different than the one created for her by him, causing fear and jealousy to interfere with something that was platonic and beautiful. Her and I wouldn’t see each other for about nine months, after she had fallen off of the wagon.

Mandy was the first one to get pregnant at too early of an age, and the first one to get mixed up with drugs and, eventually, prostitution. She had recently been released from the Kent County Jail after serving a year. Mandy had recently gotten her kids back and had a house that she shared with another young woman. The status of that relationship I do not know. My every prayer was that Sarah didn’t take after the misfortune of her cousins on her mother’s side of the family. Fortunately, she did not get pregnant, and graduated from high school. Sarah was the only one to do that on the Doyle side of her family. 

It wouldn’t be long before Michele went to jail for a DUI charge, having been out on bond and awaiting a trial.

Sandy and I met at the College Inn shortly afterward.

The Minster’s turned out to be a bickering couple of drunks as well, the catalyst for the blowout with our crew, ending Dan’s mining operation. Bill let me stay at his place for the time being, since eviction papers were served at Michele’s place- so much for me sitting her house until she got back home.

Kalamazoo and Burton became my new locale for a bit, moving what was left of my belongings to a closet in Bill’s upstairs apartment. He was doing his best to live, seeking safety by reading books in his bedroom- a routine he had picked up while in prison, no doubt. Yet, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get out of the grip of addiction. For a reality check, he’d save the liquor bottles in a recycling container by the sink but all that did was provide a few drops from each one to make a pretty good-sized drink when he couldn’t muster the few precious dollars it took for a bottle of rot-gut. Having done that a time or two, while living with Danimal, I was all too familiar with the reality.

Bill was totally broke but every time he put his card into the ATM it would miraculously spit out a twenty-dollar bill- like magic. That went on for two months that I know of. Work ran out for Bill within a day or two of my last day, which left me to call Salih, to beg for work once again.

In addition to Bill, I also had a friend named Ralph, who had a house near Bono’s Pizza, where I crashed when I was in the area and in need of being off of the street. One night, when I didn’t have anywhere else to go, I went to Jimmy and Terry’s. I slept in a recliner in the living room. At one point, maybe around five a.m., I opened my eyes to see Jimmy and a couple other fools smoking crack.

Earlier I had heavy thoughts about what I was doing, and where I wanted to go in life. It had been my attempt to find my safe haven within the local meeting with the ministry group. They had offered me a healing attempt after my confessions, where they gathered around me to put their hands on me in prayer.  This was after telling them the intimate details regarding my life, the heavy drinking, and my struggle to get away from drugs that I tried to poison myself with. My body trembled hard during that prayer- bone rattling hard. Having recognized that I was in a bad situation in life, and knowing that I needed to take the first step in the right direction, was what motivated me to reach out to them despite their imperfections. It had been read somewhere by me, that I should not ignore the messenger- though the messenger is imperfect. The decision to get away from the dope, and away from those that made up the environment that I was surrounded by was the most important decision I could have made at that time.

When I saw the demons alive around me, in the living room that early morning, it was in-my-face confirmation. It was easy to just closed my eyes and think to myself, “You’re right, Zach. It is definitely time to move on in life- away from these people and their poisons. It’s the right thing to do. Do not let the streets steal away your days any longer!”

After sleeping another couple of hours, I got up and left, and never went back or thought much about them again. The most logical thing I could think to do was to cling to the friendship that Sandy and I had developed.

Salih kept a steady stream of home and roofing repairs that enabled me to feel normal. My only slip-up with cocaine happened after I finished working for her son, Richard, on a remodel that he needed done after a serious water damage situation caused by an upstairs snafu. It was suspected by Sandy, to be a supernatural situation caused by an eerie ghostly presence in the upstairs of the home. Sometimes you could see a person in the upstairs window when you walked by the house. This I saw myself, on more than one occasion.

On the day I finished the job, I took the money and went to visit my old friend Jimmy Zemiatis, while Sandy was at work at Vitale’s. Jimmy and I met at Tommy Brann’s Steakhouse, on South Division and Thirty-sixth Street when he got off of work at Erb Lumber. After a bunch of beers, he started mentioning coke. Since I was fool enough to buy the beers, he figured he’d dig a little deeper. Eventually, he managed to coax me into getting a “teenther”, meaning a sixteenth of an ounce of cocaine powder.

After throwing down the money for the coke, we went to his house, where we sniffed powder and drank, and ate the last jar of venison stew that his dad canned before he died of cancer. There were mushrooms in it, Stumpers that he had picked that summer. Since I hated mushrooms but I hating being destroyed too, I ate the stew anyways. 

At some point I tried to rock up some of the coke. Shortly after that, his unfaithful beast of a wife, Glenda, finally dragged herself home- only to demand that I leave. She hated me with a passion, which was probably because I provided Jimmy with a bit of insight that he was not capable of having on his own- complications caused by his emasculation. She had no secrets with me, since I knew things that people wished I did not due to my ability to see inside people. Eventually, she trumped my hand by actually bringing the guy home to meet Jimmy.