Part 3 uneditied full length #amediting

Bob and I were trimming houses for Johnny Van Soest at the time. One day Johnny called Bob to a private luncheon, leaving me at the jobsite where I continued to work, eating my lunch as I went along in my details. 

The thing about me, I am told, is that the work I do is exemplary, setting the standards of those around me, and would be expected of a well-trained Finish Carpenter. Bob, on the other hand, was an imposter. His accumulated skills gave him the resemblance of a carpenter but he was not. It was more accurate that he was a general laborer. Truth is, he had such an attitude, (much like Stan), and was so snide, that nobody could stand him long enough to get any kind of work done at all. He was so insecure; anyone getting the attention of the superiors, other than him self, was targeted to be subtly, and slowly, whittled away at with Bob’s tone.

It was all fun and games on the surface but it was malicious and deviant in it’s intent; cowardly passive, yet aggressive attacks, veiled in humor. This is one of the purposes he had for my craftsmanship, passing my work off as his own where ever, and when ever, he could get away with it… until now.

Bob would soon come back from his little private luncheon, at The First Wok on Northland Drive, to make light of what ended up being an outright confrontation. John discovered that my work was what he had been promised in affect but with Bob on the job, trying to maintain a dominate grasp on the contract while fearing me taking over- the truth spilled out for the only one who mattered in the scheme to see… the man who signs the check.

Bob’s insecurity constantly rewarded me with information. If it hadn’t been for his uneasiness and guilt emanating from his disability of not being able to handle silence, he may never have told me what was said at the luncheon. Instead of a discussion about the next house or a price negotiation, Johnny flatly stated, “I don’t think you take pride in your work.” I was a bit shocked that Bob shared that with me but maybe he needed me to help him make light of it, so he wouldn’t feel the psychological sting, and the threat.

Bob and I both knew who’s work they all hired him for, and as they would learn that it was mine, he would paint out a gruesome picture of me- making himself look like a star for dealing with me. As long as he controlled me he could benefit from my work, keeping me on the weak end of the pay scale to insure that I was starving enough to keep performing. Constantly beating me down in my mind, extinguishing the flames of desire that burned in my heart, that gave me the spirit that I had. He would toy with my life as if I were a lab rat or a fly, only to torture me and keep my wings from being able to lift my self back up to the heights of who I had been in the past.

His mouth would leak things it never should have. He was his own worst enemy in that way. He is one of the first people you’d shoot, if he were in your crime family because he would run his mouth off and cause your inevitable ruin.

At one time he was an employee at a dowel company in Marne but quit when they scolded him for performing excessively in his position, denying him a raise that he had been pressing for. This didn’t wear well with his rejection issues. Before he left, being a deviant, and a psychiatrists dream, he altered all of the company’s production jigs.

This malicious act caused a huge problem, and was a devastating blow to the business, that would rob the employees of their security by going out of business because of it this act. This was a problem in the Marne area because there were few jobs around that contributed to the local community and it’s Economy. 

This would be bragged about every once in a while, just for the sake of inflating his own ego and subtly letting me know that he owned me. Occasionally he would remark to me that I, “just don’t know how to suck up right.” This implied that maybe I should be submissive to his lust....

Later, he would reveal a problem at home involving the computer, mentioning the discovery of gay porn being viewed in the browser history. He suggested that it was the curiosity of the younger of his two charges that were being cared for in his home- his brother Joe’s kids.

The boy was around thirteen at the time, and very meek, more than likely fearful of Bob. How convenient it was to use this poor boy for a scapegoat. Cheryl would now giggle a bit over the discovery, and continue to monitor the traffic on her Internet service, thinking the boys were being boys, as they say.

At one point, while staying at my mother’s house after my separation, an acquaintance convinced me into meeting him to go out and “party.” He picked me up as I walked down the street away from my mother’s house, and then doubled back to his apartment- the same building that Selena and Diamond had lived in. When we got there, I realized I had made a mistake. Apparently this guy owed money for dope and had just taken me hostage. The plan was that I would give them money in order to be allowed to leave. I spent ten hours trying to figure a way out of this situation without giving them what they wanted but ended up calling Bob to come and get me, using some of the money he owed me to fund these dirtballs for their precious crack. Just knowing that they are in their own hell is satisfaction enough, I suppose.

Yes, it was another convenient situation for Bob to use to his advantage....

Not too long after this is when I lived by the creek, saved Laura and Matt from losing their kids, and then got a job working for the carnival, which is a very interesting story, especially since it took about a year or less from the time Mindy left until I left with them on my suicide run.

I had just left 84 Lumber and was trying to get my job smoothed over. I think I was fired that day because as a Sawyer, I cut the parts for the trusses we manufactured but almost all of my cuts were wrong. With my brain injury dominating the situation, and alcohol compounding things as best supporting actor, everything was all mixed up. As I crossed the highway overpass, going towards town, a guy driving a king cab pickup truck stopped and asked me if I needed a ride or a job. People don’t just stop and ask you if you need any sort of help these days, and I should have been weary, especially since I was already in town. I got in, of course, only to find myself on my way to the carnival with a man who had to run for potatoes to use in his food wagon that he operated there. He explained to me that they always needed schleps, and me- I nominated myself. What a typical Pisces.

It was the first day of the carnival, which was still in set-up mode. Jerry’s Concessions were providing the show. The work I was assigned to do was running a ride called, The Force Ten. This ride was the feature on this midway, going in circle fashion, lifting high and tilting, spinning at a speed that generated a G-force in excess of three G’s. All of this while several pre-amps, and over two-dozen speakers blared music that I felt was appropriate for the rhythm and the intensity of the ride. It was up to me to decide what music to use. 

Metallica happened to be the best to choose from, so I selected “Battery” as the main track to use. The intro is kind of long, so I played it while loading the buckets on the ride. I would load a couple buckets and then jog the machine. Then I’d load a couple more, jogging it around some more, while burning through the introduction. When it got time to go, I would hit the run button, choreographing the music and ride for the rush and thrill- compounding the effect. What a Blast! People couldn’t get enough of it. The ride was drawing crowds of one hundred people or more that would watch. 

My costume helped a bit having long crazy two-tone hair from a dye-job I let some crack addicted woman talk me into. The music would fill the grounds and I would thrash my hair about, while playing air guitar. I loved being on a stage, especially five feet off of the ground. It was my own show that put two hundred and fifty dollars in my hand, per week. This was a huge pay cut, from the seventy thousand I made as a Finish Carpenter, to the fifty thousand per year I was making at Permalife but it didn’t matter anymore. My whole life was destroyed and all that was left was garbage. Little did I realize I was now a volunteer prisoner, serving time on death row in every possible sense of the phrase.  

One of the first couple days working for the ride owner, I was asked if I would be interested in leaving with them to go to the next spot. “Sure,” I answered. The very next question was, “Do you have any warrants?” This should have indicated the reality of modern day slavery but my common sense was completely out to lunch since my accident. I was on a suicide run, with that intention. That night, at close, I got a twenty-dollar tattoo of a runaway doobie on my left shoulder, and threw all of my identification in the nearest trash can.

The customers or ‘mark’s, would come back after riding, a lot of times with “tips” that ranged from money to drugs. I was instructed not to accept them, so I let my alter ego handle that department. Sometimes people would pay me to get on, deciding to go on a ride after all but not wanting to go through the hassle of buying any tickets. There was a young guy with a crippled arm that ran a food wagon who told me that he would watch a joint at each spot, studying the traffic and business. He would tell me that my little freak show was getting all the ratings at the Berlin Fair, saying that it was the most interesting and entertaining thing he’d seen since he had been on the circuit. Feeling proud that night but not feeling proud enough of myself to want to live; it was a momentary thing. Maybe it was ego more than pride or maybe it was blind stupidity but there was plenty of stupidity on the carnival circuit, so I blended right in. Only they don’t call it stupidity because it’s not at all recognized as anything but normality. George Orwell may have written about it already or Hunter S. Thompson, but I am going to try to explain it anyway:

Working for the carnival is just like anything else in life. There are maybe three sides to the politics. There are ride jockeys, food vendors and barkers, and then there is the management, which would be the governor or dictator. The rides are mostly owned by the management except for some privately owned rides that follow along either by invitation or bid. Management sells tickets and each ride collects them, each paid a percentage of the tickets it draws. Barkers run the games in the same type fashion only it’s cash from the marks, directly into their hand so, even among those with no honor there is an honor system to split a percentage with the management. So you should be able to see how the jockeys and barkers are competing for the same monies.

Food vendors are always neutral because everyone has to eat. The food vendors are like Cleopatra’s in the carnival. Fights often break out between the jockeys and the barkers, and it’s always due to their frustrations with getting money out of the marks. Either they are just pissed off because people aren’t spending money at the games like they used to, or expect them to- blaming it on the rides, or they claim they can’t be heard well enough over the noise of the sirens and sounds that are used to add a layer of attraction or saliency- calling the attention of the potential riders.

At then end of the night it’s party time- drugs, booze and sex. Eleven P.M. comes and then it’s all too crazy. The clans group up and who knows what will happen next. Someone almost always gets beat up. It’s like the freaking jackals or hyenas on the African plains- just a bunch of beggars around me, biding their time until they are completely freed of responsibility as earthlings who are sick of having to wash up for supper even.

Biding time until death was mostly what I was doing but I wasn’t dying from anger and hate, I was dying from a broken heart. It was typical of me to get mixed up with the dregs of society because I was born, inconveniently. And being aware of that, as well as being socially scarred because of it, placed me right where misfits end up a lot of times- on the streets.

Tom Kloosterhouse worked with me at 84 Lumber, where I met him. After I joined the Carnival, he landed a job working with me. Now that I look back with my experience on Earth, I see how we both thought it was a good idea- we both had our bells rung. My bell got rung six consecutive times in the collision with the Semi, and he got his bell rung when a stack of Trusses fell from their foolishly upright, stacked position. So, we both were dealing with concussions. And now that I have been educated on what concussions are, and what PTSD is, I clearly understand why we did something so utterly stupid.

They got rid of Tom over the workman’s compensation suit, and they got rid of me because I was having serious issues with my mathematical computations- being a sawyer and cutting the truss parts, my head injury was a serious issues. My numbers were always miswritten or misread, as if I had Dyslexia. That was fine with me because I had enough of that operation anyway. Seeing my mistakes was a constant source of frustration and aggravation that only made the drinking and using more consistent, routine and copious. Even though it would appear as though I was partying, I was miserable and hated everything I was doing to myself, which only compounded my misery all the more.

So, there we were, him and I, and our demons. One night, being locals, we let someone talk us into finding them some cocaine, one of the other jockeys. By the time we got back to the lot, we were pretty lit. In the bunkhouse room we were assigned, Tom gets out the coke he had gotten for us and puts down a couple of lines. I passed out right in the middle of trying to snort one; my head fell forward onto the mirror. Tom just grabbed me by a wad of hair and scraped it off of my forehead with his identification card. It was just an average night in the life of a Carney.

We’d pull out in a day or two and head for the next spot… Gladwin County Fairgrounds, where I’d end up getting fired from the Carnival. It wasn’t really a secret that I was playing a drunk but it would be the reason I was given- a simple truth but not the real reasons for getting the axe. It was okay with me, I had seen enough. The truth was, the guy who ran the bulldozer game was irate over the horns and sirens and the sound system on the Force Ten. He was aggravated because his game was placed right next to this ride, for what I saw, the second spot in a row, drowning him out and frustrating him in his efforts to draw players. 

He took this out on me, especially since the female he worked with was admiring what there was of me to admire, while he was intent on getting something from her that was not available to him regardless of if I had any interest in her or not. At one point he crawled under the ride and all but silenced the siren by stuffing a rag in it but me, being a take charge kind of fool, I crawled under and found the reason for the sudden change- removing the flannel shirt that was stuffed in it. The electrolysis of the big picture made me the zinc plate on this vessel that was almost certain to sink. And I was so green, as Captain, that I had no idea of the type of tact to use to escape the Despondent Sea. 

It was his mutinous attitude, I’m sure, that made the management of Jerry’s concessions decide to keep placing him where he had been placed- probably trying to get rid of him altogether.

The day I was fired was definitely interesting, with my first puker, and a drunken lot lizard. The day was just getting started when the kid threw up on the ride. Puke went flying everywhere but it was quickly hosed down and ready for the next wave of riders. There weren’t really many people around to want to ride except for a couple kids, two fortyish looking partier types and a woman who had stumbled from the back lot, where the campsites were for the crew in the show. This woman was pretty loaded, having a hard time walking even. 

After a long-winded session of her begging, I let her on. When the ride got into full swing, she was writhing in the bucket like she had a broken neck so, I was forced to stop the ride but it wasn’t stopping in her mind. I opened the gate on the bucket while there was a county cop observing- apparently he had watched the whole thing because this woman was a community drunk with mental problems that had been all over the park the night before, combing the place to suit her agendas among the campsites. She stepped down and fell into a flailing heap, what looked like tumbling in place. People who hadn’t seen the whole episode had made me out to be an abuser. The cop would explain her to me and drive her off of the lot, taking her home.

Fortunately, for me, I had made an impression on the kids in the community. The man who hired me said he was going to drive me back to Grand Rapids. Quickly deciding that was not my intention, I told him that I had family in the area, and that I would just go there.

When I hit the streets, the neighborhood kids took me in. For a while my home was with an eighteen year-old kid with handicaps, both mental and physical. They called him “Mike on a bike,” and he had his own apartment at a complex not too far from the fairgrounds. It was an apartment on the second floor that his father managed to get for him. A very many people were social security recipients at this complex.

 His father said Mike was born handicapped due to his exposure to Agent Orange while on tour in Vietnam that affected his sperm. This was the first time I had witnessed a lot of new things that, looking back now, I wish I had sense enough available for any of it to mean something to me.

At some point in my excursions with, Mike, we were at a Pamida grocery store near a Veterinarian, where we ran into a married couple that he knew, and had done odd jobs for in the past. They arranged for us to come out to their house where they were doing work to prepare the place to be their full-time residence, having been relocating there from Bay City. One of the tasks for the day was, going on one last moving run. Now, this would have been an excellent opportunity to just have them take me to a relatives house in Bay City but my step-father destroyed all familial security with his taking us far from anyplace where his failures and his many underachievments could be viewed by any of mom’s relatives. I only know that now, where, I could never put my finger on it before. 

As for what was important to him, self-indulgence, Golf, mostly. He invested all of his time and money on golf. Of all the years he was with us, he rarely spoke to any of his ten kids from his previous marriage. He actually spoke more often of his ex-wife, Gloria, than all of them combined, for whatever reason.

Now, I see how typical this is of today’s so-called man. But it wasn’t his fault entirely. For, my own failure at helping myself had created a disaster that I was just too blinded by my own actions and grief to see. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself, and too willing to give the control over to alcohol and whatever or whomever else was around. My binge drinking and misery would not allow me to see my options in the least. It’s really too bad, and a lot worse than I thought at the time because, little did I know, people that loved and cared for me were there suffering with the complications of growing old, and in dire need of help and support that I could have easily provided. We could have helped each other at a mutually difficult time in our lives.

My Aunt Bernice Russo had been afflicted with Polio when she was a very young girl. She was struck down and forced into a wheelchair, where she sat for the rest of her life. My Uncle Bill met her when they were in school together, which is when they fell in love. They were High School Sweethearts. 

He had been placed in a convalescent home with Alzheimer’s, and she was at home being tended to by in-home nurses and such. I would learn they passed away twelve hours apart but that would not be until about six months after the fact. I recall my mother mentioning the situation of Uncle Bill and Aunt Bern around the time of my divorce in 1997 but due to never receiving anything that I understood as love and affection, I was unable to respond to their needs. 

So poisonous, the regret is, over wishing I had responded to Aunt Bern’s need for my help but I failed us both. It was not possible to receive the messages that love and intuition sends, primarily failing because I was polluting myself with whatever I could get while dwelling in self-pity. Lobotomized by the closed head injury and alcohol, I remained ignorant. Ironically, of all the loss giving me worlds of grief, I was about to lose more, and quite possibly two of the last loving family members I had left.

With Polio at eight or ten, and leg braces and a wheelchair, Uncle Bill never left her side. They were both smokers in high school and their younger days, as many were. Most likely a product of the WWII promotions, smoking Camels way back then but they both decided to quit one day, as far as she knew. Being confined to a damned wheelchair, she was left only to roam the main floor and deck, which was always odd to us kids because Uncle Bill was extremely inventive, if not ingenious.

Uncle Bill had an air compressor system that he had built out of some automotive parts. And he engineered and manufactured his own boiler system that provided heat and hot water for their home. He also had a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T. God only knows when he bought it but he kept it alive, driving it right up until he couldn’t drive any longer.

Everywhere he went, someone would offer to buy this car- literally begging him to sell it. People would ask him to race, and to see under the hood, really lusting after that car. It was the same make and model that was used on the “Dukes of Hazzard” show. Uncle Bill wasn’t selling. This car was being saved for me. He had told me this himself when I was maybe twelve years old. The car is now gone. Nobody knows where it went but one thing I know is, I was never invited or informed of the funeral. 
The funny thing about Uncle Bill, with all of his inventiveness and genius, never built a lift for Aunt Bern to climb the stairs to the lower level. Come to find out, he had his own pad down there, complete with a kitchenette and an exhaust system in the chimney so he could smoke cigarettes.

It wouldn’t be until too late, until Aunt Bern has been long gone, while here at Jackson Prison, that I would finally realize what it was like for her to be imprisoned in that condition, and feeling as lonely as she must have felt. She would mail letters to us quite frequently that would always contain pictures and articles from these tabloid type newspapers you find in the grocery store checkout lanes, within reach of her wheelchair: Largest ball of twine unwinds; Thirty nine pound cat eats whole pizza; Man with no legs climbs mountain. 

There was always a “can-do” aspect to everything she shared with us. The problem was, having been going through the motions of life with a dysfunctional family, we were never motivated to write her back, that I can remember or maybe the thought was overridden with traumas from the past or a beating, replaced with the hungers children have for the love they are starved of.

My poor Aunt Bernice was a sweetheart that showered us all with hugs and kisses but having never received them, they were strange to me, and I would cringe and try to resist, like an animal that never has been in human contact.

Odd to look back on, the sheer irony, that I have been literally killing myself, in my search for a place to be in life, and in my head- searching for love and affection. And the very people that had it for us kids died before we could become wise enough to understand what they had, which denied them of the love they deserved just as much.

All I have of my Aunt Bernice is a picture of her seated and smiling, spectacles and shawl- the silver in her hair matching the bluish yarn. Extremely saddened with the truth in her memory, I realize now how very, very important love is for our children, and for one another. It’s the main message in almost every religion, and the Bible: 
God is Love. Love one another…  Stealing from our children brings pain to us all, in that moment, in their tomorrow, and finally, to us when we look around and find they’re not by our side when we are transitioning into the final phase of life- our death. So, I failed in all respects. That is, if any of it is respectable. It was a perfect opportunity for so much, to come to her rescue, as well as my own.

[I would later hear of how the in-home nursing assistants were unable to move her around without hurting her. She really would have appreciated it if I could have been able to stop feeling sorry for myself long enough to see that I was truly needed; another irony since I am a Pisces.]

It was a perfect opportunity for me to find my safe haven. It was another perfect opportunity to have love and support that I so direly needed. It was a perfect opportunity to position myself to take over the familial reigns, replacing my grandfather- becoming the pinnacle.

I couldn’t help but wonder if having a father to talk to, in this very tough time, would have changed any of it. Even still, I am not without the understanding that the drugs and alcohol compounded everything, making it all far worse than it really was or needed to be. Stupid me.

I can still hear my Aunt Bern’s voice echo in my head: “Rutabaga soup! Rutabaga soup! That’s all they fed us at damned the VA Hospital!” Between the memory and a photograph, that’s all I have of my Aunt Bern, and from what I’ve witnessed after the deaths of loved ones these days, it’s probably the best thing I could have.

Yeah, Gladwin is where I spent some time trying to find my way. Instead of going to my relatives, we stopped at Long John Silver’s on our way back to Gladwin with the household items we had retrieved from their old residence. I only knew this because I got drunk and puked all over the floor where my notebook laid. Even after cleaning it all up, the pages of my notebook were oil stained. Mike answered my question about what I ate that was so greasy the next day.

On one of my trips to and from their house, I stopped in at Wally Gator’s Auto Repair, where I filled out an application. They were steadily busy repairing exhaust systems, and were in need of help, mostly because the owner of the shop was in prison on cocaine related charges- leaving behind his wife to try to manage the business. It wouldn’t be until too late that I would realize I messed up, yet, another opportunity to get off of the street and into a refuge long enough to get pointed in the right direction to reposition myself in the game of life, instead of playing life’s games.

 She hired me but my inability to read the writing on the wall would soon get me arrested for trying to walk six miles back to Mike’s instead of going to her house. Impaired with over indulgence, and Budweiser’s, provided by numerous dollars and plenty of dancing with the women they came from, I made the bad decision to stumble all the way back to Mike’s place.

With my shoes in my hand, I started off down the highway. It was dark and cloudy so, I used the yellow lines in the center of the road to guide me. At one point the trees were making a bunch of really cool colors but I would quickly learn that it was because the bubbles on the top of the county Sherriff’s car were putting them there. 

When the cop grabbed me I stumbled, which resulted in a resisting and obstructing charge on top of the public endangerment charge. When they asked me if I had any weapons, of course, I said no but my shirt was not tucked in. If it were, it would have revealed a legal belt knife. That added a concealed weapons charge that comes with a five-year max- a felony charge.

Well, being a bit annoyed, and a wise ass with gluttony for punishment, I added a comment that was something to the affect of me being Bill Clinton. They threw me in the car and headed for the pigpen, which gave me time to think. Now, of all of the stuff I could have, and should have been thinking, I was stewing on the flagrant abuse of authority, trumping up the charges against me, and keeping me distant from any rational or practical thoughts. 

They asked me for a name again, so I made up a good one. I started to give them Tom Kloosterhouse’s name but changed it to Kloosterman, in an attempt to keep him off of the radar. My reason was that if I gave them my name they would be sending me back to Grand Rapids, which I was trying to get away from because of the crack and the court. 

Even during the booking process, it was obvious that I made up the name but the deputy just brought up a printout with all of the information that went along with the name, for me to copy down onto the paperwork. At this time he asked me if I had seven hundred dollars. He stated that if I did, the whole thing could go away. I did what I could but my efforts were useless. The woman I was working for wouldn’t be putting up any money to help me out.

Imagine my surprise, thirteen years later, to run into Nate Book in prison, not just run into him but to be sharing the same cell after having met him that night in the Gladwin County Jail. Him and the other eight men in Gladwin’s ten man cell would later ridicule me and reject my attempts at trying to convince them of what I had done with the “fake” name. Nate began calling me “Goldilocks” because of my long blondish hair. He was quite jealous, and the instigator of the taunting since he was at a total loss of all hair, having alopecia since the age of eight. Not to mention the fact that he was in jail on cocaine and criminal sexual conduct charges.

When I went to court on my several charges, I tried to explain the name issue to my Court Appointed Attorney but it was useless. He left it alone and that was that. There would be no convincing the court, in any way, that I was not the person they understood me to be. The whole thing was covered up and would later resurface in the media by way of the Bay City Times Newspaper.

It ended up being a six-month sentence in the county jail, which resulted in three entertaining months- day for day. They released me at seven in the morning on a very nice sunny day at the end of September. In an attempt to face my problems, armed with a renewed sense of purpose and a little jailhouse bible study, I found the main road and started throwing my thumb out to any vehicle LEAVING Gladwin. My plan was to head south towards Grand Rapids.

The first ride I scored was from a young couple who lived in a Geodesic Dome house that was poorly assembled and seemed way too small for a couple with three children, which it was but they were very friendly. Despite being low-income survivors- they rustled up some change for my pocket, and a pack of cigarettes.

When and where they let me off at, I can’t recall but I did the same thing I always did when I needed to get someplace- I just kept going in that direction. The only real problem I had was a result of sitting around in a jail cell for several months. 

The fast pace of my stride soon made my feet raw. My calves became swollen and aching, and my head ached from squinting in the sun. Starving and lonely, and wanting a cup of coffee in the worst way possible to want one, I kept moving on. There were some carrots that I found laying along the roadside that relieved a bit of my hunger, probably having fallen from a harvest truck on the way to the co-op.

 “The lord will provide.” I kept thinking. I wondered, “Would it be possible for a cup of coffee?” Several hundred yards later I stumble upon a small convenience store where they had coffee that had just finished brewing. I took out the change I had, some that I had found on the roadside between carrots but it wasn’t enough. I pleaded with the clerk, explaining my plight, to allow me a large cup of coffee with what change I had. 

A customer that was in front of me heard what I was saying as he left- only to come back in with the ashtray from his vehicle, giving me all of the change that he had accumulated in it. Was this the answer to my request?

Not long after I had finished sipping my super-savored cup of mud, a blue four door Oldsmobile zips past. The driver’s head turned, scoping me out as they went past me. A few minutes later the person came back, driving by me, and turning around to pick me up.

Driving the car was a much older woman than I, maybe early sixties, who’d been out at garage sales that morning. Her face was haphazardly made up. She had fresh lip paint, and gobs of mascara hanging from her lashes, looking very much like she had plans for me and hurriedly made herself up to increase her chances. She startled me with her seeming intentions. My only defense was discussing the Bible, and it worked like a charm. 

She had lunch with me that day but it wasn’t cream of some young guy. It was cold chicken salad sandwiches from a Convenience store-type gas station near the off and on ramp of U.S. 131 highway.

Once I made it to southbound entrance of US 131, a guy stopped and offered me a ride. It wasn’t even three minutes later but there I was, drinking the beer he had offered. What a huge mistake for an emotionally crippled person with a concussion disorder. For three months I had dried out, sobered up, tuned in and reasserted myself. 

The worst thing I could do was to start drinking again, before tackling and resolving, the issues that caused me to get lost in it. I knew it at the time but it had been such a long walk in the blazing sun, that my senses were compromised and I could not resist the temptation. In my experiences and realization, now, I would have refrained for most of the ride until I could decide whether I really wanted to or if it was merely an impulse- to, “sleep on it,” as they say. 

Even still, I could see that my work in life was really cut out for me.

When I started out that morning, I made a prediction that it would take six rides to get me back home. It was just a bonus adventure to beat an aged cougar off with the Bible that day. She did, however, leave a claw in by giving me her address- if I needed a place to stay. 

And NO, I never took her up on any of it but, as you can see, I never forgot either.

It’s funny how your memories work, how your psyche works, by blocking out the traumatic events and replacing them with a lack of memory. Then things that are so silly or absurd, memory takes these things and places them before the traumatized parts. It would be like a navigation system.

 The subconscious seems to always push for a better understanding in order to control emotions, and conquer anger and fear- helping steer us to destiny that we relish to find. That is, if we don’t lobotomize ourselves with alcohol and substances or with other people’s views, intentions and schemes- trading away ourselves for a glimpse of some painted up sell-outs thighs or for a Coke and a store bought smile.

The last few days, while rebelling in my own ways at the things I like to observe so-called “grown men” doing, I have given a bit of thought on the old tale about the sword and the stone. Maybe I’m just thick but I finally understand something about it. The sword wasn’t in the stone; the sword was within the stone- the stone was the sword that conquered the people. In order to have a fighting chance at their oppressor’s, they needed to have swords which meant making them- the sword “in” the stone. The man who can give the people the sword for strength would be the man that they would crown. 

It’s all so simple. We are the stone that the sword is in, and we are the ones who can get it out, giving our power to ourselves with the empowerment that knowledge and ambition brings.

Anyway, I got the next ride, ride number five, which carried me all the way to Grand Rapids. After asking me where to drop me off, I see that it’s going to be a trick because traffic is heavy and it’s a very busy spot on the highway at the 131/I-96 interchange near Alpine Avenue. 

Just about the time I get to the top of the entrance ramp heading west to Marne, a Michigan State Police officer pulls up and scoops me off of the road. My instincts were telling me to hike through the bush a ways but I figured another hitch would come along right then- not the authorities. Just imagine my surprise when he runs my name to find that Ottawa County has a warrant for me. All that way just to get picked up by the police and put right back in jail! This was my final ride. This was ride number six.

In a way I was relieved- getting right back in the ring to fight things out to the finish or maybe punishment from the spiritual realm for drinking so quickly after being clean and sober for three months. Either way, or both, it would speed things up with my tasks. Mostly, I considered it a prep-course for what lie ahead, re-uniting with my dreams of music because during that thirty days I would become acquainted with my cell-mate who played music, wrote lyrics and recorded in his own home studio. We spoke about these things ninety percent of the time, yielding only to familial topics. This got the brain train moving along, and with all the freight mine carried it was now unstoppable.

They did experiments involving prisons and institutional settings, where some of the participants were made inmates and some were made guards. It was a very powerful and informative psychological documentary. Here I am, in the reality of that particular study, on the inside. I feel like Jane Goodall in a way, only the monkeys that I am observing are a bit more serious issue: TODAY’S MEN.

The mentality in motion, on the part of those who help run the Ottawa County Jail, involved a little game with the “systems” people. There I am, waiting to be picked up for my release, all the while my people are cruising around outside in their efforts to get me but they cannot find the entrance. The grounds are set up with instructional road signs that are intentionally confusing in their implications and configuration. It seems they do not like helping people, contrasting to the “serve and protect” mantra that they are sworn to uphold.

State workers, especially turnkeys, which are largely disgruntled, get off on taunting and humiliating people (It surprises me that Bob isn’t a turn-key). Most often they become prison guards because they couldn’t pass the psych evaluation to become an actual police officer but they end up in the institutions working with people anyway, which is unbelievable and makes no sense.

So, after you follow the directions of the sign saying “Ottawa County Jail Visitor’s Entrance”, you find all the other signs. These all say “wrong way” and “do not enter” and “authorized personnel only,” leaving you with no way inside the compound. Yeah. Real funny. I’m sure some Napoleonic twerps get a frequent laugh about that but it is nothing compared to the thrill they get from getting into arguments with people because of it.

Looking around, I see the male specimens surrounding me and feel relieved that my life isn’t so lacking- left with time to imagine what life must be like for these pitiful fools. Fortunately I have better things to do but while doing some of those things, I find myself saddened with the fact that I have no real men for friends, which leaves me without anyone to call for help when I need it or anyone that I can hang out with, or have over for a card game with my wife and I.

At the moment I can’t recall if I ended up released or if I was transferred to the Kent County Jail for an FOC warrant but somehow I ended up back in Grand Rapids, on the West side of town. I am pretty sure I went back to work for Salih but it wouldn’t last very long. His wife was still too much to deal with.

It wouldn’t be much longer before I’d be back to work for Bob. I’m sure they spoke about what to do with me being that I couldn’t go back to mom’s due to Stan’s Ego, and so that’s how I ended up in a room at the Wayside Motel. Bob would just deduct the rent from my pay. One of the problems I had with Bob was that he took it upon himself to pay me so little that I was starved in effect. So much so, that once I was involved, I had no choice but to stay where I was at unless I wanted to go back to the streets. I didn’t really have enough money to do the things I wanted, like go out to the bar in search of a companion or buy dope of any kind. I had grown accustom to earning over two thousand dollars a week, now only being paid two hundred a week.

There were reasons why I was getting shorted. Most involved Bob’s scandalous nature of milking the jobs out. The profits he earned, that were rightfully my own, paid for his Corvette- an acquisition he flaunted in my face whenever he got a chance to. Little did he allow himself to understand is that if he would have listened and learned important trade secrets and techniques that I was willingly trying to share with him he could have paid me one thousand a week, enabling me to take my ex-wife to court over defrauding me, my children and the courts, and regaining my life, and have bought himself two Corvettes. But humble in the smallest, he was not, and I’ve finally become rewarded with that which I have sought so long and hard. Kids somewhat included.

Anyway, the Wayside Motel was an okay little place except for the narcotic affect of the room environment, either depressing or lacking of oxygen, I am not sure which- maybe both. Trying to keep myself busy, I took it upon myself to work in the backyard repairing the Horseshoe pits.

There were plenty of things to keep me busy, like working for Ancil Mitchell, at the church he ministered to. He needed a Baptism pond built, something other than the galvanized thing they were using. This was the same thing used to feed or water livestock with on many farms across the United States of America.

Ancil propositioned Bob to create the Baptism pond but rather than further his knowledge in the engineering and artistic scope that makes up more than half of the skilled carpentry trade, he nominated me. It was probably a decision he made because of the fact that it would end up being a low paying gig- if any pay at all. I feel like he did that to keep himself from being exposed but mostly he just couldn’t do it. There was too much thinking involved, a curious situation because my thinking faculties were compromised because of the head injury I had received from the accident with the Semi, and my newfound lifestyle after my divorce. 

Either way, I really appreciated this because it kept me busy and away from myself- consuming my time that would normally be spent drinking, especially since I was exhausted from carrying an excessive amount of emotional baggage. This pond ended up being a very, very cool thing, and it may possibly have been Bob’s attempt to help me get away from the destruction I had been doing to myself. With Ancil on the sidelines, and a team of volunteers- I let the project lead me along, helping me find whatever I had left in myself for the world. It was a confidence booster.

Outside of the fiberglass liner, the fabric, paint, and various fasteners and adhesives, I manufactured every part of it, even the mechanical hardware assemblies. We needed a lid for it that could also be the floor of the podium, concealing the pond beneath, in which to “bury your sins.”

Some calls were made, magazines thumbed through, and a day or two later I had information to use for proceeding. We found a company, on the east coast of course, that manufactured this lid component. They called it a “stress-skinned panel”, and it cost around ten grand, shipping included I imagine, which would take approximately eight weeks. It was a no-brainer for me, being it was my project. 

After a short contemplation I decided that I would engineer one of my own panels.  The one that I made was under an inch and three quarters thick and took me about two days to make. When it was finally installed you could park a full size motorcycle on it. Proud of that achievement, I glowed for weeks.

The initial phase involved removing some of the floor, cutting out some of the existing load bearing beam structure, and re-engineering it all to accommodate a new joist system that gave us the lowered finished height we needed, without having to rebuild the existing stage ensemble. 

Making the upper portion slide, roll, and lift was another small engineering feat accomplished with minimum hardware that was constructed using one inch threaded steel pipe and some bearing roller parts I acquired from a fitness store that I had worked at in the early nineties- Viking Leisure Products.

The people who made up the congregation were always there to lend a hand or just spend their time doing whatever needed to be done. A good amount were recovered from the streets and clinging to the church out of their earnestness in keeping away from those things that robbed them of life. 

 Many of them were single mothers, divorced parents, and fatherless children who found alcohol and drugs, and in some cases even prostitution and the edge of their graves.

Ancil was known as a Saint- a healer. Many persons had been healed in his church, leaving behind their crutches and various braces and even wheelchairs as a testament to their healing.

 Even if it was the mere decision to truly choose good to end a charade, they were healed just the same. His own son and daughter were not strangers to the world’s games involving being hounded and bamboozled by persons interested in separating them from their money with any of the highly habit forming and dangerously addictive salves that those who lost all but hope to find the goodness in life will try.

His son was recovered from full-fledged junkie status, having a lengthy history with intravenous drug use that all but claimed his life.

One of the young ladies in the congregation had her eyes on me but I was no where near recovered for a relationship- merely struggling with the reality of trying to find my way back to what was important to my whole existence. I could have cleverly manipulated this woman for selfish reasons but, thankfully, I am not really the type and had been just sober enough to not prey upon her, having the realization that there was respectability in keeping my grief my own. I loved her by staying away, not to share my poisoned existence with her in her efforts to keep her family intact and to be a mother to her children. 

Though it was something I yearned for in the deepest pit of my heart and soul, I was just honest enough with myself or dare I say wise enough, to know that it was wrong.

Aside from working on the baptism pond, I attended the services at the Grand Valley Voice of the Pentecost on the weekends, even became baptized in the pond that I helped them to create. 

It was a great experience at that time in my life, and I think about it once in a while with a smile, while wondering if I should find the time to visit and see what kind of maintenance the pond needs to reflect the love, care and craftsmanship that went into it’s creation. My heart was poured into that project as I had poured it into every project. 

And even though Ancil told me to come to him for money on it, I declined even the smallest payment. How could I take money from a church that showed a mere forty or sixty dollars in the offering plate? Even still, to this day, in such a time of my own dire needs- facing hardships and uncertainty, I am still satisfied in that decision. Money wasn’t what I needed.

chapter

It wouldn’t be long before a guy would move into the room next door to my own, bringing the cocaine I was struggling to get away from into my reality again. It was my inebriation with alcohol that undermined my own defenses. 

Compounding the circumstances was my need for camaraderie, being in a state of psychological and emotional weakness and unable to focus in on the big picture. Once again, I would fail to resist temptation, and I ended up cavorting with addicts again, namely, Ronald Jackson.

Ronald grew up in Allendale. He went to school there and also rode dirt bikes as a teen. He had a chance to be a pro rider but somehow got separated from that dream. His mother and sisters raised Ronald. His father was an addict who still roams the streets today. As for how Ronald’s father became an addict, I cannot say nor do I know but in regards to Ronald, I feel it was his father that introduced that poison into his life. As a whole, my guess is that it’s mostly environmental- conditioned by forces that will never show them selves to be prosecuted. 

Drugs, particularly cocaine, destroyed Ronald’s marriage. Ronald’s son is now a young adult who’s playing the same games like being a small time dope peddler, and wannabe gangster, slowly evolving into a full-blown addict, and slowly poisoning all those around him. Being a dope peddler is a convenient way to have the drug at your disposal, which is the premise behind those who “share” the drug with anyone around them. 

Ronald, much like his father did in my speculation, probably turned his son on to the drug by-way of mixing it with marijuana, the first step to turning one on to it. Nostradamus said that the cities would poison all who inhabit them.

Ron would spend what money he could pool together to use the drug. He would then call around the city, to every relative, friend and acquaintance, trying to accumulate a couple dollars from each one. 

The story was always the same: that he needed money for bus tickets to get to work. He did this so often that the phrase, “bus ticket money,” had to be understood by everyone he contacted. If I could have only gotten a handle on my drinking I would have never allowed him or anyone else, to know of my safe haven at the Wayside Motel. Ronald would drive out to get me in a stolen car, knowing that I had been working and had a few dollars, only to re-awakening the demon that I was trying to make sleep forever… bad associations.

My biggest failure was the alcohol- a door that I had left wide open, while trying to close out all of the bad people and bad things that I stumbled on while lost in life’s game. The final straw at the Wayside Motel was after the motorcycle crash that took place at Bob’s. I had been examining the mushrooms in the yard behind the motel- looking for psychedelics but the manager saw me and mowed the yard down tight.

Thrown out of the Wayside Motel soon after, I ended up at Ronald’s house, having nowhere else that I could see to go. It was soon the end of summer again because I recall it being Cody’s birthday. His birthday had motivated me to write him a special Birthday song. Ronald had a phone, so I called his mom’s house in Spartanburg South Carolina, only to sing it to an answering machine that would quickly end up erased after Cody had gotten to listen to it:

“I-     ’m singing Ha-ppy Birthday,                                                                                                  t-o   my favorite little dude.   
                                                                                                     I’m ho-ping you don’t gro-w at all,                                                                                               as I look at pictures scattered ‘round of you.                                                                           Just look around your room,    you’ll see me smiling at you                                                 in that oak sun carving I sent home with you.                                                                         Ha-ppy Birthday, Happy Birth-day.                                                                                           Happy Birthday Cody, I Love You.”

His mother told me that he smiled big as the world when he heard it, which only makes sense to me why she destroyed it now that I look back. And as angry and hurt as I have been since she took them, I am happy because it only gives that much more value to the power and significance of the love that I have to share. And it makes me happy that I survived the tests and strains. I won. You can’t kill me. You can’t destroy me. I have been strengthened by the hardships, hardened, tempered but my heart is intact. Thank God. I still can’t believe I am alive sometimes.

It was while staying at Ronald’s, on Alpine Avenue, that I would cross paths with Salih again, and regain my job performing roof repair and carpentry. It wouldn’t be very long before my substance abuse would interrupt that again. The question I now wondered the answer to was: 
“Why would Salih continue to offer, yet another chance at employment?” The answer is fairly predictable or maybe not. You see, Salih was one of a number of three or four brothers, him being the youngest. Their parents were deceased- killed in an automobile accident, if I remember right. 
I envisioned the movie, “Westside Story”. 

Alcohol quickly became a routine in their lives, which led to some serious drug use. Dependency soon took over and destroyed what was left of the family. But that’s a bit vague. To put it more clearly, cocaine almost killed them all.

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 someone looted an old abandoned building, asking for my assistance. He 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.I am not sure if he ever got what he wanted or not.

 Why do I help everyone who asks? I do not know. I can only speculate. That’s what happens when starvation for love and affection, and an addiction to something corrupts your mind, especially cocaine. 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 rat trap 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 mu 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.

Well, after losing my house on McReynolds, and the hotel room on Twenty-eighth Street along with all of my possessions, I went to Danny to tell him a select portion of what happened. He gladly took me in and we started doing whatever we could to feel alive. At some point we rehashed the intimate details of my past, of each other’s past, other than just the basic overviews. We were enjoying the days that we were given. Besides, he was battling with colon cancer, and with no health insurance or money, the outlook has only one ending. That end was closer than I could know or imagine.

Other than the excessive drinking and some marijuana, we didn’t touch anything else although stuff was all around us. We’d practice music until we could go out and perform, appearing at open mics all over town. We’d host art parties and music sessions that would pick up, and become more frequent, as our employments would enable us to do. I was still working for Bob, absorbing the routine ridicule and abuse that I came to expect but my spirits were lifted, empowered with art and my love for music. These things helped to keep me from falling back into the cocaine scene and the people that went along with it.

The city bus got me out to Walker, where I would get off in front of the Police station. Bob picked me up there unless I met him at the D and W shopping complex, about a mile before the last stop at the police station. This time period was the year two thousand.

While working in the shop at Bob’s, I had built five memento boxes from knotty pine v-groove car siding, one for each of my children, one for myself, and one for a lady who drove the city bus, (GRATA). Danny and I would be asked to move soon. Aside from property maintenance for the landlord, Danny worked property maintenance for the Kettlewell’s.

The Kettlewell’s were affluent, if not rich- his wife being an addict and quite a promiscuous tramp. Michelle Kettlewell was beaten about the legs for a debt she owed to a coke dealer, for crack. She claimed she was hurt while playing golf, injuring her knees in a freak accident. We all knew it wasn’t true. 

Her brother, Robert McVoy, lived in the apartment upstairs but was one of the regulars in Dan’s crew before I came along. He was a Paranoid Schizophrenic and was relatively unstable because he bounced in and out of reality, sometimes refusing to take his meds for fear he was being poisoned. 

Now and again he would rant about the “Secret Police”. Suspicions are that the “Secret Police” were related to the Dutch Construction Mob, which can be traced through to the Grand Rapids Home Builder’s Association. Anyhow, he’d end up in the Forensics Hospital for a while, long enough to stabilize him, and return him to his apartment. Then he would just be crazy enough to deal with.

On Thanksgiving Day, there would be a gathering at Dan’s mom’s house, to which I was always invited. Of course, I would go but only to end up being accosted by Dan’s ex-girlfriend, Helen, whom was the widowed wife of Michael DeRuiter- Dan’s older brother.

Dan was the last straw for his father, leaving Dan’s mother, Eleanor, the moment he learned that she was pregnant with another son. 
Danny was the last of four, having two sisters: Kathy and Linda. Linda may be the oldest in the family. She is a parole agent in Kalamazoo. 

Kathy was once busted for trying to smuggle a block of hashish into the country when she was a spring chicken. The family had to put up the house to help her out of that one.

 Mike ended up driving his car into a tree, which killed him. His death was claimed to be a result of his intending to commit Suicide. 

Come to find out, the wife, Helen, drove him to it. She was Danny’s ex-girlfriend to begin with. The interesting thing is that Dan’s dog, Chewy, never liked her from the beginning.

 Mike ended up having two children with her- a boy and a girl. Helen.

Danny, Mike, Kathy and Linda grew up mostly in Grand Haven, near the beach. Actually, the house was in the hillside, on the south end of the beach, overlooking Lake Michigan. Danny’s uncle was the male role model in their lives, for the most part. He was always doing the things that reflected a certain amount of ingenuity and creativity that I imagine is what had the biggest influence on Danny’s evolving or gravitating toward the Art world.

The house in the hillside would turn from a rickety shack, into a beautiful two family home, and today is still owned by the family. This was the second wake location when we celebrated Danny’s life. It was here, in Grand Haven, where Danny started studying music and playing guitar, eventually meeting someone who would become his best friend, Rick Belkofer, also known as “RB”, a musician who became a consistent, and large influence, in Dan’s life.

RB, today, is one of the top Blues guitarists in West Michigan with many albums, as well as having a string of musicians he plays with as the band, “RB and Company”.

Well, Danny had no idea what would be happening beyond the typical Thanksgiving Day merriment or he would have prepared me for Helen a little more than he did. It wouldn’t be long after this that she would make a full on attack at gaining my attention for an exchange of affection. 

Later on, If Danny would not have told me to be extra cautious, I may not have noticed the red flags that let me know I wasn’t ready for this or that this mission of mercy was just too much for me. It was only about a week after that meal, that she called, preparing for the holidays and her coupling needs. 

This was also the same time Danny was relieved of his property management services that he was providing to his landlord, which meant we had to move. 

Luckily for us, a guy we worked with on painting projects that we performed for Brad Lake, was renting a house around the corner that had several rooms for rent. 

So, we moved from forty Prospect Street to six twenty Lake Drive. By now, the Jeep Danny had was out of commission, having lost the gas tank while driving back to Heritage Hill from Coit Park, also known as, “Look Out Hill”. 

We were now driving RB’s old camper van around. It had been parked out at Dan’s uncle’s house, where his mom stayed. This period of my life was a bit tumultuous but surprisingly restful compared to the cacophony I was in when I met him.

Meeting Danimal was really the one event that I can say made the difference, that got me started on a path that I could see, helping me turn my life into something more closely resembling what my life could be without trying to destroy myself for the sake of being a failure on too many levels for me to accept living with. More irony- I found music when I first needed comfort, and now it helped me to save my life.

We went to all of the music clicks in town in order to perform and meet other musicians. The west side of town usually meant the Radio Tavern for open mike with a host Blues band. And then, for a while, there was Arco Iris, which was an informal place- a dive that served coffee where they hosted an open jam and a drum circle. It was the west side where we would become acquainted with Andy Flynn, an addict who used a fake smile and a hodge-podge travesty of musicianship to infiltrate the New-Age hippie scene. 

It would be close to too late before we would learn that he was just another dirtball who was trying to sneak heroine and crack cocaine into our reality. Thank God that never happened.

Dan named him “Bad Andy”, because he ruined everything, always. Before we banished him, we would record his attempts at songs, some of which I did the vocals. One night the three of us ventured to the west side, where we performed at the Radio Tavern. 

A woman would throw herself at me and follow us back to the studio. Little did I know she was merely an alcoholic, and a homeless woman, in between her options for a fool. Well, me being such an excellent fool, I was game to give her a chance. 

She soon emptied her bags for me, explaining her epilepsy and a falling out with her roommate, and her having to quit her job working for her dad at the cemetery. This was only because she was sick of the pre-requisite that she have sex with him as part of the job.

As wonderful as Catholicism seems to be, I don’t understand the advocacy routine. It must be the real selling point. And what’s with those creeps working around the dead? Anyway, we let her stay, even though her story about the total body shave and cigar burn didn’t correspond with any known history involving losing at strip poker. That’s the wonderful thing about alcohol; it enables us to alter our perceptions long enough for them to develop a tolerance for anything.

As the summer got underway, festivals sprang up. Dan and I decided to accept an invitation to play at the Ann Arbor Art Festival with the guys from the band “Werkshop”, however lame they really were. On the day of the show, I made an executive decision to keep Danny on the sober side by helping him drink the booze he had bought that morning, which meant he’d only be half as drunk as he would have been, had I not intervened. It really worked pretty well until we were in Ann Arbor. After getting Danny set up, I took it upon myself to buy another fifth of Burnett’s Gin for the three of us.

By the time the guys from Werkshop arrived, we had drawn a crowd and I was photographing everything I could. The need for a second fifth had already come, which I had fulfilled, and I’m sure we had consumed by then, at least for the most part. Werkshop was upset because we upstaged them by getting there when we were suppose to but we didn’t know they were that upset yet, so I helped them unload and carry their gear. Just a short time after the band was playing a set there was a muffled spat, where they complained about Danny being too loud. The jealousy of the moment found a way to the surface.

In a band, it’s always about volumes, to start with. I imagine they knew Dan was drunk, and I am sure my being drunk added to the deficiency of Diplomatic skills at hand but we had been there for hours and were ready to move on anyway, so we packed up and tried to leave. That was when we met the police officer that got involved. 

Of course, the cop was not trying to spend the next few hours trying to stay in our way, and was more than happy to accept our stating that we were leaving to meet up with our driver, since Mike from Werkshop was the snitch trying to alert them that we were driving somewhere after we’d been drinking. If ol’ Mikey had known to what extent we had drank that morning, he may have fainted. 

Well, we were so drunk that we had to let the girl drive- once we finally found the Jeep. One of the last things I remember was Dan asking her if she could drive, and if she could navigate us back to Grand Rapids. The other thing I recall is Werkshop Mike calling to ask if I had his keys after we had been on the road for some time. The keys were in my pocket, little did I realize. We stopped at the first truck stop we could find and I took them in, placing the little guitar figurine in the clerk’s hand. “Someone may come looking for these. You might want to put them in the lost and found box.” Then we got back on the road.

It was pitch black when I awoke to the woman saying that we were almost out of gas. Dan jumped up from his seat yelling, “We should have been home by now. Where are we?” A road sign came into view that said West Branch. “Gimme the map. Where’s West Branch? 

The Michigan map revealed that we were traveling North when we were supposed to have been heading South. She drove the wrong way. We were as far from going the right way as a tank of gas could get us. There should have been a quarter tank of fuel left when we got home. Why would a person continue driving while unclear if they were going the right way? Why not stop and ask someone to be certain?

 The answers to those questions would never be answered, however superfluous they were at that moment.

Dan yelled at her to get out of the truck, switching seats so he could drive, while cussing for several minutes. He put the truck into gear, and then it happened. Less than one minute later the bubble lit up on a West Branch County Sheriff’s car.

 The three of us were put under arrest and the cop went through the Jeep, finding our band equipment and my briefcase that he insisted on opening but couldn’t. There was nothing in it but my Harmonicas and notebooks, where I think he expected to find drugs, at least. The truck was impounded and we all went to the station, where they let the woman go, putting her on a Greyhound bus to take her back “home”.

Dan got another DUI but due to them misspelling his name, it was his FIRST ONE. We had to laugh about that. If he had gone to jail for a while, as one does for multiple DUI’s, it would have altered how everything afterwards that pertained to my life, would have played out. So, instead of Dan DeRuiter getting a DUI, Dan ReRuter got one.  Myself, I was arrested for false information to a police officer when I told them I was Bill Clinton, and that I never inhale. The real torture came when I realized they were holding me until I could see the judge.

The problem with that was I was finally going to be able to see my kids due to the fact that they were in Grand Rapids while their mother was visiting for the holidays- Independence Day, I think. We were finally to have time together for the first time since they were taken out of state. Their grandmother was arranging the visit. Other than music and art, the kids were the only concerns I had.

Danny’s mom would bail him out of jail in a phone call, and come up to get him in a few days. So, he’s put up in a motel and I am in jail. When she got there they came and got me out of jail, and then we went off to find the truck. What an ordeal that was! 

We searched and searched for this place, having been given misinformation to begin with. When we finally found the place, over an hour and a half later, it would become clear that we weren’t suppose to find it at all. It was hidden. 

This particular place was way, way out of town, out in the boo-oo-oonies! The only reason we found it was out of sheer determination and the fact that the stuff in it meant that much. As an artists and musicians, the equipment is half of the whole world.

The Jeep Wagoneer was loaded with odd’s and ends: Danny’s Fender Stratocaster Electric Guitar, the amplifier, effects processors and pedals, keyboard and stands, P.A. speakers, patch cords and cables, not to mention THE COWBELL.

The place had no signs and no visible mailbox. A dense wall of forestry, mostly evergreens, concealed it very well. Once we got an idea where the driveway was, it led us in a ways, much like a moonshine operation was going on. Even Dan’s mom, Eleanor, said that they were up to no good as we came upon the gated entrance.

When the gate opened Dan got out to talk to the guy that approached, while I stayed with his mom in the car. About twenty minutes later Danny came back to tell us they were moving vehicles so he could get it out. The Jeep was all the way in the back of the property, buried behind almost forty other vehicles. We knew what time it was here. Thank God Danny’s mom came to help us.

They were hoping to lay claim to the contents of the truck in a matter of days that would easily add up to way more than the truck was worth or that we could put together. They under estimated our determination, and our geographical and navigation skills. That, and we were just too hard-pressed for cash, since we had no other option.

Danny led the way out, driving Nancy, the Jeep, while I rode with Eleanor in her sporty little red Chrysler. Once we got to the gas station to fill up the tank, we were feeling more like we had recovered. The problem we had now was that the store had no alcohol.

I really felt bad about Eleanor driving back by herself but my own smoking habit and Danny’s insistence were controlling the situation. Danny listened to my story about my needing to get back for court in a couple weeks, promising to bring me back for a court appointment that I never made it back for. It wasn’t a secret to me, that I wouldn’t make it back, and it didn’t surprise me either.

Before we made it home I had a thought run through my mind. This was more of a voice with a message than a thought. The voice told me to put on my seatbelt because something was about to happen involving a wheel. My thoughts were then focused on loosing a wheel, picturing the lug nuts on the hub. One of them was broken off on a couple of the tires. 

After I fastened my seatbelt, a loud rumbling grinding sound came from the rear end of the truck. My brain replayed the previous thoughts, the fastening of the seatbelt with my right hand, the startling noise…  The truck didn’t feel like a wheel fell off, so when Dan pulled over to investigate the noise. We had no idea what we would find. Well, being mechanically inclined, and in disbelief that I knew before it happened, I jumped right out and poked my head under the chassis. “What the hell is that?” I asked. “It’s the spare tire bracket. See if we have something to rig it back up with,” he said.

Luckily for us the county had been out earlier that day, placing the wire coat hangers on the roadsides for people to find for miscellaneous vehicle cobbling. The winds created by the passing big-rigs rocked the Wagoneer as Danny and I mended the dangling spare tire bracket back up to the underbody. Moments later we were back on North bound 131 and coming up onto the Burton street overpass and exit. Dan lit another cigarette and offered me the pack. As I lit one, my thoughts went back to my intuition of loosing a wheel. 

“Wasn’t there a spare tire mounted on it?” I asked, curious why we didn’t pick up the spare too. “The spare is on the truck,” Dan said. “You mean we have been adventuring the stateside without a spare tire?” I asked. Dan said, “ It wouldn’t matter, we haven’t got a jack to put it on with anyway.” 

Well, I suppose that made sense, if anything made sense about any of what had happened all week. That was probably the bulk of it. And so, it’s just another day in the life, being a starving artist.

We got off of the highway and pulled into a party store parking lot, where Dan got us a bottle and a pack of Marlboro reds. While waiting, I made a mental note about trusting my instincts or at least considering them, especially in light of the spiritual encounters I had experienced in the past… and continued to have in the future.

Shortly after we arrived back the truck would drop its gas tank and drag from underneath by the remaining steel band that supported it. Evidently the other band had not been refastened when the fuel pump had been cobbled- a “miss-repair” done by our good friend Jimmy Huckleberry. 

Someone pulled up to us to tell us what was going on under our truck since we were unable to hear the sound of the plastic tank being worn away on the asphalt over the sounds of the exhaust system and the radio. When I got out to examine the situation I noticed what the problem was and tried to slip the band back onto the gas tank, where it had jiggled from because of the looseness. It was a bit difficult since the five gallons of fuel we had just put in it made it seem heavy in relationship to the awkward position my body was in to achieve the task. A hole had been worn through the corner and was leaking the fuel. 

Luckily we only had about four blocks left to go to get back to Prospect Studio, where we salvaged the leaking fuel by placing a plastic tub under it that’s designed for the wallpapering process. Previously, we had to take care to only fill the tank half way because of a crack in the seam of the tank but now it needed a tank for sure. I think that was ol’ Nancy’s last drive.

Fortunately, for Danny, his mother had no real need for her car at that time, so we borrowed it until we could figure out what to do. We soon decided to fetch RB’s old Ford Camper Van from where it was stashed behind Dan’s Uncle’s house where Eleanor lived in Standale. Dan and I spent an afternoon getting it ready to run and travel, which was nothing more than a repair to the exhaust pipe and a battery- typical.

Dan’s Uncle hooked him up with a project to work on, which ended up being another run-down apartment building, on the west side, just a few houses down from the Broadway Bar. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that it was to enable Danny to pay them back for all the expenses she and his Uncle had absorbed over the past couple of months. Danny would incur more expenses with his drunken antics and impatience, while we were working on rental properties on Coit hill.

We had the van and were in the process of salvaging some stockade fencing from one place, to use on another. Nobody thought of removing the rusty crusted spikes from the rails, so when Danny jumped out to assist us with putting the sections of fence on the roof of the van, one of the nails caught his left forearm, ripping the skin loose. The tear was about four inches long and made a V shape like the third of a pie- 120 degrees. It never bled a bit. It was just a flap of torn skin exposing the underlying muscle tissue and sinew. He went to Butterworth hospital, where the doctors “insinuated” he was dehydrated, giving him a great number of stitches to close the wound- forty seems to come to mind.  

The fact that he never bled told me that he was, in fact, dehydrated. He wasn’t just dehydrated. Danny was severely dehydrated. Alcohol does that to you. Why do you think you get up in the middle of the night and drink a quart of water? Ever since then I have learned to check myself by pinching the skin on the back of my hand. If the skin doesn’t lay back down flat, drink more water. This also helps your brain do its many tasks, and lessens the discomfort from arthritis but whatever.

The project that Danny’s Uncle turned us on to was a corner lot, two and one half story apartment building, and boy was it ugly. I wouldn’t realize it until the end that a woman living next door made it a point to occupy her front porch the day we started. She sat there with a cooler and a book, drinking beer, watching us, and staying where she could be seen. Dan made friends with her that first moment of the day we started. She became part of our social circle, and The Broadway Bar became our office.

The siding on the apartment building had rotted away so much that the whole top half of the building was finally covered in cedar shake shingles in the recent past, which happened to be an inexpensive repair that hid the real issue. The shingles on the building had become so badly eroded that the eves on the building had finally rotted to the point where someone decided that it would be a whole lot less work to just cut them off. 

Now the rain just ran right down the sides of the building, eventually rotting the siding to the point where the cedar shakes were put on top of the rot, which takes us to where my job began. Now, large areas of the cedar shakes were falling apart, and in need of replacement, which I did. The south and east sides were shedding paint chips so bad that I ended up being set up with a power washer to prep the surface for paint.

Here lies the lesson in building maintenance: 

The roof is the most important part of a building- secondary only to the foundation. 
The cost of roof replacement can be a hard number to choke down. 
Many landlords will just slather tar on the leaking areas, sometimes even adding granules to match the existing shingles but not very many will go to the trouble of spending a few more of their precious dollars to take that step. 

Shingles are approximately fifteen to twenty dollars per package. It takes three packages to cover one square of roof- ten feet by ten feet. 

The square footage on this building was about twenty-five hundred square feet for a shingle expense of fifteen hundred dollars, plus flashing, caulk, roof tar, and the occasional piece of roof decking. 

Labor for a building that is two and a half stories is about seventy dollars, to one hundred dollars per square- twenty-five hundred dollars. 

The higher it is the more the cost. At the most, we are looking at about five grand for the roof to be replaced. 

Now, since the roof wasn’t replaced, and the eves just were cut off, the siding had become ruined, starting with ruining the paint job. 

The cost to paint, considering the windows, doors and trim, and the color variation, is about four thousand dollars. 

The siding is another six thousand dollars, the rotted windows are another twenty-five hundred dollars, and doors and trim are another fifteen hundred dollars. 

The total cost of the damages, at this point in the negligence of the building, is nineteen thousand dollars. That does not count the damages to the interior, such as plaster, woodwork, paint-finishes, flooring etc… 

This all could easily add up to another twenty thousand dollars. That’s when the landlord puts the place up for sale, dumping the property to someone else who will do minimal patching up to the place so that they can rent it out again. 

The end product is a whole section of town that looks like crap, and drives the esteem of the community down in the process, so you get a whole bunch of addicts making up an entire side of town. 

It’s not rocket science. It’s the monetary system, where the most important thing is the unspent dollar. 

That is what we are trading our families for, and it is what we are teaching our children.

So, anyway, right as we are beginning this project the clutch went out in the van. Danny and Jimmy now had the perfect excuse for me to end up doing all of the work on this run-down apartment building. It really didn’t bother me that much because it was a whole lot less stressful to work when people weren’t bitching and moaning. The girls started off helping but quickly bailed. 

Then, Joe Grimminck came in to help, only to end up going over to work on a project for someone who was paying a lot more money. That left me alone to handle the mess.

After replacing the missing cedar shake shingles and miscellaneous woodwork, and after blasting, scraping and spot priming this ugly monster of a building, Danny finally made himself available to help. It happened to be time to blast paint on using the airless sprayer. 

Pulling the trigger was the best part of the job because that is when the real transformation takes place. This part was the part of the job I had earned but I ended up doing more of the grunt work- being chased by the triggerman. Someone had to run around with the spray shields to stop the windows from being over-sprayed in the process. The spraying didn’t help the cars parked in the area one bit. 

I’m not sure how many cars we had to clean up but I know we had at least one- the woman’s roommate next door.

Up until then, I received quite a bit of attention, especially from the barkeeper who gave me free beer quite often. Everyone knew who was doing all of the work and they continued to express their gratitude for the improvements being done in the neighborhood. Aside from booze and cigarettes, my pay came in the form of an instrument.

Danny had decided to buy an Electric Fender Bass from Rainbow Music. The bass was my payment, and was an addition to our band equipment. I didn’t get to play it as much as I expected to. Dan ended up taking it from my hands to play all the bass lines him self. It didn’t bother me. I understood how he was when it came to composing, and I can’t say I blamed him. What bothered me was a little bit later on, when he turned around and sold the bass back to Rainbow Music in order to use the money to buy booze and smokes.

In the end or just from the beginning, I never made a penny from the job where I did the majority of the work. It hadn’t occurred to me that he really bought the bass for himself, and I don’t think it mattered to me. It was merely a comfort that made me content with just having a place in life to be. That is mostly just the essence of dealing with alcoholism, in yourself or in someone close to you. Danny was my brother, and I loved him. And at that point, seeing his mistakes only highlighted my own. Besides that, I was the vocalist, lyrist and Harmonica player- absorbing the blow for Dan’s stage fright. It was okay with me to play the parts he had given me to play.

A short time after we finished the project, Danny and I would go to Chicago with our Mountain bikes and the camera. This was around Halloween. The clues were all revealed in the photographs proving the fact to me since I was so polluted I do not recall much of it. The order of the Lamprey was an interesting group that was coordinated and ran by one of Danny’s friends in Chicago. We took a pretty good amount of photographs of this, and of all of our trips.

This particular house was a definite, and important, link to Danny. It became obvious where he got some of the ideas used at 40 Prospect NE. The backyard was a sculpture garden that was walled in eight feet high with cement blocks. It was an escape from the city. We pretty much biked everywhere, visiting the art district, copping complimentary drinks at the various open studios that were having displays. It made sense to me, how this tied in with the Jazz scene.

After making our rounds, we went out club hopping. One of the places I recall was… well, I guess I can’t recall it but I do remember drinking Rum Runners all night and finding our way back. It could have been different that night, especially since the women sitting next to us kept dropping hints about wanting cocaine. 

So, passing out in the van was probably a reward in comparison to what could have happened that night. The next night I was sent to stay at Tim Dashenaw’s place because it wasn’t safe to sleep in the van, so I was told. Truth might have revealed something different but the story I was given was fine with me because Tim’s place was pretty damn cool.

Tim lived in an old bar, complete with the actual bar in it, all the stools fastened to the floor around it, even some booths that he had his tools piled in.

At some point we went to the old Cermack building where Danny and numerous other artists had once had flats or studios until they were all ousted and the building was turned into commercial warehouse use. This was now Tim’s place of employment.

While touring through the Cermack building with Danny and Tim, I happened to notice a large piece of machinery that I worked with in the past, at Tadd Industries- a panel machine. “Hey, a panel machine,” I said. It is basically a jig for clamping various wood assemblies until the glue is cured, used for making wood panels like for cabinet door fronts or door slabs. 

On one of these, you can make a wood panel that measures almost four feet wide by nine feet long. Tim was surprised that I was familiar with this apparatus, stating that if I ever needed a job he could get me in there because of my knowing what that piece of equipment was. I really had no business in Chicago, even if I could live near enough for long enough to need a job but I really had a great time in Chicago with Danny’s companionship.

One of the high points 
was smoking half of a joint of some killer green while riding the Giant Ferris wheel on Navy Pier. Now, with my head injury, the bloodstains on the rooftop of the buildings below us were a pretty disturbing sight. We took some pictures of them but it wasn’t until several weeks, actually it may have been months, before I realized that the stains were part of the Halloween décor. At least I think they were. We shot a lot of film while at Navy Pier. Some images I can still see clearly in my mind, like the bloodstains on the rooftop.

After returning from the trip, I had an experience that still frightens me- one that makes me wonder… what else happened to me that I am unaware of? For some reason, I went to the west side on my bike, stopping at Konkle’s for a few drinks. My only place to sit was a booth that was already occupied by a man who welcomed me to join him. Someone had some pills that I put in my pocket- taking one. 

It wasn’t long before I figured out why he told me to be careful with them. Methadone is pretty powerful stuff. My head started to nod, and after a while the guy I sat with offered me a ride home. 

When I awoke my eyes focused in on the cobbled crown molding on the ceiling of the dimly lit room. A thin sheet covered my naked body but it did not yet dawn on me that I had no idea where I was. Right about the time I am realizing that I don’t know where I am, a guy comes into the room and see’s that I am awake. He tells me where my clothes are- adding that I am welcome to use the shower.

After showering and dressing, I went into the living room area, where the bar separated the kitchen from the dining area. As I am lighting a cigarette, I notice that it’s nine in the morning. He is drinking a rum and coke, asking me if I want a drink. As I sit there collecting my thoughts he says, “I hope you don’t mind but I sucked you off last night.” My heart stopped for a moment, and an eerie chill washed over me. In a moment of shock, I took another methadone pill and grabbed the half-gallon jug of rum to make myself a tall drink. It was definitely needed after that.

Only a few minutes passed before I collected myself and made my way to the door, finding my bike on the porch. Within ten minutes I was having a very difficult time of managing to travel on my bike- falling, slamming into the pavement on my shoulder each time. It had to be the addition of a half pint of rum on top of the pill that affected my balance. 

My head kept echoing with the words he had said to me as I thought, “How could I have polluted myself to the point of becoming a rape victim? What have I done? What am I going to do? What am I going to say? What else happened to me? HOLY SHIT!” And then, SLAM! I’d have to get up off of the sidewalk again.

Of all of the things I was trying to erase from my memory, now there was this terrible thing. How often did stuff like this happen to me? Memory of the first time that I knew something like this happened was when I was fourteen or fifteen- waking up from the disturbance: I was with my friends, Jimmy Zemiatis, Steve Klein, and someone else that I can’t remember the name of. The kid had a small silver Volkswagen- a Rabbit. 

Steve suggested that we go to this friend of his to hang out there and drink, saying that this man would purchase booze for us. He happened to live above a funeral parlor and mortuary, where he worked as the Mortician. He may have owned it, I do not know. 

The place was in Eastmanville, near Coopersville, west of Marne. Steve arranged it but I think it was planned.

Jim and I had just come back from a trip to Petoskey with his mother and sisters a day earlier. We went fishing while we were there, hoping for some German Browns but didn’t catch anything. On the way home we had managed to get a pint of Jim Beam. The idea was to cut a hole in a watermelon we had bought at a roadside fruit stand, and put the booze in it.

We took the melon with us to this friend of Steve’s, and It wouldn’t be long before we were messed up to the point where I had to lay down. Steve walked me to a small room with a single bed in it. Here is where I would sleep it off, that is, until a hand startled me awake. The hand was not on my shoulder. It was in my pants. The hand had stimulated me to an erection. Between being a fourteen-year-old boy and being drunk, who knows how long this was going on before I woke. When I realized what was happening, I froze, scared to death. 

Where were my friends? What had he done to them? Oh God! I’m in a funeral home. He might kill us and stuff us into coffins with people waiting to be buried! The only thing I could do to defend myself was to play Opossum. 

Despite panic and shock, my body did what comes naturally to that type of stimulation. That was the most startling, and caused me to lose control of my reserve, blurting out, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m jacking you off.”  “You’d better not be or I’ll be jacking you upside your head!” I exclaimed. It was all I could come up with, and that was just a natural thing for a young teenage boy to say.

Now, I can hear the muffled laughter in the other room. Having become so upset about all of this, I didn’t know what to do. My body was shaking from the adrenaline and panic. “How could Steve do this to us, to me?” I wondered. 

This must have happened to him and this was how he was dealing with it, by getting others involved so he wouldn’t feel so much like a victim- alone. I got up and stormed out of the room and confronted the guys. After a short argument I went out to the car, threatening to leave with it if they didn’t come with me. 

They eventually followed me out, got in the car, and we left. It was never mentioned again after that night, after telling them what was going on there. They never mentioned it either. Steve was not part of my social circle after that.

So here I am, fifteen years later with the same situation but what was that? An immoral perverted man? Or was it my own poor judgment of actions and possible consequences? Or, was it that I was finding myself in bad situations because of my trying to fill an emotional void with substances that only lead me further away from that which I so very desperately searched for? But that wouldn’t be a realization until almost completely too late.

After finding a peaceful living environment and reaping the rewards for some of the sober choices that I came to make, coupled with the decision to do what I feel may help me evolve, (like a certain amount of reflection), I can finally see and feel my own personal growth.

The idea behind this manuscript is not, “Look at me! You don’t know what it’s like! You don’t know!” It’s an example of personal growth that can be gained through that reflection.

Wisdom, that develops through reasoning and understanding that cannot be made possible until the mind can be freed from prejudices and defensiveness with honesty and sincerity enough to comprehensively extrapolate those nutrients, needed to grow in order to serve the needs of my loved ones.

Last night, at an A.A. meeting, this is a certain amount of what I communicated. A reference that I made to a thing that happened to me because of drinking, and the act of trying to poison it ,(and other things), from my memory, had silenced the room. It didn’t have to take twenty-seven years to understand. Or did it?

Something keeps coming to mind lately: “Why does a mountain climber climb a mountain?” The answer used to be, “Because it’s there,” but now I have a different perspective and can see that answer as an obstinate reactionary answer. 

The truth is, mountain climbers climb mountains because that’s what they do. That’s what defines a person who climbs mountains. They see it and it interests them, so they persevere. The moral to the question is to pick something and do it. Maybe that’s why I went out with Helen. The beautiful part of it is that I was finally aware enough to read all of the signs that said, “Don’t do it Zach.”

Helen was a mess. She had erected, and constantly maintained, a shrine to her late husband, Mike, in the basement of her Kentwood home. She offered to buy Danny’s Jeep for me- to put it in her garage for me to work on it there. Oh, and the performance. She started talking about her problems with her yard- the erosion, and how she was just a woman. Oh! And the tears she shed. Geesh!  A few more drinks and a bit less of a warning from Danny, and Super Zach would have flown in to be the Hero. Thank God for what small amount of sense I had in my employ. And even though I’d pass that test and move on, I hadn’t enough sense to avoid some other situations that were far worse than Helen.

That was the same summer I became acquainted with a number of bums. Nominated for Super Bum was, Andy Flynn. Andy was, and still is, a real “A number 1 American Dirtball”. A number of people would have killed him if he weren’t already dead. This was the year 2000, I think. It was the year I finally felt a spark of happiness. The problem was that I discovered I was targeted. 

The non-stop drinking and the assortment of bad associations that were trying to get a piece of me were being realized as a real problem- a threat. It was the fact that I had an income source and that I was kind enough to be generous- routinely providing a certain amount of weed and drink, that I was preyed upon. Incidentally, Danny and I were almost exactly alike- people took his kindness for weakness also.

Andy used us bad. Who knows how much he stole from us to feed his habits, and the habits of the girls he brought around. We had the whole second floor of 40 Prospect, since the other apartment was vacant on that floor. And since Danny had the keys to the building, it was accessible. When we met Andy, we had no idea he was anymore of a bum than he appeared to be. I thought, “Just another guy, another artist with very little need for much in the way of material possessions.” I mean, look at me: on the street without a home or car or much of anything but I had all that and more not too long ago. It didn’t really mean anything really. Or did it? The truth was that he had traded it all for dope, sealing the deal by beating his wife, and the women he attracted.

You can go to treatment and counseling but when you smack a woman up you can forget it. If you lack the control to do that you’ll probably do anything because you are truly weak.

What he didn’t trade were the lies and deceit that he had stashed and accumulated in the basement of his employer’s home- Chet. Chet was a crook too, who taught Andy how to rob people with a paintbrush but I don’t need to drag another demon into my arena. 

These items were things that Andy siphoned from his household income while imitating a farcical rendition of a husband and a father, only to destroy a woman and the future of the children she had by turning her onto dope and using her for what he wanted, when he wanted it. He is the kind of guy you’d love to read about someone finding dead in a burning bed with his severed penis placed in his stash box smoldering in a heap next to him. Men, largely, make me sick.

The three of us played quite a bit of music together until we ostracized him, working on songs like “Harley Davidson,” and some other ideas. We got into some recording sessions one day, where Andy insisted on using one of the rooms in the vacant apartment as a sound room, having the room mike and an acoustic guitar off in the distant corner of the house, far away from us, under the pretense that the isolation was for the recording quality, which made logical sense. We didn’t suspect a thing.

It would be weeks before we discovered the signs of what else he was doing in there, right after we were all working on a painting project in Crystal Springs. He ended up robbing us of fourteen hundred and forty-eight dollars. We were having a great time before we realized we were screwed. But isn’t that how it goes? We were having cocktails and playing Frisbee golf at Brewer Park on our lunch breaks everyday. We were laughing the days away while doing something we loved to do, paint. It was a beautiful thing.

One day Andy mentioned a couple times, how he could spray the hell out of some paint while on Heroine, so it wasn’t long before some bare foot lookie-loose rich kid started coming around… who wasn’t painting. Next thing we knew, we had a house with paint all over the driveway and a wretched smell inside. It was soon clear that someone, only God knows who, puked all over one of the rooms in the basement. I wonder how that came about??? Well, that was the weekend that we didn’t get paid, and when Andy went into hiding. We never saw him again. What we did get out of it was a new friend or two.  Brad Lake was one of those guys.

Brad lived in Grand Haven with his wife and two children. They were “Seven day Adventurer’s”, as he stated. He had a crew of guys from the Eastown area- slacker hippie types who soaked up the kind bud and the music scene. In the past, Brad had worked with Chet, breaking out from under Chet’s wing in order to start his own crew. They were still associated, working the Crystal Springs development on the south side of Kentwood, past Sixtieth Street. 

In the past, when I worked with Paul Jensen, we had performed a lot of trades there. It was a farm that they had turned into a private Country Club, selling lots to be built on, and houses- big houses. They were all bought up by business owners, like the car dealers and restaurateurs- the better-established people with a history in the Grand Rapids area. I like to think of them as segregationalists because they created their own community separate from the rest of the city.

These segregated communities were sprouting up all around the Surrounding Grand Rapids area. It was a boom in the early nineties. But now, here I was again, working behind hacks. 

Pulte Home Builders were responsible for quite a few of these homes. Being a finish carpenter, I had a position to critique the woodwork I was prepping to paint. A section of baseboard, not more than three feet long, had twenty-nine nails in it. They were easy to count, as I had filled each one with putty. It is a wish I have, that I could say it was an anomaly but that wish proves to be only that- a wish. What I will say is, if something like this was done by me or one of my crew members, not only would we have been back-charged, we would have been completely out of work in the area.   

The problem is- that’s just what you could see. What other problems were concealed within these sheeted walls? It doesn’t matter, as long as you can keep it pasted together until one year after completion.

The homeowner is the pawn, and it’s only a chess game to get the money. There is little pride in workmanship required. Just ask Bob. Today’s Builder and Tradesmen have little to no respect, and this is true of the majority. They do not appreciate the value, the worth of anything but the dollar in their pockets and the beer or thneeds it will buy them. But hot damn! It better be the best they can get! Oh boy.

 Joe Grimminck was one of those guys that we got along well with. He was eager to perform, eager to learn, and reciprocative. Joe knew when to ask questions, and although he was unskilled at that point, he was teachable which made him a value. We became good friends with Brad and Joe.

Brad, incidentally, played the Bass very well. They would find their way back to our place on Prospect Street, where we’d do what we did: hang out, play music, do art- whatever. We’d find ourselves in Eastown, at the coffee shops, where Joe and his friends hung out, playing chess and resting up for their tomorrows. It was while in East town that we would meet musicians like Ralston Bowles and Billy Edwards.

Billy told us about a small festival happening at Riverside Park near the Veterans home, where his band was hosting the Open Jam. “Beats Sittin’ Home,” he said. A clever pitch, his bands name as well. Of course, Dan and I went. We were going to be playing Frisbee golf there anyhow.

That was the day that I ran into Beverly Knopf, my ex-wife’s Aunt. Being pretty lit up, I lit into her with some of the sting I was feeling over Minderella’s destroying my children’s household- my life, although I don’t know what I said, like it matters. It was later my regret for causing her to feel upset. She never did anything that I know of, to harm me but the fact alone that my family was not repaired meant, to me, that she did nothing to help. And being drunk on top of harboring anger and resentment didn’t win me any favors.

My favorite advice from a successful person is from Warren Buffet: “You can always tell someone they’re a jerk tomorrow.” Which, in this case meant, “Don’t run your mouth when you’re drinking because it could cause irreparable damage.” Once something is said, no matter what it is, you can’t un-say it. It would be too long after this event that I would decide to stop drinking, at least for a while.

After the Jam, Billy and his band mate came up to 40 Prospect Street to hang out, smoking, drinking and playing music. 

Danny showed off his talents, and then, William Norman Edwards played a few guarded bars of his songs- claiming he was working on recording his own album.

Just like anywhere with anyone, everyone has a line of crap that they feed you. Just because you never get called on it doesn’t mean people believe you, one way or another. I have the four track studio recordings from that day to prove it all.

Billy really was recording an album. 

Whether he was or not, we didn’t really care one way or another. All we cared about was that moment, and what we were doing with it… enjoying it and making music. If we came up with a few bars worth repeating… that was fantastic. If we got an idea, perfect. If we discussed something meaningful… that was great too. If we just enjoyed the time… that was fine too. Any and all of these things made up the goal, and were what Danny and I did everyday. We were “having too much fun,” as Dan would often say.

It would be Joe that introduced us to Jesse MacIntosh, a rogue bagpiper playing the streets and the hilltop of Coit Street. In a couple years I’d learn that Jesse was Billy Edwards’s son. It was like a lot of things that were right there, in my face or being told to me. It took a while to learn because my comprehension was delayed from the booze, added to the rattling my brain took in the accident of ’97. People said things but it never registered until later. That is, if it ever did register.

One morning, a short time after Billy was over, someone came in and helped themselves to Danny’s fifty-dollar phone card and a video we had rented the night before. It was Danny’s suspicion that my friend, Charles, had came in and took these things while we slept but it could have been a few other suspects, more likely. My trust in people was very little but I had more trust in Charles than that.

About a week later, my favorite pair of pants came up missing- along with my wallet that was chained to them. There was two hundred and forty-eight dollars in my wallet. My to-do list was to pay on my child support on Monday. When I awoke to find my pants missing, I freaked out.

Now, I have a head injury. People are always stealing my stuff, although later I find whatever it was that was stolen. It wasn’t clear to me, so I didn’t really know if my pants were stolen or if I had hid them while I was stoned, so they wouldn’t get stolen. What I do know is that the ring of keys that I had in my pockets would later turn up in the console of Danny’s van.

Right across the street from where we lived was the apartment of Lisa Pressey. We had recorded, “Brand New Day,” earlier that summer while she was detoxing at our place. Now, she was over, hanging out with us. Who knows what we were discussing or if Danny was with us. It was her words, on top of a lot of recent and not so recent hardships that jostled around in my memories, causing for me to stop myself and think. She responded to my statements regarding thinking of making a drink with, “Do you ever think about not having a drink?” This was coming from her only a month after Dan and I would console and comfort her.

She had been out with the guy who rented an apartment in her building, doing coke all night. She was pretty upset, overwhelmed with the depression that follows, and shame, afraid of the silence that helped induce her guilt. She came to us and spilled her guts. She just needed a hug and a shoulder to cry on, I guess. So we comforted her with our kindness. She curled up on one end of the couch, and Dan put some incense to smoldering, while I made some homemade hot cocoa for her. 

So, while she “came down”, Danny and I came up with a song. For the next five to six hours we played, wrote, sang and recorded with Lisa curled up on the sofa with Dans Siamese cat, Miko.

That day I learned a lot from Danny about singing with a microphone, and recording. It proved to be a bit of treasure in the mistakes of others; had she not been in distress, we might not have worked as earnestly as we did- writing, recording and working out the lyrics as we had done. Looking back, I’m sure that a certain amount of it was fueled by our secret desires to win her heart- fools we were or I was. Apprised, though not a prize.

RB would soon pay a visit to record a couple songs and ask us to make a trip out to help him paint his house and cut a window into the southern gable, where he had a room he used a lot but had no light coming in. It was a great excuse to go to Grand Haven, and we loved it. It was a fabulous way to end our summer and to help recover from the grief we received from Andy and the whole West Branch incident, just to name a couple of the situations. But a strange thing happened while lounging around RB’s pool.

I made a gruesome discovery that I had crabs! I had been looking at the sweat glistening on my belly when I noticed these little specks near my navel. I thought, “Wow, blackheads on my belly.” So, I scratched at one with a fingernail and picked up the speck. As I looked closer at it I saw that it was a bug of some sort I had never seen. After looking closer at my belly I noticed there were a few more “specks.” And, boy, did I become instantly agitated! 

Now, I’m thinking this must be associated with the mysterious itching sensation that I had been dealing with. Extended my arm out towards Danimal with one of them on my finger, I was frantically asking, “What the hell is that? What is that? Is that a crab louse?” Sure enough, it was a crab louse, especially since it had little crab claws on it that made it look like an actual crab!

In a panic, I jumped up and ran into the shed looking for solvents or chemicals of any kind that might kill them. A gas can was on the floor that had gas for the mower in it. So I doused some on my hand and rubbed it on my belly to see if that would kill them.

 Nothing I tried worked, so I had another Foster’s, pissed off that I allowed myself to get crabs! I said nothing to anyone else about this, mostly because if Judy got wind of it, she might throw us out. It didn’t dawn on me that her and RB would have gotten me the medication to use to get rid of them. 

There was far too little humility in me to begin to understand that. It was my loss and aggravation. I did, however, vow to forever be more careful to avoid such filth- yet thankful it was only crabs. A few drinks later I had all but forgotten about it.

As a reward for our efforts, RB and his wife took us to a joint called, “The Rosebud,” where we had a light meal and a few drinks. The place became packed. Danimal and I were kicking our feet to the beats of a hot Chicago style Blues band, popping the cork off of the dance floor for the evening. 

Nobody had broke from the form of restraint and order until after that. Now, the people were enlivened and becoming less inhibited. All it takes is for someone who is unabashed to draw the attention and be the fool. We sat down to rest, and drink, unconcerned that we should be proud and satisfied as the trendsetters for the evening. It was just one of those times when the band was working hard and people had no clue anymore how to respond naturally.

We just couldn’t hold it in. We’re musicians, we had to express our feelings to the band. It’s insulting to not have any dancers when you’re working so hard and sounding fantastic. People have no respect for themselves and, yet, they put so much effort into respecting themselves that they are out of touch with a sense of gratitude and humility or any sense of what love is. 

After playing the fools, the real fools don’t look foolish anymore. Somebody just has to be first. Many wives were happy with their escorts being forced to play their hands that night. As for the ones that didn’t lighten up- I’m sure they had to “play their hand” in the end.

Well, now that people were on their feet, Danimal and I could do what we did- work the crowd. The Captain was there, from Captain Morgan’s Rum. We were hanging out with him, doing shots and talking with the stereotypical vernacular and attitude of seamen or pirates. All the people around were laughing and shouting. 

We went back to dancing and then sat back down with RB- Judy had left for home. A couple minutes later a young woman approached me from behind, tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I would dance with her. 

My astonishment stole my words, mostly because I was unfamiliar with how to respond to being approached by someone, someone so… innocent, asking only to share some joy. 

Overcoming my unusual speechlessness, I asked, “Why do you want to dance with me?” She smiled a big smile and threw her head back exclaiming, “Because you’re fun!” And that was that.

After dancing with her she brought me her friend and I had to dance with her too. These two girls kept Danny and I busy dancing all night, bringing their friends to dance with us too. Come to find out, the first girl that I danced with was there with her father. He had brought her and her friends out to celebrate her twenty-first birthday! Needless to say, I wasn’t his favorite person.

Everything was heavenly until Danny bumped into someone’s table- spilling a guy’s drink. My guess is that he was one of those persons who wouldn’t dance and was already offended from his date comparing us to him. He refused to accept our offer to get him a new drink. He was obdurate. We were promptly asked to leave the premises.

Actually, it’s more accurate to mention that Danny was asked to leave. My guess is that many were envious of us because it didn’t take much for the management to side so easily with the spilled drink guy. And I’m sure that a lot of wives and girlfriends wanted to cut the rug with us, due only to their men confining them to imprisonment with their self-awareness, insecurities and inhibitions; unable to enjoy any part of the evening. 

Surely, somewhere, someone still talks about it. Out of loyalty to my friend, I left with him. Besides, we had enough fun in one spot; it was time to move on anyway.

We’d end up back at the Rosebud a few weeks later. Walking in, I did a little footwork to the music as I crossed the floor. The music grabbed me with the vibe as soon as both feet were in the building. 

From behind me came a voice that belted out, “No floor shows!” It came from an apron-clad, stumpy, grimacing barkeeper. Surprised, I found a seat at a table, rather than sit at the bar where the man now stood.

Several moments later, a waitress finally found her way to me, asking me for my order. She mentioned something about having vacant seats at the bar, to which I explained being put off by the barkeeper. “Yeah, we had to throw you guys out a while ago,” she said. This told me it must have been a memorable occasion. It must have been his daughter among the women we danced with. The first girls were part of a big birthday celebration, I remembered. There were at least twelve girls at the table arrangement, along with the father.

Why I failed, (or why I have to consider), recognizing the possible repercussions for being able to enjoy myself at a public function, is still frustrating to understand. Why do some of us have to endure being persecuted by those who cannot exist without overly concerning themselves with the opinions of small-minded people? You can actually afford to devote energy to being angry with me for my ability to allow myself to be moved by the music, or my girl’s joyfulness?

 How arrogant and self absorbed. It reminded me of the movies Elvis had been in where he was always being attacked for being able to dance and sing a song. Whatever.

Danny came back from the bathroom and we left moments later. I don’t recall what we did that day but I know we hung out at the music store for a while, where RB was working at the time. The place has been out of business a few times but the owner kept trying. 

Now that I think about it, maybe it was a cover for something else- laundering money. Why would you keep trying to run a business that consistently goes belly up? Taxes? I don’t get it but then again, I don’t have to.

Being starving artists, it wasn’t long before we were looking for another place to move to. This was just after Halloween. Helen had been offering me to move in with her after Christmas. 

Joe mentioned several rooms at the house he rented, so Danny and I went over to have a look-see.

The place Joe was living in was huge. It had five bedrooms and two baths. There was a very large porch, a full Michigan basement, a garage and a decent backyard. It was perfect, especially since there was also a fireplace, a small library area that we made into the studio/equipment area, an upright piano, nine-foot ceilings, crown molding and an attic, complete with a family of raccoons living in it. 

My money was coming from working for Bob, traveling on the city bus, to and from Standale everyday. Little did I know the well was running dry for Danny and the property maintenance business.  His reputation had become tarnished due to his Alcoholism affecting his performance. We went back to Prospect Street to discuss the move.

Lisa’s question echoed in my head, and my frustration over the disappearance of my pants or more accurately, my money, gnawed at me. Jimmy and Danny were arguing about something- cigarettes I think. That’s when I decided that she was right. 

Here I was, broke basically, and if I was going to be broke, then I need to make myself broke. When I drink I get loose with my money, my smokes, my weed- everything. These guys were consuming my money because when I drank I let them. “That’s it, I am not drinking anymore. I’m paying my child support before I get home from work, and what’s left of my check I’ll budget, buying tools and other liquidable assets,” I declared to myself. I was so mad that I quit drinking to fight the battle of the bulge- my wallets. Now that I think about it, I must have been pissed off because I was thoroughly enjoying alcohol- or so I thought.

Boy, did sparks fly from Jimmy. “You think you’re better than us?” he’d scream at me when he realized I wasn’t buying any booze. Danny, on the other hand, didn’t say anything. Certainly, he must have been frightened by a number of things. This only put him in check with reality involving his own health. And although we discussed our substance abuse, and what we wanted in life, it was like I was leaving him as a friend. His dreams of being a husband and a father were useless because he was all but dead already. All he had left was music and art. And now that he had my promise to publish his compositions- to “get the music out there”, he just had to kick back and enjoy what was left. At this point he still had five years left. And right now, I’d be happy to have one day of that back.

My newfound sobriety didn’t have a positive affect with Bob despite my anticipation. He felt a spotlight on himself as well, and re-appropriated an enormous amount of his energy at me in hopes of causing me grief that would amount to my failure but the more I did better, the more hateful he became. Never, have I seen so much hate come from a married father with so much to show for his self.

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 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, 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 home builder.

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.