Part 2 full length #amediting

Rundown

Anyway, let’s re-hash this. Thanksgiving I was working for Salih, soon to end. It wasn’t long before going back to work for Bob on the Kurt Moran development near the RV park, which only lasted two months due, mostly to Bob’s level of maturity. This was while we were still at the River Pines campground. 

Quite a number of months went by before I would end up back to endure more of him for the money. Then I called Tom Bruin who was in over his head with the time frame of completing for the Parade, which would have been a hefty fine if it were not finished in time to make the deadline. The fine would not only be a monetary assessment but it would also deny him his eligibility for the next Parade of Homes. 

My mother helped me with some work that provided the money to pay my bills, like the lot rent. It was spring when we got the Jayco, and that summer is when I discovered Bob’s Home Builder signs on a road in the area that indicated the construction of homes for sale. What interested Bob was the Bruin drama stories. This Moran project started in the summer while at Conestoga after stumbling upon his home signs after Bruin.

The Moran projects kept me supplied with steady work for the time being. There were also the various projects that were going on in Bob’s shop, especially building the cabinet doors and drawers for cabinetry that went into the houses Bob was building in the area.

Bob would continue to use me for his profits and pleasure, needing anything to avoid himself in conversations. He only continued to appear as though doing good things for the sake of his wife’s observance but when she was gone from the picture the hood came off and the horns came out, an acute and classic resemblance of a man with two faces.  

He started me out, on the ranch style homes, he was cobbling together, where he, “let me,” put in a hardwood floor, after having me help with the paint finishes. Little did I know, he was just amusing himself by keeping me around, while he fought his own demons, and vented his frustrations onto me.

Sandy was constantly nagging me about helping so, I finally had an opportunity to bring her along, on a project. 

The flooring product was real wood, a product that came pre-finished. It was a beautiful looking product called “Dirty Maple.” It was three quarters of an inch thick by two and one-quarter inches wide, and of various lengths. It stretched from the front door to the staircase, throughout the kitchen, dining room, down one hallway into a laundry room, and down another hallway into a bathroom, where it met right up to the bathtub. 

This particular spot is where Vinyl should be placed. I remember it very well, not because I had to manufacture my own turn around strips, due to Bob, intentionally, setting me up with stuff that was the wrong size, in order to take my payout down on the installation; but because of Sandy and her damned hiking boots.

Oh yeah, Sandy loved helping. On the day the job was finally completed, we were cleaning up and filling nails holes, when I happened to notice a small dent in the wood floor. Bending down closer, I became horrified. Everywhere in an area of at least ten square feet were dents, gouges, and scratches in the finish. The replay of this area went through my mind. It was where Sandy was on her knees, racking together assortments of wood pieces for me to install. Her boots had these metal rings and eyelets riveted to the top of them.

They were your typical hiking boots. She sat on her feet while working, gouging the flooring and carving long dents into the surface. There were no visible scratches at the time, hidden by the sawdust and scrap pieces on the floor, nothing to indicate that this was happening.

My attention was focused on installing and cutting the end pieces to fit up to within a quarter of an inch of the wall in order to be trimmed out with the baseboard and shoe molding for the finish. Her and her footwear never occurred to be a possible problem to me. I was so pleased with having a project to make money on that it never occurred to me.

The worst part of it was that it was a section of flooring right smack in the middle of the room. It was right in the middle of the entire field of work. I silently blew a gasket.

Taking a deep breath, I had to figure out how to handle the situation. Having a certain amount of confidence in being able to handle it or somehow hide it, I loaded up the van and took her back home, telling her that, since I was done and it was still early in the day, I had to go to the shop to help Bob with a few things, and submit my bill to get paid. It was a small lie but the intention was to not attack Sandy, which would have been explosive.

After getting the tools back out I realized that my work was really cut out for me this time. Now was the moment of truth, to see if I was cut out to repair it. Since Bob was a Dutchmen first and a carpenter last, he squeaked when he walked. There was only enough of the flooring material to do the whole job, calculating out where the wood would go next as the pile shrunk, saving him on carpeting or tile expenses. It was basically free flooring, having accumulated it from here and there from past projects.

Luckily for me, I am an extremely conservative person when it comes to material handling. And since I was told there was just enough material to get through the job I had to be extra conscientious and methodical. I had managed to use the right pieces of flooring which took me quite a bit more time installing.

After rounding all of the scrap up, there was just a little bit more than what I could use for a small fire. The wood I had put in the closets would just have to get pulled up, no big deal. The advantage I had was that my math skills were just two percent better than his, making me the only one who knew the truth.

It would have done no good to tell Sandy about it, and her helping fix it wouldn’t have made things better either. She had enough pain dealt to her in life, so I was just going to absorb this whole ordeal myself. It worried me to death that someone would show up while I was in the middle of it, namely, Bob. The end of hearing about it would never come if he did find out.

Sandy could never understand why she couldn’t just come along and help me on the jobs. I’d tell her, “It’s not about you, it’s about you not being covered by the liability insurance.” I would tell her, “The employer or contractor accepts the responsibility for certain people on the job. It’s not open to the public to come and watch.” I could never use enough tact to get her to understand that, or maybe she just refused to hear it so, I caved and brought her along anyway even though I’d catch a whole world of additional grief because of her. I was risking losing a job that I needed desperately but I couldn’t win either way I played it. This would seem true with every person I dealt with.

 Grabbing a drill and a one and one quarter inch paddle bit, I strategically picked a spot in the floor and started drilling, while praying the whole time for Bob not to show up as I worked at the repair. My hammer and a chisel, along with a lot of hope helped to extract that first piece. I started drilling more holes, got out an extra hammer, placing the head in the hole, driving it out from where the piece was locked in with the other hammer. It was a bent over, drilling, chiseling, hammering task. I worked like a madman for a few hours, start to finish, all backside and elbows. It was one hundred square feet of flooring in total. Now there wasn’t anything left but sawdust and a couple of pieces with the ends cut off that I could throw on the fire pile.

Right next door to this project was one of the last games I played with Bob. While riding back from a project in Ada Township, Bob received a phone call. It was Ricky, his excavator, just a drunken buddy of his that was calling about when and where he was to deliver a load of fill sand. They laughed and giggled back and forth like a couple of juveniles- Beavis and Butthead come to mind.

The conversation was very easily heard because the Nextel phone earpiece was audible and clear from where I sat in the van at the time. When Ricky asked who the “lucky guy” was going to be for their little game, Bob was quick to say that he sat right here, turning to look at me as he told Ricky to put the sand in the garage.

When Bob hung up he told me he needed me to install the drainage tile around the footing and to place the sand in the basement according to preparation for the concrete to be poured for the floor slab.

Naturally, I couldn’t back away from the job since I had to have the money to pay my bills. No one else was willing to work with me due to my injuries to my back, neck and head from the accident in September of 1997. Bob had me right where he wanted me.

Incidentally, Ricky owned the land that Bob was building the houses on. The land was cut up into parcels, which Bob had been buying with large amounts of money in cash. Bob had me ride along with him to make the money drop, which was done in a church parking lot, on the corner of 68 Avenue and Leonard Street, around nine p.m. that night.

Bob flaunted the money in my face, having me count it out for him, as if I had never held that much money at one time. It was just another part of his constant head game he played with me.

Ricky showed up there shortly after we did, handing over a small time capsule looking container that had a sort of combination lock thing that you had to twist to get it opened. It was a two quart sized unit that he buried in his yard somewhere.

So there I was the next day with little more than a utility knife and a shovel. There was no wheelbarrow and the sand was in the garage just as Bob had asked. To my surprise, this was located as far from where it needed to go as it could really get. The only thing farther would have been the hole it had come from.

My task was to install the drain tile and take the sand from the garage, all the way around the back of the house, in through a window of the basement, to fill and level the area for the floor.

One issue that I had to deal with first was that the tile had to connect with the tile that was around the footing of the garage. I had to dig under the footing to locate it because it wasn’t sticking through the wall where it was supposed to be. This was very frustrating because as I dug, the earth from above (sand) was caving in on me as I tried to work, creating an hourglass affect like being buried in the sands of time.

The sand kept coming and coming. It seemed like forever while I struggled with the ordeal. It occurred to me that this was how Bob had envisioned me getting the sand in the basement, by draining it from the garage like this. Surely it would drive me mad, as well as wreck my back, leaving me covered in filth. He had expected that Sandy would be with me, and that we’d both be tortured by the exercise but the joke was on him because I left her out of it entirely.

I got some boards and started fighting to get them into the hole to stop the sand from flowing, managing to buy myself enough relief to actually get the tile installed the way it is supposed to be. By the time I finished with the tile, the cement guys showed up to prepare the site for concrete delivery, remarking on the “idiots who put the fill sand in the garage”.

I started to tell them something about it when they broke out the wheelbarrows and started moving it to where they needed it. I didn’t follow through with that comment because I had suffered enough humiliation. I didn’t need to risk their comments to further the degradation. They said they were a day early but were in the area with a little time to work with, so they decided to get an early start. This was all part of their job, not mine.

The conversation between Bob and Ricky was still playing in my mind about where to put the sand. They were just two bullies planning a dastardly scheme of impossibility, placing me there under-tooled to break my back. I had driven myself mad trying, all the while knowing what they had conspired, and refusing to let a couple of cheats beat me. Here I was, a highly trained, and highly skilled tradesman, playing in the dirt for no reason but jealousy and hatred. This had been a job for three to four unskilled laborers.

My stroke of luck was that the concrete guys arrived a day earlier than Bob had planned on. My guardian angels at work again?

In the meantime, Bob was on the north end of Grand Rapids, at the real job, installing decorative columns that I had built. His fear was that the builder would recognize who the real Finish Carpenter was, between the two of us. The builder was anxious to meet me but Bob wanted to keep me hidden from view, absorbing the credit for what I had been doing in the recent weeks, the main reason for his efforts at destroying me in my mind, destroying my confidence, the confidence that he wished he had. How sad it is to see the sicknesses of today’s men active.

It was easy to imagine the conversation he was having, the same conversations I had heard from him so many times in the recent past of others, and the things he had done directly, and caused to be done, to them. He laughed while hiding his insecurities, reveling in duping the only guy that cared about life’s big picture enough to understand him, to forgive him, to fight back with kindness, while feeling sad for the love his wife must long to feel.

Sandy and I would eventually catch him in his deception and lies, red-handed that next couple of days. I kept journals that have accumulated over the years. There are many things in them about my relationship with Bob, lying dog-eared in dark cubbies awaiting my reflection.

The tides and tune soon changed and I ended up working for my mom more often, once again needing to pay the lot rent and to make a trailer payment, and in need of a vehicle since my van had taken the toll of time and wear that I could not afford, especially after it was impounded by the Coopersville Police, whom had a hand in rendering it inoperable, which I found out when I tried to collect it from the impound yard. The van wouldn’t start or respond. I don’t know what they did to it but what they did do was make sure I wouldn’t be sleeping in it anywhere around their little village.

Mom had a house in Conklin that I had been working on for some time, earning myself a bit of money to cover my bills, and eventually giving me a truck that she had for sale. We would finish out the winter at River Pines, enduring a constant battering of the negative energy that started with our own. Mom agreed to help us get another lot at a campground somewhere else when we finally paid the trailer off, ending up at, the “Kozy Kountry Kampground,” north of Ravenna, just over the Muskegon border.

Sandy began working at a nursing home in Coopersville, where the staff would routinely help themselves to the drugs in the cart, and to the belongings of some of the residents. They would come in on their days off and say things like, “you don’t see me here.” We feared Sandy would be implicated when, and if, anyone ever caught on to what was going on there. We felt a felony drug charge always threatening her. She soon decided to quit after only working there about two or three months. Which was about how long we lasted at, the “Kozy Kountry Kampground.”

Sandy had taken the truck to work one day, leaving me there at the trailer with some beer. I am not sure that the place wasn’t haunted. It may even be located on sacred Native American burial grounds. At some point, I began running around the countryside gathering greens to cook up, since it was Springtime and there were plenty everywhere that could be picked. The park management caught sight of me and called my mother saying that I was looking like a crazy man and that he was getting complaints. She came out that night to have me pack up so we could pull out, taking the trailer to my mom’s property until we could find another place to take it.

Since I was already near the Conklin project, I would continue working there. Sandy decided that I had worked enough and demanded that I stop, saying that the truck was more than paid for, and that my mother was taking advantage of me. She would go with me, cleaning up around the living quarters my mom had occupied in the basement at that time, even though my mother told her to not mess with her things. It wasn’t long before Sandy found some magazines of Tom’s, titled “Barely Legal.” She went ballistic, shredding them and throwing the pieces all over the kitchen and sitting area, and screaming at me. We argued for several minutes before she jumped in the truck and left to go back to where the trailer was parked at my mother’s property in Marne.

We had no money to speak of, except for a food stamp card and the empty beer cans around the area. Wright Township, in Ottawa County had an ordinance that may still be effective to this day. It states that you cannot occupy a trailer without a permit, which no permits were being issued for such a dwelling situation. This is probably due to a couple of factors, one being the sewage, and two being that it degrades the surrounding community. The van was the only place we had to stay in that wouldn’t get my mother a fine.

Sometimes we would sleep over at a friend’s house, or in parking lots in our van around the local area. One day, the van was impounded because we were busted for vagrancy, Sandy left on foot and I was sent to a shelter in Muskegon. It didn’t take long for me to decide that Muskegon and the shelter was not the right place for me to be, so I set off for very long walk back to Coopersville the very next day.

Sandy and I tried to get the van out of impound but we realized they had disabled it to where I could do nothing with it but leave it there to be scrapped out. My mother finally relinquished the truck to me because of it. That night Sandy and I stayed at the trailer, staying up late in the evening talking about what we were going to do.

The next morning I got up and left her to rest a while longer because we had been up pretty late the night before. Quietly, I began sprucing the place up a bit while I waited for the day to begin for us. I took care of everything but for a radio I had sitting on a small storage cabinet. The plug was in the wall socket by the sink, which stretched across the hall from where the radio sat.

When Sandy finally got up, she walked to the rear of the trailer to get fresh clothing, stepping over the cord. As she tried this maneuver her foot caught the cord, where she tripped and she fell face forward to the floor.

Still to this day, I can’t say why the plug didn’t just fall out of the wall or any number of things but I suppose it’s all relative to gravity, her footing and the dynamics of weight and balance, along with having slow reflexes. As she fell forward and went down, her arm caught the end of the bed, where a corner of it stuck out into the hall about four inches. I heard a pop sound of bone breaking. She lied there a moment and moaned, “Oh no! Oh no!” That was that. Her arm was broken.

Helping her up from off of the floor I could see that, from her shoulder to her elbow, the upper part of her arm had an unusual curve to it. That forced me to immediately call mother because we had no gas or money for gas, and Sandy needed to get to the hospital.

What’s crazy is that we had been fighting for days. The biggest and most recent was over the magazines she had found near the microwave and coffee maker area, in a pile of other like-sized paper items. She went absolutely crazy when she saw them. See, it was her idea to help and clean up all of the time. It was her M.O. to spruce up the house she was at for people.

She lacked the perception to take the hints from my mother, not to clean up her messes. And so, she found something that she wasn’t supposed to find. Tom was pretty angry about it, especially since he sold the books to his buddy when he was done with them. It was an effort to get the money back that he spent for them- money he definitely couldn’t afford at the time. He expected me to pay for them because of what Sandy had done.

It was a few days after that blow-out, the morning that I drove her to the hospital, that I saw the words written in the dirt on the driver’s side of the windshield: “I Love Pussy Books.” My eyes couldn’t believe it and I wondered how many people might have seen it while I had been driving around to various places in the days between the incidences.

I laugh out loud now but it wasn’t even on the same planet as funny when it happened. My mother still thinks I had something to do with breaking her arm.

Anyway, I took her to the emergency room and called Sandy’s son, Richard, only after I realized what they were going to do or not do, in order to get her the help that I was not able to coax them into giving her because of my inability to effectively or cordially, communicate in stressful situations since receiving my closed head injury.

Ever since then I have a personality disorder that is aggressive and seemingly violent at times. It would only be about four or five days, after her arm became broken, before we would break up once and for all but that was only because on one of those nights I went to Danny’s loft to sleep on the couch instead of sleeping out in the truck on the street-side in front of the Butterworth Hospital.

When I went to the hospital with booze on my breath, boy, was she angry. After explaining that I had stayed at Danny’s, she was even more irate because I might have been doing some greater wrong, like playing music or just drinking without her.

From the first night at the hospital, there was a possessiveness that I had failed to see fully until then. She wanted me to stay with her in the room, which was not an issue for me to do at all. It was the medical staff in her area that asked me to leave, saying, “It’s just a broken arm,” so, I went out to the truck and slept nights.

After a few of these nights of sleeping in the cab of the truck, I paid the price in pain, not to mention meter fees. My lower back and neck proved to need surgery once I resumed going to doctors a few years later, and little did I know, I was leaking spinal fluid the whole time.

On one of the first nights, I ran into Danny at a liquor store. He was on his way to go back to his studio at the loft in the Gezon Building. This warehouse was only a mile and a half from the hospital that Sandy was at.

The hospital was on Michigan Avenue, and the warehouse building was on Plainfield Avenue by the Flying Bridge Fish Market. It was the old Gezon building that Sandy and I had done the late night emergency repairs in. It is amazing that we didn’t run into Danny there that night we fixed the doors.

Danny and I talked and drank, laughed, and did some art works, played a little music, listened to some tunes, smoked a puff of grass, and that was where I stayed after that. Unfortunately much to Sandy’s disapproval. Or was it unfortunate?

Danny and I were very close friends. Out of all of the things that happened to me, and out of all of the situations, and people that I became acquainted with and went through in life, Danny was the gem of them all. He would prove to be the one person that I would end up recognizing and give full credit to for my getting my life back to belonging to me, that is, if it ever did.

When Sandy got out of the hospital, I took her to Danny’s place to see for her self. Of course, all she could see was an orgy going on, as if it was a pad of male sirens luring women in with advertisements that “we could be had”, as Sandy would put it. She went right to her son’s house for a place to stay that day. The agreement was made between them that there would “be no more Zach.”

That was fine with me since I now hated, loathed, and even despised going out in public with her, only to be accused of looking at other women. I had to be drooling over them. They were there! And she always said so, so it had to be true.

It was only too much time wasted before I realized how truly jealous, insecure and paranoid she was. Yeah, if there was a woman within view, I was looking. Funny thing is, out of all the grief I dealt with, I felt sorry for her and women everywhere who had been abused and neglected so badly, starting with their own fathers in their infancies, that they didn’t know how to respond when someone was genuine and earnest. They become so accustom to getting stepped upon that they are always ready for it. And if they don’t actually see it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s always there.

I wanted to take all of these people into my arms and show them that LOVE is REAL. It hurts me to see people bare the scars of abuse. It goaded me and fueled my thirst, a thirst that was already overwhelmed with the fuel from my own pains that were much the same, with the same scars that go unseen by the untrained eye and the untrained conscience.

She and I would continue to speak for a little while in between working and living at my mom’s house in Conklin, where I slept in an old camper van that she had in the backyard. It had belonged to my Uncle Bill and Aunt Bernice. It was full of bees but I stayed in it anyway, with my wolf/German Sheppard mix, Dusty, accompanying me. This went on through the Autumn season.

I only remember because one night I was going to the Pit Stop bar for Karaoke but I was going too fast and didn’t see the stop sign coming, missing my chance to stop. The road didn’t go through so there was only the left and right to turn on. My wheels locked up on the slippery surface, sliding through the intersection and ending up stuck head first in the ditch. It was a long walk back to Toms hog farm, where I had just been at, but he came up with his truck to pull me out.

What we realized was that the ditch I was in was too deep, leaving only the tail end of the truck sticking almost straight up. He had to go back to the barn to get his tractor.

Sandy had wanted me to give her the truck after she burned a bunch of important things in her friend’s backyard while staying there for a few days.

One of these things was the title to the trailer that we had just paid off. She would fight me over my meds, trying to use them for herself. She would fight with me about my mother. She would fight with me about everything, breaking CD's that I liked or smashing things that were sentimental. Hindsight, too foolish to see that a woman scorned has no hope or seems not to, that is until she can get over it. Unfortunately, there are some things that people never get over. You would have to know what being scorned truly is to understand.

We all get robbed in a way, especially robbed by someone who is close to us, but we forgive him or her anyway, for ourselves. It’s the only way we can carry on, fulfilling our obligations to those who are entitled to them, our loved ones.

The constant reminders of being victimized by my ex-wife, coupled with the loss of my own family, my identity, my business and my manhood, was the main source of fuel for the vehicle that slowly carried me toward complete destruction- a final release that I miserably sought for subconsciously one drink at a time.

The words of my ex-wife would, and sometimes still, echo in my head like a movie that I am being forced to watch. Visions of her and our children bombard me. Little did I realize it was part of my medical condition, Frontal Lobe Syndrome, compounded trauma, P.T.S.D.- shell-shocked.

My days would come and go, unknown to me. I rarely know what day it is or what time it is. My life is sometimes a blur and I am a madman. Some one should have hospitalized me. Alcohol was the only medication readily available. It was as if I was a Marionette. I had little to no control of anything. Food had been, and still sometimes is, of no concern.

Bathing and grooming were and still sometimes are of little or no concern. My only concerns were tobacco and alcohol, and weed if I could manage them. I didn’t drink to get high. I drank to die.

Although I couldn’t outright bring myself to die in the here and now, it was all I could hope for because all hope seemed to be lost. My soul was crying nonstop, and I had no one to cling to, no one to call, and no one who would take time to care, except for Danny, when I finally relocated him. That was how I got involved with the people who lurked in the shadows, people who panhandled for change and cigarettes, outside of the college crowd bars, in Eastown, Michigan.

This bar area was where I ran to when Mindy announced her plans. These people and their demons latched onto me in their ways. The trials and tribulations of my life that would pose the biggest challenge to my evolving as an individual, and pose the biggest threats to my life, began here, at that point in Eastown, when Minderella destroyed my home, my family, and the futures of my children as they were becoming in that reality that I helped to largely shape.

This trip I went on was a long strange trip, to say the least. I can only describe it at that moment as a round trip that started on Earth and went to the far edges of space to every galaxy at the speed of light. It was extreme misery, a broken heart and failure that never would look away, staring me in the face like a showdown. I pulled the trigger and watched as the bullet hung there before me, taking lifetimes to reach me in order to pierce my heart so, I ran toward it. And it seemed the faster I ran toward it, the longer it took. It was as if it only got further away as I tried to get closer to an end to my life, laughing as it evaded me.

Imprisoned in this new reality, nothing could ever really hurt me further. I was mesmerized by it. It would be, what felt like, a lifetime to get through but would only seem as a blink of an eye in my past. It proved that I was not meant to die yet but what was I alive for? I smoked tobacco because I was nervous, and used pot because of my nightmares and anxiety. I consumed copious amounts of alcohol because I was miserable with pains- my back, my teeth, and in my heart and my soul. I used it all to make me feel better, to feel better until I could be dead. And then I found Danny but I’ll get to that.

Celebration on the Grand was being advertised on WLAV FM, which was my favorite classic rock station. It was on in my truck when I drove and in my area of control where ever I worked at most days. I heard it while working at Permalife as a mold and pattern maker for, Randy Bouma, cousin to Doug Bouma- the guy who had a hand in black balling me from area employment after my accident.

Doug was the developer I had most recently worked for as a subcontractor, installing the Finish Carpentry in residential homes throughout the region. Maybe it was all a freak accident that I was struck by that Semi or maybe it was part of my destiny.

If I had only waited for another day and time to give my friend and band mate, Ron Vokes, window replacement estimates on his house maybe this wouldn’t have happened to me but I did not. That would have changed the events that would end up robbing me of my health, home, family and livelihood.

The head injury that was sustained had altered my perception and my life, and would directly affect my ability to run my business, contaminating my business relationships that I had been maintaining. All of my relationships changed but I saw nothing better on the horizon. Was I meant to rebuild for something better? My Destiny?

Shortly after the accident on the highway I would be “phased out” and “blackballed,” destroying my opportunities almost completely. Coincidentally, Randy was one of the only people to respond to my resume. He was the only person to offer employment but without proper medical services being provided, there would be no recognition made of the extent of those injuries that lie under the surface, yet to reveal themselves to the layman or victim- those around me and myself.

The whole ball of twine, that was my life, unraveled into a big knotted up mess that I would spend the next fourteen years trying desperately to unravel and salvage. The pile that lay at my feet only grew as memories, bits and pieces. And almost all of the mess was lost in the panic to salvage my past, present, and what would become my future.

One of the many dreams about the damage sustained was of my performing a sort of brain surgery on myself. With a few mirrors and minimum tools, I cut the top of my skull off and attached hinges. There was not a brain but a pair of Reel-to-Reel tapes, like the guts of two VHS tapes standing side by side. The reels were off of their axis points and jostled from their placement, and the tape was in a big birds nested wad, like a messed up fishing reel or something. I tried and tried to unravel it but it was otiose.

Eventually I admitted defeat and cut out the knots. My concerns were of all of the knowledge and memories I had lost- the extent of it is still being revealed as I remember bits of that which I cannot restore. The flip-top head image comes to mind a lot. That must have registered first after my repairs to the recording device that I attempted in my dream. It was, what I think was, Randy’s pity on me that gained me the opportunity in his corporation. Except for the seriously dry and dusty shop atmosphere, it was here, where I would gain a real friend, a gift that would be of great value later on when I was nearer to finished and ready to give up entirely.

Everyone was genuinely friendly to me at Permalife. I liked them a lot and had a pretty good understanding of them all, for the most part. We were a family. And as a family does, I would tell them all about the family I had of my own- the kids, wife and dog. Well, they were all sitting there with me, on break. We were talking and smiling, and happy. Just then, she comes walking or marching rather, Cody and Scarlett with her- Scarlett in her arms.

“Where’s your check?” she demanded. Silence came down hard in the break room. My co-workers were quick to conceal their discomfort by trying to go about their business making it look as though they weren’t embarrassed for me- to have to observe this woman I was just now bragging about how fortunate I was to have in my life. I was so naive, failing to see what was so clear to everyone else but I bought the tickets to dinner at the Celebration on the Grand over the phone anyway, without a second thought.
 

We meandered around the downtown area, seeing the variety and taking in the atmosphere. The band played on at Rosa Parks Circle, where Mindy said that there was something she needed to tell me.

I went into shock as the message was given, six years too late. She needed to tell me that she didn’t want to be married. She was given the choice immediately when she learned of the pregnancy but now she makes the announcement- at a celebration, of all places.

Shock took over as it sunk in. Now she gets to change her mind? Well, it wasn’t clear what she meant, and I am not 100 percent sure that I wasn’t happy. She had to be joking, I thought. She couldn’t possibly think of leaving me now. The part that bothered me, apart from her complaining about the fine establishment that the reservations were made for, and the patrons that dined there, not to mention that I spent my last five dollars on a cocktail for her and not myself, was that later she clarified that the scenario was that she was simply removing me from the family entirely- not that she just wanted a divorce.

My kids, my wife and all of my household and everything in it, except for the dog, which was all I got besides my clothing and personal items. It was all gone for what I would later find out was another man that she had met in an A.O.L. chat room. What a kick in the teeth! I don’t believe I ever got over the reality of that humiliation.

Never has she apologized for what she has done- to me, to my family, to our children- to Cody. I needed her to oversee the situation with the attorney involved in the lawsuit against the trucking company, who happened to be a friend of her family. I needed to coordinate my medical needs, which were my going to speech pathologists and physical therapists, as well as seeing the joke of a Family Practitioner that Blodgett referred me to- Dr. Mervyn Smith.

Heartbreaking is only the introduction to the lengthy description for what it was and still is. And although I am in a much better place now, and finally happier, a recognition or admission would, at least, salve the wounds that re-open every time I am forced to see the damages in my only son or in all three of my children.

No wonder she made the announcement in a place so public. She obviously feared my reaction, and rightly so. There are some who insist I should have beaten her a bit, earlier on in the relationship. The problem with that is, when a person grows up with having to choke back on their anger for so long, it may become such a violent rage that it might not be controllable. It might not be something that you can stop. I never wanted to see what my rage could become, and therefore kept it locked down tight for the fear that someone could be severely hurt or even killed. How’s that for reality- knowing that you are in total control of something so volatile and potentially deadly. That’s the mark of a real man, in my opinion.

I bawled for months at the emasculating effect of her raping my heart- my home. It got so bad that she decided we couldn’t just stay together in the same house, pretending that everything was normal while she got up the nerve to throw herself at this man who wasn’t man enough to go out in public to win the affections of a woman, let’s say- at the grocery store.

How could a person put stock into someone who hasn’t the morals enough to think twice about messing around and violating someone’s marriage? These people are cowards cloaking themselves in a digital age. When would he show his face? To this very day, he has not.

Before she moved out she spent “our” money, going on a trip to South Carolina, as well as throughout the Gulf coast. This included attending a Lollapalooza Festival in Muskegon. I wasn’t invited on the getaway even though it was my life that had been severely disrupted, and myself who truly needed the break.

My offspring were taken from me to her parent’s house, to stay with them until she returned home. She had went all over town buying things at stores, where she used my name to open up lines of credit so she could stock up on “thneeds” for her new residence plans.

When she came home from her trip, boy, was I dumb, helping her with her luggage while noticing she had smacked up the Plymouth Voyager that she had forced me to buy in order for us to go to a Thanksgiving Day gathering with my family in Bay City, instead of pooling in with my mother or sisters.

She just blew off the damage as no big deal. I was overwhelmed with the feeling to look inside the suitcase before I even got to the door of the house. Hoping to find a souvenir t-shirt saying something to the affect of, “My wife went to… and I got was this stupid t-shirt,” but what I found was a red lace Teddy that I had purchased for her at Victoria Secret on some Hallmark Holiday. I commented about it, saying that I thought it was odd to need a piece of extremely sexy lingerie for a solo trip to clear her head. She turned white as she tried to back-peddle. And even though I didn’t have the mental faculties to understand it, denying she would do such a thing to me, it slowly sank in.

I became a bit hostile, asking why she needed this item, turning to her girlfriend, Mariah Schwallier, whom had accompanied her to the music festival. I asked Mariah to tell me what was going on. Silence slammed down hard as Mindy stomped around in a somewhat silent fit of rage, taking things from the house and placing them in the van, so she could go stay with her parents. She asked her friend to help saying that she thought it would be best for her and our children to go stay “somewhere else”. She would now be staying in her mom and dad’s lower level- the new phrase at that time for the basement.

Mindy commented that they could live there comfortably, meaning more free from guilt.

Very soon after she went there to stay, Mindy’s father, Marc, asked me if I would finish his basement. I began working there in the evenings and on weekends. The work totaled four grand in value but I did it for free. It was a duel purpose- making it an affective way to see my kids, and get in her space in an attempt to resolve things between us. The idea was to save our marriage but there was nothing to save since her heart had never been in it and I had known that truth for some time. 

My sobriety had started and ended with her, having quit drinking to marry her after learning of her pregnancy. When she announced that she wanted a divorce my comment was simply, “I guess that means you won’t mind me having a beer then.” That moment I went right to Mulligan’s Pub, in Eastown.

Even still, I was a glutton for punishment. Maybe it was from being beaten regularly as a child. Who knows but I have a feeling that I would have outright killed her, had I not always been accustom to grief and pain. Sometimes I catch myself wondering how long I would have spent in prison for ridding myself of her for real.

Chapter

Charles Fizer and I got along really well. We respected each other and became friends quickly, while working together at PermaLife Incorporated. He was with me in the beginning of the end, and he’s with me in the beginning of the new ending. He has seen my worst and he knows my best. And I am one of the few people who him and his wife Candice welcome in their home. It would be his friendship that would keep me going when I was at my worst. Without Charles, I would find no one, and anyone that may have been there to help was impossible for me to reach.

It wouldn’t be long before I would end up at my mother’s after Mindy left.

The decision to quit my job at Permalife Incorporated was made at Christmas time. The funny thing about that Christmas- the gift-giving season, was that the next shock came directly from my Father-in-law whom claimed to have begged Mindy not to go through with the divorce. Only, his motives of seeming support were resting on a fact that I now learned, and that was that I was actually renting the house at 738 Rosewood from him, when I was under the impression that he helped me buy it. He was taking a profit from ME, taking away from my efforts, so that he could reduce his own house payment by combining two homes on one mortgage. I tallied him onto my mental list, my “ridding” pile.

  My mother would later tell me about Marc offering to buy her a saddle for her horse, and of his desire to wear it while she helped him entertain his fecal fetish.

So I ended up at my mom’s for a while, along with Stan, her worthless man-ling. Stan had been recently fired from the Post Office. His error was his mentality. Not everyone is employable. He constantly proved that.

One particular day, Stan took it upon himself to lighten his mailbag the most effective way he could think of, which was by throwing the bulk mail in the trash dumpster behind a McDonald’s. Incidentally, the bulk mail in particularly happened to be the Advo-system cards that have an advertisement on one side and a missing child alert on the other, of all of the things for a person to throw away, especially a parent.

An employee of McDonald’s had found the mail when they took out the trash. Man, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall that day! And how often was he doing this?

Stan had a trucking company now, resurrected from one of his earlier home-based business ventures. The transport service was called “Top-Trans”. The irony of that was that he was as close to the bottom as you could get.

Rarely could he find work. Nobody could work with him, and nobody could work for him. Anyone that had hired him in the past wouldn’t even consider hiring him again. And that was just sub-contract work.

At one time he convinced some poor woman into marriage and breeding with him but that ended with tragedy as a result of his travesty of a contribution as a husband and a father. This young lady tragically left him; killing the children and her self out of the sheer misery he introduced and kept them in.

Our yard often smoldered in spots where Stanley had burned the material possessions that once belonged to his wife and children but that was just because he didn’t want anyone else to have them, especially the very people he was robbing and cheating in everyway he possibly could at that moment in time.

If he wasn’t burning things, he was chain smoking on the computer twenty-four hours a day in a room that he took over and controlled in the house, even though my mother didn’t smoke or allow it in her house or around her, especially since her father had passed away from lung cancer.

When Stan wasn’t doing that, he was filling the property with pure junk at the immediate expense of my mother. It caused property devaluation and numerous complaints along with fines and harassment from the Wright Township office. When he had idle time on his sick hands, he was running the washer and drier with nothing in them, and flushing cigarette butts down the toilet in his campaign to ruin the appliances, cost excessive electricity use, ruin the septic system and dry up the well. I really can’t help but wonder what it would have taken to rid the world of him too.

How fortunate for all of these individuals that I am not a murderer. It would have been nothing to kill them but for my own principles, and added the misery that would occupy me further with my own destruction.

They would lock me up and throw away the key if they knew how angry I could have easily justified being. For I know what the taste of blood is. And I have been licking my wounds everyday of my life.

Now, let me tell you, no prison will ever compare to the prison that a child learns to live in without the inherent affections and nurturing that they didn’t ask to be here on Earth to have the need for.

It’s a curiosity I have. Was he was taking shots at my mother for his ex-wife’s actions? Was he punishing her for the sake of making her suffer as he felt he had or was???

Strength is often, if not almost always, misunderstood. The strength that it truly takes to be able to deal with these situations, and the memories- to control the bridle and bit on the beast of pain that runs rampant in the heart and mind, always needing to be channeled, giving energy to art. Giving life to the art that I am living or dying to share.

Funny thing is, I go back and forth from wanting to share something with the world, to wanting the world to have nothing- that the World in general does not deserve it but I tell myself that some forms of life on this planet exhaust themselves to give life to just one. If I can just give to one, other than myself, it will be worth the effort to catalogue things but even if I reach out to no one- in the end, at least I found something more to live for, while making myself happy by venting to conquer my pains.

It has been said, (and I am not sure by whom), that he who laughs the loudest on the outside cries hardest on the inside. I have lived, and have to agree this to be mostly truth, for I have, literally, been in hysterics since the seeming subsidence of one of my earlier traumas.

So many people are in a state of hysteria. Along with the attempts at taking the intentional risks that may cause death to a child, my stepfather invested a lot of time in terrorizing us, especially me. I was often called an assortment of names, not in fun, beginning with, “turtle-neck” and “pout face,” since I can ever remember, only to have Scoot and Scooter added to a list that would grow over the years.

That particular name started when I was learning to read and write, and had been so foolish not to save such an expensive vowel for if I was ever on Wheel of Fortune. My demonstration of what we were learning yielded the misspelling of my middle name. I would be taunted with this up until I was fifteen, coincidentally when he left.

The hysterics part started in late seventy-four when he took us to Six Flags over Atlanta Georgia, to see Jaws. He always loved to frighten us, genuinely frighten us. Another strange coincidence is my current wife, Jenny, was also traumatized by this film- only it wasn’t intentional. When the diver picked the tooth out of the hole in the hull of the sunken boat, and the decapitated head of a crew member rolled out, I went into shock- hysterical, uncontrollable fits of screaming and laughter.

We were eventually ushered out of the theater when it was evident that I wasn’t going to calm down. I would be maliciously reminded for a long time to come, that I pissed myself as well.

My childhood from then on (because I only remember the lights on the ceiling from the day I was born) was none, to very small bits and pieces.

Most of the very few memories I have were mere moments like walking the shores of Georgia’s Blue Ridge Lake, finding line and fishing lures among the rocks. My hopes were to find one with a big fish on the end of one. Another was of playing with my sister at our Aunts hair salon, spending time in the pet store downstairs. The smell of cedar bedding is still in my nose.

Everything else has always been a blur- blacked out, though my wet sheets would be a reminder of the damage, and would remain a topic to be tormented with well into my teens.

Stan’s Scandal

Now with Stan, he had his own way of protesting my existence, as if he wasn’t busy enough with his own tantrums. After I found refuge at moms, he would do what he could to interrupt my efforts there. Like when I built stalls for the horses because they were standing in a seeping sewage swamp secreted silently in their stays.

The “office” addition in the shop end of the double length pole barn, that my mom had built so she could live in it, needed to be finished. Her hopes were that Stan would then move out entirely, as he had threatened to do if that was where she intended to move their domicile, only then to rent out the house that they had been living in, to someone who would actually pay her rent money. She wouldn’t just tell him to get out because of the intimidation he used against her, like some prison tactic at running things, taking over the house and using her for all she was worth. She had hopes of a clean break.

The drywall needed to be hung, mudded and finished, flooring needed to be laid, and tongue and groove pine was to be installed to finish the ceilings.

While this was going on, Stan began a new hobby of nonchalantly taking the tools one at a time and using me as the scapegoat, partly in his attempt to stop her from proceeding with her plan. He had a semi trailer on our property where he’d place his treasures under lock and key.

As I think about it now, his plan must have also been for new tools, to replace what he felt was missing from his own collection. These tools Stan collected and swapped as he felt like it. Viola! The tools would reappear but their replacements would disappear. “Where did that come from?” My mom would ask. “It’s been missing for weeks. Hey, wait a minute, now I can‘t find the saw I just bought!” What a sorry little man.

It was otherwise a beautiful day when I witnessed his abuse of my mother, finally in real time- yelling at my mother, telling her how stupid she was because he sent het to the auto parts store without enough information to get him whatever it was that he was making her buy, which was usually something senseless like nice clean plastic tubing that slips onto wiring because the stuff under the hood of his Semi had dust on it. Stan Johnson, living dead. Where is a real-time smiting when it’s needed?

One morning I awoke, from the area where I slept on the floor of the living room, to find that Stan was sitting in the room with a rifle or shotgun of some kind, while entertaining the idea of killing me.

I realize that, to an outside critic, I could be mistaken but there was no cleaning kit odor in the house, and he had never been seen at anytime with, nor did I have any clue that he ever had any guns. All of this, not to mention that it was “out of his area.” It would be like he left it lay in the yard.

Couple these deductions with the gift of clairvoyance. He also had a small hydraulic rowing machine that he was using to build up his strength. It was obvious that he was working up to something. I am not mistaken, later learning of his intentions from the messenger- my mother.

The final motivating factor in Stan wanting to kill me may have been due to my having taken one of my mother’s cars out the night before- drinking and smoking crack cocaine with Muddy Water’s Niece, Hope. Then, on the way home, smacking the Ford Festiva up a bit.

My control of the vehicle was lost when exiting from the west bound highway, I-96, at the Marne exit. The exit has a very short and compact curve where I ended up too wide on the turn, and off of the road, taking out the road sign that indicated a train crossing ahead. The signage must have ripped a hole in the gas tank. I might have misjudged the distance and lost focus on my speed accordingly. Go figure.

I had recently gained employment at 84 Lumber. By taking the train tracks in Marne, I could get to the job fairly easily since it was just off of the tracks near Sand Creek. That was where I set up camp to live for a while- hoping to save some money to get back on track with. This was a great spot because it was very close to my new job, making it easy to walk to work.

Camp was right off of the train tracks, and right on the edge of the creek, where I would refrigerate my beer- making a rocky enclosure in the water to hold it from being swept away by the current. There was a felled tree right there that was over two feet wide in diameter, and suspended up off of the ground by it’s root structure about three feet. This made for a pretty good shelter.

One night, in the fall, I had been at the old Silo Gopher bar, now called the Pit Stop Bar, where I probably drank five pitchers of Killian’s Red beer. Rinaldi’s sub shop was across the street, making it a great dinner option for around four and a half bucks for a beef and cheese steak sub. I went over and made the order and then went back to the bar to drink until it was ready. Well, I made it back to the camp with my food, almost.

It was not so moonlit that night when causing me to take the wrong trail to my camp, the one closest to the edge of the creek, where it ran along close to the edge of the muddy bank. I slipped in the mud and darkness and fell in. The water must have been five or six feet deep. The new blue jean pants I was carrying when I fell in were never found when went back the next day on a salvage mission, thinking I threw them up on the bank before I climbed out of the frigid water. Instantly sobered right up, I made the best decision I could at that moment. My feet started marching the train tracks towards my friend Jimmy’s parent’s house, eating my sub sandwich along the way.

As I ate it, I appreciated how well they wrap them up because it was perfect. It didn’t get wet at all and was still hot as I ate it, contributing to fighting off hypothermia.

Jimmy’s parents house was a bit of a safe haven for me, so I knew I could go there in an emergency, which I felt this was. He was one of my only friends I had, beginning in 1980, and going our separate ways because of his wife, Glenda Palmer, and their lifestyle, around 1990- more or less. We continued to associate from time to time until 2003, which is the last time I ever spoke to him. This was secondary to Glenda but primarily because of Jimmy’s cocaine addiction.

When I got there they let me in, where I immediately stripped out of my wet clothes and passed out in a chair wearing a big bath towel. The next day I awoke to being sounded about sleeping naked in a recliner chair. Apparently Jimmy’s sister Carol and her husband lived there with their daughter of about ten years of age.

That was when realized my mind reading ability must have been shorted out when I got submerged in the creek. My clothes were dry so I dressed and left without reminding them I had nothing else to wear.

I started off to go to work, where I would eventually be invited to stay at a co-workers place. He and his girlfriend lived on the west side of Grand Rapids. I cannot recall her by name, oh wait- it’s Laura. Her name was Laura Larson, and she had a son with this guy, which was about five years old.

At one point in the relationship, they had broken up. She went away, met another man, who was from Brazil, and ended up pregnant with another child- a girl. It was this little girl that stayed in the bedroom that was in the front of the house, in the first room on the right as you walked up to the front door. The room had a couple windows, one facing the road, the other facing the neighbor’s house to the south.

These windows were extremely messed up, to say the least. They covered in, what looked like mud or brown paint. I soon learned about this room where the “man” had been keeping a bulldog puppy of sorts, and a lot of other information that was, to me, pertinent to the welfare of this child. It would be several days to a week before I would digest it all. And I’m not convinced I wasn’t supposed to be there to help the child- sent by angels to save her life, I am sure. Was this a test of my ability to care for others, while still dealing with my own misery?

The smell that came from that room was terrible and would keep me out of it until I had a better understanding of what that room was, and what it meant. When I learned that the child was sleeping in there, knowing it was also used as the dog’s room, I really started working towards finding a solution.

Matt was unabashed about my witnessing his dog training techniques- holding the dog with one hand by the back feet, while smacking the Dog about the face. He would explain that he was trying to turn the dog into a vicious fighting dog. A visualization of the scenario flashed in my head several times afterwards: the dog and child being placed together in hopes that it would kill her. It would appear as if it was only a room the dog was left in routinely, and the child had accidentally gone in there to play with it. It would not appear as though it was also being used as the child’s room.

It would look like she wanted to play in there with the puppy. It’s amazing that she didn’t die from the fecal contamination! There was a small piece of foam rubber that resembled a crib mattress. It was heavily soiled in feces. Poop was smeared and caked on all walls, doors, and window surfaces four feet up everywhere.

In the meantime, the manling was getting his paycheck cashed and getting the word STRIFE tattooed across his upper back with what little money he had left after his steady diet of Coca-Cola and fast food. He was intentionally torturing this little girl, and tormenting the household, mostly because he wasn’t man enough to accept his failures at being able to maintain and contribute to a household or to correct his mistakes and actuate his future, his destiny- or what seemed to be his fate. He was angry at her for who knows how many selfish reasons but the most important issue was over her bringing another child, from another lover she became acquainted with after their break-up, into the scenario when he finally decided he wanted to try again or to use her again or when she decided. Either way… an attempt at salvaging what they once had as a couple for the sake of the children or their son or so it would appear.

We call them sore losers where I come from. And as for the mom, Laura, it’s a sad day when a woman is so emotionally crippled, and lacking in confidence, and self-esteem because of the nurturing deficiencies in her up-bringing and relationships, that she fails in her responsibilities by getting knocked up regardless if she has the means to care for an additional child. Man, he was, in Earthly form but this manling was just a piece of filth that hadn’t yet found his calling as a prison inmate.

Strange, just as the feces smeared all over the room, he was smeared all over those children and their mother’s life. Her starvation for attention and affection was what would lead her to briefly throw herself at my feet, and that was when my foothold to motivate her to change the situation took place. With my influence, and mentioning the child protective authorities coming and taking her kids, she would walk into that disaster to face it head on, as far as the “living condition” and the dog being housed in the same room.

The situation with the manling would be a whole ’nother battle that she would have to deal with entirely on her own. As I think about it now, I had an opportunity to have him arrested for negligence and abuse, at the least, but I didn’t have the hate or anger or maybe the ability to call the police, of all people, or the comprehension of the dynamics or to understand the big picture. What I did know was that this child’s living situation had to be addressed immediately.

Whether she left or he left, I do not know but I think they did end up splitting up completely. It’s too bad it didn’t happen before the manling allowed his iguana to bite their son’s nose off. This animal had no cage, sometimes also being kept in the little girl’s room. This creature was left free to roam around the house. Their son’s nose had to be sewn back on. It was a nasty scar left on his face, and something he has to look at and relive for the rest of his life.

This Iguana was large, which over four feet, in my limited education, is large for an iguana. I ended up proving that it was never taken care of and was “misplaced.” Later, it was found somewhere in the walls of the house, where it died. It must have been a nice surprise for their landlord the day that he found it.

My west-side adventure at Matt and Laura’s hovel was what led me to find Matt and Sara. One day I decided to try to buy a used guitar from anyone I could find one. For some reason I began lurking around the payphone outside of Edzu’s Liquor Store, where I’d inquire to customers who looked like they might be artists or musicians. Surely, this was an effort I thought would put a wedge in between my drinking and my occasional crack cocaine use but it was more mysterious feeling than that. I likened the experience to Salmon returning to spawn or a Mariposa Monarch on its journey to Mexico, taking three lives to get there, and three more to get back; a true wonder of the world.

It was a force that had been trying to guide me to something in my life since I was a child. I have always been, well, stubborn, I guess. I have always done everything the hardest way possible- blazing my own foolish trail in life it seems. Destined to get there but taking the long, scenic route. I don’t recommend that for regular everyday people, the psychiatrist would probably just say, “it’s remarkable,” which doesn’t generally interpret to a good thing, by the way.

It’s a coin toss, supernatural or chance. Either way, this was what led me to Matt and Sara, beginning our relationship as friends, and giving me another shot at learning something in life. This would be about the time, at a Dairy Queen on the corner that I would get to see my kids for the first time since she took them away from me.

Luckily these children of mine were not at the John Ball Zoo when the manling Laura was with put a rope out for the monkeys, which found their way out of the pit-style containment, only to attack people and children. One was bitten repeatedly about the face and head. Matt was never caught or turned in but he boasted to me about this “feat”, admitting how he did it- tying a length of rope to the picnic tables along a fence lined area that overlooked the pit, directing the loose end into the area within reach of the monkeys.

He also bragged about some other crimes involving a sawed off shot-gun but guys like him speak of so much in their efforts to fit into their ego suits that you really can’t believe one word they say. Strife, ironically enough, will be a large part of this manlings existence, which will, more than likely, prove to reward him for the rest of his life, just as he deserves. Maybe you’d call it Karma, and the reward would be Strife. My hope is for someone wise enough to recognize, in his errors, as well as my own, lessons for themselves. Necessary Evil, as they say.

The world is small, so I am sure the future will produce Ms. Larson and her children eventually. Maybe I will be able to see some good I have done for someone else, in them. It would be reassuring, and reinforce my faith in humanity, which I sometimes desperately need.

As for my relationship with Matt and Sara Howell, they were steady consumers of beer and weed but I am certain that the beer was a substitute for her coke habit and it just became an everyday thing for them. Eventually, Matt would discover a love for fishing that would pull him away from alcohol, which was a minute Demon compared to this woman he so naively called his wife.

Sara was a shock-jock. She covered herself in tattoos and wore very suggestive and revealing clothing-like items as an everyday thing to go out in public wearing. These were things you would come to find in a Fredericks of Hollywood catalogue. She did anything and everything for attention. The Bistro BellaVita, where she worked as a head chef, is a very high-end pretentious joint. How did she get the job?

My guess is that the owner was bored and thought it was a disaster in the making that would earn him some kind of notoriety or social report with his fellow business owners down at the Chamber of Commerce, by way of the conversation piece that she insisted on making her self.

Sara’s co-workers would come in on their days off just to see what she was wearing. Don’t take this wrong; she was an accomplished culinary artist with some kind of credentials from a place that I cannot recall. She would design the daily specials herself. Once, that I know of, she sent a busboy to pick crabapples for the days dessert special, from a tree she passed on her way to work that particular day. She was very creative, a character of her own- mostly.

Sara was a person whom had some things she kept secret, like her attempts at Witchcraft. She was the first person to try using it on me, that I know of, and was just the beginning of what would resemble a list of people.

At one point, Matt went out of town for something, asking me to stay with his wife and animals while he was away for fear of her coke addiction causing some great controversy of sorts. They had regular menagerie in their home- dogs, cats, fish, lizards, snakes, turtles, and birds… I don’t remember what else.

The next thing I know, Maynard, from the band Tool, shows up on the first or second day. We drink, smoked and hung out. Sara and I noticed him, at one point, peeling the Blue Pearl/Nag Champak from its bamboo incense stick form, balling it up into little marbles, where he sat on the couch.

She asked him what he was doing to her incense, and why. His response was only that he was going to sell it for “gank”, so he could buy some dope of some kind. I assumed he meant crack but I think it was heroine, specifically. I never saw him face to face after that day but the recordings keep coming out.

The next night an old friend that she used to do coke with stopped by, bringing some synthetic coke for her to try. She must have called him, asking him to drop by. Never had I met the guy before, or heard of him in conversation in the many months we had spent together.

Myself, having been clean for some time now, gave in to temptation. Synthetic coke sparked my curiosity. After we bought some and I snorted a line. It set me off, causing for me to go on a binge that night. Calling Hope with the intention of her bringing me some rocks, I ended up running the streets all night long for the garbage.

In my search for friends and support, while dealing with my familial losses, this was what got hold of me. Never, was it my desire or intention but it became a product of the Demons that recognized I was in a state for them to feed upon- to prey upon. It would be a whole ‘nother element to my battles and only added to my struggle to stay alive once I did finally realize what I was into. 

It was my job working for Salih as a Carpenter, mostly performing a variety of roofing repairs and installations, helping me to carry on at those moments in my, so-called, life. And it would be off and on employment for the better part of this period of time. It was his irate, difficult, ungrateful wife that would insist on interrupting the work situation, causing senseless grief to him and all who worked for him.

About now I got an apartment on McReynolds, with Salih’s help, quickly taking in my oldest daughter’s mother’s ex-husband, (her brothers father)- Bruce Vachon.

Little did I realize that he was mental or becoming senile. Whether it was an underlying condition or relative to his alcohol and past drug use, I can only speculate (alcohol) but it would later surface and cause the loss of those items I did maintain from my broken marriage, that were very near and dear to me.

This would add a whole ‘nother flavor to my defeat and my heartaches. And no matter how badly I recognized that I needed to quit drinking and using- this only made it that much more impossible.

Anyway, when it was all said and left undone, Matt had an affair. Per their agreement, the one that cheats leaves, forfeiting all but their most personal possessions, leaving the household items behind, which had to be a relief to Matt all the way around. Now that I think about it, I wonder if he hadn’t hoped she would have an affair with me, thinking he’d get everything but then deciding it was best this way? Either way, he left and I stepped right in to help out.

They had just recently moved into the upstairs apartment of the house they were living in before their breakup, where I mistakenly went one night, while drunk off of my rear, mistakenly thinking it was my own apartment. They watched me through the peephole, trying to figure out which key was the one to the door, and then turning around to urinate in a potted plant that sat near the door at the top of the stairs. Finally, I realized I was at the wrong house and left.

Well, she decided to move into the house across the street, on the corner lot, when they broke up. And, with all of my foolishness, being so freaking stupid and starved of affection, I stepped right in to “save the day.” I did all the work possible in her move and was given a room there in the upstairs of the new house. It would quickly accumulate cats and kittens, and feces, and all of the smells that go along with that.

Throwing myself at her feet, as I seemed to do whenever a woman within my reach was in need but having always been too ignorant to discern which ones were worthy, I hoped for a relationship with her. Never mind that I was not emotionally healthy enough for one with anyone, for that matter. All I knew was that I desperately needed a relationship of some sort, of any sort.

After having researched this and attributing my condition to not receiving any attention, affection or love from my own mother, is what gave me the wisdom needed to correct my path. I could see her but not touch her, like a carrot on a stick.

She finished (Sara) with me and tried to do some magic to rid her of me. This became clear one day when I was drawn to the room used as the library/study, where I snooped to find a book of spells. This book brought itself to my attention more than I searched for it, revealing what I needed to know. It wasn’t possible that she wanted me to learn what I had learned but I am still confused as to why she didn’t just ask me to be gone.

At some point in my refusal to read the writing on the wall, she called for a pizza, ending up seducing the poor schmo on the other end, in a last stitch effort to relay to me that she wasn’t interested. Eventually I got it through my thick head but by the time I had returned to McReynolds Street, it was too late, Bruce blown the money I had left for the rent.

On what the money got spent on, I can only wonder. Bruce’s only concerns were cheap beer and rolling tobacco, so how four hundred and fifty dollars ended up gone is still a mystery, and though I am not interested- it’s a mystery just the same.

After escaping, I realized what would later be recognized as a new beginning, with the end of her in my life entirely. At a time later she would resurface in a junk store on the west side of Grand Rapids, tempting my reality with her re-entry into it. After offering Sara one of the CD’s that I was promoting at the time, from my residual band, The Bandana Brothers, I never really thought of her again until now.

At this point in my life I had gotten through a lot of bad situations. These situations tempted my patience and willpower, and my very life, reshaping my existence and potential future into the needs of the people I was around.

The coke and degradation was an everyday thing, a re-run. It was like the movie “Groundhog Day,” with Bill Murray. Only on one of those mornings I had hoped to awaken in my death, I awoke to find life and fought back in a whole-souled effort, and what I thought was, finally meeting a female companion to help me to save me from my self. Little did I know, I was about to order a beer and meet someone who would prove to be the only good thing I had found in Grand Rapids since my selfish, arrogant, ignorant wife took my children, destroying my family empire, my identity and my heart, refocusing the sights of my reality to the bottom of a pit.

The only things that I felt prevented me from killing her were my children and my love and grace. It’s been a bit of an unsettling thing to deal with. It is frightening even, when you come to learn how easy and instinctually familiar it is to you. Seeing the images of the act of killing. Seeing yourself handling the body, feeling the various sensations from the emotions, from the exertion, the sting of the sweat in your eye, the smells of bodily discharges and a smell like wet rusty steel.

And there is the splattering and taste of the blood, the stickiness of it on your hands and between your fingers. And then the sensation of it as it cools and the water moisture evaporates, causing it to thicken in a short time. And then there are all of the ways of disposing of it or of them, cutting it up on a band saw after having had it in a freezer for some period of time.

And then the burning of it, dumping the ashes in the river or even a blow to the head that would indicate a slip and fall that resulted in drowning while they may have been hanging out on the river alone while extremely intoxicated.

Then there is always the old way of feeding the pieces to some pigs or the dogs.

And then my favorite sensation: the feeling of my hands around her throat, the sounds of her last struggle, the feeling of her body twitching and finally going limp as her head changes in form, from round to flattened on the backside, and turns softened as I repeatedly pound it on the pavement like it’s a coconut and it’s all I have to use to stop the earth from spinning.

These are all very dark images, I am well aware. The funny thing is that I even imagined my imprisonment for the crime/s. No part of it bothered me any more than my usual nightmares I have. These thoughts had become to be just another thought playing on another of the multiple theater screens playing in my head.

It was just another day that I had to live through. And out of all that I have lived through, and been through, and was forced to endure, it would be learned that this would have all been expected. These images really paled in comparison to my nightmares. But who was I to interrupt her fate in my hands by resisting?

Well, I have always felt that I had a purpose, a gift, a calling in life on Earth, and no matter if I found it or not I do not want my donations to man to be ignored or rejected by something as petty and as self serving as satisfying an itch for wrath on such a deserving individual. It was only because of the children that I didn’t do it.

Had I done this terrible thing, they would have hated me but had she never given birth this would never have been a torture that I had to feel. I accept that I’ll never be given credit for my restraint but a large part of me would like to hear a “thank you” and an apology. One I do not expect in any foreseeable future.

In the meantime, I spend a lot of time keeping my sharp things sharp, my aims accurate, and my self in shape or shape-like. The only thing that gives me anything to worry about in a time of need remains to be my lower back and neck. Other than that, I really have no concerns.

It doesn’t take a very smart person to be able to tell how healthy a person is. A caring, well-tuned person can easily see it in another’s eyes- the hurt, the pain, the damage done by a loved one. I can’t help but wonder if my damages were revealed to Danny that day at Konkle’s Bar in the winter of ’99.

The barkeep handed me a draft beer, one of the booths on the wall invited me to sit, where I did, lighting a smoke. The person with me was a guy I was letting stay at my apartment on McReynolds Street, him and a buddy of his. They were a couple of guys I had met when I was out smoking crack on a recent night of stupidity. He was quiet, probably wondering when we were going to get some dope. Still plenty disgusted with myself from the last crack-about, it would soon be a moment or two in life before I realized the error of my ways, as they say.

My immediate attention was on a young girl in her early twenties. She wore a Beret and had a way about her that sucked me in. Later, I would realize that it was her plan, to suck someone in, trapping a man’s affections in order to use him for whatever she could get. We would speak, and even dance together but not sit together. She remained with a seat at the bar.

At one point, my ears perked up on the words “Billie Holiday”. That really stopped my twisted mind in its tracks because Konkle’s bar full of uncultured persons. It was a place where a guy could feel like a star. If you sang Karaoke, you were great. Compared to the other people that frequented this place, my teeth were fine, and I was very looking. There would be the occasional reminder of how smart you were, a psychological booster shot, so you can see why I’d be surprised to hear about Billie Holiday in the conversations at another table.

“What do you know about Billie Holiday? I asked them. A man who sat with the two women and another man said, “We’re members of WYCE.” This man was Robert McVoy, and I would learn of his craziness soon enough. Just then the other man interjects, “Yeah, and I’m an artist and a musician.” I responded with my being a musician to which he then stated, “I’ve got a studio, let’s go record.”

As best as I can recall, that’s how it went but either way, the statement was, “Let’s go record.” Of course, we left promptly but it was tough, only hesitating since I had just received another beer. It took a second to slam it down, and then we all piled into Danny’s Jeep.

Well, when I got to Danny’s studio, my senses were in a bit of shock- more positively than they were accustomed to at that time in my life. In time, ironically enough, this place would prove itself to be haunted too.

There were creations everywhere. Watercolor paintings, sketches, sculptures, musical instruments and equipment were everywhere you looked, like a battle of the arts had taken place, and continued perpetually. There was a fireplace like I had seen only in movies and in books showing Victorian style Castles. You could fit a large tree stump or two within it.

Later, I would learn that this Heritage Hill district home, at forty Prospect NE, was once a Mansion, complete with a Ball Room floor. This property overlooked much of the city of Grand Rapids. There were five apartments carved out of this place, of which Dan’s was on the actual Ball Room floor, the second floor of the building.

The kitchen was small, a simple galley style, where a rear-service staircase entered- once used by the servants. I doubt that the kitchen had existed before, and if it had, it was probably just for Hors d'oeuvre and as a drink preparation-type wet bar.

We would soon use this area for another aspect of the arts- our own culinary efforts.

There was a screened in porch-type nook that was just a kind of a box that hung out off of the south side of the house. It was a nice place to sit and listen to the elements of nature while reading, smoking, drinking, listening to or playing music, writing or just passing out.

This overlooked the parking area and the wooded portion of the property to the rear of the house, where he had an outdoor art gallery set up in the past summers. We would transform it once again and entertain the community and ourselves until Mother Nature protested.

The yard sales were always a treat, placing a slew of items out for sale, only to embellish upon them as if they suddenly meant more than we realized. Dan called it the “anti-sale”, saying, “Oh, well, I shouldn’t sell that…” He would then add how it had some sentimental aspect, being handed down to him by someone in his family or past, making it all the more interesting or curious to the potential buyer to the point where they would offer him much more for the item than he originally priced it.

We would laugh and giggle about it after they had long left, tickled to get so much money for something we either dug from the trash, found at a thrift store or came across while cleaning out after evictions.

All of those classes at Kendal School for Art and Design paid off at these sales in small dividends that would yield us more gin, cigarettes and even more entertainment.

In addition to the music, photography and art classes, Danny had studied psychology just enough to become a bit of a hustler. It was a new world to me, one that I had been searching for since long ago, and finally found, fully loaded including it’s own Demons.

A baker’s rack held many electronic stereo components that added up to be a sound system for doing anything you could want with sounds. There was a four track Tascam Port-a-studio, a Yamaha keyboard, a Fender Stratocaster, mics, amps, pre amps, lights etc…  There was everything but an audio slave for lights, and a CD burner. It was not a big elaborate system, nothing at all like what I thought that I would find in a “studio”. It opened up my eyes to a new reality, one where a guy didn’t need anything much more than the “want to” to create recordings that were pretty powerful.

It’s always amazing to me, when I see something in its raw form that I had thought was something different, something more difficult or more intricate. Danny made it look too easy. And along with all that he would show me while we became to be close friends, I would learn of what kept him so deeply immersed in art and alcohol as well … his health.

If ever I am stricken with Alzheimer’s, I don’t think I will ever forget that first day I met Danimal or when he popped a tape into the Tascam, adjusting a knob or two and handing me the Shure SM58 saying, “Here, put lyrics to this.” And having no clue what I was listening to, and no idea in my head, much past, “Microphone, lyrics?” I listened and let a few bars play and just started in where I felt the spot was to start.

It was almost as if someone else was driving. It may have been spiritual even, now that I think about it. As if I was a medium for a spirit just then, having no idea where it was coming from. It was like my conscious mind had been out to lunch from my body forever, and I had just gotten home to myself, like I didn’t even know me. Well, maybe I didn’t.

Whatever I was doing got Danimal excited. He picked up the Fender Strat and started playing leads. Little did I know, the tape was rolling, which meant that he was recording the music we were making.

Nine minutes later he’d play the tape back and it would become one of my most prized possessions, proving to be a gift. And it was a gift. It was a gift of my rebirth of mind.

Music was my oldest, closest friend and we had been, finally, reunited with her. I had been kept distanced from her, by Mindy, tormented with the view of her and the unobtainability that was hard to bear thought of.

Once a month, I was allowed to go play in a basement for an hour or so, with friends. At home it was a different story. I could get no personal time to play at all. Her fingers would silence the strings during my attempts, in order to remove my guitar from my moment of attention. Only to replace it with some menial task that had little to no importance, merely her demand.

Red meat was not allowed, nor was I allowed to watch any action films that featured men such as Clint Eastwood or Sylvester Stallone. It was so ironical to me, how I had married a Jewish girl who was so… Hitler-like. She would later satisfy some of my unrest with the knowledge of her unhappiness that I learned of in the near future to this moment- this moment in life when I had become reunited with music, and in a growing friendship with Danny.

That same satisfaction was a detriment to my children, especially my only son, Cody. She continued to punish me for no reason at all through him, and now he is living with the damage for me to have to, painfully, observe. When he was five he wanted to learn how to become the President of our country. He will be released from prison on August 24^th, 2014, according to Michigan’s Offender Tracking System, on the Internet at this moment in January of 2013.

This particular weekend I had spent at Dan’s was four days long. I am sure we drank at least six fifths of gin and rum. The bottles were there to prove it, and had enough residual booze droplets in them to make us both a drink, which, in fact, they did.

There was also Amy and Jen- the lesbians. Later I would learn that Dan had met one of them or both, while in Rehab. They were both Heroin addicts. [Here’s where I have to put it out there that it is not a very good idea to make any new best friends at Rehab. This is, simply put, a future stumbling block. Take note.] I awoke on one of these first few days at Danny’s house, and couldn’t find my weed. I was certain that it had been taken.

My frontal lobe syndrome caused suspicion to point to the girl with the Beret that I had brought with us from the bar. It wasn’t like I openly accused her but, boy, was I sure it was her that took it. After a while of searching like a madman, I found it tucked in between a chair cushion and the wall of the armrest that I had been sitting in the night before… Whoopsie.

It wasn’t that I actually pointed fingers. It was my body language that screamed out the statement for me.

Not until this little time out, at Jackson Prison in 2011, would I realize that my “bamaged” self can only endure a few hours of the normal stress of everyday life before symptoms, like confusion, inability to concentrate and “people stealing my stuff” become disabling.

Now, after focusing on recalling my past for a couple of hours, I lose things, always wondering if they were stolen but before I find myself wrongly accusing someone and creating discomfort in our close quarters, I dig around and always find what I it was that I could not.

Fourteen years later, I am finally identifying some of my handicaps and learning to cope but still fighting for my compensation and proper medical attention to suit my needs.

Somehow I had found out that this girl wearing the Beret was squatting in an abandoned house. Why I got it in my head to “help” by taking her in at my house when I could barely help myself was typical of me. So many things went on that I have a hard time remembering it all. Maybe part of the problem was because I had spent so much of the time as drunk as I could possibly afford. Things like, how soon after that, that I let the lesbians Danny was caring for talk me into giving them money for heroine.

As I said before, and it is like this for all of my recollections- I can recall few things the way they were, some things with accuracy and no sense of time, and other things in a generality but eventually, if I think hard enough, for long enough, I can remember the details I am looking for. Sometimes it will pop into my head a few days later, and sometimes the answers come to me a few years later. Like the last name if Jen, it’s Rasmussen.

Anyway, one of the problems I deal with is that these memories are sometimes on a loop, always playing, as if my mind was a multi-screen theater- open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with shows on that I don’t want to pay money to see. It’s a lot like the tell-lie-vision. My sleep is continuously disturbed by nightmares from the past, mottled with morbid graphic images and horrific situations.

These things were issues before the substance and alcohol use, issues that I maintained at bedtime with marijuana for several years and all during my marriage but no matter how hard I tried, with or without drinking, sleep could only be avoided for so long.

My habit would be to drink until I was unconscious. I began to call on Danny as my free time permitted, usually on the weekend since I was working for Bob at this time.

My trips to Dan’s house were a fast paced hike on the heel-toe express. The girls, as Danny called them, were home and seemed upset. Dan was not there yet or he was at the store, I think, soon to arrive but not until after I gave them the fifty dollar bill.

Anyway, Jen was crying about the court and child support, and about the threat of going to jail because of the money that she claimed she owed. Knowing first hand about the scenario, and having some money, my malleable heart gave in to them. They thanked me profusely and skee-daddled with Mr. Grant.

When Dan got back he asked me where they were, only to add that I better not have given them any money. The room instantly gloomed over. He was so upset with my having given them money- and the fact that he now was forced to tell me their secrets. My heart sank, for I had just contributed to a possibly fatal disaster in the making. I went from Hero to Zero in a split second.

When they arrived back at the house, Amy was dragging her girlfriend up the stairs and into Dan’s house, where they were living. He scrambled for the bathroom to fill the tub with cold water. Now there was a mess, and the mess really hit the fan. Dan would throw them out in another day or so.

And Danny, having just now completed his hoop jumping for a DUI- it was a possible fatality that would be sure to bring cops and investigators, a whole can of worms about to be spilled. NOW, what did I do?

It would come out later how, Tim Steele, a local Radio Celebrity for WLAV FM, had lived upstairs in the recent past. He had a girl over who had overdosed on heroine and forced him to solve that little problem without drawing attention to his own activities that would surely become strewn about by the Media.

The Grand Rapids Press would have had a hay-day with it. It is possible that WLAV would have had their attorneys step in the clean up and quiet down the mess without any attention but who knows what would have been done until it happened. If it were my self in his shoes, I’d be praying that I had a larger than life reputation to pull the real strings on the situation. That would definitely be when a person like him would find out just how important he is.

Well, you guessed it, being such a big sucker and a glutton for punishment; I brought the girls in to my apartment too. I have no real clue how long it took before everything that could go wrong went wrong at my place. It didn’t help that these girls recruited an ex-girlfriend of Dan’s to “help.” This woman just so happened to drop in to Dan’s a day or two after this all went down.

She was an elementary school teacher with a huge drinking problem and no fear or shame with taking it to the streets when she needed money. I can only assume that they bought dope with the money because for some reason we got a hotel on the edge of town very close to Marne.

It is easily remembered because this woman and I went there and ended up being thrown out of the Pit Stop Bar by the barkeeper, who was a friend of mine, for dancing without my shoes on. In a few short days she would be gone and I would finally lose my cool with the rest of my strays.

It was a day when I had just gotten home from work. As I settled into my favorite sitting place in the living room I discovered that the girl in the Beret was in the front bedroom with one of the strays, which not only made me angry, it confused me because if he fell into a barrel of tits he’d come out sucking his thumb.

They were just using me for my apartment, my money, my property- everyone in the place was. They were there by my undeserving grace and had taken me for a huge sucker. This happened just as I had realized how obvious it was that nobody would be contributing to the household. It would become clear when I found my weed and booze gone regularly. These were items that I shared with them when I was home. They must have figured that it belonged to the house as a part of my unusual hospitality. The world’s biggest fool was my self for the moment but that was about to become an impression that I was going to demonstrate a correction of.

Right about now, I discover that the girl in the Beret was trying to practice witchcraft on me. As I am reading them the riot act and telling him that he was leaving, she came out of the kitchen with a small saucepan that had some strange looking mixture of ingredients in it. There were small vials containing some types of extracts in her pocket of her smock, as well as strewn about and on the counter in the kitchen. It was clear that it was done frantically. She was urging me with a sudden suspicious affection, to ingest the mixture. It wouldn’t be anything but a waste of time and energy for anyone to try to convince me that I may be wrong, for you should always trust your instincts and the messages that you are in tune enough to receive, however late they may come to your attention.

At the very moment, putting words like these in ink, I am curious if a deity of an evil kind wasn’t something that had become a part of my reality years ago, and continues to follow me until I become destroyed, I wonder…?

Where was I, Oh, the girl was a big mistake to bring home. For some reason I decided, in all fairness, to give them a certain amount of time to vacate my apartment then next morning. They must have thought that I didn’t really mean it when I had told them to leave the night before. I was right in the middle of giving them the count of ten to gather their things and leave when Bob pulled up to pick me up for work that morning.

Maybe I had already gotten to ten because I recall him mentioning something about the stuff that was strewn about in the front yard, like clothes and hangers, along with a couple of old sea chests and a foot locker… When I had gotten to the count of five, I went to the front picture window and opened it as wide as it would go to let them know it was real.

The guy she was in bed with- the stray, I call him, was crying saying, “Why Zach, why?” It didn’t begin to soften my fury and only enraged me that he had the nerve to insinuate that I was in the wrong. When I got to ten I grabbed the biggest package I could find and launched it out the window and into the yard below. Some of the things bounced out into the street among the cars that were parked along the road. Right after launching the second chest out the window, the Beret attacked. She came at me like I would imagine a full-grown lioness, in a wild rage.

Wow! She put up a real fight- one hundred times more than anyone had ever came at me with before. All I could allow myself to do was to minimize what harm could come to me by blocking her and wrestling her to the floor in an attempt to restrain her, overpowering her into a nicely rolled up ball.

She was like holding onto a huge spring that I had compressed, waiting for the slightest easing up on the pressure so she could fly apart. We were both breathing extremely heavy with exhaustion, hormones and adrenaline flooding through our veins. It was exhilarating, sexual, as if we had been through a series of rigorous sexual acts sought out by those who hungered with lust to make their wildest fantasies come true.

Now, I gave the other guy two weeks to find somewhere else to go but he gets up, as up as his stump of a frame could raise him, squaring off in an attempt to fight me. I really didn’t want to fight with him at all. When he made motion to grab at me I placed my hands at the shoulders along his biceps just above his elbows and twisted him down to the floor like I was laying down a one hundred sixty pound cabinet, saying, “Don’t make me hurt you. I gave you two weeks.” With that, I took a cigarette out, lit it and went down to the van to speak to Bob briefly about leaving for work.

Bob had a nervous air about him, not knowing what to expect, and having witnessed the eruption from the upstairs window out into the yard as he pulled up in front of the house. “I need a couple more minutes,” I said to him, “I’m almost finished.” He just chortled a bit in complete surprise, and with a bit of disbelief over what he had witnessed. As I think about it now, I am wondering if she wasn’t part of the group from the beginning but maybe that’s giving them all too much credit.

Anyhow, on the way out to the van to finally leave, I stopped at their car, finishing my protest at being duped by puncturing all four tires on their Plymouth Horizon sitting behind the house. Maybe I did it at some earlier point in my fit of rage, either way; it sure put a stick in the spokes because now they had no vehicle to leave with.

Lesson learned? Respect the vehicle and learn to recognize what a vehicle for change is. They take many forms. I had immobilized a vehicle for change in my life and now that much-needed change was going to be more unlikely to satisfy my desires.

Well, I had no idea how that little loss of control was going to affect me but after work that day I ended up going to some other little dive of a bar, on Leonard Street, Slackers Bar. How appropriate, considering. Stumpy, having just got off of work for the day, had ran into me on the street and wanted to talk, so we went inside and grabbed a beer.

He was in the habit of wearing a black over-coat, like he must have thought he was a warlock or something. It was the kind of coat that you see these wannabe Goth kids wearing or flashers at night on the city streets of Chicago or New York City. His job was working at Louis Padno’s Scrap yard through a day labor company that places like these cheap screws use to undercut their regular wage expenses.

Anyway, while we were sitting there at the bar, the female bartender starts giving me a bunch of crap- an attitude that was almost as big as she was. It wasn’t like me to not say anything to her about being rude to a paying customer when the place was in so dire need of patrons, so I sounded her about it, explaining that the place wasn’t exactly flourishing with business, and that I was a paying, customer who tips, not a punching bag, which was ironic because while I was taking another sip from my mug, a punch makes contact with the side of my head and lands squarely on my ear.

What kind of guy hits you in the ear anyway? Sparks lit up in my sight in a blazing flash. This punch was from Stumpy, and it was a big mistake because I was still lit with a good amount of fury still residual from that morning.

Maybe he got his ego bruised when I overpowered him. I didn’t mean to do that to him, and was only trying to avoid hurting the guy. I didn’t want to have to hurt anyone, and I never really have before. I only wanted them to contribute or get out. Or maybe he was getting back at me for throwing his friend out or puncturing the tires of the car or for throwing the girls trunks out of the window.

Well, upstairs or not, whatever it was, I was thankful I hadn’t seriously hurt one of them or had sex with the girl, for that matter. That would have only added to my serious confusion.

Now, I don’t like getting hit. And I don’t like spilling booze, especially when at a bar with so little cash. And I hate getting wet, unless it’s my idea, so when I got hit in the ear, causing for me to spill my drink on myself, I was firstly- in disbelief, and then feeling violated by someone who I was extending myself out to help. Then I was, though quite rare, in another fit of blinding rage.

All three sensations or emotions were easy to lament, denial-violation-rage, even though it was all in under a half of a second. Never the less, I reacted. Bar stools went flying as we were both heading to the floor. Next thing I knew, I had shown him to the Jukebox. Fortunately the connection to my ear was the only one or the only one I noticed. How he faired really wasn’t a concern of mine, not like getting out of the place and disappearing before the cops came as quickly as I could render him motionless.

My ear soon turned black. It must have ruptured a blood vessel or something. I have no clue how long it stayed that way either, since my ear-ripheral vision was out of order at the time. Otherwise I would have ducked when he was about to sucker punch me. The situation was efficacious because when I got home, all three were gone. Now all I had to do was rid myself of the rest of them, little did I realize at the time.

Soon after this came the notice of eviction. Bruce’s spending of the rent allocation had caught up with me, not to mention him showing up on the police radar in the area. I cannot recall how it happened but I think it was a psychotic episode or a senility thing. When the police took him off of the street, asking him where he lived and how long he had been there, he had told them that he built the house and hauled it to it’s location with his car! Though I suspected it before, it comes out that Bruce is out of his mind. How he managed to keep it to himself this long is still a mystery.

All of these people, and the situations around them, just go to show you that you cannot help those who aren’t taking the initiative to help themselves. Helping myself seemed to be a great difficulty but I managed to continue finding work to finance my activities despite my dysfunctions. What would have been smart right about then was to finance a replacement Michigan identification card because being evicted created a bit of a problem.

Why didn’t I call Danny for help? Even though I had just met him, he would have helped me but out of guilt over the situation with the girls, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was forced, or so I thought I was at the time, to rent a storage unit from a place on Leonard, right next to the Arnie’s Bakery, and since I had discarded my ID card, it was necessary for the girls to put their name on the paperwork. They were all to eager to take advantage of that situation, to help, of course. What a costly mistake for me that would turn out to be.

We moved everything but the couch. This couch was a gift from Bob but most likely his wife, Cheryl. When I moved it in, it required some disassembly and was a bit tricky for me because I had no experience with couch manufacturing, and had little clue how to do it.

Bruce proved to be handy for this task but it was a bitch, which [ha-ha, bitch witch] is why I bailed on it when it came time to move it.

Jens homosexual son, Ethan, drove us around in his little baby blue Ford Ranger until we found a place to rent a room that would charge us on a weekly basis. I think it was the Econo-Lodge near U.S. 131 on 28^th Street. At two hundred dollars a week, it was anything but economical.

Since we had a storage unit there was plenty of room for my computer, one of many that I lost in the past fourteen years. This way I could continue to write the materials for my books that I fantasized about writing and publishing- mainly as a last will and testament to my children.

The guitar I had at that time, given to me by William “Zig Zag” Goode, was claimed to have been given to him by Ted Nugent, along with a beautiful pair of black and white sculpted cowboy boots that he managed to find for me at a garage sale; all probably given to me to insure that I would be providing the booze for a while.

William Goode was a sad case. One night we were out on a walk-about, looking for people who needed help drinking their booze. We must have not had any money because I remember walking with him to the train track crossing on Bridge Street for a nickel that was embedded in the overly tarry blacktopped asphalt. It was about eleven o’clock at night. He couldn’t get the nickel up out of the tar, and with nothing to pry it with but another nickel, it remained embedded in the tar. It reminded me of the sword and the stone. I guess he wasn’t the one that was meant to have it. The back-up plan was to go into a bar called, “Our Tavern”, which we did.

The bar was pretty empty that particular night, all but for two couples, a lone man, and the barkeeper- all sitting at the bar. It must have been fairly busy recently because the tables were a bit disheveled, several having empty glasses and pitchers on them.

Bill told the barkeeper that he’d clean them up in hopes he would be rewarded for his efforts with some alcohol. He set right to gathering the glasses and pitchers, emptying the ashtrays and pushing in the chairs as if he worked there regularly. A few of the pitchers had a little beer in them. He poured it all together and set a couple glasses down for the two of us.

I could hear them quietly discussing this whole scene- a guy and his wife, who were laughing about it, ordered a pitcher for us. Guilt and embarrassment consumed me- for Bill, for us but mostly for me, I guess, because I wasn’t drunk enough to have no shame. It was probably because of a mixture of Bill trying to help out all of the time, and me having told him earlier that I had no money to buy anything to drink that day. And being his friend when he had so few, he was just trying to help me out the only way he knew how. I mentioned to the people giggling about him, in his defense, that he was hard to reason with, and that since he was drunk I was just trying to keep him company until his wife might let him come back to the house. This should have sunk in as a possible future for myself but maybe I was too preoccupied with my memories of the last and only time that I had ever been to Our Tavern, to see it.

Bill Bolthouse and I had been called out on a service call to repair the bathroom plumbing about ten or more years ago. We showed up there and went inside to the instructions of who ever took charge of the bar at that moment. The men’s urinal wouldn’t flush, only to spill out onto the floor every time someone tried, which, despite the mop bucket and the sign saying, “Do Not Use The Urinal,” they did. We checked every fixture in the room, inspecting the entire plumbing assemblies before we settled down to the one particular object of concern.

One of the toilets liked to run on, and sure enough, the urinal was clogged. With me holding the tool tray up off of the urine stained floor, Bill lifted the lid to the tank on the throne. He burst out laughing, only because it was always comical to find a brick in the toilet tank.

It’s a valiant effort to want to conserve water but regardless of whether or not a brick saves water, the solution is within the mechanics. The float-bulb is in the water tank, connected to the water valve by a threaded rod. The threaded rod is made of a soft copper but sometimes it’s soft steel or aluminum. This bulb controls whether the valve becomes on or off by the downward and upward motion of falling or rising water in the tank. If you bend the rod in the middle so that the bulb sits lower in the tank, it will shut off sooner, using less water per flush. It’s not Rocket Science or Magic.

The urinal, on the other hand, had… an organic problem. When we yanked the urinal from the wall mounting plate, we found out why it wouldn’t drain. Apparently they drink so much beer, so fast, that it doesn’t become digested or broken down by the body.

The drain port had a collection of gelatinized residue from the beer clogging it to the size of a quarter when it was a two and one half inch piece of drain pipe. It looked very much like Tofu or maybe even a Jellyfish sewage monster or maybe… well, let’s just move on.

It was one of those jobs where you thought your chances of getting a disease were pretty likely. This always runs through my memory banks when I recall anything to do with Our Tavern, and it had to be a distracting thought the night, while I was there with William- distracting me from receiving the messages that were there for me to take in.

Anyway, one, of all the things that I had with me at the Econo-lodge, which were all important to me at the time, was my computer. I cannot remember where I had gotten it from but I do remember it did not like to work with it’s casing on the hard drive.

It took me a while to figure out that it quit working when I put it back on but that’s as far as I ever got with it, continuing to use it with the guts hanging out of it. I had written on it with a black Sharpie: “I Only Work Naked.”

This computer was nothing to me but a simple tool for writing, for focusing on writing my stories with. The only thing of value in it to me was that which I had written. At this time in the turmoil of the events and people in my life, I clung to the idea of writing but not for the sake of writing, for the sake of my very dear children.

These writings were to express myself to them in any and every way I possibly could, to tell them how much I loved them and how much I grieved over our separation. The writings were to share the things I had gone through in my duress and the strange dichotomy between wanting to die to end my pain, and wanting to survive to see the day I had them back in my life. They would serve to be my final testament and an expose’ of the truth of their so-called mother and the terrible thing that she had done.

So, when I wasn’t in an alcohol-induced coma, I would write.

Now and again, I would lament a hope that I will be reunited with those songs, stories and morsels that I spilled out through the keys but my perspective of Realism say’s that they are gone forever because the girls would vacate the room, taking the unused payment on the room, along with all of my possessions, disappearing with the entitlement to the storage unit- all of what was left of my entire life, and my attempt to rebuild it.

Of all the things I had been separated from, the one thing I am saddened by the most was a cardboard box that once held Paslode Framing Nails in it, repurposed to hold every photograph I had ever taken of my children.

These photos that I took I had to beg Mindy to allow me to accumulate, since she thought nothing for our family’s need for a camera. Other than photos, the most peculiar and significant thing about that box was the actual blood that was sprayed and splattered on it, human blood. It was evidence of the reality of my struggle to find my way back in life.

Howard robbing me for crack after Mindy left.

That little detail just spun the clock back on this yarn to before I lost the house to Minderella’s father. The company I had become associated with led me into a lot of unusual situations that may or may not be typical of the crack cocaine scene. This company went by the name, Howard.

I met Howard when I found myself off of Franklin Street between Eastern and Madison Avenue. My mission was to score fifty dollars worth of cocaine. He and an associate of his were working the streets, hustling by hooking people up with dope or taking their money entirely. I was one who got ripped off. Instead of fifty dollars worth of dope I was left with a crack-head who did everything he could to stay by my side. Only in hopes of me buying dope, so he could smoke some. He fed me a bunch of sob stories that caused me to end up bringing him back to my house so he could use my shower and eat something.

It wasn’t until much later, steeped in the environment, that I would learn of his social status, and the intentions of an addict for an unsuspecting victim, especially someone love starved, friendless, and being psychologically and emotionally impaired.

He would coach me on how to smoke the drug, always doing what he could to insure that the next hit he had would be doubled due to the dope I tried to smoke running down the pipe to the other end when it became liquefied from an inappropriate amount of heat being applied. He would shove the screen to the other end, load it with another piece, and blow out a huge cloud of smoke.

I got sick of his instruction, at one point realizing what he was doing and why, shouting at him to shut the hell up. “You graduated, baby,” was what he said to me at that moment. I was suddenly disgusted and sickened by what I had gotten myself into, and sickened by the reality of the drug I was dabbling with, and all of the people associated with it.

Without anyone from my past around to see, I slipped deeper into the grasp of the Demons that I allowed to torment me. Although a part of me knew it was bad, a part of me still said that I could do anything I set my mind to, which was walking into the caves of seriously dangerous Demons, taking what was mine, and walking back out with my life.

Despite my anguish and misery I still reached out to help people like Howard, asking them questions like, “Is this how you want to die?” At some point in my delusions I even wondered if I might be Jesus incarnate, coming back to try to stimulate a change in mankind. It’s crazy, I know but I wondered that just the same. I was desperately searching for a reason why I had gone through such changes of events and circumstances in my life.

How could I go from being a successful business owner, with everything I always cared to have for myself, to the edge of the grave? There had to be something more to it that I did not understand. I couldn’t just simply be stalling from my death, could I? Kind of like, “Screw it, I might as well, I am dead anyway.”

One night, around nine, we were approached by a group of kids, asking us to buy them booze. Howard took up the collection and went into the store. Moments turned into minutes when the kids decided it was time to vandalize my truck because Howard wasn’t returning. They grabbed up steel pipes from a vandalized chain-link fence and proceeded to trash the cap on my truck. These kids were eventually arrested for the vandalism.

Howard had ripped the kids off while they had attempted to buy some booze. The money ran through Howard’s fingers and led him right out the door to the next dope house, which was right around the next corner. My truck paid the fee for the evening.

Howard would introduce me to his child’s mother whom I would find out was another addict. Her name was Selena. A little while later I would end up at her place, where she lived with a roommate named Diamond.

There was a man there who had been beating them up but I had no clue why. He wasn’t there when I got there but would be returning soon. She was scared and asked me if I had any friends she could stay with, so I took her out to my truck, which had been idling in the snow and ice covered parking lot for about twenty minutes. As we got to the truck, this guy they called Grey (short for Grayson) saw us and came running toward us.

We got into the truck but he jumped into the bed, trying to attack her through the window. I was trying to drive away when he got in the back, opening the slider window. Why she didn’t beat him with any of the tools I had in there, I don’t know. All I could think to do was drive, trying to fling him from the back of the truck without running into any of the other cars or people that were in the parking lot. How he managed to be removed from the truck is not a recollection I have but the truck did overheat in the process, blowing a radiator hose on the top end of the engine. I parked the truck down the street from my house that night, thinking he might come looking for me, identifying my truck at the house. What I didn’t expect was for her girlfriend, Diamond, to rat out her whereabouts for a twenty-dollar piece of dope.

How late it was when I finally went to sleep, I do not know but when I woke up it was due to her screaming. I tried to get up but I was attacked from behind, beaten about the head, and punctured in the upper left side of my back with a shard from a bowl that he had broken when he threw it at me. 

Exhaustion was dominated with an Adrenalin rush, motivated by the persistent screaming of Selena. I rolled off of the mattress toward the wall, grabbing the mattress and rolling it over with me to stand using the mattress as a shield. Now I got a visual and moved to shove him out of the room and down the staircase with it. When he realized I was coming at him, he fled the scene. That’s when I saw the other guy with a gun in his hand. He fled right behind him after making eye contact with me.

I looked down at Selena, who was still screaming, and now I knew why. Her face was busted up pretty badly. Her top lip was split in two pieces below her nose. Blood was all over her. Blood was all over the entire room. It looked like a slaughterhouse, sprayed all over the floor, walls, ceiling, and us. We must have been having a heart to heart about addiction, life, and kids because my box of pictures was there in the room with us, now splattered with blood.

It was the neighbors who called the cops, bringing an ambulance arrived ahead of them. Selena and I both ended up at Blodgett Hospital, where we received care for our injuries. Both of us needed stitches- her far worse off than I.

Mindy showed up to see me, and told me about all of the different chemicals ending with “caine” that were found in my blood. This was how I ended up learning of how many different ways I had been robbed. Robbed by myself, or by others, it didn’t matter. I needed to somehow remove myself from where I was, to elevate my social class but seeing the mother of my children only added insult to my injuries, and was anything but uplifting.

Now here I am, two years later, coming away from crack but cavorting with heroine and living with addicts all over again. Bob had been entertaining himself under the guise of helping, by finding things for these girls to do for him. In his wife’s eyes, he was a hero but the truth is that he was so miserable in his own silence that he grabbed onto anything that he could gossip about- probably to comfort himself in his questionable sexuality. I don’t believe that the girls having money did anything to offset my financial burdens, ever, even in the slightest sense. It seemed I continued to pay for things despite their working for Bob.

Anyway, Bob didn’t want these girls to work this particular day, and me, being so trusting, even though having trust issues, I left them at the motel without a second thought. I assumed it was so he could bitch at me for the situation that happened a few days earlier, where the girls were painting a gable end on his house but couldn’t reach the peak area, complaining to me about needing me to help them do it. Well, me being a show-off, I went up to show them how, and they went down to the ground without considering the need to hold onto the paint bucket for me.

Though I was on an entirely different task in the shop, I took time for this.

On the roof of the garage I am doing my mighty mouse routine, or better yet, my underdog routine, trying to help out a lot lesser than a Sweet Polly Purebred, when in my haste, I knocked over the pail of Cabot’s Stain. This stuff goes running all over the roof, down into the eaves trough, just like it’s supposed to do when it’s spilled on a rooftop. My first reflex was to use a rag to dab at it with, only because it seemed like a splatter but I realized it was not going to work.

One good thing about this was, when I sent them up with the paint, I only sent them up with a small amount of it so there wasn’t really that much. This was a job for the hose, only after getting it and trying to wash it off, I realized it was an oil base product. I did manage to rinse it off once I got it loose from the surface but it left a heck of a residue behind.

When Bob finally got back he saw the yard was wet, then he saw the stain on the shingles that he had installed with a one inch crown pneumatic stapler- he lost it, mostly screaming and yelling at me for the contamination of his little garden in the clay.

This land in Ottawa County is all clay. Hardly anything grows on it at all. And he is the last one to give a crap about the environment but now I have ruined everything for him. If he was a rational person, even in the least, this wouldn’t have been an issue and I would have left the paint on the shingles to be dealt with on another day but since he was such an irrational person, I was too scared to be able to properly deal with it- starting with helping the girls and reading the can to begin with. I was simply afraid of his reaction, which I am sure being abused by my father was a major factor in my confrontational disorder. [Take notes.]

Anyway, Bob and I are almost to the job that day when his phone rings. He answers the phone and then say’s, “I don’t know,” giggling and turning towards me. “I don’t know? Zach? Where do you want your stuff?” It was Amy and Jen. Suddenly I start freaking out, wondering why I would want my stuff anywhere but at the room where I had left it. It hadn’t dawned on me that they would cash out early, taking the money to feed their addiction.

They had recently explained to Bob how I was, “A ray of Hope,” in their lives. It didn’t seem like it but I was shooting craps in life again. Here would have been a great time for Bob to drive to meet them in order to salvage my interests but Bob was so pretentious that he didn’t stink, and if he did it was only fitting that everyone else had to smell him because nobody was fit to breathe the air as it was.

My days with him were much the same everyday, most likely reserved for him to express his perpetual vehemence at his mommy abandoning him to his hateful father- dear ol’ daddy.

Bobby grew up in a rural setting, on a large farm property that was just another nonchalant junkyard where dreams that were once someone else’s were bought, hauled to, and cut up into bits. It would become a result of old man Smith’s junk in the yard that no one in Wright township could have anything that resembled junk in their yard. Blame cannot lay only on people with the items in their yards, believed to be or expected to become, monetarily valuable.

It gets to be distributed as well to the morons who want to take farms and transform them into high density residential property upon them inheriting it, only to bulldoze the farm and everything on it, and cashing it in as a housing development, which happens to be right next to the highway only separated by a parallel running set of train tracks. This would be his last laugh at his dad for not ever showing him love.

Funny thing is, Bob has a brother who did not escape the familial devastation, and actually ended up on the worse end of the suffering, having struggled through life in some hard luck situations. Joe would watch while Bob did what he could to dupe a woman from a well off family into believing he was a loving family man, all the while just a thief. And Joe would grab at the world’s straws, trying to find himself a decent life.

Joe ended up in a situation involving cocaine, where he allegedly managed to manufacture some checks, only to cash them in to buy dope. He went to jail and served his time at a work camp, managing to pay the money back.

Somehow, his wife lost the kids whom Cheryl spearheaded getting the custody of, leaving Joe to be forced to pay Child Support to Bob and Cheryl. It’s odd how Bob beat his brother up with the system, all the while mean-mouthing the children to me, while at work all day.

Bob was such a hypocrite, bragging about his drinking and pot smoking, while humiliating poor Joe over the pitfalls he had found on his search for happiness. Without Cheryl, Bob would just as soon continue in his self indulgence and deviant activities, all the while drooling over other women every other second of his time out in public- a travesty.

Frequently, he would have me get him pot, only to throw it in my face that I was a dope-head while he would be drinking and driving. And ridiculing me, on top of it, about my drinking problem and how big of a problem it was for him to have to deal with, while he came to work religiously with a hangover, only to abuse me until he felt better, which was quitting time when he could start all over again. It was the price I had to pay for having an understanding of him. All the while, he remained ignorant of the least of my charity, as well as my forgiveness for him.

There was one day that I recall quite frequently because I have a separated shoulder to remind me of it. It was a day that I worked in his shop, at his house in Marne. This particular day was a Saturday and we were drinking beer, pretty much all day long, along with smoking weed as well. At one point, early in the late afternoon, he said, “Hey, let’s ride the dirt bikes.” The boys wanted to ride, since he had promised them earlier that they could take the Fat Cat and three-wheeler out on the trails.

He climbed on the Yamaha IT 250 Enduro, and gave me the Honda 100 Enduro to ride. Naturally, I got on the bike while the boys followed us. There was a trailhead that was near the house. It went out and around a farmer’s fields. At one point Bob stopped and ordered me to ride the 250, taking the bike I was on for him self, saying, “Here. Ride this if you want to beat on something.”

Well, I jumped on and took off, racing along through the gears. I think it was about six seconds, if it wasn’t eight, until I came up onto a sixteen or eighteen inch lump of earth in the trail resembling a small jump. When I hit, it was like I ran into a wall.

The bike mule-kicked me straight up in the air to a height of, what seemed like one hundred feet but was closer to fifty, causing me to activate my wonder twin powers into the shape of a rocket- coming straight down from my ascension head first into the well packed earth. The bike flipped over the jump and continued flipping in an “endo” fashion all the way down the trail repeatedly, with quite a bit of velocity, as would be expected since I was at the end of the wick, and up to fourth gear. It flipped rear over front for approximately forty yards, if not fifty, judging by the amount of flips it did, hitting the ground twelve times at the least.

I wondered ever since then, if the house overlooking the crash site might have contained any witnesses since it had a clear shot. It had to be quite a sight to see.

Bob came up to me, only to run past the heap I made, towards the heap I had successfully made of his bike, exclaiming “My bike! Look what you did to my bike!” His childish concern for the bike, ignoring my physical health, especially in the presence of the adolescents, spoke volumes.

The bike he was so worried about was an acquisition he made by taking advantage of people, running his own one-way pawn service. I was in a bit of shock and there was a dull sting in my shoulder. Along with that sensation was a message that told me it was just popped out of the socket so, I slammed my arm down into the ground several times, trying to pop it back in. The doctor would later say that it was separated, requiring me to come back in two weeks to “talk about it”. I have been around enough to know that I wouldn’t be having my arm repaired due to not having any insurance. I never went back to talk about it.

My mother was the one who took me to the hospital that day. They all thought I exaggerated the story of what happened, saying that I was “overly animated”.

I could have sued Bob for the medical expenses, especially in light of the fact that he made me pay for every single repair to that bike, using the most expensive bike shop in town, Shawmut Hills Honda. I never brought up the entire situation and story to his wife. It was just another episode where Bobby unfairly took out his stored up anger on me, the only person, other than his wife, to truly put effort into whatever kind of relationship we had.

Yes, I could have said no but who would deny a dirt bike ride, especially in Marne, just because they had been drinking? That’s blasphemous. It’s a requisite for dirt biking.

Every Marnian knows that. But Bob knew of my head injury and the psychological conditions I was dealing with, not to mention my problem with alcohol, and all of my accidents in the past. He knew better than to offer me booze while at work, and he knew better than to put me on or give me the opportunity to ride his motorcycles, let alone force me to pay for the damage to the bike. It’s not like I asked to come and borrow it. I was there to make money.

I’m not sure if it’s needless to say or not but come Monday I was right back at work, cutting parts and assembling a stained Oak staircase one handed,  and by myself- single handedly if you will.

(Wayside motel, to move in with Ron Groenlier soon)

 Bob and I were working on newly built houses for, Ancil Mitchell, who was a preacher for a church called, The Grand Valley Voice of the Pentecost. This man built simple homes and duplexes for financially disadvantaged people who wanted to get out of the city and away from the potential hazards that went along with life there.

Knowing Ancil would have been extremely helpful after Mindy left, which happened to be when I found out that the house I had been living in wasn’t mine at all.

Soon after our separation I would end up being thrown out by her father, Marc, when I could no longer pay him the rent, which was seven hundred and fifty dollars per month. Marc, along with Minderella’s sister, Amy, (so Mindy claims), packed up what was left after Minderella had her way with everything of any use or value despite the judge’s fifty-fifty ruling.

Trash bags suited this procedure because that’s how they treated my belongings. Some of which were heirlooms that I had received, that were to be handed down to my children- heirlooms like their Great, Great Grandmother Lindner’s cookie jar.

My Great Grandma Lindner was always known as the cookie Grandma. After her death, since I was the oldest Great Grandchild, the cookie jar was presented to me. This particular jar was a mother Pelican with a small baby Pelican on her bill, which happened to be the lid. The baby made the handle.

Minderella had already smashed it once, in the not so distant past, during one of her Infamous tantrums of Princess-like temper. I used my crafting skills, and wounded sentimentality, to glue it back together, filling in the missing areas with plaster to sculpt it back into wholeness while trying my best to hide the fact that it had once been destroyed. I should have stripped the familial reigns that I had placed trust in her to hold, from her hands that very day.

Why I didn’t divorce her, for that alone, probably had a lot to do with the children and my Love for them- along with the great Hope that I had for her to one day embrace her role in our relationship, and become everything she was expected, and vowed, to become.

The beloved cookie jar was an item synonymous with Cody and Scarlett's very dear Great, Great Grandmother Lindner but was now marred with the scars of what seemed, to me, to be a loveless marriage.

The thought of it now, still aches my heart. When Cody was born we were five generations living. To my mother’s family as a whole, that was a pretty serious thing for our family history. We photographed the event.

Looking back, those mistakes were a dreadful thing. Or is it dreadful to see how the solutions were always overlooked, and so simple, leading to the most difficult situations and the most needless suffering? None of it had to be the way that it had been but when you are alone in life with no one, and nothing to count on, you are forced to make all of the mistakes that you could have learned from others having done them before you. But there are those who would rather you made them instead, out of spite. After all, it didn’t kill them.

 Oh well. I didn’t know Ancil at this trying time in my life but I did know Charles. And when I was out on the street he tried to help by taking me to the only place he knew of where I could find a bit of hope or just a room to stay in.

One of those places was at Ronald Jackson’s apartment. This is the same place, where sometime after this, I would plan to take Selena as a somewhat of a safe haven but became interrupted that morning when we were attacked.

And incidentally, it was not the right place for either of us to go. The drug issue was about to get worse because this guy was a daily crack cocaine user. It’s probable that I was taken there due to the fact that I had been using, and Ronald Jackson was a user who was always calling people for a little cash so he could score more. Sort of like the buddy system for drug user’s.

At one point, while living at one of Ronald Jackson’s apartments, I managed to find the Independent Living Services in the phone book so, I called them and spoke to a woman named Tina Tilney, who did come to speak with me. It was a desperate attempt, on my part, to get out of the environment after I realized how bad it truly was and is.

She was clearly overwhelmed because she had never followed through with finding me a home for “highly functioning individuals”, as she had discussed with me. She also mentioned various jobs that she could get me involved in, and some therapies to learn how to cope with my injuries and state of duress. She took all of my files that I showed to her and just vanished.

Living at Ronald Jackson’s apartment was turning even more ugly as the drug use continued on by the minute. In a desperate attempt to change my environment, I went to Ron Vokes house that ask him to rent me a room.

It just happened to be that Ron Groenlier showed up shortly after my arriving. After he mentioned that he was moving into a house owned by his Aunt, I explained that I was looking for a room to rent. He was quick to ask me to come and share his place.

When I went there to start moving my stuff in I had ran into Salih, owner of Native American Builder’s, he offered me another job that lasted for a few months, eventually ending once again. Only this time it was because her problem was that I knew more about there marriage than she wanted me to. It was one more time that I had to call Bob for work.

One day Bob came to pick me up for work at his shop. We had been working through the week for Johnny Van Soest, who was building new homes in the Rockford area. There were a few projects going on in the shop where Bob was building a few items to go in his house. Things like a sow’s belly draw standing cabinet for potatoes and onions, and a small desk for the mail, keys, and charging packs for cellular phones.

As I was trying to keep going with the momentum that I was being pushed to maintain, I made a poor decision to use a small piece of scrap wood to cut a part from rather than an ample sized piece to work with. My thumb got cut on the table saw while trying to rip this board to size. It was a board that I knew was too short to cut on the table saw when I was doing it but out of my wanting to keep Bob happy by letting less material go in the pile for the wood stove I nearly lost one of my hands.

And although I was a very highly skilled woodworker, my head was twisted up with the residual affects of the substances I had been using the night before.

The saw blade became pinched by the twist in the wood as the board became separated into two pieces, caused by the nature of the wood grain as it had grown around a knot. The blade yanked the board and the force I was using to push on it let the weight of that force fall forward into the area of the blade, catching a piece of one of my fingers on my right hand. Had my senses not been compromised by a hangover, I would have been able to achieve it, as I had become known to do the improbable routinely.

As the board went flying, bouncing off of the wall, my hand was struck and vibrated with a high frequency vibration. My fingers felt hot from the blow. It was my first reaction to grab the struck hand with my other hand, and grip the fingers tightly as if to hold them together. The pressure applied was to stop the blood flow that I knew was there. It was also to hold the pieces together. Fearing the extent of the damage, I just kept squeezing until I could stomach to look at the wound.

Bob took me home shortly after. I grabbed a half pint of Seagram’s Seven and a couple of pain relievers. Having thought that it was minor, I realized that it was quite a bit worse, so I got on the telephone and called around for someone to take me to the hospital but no one was around to help.

Then I go the big idea to call The Independent Living Association to see if Tina Tilney could help me, and continue our discussion about my life situation. The way I saw it was that she would see that I nearly cut my hand off and would then recognize that I truly needed the help of her organization.  

Tina Tilney did come to the house and took me to the hospital to be treated. While we were there I told her about a story I had been writing and a few nightmares I had been having. She didn’t really listen to me, thinking that I was delusional or crazy.

There happened to be a friend of my ex-wife’s there with her husband but she never said a word to me, only to relay her observations back to Mindy shortly after she had left the Hospital. Later on in the coming months I would hear how Carrie was there with her son, and with the impression that I was out of my mind.

Within a few months weeks Bob would land Ron a job working for a friend of his who owned a heating and cooling business, as well as an auto-body and mechanic’s shop.  This time things would get bad around the house with Ron, especially since he had an income now. His drinking had gotten so bad that I would question my own. Eventually he would end up losing that job.

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