The 1972-73 school year, 9th grade, was perhaps the most difficult one of my young years. Though I don't recall starving during this time, it was definitely the year that expectations began to be laid at my feet by my mom and grandmother to make up for the gaps left by my dad's repeated absences and lack of income. Since I worked again at the park that summer of 1972, I felt obliged to contribute extra money for bills and food. In June, we once again made a late-night getaway from one house in rent arrears to another whose landlord/property management company presumably fell prey to dad's gift for bullshitting, since I have no memory of any job he held during that time. The house on North M street bordered what was even then a sketchy area on the north side of Fort Smith, and the dilapidated looks of the outside of the structure were not false advertising. We were to soon discover that the house was infested with rats! I had my first face-to-face with one during a hot summer night when I woke up thinking I was dreaming, since a squirrel seemed to be at eye level examining me. It was not a dream, and was not a squirrel - only a rat that was as big as one. A purge campaign of setting poison bait traps ensued, and eventually it was successful, except for the awful smell that one left lingering for weeks after expiring inside of a wall.
That summer was one of the hottest I remember in Arkansas. I believe the temps stayed over 100 for several days. Without air conditioning, the temps in the house were unbearable. We got through by bringing the mattresses into the living room, training three fans on us on high, and sleeping nearly nude. Still, we would sweat for hours until the heat finally exhausted in the early morning hours. These memories are why I have never taken climate control for granted and see it as one of the pleasures that modern life has granted us. Since I worked every day, I stayed out of the drama at the house mostly, but managed to get into a drama at the park which would have a long sequel of events that would play out over the next few years. My co-worker and I were in the deep drainage ditch on the northwest side of Tilles, using hand-clippers to cut weeds growing out of the cracks of the rock walls. My vision was directed toward a building across the street bordering the park, at that time a drug store. There was a car parked alongside the building, and the driver's face caught my attention, because it was shaped in my view like the scrunched-up visage of a weasel. The man turned his head toward my direction, and I suppose because of seeing someone there unexpectedly, shot me a dirty look. Just as I was about to lose interest, a man garbed in a bright orange jumpsuit, carrying a leather satchel ran out of the alley space behind the drug store and jumped in the car. The driver peeled rubber and took off.
Three minutes later, we had finished the weeding and were taking a break sitting on the rock wall bordering Grand Avenue. Another car screeched to a halt in front of us, and a man jumped out and flashed a badge. He urgently asked if we had seen anything strange, that the bank a block away had been robbed. Due to the serendipity of my placement in the ditch and the strange shape of the getaway driver's face as well as the brightly-colored fashion choice of the robber, I was able in less than 60 seconds to give face, body, and attire descriptions of the men and of the car, as well as being able to point them in the westerly direction the crooks turned after speeding past the park. The information I gave the detectives allowed them to locate the car and arrest the men who had holed up in a hotel across the state line in Oklahoma. Reporters from the local newspaper interviewed the two of us, and a second detective had us write the blow-by-blow account of our involvement. I remember going home and trying to explain the happenings of that day to the others, and receiving no reaction, which made the next day even sweeter as my name and contribution to the arrest were prominently featured in the headline story of the newspaper.
Fourteen was the year my hormones went into overdrive. My fantasies about many of my female classmates became rich with imagery, a combination of romantic ideation and outright lust. But with zero self-confidence, and cursed with the bright red hair that had made me a constant target of teasing and bullying, none of these fantasies were to be fulfilled. My main crush was a girl who was seated next to me during algebra class, Sandra Howell. She was a cheerleader, with dark hair and a skin tone that made her look Irish. She was so out of my league that basic conversation seemed impossible, and her string of jock or older boyfriends further intimidated me into silence. When I finally exchanged words with her, it was predictably for my life a traumatic encounter.
Sometime in the spring months, my dad and a few of his fellow con-men had started up a company that did special promotions for the grand openings of businesses. Their entire shtick seemed to consist of dressing up in vaudevillian costumes - my dad as a mustachioed carnival barker, one friend painted as a circus clown, and another wearing a full gorilla suit. I of course was tapped for logistical support, loading and unloading the props and standing by squeamishly as they ad-libbed extremely unfunny interactions with customers of the car dealership/mini-golf franchise/car wash they were at that particular weekend day.
Problems arose at one event at the Phoenix Mall one Saturday when Bill, the ape-suit guy, did not show up. Apparently his act was the straw which stirred the drink, as my dad and the clown seemed lost without having this foil to play off of. "Bobby, put the suit on" Dad finally demanded as a solution. I protested and refused to budge, but eventually his voice berating me in front of others seemed a less-embarrassing alternative, so I put the costume on. For the next hour, I did my best emulation of an ape on the loose in a suburban mall, chased by a tag team of Groucho Marx and Pennywise. What I hadn't expected was the intense heat from being inside the suit with no ventilation. I demanded a break, and took the head off. Sweet relief lasted just a few seconds as I heard a querulous female voice from behind me. "Bob?" I turned, and who else would it be but Sandra and her high-school boyfriend exiting the movie theater.
Humiliation is not nearly strong enough of a word to describe what I felt in that instant. I mumbled some nonsensical syllables, spun around and fled to the back room area from where the enterprise was being staged. Tears were running down my face when Dad came into the room demanding to know why I was crying. "Because I fucking hate this!" I yelled. He slapped my face, but the sting of that was nothing compared to once again having my self-esteem nuked. My luck with the opposite sex was destined to one day get better, but for the rest of my teen years I would remain a frustrated spectator.
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Sunday, April 1, 2018
Life at 28
28 is known in astrology as Saturn return - the year that planet regains its position in the heavens relative to Earth. This ends the first, and begins a second cycle of one's destiny, IF one grants any credence to this set of knowledge. A mundane way to look at it is to conceive of each cycle as a part in a roughly 3-part TV series. Our move to Texas represented my transition to part 2, and with that it is appropriate to flesh out the rest of the story about the Adelphi Organization.
Denise and I attended the studies, lectures and social mingles which were set for every Sunday in Garland. Richard Kieninger was always present, though he wasn't made the focus of attention, and to be true he didn't seek such fawning. Now that I had the opportunity to observe him over a longer span of time, I could see he was every bit the introverted engineer type, just as he had characterized himself in his writings, and it was this lack of egocentric behaviors gave his claims even more credence in my mind. The lessons were satisfying, the social interactions fun, and despite the gaps in the internal logic of the enterprise, we continued to support the group with financial donations. We invited Richard to dinner sometime in this summer of 1986, and he accepted our suggestion to meet at a German restaurant in Dallas. The conversation was lively and stimulating, and we left that night with even a more solidified opinion that he was without guile and to the extent that we could verify, he believed what he had written in The Ultimate Frontier .
Sex is often the catalyst that triggers volcanic-like eruptions in human affairs. I had no reason to expect that this would be the case with our group of truth-seekers, but alas this all-too-predictable event happened. Richard had been living with the groups secretary since the group had relocated to Texas some years prior. Her name eludes me; she was a likable person but otherwise just a fringe element of my memory. She was perhaps 20 years younger than Richard, which may have been the source for gossip among others in Adelphi but to us was just a fact we accepted without question. Well, she apparently caught Richard making moves on a significantly younger female, and then brought accusations of inappropriate behavior to the board members. Faced with a brewing scandal, they decided to be completely open about this bad cloud and called for an open meeting of all members to discuss it. That Sunday in early winter was an emotionally-exhausting one, as in essence this nexus of ideals and future hopes we had shared with so many others disintegrated within several hours.
For a great while, I felt foolish about these few years of my life when I believed in something enough to devote my time energy and money to it. 30 years after this, those emotions are gone and I can freely summarize the downfall of the Adelphi Org. Richard was a human complete with the accompanying frailties; for him, a proclivity toward beautiful young women. When one is a prophet/messenger of anything remotely resembling a faith, this frailty is not acceptable. Right or wrong, these are the rules of the game. That December day in 1986, dreams collided with rules and it was game over. The fallout was swift and severe - people we had spoken to at length every week became non-existent, though not from our choice. The schism divided the majority of the group who supported the choice to sever ties with Richard with the minority who felt that without the messenger, there was no message. That left a small space for just a few of us who basically said "hat the fuck is going on?" The board became aggressive and quickly adopted a "our way or the highway" attitude. We rejected that out of hand, but neither could we accept the notion of joining yet another splinter group created from scratch with Richard's twenty or so loyalists (as he was to do a few months later, with the new association being called "Builders of the Nation"). One of the handful of those like us who refused to join either warring faction was John, a lanky thirty-something computer programmer, who took the initiative of driving to Illinois to interview a person who could shed some insight on events since she had been at the forefront of the first group split-up a decade prior - Richard's ex-wife. When he returned, he accepted our invite for dinner at our apartment, and he shared his findings. Gail told John that Richard was a man-whore, a narcissist, and a manipulator, but despite every possible motive to hammer the final nail in his coffin, she still believed that the information he shared came from a supernatural source. Her reasoning? Three decades before, living in suburban Chicago, he had stayed up for 72 hours and had written every word of The Ultimate Frontier without reference works or outside agency.
This one night allowed us to put the entire Stelle/Adelphi/Richard era of our life to bed. Despite this tantalizing last nugget of info, the ordeal was too painful and we wanted to make a clean break with all of it. We dropped all contact with the members and of course Richard, and began contributing our funds to various charity works we identified as being legitimate and worthy instead of what turned out in the summation of things to be a metaphysical Ponzi scheme. The Adelphi board and their supporters lasted perhaps another year before dissolving, and Richard's new enterprise never gained much traction. May 2000 came and went, but no pole shift or ice age occurred. I discovered perhaps a decade ago that he became affiliated in the 1990's with a separatist group in Texas, and some obviously bad decisions were made in this regard as he ended up in prison for fraud, serving two years and then dying soon after. The Pharaoh didn't fare well this journey around, unfortunately.
Denise left the drug-den hospital for a oncologist's lab in Fort Worth where she was the assistant supervisor. After the string of temp or truncated career choices I had been faced with, I finally secured a temp-to-perm job at a hospital in Bedford about 12 miles away. It was a midnight 10-hour shift, 7 days on 7 days off. It was an insanely stressful job, since for the majority of my stay there I had to not only do the lab work but draw blood as well, which lead to impossible pressures to be two places at once. Still, I was happy that we had some sort of financial equilibrium, so I determined to survive no matter the stresses.
My week off allowed me to recover from the intensity, and I spent many of those days playing pickup full-court basketball at a rec center in Pantego, a neighboring burb. There were a group of regulars that were there most days, a few of them teenagers who wore "Iron Maiden" and "Judas Priest" t-shirts. These guys had friends who never played but hung around watching the action, one of them a burly guy with long hair. It was a few years later when I was reading a "Dallas Observer" touting a new metal band taking the area by storm that I realized I had been playing ball with future members and friends of "Pantera" while we were watched by the late Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul!
If I had thought the female sexual overtures during my cable sales days were intense, working with 95% female co-workers at Northeast Hospital amped this into the stratosphere. Suffice it to say that if I had been willing, I could have had a different sexual partner for every day of the week. My marriage was cold and I was unhappy, yet I still couldn't rationalize crossing the line. Two women almost pushed me there though. Gwen was a morning-shift phlebotomist who I had perhaps 15 minutes of interaction with periodically. Yet, even in this short amount of time I somehow, without a single question from me, became aware that: her sex life with her husband sucked, that he cheated on her constantly and left her at home managing four young kids, that her therapist told her she should have her own affair, and that she had chosen me! Gwen was waif-sized, very cute with incredibly seductive eyes. Despite multiple attempts to offer me sex, I managed to say no without being an ass about it. Larissa was even harder to resist. She was an ER nurse on nights with me, with a slender lionine frame and sexual energy bubbling out of her pores. She too was married, but separated and was as unhappy as I was. Our interaction became a little closer to the line, with physical contact that almost became full-out wildfire for both of us. We decided to take a drive one morning after work in her truck, parking at a levee overlooking the Trinity River. As the sun rose, we confessed our desire for each other, and shared our one and only kiss. She asked that if we were to go any further, I would have to leave my wife. It was a huge dilemma for me that I couldn't resolve then nor in the following times we worked together, and I suppose this indecisiveness was the answer for her, as with few words we backed into the distant co-worker relationship which we maintained for the rest of my time there.
With not even a year at her new job, Denise was recruited to join the Texas Department of Health as an inspector, and the money was enough of a difference to make her say yes. Little did I know that this decision was to drive many dramatic future events in the next few years. The job was 80% travel which meant that if her travel week overlapped my off-week, I would go 10-14 days barely seeing her. This enforced separation increased my sense of alienation from her, and for the first time I began to regret marriage not only with her but in general as a limiting constraint on human freedom.
Denise and I attended the studies, lectures and social mingles which were set for every Sunday in Garland. Richard Kieninger was always present, though he wasn't made the focus of attention, and to be true he didn't seek such fawning. Now that I had the opportunity to observe him over a longer span of time, I could see he was every bit the introverted engineer type, just as he had characterized himself in his writings, and it was this lack of egocentric behaviors gave his claims even more credence in my mind. The lessons were satisfying, the social interactions fun, and despite the gaps in the internal logic of the enterprise, we continued to support the group with financial donations. We invited Richard to dinner sometime in this summer of 1986, and he accepted our suggestion to meet at a German restaurant in Dallas. The conversation was lively and stimulating, and we left that night with even a more solidified opinion that he was without guile and to the extent that we could verify, he believed what he had written in The Ultimate Frontier .
Sex is often the catalyst that triggers volcanic-like eruptions in human affairs. I had no reason to expect that this would be the case with our group of truth-seekers, but alas this all-too-predictable event happened. Richard had been living with the groups secretary since the group had relocated to Texas some years prior. Her name eludes me; she was a likable person but otherwise just a fringe element of my memory. She was perhaps 20 years younger than Richard, which may have been the source for gossip among others in Adelphi but to us was just a fact we accepted without question. Well, she apparently caught Richard making moves on a significantly younger female, and then brought accusations of inappropriate behavior to the board members. Faced with a brewing scandal, they decided to be completely open about this bad cloud and called for an open meeting of all members to discuss it. That Sunday in early winter was an emotionally-exhausting one, as in essence this nexus of ideals and future hopes we had shared with so many others disintegrated within several hours.
For a great while, I felt foolish about these few years of my life when I believed in something enough to devote my time energy and money to it. 30 years after this, those emotions are gone and I can freely summarize the downfall of the Adelphi Org. Richard was a human complete with the accompanying frailties; for him, a proclivity toward beautiful young women. When one is a prophet/messenger of anything remotely resembling a faith, this frailty is not acceptable. Right or wrong, these are the rules of the game. That December day in 1986, dreams collided with rules and it was game over. The fallout was swift and severe - people we had spoken to at length every week became non-existent, though not from our choice. The schism divided the majority of the group who supported the choice to sever ties with Richard with the minority who felt that without the messenger, there was no message. That left a small space for just a few of us who basically said "hat the fuck is going on?" The board became aggressive and quickly adopted a "our way or the highway" attitude. We rejected that out of hand, but neither could we accept the notion of joining yet another splinter group created from scratch with Richard's twenty or so loyalists (as he was to do a few months later, with the new association being called "Builders of the Nation"). One of the handful of those like us who refused to join either warring faction was John, a lanky thirty-something computer programmer, who took the initiative of driving to Illinois to interview a person who could shed some insight on events since she had been at the forefront of the first group split-up a decade prior - Richard's ex-wife. When he returned, he accepted our invite for dinner at our apartment, and he shared his findings. Gail told John that Richard was a man-whore, a narcissist, and a manipulator, but despite every possible motive to hammer the final nail in his coffin, she still believed that the information he shared came from a supernatural source. Her reasoning? Three decades before, living in suburban Chicago, he had stayed up for 72 hours and had written every word of The Ultimate Frontier without reference works or outside agency.
This one night allowed us to put the entire Stelle/Adelphi/Richard era of our life to bed. Despite this tantalizing last nugget of info, the ordeal was too painful and we wanted to make a clean break with all of it. We dropped all contact with the members and of course Richard, and began contributing our funds to various charity works we identified as being legitimate and worthy instead of what turned out in the summation of things to be a metaphysical Ponzi scheme. The Adelphi board and their supporters lasted perhaps another year before dissolving, and Richard's new enterprise never gained much traction. May 2000 came and went, but no pole shift or ice age occurred. I discovered perhaps a decade ago that he became affiliated in the 1990's with a separatist group in Texas, and some obviously bad decisions were made in this regard as he ended up in prison for fraud, serving two years and then dying soon after. The Pharaoh didn't fare well this journey around, unfortunately.
Denise left the drug-den hospital for a oncologist's lab in Fort Worth where she was the assistant supervisor. After the string of temp or truncated career choices I had been faced with, I finally secured a temp-to-perm job at a hospital in Bedford about 12 miles away. It was a midnight 10-hour shift, 7 days on 7 days off. It was an insanely stressful job, since for the majority of my stay there I had to not only do the lab work but draw blood as well, which lead to impossible pressures to be two places at once. Still, I was happy that we had some sort of financial equilibrium, so I determined to survive no matter the stresses.
My week off allowed me to recover from the intensity, and I spent many of those days playing pickup full-court basketball at a rec center in Pantego, a neighboring burb. There were a group of regulars that were there most days, a few of them teenagers who wore "Iron Maiden" and "Judas Priest" t-shirts. These guys had friends who never played but hung around watching the action, one of them a burly guy with long hair. It was a few years later when I was reading a "Dallas Observer" touting a new metal band taking the area by storm that I realized I had been playing ball with future members and friends of "Pantera" while we were watched by the late Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul!
If I had thought the female sexual overtures during my cable sales days were intense, working with 95% female co-workers at Northeast Hospital amped this into the stratosphere. Suffice it to say that if I had been willing, I could have had a different sexual partner for every day of the week. My marriage was cold and I was unhappy, yet I still couldn't rationalize crossing the line. Two women almost pushed me there though. Gwen was a morning-shift phlebotomist who I had perhaps 15 minutes of interaction with periodically. Yet, even in this short amount of time I somehow, without a single question from me, became aware that: her sex life with her husband sucked, that he cheated on her constantly and left her at home managing four young kids, that her therapist told her she should have her own affair, and that she had chosen me! Gwen was waif-sized, very cute with incredibly seductive eyes. Despite multiple attempts to offer me sex, I managed to say no without being an ass about it. Larissa was even harder to resist. She was an ER nurse on nights with me, with a slender lionine frame and sexual energy bubbling out of her pores. She too was married, but separated and was as unhappy as I was. Our interaction became a little closer to the line, with physical contact that almost became full-out wildfire for both of us. We decided to take a drive one morning after work in her truck, parking at a levee overlooking the Trinity River. As the sun rose, we confessed our desire for each other, and shared our one and only kiss. She asked that if we were to go any further, I would have to leave my wife. It was a huge dilemma for me that I couldn't resolve then nor in the following times we worked together, and I suppose this indecisiveness was the answer for her, as with few words we backed into the distant co-worker relationship which we maintained for the rest of my time there.
With not even a year at her new job, Denise was recruited to join the Texas Department of Health as an inspector, and the money was enough of a difference to make her say yes. Little did I know that this decision was to drive many dramatic future events in the next few years. The job was 80% travel which meant that if her travel week overlapped my off-week, I would go 10-14 days barely seeing her. This enforced separation increased my sense of alienation from her, and for the first time I began to regret marriage not only with her but in general as a limiting constraint on human freedom.
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Life at 27
What would be my last year in Florida began fairly low-key compared to the rollercoaster year of 26. I had settled fairly comfortably into my role at Jones Intercable. I managed to become the best performer of the two-person sales department in short order, not a Herculean feat considering the other door-knocker would periodically disappear on cocaine binges, only popping back up when the money, and therefore the blow, had dried up. I was Mr. Steady, averaging a consistent one signup per day earning an average commission of $35, which for 1985 was somewhat livable.
This was low-hanging fruit to be sure, referrals from existing customers and calls to the office secretaries who gave me the leads. I was perhaps the most amotivated cable t.v. sales guy ever. If I signed a new customer by 11 in the morning, my day was done by 12. If I felt the need to hang around longer to get my minimum quota, I drove to the county pier parking lot, lit up a doobie and enjoyed the waves.
If I had been single instead of newly-married, the opportunities for debauchery with this job would have been endless. Women both single and married would drop hints both subtle and obvious, and often there were shots of Jack Daniels and bong hits offered. I embraced the latter, while managing to safely navigate past the former. One day, a tragic happening entered my otherwise playful work life. A few days prior to this I had signed a new customer, a girl in her early 20's, to a subscription but since she didn't have money for the deposit I kept the paperwork and scheduled a return time to get the check. When I turned down the street toward her trailer, I could see police cars and an ambulance lined up, and as I slowly cruised past saw a gurney with a sheet-covered body being lifted down from the abode. I was flabbergasted and drove around for several minutes trying to make sense of what I had seen. I decided to return home, and took the only route from the beach back to the city, the bay bridge. The two lanes reduced to one because of construction, and a vehicle merged in front of me. It was the ambulance carrying the body! I drove the entire way back to Panama City following it, and like I was in a trance remained behind the entire way since our rental house was only blocks away from the county hospital.
The next day's news gave explanation. She was beaten to death by a jealous boyfriend who suspected her of cheating. Irrational guilt washed over me. Did my being there alone with her trigger him? Maybe it was my card I had left with her; maybe she had shared how I made her laugh as I would often do during on-site sales; maybe a neighbor told him about a man with red hair who came to visit and quickly left from their trailer days before. All this of course made no sense, but neither did the fact that a beautiful young woman who I had been with 48 hours prior had suffered such a terrible fate. This tragedy haunted me for a long period of time, and in fact it took even greater traumas I would experience while working in hospitals to subdue the impact of it.
Denise and I reached our one-year mark this year, and I don't recall anything that we did to celebrate. At the same time we had been growing in our determination to leave Panama City to join what we thought was a group of people with like minds in Dallas (foreshadowing, knock-knock), in my estimation we had already lost that spark of physical/sexual/emotional passion which had convinced me to marry her. She was cold and business-like in her dealings with others and with me, and my maturing sense of human psychology clued me that this was in essence her core personality and to not expect dramatic softening of her often-militant positions.
A few weeks later, we made a trip to Rock Hill, South Carolina for me to act as best man in my college roommate David's wedding. Last mentioned in the prior year of events when he was my best man at our nuptials, he had broken up with Janet and became involved with a younger woman named Jackie who worked under him at the Biloxi Dominos Pizza. Now in SC he was general manager of the local stores and wanted to make their live-in arrangement permanent. At the groom's dinner, I could see his mother cutting harsh glances at me. Apparently once a drug dealer in someone's mind, always to be. I had written a song which I performed before the vows, and amazingly still have the cassette tape recording of it some 33 years later. I remember little of the weekend save that since we were staying with them in their studio apartment due to lack of funds, the night before the wedding we were kept up by the two of them having sex non-stop. As in, all night long. Even with lack of sleep, and Denise seething, I had respect for their "can-do" attitude.
We had experienced a brush with a strong hurricane named Elena in September which ended up missing the Panhandle and hitting my old area Biloxi instead. But in late November, we weren't so fortunate as Hurricane Kate, a category 3 storm, hit just to the east of us, knocking out our power for almost a week. My nascent prep skills were adequate to the task as I had filled up the bathtub with water for flushing and had several gallons of drinking water stored. We used the last of the thawed food the day the power was restored, which in turn allowed the grocery stores to reopen and be resupplied.
By Christmas that year, we had decided that two more months were all that was needed to save for the move. Thankfully, since I no longer had motivation to knock doors, my boss put me on salary at the end of October to do an independent tap audit since he wasn't trusting the numbers given to him by the head of the cabling department. What he didn't know was that this guy and I were smoking buddies, so instead of pounding the streets with a 30 lb. stack of data sheets to check off illegitimate cable taps, I instead cooked the numbers to make him look good as a going away present. Some may call this unethical. I call it an intersection between being 27, having one foot out the door, and having the back of a brother.
March 1st came, the U-Haul was packed, keys turned over to our nice landlady and we embarked on a caravan. I drove a 16 foot truck and Denise drove the tiny new Chevy Sprint we had just purchased. As a sidebar, here's a riddle for you, dear readers. How can a 1986 model, 1.6 L. vehicle get 50 + m.p.g. highway and 42 in town, and now after three decades of what should have been continuous technological improvement there is not a single vehicle sold new in North America that can achieve this. Not one. That's rhetorical of course. If autos burned fuel at even a incremental amount of efficiency past the current 34%, then ExxonMobil, Chevron Texaco, and the many other oil giants would have profits reduced by half or more. Okay, eco rant over. We made it to Dallas unscathed, and began searching for apartments in the Garland area around the Adelphi Org's office/meeting space. I don't remember why, but somehow our apartment search took us to Arlington, which is over 40 miles away from where we ostensibly wanted to be. Yet another example of small decisions which later prove to have vast influence on broad swaths of one's future. We ended up in a nice two-bedroom apartment on the west side of that town bordered by the largest greenspace in the area, Veteran's Park. Idyllic it was, until a certain pair of naive Floridian transplants realize that, oh by the way, dead bodies were recently found there in the woods, deaths attributed by authorities to Satanic ritual killings, and hey, that car you saw parked overnight just a stone's throw from you contained the body of a suicide. Welcome to Texas.
Having just a sliver of funds over the first months rent, and with credit cards maxxed out, our first order of business was to find work. It took no time for Denise to get a job running a two-person lab in Oak Cliff, directly south of downtown Dallas. Sounded like a peaceful burgh, but as we were to find out it was a hotbed of crime and depravity. During the barely two months she was there she encountered: heroin dealers sneaking into patient rooms to make sales; a junkie passed out in bed with needle still in his arm; and her boss asking her to sign a stack of documents she knew to be fraudulent so the hospital could scam the Medicare program. While my days lack such controversy, I still envied her relative stability. I bounced like a pinball between temporary lab jobs (hated it/good at it), selling cars (hated it/horrible at it), selling life insurance (hated it/perhaps the worst ever at it) and finally through an introduction from of all people my father, asbestos abatement (hated it and bewildered by it).
The last role did give me the most pleasurable six weeks of my work life. Notice I didn't say the easiest or most rewarding. But pleasure is exactly what I experienced each day when I entered the Miller brewing facility in south Fort Worth. For those of you who have worked in a brewery, this explanation will be familiar but for those of you not so lucky read on. Remember in Life at 5 how entranced my olfactory sense was situated downwind from the bakery? Multiply that sensation times a 100 with the craft of brewing beer. The aroma was like a permanent cloud of humidity, generated by the pour off of the excess beer from the vats during fermentation. I breathed deeply as if I were doing continuous Yoga. That's a great concept - Beer Yoga. Sign me up right now for that.
The mechanics of the job found me all over the plant, making small incisions into the pipe insulation, and placing the resultant samples into film roll containers. I was woefully unprepared by training or experience for the job, but that didn't matter to my boss who had even less reason that I did to be involved with such doings. I literally had to make up procedures on the fly and when I did ask for advice on how to handle an issue his stock answer was "your guess is as good as mine." Glen did teach me a lesson though, that the world of commerce is run by bullshit and bravado. He had no business being in a technical discipline, but because he drove a Mercedes and wore tailored-suits, somehow the decision-makers at Miller thought his company competent to do the job and he was awarded the contract. The cheap S.O.B. didn't even want to pay for new film roll cannisters, and had me dumpster dive outside photo supply stores for their throwaways after I was unsuccessful begging for them. It shows how desperate I was for money then that I gave in to his demands. At the end of the job, he had failed to secure any other business, and mysteriously my last paycheck didn't arrive on time. When I finally reached him by phone, he had the gall to tell me that my dad owed him money and had told him I would be good for it. Oh Hell no! I burned rubber to North Dallas, pounded on his door until he opened, and had to threaten a general thrashing before he borrowed money from his girlfriend to make me right.
That put the cap on this year - unhappy wife, slim bank account and no permanent job. Florida didn't seem nearly as stultifying now.
This was low-hanging fruit to be sure, referrals from existing customers and calls to the office secretaries who gave me the leads. I was perhaps the most amotivated cable t.v. sales guy ever. If I signed a new customer by 11 in the morning, my day was done by 12. If I felt the need to hang around longer to get my minimum quota, I drove to the county pier parking lot, lit up a doobie and enjoyed the waves.
If I had been single instead of newly-married, the opportunities for debauchery with this job would have been endless. Women both single and married would drop hints both subtle and obvious, and often there were shots of Jack Daniels and bong hits offered. I embraced the latter, while managing to safely navigate past the former. One day, a tragic happening entered my otherwise playful work life. A few days prior to this I had signed a new customer, a girl in her early 20's, to a subscription but since she didn't have money for the deposit I kept the paperwork and scheduled a return time to get the check. When I turned down the street toward her trailer, I could see police cars and an ambulance lined up, and as I slowly cruised past saw a gurney with a sheet-covered body being lifted down from the abode. I was flabbergasted and drove around for several minutes trying to make sense of what I had seen. I decided to return home, and took the only route from the beach back to the city, the bay bridge. The two lanes reduced to one because of construction, and a vehicle merged in front of me. It was the ambulance carrying the body! I drove the entire way back to Panama City following it, and like I was in a trance remained behind the entire way since our rental house was only blocks away from the county hospital.
The next day's news gave explanation. She was beaten to death by a jealous boyfriend who suspected her of cheating. Irrational guilt washed over me. Did my being there alone with her trigger him? Maybe it was my card I had left with her; maybe she had shared how I made her laugh as I would often do during on-site sales; maybe a neighbor told him about a man with red hair who came to visit and quickly left from their trailer days before. All this of course made no sense, but neither did the fact that a beautiful young woman who I had been with 48 hours prior had suffered such a terrible fate. This tragedy haunted me for a long period of time, and in fact it took even greater traumas I would experience while working in hospitals to subdue the impact of it.
Denise and I reached our one-year mark this year, and I don't recall anything that we did to celebrate. At the same time we had been growing in our determination to leave Panama City to join what we thought was a group of people with like minds in Dallas (foreshadowing, knock-knock), in my estimation we had already lost that spark of physical/sexual/emotional passion which had convinced me to marry her. She was cold and business-like in her dealings with others and with me, and my maturing sense of human psychology clued me that this was in essence her core personality and to not expect dramatic softening of her often-militant positions.
A few weeks later, we made a trip to Rock Hill, South Carolina for me to act as best man in my college roommate David's wedding. Last mentioned in the prior year of events when he was my best man at our nuptials, he had broken up with Janet and became involved with a younger woman named Jackie who worked under him at the Biloxi Dominos Pizza. Now in SC he was general manager of the local stores and wanted to make their live-in arrangement permanent. At the groom's dinner, I could see his mother cutting harsh glances at me. Apparently once a drug dealer in someone's mind, always to be. I had written a song which I performed before the vows, and amazingly still have the cassette tape recording of it some 33 years later. I remember little of the weekend save that since we were staying with them in their studio apartment due to lack of funds, the night before the wedding we were kept up by the two of them having sex non-stop. As in, all night long. Even with lack of sleep, and Denise seething, I had respect for their "can-do" attitude.
We had experienced a brush with a strong hurricane named Elena in September which ended up missing the Panhandle and hitting my old area Biloxi instead. But in late November, we weren't so fortunate as Hurricane Kate, a category 3 storm, hit just to the east of us, knocking out our power for almost a week. My nascent prep skills were adequate to the task as I had filled up the bathtub with water for flushing and had several gallons of drinking water stored. We used the last of the thawed food the day the power was restored, which in turn allowed the grocery stores to reopen and be resupplied.
By Christmas that year, we had decided that two more months were all that was needed to save for the move. Thankfully, since I no longer had motivation to knock doors, my boss put me on salary at the end of October to do an independent tap audit since he wasn't trusting the numbers given to him by the head of the cabling department. What he didn't know was that this guy and I were smoking buddies, so instead of pounding the streets with a 30 lb. stack of data sheets to check off illegitimate cable taps, I instead cooked the numbers to make him look good as a going away present. Some may call this unethical. I call it an intersection between being 27, having one foot out the door, and having the back of a brother.
March 1st came, the U-Haul was packed, keys turned over to our nice landlady and we embarked on a caravan. I drove a 16 foot truck and Denise drove the tiny new Chevy Sprint we had just purchased. As a sidebar, here's a riddle for you, dear readers. How can a 1986 model, 1.6 L. vehicle get 50 + m.p.g. highway and 42 in town, and now after three decades of what should have been continuous technological improvement there is not a single vehicle sold new in North America that can achieve this. Not one. That's rhetorical of course. If autos burned fuel at even a incremental amount of efficiency past the current 34%, then ExxonMobil, Chevron Texaco, and the many other oil giants would have profits reduced by half or more. Okay, eco rant over. We made it to Dallas unscathed, and began searching for apartments in the Garland area around the Adelphi Org's office/meeting space. I don't remember why, but somehow our apartment search took us to Arlington, which is over 40 miles away from where we ostensibly wanted to be. Yet another example of small decisions which later prove to have vast influence on broad swaths of one's future. We ended up in a nice two-bedroom apartment on the west side of that town bordered by the largest greenspace in the area, Veteran's Park. Idyllic it was, until a certain pair of naive Floridian transplants realize that, oh by the way, dead bodies were recently found there in the woods, deaths attributed by authorities to Satanic ritual killings, and hey, that car you saw parked overnight just a stone's throw from you contained the body of a suicide. Welcome to Texas.
Having just a sliver of funds over the first months rent, and with credit cards maxxed out, our first order of business was to find work. It took no time for Denise to get a job running a two-person lab in Oak Cliff, directly south of downtown Dallas. Sounded like a peaceful burgh, but as we were to find out it was a hotbed of crime and depravity. During the barely two months she was there she encountered: heroin dealers sneaking into patient rooms to make sales; a junkie passed out in bed with needle still in his arm; and her boss asking her to sign a stack of documents she knew to be fraudulent so the hospital could scam the Medicare program. While my days lack such controversy, I still envied her relative stability. I bounced like a pinball between temporary lab jobs (hated it/good at it), selling cars (hated it/horrible at it), selling life insurance (hated it/perhaps the worst ever at it) and finally through an introduction from of all people my father, asbestos abatement (hated it and bewildered by it).
The last role did give me the most pleasurable six weeks of my work life. Notice I didn't say the easiest or most rewarding. But pleasure is exactly what I experienced each day when I entered the Miller brewing facility in south Fort Worth. For those of you who have worked in a brewery, this explanation will be familiar but for those of you not so lucky read on. Remember in Life at 5 how entranced my olfactory sense was situated downwind from the bakery? Multiply that sensation times a 100 with the craft of brewing beer. The aroma was like a permanent cloud of humidity, generated by the pour off of the excess beer from the vats during fermentation. I breathed deeply as if I were doing continuous Yoga. That's a great concept - Beer Yoga. Sign me up right now for that.
The mechanics of the job found me all over the plant, making small incisions into the pipe insulation, and placing the resultant samples into film roll containers. I was woefully unprepared by training or experience for the job, but that didn't matter to my boss who had even less reason that I did to be involved with such doings. I literally had to make up procedures on the fly and when I did ask for advice on how to handle an issue his stock answer was "your guess is as good as mine." Glen did teach me a lesson though, that the world of commerce is run by bullshit and bravado. He had no business being in a technical discipline, but because he drove a Mercedes and wore tailored-suits, somehow the decision-makers at Miller thought his company competent to do the job and he was awarded the contract. The cheap S.O.B. didn't even want to pay for new film roll cannisters, and had me dumpster dive outside photo supply stores for their throwaways after I was unsuccessful begging for them. It shows how desperate I was for money then that I gave in to his demands. At the end of the job, he had failed to secure any other business, and mysteriously my last paycheck didn't arrive on time. When I finally reached him by phone, he had the gall to tell me that my dad owed him money and had told him I would be good for it. Oh Hell no! I burned rubber to North Dallas, pounded on his door until he opened, and had to threaten a general thrashing before he borrowed money from his girlfriend to make me right.
That put the cap on this year - unhappy wife, slim bank account and no permanent job. Florida didn't seem nearly as stultifying now.
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Life at 13
So for two glorious months in the
summer of 1971 we were allowed a taste of the finer things in life.
This statement is proof that all in life is relative, for even though
the house on South 16th was transcendental compared to the
abodes we had lived in prior, it was by modern terms just a solidly
middle-class dwelling. It is remarkable though that a June and July
43 years ago would be memorable at all.
Dad was as I mentioned before driving a
taxi during this stretch, and being off for the summer, most days I
would cajole him into taking me along. This would prove to be an
education all its own, as the majority of the clientele were from the
fringes of society – drunks, hookers, gamblers and probably more
than a few gangsters. It was my job to manage the money, which I did
from the high-tech device of a cigar box which contained the money.
He was charged a flat fee to rent the vehicle each day, plus the gas,
so the challenge each day became reaching the breakeven point after
which all the money was take home. There were definitely days that
was shaved close, since reaching the pickup point for passengers was
often a competitive race with other drivers which the dispatchers
seemed to encourage instead of assigning one driver over the two-way
radio. To get those assignments required stretching the truth,
pretending that we were closer to the pickup spot than we actually
were, and then using speed and shortcuts to close the gap before our
ride was poached. Sometimes we would arrive exactly at the same time
as another driver with horns blaring and he would stave off the other
driver as I ran to the door and ushered our fare into our cab.
One night, we picked up an extremely
drunk man at a liquor store, who told us to take him to a downtown
hotel. I was sitting in the front passenger seat and he was in the
back, I felt his fingers start running through my hair as he slurred
“you sure are cute” Dad yelled at him to stop, but he was too
drunk to care because he then started rubbing my chest and tried to
kiss my neck. Dad slammed on the brakes, grabbed him out of he back
and tossed him on the side of the road. After he took off again sans
my attempted molester, he awkwardly tried to explain about “queers”.
Though I was aware of homosexuals before, this was certainly a
shocking first-hand introduction.
There was a major flood that occurred
that summer, and the low-lying areas which included the public
housing areas were under water. That day, we participated in several
extractions – I wouldn't call them rescues because I didn't
consider our acts risky or heroic – but we helped people who were
stranded on high ground outside their dwellings get to shelters.
Fares were not a concept that day; Dad was just doing what needed to
be done since the police and fire departments were overwhelmed. After
several months of driving 12 hours a day and making perhaps $30 net,
he called an end to his brief life as a taxi driver and I lost my
front-row seat into the seamy underbelly of Fort Smith Arkansas.
Our little two month run of glory was up on the south side; the landlord had reconciled with his wife and wanted his place back. Our next move was back to the north side of town, to a new federally subsidized apartment housing development named Allied Gardens. There were multiple surprises in this new place – it had four bedrooms, gleaming clean white tile throughout, and it had central air conditioning. Valhalla! We were only to live here for four months (I throw up my hands trying to understand why), but it was a memorable period for several reasons. I became friends with a guy who lived in the same building downstairs from us, who was also 13. He and his two sisters lived with their mom, who was always at work it seemed, so they had a revolving door to their place where I and others hung out.
Our little two month run of glory was up on the south side; the landlord had reconciled with his wife and wanted his place back. Our next move was back to the north side of town, to a new federally subsidized apartment housing development named Allied Gardens. There were multiple surprises in this new place – it had four bedrooms, gleaming clean white tile throughout, and it had central air conditioning. Valhalla! We were only to live here for four months (I throw up my hands trying to understand why), but it was a memorable period for several reasons. I became friends with a guy who lived in the same building downstairs from us, who was also 13. He and his two sisters lived with their mom, who was always at work it seemed, so they had a revolving door to their place where I and others hung out.
I liked Max a lot, but was completely
blown away when I met his younger sister Lynn. I will try to describe
Lynn by comparison. An actress who was in vogue in that era was Ali
MacGraw, the star of the mega-hit “Love Story” and generally
regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the world.
Lynn was an
almost-perfect distillation of Ali MacGraw, save that she was more
beautiful, had a better body, had deeper more soulful eyes and a
husky voice to match. And she was 12. I'm sure some will look askance
at my memory from my brief intersection with her 43 years ago and
roll their eyes. As the old saying goes, you just had to have been
there. Everyone - young boys, teenagers, grown men – fell in love
with Lynn. Men would roll down their windows trying to start
conversations with her. I remember a 17 year old on a motorcycle
standing outside her apartment begging her to come out to see him. To
add to her ridiculous physical allure, she had an old-soul weariness
that seemed to want to escape the burdens of her physical beauty. I
remained perpetually tongue-tied around her, which seemed to endear
me to her since every other guy was trying to get her clothes off. So
for the first time in my life I was the object of envy from other
guys since Lynn would always find a reason to sit with me while
studious ignoring those with their tongues dragging the ground
lusting after her. I never so much as held her hand, yet her visage
is more remembered to me than some whom I've slept with. The last
time I saw her was several months after we had moved from those
apartments on a church bus. She was sitting in the back, acting
morose and not making eye contact. I asked Max what was wrong and he
said she had gotten into trouble and their mom was sending her to
live with relatives in Kentucky. I've often though of her since as an
archetype of precociousness in a world that wants things to ripen
according to a strict schedule rather than on their own timing.
 |
| Even this may not do Lynn justice - Ali MacGraw"s sublime perfection |
And she was not the only female who
stirred my interest at Allied Gardens. Peggy was a tall girl of 13
with strawberry-blond hair who was an only child with a single mom.
Peggy liked to play touch football on the playground which often
degenerated into full-contact wrestling where I could hold my own,
but she was quite the competition. One afternoon she invited me to
her apartment on a day that her mom was at work. Under some pretense,
we started wrestling, and only with the passage of time do I now
realize that Peggy was enjoying the physical grinding for a more
ulterior, lusty reason. For my part, I was too shy and too scared to
advance it beyond the innocent pretext it was, but I clearly missed
out on losing my “V” card that summer of '71.
We were no longer in Darby district so
I began my 8th grade year at Kimmons Junior High. Except
for Max and Peggy I knew no one so I went back into my social
isolation shell. But my family's “never stay still” ethos came
through as we made yet another of our “thief in the night moves”
to a house on N. 37th street and I was back in Darby-land.
I have no memory of Dad doing anything to make money so I suppose we
were surviving by Maw-Maw's SS check and voodoo. The house had a
partially finished attic and that became my bedroom. It was a
flat-out eerie place and I had many “bump-in-the-night”
experiences up there. I retreated even more into a world of music and
comfort food, which for me = crackers and milk. Which of course
equaled even more poundage on my frame, which equaled depression,
which completed the circle of the vicious cycle I have dealt with for
much of my life. I was fat, I knew it, as did everyone else, but I
had no goal then to get motivated to move. It would be the discovery of
that insane emotional passion called a teenage crush which would a few years later offer a solution to my lack of motivation.
With little prep, my french horn and I
went to region tryouts and our little team surprised my band director
by making first band. They made quite a deal out of it since the
concert was at Darby that year so I got my mug printed in the paper.
I see that person now and feel so much empathy for him, knowing that
his life would take so many dramatic twists and turns the following
decades. In another plus, I consistently started making the honor roll this school year as I stopped having so many sick days derailing my work.
In a fit of what I now consider insanity, I convinced myself that it would be super cool to run for 9th grade class president. Except for the campaigning, speech writing, speech delivery, and getting votes, I think I did fairly well. It did teach me a valuable lesson, that just because from the outside things looked easy, like speaking to hundreds of people, they definitely were much harder when you were the object of attention. On Election Day during assembly, I pretty much froze and managed to spit out just a few cliches before retreating in shame. And still I finished 3rd out of 4 which says something for the pity factor.
In a fit of what I now consider insanity, I convinced myself that it would be super cool to run for 9th grade class president. Except for the campaigning, speech writing, speech delivery, and getting votes, I think I did fairly well. It did teach me a valuable lesson, that just because from the outside things looked easy, like speaking to hundreds of people, they definitely were much harder when you were the object of attention. On Election Day during assembly, I pretty much froze and managed to spit out just a few cliches before retreating in shame. And still I finished 3rd out of 4 which says something for the pity factor.
In the spring of '72, there were
several tornado outbreaks in our area. Almost every week we would
hear the sirens blaring, which meant little to us because there were
no safe places to go to anyway. One night I had gone to sleep early,
and a storm had developed that was a whopper. A tornado warning had
been broadcast on our local channel 5, and Dad had come upstairs to
wake me up. The suddenness of my sleep interruption was so profound
that to this day I still remember the dream I was rudely ripped away
from. Perhaps it helped that it involved the 9th grade
cheerleaders, and a shower room, and … well, you get the reason for
the lasting memory. I came downstairs listening to the wind howling.
This was before the days of comprehensive radar, so the news channel
relied upon phone reports from law enforcement. The man at the
channel 5 news desk was a recent import from Chicago whose arrival
the station management had made a big splash about. He was furiously
reading reports left and right “funnel cloud at North 6th
and E Streets”, “damaging winds at the river bridge”. His next
report was epic.
“Tornado spotted at 13th
and Grand”. Til this moment, he had been looking down at the sheets
of info that were being handed to him. After this one, he looked up,
stared into the camera with eyes as big as saucers and said in a
panicked voice “13th and Grand? That's where I am!”.
And then, he promptly dove under the desk, leaving the camera on an
empty seat.
In the midst of the danger, our entire
family, as I am sure many others across the viewing area, lost it.
His sudden shift from professional control to abject terror had us
dying with laughter. I wish footage of this existed today, I'm sure
it would be an all-time YouTube hit. Once we regained our breath, I
realized there was still a bad situation going on. I went out on the
front porch followed by Dad. It was at that moment that the tornado
passed just houses away tearing a path of destruction down Grand
Avenue. The sound was like a combination of a bellowing bull moose
and enormous freight train. Within seconds the wind went from around
30 mph to gusting over 100. I make that estimation because I was
lifted into the air, and I only saved myself by grabbing onto the
wrought iron corner and holding on for dear life as Dad watched
helplessly since the wind had pinned him against the door. After a
few seconds, the tremendous pressure relented and I collapsed onto
the porch floor. That was a real-life “Wizard of Oz”
experience I never forgot.
experience I never forgot.
When summer came, I signed up for a
program called Neighborhood Youth Corps, which was a grant program
that gave young teenagers jobs for working at schools and parks doing
maintenance work. I was assigned to Tilles Park, which was exactly
one block away from my house. The pay was minimum wage of that time,
which was $1.20 an hour. Though I didn't mind the hard work – and
in an era before power trimmers and edgers, EVERYTHING was done by
hand – the park superintendent was extremely difficult to please.
He was an older man that never seemed happy and always criticized
everything I did even when I had worked hard to make sure it was
right. He was always ranting about “hippies” being the cause of
everything bad in life, and looked at me with suspicion often since
my hair, though not overly long, was starting to grow out. One day,
there was a miscommunication about something he wanted done, and he
chewed me out in front of the other young guy who worked with me.
Even at that age, I had a thin tolerance for people abusing me, so
this time I argued back instead of cowering but this seemed to fuel
his flame, so I walked off the job. My supervisor in the program
called and I explained that the old guy was very hateful toward me
and even though I appreciated the money I couldn't take the abuse
anymore. He brokered my returning the next day, and to my shock I
even got a sideways apology from the old bastard. I had no guidance
in matters such as this, but this experience as with many other
similar happenings in life proved my instincts are correct – it is
always best to stand up and fight back when you are being treated
badly. Tends to lead to a bit of job instability – I've had around
26 give or take a few temp jobs – but I can go to my grave knowing
I never was anybody's bitch.
As my 14th birthday
approached, our yearly ritual of having used up a landlord's good
will returned, and we were booted. The next house, in an extremely old and poor area of the
north side, was perhaps the nadir of my adventures in relocation.
Ugly, small, riddled with holes that apparent steroid-abusing rats took
advantage of to pay us nightly visits – yes, this was the cherry on
top of the whipped cream of the very nasty sundae that was our
housing reality. It was broiling hot in the summer, bone-chillingly
cold in winter, with a perpetual smell of disintegration. To add to
this scenario of perfection, it was on an over sized lot that grew
like an African jungle and it fell unsurprisingly on me to mow all of
it. One day that June right after we had moved in I attempted to
tackle an area that was at least two feet high. I hit what seemed to
be a huge rock hidden down in the grass, but a second later the torn
up remains of a turtle that landed at my feet informed me otherwise.
I promptly retched, left the mower where it was covered in turtle
blood and goo, and it would stay there for 2 weeks until I recovered
from the trauma. By now, the foliage was at eye level so I made a few
token attempts at the edges before giving up and allowing that part
of the yard to be what it wanted. The neighbors never complained,
which I took as a sign that they had sen this scenario go down too
many ties with the revolving door of renters occupying such a crappy
property.
Somehow in the midst of all this confusion Maw-Maw had purchased a car, a small yellow Ford Falcon.
Though we were grateful to have a consistent vehicle with us for the
first time in forever, due to my Dad's incessant disappearances, it
was a scary proposition riding with her since her vision had gone
down the tubes and she couldn't afford glasses. We adjusted by having
me sit next to her to redirect he wheel when she began to veer across
the line into oncoming traffic. In retrospect, avoiding a major
accident during this last period of her driving, which thankfully
lasted less than a year, was itself a minor miracle since when I was
at work 8 year old Liz had to take my place saving the carload of
Miller's from doom.The end of my baker's dozen of years reached, I was caught in that limbo between the last of childhood, and the demands of onrushing adulthood. It was an uncomfortable space for me without guidance or resources, but enough of my youthful idealism remained to stave off the depressive realities of my existence. Barely.
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