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.
