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. 

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 16^th 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.

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.

Even this may not do Lynn justice - Ali MacGraw"s sublime perfection

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.

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 8^th 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. 37^th 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 9^th 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 3^rd 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 9^th 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 6^th and E Streets”, “damaging winds at the river bridge”. His next report was epic.

“Tornado spotted at 13^th 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 “13^th 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.

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 14^th 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.