Sunday, February 27, 2011
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Meeting Satan
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Meeting Satan: "Going to jail is never fun no matter where you are, but Cook County jail is incredibly intimidating. It's huge, 13000 inmates generally, and..."
Meeting Satan
Going to jail is never fun no matter where you are, but Cook County jail is incredibly intimidating. It's huge, 13000 inmates generally, and there are some scary dudes there. Processing you in is one of the worst parts. You are already worn out and scared (least I was) and then you are crammed into a holding cell that is designed to hold about 50 with 150 others. And they are just as they were when they were taken off the street, dirty, angry, and a few dopesick. On that note I have to add that the idea of being dopesick in jail is absolutely terrifying to me. It sucks under any circumstances, but there, with the guards coming down on you....yeesh. From holding you move through a chain of stations, and one of them is a lab tech who takes blood from you, presumably to check for communicable diseases. The lab tech that I saw was a short Jewish guy, and when he saw my address (for some reason my Dads address was on everything) he immediately assumed I was Jewish too. He seemed very concerned, like he wanted to help me, so I said yeah. I have had so many people think I'm Jewish I just tell people I am now, it saves time. He let me use his phone to call my Dad, and what a weird call that was. He dialed and spoke to my Dad for a second before giving me the phone. My Dad had no idea what to make of this, wondering if someone was trying to extort money from him or something. Not really that wild a thought, it's Cook County after all. Following my brief phone call my new advocate pleaded with the guards to take good care of me, and at that point I realized I had made a mistake. I could tell by the amused look on the guards' faces that this guy carried no juice whatsoever with them, and now I had their attention. I did not want that. I wanted to blend in as much as possible, or maybe as much as that was possible. One guard looked at him, looked at the stamp on my hand, and said," He's going to minimum, he'll be fine." After the lab tech the next stop on the magical mystery tour was another holding cell. The guards put me in a separate holding cell with only one other guy in. I had my own suite! The were kind enough to mention the one other occupant had scabies, presumably why he was isolated.
Then came the lovely strip search, everyone lined up down a hallway, a cold hallway, with their clothes and shoes in front of them. Spread your cheeks and cough, the whole nine. I was withdrawing from alcohol, anxious as hell in general, and at that moment suddenly sure the guards would find the ten bucks I stashed in my shoe. And it was freezing. Predictably, I was shrunk up like a stack of dimes. There I am, already having a bad day, when I here one of the guards say, "man, he must be like triple Jewish!" Thanks dude, I needed that.
Processing, which began at roughly 7pm, ended about four am, and I was just dying to go to sleep. This is minimum security in county, so the deck is not divided into cells the way you would expect (New Orleans Parish Jail is, but that's a story for a different day), there are 3 groups of fifty bunk beds each, so 300 guys. Picnic stables down the middle of the floor and a few tv's. One of them was always tuned to telemundo, and I watched a fair amount of soccer with the Mexicans who couldn't speak english. They were so nice to me. The other tv's....guys wanted to watch COPS all the time. I could never understand that. I don't know if they hoped to see themselves or what, but I can tell you I had had my fill of COPS. But I digress. It's 4am and I get my bunk, they were out of pillows and blankets but that proved to be a lesser problem than this one: You can't get into your bunk until you have taken a shower, you can't shower without shower shoes which they don't provide. Just before my head exploded a felt a tap on my leg. The guy on the lower bunk next to mine, a biker dude named Kevin, pointed at his shower shoes on the floor and told me I could use them, Hallelujah! I showered then lay on my bare bunk curled up as much as I could to maintain warmth, and got a couple hours of sleep. The next day I would get to learn about my new environment.
Some early observations...minimum was a workers deck, everyone had a job, and these jobs covered all three shifts. People were coming and going at all hours, and the lights were never turned all the way off. I was on an upper bunk, with a florescent light 5 feet above me that never turned off. Sleep was just not happening and not only for that reason. 13000 inmates to feed at Cook County. Our deck was fed first. Sounds good huh? Breakfast came at 3:30 am! Just about the time you are really getting to sleep you had to wake up to eat. Yes, you were welcome to sleep though it, and I made that mistake just once. They feed you just enough to survive, skip a meal and you will be starving. At least the open floor plan allowed people to wake you up to eat. Of course, the lack of bars also meant anyone could get at you, at anytime. I'll come back to that later. This was 2004, and smoking was still allowed in jail, everywhere. Commissary sold cigarettes, and they also sold tobacco and papers, which was a cheaper alternative. All those people with idle time, so much smoking....I was a smoker and a week of that air and those damn hand rolled smokes and I thought I was gonna horc up a lung. I felt for the non smokers. When I woke up that first day I wanted a smoke bad, and my mission was to find some. I did, after all, have the ten bucks I smuggled in. Found a guy who would sell me some, funny enough he thought I wanted a dime bag of weed. Weed makes me paranoid, and I needed no help with that, so I bought 20 handrolls for ten bucks. I know, I know, I overpaid terribly. If the guards had seen that transaction they would have known for sure I wasn't a Jew. But you really aren't allowed to have money, so it's not like he could give me change, and the number of people who will take money for something of real value was small. Why would you want cash? Money on your books for commissary, sure, but cash? Nothing to spend it on, unless you hold it for a trip to the Popeye's across the street on your out date. So I smoked and endeavored to learn about my new place. The people around me. Their hopes and dreams.
That was when I met Satan. Satan was a Puerto Rican gangleader who was on the top bunk directly behind me. The bunks were spaced so close you almost had to turn sideways to walk between them, maybe two feet apart at most. Satan. I kid you not. He had Satan tattooed across his upper back and an enormous pentagram. Had a copy of Anton's Satanic Bible. I really didn't care much about that, in fact we had an in depth conversation about it at one point. Everyone in his life was Catholic, and no one knew a thing about it. I'm no Satanist, but I knew enough to hold a conversation. Here's what I did care about. Because he was a leader, there were Rican gangsters clustered around his bunk at all hours, which meant they were clustered around me too. I'm not intimidating now, but at least I'm big. I wasn't then, I was white and skinny. They would fuck with me from time to time, in retrospect just trying to scare me, and mission accomplished. To my credit I never showed it. In fact, the first day I'm in there a few of his guys were talking to him and one called him Satan. I looked up and, no shit, said, "Oh Satan! I thought your name was Santa, and these guys were like your elves." He must have been high, cause after what seemed like an eternity he laughed. Know what they did to cover up the smell of pot smoke? Blew baby powder into the air. Worked damn well. So that was my neighbor to the back, I got luckier with the others. Next to me and below, Kevin, biker, friendly guy. Above him another white dude about my age, we became fast friends but damned if I can remember his name. In front and on top was a black dude named Eric. I mention color because although most people in the place were ganged up, everyone seemed to divide by race. When you're one of maybe 7 white dudes, that leaves you rather isolated. Eric was a good guy, not ganged up, he had a carpet cleaning business, wife, kids...the whole shot. The cops pulled him over for a routine traffic stop and pulled him out of the car and hassled him. The bent him over the hood and had one cuff on when he went nuts. "I started swinging my arms like a gorilla man" were his exact words. The dangling cuff caught the female cop in the head, and when back up arrived they worked him over pretty good. He was doing six months for it. Eric and I talked a lot. He had a carpet cleaning business, and two cars. His beater, and his Chrysler Concorde with only 40,000 miles that he never drove. Wanted it to stay nice forever, I think it was the first nice thing he ever had. While other guys spent their commissary money on cigarettes he bought envelopes and stamps. He wrote his family frequently. He also bought food, and he let me keep my stuff in his box. My stuff would be immediately stolen, but no one touched his. He wasn't in a gang, but he was big and black. He was left alone. The things you remember, my first day before we had ever spoken, I was sitting on my bunk hating life, and I saw him go into his bin and get a Little Debbie oatmeal pie. As he opened it to eat it he glanced my way, and I must have looked so sad, because he stared for a minute then grabbed another one and tossed it up to me. I wish I had the words to describe how much that meant at that moment. Later, he taught me how to make dip. Dip is a jailhouse tradition that extends across the country, I met a guy who was in county in Denver and they called it spread, but it was the same thing. You buy ramen noodles, a summer sausage, fritos, and save some bologna from lunch. Cut the meats into small bits, crush the noodles up, and put them in a plastic garbage bag. Fill the bag with hot water and shake for about five minutes and the noodles will soften. Serve and enjoy. Commissary came Saturday mornings, and Saturday night me him and another guy made dip and I swear it was the best thing I had ever tasted. I went to sleep with a full belly that night, a rarity. That same night some guys at the other end of the floor made hooch, and Satan went over to get drunk. I was horrified at the idea of him being drunk, way to easy to go from messing with me to messing me up. As luck would have it, the hooch made him massively ill. My night was great on many levels.
Back to my first day. I have to share this, cause this is one for the ages. At the far end of the floor, relative to my bunk anyway, was a small room with the stairs that led out. Work groups assembled here, and you were not allowed to be in there unless you were going to work. Well I didn't know that. I was looking out the windows at the same end of the floor and saw a guy I had sat with in processing sitting in the room. I reached in to slap hands with him. Bad move. The guard, nicknamed the beast, whirled at me at informed me with several trenchant remarks I'll not repeat that I shouldn't be in there, not even reaching in to slap hands. I tried to explain it was my first day, but he really wasn't trying to hear all that. So here is what he made me do. It's mid day, the tv's are on, people are milling about playing spades and what not. Open time. He made me walk out to the middle of the floor and yell as loud as I could "I have angered the beast and ruined it for everyone". After which they called 1 on 1, which meant go to your bunks, tv's off, etc.. As I walked across the floor to my bunk I felt certain that I was walking to my death. Thank all gods big and small my bunk group , my "house", was the furthest away from where this happened. I jumped on my bunk and laid there, listening to the guys around me asking each other what happened. I did not volunteer the answer to that question.
As my first night in approached I knew I would not be able to sleep, or even stay still. I had known that I was going to jail for awhile, and I had been drinking heavily. I was now detoxing. The guards asked for a volunteer to work overnight and I jumped at the chance. The called it waterworld, and I soon saw why. It was kitchen cleanup, they put you in rubber boots and a suit and you sprayed trays. 13000 inmates man. That's a lot of trays, and indeed I got soaked to the bone, but at the end of the night I got a great meal. The work crews were run by outside employees, not guards, and they were pretty nice. Aramark, I think, did food service. Once work was done they made a meal just for us, noodles, chicken, can't remember what else, but man was it good. I got back up to the deck about an hour before my real job was supposed to start. The guards were going to pull me off because I just worked but I protested. No way I wanted to sit around all day. I pulled lawn duty, outside weed whacking around the super max facility, and they told us if you find a weapon and turn it in you get two days off your time. I was instantly alert and attentive. I didn't find one, but here's what did happen that was almost as good. We had split into two groups, and mine finished first so we were just laying in the grass waiting on the others. The guy leading my crew, again, not a guard, an outside employee, started talking about how he was screwed in his car loan. My eyes lit up. I was a sales manager at a car dealership! I knew exactly where he was, and how to get him out of it. While the other guys went back to work I spent an hour with this guy detailing my solution, complete with the names and phone numbers of people to call. He appreciated it, and he did me an enormous favor. He switched me to laundry.
Let me explain what a coup this was. Laundry is not done on premises, it is shipped out. There were about 8 of us working in laundry and all we had to do was roll these massive bins onto a scale, record the weight, then wait for the truck. Roll them into the truck, then wait several hours. Another truck came back and we rolled that stuff in and weighed it. That's it, but that's not the half of it. First, because we worked in laundry, we got brand new clothes. This sounds hard to believe, but clothes are a big deal in jail. Lots of guys wearing threadbare DOC stuff that won't even stay around the waist. The gangsters wanted to look good. I could smuggle clothes out and trade for damn near anything, and I sure looked sharp too. Second, we had tons of free time, and a tv with cable and movie channels, as well as a radio. The one guard who spent the day in there was cool. We never gave him any trouble,so he was free to do whatever he wanted. Third, and best of all, we got food. The people in processing would get pre packaged bologna sandwiches and a little bottle of kool aid. The extras were put in a milk crate and dropped off to us. We had a microwave and a fridge, and that bitch was stocked with bread, bolgna, cheese, and kool aid. Microwave bologna till it's crisp and it's not half bad. So we watched movies and ate as much as possible. Once a day the women who were processed were marched by our open door. We all gathered to watch that parade. Granted, the looked pretty bedraggled, but they were women, and the sight of a live woman was uncommon enough.
My transfer to laundry made life infinitely more bearable. I snagged Satan some brand new fits and that chilled him out (a bit, anyway). You know, he terrorized me from time to time, but he never really did anything to me. Gave me a hot foot once, but that's more prank than terror. And he was kinda funny. When he was high we had some long conversations and he would actually be nice. On the topic of weed. Two bunks in front of me was a white guy named Steve, also in laundry, and Steve smoked like 5 joints a day. In jail. He had friends on the outside pay whoever, and he got it inside. You ever hear on tv that the guards bring drugs into jail? 100% true. They collaborate with the gangs.
One more funny moment. I'm sitting on my bunk and Satan nails me in the back with an orange. I turned around, said oh haha, and threw it back. He then decided to throw it at Steve, who was two bunks in front of me. He overthrew it and hit the guard sitting at the desk open on the floor. Needless to say, she went ballistic. "Who the fuck threw that? Who was it? I'll burn this whole deck till I find out!" (meaning no tv or anything else). Everyone in our house knew, all 100 of us, and no one said a word. After a minute she said we would all be on our bunks till she found out who it was. And walked away. After a couple minutes some grumbling started. The black guys in our house were not thrilled with this. Then a young black kid stands up and says, "Y'all know who it was, but I'll take the hit. I'm not gonna see the whole deck get burned all weekend" and starts off to the guards office. Now the grumbling from the black guys is turning to outrage that one of their own is taking a hit for something Satan did. The three "houses", groups of bunks, have a fair amount of space between them, but not so much that everyone else couldn't hear the whole thing. The black guys in our house start to get up and band together. The Ricans start gathering around Satan's bunk, and almost magically, guys of both groups from the other houses slip in. That really was amazing. They just appeared, so now the groups are getting big. I'm sitting indian style on my bunk in absolute glee. I was no part of it, and no way I would catch a stray shot up on my bunk. I had a skybox seat to a gangfight. I'll say this for Satan, the guy had balls. He put on some work gloves, looked at his boys and said, "You ready to do this?" and jumped off his bunk. They were heavily outnumbered. The Ricans were the biggest shit starters in the place, but they had no chance against the black dudes. We're talking 18-20 against 50, easy. And if the whole floor got into it it would be even more lopsided. The two groups squared off and approached each other, the black guys screaming about how wrong it was for the kid to take a hit for Satan. Just as they closed to fist range guards came flying out and it dissolved. I was thoroughly disappointed. In the end Satan did own up, and when he explained to the guard he was throwing the orange at Steve, jokingly, she was ok with it. Oh the drama a piece of produce can produce.
And then my out day came, and I was glad. I went directly to Popeye's chicken, something everyone talked about inside. My taste of jail was different than I expected. My biggest fear became my own lack of control over the situation. The guards didn't want to hear anything, there was no one to talk to. Some guys missed their out dates and served extra time because of a clerical error, and the guards wouldn't take the time to check. I feared I could bounce around that place like a red rubber ball. All's well that ends well I guess. Wish I could have kept my DOC uniform. It looked good on me.
Then came the lovely strip search, everyone lined up down a hallway, a cold hallway, with their clothes and shoes in front of them. Spread your cheeks and cough, the whole nine. I was withdrawing from alcohol, anxious as hell in general, and at that moment suddenly sure the guards would find the ten bucks I stashed in my shoe. And it was freezing. Predictably, I was shrunk up like a stack of dimes. There I am, already having a bad day, when I here one of the guards say, "man, he must be like triple Jewish!" Thanks dude, I needed that.
Processing, which began at roughly 7pm, ended about four am, and I was just dying to go to sleep. This is minimum security in county, so the deck is not divided into cells the way you would expect (New Orleans Parish Jail is, but that's a story for a different day), there are 3 groups of fifty bunk beds each, so 300 guys. Picnic stables down the middle of the floor and a few tv's. One of them was always tuned to telemundo, and I watched a fair amount of soccer with the Mexicans who couldn't speak english. They were so nice to me. The other tv's....guys wanted to watch COPS all the time. I could never understand that. I don't know if they hoped to see themselves or what, but I can tell you I had had my fill of COPS. But I digress. It's 4am and I get my bunk, they were out of pillows and blankets but that proved to be a lesser problem than this one: You can't get into your bunk until you have taken a shower, you can't shower without shower shoes which they don't provide. Just before my head exploded a felt a tap on my leg. The guy on the lower bunk next to mine, a biker dude named Kevin, pointed at his shower shoes on the floor and told me I could use them, Hallelujah! I showered then lay on my bare bunk curled up as much as I could to maintain warmth, and got a couple hours of sleep. The next day I would get to learn about my new environment.
Some early observations...minimum was a workers deck, everyone had a job, and these jobs covered all three shifts. People were coming and going at all hours, and the lights were never turned all the way off. I was on an upper bunk, with a florescent light 5 feet above me that never turned off. Sleep was just not happening and not only for that reason. 13000 inmates to feed at Cook County. Our deck was fed first. Sounds good huh? Breakfast came at 3:30 am! Just about the time you are really getting to sleep you had to wake up to eat. Yes, you were welcome to sleep though it, and I made that mistake just once. They feed you just enough to survive, skip a meal and you will be starving. At least the open floor plan allowed people to wake you up to eat. Of course, the lack of bars also meant anyone could get at you, at anytime. I'll come back to that later. This was 2004, and smoking was still allowed in jail, everywhere. Commissary sold cigarettes, and they also sold tobacco and papers, which was a cheaper alternative. All those people with idle time, so much smoking....I was a smoker and a week of that air and those damn hand rolled smokes and I thought I was gonna horc up a lung. I felt for the non smokers. When I woke up that first day I wanted a smoke bad, and my mission was to find some. I did, after all, have the ten bucks I smuggled in. Found a guy who would sell me some, funny enough he thought I wanted a dime bag of weed. Weed makes me paranoid, and I needed no help with that, so I bought 20 handrolls for ten bucks. I know, I know, I overpaid terribly. If the guards had seen that transaction they would have known for sure I wasn't a Jew. But you really aren't allowed to have money, so it's not like he could give me change, and the number of people who will take money for something of real value was small. Why would you want cash? Money on your books for commissary, sure, but cash? Nothing to spend it on, unless you hold it for a trip to the Popeye's across the street on your out date. So I smoked and endeavored to learn about my new place. The people around me. Their hopes and dreams.
That was when I met Satan. Satan was a Puerto Rican gangleader who was on the top bunk directly behind me. The bunks were spaced so close you almost had to turn sideways to walk between them, maybe two feet apart at most. Satan. I kid you not. He had Satan tattooed across his upper back and an enormous pentagram. Had a copy of Anton's Satanic Bible. I really didn't care much about that, in fact we had an in depth conversation about it at one point. Everyone in his life was Catholic, and no one knew a thing about it. I'm no Satanist, but I knew enough to hold a conversation. Here's what I did care about. Because he was a leader, there were Rican gangsters clustered around his bunk at all hours, which meant they were clustered around me too. I'm not intimidating now, but at least I'm big. I wasn't then, I was white and skinny. They would fuck with me from time to time, in retrospect just trying to scare me, and mission accomplished. To my credit I never showed it. In fact, the first day I'm in there a few of his guys were talking to him and one called him Satan. I looked up and, no shit, said, "Oh Satan! I thought your name was Santa, and these guys were like your elves." He must have been high, cause after what seemed like an eternity he laughed. Know what they did to cover up the smell of pot smoke? Blew baby powder into the air. Worked damn well. So that was my neighbor to the back, I got luckier with the others. Next to me and below, Kevin, biker, friendly guy. Above him another white dude about my age, we became fast friends but damned if I can remember his name. In front and on top was a black dude named Eric. I mention color because although most people in the place were ganged up, everyone seemed to divide by race. When you're one of maybe 7 white dudes, that leaves you rather isolated. Eric was a good guy, not ganged up, he had a carpet cleaning business, wife, kids...the whole shot. The cops pulled him over for a routine traffic stop and pulled him out of the car and hassled him. The bent him over the hood and had one cuff on when he went nuts. "I started swinging my arms like a gorilla man" were his exact words. The dangling cuff caught the female cop in the head, and when back up arrived they worked him over pretty good. He was doing six months for it. Eric and I talked a lot. He had a carpet cleaning business, and two cars. His beater, and his Chrysler Concorde with only 40,000 miles that he never drove. Wanted it to stay nice forever, I think it was the first nice thing he ever had. While other guys spent their commissary money on cigarettes he bought envelopes and stamps. He wrote his family frequently. He also bought food, and he let me keep my stuff in his box. My stuff would be immediately stolen, but no one touched his. He wasn't in a gang, but he was big and black. He was left alone. The things you remember, my first day before we had ever spoken, I was sitting on my bunk hating life, and I saw him go into his bin and get a Little Debbie oatmeal pie. As he opened it to eat it he glanced my way, and I must have looked so sad, because he stared for a minute then grabbed another one and tossed it up to me. I wish I had the words to describe how much that meant at that moment. Later, he taught me how to make dip. Dip is a jailhouse tradition that extends across the country, I met a guy who was in county in Denver and they called it spread, but it was the same thing. You buy ramen noodles, a summer sausage, fritos, and save some bologna from lunch. Cut the meats into small bits, crush the noodles up, and put them in a plastic garbage bag. Fill the bag with hot water and shake for about five minutes and the noodles will soften. Serve and enjoy. Commissary came Saturday mornings, and Saturday night me him and another guy made dip and I swear it was the best thing I had ever tasted. I went to sleep with a full belly that night, a rarity. That same night some guys at the other end of the floor made hooch, and Satan went over to get drunk. I was horrified at the idea of him being drunk, way to easy to go from messing with me to messing me up. As luck would have it, the hooch made him massively ill. My night was great on many levels.
Back to my first day. I have to share this, cause this is one for the ages. At the far end of the floor, relative to my bunk anyway, was a small room with the stairs that led out. Work groups assembled here, and you were not allowed to be in there unless you were going to work. Well I didn't know that. I was looking out the windows at the same end of the floor and saw a guy I had sat with in processing sitting in the room. I reached in to slap hands with him. Bad move. The guard, nicknamed the beast, whirled at me at informed me with several trenchant remarks I'll not repeat that I shouldn't be in there, not even reaching in to slap hands. I tried to explain it was my first day, but he really wasn't trying to hear all that. So here is what he made me do. It's mid day, the tv's are on, people are milling about playing spades and what not. Open time. He made me walk out to the middle of the floor and yell as loud as I could "I have angered the beast and ruined it for everyone". After which they called 1 on 1, which meant go to your bunks, tv's off, etc.. As I walked across the floor to my bunk I felt certain that I was walking to my death. Thank all gods big and small my bunk group , my "house", was the furthest away from where this happened. I jumped on my bunk and laid there, listening to the guys around me asking each other what happened. I did not volunteer the answer to that question.
As my first night in approached I knew I would not be able to sleep, or even stay still. I had known that I was going to jail for awhile, and I had been drinking heavily. I was now detoxing. The guards asked for a volunteer to work overnight and I jumped at the chance. The called it waterworld, and I soon saw why. It was kitchen cleanup, they put you in rubber boots and a suit and you sprayed trays. 13000 inmates man. That's a lot of trays, and indeed I got soaked to the bone, but at the end of the night I got a great meal. The work crews were run by outside employees, not guards, and they were pretty nice. Aramark, I think, did food service. Once work was done they made a meal just for us, noodles, chicken, can't remember what else, but man was it good. I got back up to the deck about an hour before my real job was supposed to start. The guards were going to pull me off because I just worked but I protested. No way I wanted to sit around all day. I pulled lawn duty, outside weed whacking around the super max facility, and they told us if you find a weapon and turn it in you get two days off your time. I was instantly alert and attentive. I didn't find one, but here's what did happen that was almost as good. We had split into two groups, and mine finished first so we were just laying in the grass waiting on the others. The guy leading my crew, again, not a guard, an outside employee, started talking about how he was screwed in his car loan. My eyes lit up. I was a sales manager at a car dealership! I knew exactly where he was, and how to get him out of it. While the other guys went back to work I spent an hour with this guy detailing my solution, complete with the names and phone numbers of people to call. He appreciated it, and he did me an enormous favor. He switched me to laundry.
Let me explain what a coup this was. Laundry is not done on premises, it is shipped out. There were about 8 of us working in laundry and all we had to do was roll these massive bins onto a scale, record the weight, then wait for the truck. Roll them into the truck, then wait several hours. Another truck came back and we rolled that stuff in and weighed it. That's it, but that's not the half of it. First, because we worked in laundry, we got brand new clothes. This sounds hard to believe, but clothes are a big deal in jail. Lots of guys wearing threadbare DOC stuff that won't even stay around the waist. The gangsters wanted to look good. I could smuggle clothes out and trade for damn near anything, and I sure looked sharp too. Second, we had tons of free time, and a tv with cable and movie channels, as well as a radio. The one guard who spent the day in there was cool. We never gave him any trouble,so he was free to do whatever he wanted. Third, and best of all, we got food. The people in processing would get pre packaged bologna sandwiches and a little bottle of kool aid. The extras were put in a milk crate and dropped off to us. We had a microwave and a fridge, and that bitch was stocked with bread, bolgna, cheese, and kool aid. Microwave bologna till it's crisp and it's not half bad. So we watched movies and ate as much as possible. Once a day the women who were processed were marched by our open door. We all gathered to watch that parade. Granted, the looked pretty bedraggled, but they were women, and the sight of a live woman was uncommon enough.
My transfer to laundry made life infinitely more bearable. I snagged Satan some brand new fits and that chilled him out (a bit, anyway). You know, he terrorized me from time to time, but he never really did anything to me. Gave me a hot foot once, but that's more prank than terror. And he was kinda funny. When he was high we had some long conversations and he would actually be nice. On the topic of weed. Two bunks in front of me was a white guy named Steve, also in laundry, and Steve smoked like 5 joints a day. In jail. He had friends on the outside pay whoever, and he got it inside. You ever hear on tv that the guards bring drugs into jail? 100% true. They collaborate with the gangs.
One more funny moment. I'm sitting on my bunk and Satan nails me in the back with an orange. I turned around, said oh haha, and threw it back. He then decided to throw it at Steve, who was two bunks in front of me. He overthrew it and hit the guard sitting at the desk open on the floor. Needless to say, she went ballistic. "Who the fuck threw that? Who was it? I'll burn this whole deck till I find out!" (meaning no tv or anything else). Everyone in our house knew, all 100 of us, and no one said a word. After a minute she said we would all be on our bunks till she found out who it was. And walked away. After a couple minutes some grumbling started. The black guys in our house were not thrilled with this. Then a young black kid stands up and says, "Y'all know who it was, but I'll take the hit. I'm not gonna see the whole deck get burned all weekend" and starts off to the guards office. Now the grumbling from the black guys is turning to outrage that one of their own is taking a hit for something Satan did. The three "houses", groups of bunks, have a fair amount of space between them, but not so much that everyone else couldn't hear the whole thing. The black guys in our house start to get up and band together. The Ricans start gathering around Satan's bunk, and almost magically, guys of both groups from the other houses slip in. That really was amazing. They just appeared, so now the groups are getting big. I'm sitting indian style on my bunk in absolute glee. I was no part of it, and no way I would catch a stray shot up on my bunk. I had a skybox seat to a gangfight. I'll say this for Satan, the guy had balls. He put on some work gloves, looked at his boys and said, "You ready to do this?" and jumped off his bunk. They were heavily outnumbered. The Ricans were the biggest shit starters in the place, but they had no chance against the black dudes. We're talking 18-20 against 50, easy. And if the whole floor got into it it would be even more lopsided. The two groups squared off and approached each other, the black guys screaming about how wrong it was for the kid to take a hit for Satan. Just as they closed to fist range guards came flying out and it dissolved. I was thoroughly disappointed. In the end Satan did own up, and when he explained to the guard he was throwing the orange at Steve, jokingly, she was ok with it. Oh the drama a piece of produce can produce.
And then my out day came, and I was glad. I went directly to Popeye's chicken, something everyone talked about inside. My taste of jail was different than I expected. My biggest fear became my own lack of control over the situation. The guards didn't want to hear anything, there was no one to talk to. Some guys missed their out dates and served extra time because of a clerical error, and the guards wouldn't take the time to check. I feared I could bounce around that place like a red rubber ball. All's well that ends well I guess. Wish I could have kept my DOC uniform. It looked good on me.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Way to go, Dad.
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Way to go, Dad.: "As a kid your parents are usually the only fans you have. Maybe a grandparent that calls you by your cousin's name, maybe an observant uncle..."
Way to go, Dad.
As a kid your parents are usually the only fans you have. Maybe a grandparent that calls you by your cousin's name, maybe an affectionate uncle (hopefully not too affectionate), but usually the only people remotely interested in your life are your parents. Because they love you, everything you do, no matter how menial, is fascinating to them. (Also because to the world you are a walking billboard of their DNA, and they are desperate to see some sign of greatness in you that will prove to them, and their friends and coworkers, that they really are genetically superior). I wish I could go back in time and repay the favor, be my Dad's cheering section on a couple of occasions, because looking back he had a few moments deserving of a high five and a trip to McDonalds.
My parents divorced when I was 8, or at least began to. I believe in was in my early twenties by the time they had reached an agreement on child support. Obviously that's an exaggeration, they have yet to agree on anything. In reality I was close to 11 when the case finally wrapped up in court. A staggering amount of misconceptions about the impact divorce has on children abound in the child-worship era of today. Divorce doesn't necessarily screw a kid up, remarriage, however, almost always does. Living with one parent instead of two is much easier than one parent and an extra adult you don't know very well, which is how these things work out. You weren't getting to know this new person over strawberry margaritas at the Mexican place by Walgreens. You were at home, hopefully not with the too affectionate uncle. The other potential pothole is the way the divorce is carried out. My mom left my Dad by means of a note. He never saw it coming (though the recent "business trips" might have been a clue to a more suspicious man), in fact he would often say later that if someone had told him the day before that he would one day be divorced he would have laughed out loud. No fights, no tension, no warning. He didn't take it too well.
Dad was a school teacher, and was home in the afternoons when I got home from school. I can remember coming in the house and seeing him sitting in the basement, rocking in his La-Z-Boy (loved that chair), with the lights out and shutters shut. At night I could hear him on the phone with people, sometimes crying, and he lost a bunch of weight. That is very telling when you're thin to begin with.
I think this happened in February or March, who knows, but when the weather started to get warm he put a basketball hoop up on our garage. Being a teacher he was off summers, and that summer I would wake up in the morning and hear the basketball bouncing off the backboard. I was too young to be able to see shooting baskets 8 hours a day as a means of coping with emotional turmoil, I just liked him available to play whenever I wanted to. Nice having someone cheer when you make a good shot.
Drama aside, I'll let you in on one of the coolest things a kid could hope for. Our house was about 3 miles from 6 Flags Great America (marriotts at the time, to be technical), and like most people in our town we had seasons passes, and the season parking tag. We were both off for the summer, so in the evenings after dinner we would cruise over to Great America, ride a few rides, stop by the root beer stand, and go home. That really was awesome. We went to Six Flags the way most kids and their parents go to a park or maybe a Dairy Queen.
Back to hoop dreams. My Dad grew up in rural Indiana, so basketball was in his blood. Shooting baskets, anyway, he wasn't driving the lane. He was like a white Larry Bird, and after a few weeks of practicing a mere 16-18 hours a day he had a damn good shot. One night we were strolling around Great America, and as we walked through the games section we spied a basketball shooting game. A dollar per try, sink the shot you win a stuffed basketball. They had five different styles to choose from. I asked Dad to win me a ball. (Ok, I made have made that part up, it may have been his idea to try, but it sure sounds nice this way). We walked up to the counter (this part is 100% true) and Dad gave the guy a $5; and proceeded to sink 5 straight shots and get me each ball. Right the fuck on!
Those games are not meant to be easy, everybody knows that, but years later I did business with one of the top execs from the park, and he told me the games got harder after noon. Most every game had a small adjustment, so people would win early and carry around huge stuffed animals, leading people to try their hand at a contest whose odds had already changed. With the basketball game the rims go up, I don't remember how much, but it wouldn't take much variance to throw someone off. Shaq has been shooting at 10 foot rims for years and still can barely hit 50%. My Dad handed the guy a five at night, the harder time, and was straight money. Oddly, I still have all five stuffed basketballs. I have very few possessions, so many moves, so much irresponsibility, foreclosures, evictions, rehab, bankruptcy, and yet I still have those balls. Way to go Dad. Way to ball.
My Dad and I lived together, just the two of us, for seven years. Seven great years, really. My mom lived close, I did the dual family kid every other weekend thing, so I still saw her quite a bit, but my Dad and I were super close. And I had a few friends, rotating through best friends as I advanced through elementary school. When I was 11 or 12, my best friend at that time had the same name as me, Hoi (haha). He had a sister who was a year or two younger than us, very sweet girl, and a brother who was about 5 when I met him. His younger brother was a sociopath. Ok, maybe not an according to Hoyle sociopath, but something, criminal mind, borderline personality, or in those days just crazy. I don't remember many specific examples to give you of his behavior, other than to say he was usually very nice but would do very damaging things out of the blue, calmly. No lack of comprehension that what he did caused damage or pain or whatever, just no emotional reaction. I wish I had a good story about him killing small animals or something, but I don't, all I can say is that you just knew it about him. Everyone around him knew it.
Aside from having a sister and Ted Bundy for a brother, he had a Mom (apparently more than half the people in America at that time had mothers). Well, he had a MILF, really. At 11 or 12 I was at a unique age when it came to the opposite sex. I knew his Mom was pretty, but I was never attracted to her. A couple years later and my best friend's hot mom would have been fantasy material. My Dad, being a few years ahead of me, was at that stage the first time he met her. She was single, like him, and had been divorced twice. Her first husband, and the father of my friend and his sweet sister, had killed himself. Car running in the garage. At the time the story my friend and his sister had been told by their Mom was that he accidentally fell asleep, but I remember the day they told me, and I remember then not believing that, young as I was, and I remember knowing for certain that neither one of them did either. Her second husband, and the father of Dahmer, turned out to be an abuser. She took the kids and left him, left the entire country in fact, they were Canadian. She had a pretty good job as a chemist, so that may have spurred the long distance move. On the other hand, having met the walking billboard advertising that man's DNA, she may have just wanted to get as far away as possible.
She and my father saw each other a lot dropping us off and picking us up from sleepovers at each others houses and things like that, and they started spending more time with each other. It didn't really change much for me, I still slept over at my friend's house on the weekends, only now my Dad was coming with. He slept over too.
Again, 11 or 12 is a weird age for sexual awareness. My friend and I both knew what it was, and that our parents were doing that at night, but it wasn't something we thought much about. A year or two younger, we would have been clueless, a year or two older and it would have been a big deal. As it was we existed in the balance between awareness and giving a shit, and this unique perspective made possible a hilarious scenario.
His house had four bedrooms, one for each kid, and one for his Mom. His room had bunkbeds, so it really worked out great for us to stay there, which we did, a lot. We made up a pretty good dynamic, the lot of us, got along well and had fun together, took some small trips. His brother wasn't that bad, not at that age, and he wasn't mean, per say.....just wired wrong. You felt angry with him and bad for him at the same time when he did things.
One Friday or Saturday night my friend and I were in his room trying to go to sleep, but we couldn't help but clearly hear....Ok, two things, one, she had one of those old fashioned brass beds that will sound like a porno is being filmed on it if you so much as roll over, and two, she was a screamer, or at least a loud moaner. I can't believe I didn't appreciate the magnitude of the moment, neither of us did. He should have been totally creeped out hearing his Mom getting off, and I should have been totally aroused. I kind of am just thinking about it now, like I said, she was hot and she was loud. Yum.
But we didn't grasp the weight of the situation, we were just annoyed that we couldn't get to sleep. I was laying there awake, staring at the ceiling, when I heard my friend whisper to ask if I was awake. I said yeah, of course, it was loud (tile floors in the hallway and not much distance between rooms, that brass bed echoed something terrible). He agreed, and we were silent a moment. Then he asked me if I thought we should say something, and I said yeah go for it. So he yells out, "Excuse me, could you please quiet down!" and the way he said it, not angrily, but forcefully, firmly, and plenty loud enough to hear.
Instant silence. We didn't give it another thought, didn't talk much more, just went to bed, and woke up the next day thinking about other things. It was years before I happened to remember that, and fully appreciated the incredible awkwardness our parents must have felt. I can only imagine how mortified they must have been. Late at night, been doing it for months, caught up in the moment, forget your kids are about 15 feet away....and then hear one of them politely ask you to quiet down....wow! We didn't think about it at all the next day, but I bet they were embarrassed as hell to sit with us at breakfast, probably were dreading leaving the bedroom that morning. haha!
Like the basketballs, I appreciated what my Dad was doing on a much smaller level. I now appreciate how hard it was to hit five straight shots, at the time I just liked getting the stuffed basketballs. At the time I just liked spending more time with my friend and his family, but now I appreciate how hard my Dad was hitting that very respectable Canadian ass. Way to go Dad! Way to ball.
A footnote: I don't know if I will ever write about them again, so I'll mention that my Dad dated her for about two years. They broke up, and he met my next step mother ( I have had a couple, I'm issuing trading cards for them) and, obviously, married her. He would soon, and forever, regret that, at least the part about my step mother. I'm not sure if he wished he had stayed with the Canuck. I know this though, he loved my friend and his sister, really did, but he was not at all sorry to not have to deal with the little brother growing up. Like I said, you just knew, everyone did.
My friend and I lost touch, and I went a good fifteen years without seeing anyone in his family again. Then one night I went into a bar that was about 3 blocks from the apartment I had been living in for the last six months. I'm sitting at the bar with a friend, having a beer, and I keep looking at the bartender. There is something familiar about her, but I can't place her. She did, though. It was weird and so out of the blue to see her. We were very close when we were young, she really was like a sister to me for two years, and my Dad and I kind of left her, her brother, and her mother. I never really looked at it that way, but I did the moment I realized it was her, and it flustered me a bit. I talked with her and found out her older brother, my friend, was married, house, young kid, doing well, as everyone knew he would. Her mom had remarried as well and was apparently doing well, but I could tell that even all these years later she was hurt that my Dad had left her Mom, and her I guess too. Her Dad had killed himself, her step dad beat up her Mom, she meets my Dad (who really is a great guy) at age 10 and at 12 he's gone. Even worse, two years later she is attending the high school he teaches at, and sees him and talks to him frequently (in passing, not confiding), so that wound must have never really closed. My Dad had mentioned a time or two that he saw her and her brother around the school and they were doing well (we had moved to another town to live with step#1), so I had all the facts to deduce that she was really hurt by that situation, but....I was young, and had a total nightmare of a woman in my life to deal with. Never occurred to me. So like I said, I was flustered, and I didn't really talk as much to her as I would have liked to, and I'm sure didn't seem very interested in seeing her, even though I was.
Drinking at that time had started creating real problems in my life, it was an odd night, a slip I guess, that I went to a bar at all, the one she worked at or any other. I didn't think to mention that, but I did mention that I lived within shouting distance. So when I never went back there, what might she have thought? My Dad bumped into her some months later, and she mentioned I had been in. And never been back. He said she looked hurt by that, and he didn't know what to do. One the one hand he wanted her to know it wasn't that I was avoiding the bar right outside my house because she worked there. On the other hand, explaining why I shouldn't be at a bar in the first place was a long topic for a chance meeting in a grocery store or wherever. I have no idea how he handled it, I hope he made it ok. She wasn't an emotionally feeble clingy person at all, just a good person who had been the victim of circumstances beyond her control.
The $10,000,000 dollar question. When I saw her at the bar that night, she told me what had become of her older brother and mother, but what of her younger brother? I asked about him. She looked down briefly, shook her head a little, and said, "Exactly what you thought would" or something to that effect. She mentioned him being in prison, either at the moment or already had been and was out. I didn't press her on it. It was too sad, at that moment, to think of the five year old boy that I had spent so much time with, baby sat for, taught to throw a football, turning into the dark character that had always been inside him. Despite the efforts of so many people who had loved him and done all they could to save him from that. I know perfectly well that my Dad and I staying with them wouldn't have been enough to help him, but at that moment, I felt horribly guilty. We would have helped her.
My parents divorced when I was 8, or at least began to. I believe in was in my early twenties by the time they had reached an agreement on child support. Obviously that's an exaggeration, they have yet to agree on anything. In reality I was close to 11 when the case finally wrapped up in court. A staggering amount of misconceptions about the impact divorce has on children abound in the child-worship era of today. Divorce doesn't necessarily screw a kid up, remarriage, however, almost always does. Living with one parent instead of two is much easier than one parent and an extra adult you don't know very well, which is how these things work out. You weren't getting to know this new person over strawberry margaritas at the Mexican place by Walgreens. You were at home, hopefully not with the too affectionate uncle. The other potential pothole is the way the divorce is carried out. My mom left my Dad by means of a note. He never saw it coming (though the recent "business trips" might have been a clue to a more suspicious man), in fact he would often say later that if someone had told him the day before that he would one day be divorced he would have laughed out loud. No fights, no tension, no warning. He didn't take it too well.
Dad was a school teacher, and was home in the afternoons when I got home from school. I can remember coming in the house and seeing him sitting in the basement, rocking in his La-Z-Boy (loved that chair), with the lights out and shutters shut. At night I could hear him on the phone with people, sometimes crying, and he lost a bunch of weight. That is very telling when you're thin to begin with.
I think this happened in February or March, who knows, but when the weather started to get warm he put a basketball hoop up on our garage. Being a teacher he was off summers, and that summer I would wake up in the morning and hear the basketball bouncing off the backboard. I was too young to be able to see shooting baskets 8 hours a day as a means of coping with emotional turmoil, I just liked him available to play whenever I wanted to. Nice having someone cheer when you make a good shot.
Drama aside, I'll let you in on one of the coolest things a kid could hope for. Our house was about 3 miles from 6 Flags Great America (marriotts at the time, to be technical), and like most people in our town we had seasons passes, and the season parking tag. We were both off for the summer, so in the evenings after dinner we would cruise over to Great America, ride a few rides, stop by the root beer stand, and go home. That really was awesome. We went to Six Flags the way most kids and their parents go to a park or maybe a Dairy Queen.
Back to hoop dreams. My Dad grew up in rural Indiana, so basketball was in his blood. Shooting baskets, anyway, he wasn't driving the lane. He was like a white Larry Bird, and after a few weeks of practicing a mere 16-18 hours a day he had a damn good shot. One night we were strolling around Great America, and as we walked through the games section we spied a basketball shooting game. A dollar per try, sink the shot you win a stuffed basketball. They had five different styles to choose from. I asked Dad to win me a ball. (Ok, I made have made that part up, it may have been his idea to try, but it sure sounds nice this way). We walked up to the counter (this part is 100% true) and Dad gave the guy a $5; and proceeded to sink 5 straight shots and get me each ball. Right the fuck on!
Those games are not meant to be easy, everybody knows that, but years later I did business with one of the top execs from the park, and he told me the games got harder after noon. Most every game had a small adjustment, so people would win early and carry around huge stuffed animals, leading people to try their hand at a contest whose odds had already changed. With the basketball game the rims go up, I don't remember how much, but it wouldn't take much variance to throw someone off. Shaq has been shooting at 10 foot rims for years and still can barely hit 50%. My Dad handed the guy a five at night, the harder time, and was straight money. Oddly, I still have all five stuffed basketballs. I have very few possessions, so many moves, so much irresponsibility, foreclosures, evictions, rehab, bankruptcy, and yet I still have those balls. Way to go Dad. Way to ball.
My Dad and I lived together, just the two of us, for seven years. Seven great years, really. My mom lived close, I did the dual family kid every other weekend thing, so I still saw her quite a bit, but my Dad and I were super close. And I had a few friends, rotating through best friends as I advanced through elementary school. When I was 11 or 12, my best friend at that time had the same name as me, Hoi (haha). He had a sister who was a year or two younger than us, very sweet girl, and a brother who was about 5 when I met him. His younger brother was a sociopath. Ok, maybe not an according to Hoyle sociopath, but something, criminal mind, borderline personality, or in those days just crazy. I don't remember many specific examples to give you of his behavior, other than to say he was usually very nice but would do very damaging things out of the blue, calmly. No lack of comprehension that what he did caused damage or pain or whatever, just no emotional reaction. I wish I had a good story about him killing small animals or something, but I don't, all I can say is that you just knew it about him. Everyone around him knew it.
Aside from having a sister and Ted Bundy for a brother, he had a Mom (apparently more than half the people in America at that time had mothers). Well, he had a MILF, really. At 11 or 12 I was at a unique age when it came to the opposite sex. I knew his Mom was pretty, but I was never attracted to her. A couple years later and my best friend's hot mom would have been fantasy material. My Dad, being a few years ahead of me, was at that stage the first time he met her. She was single, like him, and had been divorced twice. Her first husband, and the father of my friend and his sweet sister, had killed himself. Car running in the garage. At the time the story my friend and his sister had been told by their Mom was that he accidentally fell asleep, but I remember the day they told me, and I remember then not believing that, young as I was, and I remember knowing for certain that neither one of them did either. Her second husband, and the father of Dahmer, turned out to be an abuser. She took the kids and left him, left the entire country in fact, they were Canadian. She had a pretty good job as a chemist, so that may have spurred the long distance move. On the other hand, having met the walking billboard advertising that man's DNA, she may have just wanted to get as far away as possible.
She and my father saw each other a lot dropping us off and picking us up from sleepovers at each others houses and things like that, and they started spending more time with each other. It didn't really change much for me, I still slept over at my friend's house on the weekends, only now my Dad was coming with. He slept over too.
Again, 11 or 12 is a weird age for sexual awareness. My friend and I both knew what it was, and that our parents were doing that at night, but it wasn't something we thought much about. A year or two younger, we would have been clueless, a year or two older and it would have been a big deal. As it was we existed in the balance between awareness and giving a shit, and this unique perspective made possible a hilarious scenario.
His house had four bedrooms, one for each kid, and one for his Mom. His room had bunkbeds, so it really worked out great for us to stay there, which we did, a lot. We made up a pretty good dynamic, the lot of us, got along well and had fun together, took some small trips. His brother wasn't that bad, not at that age, and he wasn't mean, per say.....just wired wrong. You felt angry with him and bad for him at the same time when he did things.
One Friday or Saturday night my friend and I were in his room trying to go to sleep, but we couldn't help but clearly hear....Ok, two things, one, she had one of those old fashioned brass beds that will sound like a porno is being filmed on it if you so much as roll over, and two, she was a screamer, or at least a loud moaner. I can't believe I didn't appreciate the magnitude of the moment, neither of us did. He should have been totally creeped out hearing his Mom getting off, and I should have been totally aroused. I kind of am just thinking about it now, like I said, she was hot and she was loud. Yum.
But we didn't grasp the weight of the situation, we were just annoyed that we couldn't get to sleep. I was laying there awake, staring at the ceiling, when I heard my friend whisper to ask if I was awake. I said yeah, of course, it was loud (tile floors in the hallway and not much distance between rooms, that brass bed echoed something terrible). He agreed, and we were silent a moment. Then he asked me if I thought we should say something, and I said yeah go for it. So he yells out, "Excuse me, could you please quiet down!" and the way he said it, not angrily, but forcefully, firmly, and plenty loud enough to hear.
Instant silence. We didn't give it another thought, didn't talk much more, just went to bed, and woke up the next day thinking about other things. It was years before I happened to remember that, and fully appreciated the incredible awkwardness our parents must have felt. I can only imagine how mortified they must have been. Late at night, been doing it for months, caught up in the moment, forget your kids are about 15 feet away....and then hear one of them politely ask you to quiet down....wow! We didn't think about it at all the next day, but I bet they were embarrassed as hell to sit with us at breakfast, probably were dreading leaving the bedroom that morning. haha!
Like the basketballs, I appreciated what my Dad was doing on a much smaller level. I now appreciate how hard it was to hit five straight shots, at the time I just liked getting the stuffed basketballs. At the time I just liked spending more time with my friend and his family, but now I appreciate how hard my Dad was hitting that very respectable Canadian ass. Way to go Dad! Way to ball.
A footnote: I don't know if I will ever write about them again, so I'll mention that my Dad dated her for about two years. They broke up, and he met my next step mother ( I have had a couple, I'm issuing trading cards for them) and, obviously, married her. He would soon, and forever, regret that, at least the part about my step mother. I'm not sure if he wished he had stayed with the Canuck. I know this though, he loved my friend and his sister, really did, but he was not at all sorry to not have to deal with the little brother growing up. Like I said, you just knew, everyone did.
My friend and I lost touch, and I went a good fifteen years without seeing anyone in his family again. Then one night I went into a bar that was about 3 blocks from the apartment I had been living in for the last six months. I'm sitting at the bar with a friend, having a beer, and I keep looking at the bartender. There is something familiar about her, but I can't place her. She did, though. It was weird and so out of the blue to see her. We were very close when we were young, she really was like a sister to me for two years, and my Dad and I kind of left her, her brother, and her mother. I never really looked at it that way, but I did the moment I realized it was her, and it flustered me a bit. I talked with her and found out her older brother, my friend, was married, house, young kid, doing well, as everyone knew he would. Her mom had remarried as well and was apparently doing well, but I could tell that even all these years later she was hurt that my Dad had left her Mom, and her I guess too. Her Dad had killed himself, her step dad beat up her Mom, she meets my Dad (who really is a great guy) at age 10 and at 12 he's gone. Even worse, two years later she is attending the high school he teaches at, and sees him and talks to him frequently (in passing, not confiding), so that wound must have never really closed. My Dad had mentioned a time or two that he saw her and her brother around the school and they were doing well (we had moved to another town to live with step#1), so I had all the facts to deduce that she was really hurt by that situation, but....I was young, and had a total nightmare of a woman in my life to deal with. Never occurred to me. So like I said, I was flustered, and I didn't really talk as much to her as I would have liked to, and I'm sure didn't seem very interested in seeing her, even though I was.
Drinking at that time had started creating real problems in my life, it was an odd night, a slip I guess, that I went to a bar at all, the one she worked at or any other. I didn't think to mention that, but I did mention that I lived within shouting distance. So when I never went back there, what might she have thought? My Dad bumped into her some months later, and she mentioned I had been in. And never been back. He said she looked hurt by that, and he didn't know what to do. One the one hand he wanted her to know it wasn't that I was avoiding the bar right outside my house because she worked there. On the other hand, explaining why I shouldn't be at a bar in the first place was a long topic for a chance meeting in a grocery store or wherever. I have no idea how he handled it, I hope he made it ok. She wasn't an emotionally feeble clingy person at all, just a good person who had been the victim of circumstances beyond her control.
The $10,000,000 dollar question. When I saw her at the bar that night, she told me what had become of her older brother and mother, but what of her younger brother? I asked about him. She looked down briefly, shook her head a little, and said, "Exactly what you thought would" or something to that effect. She mentioned him being in prison, either at the moment or already had been and was out. I didn't press her on it. It was too sad, at that moment, to think of the five year old boy that I had spent so much time with, baby sat for, taught to throw a football, turning into the dark character that had always been inside him. Despite the efforts of so many people who had loved him and done all they could to save him from that. I know perfectly well that my Dad and I staying with them wouldn't have been enough to help him, but at that moment, I felt horribly guilty. We would have helped her.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: A favorite website of mine, convet youtube videos ...
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: A favorite website of mine, convet youtube videos ...: "http://www.video2mp3.net/afterdownload.php"
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Gamblers
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Gamblers: "There was a time in my life when I considered drug or alcohol addiction to be the worst character defect a person could have, in terms of th..."
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