Going Through It

Moments of Weakness

Right now, it is about 4:30 AM, the Friday after Thanksgiving. I am cooking the Turkey that I got the day before the holiday.

The Thanksgiving basket that I got had, of course, the frozen bird, maybe a 8 pounder, along with other stuff that I was better off getting rid of to remove the temptation of eating in moments of weakness.

There was a loaf of white bread, two dozen eggs, and a gallon of 2% milk, along with a package of margarine.
The recipe for French toast, which I really love, especially with whipped butter and real maple syrup) is also a recipe for eczema, a skin disease that I was plagued with throughout my teens and into my twenties.
It wasn't until I did my first "Three day cleanse and fast and mucous-less diet" at the age of 24 that I felt comfortable in my own skin, for the first time. "No wonder other people my age sing and dance and play all day, and are so happy," I thought. They aren't taking in allergens daily. And, none of them would see the point in suffering through 5 days of a fast, behind some theory too nebulous to sustain them.
Especially when there are enough nay sayers in the world ready to tell you that fasting is unhealthy.
Yet, the less you eat, the longer you live.
It has been theorized that it is a buildup of toxins to some critical level which eventually does people in.

I had no idea that it took some things up to two weeks to clear the system; that is something that I just discovered after I ate a bunch of stuff that the lady that lives in the house with Howard,  Berta (bless her heart) gave me a couple Sunday's ago, as I was leaving after watching football with Howard.
She had been trying to stuff my face while I was there, but I told her I was in the middle of a juice fast. I was feeling energetic and thinking clearly and in an upbeat mood that didn't fluctuate, no matter what thoughts occurred to me.
"No, you need to eat; you're too skinny," said Berta.
She gave me a package of stuff to put on my handlebars and bring home.
Once I was home, I just put it in the refrigerator, then kind of forgot about it.
Eventually, on about the sixth or seventh day of the fast, I had a lapse.
"F**k it; let me see what's in that bag," I said to myself.
There was a perfectly cooked rare T-bone steak in a Zip-lock bag, lightly seasoned, and so delicious, that I thought it must have been world-class five star quality right when it came off the grill. I understood why Berta was disappointed that I hadn't wanted to eat it at that time, I was wasting some of her cooking talent.
The flood gates were opened. The fast had had a steak driven through its heart.
I started opening other Tupperware containers and finding other delicious things. There was an extremely fresh salad with no dressing on it.
If I would have quit right there, I wouldn't be writing this.
But, there was bread pudding.
I love bread pudding as much as I do French toast with whipped butter and real maple syrup, and I indulged.
I'm sure that it had eggs combined with soy oil in it, a deadly combination.
That is another one of those combinations where both items trigger a reaction to each other.
I can deal with a little bit of soy oil, with maybe some running of the nose, itching around the eyes, and dandruff over the next few days, and I can eat eggs, up until a point where the back of my head begins to ache, like with a tension headache, and I get dandruff, once again.
But when the two are combined into mayonnaise, this becomes squared, and after eating a lot of that over a three day period, I would probably break out from petting Harold!
[My turkey has another hour to go!] 5:38 AM C.S.T.

These triggers can make you sensitive to other things while they are in you, leading you to believe you are allergic to them, too.
For instance, I once had some cereal in milk, and then I think I ate an orange a little bit after.
Then, I petted a cat.
Then, I put some lotion on my face, which seemed to be a vehicle for transporting the cat oils to beneath the skin, causing it to itch intensely. It was the kind of itching that made me want to rinse it off with water, but that didn't help.
I'm not allergic to cats, I have one. But with those other triggers in the system, I was.
A complex problem rarely has a simple solution.

Losing the Special 20 harmonica and holder put me in a state of paralysis.

I wavered between thinking that this was an opportunity to build character by going out every night and playing just the guitar and singing, like I had done for the first few years of my busking career, until I had enough money for a new harp.
Then, I would start to write an e-mail to my mom, explaining the situation and asking for an early Christmas gift of a harmonica.
But, then I would picture her telling me that, when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and, why couldn't I go out and busk with just the guitar like I did for the first few years of my busking career?
Then, I wouldn't send the e-mail.
But, having no money the past week has imposed a cold turkey withdrawal from kratom and weed upon me.
I have been able to feed Harold, barely, by finding minuscule amounts on plastic cards that, for all other intents and purposes, I had used up. ...what am I going to do with 72 cents...?
It had me watching Eckhart Tolle videos and meditating, over the days leading up to Thanksgiving.
I suppose I should look on the bright side.
Those videos turned out to be the salve that would get me through the withdrawal from weed, and from kratom, if there is such a thing, and to help me with the anger.

But, miraculously, I got 10 megabytes of data on my government phone this month, instead of the 2 megabytes that I usually get, as part of the "Lifeline" plan.

And there were the Eckhart videos.
I can only surmise that there was some kind of glitch.
But, it does seem odd that I lost a $40 harmonica and then somehow got $30 worth of data on my phone for free.
There is something else going on with losing the harmonica, I have a feeling.
It is as if the universe was trying to tell me something.


I was able to let Eckhart lecture for hour upon hour on auto-play, and even watched a lot of Rick Beato videos about arranging for orchestras, using the music of John Williams as examples of how to do that well.
I will never listen to the opening theme of Star Wars the same way again.
One of the cool things about it was that Williams knew that the theme was going to start at the very beginning of the movie, right when the famous 20th Century Fox theme was still fresh in the ears of the audience, so he wrote it in the same key of B flat.

The experience of losing the harmonica shed light on a few things.
On the night I lost it, a Friday, Jacob and I had eaten some psilocybin mushrooms that a group (probably fresh from Colorado) had given us when we had been busking on Tuesday night.
One of the guys in the group said that he remembered me from Mobile, Alabama, and that I had helped them hop the train to New Orleans, by telling them where to wait in order to increase their chances of getting in an open boxcar.
"This is the way to go," because you can fully recline to sleep, and can do it far from the opened door so that no amount of rocking and bouncing would rock  and bounce you out if you were nearly comatose from the whiskey, which seems to make such a good train hopping companion, along with peanut butter and water.
So, here was the guy, with a memory like an elephant, repaying the favor 6 years later.

But, here it was a Friday night, and we had eaten the mushrooms and we started playing.

To me, it sounded no better than an average session, maybe not even that. Without the encouragement of tip money going in the jar, it felt like the music was kind of flat.
Not, for Jacob.
He kept saying that whatever we had just played was the most incredible music imaginable.

I'm usually not one to judge music by how much goes into the tip jar, because there are so many other factors involved, but, I do know that the best tips come from people who make some kind of connection with it.
A lot of people are in generous moods, but they don't want to just give money away, they want to feel satisfied that you are playing just for them, or even just want to see you break a sweat; to work for the money.
So, after almost 2 hours of playing, that the psychedelics made go by faster, I had to resist becoming angry.
It didn't seem to dawn on him that I have to live for the rest of the week on whatever I make busking Thursday through Sunday.
So far, that was 3 dollars.
To him, the music was an end in itself.
"This is the most wondrous, astounding, amazing and incredible night there could ever be!" he said.
Then, the zen of busking came into play.
Becoming irritated over not making money, and exuding that vibe, was going to further stem the flow of it.
Then, I lost the harmonica.
I haven't played since.

Chapter 2: A Slice of Americana

First, you might want to set up a "dummy" blog just to do your writing on, because this site doesn't seem to lose stuff these days. It auto-saves every few minutes, and every time you leave the page. Then you can cut and paste to this blog here.

You could also use Notepad.

How you count words, I dunno how you keep track. I'd find it hard to do, and would probably count out 100 or 50 word literal snippets of a print-out, then count those. People knowing how many words they've written impresses me because I don't know how you can count them other than manually counting them.-Alex in California

The dummy blog is an idea that I have tossed around.

I even thought that I might create a no holds barred blog where, under the cloak of anonymity, and even using the alias of the anti Daniel, I could talk about my relationships with any one of the 40 people (world-wide) who might read this blog at least a couple times a year.

I am seeing a trend whereby, in the future, people will have their whole lives compartmentalized on their devices, and whenever I post to the blog, anything from a hovering icon of my face on their screens, to perhaps an uptick by one to some tally of "unread" things will occur.

Using the "save as draft" feature basically accomplishes the same thing that starting another blog would.

What happened was that, I started cutting and pasting huge sections of the story, so that, for instance, it no longer started out with the wedding, and then jumped back a year, instead, it just makes mention of the wedding and then jumps back a year.
But, it jumps back a year and then forks into 2 storylines, the trailer park story line, and the Russian one.
So, without further ado:

When we last left off, I had bought a trailer from a man with a very wide ass, on a "rent to own" contractual agreement.
I pulled up to the place in the 1984 Corolla, which had been my home for about the prior year.
The driveway used to run right to the front door of trailer #60, before what looks like a handicap ramp (photo) was added.
I parked my Corolla, and went inside, to begin trailer park life.
It was my first time walking around the place without lard butt by my side, and my attention was immediately drawn to the fact that there was nothing in the place.
Except, ironically, the scrawny fold out table where I had inked my name to a lease agreement that was equally flimsy.

That was OK, because the refrigerator worked, and that was going to save me money over buying food one meal at a time, even though I had been pretty much living off of stuff that came in bottles out of GNC.
And, I was going to have a place to hang out at, so I wouldn't be riding around all day, stopping at places to spend money out of boredom.

Still, off I went in that Corolla, to put in almost 60 hours a week delivering pizza.

The agreement that I signed came with a lot of hidden costs (which didn't stay out of sight for long).

I had to pay for an annual inspection decal to be placed upon the unit, at a cost of $38.

I was responsible for keeping my lawn trimmed to within park specifications, so I had to buy a push mower and some other garden tools.
It was suggested to me by the park supervisor that, if I really wanted to have a decent lawn, I might have to bring in loads of loam, to build up the soil a bit; something the inhabitants before me had been negligent in, and it was further hinted to me that they didn't need any more residents like them. The creases in the bedroom ceiling flashed through my mind.

Withing the first couple weeks, I heard a loud pop come from under my place, and then discovered that I had no hot water.
I was crawling under the place the next day with a saw and a length of PVC pipe and a couple "sleeves" and a jar of the blue glue, all at my expense, and after having consulted a few people about the problem.

One such guy named Paul was a manager at the Dominos where I worked, and he had come out, after I had taken the place, to look at it, even though it was too late for me to have taken any advice he may have given me on whether or not the place was worth the money.

He showed up one afternoon with a mattress in the bed of his pickup, which he gave me. I had just been sleeping on the carpet in the bedroom. The better to hear popping noises...

Paul would have been a good person to talk to after I had initially met with lard butt, and had been convinced by him that I wasn't going to find a better deal in the rent-to-own trailer market.

The deal was conceived in the same spirit as those that the middle class families that I grew up around subscribed to when buying cars.

They would get a brand spanking new car, along with a 60 month amortization table, which would make the monthly payments seem reasonable (for such a brand new shiny car) but the principle balance would lag behind the book value of the car, which would have depreciated  about 30% as soon as the person drove it off the lot.

Then, at some point during about the 48th month of the loan, the person would be driving a car that was worth about 2 thousand bucks, which would be right around what the "payoff" amount of the loan would be.

But, now the car is 4 years old and is starting to cost almost as much at the mechanic's shop as it does at the bank.

And, so the person trades in the 4 year old car at the same dealership, that the family has been loyal to for years, and the dealer gives them the good news that if you trade in the 4 year old car ("towards" a new one) they will pay off the balance of the loan on it, to the bank, and so the person won't have to carry over anything that they still owe on their old clunker, that was probably going to need a new transmission.

This might make the person think that he is having a whole year's worth of payments made, in exchange for the car, when actually it is just the principle that the dealership is writing a check for. You don't really owe another 2 grand on the thing, when you look at it that way, probably more like $1,300.

But, on paper, it looks like a couple thousand had been knocked off the price of this year's model (with the electric aerial, so you don't have to step out at the car wash to push it down) when, in fact, the full MSRP of the newest model had been extracted from the person, using the outstanding balance on the clunker as a ploy.

And, it always seems like the person who has to borrow money from a bank, and who still owes on a car that is beginning to fall apart, who is over a barrel.
Not the dealer, who sells cars that start to fall apart after 48 months, and not the banks.

This is why, when I was a kid who worked as a caddie at a country club, I noticed that the members of that exclusive club were mostly "doctor" this or "doctor" that, or their last names were familiar from the sides of oil tankers, or insurance companies.

But, there was a generous smattering of "that guy owns the biggest Cadillac dealership in Florida," or "That's Rick Starr.....Rick Starr Toyota?!? Yeah, that Rick Starr..." to be heard.

Of course, no pun intended, there were golfers out there who were high school teachers, one of whom was named Bernie DePasquale, and he showed his appreciation for having somehow gotten to play golf at Oak Hill Country club on a less than six figure salary, and spread his love of the game, by beating every other member a couple years in a row, to take possession of the club championship trophy.

There were priests who teed it up, quite a few, actually.
What kind of salary were they pulling in?
The priests had designated times that they had to play, though, in exchange for whatever holy voucher they had been provided.

Priests Playing Golf

And, I know this is a story about 1996, and that I have been trying to get to the point that lard ass seemed to me to have country club written all over him; but...I can't resist.
Priests playing golf...I have to include this, and then back to the story...

These guys were playing golf, and they had a nun in their foursome.
One guy missed a putt, and yelled: "Shit, I missed!!"
The nun admonished him and warned him that God would punish him for using such language.
A few holes later he missed another shot, and again he yelled: "Shit, I missed!"
The nun, once again, warned him.
Then, they got to the 18th green, which sat atop a hill and, by then, the wind had picked up and dark clouds were blowing in overhead.
Thunder could be heard in the distance...
The guy missed yet another putt, and, snapping his putter over his knee, yelled: "Shit, I missed!!"
Then, there was an enormously loud snap, as a bolt of lightning came down from the sky; and hit the nun, killing her.
As the thunder pealed off, a deep booming voice came down from the sky:
"Shit, I missed!"

Back To The Serial Novel...

OK, so lard butt fancied himself as being on the side of the bread which is buttered.
That is the side that the people who have capital are on.
It is the person who is flipping through a newspaper and coming across a "Trailer in a nice westside park, $375/mo. rent to own" ad who thinks: "Hey, I can afford that; I can have a roof over my head tonight!" who is analogous to the person (back in '58) about to buy a brand new Impala on a 60 month bank note.

I guess, if I had to do it all again, I would have looked around the park, and I would have spotted the Goetzinger's trailer -a double-wide, with all the tell tale signs that the occupants had been there a while, to wit, vines that were on about their third lap around the base of the dwelling, children's toys that looked as if their better days had been outgrown, yet were still in the yard, maybe because Mrs. Goetzinger had five children already, at the age of about 28, and why get rid of a Big Wheel that still works, only is spattered with mud from the last rainstorm?

I would have seen the tell tale signs that Mr. Goetzinger had a trade. To wit, the van in the driveway, with the name of a (was it plumbing?) business on it.
I would have noticed that, from a certain angle, the satellite dish seemed to adorn the van like a bow.

The whole idea of a trailer is to be able to surround it with stuff which is worth way more than the dwelling itself. A Jacuzzi in the back would cover that in one fell swoop. 

The Goetzingers were the upper class of the park.

They were practicing Catholics, as was the park superintendent.

But, they had also mastered the art of living pretty well in a trailer park; but I just couldn't read all the signs.

I probably could have knocked on the door of his trailer, or caught him coming outside to grab his lighter out of his van, or something, and told him that I was thinking about renting the trailer on lot #60, and then showed him the newspaper ad, even.
  
...sure, and then Mr. G. would have shaken his head, removed a straw he was chewing on from his mouth, and advised: "I wouldn't. That's one of lard butt's ads. I can tell because it's a beaches number....Hell, no!
He's not going to tell you about all the pipes that are ready to bust as soon as you go to take a hot bath; that you either fix yourself or, God help you if you call his fat ass...for 'driving all the way from the beach' I think he soaked the last guy something like an extra fifty bucks, cause he 'had to drive all the way over here,' on a Saturday when the Gators were playing.
But, when the hot water heater goes out, which it will, in about 9 months, then he will insist upon doing the installation of a replacement, citing some bullshit about him not being liable if you go out and find a refurbished water heater or something out of a junk yard and you install it wrong; (and it explodes like the boiler on a steam locomotive and maims residents children playing hide and seek)
No, this ad is for suckers, pure and simple...look, you have a job and a steady income?
I know this dude, right over there in that park across the way; I'll even take you over there and show you the place; it's nice; he's selling his trailer cause he's into remodeling houses now and he's gonna use the money to start his business, and...

Boom! That's how social engineering could have worked, even back in 1996, in the heyday of the BET thing.

That was fun; let's imagine that Mr. Goetzinger is on his third Old Milwaukee and has to wait to turn the ribs anyways, and so he goes on:

And lard butt ain't gonna tell you that he has his own key and is likely to just walk in your place sometime, even if you're not there, and claim that he had to look at the specs on the water heater, so he'll know which one to order, but, of course when he barges in again on a Saturday morning, he'll have some dusty used heater with spots of rust on it.
Then, he's gonna tell you that he is adding the cost of the 'new' heater onto the end of your lease, at whatever value he pulled out of his fat ass!
Man, I know a lot of people who fell for one of his ads and just signed away like a damned fool; ended up paying like $13,000 for a trailer that might be worth $4,000.
Oh, and after he's disturbed your sleep on a Saturday morning that you were up until almost 5 AM recording music, or whatever you do, I know I just met you for the first time when I stepped outside to get my lighter, but you seem like the music recording type....well, after disturbing your sleep, he's gonna probably pause and look at the carpet, then flippantly say: 'You need to keep this carpet clean.'
That's going to be his veiled way of saying that you're never going to own the trailer; it's always going to be some bullshit that he'll add on to the end of the loan...

But, of course, we never had that discussion.

But, our paths would cross soon enough.

The first time would be over a jar of coins.

I was outside, on probably a May afternoon, cleaning out and vacuuming my car in the driveway; attached to a cord that the front door was opened to accommodate.

Naturally, this attracted the attention of a group of 3 boys, a couple 14 year olds and a kid of about 12, who turned out to be Brett Goetzinger, the middle child of the 5.

In a park already curious about the new guy with the white Corolla, it took only the vacuuming out of my car to get them to stop, with one of the older boys posing the question: "You live here now?"

Then it took only the sight of one of my guitars through the open door to spawn further conversation.

One of the older boys was named Royce.

I believe that Royce had the misfortune of living with two "parents," neither of which was a blood relation to him.

His mother had met some guy who already had Royce from a previous relationship, and then, I guess after raising him along with his dad, wound up still with him, through trailer park science that is beyond the scope of this post.
The mother, at that trailer diagonal from me, was a late twenties, blond haired, fair skinned and more stout than skinny, stripper.

It was kept a secret around the park just where she stripped, I guess for them not wanting guys from the park to embarrass her by going there, then making hoots and catcalls at her when she is just going out to sun herself on an aluminum recliner in her driveway.

There was a middle child, named Allie.

Allie resembled the mother, except that she was a much browner skinned version of her. I don't know if they are avid bowlers, or if they had conceived the girl in an Alley, but she was at least half related to some of the family.

And, there was a little girl named Courtney, who was the offspring of the stripper AND her current live-in boyfriend, who was also fair of skin and hair.
Courtney was doted upon.

Royce, not so much.

And the other 14 year old kid, who was skinny and white and wore glasses, insisted upon bringing a wooden club as a potential weapon with him after I did let them inside to check out the guitar and amp.

After we were back outside, Brett, who had been holding a cup, asked me if he could go back inside to get a glass of water.

Thinking that I (sadly) had nothing to steal in there, at least nothing that he could conceal upon himself, I let him.

In the room at the far north end, I had a huge glass bottle that I used to chunk my change into at the end of my pizza delivery shifts.

Often, it was all I had to show at the end of a month.

It sat next to my IBM 386 computer, which had its memory expanded to 1 megabyte to help me keep track of how much should be in the jar.

There had been somewhere around 82 bucks in the jar when I came home that same night, after the afternoon that I vacuumed out the car, to find that the jar had vanished out of the computer laboratory!

And, the funny thing is; I might still be wondering to this day whatever happened to it had not the thieves given themselves away.

The first part of their plan was almost ingenious.

When Brett went inside to get a glass of water, he quickly undid the latches on a certain window which opened upon the alley behind my trailer. He had chosen it for this reason, and because it was one of the few windows in my place that had any kind of curtain hanging from it, so the undone latches would be hidden from view.

Also, in the amount of time that it typically takes to get a glass of water from a sink, his choices would have been limited to that, or one more similarly curtained window.

Where they really messed up was by not re-locking the window that they had come in through.

This told me how the trailer's security was breached, and narrowed it down to the only person, other than myself, who had access to that window lock.

The other snag in their operation was that the window that Brett unlocked was quite a small one, maybe even intended to house an air conditioner, but it was small enough so that none of the older boys could fit through it, and so they had to enlist the help of 9 year old Britney (Goetzinger; second from youngest of 5) who was able to fit through the window (but who might have been slipshod in not re-latching the window) but, who was also reported seen around the park, attempting to trade change for paper dollars.

The gossip grapevine cannot hold such a juicy item.

She also caved in during interrogation after I had mentioned it to her mom, during one of my jogs around the park when I encountered her.

The next evening, there was a knock at my door, which I opened to see Mr. Goetzinger, standing next to a very contrite looking Brett, and an equally ashamed Britney.

"I understand that you had a jar of coins stolen from your place, and that the evidence points towards these kids..." began Mr. G.

He asked me how much I thought had been in the jar, as one of his oil-stained, well calloused hands reached for his wallet.

I had already told the Mrs. that I was pretty sure that there was "a little over 80 dollars in the jar." I stopped short of telling her that I knew the amount to the penny because I logged all my pizza delivery data at the end of the night, into a Lotus spreadsheet, along with my expenses -that sounds too much like part of the profile of a serial killer, or something- best to just say "a little over 80 bucks."

I took pity upon the kids, but then again, it was good to see them being disciplined. I'm was pretty sure I wasn't going to be visited by a contrite Royce, who, at the prodding of his stripper mom whom he isn't related to, would gush an apology.

He's the one who put up the younger Brett to do the unlatching of the window, and then the even younger Britney, to crawl through it.

And, the other kid, whom I would only go on to encounter a couple times more over the next year, would he and his father figure stop over, both wielding clubs, to apologize for the lads lapse in judgement?

But, the Goetzingers were trying to raise good kids, but, like I said, this was the Age of BET (black entertainment television).

While Mr. Goetzinger was plying his trade on the other side of the river, where flags flew in front of houses and off the sides of SUVs, his oldest daughter, Shauna had also been taken advantage of, for her innocence.

She had fallen into the company of a group of black kids from another park nearby, who were a couple years older than her.

They basically went through the tired prole of introducing her to crack; giving her a steady stream of it until she became addicted, and then cutting off the supply to her and letting her suffer withdrawals, and then offering her more crack in exchange for her having sex with all 4 of them.

This had gotten Shauna "so" grounded after it had come to light somehow, that she had been restricted to the confines of Americana park.

She spent a lot of time babysitting at the stripper's house.

She had a boyfriend named Jose, who was 18 that summer, and that would have made him 16 when he had been with the boys who had abused her, with him being the only one of the 5 who didn't want to participate. 

With the black kids, though, the practice found more acceptance. Jose might have believed that a beautiful young lady shouldn't  be abused such.

But this was 1996, and what had happened by then was...

From the perspective of a musician, I will say that the multi-million dollar success of Michael Jackson in the early 80's created a perception that there was gold in them thar hills, and that, perhaps white people had a greater appetite for "colored" music than Michael and Stevie Wonder alone could provide.
If Madonna was coke, than Michael Jackson was Pepsi.

If black artists were topping the charts, then why not promote the truly talented Stevie Wonder.

Miles Davis would hit it big in 1986 with his Tutu album.

But, then, along would come Public Enemy, and soon N.W.A., and by the early 1990's just about the coolest thing an 8 year old kid could hope to grow up to be would be a rapper.

Black kids could be seen walking around in public with their lips moving, as they practiced their rhymes.

Suddenly there was hope for those who couldn't dribble a basketball, or break dance.

Then, somehow, the illusion got turned inward upon itself.

Videos came on BET which had been staged with the artists, wearing rented clothing, rolling down the street in a rented pimped out car, alongside paid models wearing rented jewelry and clothes, flashing bling and stacks of hundred dollar bills that one can only surmise had been rented, and cutting to shots of the artists rapping on stage in front of a couple hundred people who had been basically hired as extras, and told that the more enthusiasm they showed, the better their chances of seeing themselves in a real video; on BET.

In a case of great irony, one such video, full of such illusions that glorified materialism, contained the refrain: "Don't believe the hype!"

Unless it's their hype; then, believe it.

By 1996, when I delivered pizza in the Arlington section of Jacksonville, close to half of the customers who came to the door were young white girls and, visible over their shoulders, as if intentionally posed, would be a black guy, reclined on a couch with a remote in his hand, perhaps, calling the shots, pressing the buttons. Waiting for his girlfriend to fetch the pizza and bring it to him.

To me, it had the feeling of a fad, such as when, in 7th grade, one kid showed up at school with a unicycle.

We all tried to ride the thing, but only Vinnie Brennan could, at first.

As other kids started to get the hang of it, they were soon down at Gamache's Cycles, ordering themselves unicycles. They got the money from wherever upper middle class kids do.

Vinnie Brennan eventually went back to Gamache's when he needed a part for his own unicycle.

Upon learning who he was, Mr. Gamache shook his hand, and told him: "Because of you, I've sold almost 25 unicycles in the past year!"
He gave him his part for free, plus a new seat, I think.

But, the point was that, once we caught the fever, we all had to have unicycles.
I thought this was just due to our adolescence, the same way that every kid in the school had had to have the "Destroyer" album by the band Kiss.

To know that you were the only kid home on a Saturday night not cranking up "Shout It Out Loud," was unbearable.

But, we outgrew such things, and learned how to think more autonomously; maybe less like a posse.

But, there is a dynamic that I sensed back then, and even more so into the early 2000's, that having a black boyfriend had become like the unicycle of the modern day white girl. All their friends are doing it.

And, I think the Arlington area statistics were skewed by the fact that, it seemed like a lot of such couples ordered pizza, just so the usually white driver will become a witness to their love. The black guy always being in sight when the door opens -you never would seem to catch him during a bathroom run- seemed peculiar.

At the Arlington store, a new manager had taken over, because of floundering sales.

It was a guy named John Abel, whom I had worked for at the upper middle class Mandarin store.

He was a no nonsense type of manager, who had a system, which he had successfully applied at other stores, effectively doubling their sales within a year and a half.

He resembled Adolf Hitler (he was even of German descent) and ran the store like a dictator, barking orders that he expected to be obeyed without hesitation.
He would just fire anyone who lagged.

One of his strategies was to bring in a large number of drivers and to give them each one pizza at a time to deliver.

This pissed off many drivers, who couldn't understand why they shouldn't be allowed to let one pizza sit for ten minutes on the warming rack while it waits for a second one that just went in the oven, but was going to the same neighborhood.

Those drivers thought that, to make good money, they needed to leave the store with 4 or 5 orders, drop them off as fast as possible, then return for more.

But, they would be returning for less and less as time went on, after those customers who had gotten the 5th order that someone dropped off, luke-warm, and about 45 minutes after they had ordered, migrated to another pizza company.

After just a couple of months of everybody getting their pizza in an average of 17 minutes after they ordered, sales would be up to the point that drivers could start taking more than one order because they would be coming out of the oven so fast that they wouldn't have to wait as long for two in the same neighborhood to be ready.

John had taken over the Arlington store and, during the first week had fired every black employee except 2.

That meant that he then had little more than 2 employees.

"They'd be leaning up against the wall, and I'd tell them to grab a broom or something and get busy, and they would stare back at me and not move."

And, so, I told John that I would go up there to work for him.

John's replacement in Mandarin was a black guy named T.C.

T.C. was in his mid, to late, 40's and so he was "old school," and thus shunned a bit by the white girls who seemed otherwise to be ga-ga over the younger blacks and the BET lifestyle that they promised.

But, perhaps as a sign of the times, T.C. had been recommended for the job through John, because T.C. was technically John's stepfather.

Yes, John's German mother had married an old school black man. It was 1996, after all.

"Your Old School Brother Is Home!"

T.C. was constantly hocking up phlegm and spitting it into a trash can that he kept nearby him.

He was also a slow worker, and the delivery times, and hence the sales began to slump shortly after his arrival. He would drift off into a daydream for a while sometimes before coming out of it with a start: "Oh, I have to make that pizza!"

Yes, T.C., you kinda had to make it about 11 minutes ago.

T.C. was constantly preparing pizza, wings and cinnamon twisty sticks ҫ and trading said product for everything it seemed he could get his hands on from the little strip mall where the Dominos was situated.

It was not far from a little liquor store, which was run by some very nice Asian people, who would, twelve years later give me the bus fare so I could go downtown and busk outside the Florida/Georgia game, but for now, it was -in with a couple dozen wings (retail value $15.87) out with a six pack of beer.

"I know how us managers do it," said T.C. one time when I just about ran into him as I was hustling back to the store with an energy drink I had gotten from nearby Health Source, and he was coming out of the Blockbuster Video place, which is further down from the liquor store (with nobody technically watching the store during the overlap) holding a stack of at least a half dozen movies.
Poor T.C. was going to have to pace his beer consumption and only crack one open whenever the lion roars at the beginning of the next feature.

And, since T.C. knew so well how us managers do it, there were the lovely young ladies at the Flowerama place next to Dominos on the other side.

I basically forgot about them until Valentines Day rolled around each year.


Then, I would make a killing, using my memorization of the map over the entire area along with those of other stores that I had worked out of, like the even more affluent Julington Creek area (where a pizza deliveryman has no right living, but more on that in the upcoming "Russian" sections).

I would be able to take a couple dozen floral arrangements; arrange them in my car in an order ordained by the map in my head, and deliver them all (all you had to do was leave them at the front door, wouldn't have to ring) at $5 per delivery, and $10 if you had to go all the way downtown, which was 16 miles from Flowerama, but only 3 more miles past the point of my last delivery, as per the way I would have set them up.

So, on February 14th, with visions of $120/hour in my head, I thought about the lovely young ladies at Flowerama.

But, the lovely ladies of Flowerama were in T.C.'s thoughts and were soon delighting in the greasy pleasures of pepperoni cal-zones and garlic bread, in exchange for a few loose flowers in a real glass vase.

So, that, when T.C. got home to his German wife, he could make a grand entrance and shout "Your old school brother is home, with movies and beer, and flowers for you, my dear!"

And the owner of the franchise probably only had to shell out about 12 bucks (food cost) to make it happen. Maybe that is how us managers do it...

So, meanwhile, T.C.'s white, Hitler-looking stepson had fired all but two black employees, up in Arlington.

Well, all but 2 and a half.

He kept Kimberly, whose mother was white, and whose father, had been black. Well, he's still probably black, but he was long gone before Kimberly was born, hence the past tense...

Kimberly identified with her black half exclusively.

Every once in a while, one of us drivers would deliver to a motel room and Kimberly's mother would come to the door to get the pizza and there (as if posing, again) would be some random black guy, shirtless, perhaps, on the bed, waiting to be fed.

So, even if it was at the guy's insistence that the pizza be ordered so the white man could see him in his glory, why order from the place where her 17 year old daughter works?

It became common knowledge that Kimberly's mom would "trick" occasionally, and, good for her, I guess. She got pizza out of it, apparently.

But, I will never forget the one night, after I had been working at that store a few months and had been living in my trailer not much longer.

After the sales had indeed doubled from an average of 9 thousand something to a record week of almost 18 thousand (the Jacksonville University students had arrived for the fall) John had relaxed a bit and was willing to allow Kimberly to flip the channel of the TV that was almost always showing football related stuff, to BET.

Kimberly had pleaded for this because there was to be a memorial service broadcast on BET that night to celebrate the life of the rapper, Notorious B.I.G. who had been murdered by another artist, I believe it was.

I will admit that, if I had to be marooned (excuse the pun) on an island with only a rap album at my disposal, if I wanted to listen to music.

Then, I would probably select the Notorious B.I.G. album, the one depicting him as an infant on the front cover. An infant who weighed half as much as I do today, but I digress.

So, I appreciated the artist.

But, this was like poor Kimberly's J.F.K. funeral, whose eyes were glued to the screen as she, perhaps, fought back tears.

The stage was full of people of color. It was the R&B band, 112. A symphonic sound arose and the people, whom I guess had all been close to the slain rapper all began to sing.

Then, it was P. Diddy (who lived in the Ponte Vedra Beach Dominos area and ordered sometimes) who sang "I'll Be Missing You," which is based upon "Every Breath You Take," the very well known song by the band The Police.

The lyrics had been modified to be more of a tribute to a slain rapper than the "I'll Be Watching You" ruminations of the stalker that Sting of The Police was alluding to.

And so, Kimberly was allowed to have the moment to commiserate with Puff Daddy, and I was about to return to my broom or something, when I noticed that the producers of the memorial tribute had done something kind of unique and interesting.

For, suddenly, at the start of the next verse the cameras panned to, not Puff Daddy, but lily white Sting, the guy who had composed the song, looking extra white after having seen Puff Daddy's face zoomed in on, like when you stare at a yellow object for a while then look at a white wall, you will the the inverse (gray) color, as an after image.

That is how extra white Sting looked when they surprised the viewer with his appearance.

Kimberly immediately clucked in disgust and groaned: "What is that white guy doing there?!?"

What's that white guy doing there?!?

For the sake of Janis, who was one of the 2 black employees who had been retained after the Great Dismissal, and who seemed to like me, I only said:
Because that white guy is the musical talent who composed that song because he can read and write and understand music.
And it's his song that the black guy stole, oh, I'm sorry, "sampled."
I stopped short of adding:
"And he is now trying to cash in monetarily on the death of someone, because blacks have little regard for life."

But, Kimberly wasn't having any part of her white half. 

And, so I would drive back from that scene to my trailer over a different bridge coming from the Arlington store, than the one I would take to and from Mandarin, both of them divide the haves from the have nots; just to differing degrees.

I would do my computer stuff, updating the tally of the change in the big jar, eat, probably record some music, all arranged around the nightly viewing of the Late Night with David Letterman show on my 5 inch screen black and white TV; which kicked off with a joint being lit at the onset of the opening theme.

The TV had been a gift from one of the Russian guys that I worked at, at the Mandarin store. It was a harbinger of other things to come from Russia, with love.

I would eventually drift off to sleep at some time around 2 AM, and so I would have just attained the magic number of 8 hours of it, at such a point when I would hear a knock at my back door.

It would be Shauna.

To be continued  
ѿ

More Loss

• Chapter 2 Lost
• Harmonica Lost
• Beer Bottle Comes Through Window
• 2 Plastic Sharks Found
• Apartment A 110 Among Turkey Giveaway Winners

I lost about 11 thousand words, or the entire second chapter of the serial novel, in a Focuswriter application window mishap.

That should be enough to make me never want to use that particular application to write with again.
What could be more catastrophic to a writer than losing his writing?

But, I love to set it to make the sound of an old fashioned typewriter whenever I press a letter. It drowns out the voices of dissent in my head, or something.


The "software updater" was involved.

I think these updates are cool, because they actually patch applications up on the fly -like, all of a sudden a slider in Audacity no longer has an annoying glitch, type of thing.


But, Focuswriter will not save crap, when the system is rebooted so that the updates can take effect, and I had forgotten this.

Maybe a future update will fix this problem with Focuswriter.

Maybe my mind will clear in the future, and I will be able to do some nifty programming to link a sound module to another word processor that I like, so that I can hear the typewriter sounds, AND stop worrying about manually saving stuff as I go along.

I just really like the old fashioned typewriter sounds. It kind of tell the world: "tick tick tick I'm busy tick tick I'll get to you when I tick tick tick get to you!" and can be set to be triggered when you press keys.


That is one hefty trade off for such an ornamental feature, I must say -a week's worth of painstakingly written words- and not the first time it has happened, yikes, too many mushrooms, or the early onset of Alzheimer's?
  
How could I forget such an important thing?

Probably the same way I could have left my Special 20 harmonica sitting on a milk crate and then walked away from it, as if everyone would know that it belongs to me and not to touch it, when I took a break from busking Friday night.

As, that is what happened.

Jacob and I had gotten to the Lilly Pad very early, but had eaten some mushrooms.
The plan was that, we would go over to the house where he lives, because his guardian would be out of town, and we would eat some of the mushrooms, but not so many that Jacob wouldn't be able to drive, and then we might even hit the THC vaporizing pen while there, before launching into a recording session that Jacob had probably already created an empty sound file for and named 'Mushroom Jam With Dan," or something.

But, what happened was that, after I ate my share of mushrooms, I began to feel as though that plan was fraught with the danger of us embarking upon an 8 hour jam session, after we became immersed in the trip and lost track of time, which might have produced an "I Am The Walrus," or two, but also would be lacking in any kind of human interaction, which can be the crowning glory of a mushroom trip, and that we needed to consider, as we hurried towards the busking spot.

We decided to take a break at around 9:30, and then return after having had doughnuts, in his case, and a 175ml bottle of white wine, in mine.

We had only made 3 dollars in tips, over the couple hours that we played, and it was easy for me to imagine that we were just a little too trippy for the people, or perhaps too distant (in the case of Jacob having his eyes closed and a grin on his face much of the time).
The idea that doing well in tips is God's way of sending encouragement might have become too imbued in me over the course of the last few years of busking.
Certainly, there were the freaky occurrences, like arriving at the Lilly Pad to find an unopened gallon of spring water during a time when I was on a water fast and had actually run out of it.
And then there was the time that I had quit drinking and was on only the third day (of what would extend to almost 1,400 days) and I was tempted 3 times by offers of alcohol, and had turned down each one -the last of which was a guy who had asked me if I drank, because he had a gift card good for 50 bucks at Pat O' Brien's that he wasn't going to wind up needing because, I guess he had just found out that he needed to fly back home immediately or something.
After I had rebuffed all three temptations, a guy appeared out of nowhere and put a 20 dollar bill in my basket, even though I hadn't been playing.
And, there were even the recent times when Jacob and I had 50 dollar tips thrown our way, when you almost had to conclude that somehow we had found a very odd shaped peg hole for whatever we might have been playing at the time.
But, the tip free nights can make you second guess your entire existence.

Hidden Costs  

It was then that I noticed that I must have put the harmonica down on the milk crate so that I could put my hat back on my head (after the latest repair to the harmonica holder made it a much tighter fit so that I could no longer put it on or take it off over a hat) and then probably placed the backpack on top of the thing when I was stuffing more things in it, and then, after I took the spotlight down from the overhead vine and shut it off, didn't see the harmonica after I picked the pack back up in the dark....
That's most likely pretty close to what happened.
After playing at the same spot for something like 5 years (continuously) I developed a routine way of unpacking and packing.
Having been stung once by arriving at the Lilly Pad without my spotlight, which required me to make the 19 minute bike ride each way to the apartment, and then setting up a full 45 minutes later than planned and making something like 40 bucks, and then having to forever wonder what I might have made during those 45 minutes, pretty much cemented into my "leaving checklist" the item of: "Do I have my spotlight?" and this has the companion inquiry: "Did I charge it?"

I can accept the fact that it is pointless to wonder about "what might have been" in life.
Everybody knows that, if they were to go back and change anything in the past then they might find themselves suddenly dead. Sure, I might have noticed the harp and picked it up; but then when whoever came along and, seeing it sitting there, grabbed it, and then took off before anyone might come along and ask them if they had it, may have still been sitting there on the milk crate after Jacob and i got back from the store, and that could have changed the whole dynamic of the night for the worse. Worse than having to play without a harmonica, I'm not sure, though.

The new wrinkle in the arrangement was the harmonica holder no longer fitting over any of my hats. All I had to do was take the hat off first, then take off the harmonica and put it down somewhere, then replace the hat.
It sounds simple, but in the process, I lost a 44 dollar harmonica, plus a holder that had been repaired so that it might have functioned for another year or two.
I must have put the hat back on my head and then went for the overhead spotlight next, casting the area into a darkness that made the harmonica blend in with the milk crate.

I suppose I am not so much in mockery of Howard's routine, about which I even wrote a song.
I used to feel sorry for him was it? because he stood up every morning at almost exactly 6:05 and then, after putting on his shoes in the same order, followed a path identical to the one of the day before.
But, I guess, in his defense, there is enough that pops up during a typical day which is new and different, such as whatever is in the newspaper that he would grab at around 6:08 AM each morning, from the same store, to keep his life varied and interesting.

Maybe Howard just lost enough of whatever his equivalent of harmonicas would be, to say, enough is enough, I'm better off with a routine..

The harmonica is 75% of my live act, approximately...


And, then, I absentmindedly lost the 11 thousand word story after innocently updating my software...

[I am going to Google "Symptoms of early onset of Alzheimer's" but, first might try getting more regular sleep and cutting way back on the weed and mushrooms] 

Incoming Voodoo Ranger IPA 

And, then, this (Saturday) afternoon a beer bottle came crashing through one of my windows, as I was laying on the bed in that room.

I jumped up within a few seconds, half expecting to see Jacob, along with an embarrassed looking one of his friends, who might have underestimated the strength of his throwing arm.

But, there was nobody in sight, when I looked out.

This seemed to rule out that the bottle had been thrown from a distance, and had missed the intended window which wasn't mine.

Whomever threw it was close enough to the window so that it could be aimed above a picture that I had in the window which was on thick poster board type stock, and would have probably prevented the bottle from going all the way through the window.


The beer was an IPA ale, and not a really cheap brew, certainly nothing that a Sacred Heart resident would probably even like the taste of. Olde English Malt Liquor, now that's more like it!!

About an ounce of liquid was left in the bottle, seemingly to give it enough weight to make it go through the window.
Thoughts:

I am thinking that it might be a blog reader, who had become so disgusted after reading that I have broken a 4+ year period of sobriety, that he came by and yelled: "You were my hero and you let me down!!" before chucking the thing...

But that might be just wishful blogger thinking...

[left: Yes, on Halloween night, I broke a 1,384 day stretch of sobriety by drinking a 24 ounce Tecate lager. Three weeks later a bottle similar to the one shown came crashing through one of the windows that faces Canal Street...mere coincidence, the Halloween thing...yet, why does stuff like this happen when psychedelic mushrooms are involved?]

Or I am thinking it might be someone who read a Facebook comment that I left, but, even though my address is easy to find through my online presence, it would be nearly impossible to look at the Sacred Heart building and be able to tell where my apartment was.

Or, it might have been just that I have hung some of my drawings in the window, to go with the big poster board of the tropical bird about to take flight.

I think a drunk person might just throw a bottle of Voodoo Ranger IPA, which he probably would have bought at the Holy Ground bar at the corner, and would have sipped down to where there was just an ounce left in it by about the time he arrived at my window, and might have thrown it just because, as a patron of that particular bar, he may have come to believe that every person living at Sacred Heart is the type of skeezer that they see almost daily, holding a sign right across the street or on one of the other corners, or, in the case of Brian, who lives here, begging for money "so I can get an ID, so I can get a job" from people using the same story (that one) over and over, until now every patron of that bar knows that Brian ain't getting no ID any time soon, so he can get a job any time soon.
Or, if the patron isn't wise, someone would surely nudge them in the ribs subtly and whisper "He's lying," or something. He's Lyin' Brian, after all. Brian's other story is that he has to feed his "chirren" (children) of which nobody here has ever seen hide nor hair of.
If the patron of the bar, who had spent 3 buck a bottle on that particular Voodoo Ranger ale without having read "9% alcohol" in the fine print, and that person had become "shitty" drunk, then they might look at the artwork in my window and throw the remainder of his ale through the glass, for reasons only understood by drunk. Maybe the person thought the drawings were done by Brian's chirrens.

But, the placement of the hole suggests that the bottle was not aimed directly at any one piece of artwork, but was thrown so as to miss anything that might prevent it from going all the way through the pane.

This introduces the theory that whomever threw it not only knew who lived there, but also where the bed is located, because the bottle came to rest just a couple feet short of the bed, where I indeed had been reclined.
And, would this person know that I typically slept in until about 1:30 PM (when the sun reached its zenith) and that I would indeed be in the bed that they might have been aiming for?

While the theories are running unbridled through my mind.
There is another remote possibility.
This came to mind because of the circumstances surrounding the last time I had a beverage thrown at me.
That was when I was jailed in Culpeper, Virginia.
It was an old building that housed the jail, and it was November and starting to become cold outside, below freezing most days.
I had been relegated to sleeping on the floor, as all of the bunks had been taken by inmates with more seniority.
At one point, though, a bunk opened up and I was told that it was kind of rightfully mine because I had been sleeping on the floor just about under it, ostensibly waiting for it to become available.
But, then I thought about how I had almost become comfortable on the floor, after having gotten an extra blanket, and how light streamed in through the front bars of the cell in such a way that allowed me to read all night if I wanted to, or to rotate my head to be facing the other way, to sleep all night, if I wanted to.
So, initially, I responded to the information "There's a bunk open, you should probably grab it," by saying that I didn't mind the floor, because I liked to read at night sometimes.
This information reached the ears of another inmate, a young skinny half Latino half white looking kid, who apparently had been quite anxious to get off the floor himself.

But, in the meantime, the other guys in my cell encouraged me to take the bunk, because, otherwise, it would become a crap shoot as to who might wind up in there.

And, there was the fact that we were about the only white guys in the block and that, we would be preserving that demographic if I took the bunk. Anyone new guy coming in, who would be relegated to the floor, would not necessarily be staying long, and the area under the bed would be kind of a revolving door for people who get bonded out, type of thing..

And so, I changed my mind and decided to take the bunk.

After fitting it with my blanket and pillow I was sitting on it, alone in the cell when I was suddenly hit on the side of the face and body, with what seemed to be cold coffee which had been thrown at me from out of a cup held by the kid who had been ready to take the bunk, before I had changed my mind.

There might have been a sentiment of "we don't want that kid in here (he bangs on the bars and raps in Spanish into the wee hours of the morning, or something)" as the impetus behind my cellmates talking me into taking the bunk, and the kid might have senses this personal slight against him.

But, my perception was that he was like a spoiled kid whose knee jerk reaction to being denied anything by anybody was to lash out. I thought about the kids his age who mug people and then wind up shooting them just because they only had 8 bucks in their wallet, when the kid had his heart set upon a hundred bucks and was already spending the money in his mind.
The idea being that, um, he was going to send a message to all the people everywhere that they had better do better than 8 bucks when it came their turn to be mugged by him, or suffer the consequences.
But, equally disturbing is the apparent belief that the victim was actually victimizing the robber in that way, carrying just 8 bucks so he could see the look on the face of anyone who might try to rob them, and that they were inwardly laughing at his stupid ass. "What are you going to do now, are you going to let him get away with just having 8 bucks, are you going to let him do that to you, make a joke out of you, or are you going to stand up for yourself and shoot him?" type of thing...
And, so I had cold coffee thrown on me after I changed my mind and took the bunk.
Fast forward 14 years and the beer bottle coming through the window immediately reminded me of that time. 


It's not out of the realm of possibility that someone in the front office had possibly told someone that there very well might be an apartment becoming available soon, because the guy living there, despite having had a few "final" warnings posted on his door informing him that the decision had been made to not renew his lease at the end of the year and yadda yadda...and the guy was hanging by a thread, and, knowing him, he would just procrastinate until such a time that he was physically evicted from the place by the management with the help of a sheriff's deputy.

And then, after being informed that the guy had come through and made a gargantuan effort to procure his own ID, without having relied upon any assistance from the "unfortunately, that fund has been used up" caseworkers from Catholic Social Services, or for a ride to the office of motor vehicles in the van owned by the same group and that, against his nature, had followed through with getting the thing, making two trips to the IRS office to get the required paperwork in the process; whomever it was might have, for lack of a cup of cold coffee, thrown the bottle through the window, thinking that I was in there, actively denying him, like the guy with only 8 bucks on him...

Or, it could have been totally random.

Or, it could have had something to do with Bobby in building C whom I have broken off communications with, since about a couple weeks ago when he had started dabbling with the heroin that the methadone he gets is supposed to keep him off of, after he sold too much of it (the methadone) which had put him in the state of withdrawals.

About a year ago, Bobby bought me a shiny new acoustic guitar.
That guitar turned out be be inferior in every way (except in appearance) to the Takamine that I had been playing every night.

Bobby puts a lot of stock into appearances. He kept referring to the slight damage that the Takamine has on one side of its body, when asking me "Don't you want to upgrade from that piece of junk?"

He said the same thing about my laptop (which is a refurbished one using an older case, but with a newer mother board, etc in it).
"Geez, when are you going to get a decent laptop; look at this dinosaur!?!" type of thing.

Well, about a year ago, Bobby wound up taking that guitar back from me, like an Indian giver...it didn't matter much because I wasn't playing the thing.
But, this year he gave me an Ibanez electric guitar that he supposedly got from a cousin or someone out in the swamp who wanted to trade it for weed.
So, Bobby paid for the guitar and gave it to me "no strings attached" he said (and excuse the pun) and so, when he showed up at my door a couple weeks ago, exhibiting the signs of a guy who was dope sick and at my place to take back anything he might have given me over the course of the year, I basically took diverse actions to elude him.

I hid the Ibanez in a closet, prepared to tell him that it was over Jacob's house because we were going to do recordings with it; and then I have avoided him in general.
I am waiting for the cycle to play out, when, after the season changes he will go back to being the old Bobby again. It has happened the past 3 years; the giving, the taking back. So many people seem to be stuck in patterns and on auto pilot that it might be best to not resist them.
Kind of like knowing that if you knock on someone's door in the morning they might be grumpy, but in the evening they will be in fine fettle.

That just about exhausts my theories about the beer bottle coming through the window at around 2:40 PM, Saturday.

There is a chance that I can go to the office tomorrow morning and have them try to look at the camera footage from that time and place and maybe even spot the culprit. But, that might also mean that I would have to call the police, wait for them to arrive for such a trivial matter, fill out a police report, and even then, would not be allowed to see the video myself -some rule they have, maybe to keep people from taking the law into their own hands, if they are sure from the video who the person is, while it might not give the police enough to make a positive identification; or, maybe you can see the person with the bottle, then see them running away without a bottle, but then have no way to absolutely prove what happened to the bottle in the meantime. The cops aren't allowed to use common sense, because a good lawyer would pick them apart on the stand, type of thing...

The Serial Novel

I now attempt to rewrite the story.

I am not going to worry about making sure that every section ends with some kind of cliff hanger; that's what has been holding up publication of it for weeks now.
I'm just going to write an arbitrary amount of words and the post it up with a "to be continued" after it.



Replacing the harmonica is going to be a bitter pill to swallow; it will require me going back out to play with just the guitar and my voice. I can expect only about 10 bucks an hour doing that, along with a good dose of humiliation.

People at least stopped yelling: "I can't hear you!" once I added the harmonica to the mix...

But, my immediate response to the situation is to want to take the whole day tomorrow to rewrite the chapter of the story.
  
In Other News

My apartment is on the list of those chosen as winners of a "turkey basket" of some sort, to be available for pickup on Wednesday morning, between 9 and 11 AM.

This is another example of them getting over on people by attrition.
If you are not there by 11 AM to pick up the turkey basket that you won, it will be given to "someone else."
So, they lay a trap for the over sleepers, the absent-minded, etc. Making stipulations that people might not adhere to and then waiting to pounce on the turkey baskets for themselves and their friends.
I wonder if I will get another bottle thrown through my window if I manage to make it down there Wednesday morning to get the thing.
There will certainly be people hovering around, already bickering among themselves as to how many of the unpicked up baskets each would be entitled to.

Black Grinners

By the way, after I got back to the Lilly Pad Friday night and discovered that my harmonica was lost, I said something to Jacob out loud like: "I can't find my harmonica!"
I supposed I instinctively glanced around, as if I might ask anyone in the area if they had seen it? I don't know...
But, there was an older black guy sitting on the stoop on the other side of the house, whom I might have seen around the block before.
He was sitting there with a big grin on his face.
It was as if he wanted me to know that he knew what happened to the harmonica and, most importantly, that it gave him great amusement what had happened to it, and he wanted me to know that it gave him great amusement.
I guess I'm happy now that I have never given any one of them a dollar or a cigarette.
Can you imagine it being your business to sit somewhere and wait for someone to come along and discover that he has lost something, so that you can make sure he knows that you think it's funny?
The guy sat there, as if thinking that we were going to have to call it a night and pack up.
He might have even been looking forward to asking: "Where your harmonica?!?" as I walked past.
I will leave it to you the reader to figure out why these certain black people (but not all of them, of course not all of them) always want to be there to see the reaction of a white guy to losing something or having something stolen.

There was another time that I had a guitar stolen that I had leaned against a wall as I was digging for food outside Rouses Market.
It was a guitar that I had broken the neck of which I had tried to fix with glue but was doubtful that the repair would work.
So, after I had dug some food out of the barrels and loaded it in my backpack, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the guitar was no longer leaning where it had been.
But, not 5 feet away there was a young black guy, maybe around 20, who was leaning against the wall looking as if he was about to pee himself from trying not to laugh.
Knowing that I was about to trash the guitar anyways, I walked past him nonchalantly, and never even glanced towards where the guitar had been.

He mumbled something as I passed. The grin was off his face. I had deprived him of some great satisfaction, it seemed.

Loss

The drinking:

I did this; that's all I can say...

In the back of my mind, I always wondered if "complete" abstinence, with regards to anything, was "the way to go."

I truly believed that the 2 and a half glasses of red wine that I had with my healthy meals just about every single night for years (meals that turned out to be pretty shining examples of the "keto" diet -mainly fish partly fried in olive oil, partly baked and partly smoked over either a red or white oak, or hickory wood fire with a lot of vinegar-based hot sauce poured over it, with a side of sauteed mushrooms, broccoli, onions, garlic, ) were a big contributor to the fact that, even though I was homeless, I could say: "At least I have my health."

But, then I also saw how the 3 quarter bottle of wine started turning into a whole bottle, and then how the brilliant idea of buying 3 liter jugs, at a cost of what amounted to about $2.50 a bottle, would save me all kinds of money, with the reasoning being that I was already spending about 6 bucks a day on a single bottle; so why not get a jug that would last 4 days?
I then saw the 3 liter bottle lasting only 2 and a half days; and then, it went from there.
I got to the point where I would black out, and would actually be proud of it: "What did we do last night?," I might ask my camp mate, Larry.

And, then I thought it was helping me musically, because, in order to improvise music, you have to shut down the rational, logical and critical thinking part of the mind, and, what better way than being so drunk that you are going to open your guitar case the next morning to discover money in it and assume, I must have played somewhere last night, and must have sounded OK...

But, there was no future in beer drinking. I can see that by looking at photos of myself from around the time I was with Karrie. Was my nose so red because I had been out in the sun all day, or did I have a cold and had just finished blowing my nose?

There was stuff in that cheap malt liquor that my body was merely tolerating. Perhaps the alcohol was sedating me and knocking me out so that I wasn't aware of the toxic accumulation of whatever, with the payoff being that I would have no inhibitions about setting up in front of some random store and busking away until a few dollars went into the jar, or the manager came out of the store to run me away. Of course this radical type of action kept the alcohol flowing...


But, it was Halloween night.
The night before, Jacob and I had busked and made nothing at all, as costumed people walked by, apparently hiding behind the anonymity of the costumes in order to not feel personally obliged to tip us; as if we would never be able to match their faces to their cheapness.

And, it was a cold night. I wasn't going to go out to play, even though on the surface it promised to be a good night.
And, somehow, it seemed like a big can of good beer would warm my blood (and release me from the ego driven count up of "days sober" which, in an of itself means little unless as a way to belittle hopeless alcoholics, or unless some blessings flow due to the sobriety).


That was a failure. The big can of beer was a downer from the sound of it opening, to the smell of the foam that rose from the opening, to the first taste of it (shouldn't the first beer in over 4 years be an epiphany of flavor?) to the buzz, which seemed like something I had improved upon with kratom, to the fact that, whatever I had been working on that night, went unfinished; and I probably got up in the middle of the night and shut the lights and the music off and saved whatever I had been writing, so that one more day without the publication of a chapter would go by...

The Serial Novel

The serial novel has taken on a life of its own.

After I tried to add some background stuff in between the first and second chapters, I wound up writing an entire chapter, so now the second one will become the third.

It's hard to arrange things so there is something like a cliff hanger at the end of each chapter.

Hopefully, after I ride my bike up to the market where I will get something to eat and maybe a cheap bottle of wine.

I am drinking again, after having bought a 24 ounce can of Tecate beer on Halloween night, which was a very cold one, which I wound up staying in for. The consumption of the beer was enlightening.
The taste didn't impress me, even though it was my first one in over 4 years.
And I was plagued by a mild outbreak of eczema, over the next 12 hours or so, after waking up with a headache -something I almost never get.
But, wine is on the menu for tonight.
I got the ID.
It wound up being $22.50.
I had to use social engineering in order to have my correct address affixed to the thing.
At first, the lady balked at accepting the envelope with my address handwritten on it.
I don't have any utility bills or phone bills sent to me.

The only copy I could find has the Lilly Pad cropped out (far left)

She was going to put the old address of The Rebuild Center on it, which is something that she said she could do (and then you can change it in the future [for another $22.50])
But, while chatting with her and telling her the whole story of my getting the apartment and the government phone, and being able to show her the spot where I busked by pointing to a picture of Alan Toussaint which was hanging on the wall at the place, with him posing in front of Lafitt's.
And, after she scrolled through my phone, trying to find some mention of my current address in there (in the "my account") section, while I yapped away; she finally saw a congruence between everything I was yapping about and the photos and text messages in the thing.
She asked me how I had gotten there; probably while reading a note from Jacob asking me if I wanted a ride to the ID place the next day.
"My friend, Jacob gave me a ride here..."
And, seeing such things as the picture of Jacob and I (the party animalz one) I guess tipped the scale in favor of her going ahead and putting my current address on the thing, despite only having a handwritten envelope as evidence of such.

Dollars Holding Up Pennies

• Serial Novel Delay
• Life, In The Meantime

The Louisiana State ID

So, the assault upon getting a State ID boils down to this:
Tomorrow morning, I must get on my bike and ride about 3.5 miles to the Office of Motor Vehicles. About halfway there, I will pass the Uxi Duxi (bottom right).

Then, I must produce anywhere between $16 and $40 in order to obtain a Louisiana State ID.

I lost my ID almost a year ago.

I had a certain pair of jeans which had its back pockets sewn in such a position and at such and angle that, when I rode my Trek Calypso bike, the wallet would work its way out of the back pocket as I rode, and fall onto the street behind me about a mile along my journey.

It's funny because, The Trek had been given to me after the bike I had before it was stolen. I guess the lost wallet was the hidden cost of it. I had no idea that the big, wide, flat and comfortable seat on that particular "cruiser," combined with that cheap pair of jeans, would do that



But, the ID was expired, anyway.

Plus, it had the address of the homeless shelter on Gravier Street on it, instead of Sacred Heart, where I have been procrastinating for almost 5 years over getting a change of address.

Part of the reason it has been taking me so long, recently, to get the thing has to do with the ambiguity over how much it will cost.
I have been ready to go to the place a few times, when I had lesser amounts of money,  but then hesitated after hearing different things from different people.

Changing the address is a a good idea.

Many people in New Orleans know that my previous address was "the address of the homeless" that would make it harder for me to do things like cash checks, open bank accounts, and stay out of jail.

A homeless person who needs a mailing address, ostensibly so he can get an ID and then a job; and then back on his feet; can use the address of The Rebuild Center to help fill in that blank.
But it is just as likely that the some person needs a mailing address, so he can apply for government benefits, and free phones, etc.

This is a red flag for a lot of people, despite their best efforts at being politically correct, and all that, and there is definitely a stigma around 8304 Gravier Street in New Orleans.

A cop, seeing that address on an ID would immediately wonder: "Yeah, but where do you really stay?"

That would be a waste of that particular aspect of the resource that an apartment is.

Anyone knows, from listening to The Who song: "Who Are You?" that people -even those passed out drunk- are often offered the opportunity to go and sleep at home, that night, if they can get up and walk away.

Having the right address on my ID could potentially explain to the authorities what I am doing in the crack neighborhoods that are around Sacred Heart ...I live right over there, I'm just cutting through; going home; paying into the system, even if indirectly...type of thing.

So the change of address is a must.
And so am going to go there, armed with enough money to cover whatever exorbitant amount they can dream up. ...You, um, let more than a year go by before renewing, and so it's gonna be... type of thing

The ID is necessary because I must go to the IRS and get a "non filing" letter of some sort, so that I can re-certify my lease application at Sacred Heart. And, they won't even let me into the IRS building without a photo ID.

The Sacred Heart office staff have been sending me increasingly ominous reminders that I needed to get them that particular letter.

I am taking their warnings with a grain of salt, considering the residents here that they have to deal with.

My least doesn't technically end until the end of the year, and I'm sure that the office people begin their efforts at hounding people in order to get their paperwork in order, well in advance of that. Like in late September, when they first notified me.

But, the last letter that I got made mention of my making arrangements to remove my property from the place, because everything left behind after a certain date will be thrown away, type of thing.

I noticed that it hadn't been signed at the bottom where there was a blank intended for the signature of the property manager, and figured that was just a scare tactic, as was other language in the letter like the: "We wish you well wherever you wind up," at the bottom.

It was enough to get me to go down and talk to them and promise them that I would have the IRS letter by the end of this coming week, and so, I shouldn't be evicted.

Why is there a voice in my head that keeps whispering: "Get evicted, become homeless, travel the country busking, find adventure; make this blog more interesting, dammit!!"?

Now off I go to polish up the second chapter of the serial novel. It was supposed to be just a bridge to the third chapter, which I thought was where the most interesting stuff was, but, I have dredged up enough memories of that interim period so that the second chapter is expanding.


70 Dollar Sunday

Jacob and I went out and made around 70 bucks Sunday night.

It was a Sunday night before the holiday of Veteran's Day, and so, not a typical Sunday, but it was interesting, and I'm going to make an effort to post some audio here.

Part of the problem is that we have almost 3 hours of music from which I want to distill maybe 10 minutes of a sample of.

Then, I can worry about adding horn or string sections later...

Serial Novel, Chapter One: Amarijuana Park

When I was 35, I married a Russian lady in Jacksonville, Florida.

The picture (left) which started out as me messing around with a chapter in the Photoshop for imbeciles book (and might be evidence of my having not quite mastered the techniques taught therein, especially the "feathering" part) gave me the idea to write this story, because they -the Russian looking girls- reminded me of the year leading up to that grand union, when I was Photoshopped into the Karakov family.

It was the joining, in matrimony, of the half sister of a Russian oligarch, with ties to the Golden ADA jewelry store in San Francisco, which fenced diamonds and gold from the Soviet National Treasury for Boris Yeltsin and, um, me.

And, after much fretting over the decision, I have chosen to back the story up about a year and tell it from there.

1996

In 1996, I was living in a trailer, in a park on the west side of Jacksonville.

Americana Mobile Home Park, on Townsend Road.

"We call it A-marijuana Mobile Home Park, cause everyone in here, just about, smokes, it," said Brett, the 14 year old son of Mr. Goetzinger, a man who "had a trade" and was thus able to support a wife and 4 other children, besides Brett, in a pretty decent double-wide that had two bathrooms.

I was in a pretty nice 1984 model single-wide, which had, as its only visible damage, at the time it was shown to me, a slight wrinkle in the contour of the ceiling of "the master bedroom," as if some heavy person had stood on the roof of the dwelling above that spot and jumped up and down.

After a year of trailer park life, it seems to me very likely that it was something like that which happened.

In fact, I can picture it.

The girlfriend of a guy from another trailer wasn't home when he came home early from the bar after the pool tournament had been cancelled because someone dumped a whole pitcher of beer on it, during a scuffle (with a woman! mind you, who held her own, surprisingly) and they had to keep a fan blowing on it to dry it, which would not have worked out well for the tournament, because altercations would arise over missed shots being blamed on the fan: "Now you saw that ball heading right for the pocket, before the fan blew it off course, Cletus! Don't try to say otherwise, or I'll break this stick over your head!" type of thing.

So the guy pulls up earlier than usual for a Wednesday night, having only hung around long enough to drink his usual amount of Busch beer, just without them having been spaced out over the duration of a pool tournament, and so he is drunk, as is usual, but more drunk than usual.

When he gets to his trailer, his girlfriend isn't there.

He begins to strongly suspect that she is with the guy who used to live in the trailer that I was being shown (before he defaulted on the payments, due to the ludicrous terms of his rent-to-own contract, but more on that later).
He is soon wailing on the front door with his fists, yelling something like "I know you're in there, Linda! I know you're in there 'cause you f***ed up when you left your boots by our front door! If you were going to your mom's in the other park like you said you might, you would 'a wore your boots, 'cause o' that snake you saw that one time, remember the snake, Linda !?! I know you didn't go far 'cause you left your boots, now come outta there, right now!!"


Then, after pounding on the door produced no Linda, it would have been perfectly normal Americana Mobile Home Park behavior for him to have climbed up on the roof of the thing, and then jumped up and down over where the master bed was.
In case Linda hadn't heard him at the front door.

I would have figured that out immediately upon seeing the creases in the ceiling, had I already lived in the park for the year and a half that I eventually would. It would have made perfect sense.


Linda trying to shush, let's call him Ed, who had been giggling right along with her under the covers, trying not to laugh aloud as Cletus was battering the front door, but who was now ready to jump up and yell: "Hey, get off my roof, or I'll come out there and shoot you off with my 12 gauge!"

"Shush, Ed!"

"He's f*** up my roof, Linda! I can't afford to pay no one to fix it!"

"He'll kill me if he finds out I'm in here, Ed!"

"Damn, I wish you wore your boots, Linda!"

Yes, it's easy for me to imagine, now. Cletus was f***ing up my roof, it turns out...

But, I had never lived in a trailer park, nor had I ever bought a trailer before.


I would wind up wondering who was worse, some of the people who live in trailers, or the shysters who sell trailers. I can't really say that I would never do it again, but, I had been pretty happy living in my '84 Corolla, which I had paid $1,400 cash for, not thinking that it would ever become a status symbol for me. 


A Year In A Car

It was a car that I had lived in for about a year, delivering pizza with it, while accumulating what would become the down payment on the trailer, which sat squarely in the middle of lot #60, surrounded only by scorched grass.

A lot of the other lots had had been landscaped with such things as awnings over driveways, plastic replicas of pelicans and/or flamingos sticking up from lawns which were not scorched, shrubs around the trailer, above ground pools in the back, maybe a hot tub, trees to provide shade from the scorching sun, and details such as welcome mats.

Trailer number 60 was just sitting there with not so much as a plastic flamingo, as if it had just been abandoned there to fend for itself.

I had gotten the misconception that I just had to get into some kind of place and get out of living in my car, as soon as possible. I hadn't been homeless enough to realize that, in a lot of ways, it is preferable to bearing the burden of keeping "a roof" over one's head. I had been swayed by idiots who had roofs over their heads by such arguments as: "You can't just live in your car; don't you want a place to call your own?"
I should have given that question more careful consideration before I responded to an ad in the paper for a "Trailer in nice west side park, rent to own, $375/mo."

It is exactly those members of society, brainwashed by such notions as "you can't just live in your car" who become victimized by the "investors" of the world.

Life in the Corolla, had meant that, after I was done delivering pizza, I could roll around to the back of the store and park the thing in a nice dark spot, where I would sleep like a baby, knowing that I would wake up with my entire wages, plus tips still in my pocket, and that I wouldn't have to write any checks for almost a grand every month, payable to any such "investor."

Me sleeping behind the Dominos where I worked provided the owner with an additional measure of security, for free, which made him happy.

And the manager had, always on call, a driver who could be woken up or interrupted in playing his guitar along with a Grateful Dead CD, whenever some other driver couldn't make it in, and who could be in uniform and ready to go, maybe after washing up in one of the huge stainless steel sinks in the back of the store.

Other drivers, who might have been high school kids, working a few hours so they could dispose of their income any way they wanted, because they were still freeloading off their parents, who were full of rosy hued expectations of how grand life was going to be once they graduated from college, might have shaken their heads at the sight of me toweling my hair off in the back of the store. Certainly, I had gone wrong somewhere...


But, the almost thousand dollars a month which I was not paying to a landlord tended to accumulate in my wallet, as my only expenses were those of keeping a car on the road, which entails more than the future graduate might realize.


The $400, or so, that I was making each week went towards a gym membership, where I would go upon waking in the late mornings, to get in a good workout, while consuming high calorie, high protein, high energy, multi vitamin drinks that were a hell of a lot better for me than anything I might have nuked in a microwave in a dwelling.

After a hot shower, that came with the membership, I would shave and put on clean clothes and hit the streets cleaner than a lot of people who lived in houses.
Especially those who were conserving hot water, trying to keep their energy bills down, so they might be able to make their mortgage payment that month.

I would clean and vacuum out the car at least once a week, so it wouldn't look lived in, and it had a state of the art stereo system in it, all paid for with money that wasn't going to an investor (investing in my stupidity).

My standard of living was high. It was common for me to have over a thousand dollars in my pocket, at any given time, maybe because I had gotten so busy with work and sleep that I hadn't had time to spend it.

It was a fallacy, the notion that I needed to be on the lookout for some kind of place that I could afford. Why, so I could avoid the derision of high school kids without a clue about life, who probably had rude awakenings coming after they graduated with degrees in "computer science" around the year 2000?

"Wouldn't it be nice to sleep in a bed, and be able to get up and go to the refrigerator anytime you're hungry, and to have a couch to sit on and watch TV and...?" was a common thing I would be asked.

It would be nice to have a music studio, I might admit to them.

If I had that to do over again, I probably would have continued to sleep in my car and to work until I had enough to put at least 50% down on a house with land. Then I would become somewhat of an investor, myself.

The rent to own thing had been a mistake. Or at least the way it went down had been.

I didn't figure out until it was too late that the business model of the guy who "sold" it to me was designed for me to fail.

I think he wanted people to rent his trailers, and make payments thinking that they would own the place one day, and then mess up. That way he could reset the principle back to the original amount, then look for another sucker to put in the place.

I don't want to make this post about shysters in the real estate game, but this guy, who had a huge ass, like you see on some black women, was a scoundrel.

The first time I met him, at the trailer, after seeing his ad in the paper, which made the place look very affordable at $375 per month, I had $2,000 in my pocket as a potential down payment.

His price, to buy the trailer outright was $7,500.

Or a sucker could start paying $385 per month, and wind up owning the thing in something like 5 years. Or, more likely, not.

By then, its book value would probably be about $4,000. Nothing seems to depreciate like last year's model of mobile home. But, lard butt wouldn't have mentioned that to me.

The math worked out to the sucker paying off the $7,500 principle over the course of 5 years.
I would imagine that his interest rate was as high as whatever was allowed by Florida law.


I met him at the trailer with the $2,000 in my pocket.

I had done my own math and determined that, putting two grand down would leave a principle balance of $5,500, which I further determined that I could knock out in more like 3 and a half years, with considerably less interest accruing.

He walked like a steamboat. One with an ultra wide keel. With the chugging of the paddles being his steps and him carrying his head like it was a bust of it in some museum. He resembled to me, Billy Casper, who played pro golf back in the 70's

I told the guy that I had $2,000 to put down.

"OK," he said.

Then, he produced, from a briefcase, an amortization table which had already been tabulated based upon a person putting 2 thousand down. ...had I mentioned that amount when I first called him...I don't think so...

It had the selling price of the trailer (that he would supposedly sell outright for $7,500) at $10,800 with the 2 thousand down and the monthly payments all figured in.

I balked.

"You mean, putting 2 thousand down makes the price of the trailer go up $3,300?"

I started to tell him that, I had figured that I could knock the balance down to $5,500 and that I also figured that I would be able to afford the thing, based upon that.

The guy seemed to become irritated.

"I know this might be your first time purchasing something like this, so let me tell you how it works..."

He then went on to explain how "money over time" is worth more than cash in hand.

And that, since he could conceivably get $7,500 for the trailer the next day, should a buyer come along, but he would have to wait 5  years for my payments to come trickling in, take the risk of relying upon me to make regular payments, then, yeah, the trailer was now worth $3,300 more.

To this day, I haven't actually researched to see how much of that was bullshit.

But, I was a fool, and, knowing that it was my first time purchasing such a thing, he had laid out a trap for such a fool; but this is all in hindsight, of course.

I told him that I would need time to reconsider the deal, since I hadn't known about "money over time."

Then, I learned another life lesson.

He became more irritated.

He said: "Listen, I drove all the way over here from the beach (25 miles) and turned on the air conditioning an hour before your arrival, so it would be comfortable in here, because I thought you were serious about us doing business here!

Now you're telling me that I wasted my time and my gas and you were just pulling my chain!!" or words to the effect of the chain part...

His ass was almost 3 feet wide inside his designer shorts, to go with his XXXX Polo shirt.

He was dressed like a pro golfer on the "Champions" tour (the only group of senior citizens that the sports world inexplicably cares about). He had driven his Lexus all the way from the beach, where some of the most expensive homes in Jacksonville are.

In my mind, to this day, in my weaker moments, I go back in time and re write the scene to have me saying something to the effect of: I thought the real estate business involved a lot of showing properties to people, and very little selling.
Don't you pop a champagne cork and take the wife out to dinner to celebrate after you close a deal?

Had I said that, though, he would probably try the low ball comeback of saying that it wasn't a quarter million dollar home we were talking about, but a trailer in a west side Jacksonville park.

But, the guy kind of convinced me that that was just how the rent to own business worked, and that he wasn't a ripoff. And I had half a mind to believe him. I should have at least talked to some of the other people in the park, who might have given me some insight; even if it meant that lard butt would have to make another whole drive all the way from his beach side home to turn the air conditioner on early.

I really wanted the trailer at that point, because I was starting to envision a music studio, where I could record stuff, after coming home from work, until the sun came up.

I could plop my 386 computer running DOS, on the rug of an otherwise empty room, making it the computer room, at the opposite end of where I would plop a bare mattress down in another one, making it a bedroom.

I saw it all flash briefly through my mind.


And, I signed on the dotted line; he had turned the air conditioning on an hour before my arrival, after all.

And soon thereafter, up walked Brett Goetzinger, who asked me "Are you moving in?" and that was when he tole me that everybody called the place A-marijuana Mobile Home Park.

The Goetzingers were the upper class of the park.

The van with the company name and logo on it (plumbing, was it?) in the driveway said it all. It seemed to be wearing their satellite dish like an expensive bow if seen from the right angle.

They were a nuclear family which just may have, on its own, made up the entire 7.5% or whatever it was of the park inhabitants whose status was "legally married," and which went to a Catholic church every Sunday, and sent it's 5 kids to Catholic Schools..

When they weren't suspended.

Having a vehicle of any kind (registered and insured and with all your tickets paid off, because the cops on the other side of the bridge will find an excuse to check, in short order) on the west side of Jacksonville, was like having wings to fly where all the ripest, most edible fruit is growing out of the sides of cliffs.

You could basically live real cheap on the west-side and, every day, drive your vehicle across the 3.7 mile Buckman Bridge, where you would be in a world where people lived in big houses and, among the ever expanding variety of businesses, in one of the continuous rows of strip malls could be found a store which dealt only in flags. It was "Flags Unlimited," or something; right next to a scuba gear store.

These were (those) flags that you stick in front of a big house on one side of the walkway to tell the world, usually often which college you graduated from, that seemed to convey a sentiment such as: I went to the University of Kentucky, and look at MY house, maybe next door to a house with one that implied: despite this big house, we are down home, simple and pure people, who believe in God -the One symbolized on the flag, that is....

People would pull up in to that particular store, on that side of the river, in high-end SUVs and go in (after making sure the mortgage had been paid, and that the kids had food to put in their stomachs, I'm assuming) to buy flags. Not just any flags, Flags Unlimited ones, at something like 50 bucks a pop.

They could even buy smaller ones to attach to the sides or tops of those same vehicles to flap along wherever they went.

By contrast, on the west side, a redneck (without a vehicle) would be sweating his way, in holy sneakers, up the imaginatively named 103rd Street to one of the few little run down stores within a mile of his trailer, where the wares would be a lot of cigarettes and beer and lottery tickets, but, sorry, no scuba tank regulators, you'd have to go over the river to get something like that...

But, he can't because he has no car, and they will take you to jail in a heartbeat if they see you walking across the Buckman Bridge, and cops patrol it, sure they do. just like I now patrol the bathroom area of my current residence for roaches that might be attempting to enter via the drain pipes.

And, since he can't get across the bridge, he is relegated to the limited prospects that the west side of Jacksonville had to offer, to someone without a vehicle.

Nothing like the wages that a guy on the other side of the river might make, for sitting in an air conditioned room and saying: "Welcome to Scuba Unlimited!" a few times a day.

As a pizza deliveryman, with a job on the other side of the river, I was doing well,  by trailer park standards.

I'm sure that this aspect of Jacksonville's economy, plays itself out in any other city that has a huge river to conveniently divide the haves and have-nots into easily manageable sections.

Other cities will use railroad tracks, if they have them, as this demarcation.

And any kind of hill will tend to draw the wealthy to the higher elevations, while the less fortunate flounder in the valley.

But, it is also something of a rite of passage, when a man born into humble beginnings, such as a trailer park on the west side, is able to get himself a valid license and a vehicle and maintain that vehicle, without one of the myriad things that can go wrong with such a venture sinking that venture (as if into the St. John's river) can weather the storms, not be dragged down, and can show up every day sober and ready to ply his trade.

This was regarded as if Level One, if you will, in the eyes of a lot of the community.

Level Two would be having done something about the two missing front teeth and being ready for the air conditioned room, I suppose.

So, here, I will pause, with myself having moved into a trailer park in the spring of 1996, and will continue the story, which has already been written, as soon as I decide upon the chronology I want to use. I don't want too many spoilers.

Do I get even with lard butt? You will have to read on....