An Untitled Life in Bullets: Part II

PART II

The Byronic hero was popularized by Lord Byron. They can be an anti-hero, anti-villain or just a villain. They tend to be rebellious, arrogant, anti-social, exiled. They are always darkly romantic. Heathcliff, Lucifer, Jay Gatsby, Bond. They are mad and dangerous to know.

“You are a beautiful man. I imagine you roaming inside of your lofty aerie, dark and brooding, tortured, obsessive, wearing your tragedies like a cloak. There’s violence in your words but your strong passions belie a certain tenderness.” – a fan, 2015

The first time I knew betrayal I was five. A bunch of us were playing in the sandbox at a friend’s house. We were jumping off a swing into the sand. When my turn came a boy threw an entire bucket of sand into my eyes. I fell in agonizing pain with a blood curdling scream.It was if a thousand needles had been pushed into my eyes. I was rushed to the ER. I was terrified and in excruciating pain. I heard panic in the adult’s voices. I remember my cold skin on the gurney and the doctor forcing my jagged eyelids open. They gave me a shot of something.

I don’t remember the procedure, but my eyes ended up in bandages for weeks. I lived as a blind person dependent on those who could see. I dropped a small toy in the yard and my mother couldn’t find it. I became frustrated with the people around me as I adapted to my situation.

The terrifying feeling of possibly being permanently blind was overwhelming for a five-year-old. I remember being frustrated and envious of those who could see. They all seemed stupid. I never let on that I thought that about them. I went through all of that with pained patience. Eventually the bandages were removed, and I successfully healed. I never found my toy. I learned an early valuable life lesson about trust and betrayal. It always amazes me the fucked-up shit people do to each other for no reason. Perhaps the kid was an idiot, perhaps malicious.

The takeaway is always known who you have waiting for you when you jump off the swing. That’s a powerful life lesson. We let so many people into our lives who disappoint us. I’m guilty of it and so are you. We’re all guilty. Hold on to those who are loyal and have your back.

“You are not a nice person.” she said coldly. “I know. I realize that now. Upon reflection I’ve recognized the fallacies I live under. The self-image of a kind, just, honorable man is often incongruent with my actions. We are complex, we are not black and white, but rather grey.”

My Dad struggled with alcoholism. He hid bottles around the house and my mother would find them and pour them out. I remember the cops talking to him about damage to his car and he insisted he wasn’t driving. He was a mean drunk. The arguments between my parents were bad.

When I was seven in Scotland, I was at a bar with him. I jokingly told him to shut up. He slapped me so hard across the face that my ears rang for hours. I never told him to shut up ever again, even when he was old. I tried to avoid him when he was drinking, which was often.

I was jumped by three Norwegian kids in the bathroom. My Dad was enraged that I didn’t fight back. He was drunk and insisted on teaching me how to barfight. The broken beer bottle tactic was my favorite next to the elbow to the teeth. I was eight. My mother said he made me a man.

Years later I went to a football game with him. I was ten. He drank throughout the entire game. He brushed a car on the way home. My parents argued as I went to bed. He went into a rage and destroyed the living room, bookcases on the floor. I cried myself to sleep hating him.

Later that year he contracted malaria in Guatemala and almost died. The doctor told him to stop drinking because of the quinine. He never touched another drop. His gambling problems were another story. I hate bringing all of this up, but it’s relevant. I loved that bastard.

He was born on a farm in Oklahoma in 1939. His father left the family, and he was raised by an abusive stepfather. His father was a Cherokee Indian. His mother was white. He lied about his age at 15 and joined the Air Force where he was a crew chief for cargo planes. His mother and stepfather had two boys and a girl during their marriage. His oldest half-brother went to Vietnam as a medic. He came back a drug addict and drifted from town to town. He tried to clean up and worked briefly as a nurse in Sacramento before being fired in the 80’s. When he was in his 60’s he was found beaten and left for dead in a frozen ditch in Oklahoma. They had to amputate all his fingers and toes. It was a drug deal gone bad. My Mom and Dad helped him financially. After her death he loved with my dad for a while but was abusing him. My dad kicked him out. After my dad’s death I found broken things around the house. Some things were of sentimental value. I got the impression that there were many arguments in the last year of my dad’s life. I was living in San Francisco with a new family and career.

To this day I don’t know what happened to my dad’s half-brother. Some say they’ve seen him with his white hair and beard, ragged, walking down a country road in Oklahoma. I imagine he must be dead at this point. His other half-brother was my favorite. He had long hair and reminded me of one of the Allman Brothers. He married young and had a beautiful daughter. Tragedy struck when he was 25 and the big rig, he was driving had a head on collision with another truck. He was killed instantly.

My Dad’s sister was beautiful. She moved to California and married a Sheriff’s Deputy in Sacramento. She is an RN for Kaiser. They never had children together, but she helped raise his two kids. Her husband is retired, and they spend their time skiing in Lake Tahoe and traveling.

My Dad’s father left his family in 1940 or so when my dad was a baby. I’m not sure the exact details of his dad’s life but I do know he was a hobo living and running off the trains in the Southwest. In 1946 the family received word that he had been killed in Douglas, Arizona.

I’m simply amazed at my dad’s meteoric rise humble beginnings. From being raised on a small farm in rural Oklahoma to running multiple billion-dollar oil exploration sites for major corporations in Libya, Algeria, Guatemala, and even the government of Saudi Arabia among others. When he was a teenager, he worked as a bootlegger for a local millionaire. He would run illegal alcohol into dry counties in a fast car. He told of how the local police were in on the scheme, seizing alcohol from rivals and passing it to my dad from the back of the station.

He dropped out of High School in 10th grade to join the Air Force. His birth certificate had been lost in a fire. He claimed to be 17 and forever would claim to be two years older. When he left the Air Force, he married and worked as a truck driver after considering police work.

He had two different color eyes, one brown and one blue. The blue one was put out during an accident when he worked briefly in the oil industry. A machinery problem prompted him to climb down into a pit and while he was working a pipe fell onto his face, crushing his eye-socket. He left and became a truck driver. He married and had four children. A boy and girl twins and two boys. While running his route in rural Oklahoma he came upon a blonde woman whose car had broken down. He gave her a ride, talked and they exchanged phone numbers. She was married.

They would talk off and on when they could throughout the next year. He was always on the road and would call her at home. One day she told him she was leaving her husband and asked him if he could help her get away for a while with her two boys. He was a kind man. He agreed.

That woman was my mother. One morning she packed us all up in the car and told us we were going camping. We met my future stepdad at a hotel and spent the next six weeks on the road with him in his truck until the Highway Patrol in New York caught them and he sent us back by cab.

My mother’s parents were wealthy. They owned a large ranch in the Creek Nation Capital near Tulsa. After we returned to stay with my grandparents, we got word that my dad had a serious accident which left him injured. It wasn’t long before we were living with him in Louisiana. We lived on a bayou South of New Orleans. He found a job working for a major offshore oil exploration company as a mechanic for their ship’s engines. He would occasionally be required to go out to sea. After a few years he worked his way back into exploration.

He took a promotion in Algeria to what they call in the industry ‘Tool Pusher’. We moved to Palma de Mallorca, Spain and he would work 30 days on in Algeria and home for 30 days in Palma. It was a different sort of lifestyle. I remember the bell bottoms, the bars, and pinball. We befriended two brothers who owned the ABC Bar and Grill near our home. We lived in the waterfront. They would have a roasted pig in the front window with sunglasses and a cigarette in its mouth. I ordered what I thought was onion rings and tried calamari for the first time.

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It was a lifetime ago when she left California. She had just graduated High School and had gotten herself sideways with a drug addiction. She wanted to leave the fast lane for a little while and get cleaned up. There was no better place than her grandparents place in rural Texas. Her grandfather was crazy. He lived with his wife in a trailer on ten acres outside of Livingston. Her grandmother had a heart of gold and endured his crazy rants. They spent their days on the golf course after he retired from the aircraft manufacturing industry in California

The neighbor kid would come over and mow her grandparent’s extensive property. He didn’t think much of her. They knew each other since she was six years old. He used to poke fun at her make up and call her Wednesday Adams when they were teens. He was three years older than her. He was a medium sized fish in a small pond. Although he was provincial, he was popular with the local girls. Intelligent, he could hold his own. She was well read, having been influenced by her paternal grandmother’s extensive rare book collection. They inevitably started talking

They were heading to a party. They bought some 40’s of beer. His sister was driving the old Chevrolet pickup on the narrow two-lane road when a car swerved toward them. The truck rolled three times. Miraculously no one was seriously injured. Beer and glass were all in their hair.

They landed in a local farmer’s front yard and the family came out to check on them. They were shaken when the farmer invited them in the house. The neighbor kid spoke with the police as the tow truck came to haul away the wreckage. They were left with scrapes and bruises. Their romance took off and they were married a year later. He was 22 and she was 19. He had just enlisted in the Army as a communications tech. After a long separation while he was in training they moved to Augusta, Georgia and they played at house, trying to build their lives.

She studied and became a hair stylist. She made lots of friends. He was more of a homebody. He would sometimes try to keep her from going out with her friends. He would spend a lot of time on maneuvers in the field leaving her free to go out and party. Life was good for them. After three years their marriage showed signs of strain. His jealously and attempts to control her wore her thin. She felt trapped. To exacerbate matters, he got orders for Korea. This was a yearlong hardship duty. She couldn’t accompany him. When he left, she moved to California.

She quickly fell into her old patterns. She began to party with her friends. She cheated on him. She felt guilty and called and told him the next day. They officially separated. She carried on as if she was single and had several relationships. She fell back into drug addiction. She spent a couple of stints in rehab, but she always fell back into old habits. A year had gone by, and her husband was coming back to Texas. She was at a low point and reluctantly agreed to return to try and work things out. They moved in together and made efforts to start again.

He developed an alcohol addiction in Korea. He got alcohol psychosis from his father. They would argue and he would trash the house, threaten her cat. He was possessive, violent, and jealous. So much so men laughed at him at a pool hall when he thought they were checking her out. Before she moved back to Texas, she had told her boyfriend that she had to leave. He was devastated. She was able to turn off her emotions. She had another affair while in Texas. Her lover would call her house and her husband knew what was going on. At that point they were done. She ended up breaking things off with her lover. She would see him staring at her and her husband as they drove by his home.

Her husband was unaware of their connection. He just received word that he was going to be promoted to sergeant. The wives were invited to watch the hazing. They pinned the new rank on their collars hitting the metal insignia hard with fists, driving the pins into the collarbone. Then they made the soldiers walk through a gauntlet where fellow soldiers would punch them. Next, they were made to do push-ups while pouring beer on them. That night they had a party at their place. Somehow the subject of penis piercings came up. She said she didn’t like it because it clanked her teeth. They asked him if he had his penis pierced. Glaring at her he simply said “no”. They later argued into the night. About a month later she went with a friend to a roadside bar outside of the city limits. The place was called ‘Sandy’s’. It was a sprawling place with outside sand volleyball pits and several bars. That night Sandy’s wasn’t very busy. It was a Thursday. They were getting hit on.

So that’s how we met. I was with a buddy, and I asked her and her friend over to our table. Her and my buddy seemed to hit it off and I backed off. I didn’t care much for her friend. You know, she was one of those obnoxious Texans, ignorant and judgmental and proud of it. I was 29 and she was 23. She thought I was too old for her. My buddy and her came to a party at my house and he left because she was ignoring him. She and I talked on the back porch for a while before she decided she was hungry. I didn’t have anything, so we went to Whataburger.

We hooked up back at my place. My roommate, a beautiful woman from Guyana, walked in on us in the living room. We went upstairs. The next day I had to go to the field for maneuvers. I was a Cavalry Scout in an elite Army recon platoon. I didn’t expect to ever see her again.

Two weeks later I returned. She left several messages on my answering machine. I liked her. I had never met anyone like her. She had that California girl accent. We went for drinks then back to my place. We made plans for the next day, but she called saying she couldn’t make it. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Out” she said. “No, you’re not.” She saw beer bottles lined up on the bar of their place. He had been drinking all day. They argued. He hit her with his fist. She left the apartment. He came after her with a shotgun and pulled her back by her hair

Late in the evening she came knocking on my door. She had been crying. “Can I stay with you?” she asked, fighting off the tears. I told her she could stay with me until things blew over. I didn’t realize it then, but I would never leave her side for the next twenty years.

A neighbor had seen the scuffle in the parking lot with the shotgun and called the police. He was questioned. They had to go together that week for counseling and the counselor saw the bruises. That afternoon military police came and arrested him. He was ordered to live apart. They divorced. We moved into a place together for the remaining six months of my time in the Army. After living in California, we ended up getting jobs in Oklahoma and were married two years later in a resort town in Arkansas. Ten months after we moved to the desert Southwest.

I’ve worked in California for the better part of two decades. Both of my daughters were born there. I’ve taken long-term work assignments that took me to places like St. Simon’s Island, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Washington, DC; Arizona, New Mexico, and the Netherlands.

...and they all lived happily ever after. Isn’t that how it is supposed to go? Admittedly it was happy for years. I don’t know if I changed, or she did. Perhaps I saw too much, became too cold. I’ve seen hell. Perhaps I became too distant in the name of survival. Too cruel.

Something happened that December when we came back from Death Valley. It was an event that nearly broke me. Perhaps it did. It made me aware of how brutally short life is when death comes without warning, without mercy. Senseless. Random. Final. The endings of unfinished lives.

The following winter I left my wife. I suppose I could blame stress from my work. I could blame a lack of respect we allowed to enter our relationship during the prior past few years. I could accuse her of emotional abuse, of not caring enough. Perhaps she could say the same. I left her for another woman and told myself it was because I was treated poorly; that our level of communication and intimacy had broken down. I could blame  depression, situational or otherwise. In the end I was just a selfish asshole who fell for a younger woman.

In the end we make a choice to either deal with the pain and darkness of life or use it for a crutch. Pain is too often a sympathetic excuse for behaving horribly and hurting others if they don’t look too closely. In the end you own your actions and can’t blame the pain on others.

The following summer I moved to Virginia just outside of Washington DC. My lover followed me. My youngest chose to stay with me there while my oldest remained in California with her mother. I put my soon to be ex-wife through nursing school so that she could start a career.

I remember my parents fucking around on each other. When we lived in Malta my dad was away much of the time for work. During his absence my mother took on other lovers. I remember some guy banging on the door in the middle of the night, exasperated, as she hid in her bedroom. I remember hanging out with my mother and her “friend” at a local bar. I told him that I thought he drank too much. He flipped out and told her to tell me children are best seen and not heard. I was ten years old, but I knew an asshole when I saw one. He was also married. She had an affair with our housekeeper’s husband. She would take him to the beach with my brother and me. He was a dapper man, kind, and hard working. My brother caught them together in the living room of our flat. It was all so in your face. Somehow, I think my dad knew about it.

During all that my dad came home in the middle of the night one evening after they went out drinking and fell down the stairs of our flat. He was unresponsive. My mother called for an ambulance. He was admitted to the hospital in Valletta. He had a stroke. He was 40 years old. There were no more affairs that I’m aware of after that happened except for the brief one my dad had when I was a teen. When my mother passed away my dad, my brother, and I hugged. My Dad kept repeating that he loved her always through thirty years of marriage.

My ex and I remained friends. We hated each other at first. We had children together and we needed to make decisions, so we maintained an open line of communication. Six months after I left, she brought my oldest daughter to Virginia so we could spend Thanksgiving as a family. We were both in relationships. We would talk to each other about our lives. We committed to getting our finances in order before divorcing. Of course, remaining married put a strain on our personal relationships, but it was the adult thing to do.

She discovered herself. She really found out who she was. She had been married her entire adult life and now she was free. She dated. She had relationships. She discovered new hobbies. She’s an avid hiker. She grew as a person. She recognized she didn’t treat me well and changed. She strives to be a good person. She told me that the way she used to treat me was wrong. It took having other relationships for her to realize this. I share the blame on this. I withdrew and the communication suffered. In the end it didn’t matter except to grow and move forward.

To be continued…