A few people have asked me to explain how pleasurable it has been to defy the odds of my having been (not so far) in jail. Good Karma? Prayers from friends and relatives?
As my life-expectancy dwindles, my view of the past expands. I have written other memoirs to relatives, but here is the DailyKos version. I was an obedient child, and a good citizen, in the family memoir.
Not!
Oh, and by the way: I don't care what my prognosis is, I'm still having fun. If you can't enjoy a nice sandwich, you've missed the point.
Biopsy Wednesday. Further details this weekend, after Friday appointment with an oncologist. Persistent rumors that I was on the Grassy Knoll are untrue. I was only fifteen at the time.
My career as an outlaw started when I was very young. Some people claim not to remember their infancy. I find that odd, since one of my earliest memories is of crawling to my mother's potted plants on the porch and upending them. Sheer delight! She couldn't keep an eye on me forever; the least sign of distraction, and I was off to do mischief.
My dad was in China, at the time. Navy doctor. This may have contributed to my anti-authoritarian bent. The minute he saw me, he took me to a barber shop. I still remember how much I hated him for that. It was a very frightening experience. Remember, I couldn't even walk yet.
I have a photograph of me from the period, with a lock of hair enclosed beneath the glass. Red hair. He thought the curly locks made me look like a girl.
Ok, so I did a lot of naughty things as a child. I was quite naughty.
One of my first brushes with authority was when I moved from Kindergarten to first grade. I just assumed that school was over after the half-day, and went home. Mother drove me back to school. One couldn't trust her, after all. So, every time I got a chance, I went over the wall at lunchtime. Being that this was rural Kansas, there were plenty of places to hide. After many punishments, I gave up. Hiding was boring, anyway.
But, my first brush with the law was when I got a BB gun. Pump action. From the Daisy company, as I recall. It had a very accurate sight, too. I was really a dead shot with that BB gun. There was an abandoned (I thought) building a couple hundred feet behind the house (Western Kansas, by now, I should have made it clear that we moved), in back of which were many dozens of glass gallon milk-jugs. So, a neighbor friend and I started taking target-practice on the milk-jugs. It was his idea, I swear. But, I was very enthusiastic. We had a lot of fun.
Well, the back of the building had windows, so we started (eventually, days later) taking shots at these. I'm just going to name the (one-year-older) friend at this point. Gary. Gary Caswell. Deep breath.
It turned out that his father, Dean Caswell, owned the building, and was very pissed off that I (and I alone) had been shooting at it. So, luckily my parents were away when the Sheriff showed up at my house and told me to cut it out. I would have gotten a heck of a spanking, if Dad had known.
We're going to have to fast-forward a bit here. I started smoking cigarettes in fifth grade. They had vending machines, back then, which didn't check IDs.
Then we moved to Houston. I got recruited into the "hoods" - why not? And yet, I was in all the "advanced" classes. The schools were so good in the Spring Branch Independent School District that I had small desire to make mischief at school, except for derisive cartoons of teachers that I occasionally posted on hallway walls. I liked the "hoods", though. We smoked, and turned up our shirt collars. Swagger a bit, and you're a member.
But, by then, I had begun taking the odd swig off the old man's whiskey bottle. The other thing: my mother got sick. I was only 13, but I started doing the errands. Grocery store, etc. I didn't get busted for under-age driving. It sucked that I had to do that, but by that time Dad was pretty much living with his fellow-alcoholic mistress. Back then, you could get a driver's license in Texas when you were fourteen. Mind you, whenever I went out on errands, I bought cigarettes. Against the law, but I always did enjoy being naughty. I think that I noted this before.
Fast forward. I hooked up with the "nice" crowd. Honor Society, doting teachers, all of that. Got a National Merit Scholarship. Fly in the ointment: Dad refused to fill out the paperwork. Did I mention that he didn't like me?
It took me a year to be certified as an "adult", so thank you Mr. Everett for offering your services pro-bono. Husband of my Calculus class teacher.
Nashville, at last! Full scholarship, part-time job! Also, a fake ID. Yippee! Alcohol. Man, was Vanderbilt a swell place, or what? No trouble with police. A totally exciting place, intellectually.
Had to drop out. Dad sunk into total incompetence, mother so ill that she needed around-the-clock care. I should've just stayed in Tennessee.
Did I mention that I fell in love in Nashville? No, not so far.
So, anyway, Martha came to visit me during the next spring break after I dropped out. And, she had marijuana with her!
Did I love Martha more, or the marijuana? Moot point. Martha married someone else, I found a local source, and I was off to the races as a drug dealer.
Did I mention that I got a job after dropping out? Probably not. Now, the year that I dropped out was 1968. What a year. Worst year ever, for an idealist. My new job started in January, 1969.
Fast forward. Work with computers, deal dope, always getting lucky. I had five pounds of pot in the trunk when I was pulled over for speeding. I had an honest face. Went on like that for years.
Eventually, I was able to quit my job, because I had learned to cast Tarot Cards and give Astrology readings, and I was doing pretty well dealing dope. Did I mention that I did five trips on mescaline, and more than twenty on acid? Eh, by the time you've done ten acid trips, you've done them all. Hundred bucks for astrology, twenty for Tarot. This was back in the 1970s. That was big money, back then. Of course, I wasn't reporting it to the IRS.
So, I was dealing acid. One of my Astrology students (I also taught classes) sent her brother, a rather timid and clean-cut lad, to me; he wanted to buy a lot of acid. A hundred tabs, in fact. He had a rather rough-looking (ok, frightening) friend with him. I had just made a quiche lorraine before they arrived. I offered them a slice. The frightening-looking guy spit out his first bite. "I thought this was gonna be pie," he croaked.
I was glad to get rid of them.
The next night, I was watching the local news. The buyers had been arrested. It turned out that their drug deal had gone down wrong. The frightening-looking guy had shot the buyer. To get rid of the body, they had decided to jam his body between a box-spring and a mattress, and carry the assemblage to a van. Unforturnately, the corpse fell out in the courtyard of their apartment.
Yowza! but apparently neither of them remembered where I lived, and in any case I was out of there. No forwarding address, no nothing.
So, I reconsidered my life of crime. I got another computer job. Then another. No dealing, but I was still buying.
The last company I worked for went bankrupt, I didn't even get a final paycheck. So, I went to an employment agency. Would I be willing to work in Arabia? Yes, indeed!!!!
The thing is, if there were one place in the world I would have wanted to explore, it would have been Arabia Deserta. My favorite prose work was "Arabia Deserta", by
Charles M. Doughty (available in two volumes from Dover Press) and my favorite movie was "Lawrence of Arabia".
OK, so smuggling drugs into Arabia was lucrative. But, if you got caught, it was a death sentence. I was soon involved in the hashish trade. Man, I loved hashish. The odd thing about Arabia: hashish water-pipes were sold openly. I suppose that the devout used them to - oh, I dunno - light incense?
My most frightening brush with the law, ever:
My friend Pat and I drove to Dharan to get the latest shipment. On the way back, we encountered a roadblock. Everyone's documents were being checked, and AK-47-bearing soldiers were peerining into vehicles along the line. I tried to nonchalantly slide the brick of hash on the front seat into the crevice between the backrest and the seat. None too successfully. I said to Pat, "Do you have your passport?" "No, man, I forgot it!" he replied. I had also forgotten my passport. Finally, we got to the head of the line at the checkpoint, and were waved through with no questions asked.
Pat was driving. A few miles down the road, he pulled over. "I can't drive any more," he said. His face was green. So we switched places. He threw up, while crossing in front of the Chevrolet. I merely felt faint. A Saudi Arabian prison is no place for a westerner to be. Pat didn't know it - we still ran hashish from Dharan to Riyadh - but I started importing cocaine from Houston, via the APO privileges that we contract workers were granted. This was very lucrative. I was reimbursed by another American, who passed off the product to a Saudi Prince, who was willing to pay premium prices.
In the meantime, Pat and I started growing pot in my spare bedroom. Pat was married, but I divorced my wife soon after arriving in Arabia. Long story. She (rude noun) refused to join me. I didn't tell the Joint Venture that I was divorced, so I had a married-status three-bedroom villa.
Things went on. Eventually, I left Arabia. It felt like ten years, but it was only three.
Coming back, the Reagan Recession (in Houston, at least) was in full swing. It wasn't just that one couldn't get a job - one couldn't even get an interview. Back to dealing. Mostly cocaine. My good luck was that I HATE cocaine. That's a nasty drug. I hated it, and if you offered me a line today, I wouldn't sniff it. So, I wasn't putting my profits up my nose.
I eventually got work - the company I had worked for on contract before I went to Arabia desperately needed my expertise. They still had the same damn computer and software, but my supervisor was dying (of AIDS) and they didn't know what to do. I saved the day for them, which allowed me to give up my life of crime.
Fast-forward to 1999. I gave up drugs.
My bipolar disorder made me crazier and madder day by day, after abandoning pot. I got fired, just after I saved ITC's ass on the Y2K dealie-hoo. That was in 2000. After running through 100k+ of my 401k money, I wound up at Austin State. Suicide attempt - then ideation. The Law took me to Austin State twice. I now see them as agents of mercy. Certainly, the ones in my area seem to have fine training on dealing with the mentally ill. I got an SSDI pension out of the deal. It's a shame that Medicare didn't kick in for another two years. This might have enabled me to see a doctor before I had a bad diagnosis.
OK. Here's the story everyone has been waiting for. What happened last Thursday.
My sister took me to a new doctor, recommended by the former doctor.
So far, so good. But on the way back (after treating me to a wonderful sandwich - I had to fast for the exam) she started mentioning that she was now addicted to DQ milkshakes.
Well, that evening, all I could think about was DQ milkshakes. I really wanted a DQ milkshake. I hadn't been to Dairy Queen for decades, but I was going all Proustian.
So, I decided to get a milkshake at DQ.
This involved driving out on Turtle Creek boulevard toward Texas Parkway, then turning left, until the DQ appeared - about a mile.
Unforturnately, as I was nearly done approaching the highway, a cop car turned right onto Turtle Creek. He spotted my expired registration and inspection stickers, and flashed his lights. Keep in mind that we were going in opposite directions, and his U-turn lane was blocked by other cars.. So, instead of turning left, I turned right on red. The city limit was only two blocks away. Panicked, I kept driving. Soon, I was out of Fort Bend County.
I made it back home by a circuitous route, but not without the car threatening to stall out. The transmission doesn't like to get hot. It won't downshift when it gets hot. I had to run a red light and three stop signs on the way home, to keep from being stranded until the transmission cooled. That only takes an hour or so, but it's inconvenient.
Someday, perhaps I will tell the tale of how I ran up forty thousand dollars in credit card debt, trying to save my doomed brother's uninisured life, and how much fun we had - he needed dope to overcome his pain, and I had a dealer. So, back on pot again. We ate out a lot. His death was pretty awful, but at least he never entertained the notion that it was coming.
I have two default judgements outstanding. Suck on this, Visa! So, two credit card companies kept sending me checks you could use for anything, such as a mortgage. Well, you could also send a loan-check to cover the Visa bill that paid the mortgage. It worked out to be quite a pyramid scheme, once a third Visa card sent me a TOTALLY free card. No questions asked, although I was by then unemployed.
My outlaw life. Eight years of retirement since 2000. Two trips to a mental hospital, since then. I can't recommend Austin State too highly, except for the cold showers. The second trip was just because I was in the mood to go back - I was bored, so I told the psychiatrist that I was on the verge of suicide. Shhh. If they find out, I'm going to get in a lot of trouble. I'd like to go back a third time, but the scheduling is a problem.
You know what's incredible? A good many people think I'm a good person. Not so: I'm just a nice guy, mostly. There's a difference, I think. I'm more of a confidence-man, a carnival-barker, than a decent, upstanding citizen. Whew. I don't envy the good ones who plow their way through life with a goal in mind, though they seem to be winning out. I'm hoping for a milkshake tomorrow, but I'm going to ask my good niece Sarah to fetch it. One car-chase is enough, for one week.
Somehow, since my infancy, I've never enjoyed life so much as the times I was sliding on the edge of danger. I certainly got away with a lot. Somehow, I think that I've stashed away a bit of Karma for later....