Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie

I continued to look for work. I had a few interviews, but telling someone you are a convicted felon is not the way to get a job. So I didn’t get one. My money ran out.
The rest of this story is about how I became homeless, but it also includes some more crazy behavior on the part of my Irish Catholic family and in particular my brother John P. Donnelly. I have to tell part of John’s story to finish telling my own.
The only person I am aware of on Earth who came to drugs and alcohol earlier than my brother John P. Donnelly is Drew Barrymore the chick that played Gertie in the Spielberg classic E.T. John found drugs and booze at about age 15 or 16 and he hit them pretty hard. John was smart. He was the kind of kid who would get bored in school because he probably wasn’t being challenged enough. When we were really little kids people would always ask if we were twins. John is two years older than I am.
When he was 16 or 17 John did something he should not have done. He took my father’s tithe. That’s church money. My father’s reaction was extreme and brutal. I will not go into the details. John had a drug and alcohol problem that would not go away. I have no idea what avenues my parents pursued in an attempt to get him straight, but in the end what they did was kick him out of the house.
John dropped out of high school, got a GED and joined the United States Army. I think he went through basic training at Fort Knox in Kentucky but don’t quote me on that. He did just fine and was trained in the lethal art of operating a huge tank of some kind. After his training he was stationed somewhere in Europe. He was only 18 or 19.
I am not shitting on the US Army, but people are people all over the world and they have the same problems and fears and yada yada yada…
John’s adventures in booze and drugs continued in the Army. In Europe.
When my brother John was 19 he got into some kind of accident. A fall of some kind. John became paralyzed from the waist down. He never walked again.
The Veterans Administration has been good to my brother. They have taken very good care of him. He has a house, a huge van that he drives, and number of different wheel chairs to get around in.
But try and imagine what it would be like to wake up in a VA hospital at age 19 with a doctor telling you that you are never going to walk again. …I just can’t do it. It’s the kind of thing you would not even wish on your worst enemy.
When he was a teenager John used to love Rock-N-Roll. He played foosball and was fond of the video game Missile Command. He was also an outdoorsman. He liked to fish and would do it often.
To say that something changed in my brother is an understatement. A million things changed in him. Time marched on. He grew up. Stopped listening to Rock music. The fall that took away his mobility cured him of any alcohol or drug problems.
He found things to do to stay sane. But I’m not so sure he made the right choices.
I can’t remember what year it was that John discovered billiards, but he took to it. John decided that he would spend the rest of his life shooting pool. He replaced Rock-N-Roll with talk radio, and worshiped at the church of Rush Limbaugh. At some point my brother began to listen to talk radio 24/7. No music at all. I think a person who can’t enjoy music of any kind is a person whose soul has died and moved on.
For the record I don’t much care for talk radio. And I hate Rush Limbaugh.
One thing my brother never took to is computers. He gets online via something called Web TV.
John came to my rescue in October of 2005 when I was about to become homeless.
My time was finally up at 810 1st Avenue NW apt. 1 Largo Florida 33770. It was time to leave and I was glad to be going. Tony was still living right next door.
John stops by my place one day and says it will be okay if I move in with him. I have no place to go and no money so what do I say? Yes of course. But on the morning of the move John doesn’t take me over to his place. He takes me to an apartment complex located at 12480 Rose Street North Seminole Florida 33772. He rents an apartment for me. Apt. 1. I am so dead set against this, but I am in no shape or condition to argue with him. Papers are signed and I move in on a prorated 6 month lease that in essence gives me 7 months.
It was a tough move. John could not drive a U-haul and neither could I because my license had long since been suspended and revoked. John let me load up his van with all my crap and then I would unload it at the new place. I bet we made more than five trips.
It was a tough move. It took all day and on into the night.
The apartment at 12480 Rose Street North apt.1 Seminole Florida 33772 was a huge step up. It rented for $700.00 per month. Had two bedrooms that were both larger than the apartment that I was leaving behind and best of all, it had a full size kitchen with a fridge, and a stove.
Unfortunately my brother had some odd plans that he never articulated to me.
My brother betrayed me. More than once. In some really big ways.
My brother John was extremely helpful at this time, but some of his ideas made no sense to me.
One of his ideas was that I should get my drivers license back. I don’t have a car, and I don’t have any money what do I need with a drivers license? He was insistent. It got complicated. Remember I’m a convicted felon because I was arrested for DUI and not only was I arrested for DUI, I was involved in a high speed car accident that resulted in the total loss of my vehicle. The aforementioned Geekmobile.
In order for me to have a drivers license, I have to carry a certain kind of insurance called
SR-22. I have no idea what this is or what it implies, only that to carry a Florida drivers license I have to have SR-22 insurance even if I do not own a car.
So John springs for the insurance. He pays for me to have a non owners insurance policy complete with this “SR-22” stuff and after two trips to the DMV and one to the insurance company I get my Florida drivers license back. I think this cost almost $600.00. The insurance wasn’t cheap and neither was the DMV. I know it was over $150.00 at the DMV just to have them take my picture and hand me over a license.
Great. I have a piece of plastic with my picture on it. NOW what the fuck am I going to do with it?
I almost starved to death at 12480 Rose Street apt. 1 Seminole Florida 33772. It was winter, I had no money, no job, and no food. I had a Florida drivers license though.
Ever had peanut butter on apple slices? I did. It was all the food I had.
I applied for food stamps. The government gave me 70.00 dollars, but said because I was getting so much financial help from my family it was all I was entitled to.
I ate like a king one night.
So now John is paying for my food. Is this insane or what? We started this little odyssey
with the agreement that I was going to be living with him. It would have been taxing, but it would not have cost him much of anything. So he’s paying for my rent
700.00 cha-ching, insurance 350.00 cha-ching, food cha-ching, drivers license 150 cha-ching and he’s spending time with me that he would otherwise be spending watching T.V. or shooting pool. He likes to play in tournaments and if you own a pool hall and live anywhere near Pinellas County Florida you have seen my brother shooting pool in your fine establishment, or leaving it in his big blue and white van with the handicapped lift.
Now to get an idea of what both of us were going through I have to describe a little bit of my life as it was back at 810 1st Ave NW apt 1 Largo Florida 33770.
Back at my old place I could walk to a Publix grocery store in less than 8 minutes. It made it just doable for me to go grocery shopping with out need of a car or a taxi cab.
I would buy just what I could carry and lug it back to the apartment. It wasn’t easy, but it was doable. Ditto on laundry.
Did I tell you I used to own over 40 pairs of underwear. I did. Mostly because I hate going to the laundromat. You can never have to many clean towels or to many clean pairs of underwear.
Following the demise of the Geekmobile I bought a cart. What the fuck? A cart you say!
Yes. A cart. I had to shop around online until I found just the right one, but I did it.
I needed a cart to get my laundry to the laundromat. When I lived at 810 1st Ave NW apt. 1 Largo Florida 33770 I would put my clothes and stuff in three laundry baskets, and my cart would hold two on the top tier and one on the bottom tier. I would tie the stuff down and push my cart to the nearest laundromat which happened to be just down Clearwater Largo Rd next to the 7/11. It sucked big time doing it this way- BUT it was doable. It took less than 7 minutes to push the stupid cart down to the laundromat.
Now at 12480 Rose Street apt.1 Seminole Florida 33772 I still had my cart, but I could have pushed it all day and not actually gotten anywhere. There was just nothing close by.
There was a Win-Dixie down Park Blvd. for shopping, but I could not carry my groceries that far. So I would have to steal a shopping cart every time I did make it to the grocery store.
The apartments at 12480 Rose Street Seminole Florida 33772 had a laundry room but it was in disrepair and was not acceptable for actually doing laundry.
Now John has to come over once a week, or once every other week, and hall me and my sorry ass, plus all of my clothes and stuff to a laundromat. It gets to be a chore. For both of us. It really does.
Meanwhile I am applying for jobs online. That’s right I’ve hooked myself back up to the internet. I’m starving. But I’m online with a high speed connection. This is of course getting me nowhere. So John offers to take me around to apply in person. I get dressed up and hit the bricks. I applied to places like Raymond James. Timer Warner. I’ll be honest, applying at Time Warner was my idea of a really silly joke. I mean if anyone on Earth had a right to know what I was looking at online it was Time Warner. They actually called me in for an interview and I think I almost had that job. I put on a suit for the interview and everything. Maybe calling me for the interview was their idea of a silly joke. They just wanted to see the pervert in person. Yawn.
I got desperate to be back at work and I even had John take me over to one of those day labor places. I swear I am not making this up. They had this strange test that they gave me at this day labor place. You were asked a bunch of questions that were in essence essentially the same stupid question over and over again. I failed it! I couldn’t even get a job at a shitty day labor joint. Now not even the convicted felons who hire convicted felons wanted me. This was the low point of my life. I swear.
So in the end what I did was slink back to a couple of the temp agencies that I had used in the past. I was dead set against this, I did not want to be a temp. I wanted to be back on the chain gang! For real. But I was so out of options. Time was running out. Christmas had come and gone.
In March of 2006 Spherion placed me at Transitions Optical out on Belcher Road.
This was a huge disaster in so many ways.
This was so fucked up I’m not even sure where to start. Hum…let me see. Okay..let’s start with the work. Factory work. I’ve worked in a factory way back when. I’m starving and mooching off family members. I’ll do it! Factory work!
3rd shift. It was all they offered me. I clocked in at 10 or 10:30 at night. This sucks even if you have a car, and I don’t. So my commute is an unbelievable cluster fuck that involved me catching a bus, riding it down Park Blvd., jumping out at the corner or Park Blvd. and Belcher Rd., and then walking all the way down Belcher Road to the location of the Transitions Optical. Because of the bus schedule I was required to get to work 2 hours before I had to clock in. I would just hang out on bus stop benches for and hour or so and the head inside. An hour or so. Hanging out on bus stop benches. But there was a pay check in it. Real money. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
Only that’s not even the half of it.