Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie

One morning I asked John if he wanted to go out to eat for breakfast. There is a Village Inn a few blocks over from John’s place and I was in the mood for a real breakfast. As a homeless man breakfast is something you just don’t get. I wanted eggs and orange juice. Pancakes or French Toast. A bowl of freaking corn flakes!
It’s September 2006. It’s Florida. It’s still hot and humid outside. You know what I have on my feet most of the time? Flip Flops. That’s right. If I am not going in to work I usually have on a pair of Flip Flops.
That’s what I was wearing the morning I asked my brother to have breakfast with me over at the Village Inn. His response was so unnatural, so strange there is almost no way I can convey how I felt.
John said he would gladly have breakfast with me but that I would have to put on a pair of shoes first. He insisted that they would not serve me at the Village Inn if I tried to be seated in a pair of Flip Flops.
“Then the good folks at the Village Inn can kiss my shinny Irish ass,” I said.
But it wasn’t the good folks at the Village Inn that had a problem with what I was wearing on my feet. It was my crazy, paraplegic, pool shooting, dick juice dosing, brother John P. Donnelly. He did not want to have breakfast with me if I was going to wear Flip Flops.
“Then I will be having breakfast alone,” said I.
My brother pressured me from the lofty depths of his wheel chair. The crazy son of a bitch insisted-insisted that I go into the house and put on a pair of shoes.
I told him in no uncertain terms. I am an adult. No matter how foolish or childish I act, you cannot tell me what to wear. Not now or ever. Period.
Not only do I have very well manicured feet, my feet are so well manicured that they are feet to be envied! I swear I am not making that up.
John finally realizes that he is fighting a fight he cannot win. He leaves with out me.
He returns a short while latter and says we can still go out to eat, and that I can wear my flip- flops, but that we cannot go to the Village Inn. So we went to some sorry ass mom and pop place and paid way too much for some really shitty breakfast food. How can you fuck up eggs and toast? I have no idea but the short order cook at this place did just that. The meal sucked. And the whole time I’m shoveling this crappy food down my throat I am wondering about the sanity of my brother.
For the record college students have visited the president of the United States of America in the White House and when they did…they wore open toed sandals. I read about it somewhere. Time Magazine maybe. Hey if it’s good enough for the President and the White House…it’s good enough for me.
I talked a lot with my brother the first night or two I stayed with him. He wanted to hear about where I had been and what I had been doing from the time I left the apartment at 12480 Rose Street Apt. 1 Seminole Florida 33772, to the time he came and picked me up at the C.H.I.P. center. I filled him in.
I have to tell you now what I think was happening. Even though I have no proof. I can only offer my gut feelings. I am pretty sure what my brother John P. Donnelly was hoping is that I would talk with my other brother Eddie Donnelly and that after doing so I might just decide to move out of Pinellas County Florida and head for Vermont. That’s where Eddie is living now. But I wasn’t in the mood to talk with Eddie, and I wasn’t in the mood to leave Pinellas County Florida. See in my mind I had a few loose ends to tie up. I had this whole stupid sorry story to tell. To the police. To a lawyer. To god and the devil if they still give a care. Surely to someone. But just to up and leave and let it all go.
Nope. Not going to happen.
I filled John P. Donnelly in on all kinds of information. And he used it to attack me.
Or he let someone else do the attacking. All the same while I was in my first week of work at Consumer Energy Solutions some burned out drag queen assaulted me psychologically. Someone had culled the information I had shared with my brother, and reduced it to just a few sentences that would be sure to get a reaction from me and then instructed this idiot I was working with to corner me and basically rape me. A mind fuck to be sure. But a devastating one. A painful one. One that I knew with out a doubt my brother John P. Donnelly had something to do with.
It was September 11, 2006, and I was in training at Consumer Energy Solutions and some guy who should know nothing at all about me seems to know an awful lot about me. And because he is trying to be a hurtful, miserable, son of a bitch, he succeeds.
I can’t even tell you what the guy said. Only that it was meant to get a reaction out of me. An extreme reaction. It almost worked. I just looked at the guy. I called him the burned out drag queen because he had a voice like Harvey Fierstein. He said something to me just to get a negative response from me and it almost worked. I just looked at him. And as I was looking at him I fought a hard battle inside myself. I struggled to keep my cool. I struggled not to lunge at the evil burned out drag queen. I won the battle. I turned from him and walked on out of Consumer Energy Solutions.
Did I tell you that one of John P. Donnelly’s biggest concerns regarding me was that I had maybe joined The Scientologists. I swear I am not making that up. I am fighting absolute poverty, that includes homelessness and my Irish Catholic families biggest fear is that I have joined The Scientologists.
John likes to shoot pool. He has a regulation size pool table in his living room. He also has a rack where he keeps all of his pool cue sticks. He has a lot of them. One of them was actually on the pool table the evening of September 14, 2006. I think it was a Friday.
I got home that evening around 5. John wanted to head on out and look for a place for me to live. I wanted to flop into bed. I got angry. I overreacted. I will not deny it. I was in the process of quitting smoking and I had on a nicotine patch, but I was in the early stages of mild withdrawals. He shouldn’t have fucked with me. I had been living with him for less than a week. He was insistent and it was clear he wanted me out of his house. So I got my stuff packed up and was ready to leave, but I thought what he was doing was so unbelievably wrong that I decided before I go any where I am going to call the cops on him. I tried to use my cell phone. I was not about to dial 911, so I had to find a number for the cops. I found a phone book out on the front porch and brought it into the house.
You know how they drop those damn things off every so often. It was just sitting out there on the front porch of my brother’s house. I needed it so I dragged it into the kitchen, near where the phone is. By then I had just decided to use his phone. But he starts to interrogate me about what I’m doing. I am really pissed off. At him. I believed then and I believe now that he had absolutely no right whatever to be treating me the way he was. We started to argue. I started to shout at him. I mean really, really scream. I could actually feel my brain dump a huge amount of adrenaline into my system and I grabbed the pool cue stick up off the table and I came within a whisper of smashing him over the head and in the face with it. But something stopped me. I put the damn pool cue stick back down. But I still lunged at my brother. He was sitting in his wheel chair. Defenseless. I threw a few sissy punches and only managed to tag him in the head a couple of times. But I had lost it. I was screaming at him and I know I hit him at least twice. There was no blood. He did not need medical attention. But he was scared out of his wits. So he goes and calls the cops on me.
You know what I hate about the cop cars in Pinellas County Florida? The plastic seats.
I swear they have plastic seats. The same kind of plastic that your computer is made out of. How do I know this? My name is Kenneth G. Donnelly and on September 14, 2006
I got arrested for domestic battery. My dear brother John P. Donnelly who had, less than a week before, rescued me from the C.H.I.P. center in Clearwater Florida, decided to kick me out even though he had said I could come and live with him. I lost my cool, threw a few punches, screamed a bit, and got hauled away in a cop car. I can’t remember the cops name. She was pretty. A blonde. She acted surprised when I said this was my first time getting arrested for a fight, and that there were no drugs or alcohol involved. I went to jail because my stupid evil Irish Catholic family couldn’t mind their own fucking business. They were so busy worrying that I had joined The Scientologists.
What a fucking farce.
I put the pool cue stick down because I knew how harmful it could be. Even in my anger.
Something in me had the good sense just to let it go. Just not all the way. The cops even asked me about it.
“Why did you put the cue stick down?” The cops asked.
“Because that would have been horrible,” I said. I meant it.
I spent over 48 hours in county over on 49th street. Not exactly hard time, but plenty of time to get you thinking. I was released on my own recognizance a few days later. I was homeless. No chance of going back to the C.H.I.P. center. No chance of going back to my brothers place. I have never in my life been so mortally fucked.
So what did I do? I went to the movies. I watched Nic Cage in “The Wicker Man”, and then I watched something else. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the second movie I watched. Later that night after the sun went down I walked over to The Candle Wood suites out on the corner of Ulmerton and 49th. I had to check in at pretrial at the court house. And then I had to check in at pretrial once every Tuesday for over a month. The misdemeanor charges were dropped eventually.
I think I walked around in the same dirty clothes for over 48 hours. I showered in the hotel room of course but I had no clean clothes to change into. I had to return to my brother’s place to get my stuff. To do that I needed a police escort. I wanted him to feel safe, and frankly I didn’t want him starting in on me with any more of his bullshit.
He’s big on bull shit let me tell you.
So I called the cops and waited for them to meet with me and take me over to my brother’s place, but the cops never came. I lost my patience and went over to my brother’s with out a police escort. I grabbed what I could carry. My old back pack and my old gym bag. I walked a few blocks but I had way too much stuff. It’s just over a week now that I have been out of the Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project shelter and I can’t go back there for 30 days. I stopped right there in my brothers neighborhood and I had to dump a bunch of stuff. Some clothes, some towels, an alarm clock.
There. That’s more like it. Only I have no idea, absolutely no clue as to where I am going. I had hit rock bottom, and then I did a Doors number, I broke on through to the other side. I spent a few nights outside. Sorry, not going to tell you where. What does it matter. There were even a few rainy nights. I got caught in the rain. But for the most part, I had found place to crash that was out of the rain. But I couldn’t do it forever.
After a cooling off period I called my brother and he agreed to meet me at Largo Central Park. He brought a check with him. He dropped me off at the Diana Motel 1814 Gulf to Bay Boulevard Clearwater FL 33765. Not exactly the Ritz, but it’s close to a lot or restaurants. Then I went back to the C.H.I.P. center…for the second time.
Staying at the C.H.I.P. center was much harder the second time around. You get penalized for leaving and then coming back. I had to sit through 30 “resource” meetings.
Those are meetings where they go over the rules with you. I wanted to say, “ I am fully aware of the rules, I was not fully aware of what a treacherous bastard my brother could be. Please forgive me.”
I went and got my old job back. The one at First Global Services. Remember you only have 7 days to get a job when you get to the C.H.I.P. center.
There were a few new faces at the C.H.I.P. center when I got back to it in October of 2006. I met two very interesting people. One I liked very much, and one not so much.