So I wound up back at the Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project shelter. I got back in October of 2006, my second time starting over at the C.H.I.P. center.
I met a guy named Scott Rollins that time. He was cool, and he stands out as the only person I have met at the C.H.I.P. center that I genuinely liked and it’s to bad, because he was my enemy right from the start. He would bring movies back to the C.H.I.P. center and the movies he picked always seemed to have a subliminal message just for me.
One time Scott Rollins and I watched part of the old Tom Cruise flick “Legend” together. It’s a fantasy movie directed by Ridley Scott, and it’s not so great.
The movie features the devil and here is one of his lines,
The Lord of Darkness: Oh, Mother Night! Fold your dark arms about me. Protect me in your black embrace. I sit alone, an impotent exile, whilst this form, this presence, returns to torment me!
Right. Impotent exile. Got it.
He brought a few others that always seemed to have a ridiculous undercurrent or theme that had a little something to do with my hopeless situation.
He insisted on watching “The Ringer” with me. It stars Johnny Knoxville as a guy who fixes the Special Olympics by posing as a mentally handicapped person, all so that he can pay off his bad debt.
Mike Murphy, the fat bastard from Mercury Insurance was a big fan of “The Ringer” and I remember him actually pitching the film to me one time.
Despite Scott Rollins’s poor taste in movies I liked him any way. He had this way of talking and I loved the sound of his voice. Scott is a big guy. Big hands. Big feet.
Big. Not the kind of guy you want to piss off. Not for any reason. So I just stayed cool.
But eventually I called him on his odd choice of films for him and I to watch. He implied that I am a total paranoid schizophrenic. I implied that he is my enemy and that I know that he is my enemy. It’s a shame because I really liked him. Still do.
The guy I met my second time through the C.H.I.P. program that I didn’t like so much was named Rick. His last name sounds like but is not spelled like: Kazmarick. That’s kind of a phonetic spelling. Rick will talk your ear off. Rick is very well read, and smart.
Rick is a Republican, or at least he posed as one to me. Rick will defend President Bush, and will not concede that President Bush is a huge asshole.
But at least Rick would talk about things. Most people at the C.H.I.P. center had no interest in talking about greater social, economic, or political issues. I keep up on current events, and I have some odd opinions about some things. We talked quite a bit, because my bed was right next to Rick’s bed in the men’s dorm room. When I got to an issue I did not agree with him on, I always folded. I would concede and then just restate my own opinion. Often I would talk with him about things that I like such as books or movies, and I would do this to avoid a political discussion.
I never completely trusted Rick Kazmarick. He came on strong, and I always got the feeling he wanted something from me. My soul perhaps?
Ken, Ken, Ken, your saying. You’re a beer drinking, porno watching, drunk driving,
pill popping, pot smoking, coffee drinking, pervert, with no soul left what so ever.
Nope. I’ve still got nothing but soul!
Finally I want to tell you about a guy whose real name I don’t even know.
This dude is an ex junkie or a struggling junkie, and by junkie I mean the hard stuff.
A heroin user.
He’s spooky looking as hell. He looks like the lead singer from the Rock band Anthrax, he’s covered in tattoos, and he has this odd looking goatee. Everyone called him Tweak, because he was tweaking.
One time Tweak approaches me as I am sitting on my bed in the morning. I think I had just put on my shoes. He starts up a conversation. I’m not rude. I talk to the guy.
I admit to this Tweak that I am a convicted felon and things are not exactly looking to good for me and he turns around and says, “I can help you get an unregistered hand gun. It’s what I do.”
Hu? What?
What the fuck?
Then Tweak dropped off the face of the Earth. When I got back to the C.H.I.P. center later that evening he was gone.
Someone pitched a line of bullshit so long I think it stretched from Earth to Alpha Centauri. That’s 4.37 light years, or 25.8 trillion miles from home. If E.T. had been staying at the C.H.I.P. center he wouldn’t have had to phone home, he could have walked home on the line of bullshit someone was pitching.
See they told me that Tweak disappeared because he had an infection around his heart and had to go to the hospital and that he would be staying there a while. I think Tweak may have had an infection, but I think it was around his brain and not his heart.
My guess is Tweak was in jail. I have no proof though.
I think I would have been okay the second time through the C.H.I.P. program if it hadn’t been for First Global Services.
I was glad that they took me back, I needed a job, but man do I hate telemarketing. As much as you hate getting calls from telemarketers, I hate calling you as a telemarketer even more.
Despite how much fun I was having at First Global Services, I hung in until January of 2007. Then one day my boss called me into his office and said that I was not doing my part by not giving my attendees specific directions to wherever the travel seminar was being held. It was part of my job to really sell the seminar, and if the person I was speaking with agreed to attend it was also part of my job to make damn sure they got to the seminar by going over the driving directions with them. I gave the seminars a real soft pitch, and I never went over directions unless the person I was speaking with asked for them. I would give the address of course. But this was not enough. So considering that my boss was not happy with the way I was doing my job, and considering that I was not happy with the job I called it quits.
This created a big problem at the C.H.I.P. center. One I didn’t tell any of the administrators, and two they found out. I knew that they knew, but it was my duty to go to them and inform them. Because I didn’t I was punished, and punishment meant that I would be sleeping on the floor again. This is kind of miserable because you have no where to be. You have to roll out a little sleeping mat each evening and then roll it up each morning even on weekends too, so that you are effectively homeless again. You
have no where to be.
I started looking for work. I didn’t have much luck, so eventually I wound up at Special Data Processing. I took what I could get. But a lot of time had passed and because of my sleeping situation at the C.H.I.P. center I was exhausted. If I could have hung in there another week or so I would have been okay, but I couldn’t. One day I just had to sleep. It was on a weekend. So I checked into a hotel. By doing this I blew my budget. You have to keep a budget at the C.H.I.P. center. Here’s how it works. You get to keep 70 dollars each week. Everything else you come by has to be put into an account. They monitor this activity each week and violation on budget is a big one. They’ll kick you out for this kind of thing.
So I checked into a cheap motel to get some sleep. I crashed. When I woke up and felt a little better I went back to the C.H.I.P. center to get my stuff. It was February of 2007.
This year. I was homeless again.
Now before I left the C.H.I.P. center that time a couple of odd things happened. One time I was accused of smelling bad. The problem was I had just gotten out of the shower. I think three guys came over to my bunk and demanded that I get in the shower. I said no.
But they were really insistent. One of them called me dog. They use it as a kind of term of endearment I think.
“Hey dog, chill,” someone said.
“Don’t dog me,” I said.
See they wanted to get me into the shower for some reason but I was not in the mood to play along. I know I didn’t stink but that’s what they were accusing me of.
Another time I had a little problem there was in December of 2006. Some old guy named Lesley or Leslie, he was talking shit and he was in my area over near my bunk and he started to talk about poisoning the food out in the common are. See at the C.H.I.P. center there is a common kitchen area where you can keep a little bit of food if you want. I never do because people are always stealing each other’s food and I don’t want anything to do with it. But here comes this old guy Lesley and he starts talking about poisoning the food so that if someone steals his food they will get sick. Now I’ve told you about how I have been poisoned, and I have implied that I didn’t think it was so cool. Well when I heard old Lesley talking about poisoning someone, actually laughing about it, I got really pissed. Especially since someone had just poisoned me with dick juice. Right there at the C.H.I.P. center.
I tore old Lesley a new one. I called him a fucking freak.
“Poisoning someone’s food is not funny you fucking freak,” I said.
I called him a fucking freak several times. I yelled. I can be loud if I have to.
There were a number of people standing around, and I think I scared the crap out of all them. After that they tended to call me bipolar. But I am not bipolar. I am anti bullshit though.
Back when I worked at Mercury Insurance sometimes I would walk around all day without my glasses on. Someone once asked me about it.
“Hey Ken how come you don’t have your glasses on?” They asked.
“I’m maximizing my efficiency by minimizing my bullshit,” I said.
Old Lesley left not soon after that. I don’t know if he left because of me or if he had a few issues of his own. The C.H.I.P. center it just has a way of wearing people out.
Another time I was physically threatened by a huge fat guy with enormous bitch tits.
It was such a funny fight. He was trying to tempt me into hitting him, and I begged him to hit me.
“Hit me. Hit me,” I said.
We were fighting over the bathroom really. He had left his stuff in the bathroom and then disappeared so when I showed up to get a shower and I found his stuff I just picked it up and moved it out of the bathroom and then along comes Mr. big boobs and he starts threatening me and giving me a bunch of crap about moving his stuff.
This same guy, the guy with the huge man boobs, he was always going on about how the C.H.I.P. center is just like prison.
The Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project has a number of sponsors. And they are:
The St. Vincent de Paul Society. The Clearwater Police Department. The Salvation Army, and the Clearwater Housing Authority.
The C.H.I.P. center is a police substation. There are always at least two Clearwater Police officers on the premises at all times, although you hardly ever see them.
But still I hated to hear old Mr. Big Boobs saying a thing like that. You get to live there for free. You don’t pay rent, and you usually get at least one really good meal a day.
There was a guy named Rodney Calhoun at the C.H.I.P. center the second time I was there. I never heard Rodney use a sentence that didn’t have the word fuck in it. He never had anything good to say. Okay I take that back. He once went on for twenty minutes about some ribs he had eaten at a place in Minneapolis. It was a combo place. You could eat barbeque ribs and look at naked chicks all at the same time. Rodney Calhoun.
“Best fucking ribs I ever had,” Rodney says.
One time Rodney comes up to me as I am standing out in front of the C.H.I.P. center. I think it was a Monday evening. I was waiting to head over to the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen for a bite to eat.
“They’re serving fucking hot dogs again,” Rodney says.
I didn’t say anything to him. Not my job to brighten up this guys day, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have anyway. But what I was thinking about when he said that to me was how many times I had eaten hot dogs when I lived in my own apartment. See when I lived on my own hot dogs were a staple. I always had a pack of hot dogs and some relish in the fridge. Weather you boil your dogs, cook them in a pan on the stovetop or nuke them, they are a quick delicious meal. And if it is a quick delicious meal, it is the bachelor’s best, best friend. I love hot dogs, as American as apple pie or baseball for crying out loud.
But here’s old Rodney Calhoun, “They’re serving fucking hot dogs again.”
Yikes, free hot dogs with baked beans. Let me run for my life.
Many times as I eat a free meal at the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen I think of my father, and the money that he has given to the Catholic Church over the years. I bet I could eat there once a day for ten years and not recoup that money. But I tell you, when I eat there I don’t feel guilty. I am thankful though, in more ways than one.
I never really completely understood organized religion until I became homeless. But each morning 7 days a week people from various Christian faiths, volunteers mostly, take the time to prepare and serve a meal to people who can’t afford to buy one. And on many nights, volunteers from various Christian faiths come back to the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen and prepare another meal just for the people who are staying at the C.H.I.P. center. This is the one meal a day I would get usually Monday through Thursday. Weekends are kind of iffy as far as meals go if you are staying at the C.H.I.P. center.
But I swear it at least put some of Christianity into perspective for me. Seeing people actually doing something, rather than just spouting the gospel, suddenly all the years of attending Catholic Church at least once a week seemed to make a little more sense.
When I left the C.H.I.P. center in February of 2007 I stopped eating at the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen. I got as far away from that part of Clearwater as I possibly could. I was working at Special Data Processing. I tended to travel up and down U.S. 19 because it was convenient to where I was working. I spent so many nights out doors. It wasn’t that bad.
I usually had two meals a day. I would eat at Dunkin Donuts in the morning, 2 donuts and a large coffee, and then at night I would hit any one of the number of restaurants that are close to the offices of Special Data Processing. Ci’Ci’s Pizza, Subway, Wendy’s, Taco-Bell, yada, yada, yada. Even though I was only having those two meals a day I actually started putting on weight. Eating donuts every day is not healthy.
I had a pay check coming in. It was tiny, but it was something.
“Sweepstakes entry center. May I have your ID number please,” I would say.
Then I would pitch the most unbearable line of misleading bullshit imaginable. They were paying me to.
“If you win the million dollar sweepstakes, how would you spend all that money?” I was paid to say.
After this inane mind numbing insulting rhetoric I would then bamboozle callers into subscribing to a magazine. Then I would pass the call on to a “verifier” whose job it was to sell the poor unsuspecting individual yet even more magazine subscriptions. I talked to some very lonely sweet old people who were being buried alive under as much as 8 monthly periodicals.
The place left me feeling dirty. All the way down to my soul. I knew that it was a temporary thing. I just didn’t have the heart to screw people over with such reckless abandon.
I was so sick of this in about the first five minutes.
With my check I usually squirreled enough away for two nights indoors each week.
The best days were Sundays, and Wednesdays. These were my days off. I would check in at a cheap motel as early as possible and either sleep or watch T.V. No partying. No booze. I didn’t do any writing either. I bided my time and waited to go back to the C.H.I.P. center yet again.
Showing posts with label homeless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homeless. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie
Being homeless is strange. I’m often waiting to leave nowhere on my way to nowhere.
Standing at a bus stop with my backpack on, the sun beating down. Waiting.
Then I’m on the bus and before I know it…I’m waiting to get off. Sometimes I’m even in a hurry. No reason why. I’m going nowhere. But apparently I wanna get there right away.
Anyway I found the C.H.I.P. center sometime in mid July of 2006. I had been homeless for approximately 3 weeks. I waited to get in. All day. I sat in the lobby at what is called “the day center”, and then I sat out back behind the C.H.I.P. center. Waiting to get in.
The best thing about the C.H.I.P. center is that it’s right next door to the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. Homeless people eat better than I did when I had a job, and a decent apartment. About the only draw back is you have to wait in line, and you can only eat once a day between 9 A.M and 11 A.M.
For me the worst thing about being homeless is I never feel clean. No matter how much I shower. You get close enough to a guy that has been on the street for long enough, he has that look, and that smell. The smell is like a living thing. It’s alive. It’s really, really mean, and it assaults you. No matter where you are. It gets you. It jumps from him to you and it gets into your nostrils and it slides down your throat. It’s pissed off. And it has its way with you. You can’t react too much. What are you going to say? The best you can do is try and not breathe to much. If you are in an enclosed space-like on a city bus- the smell sets up shop. It gets to work.
Trying to eat at a table with a guy that has been on the street so long he has made friends with that smell is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Starvation made it easy though.
When you get to the C.H.I.P. center you have to take a shower, and wash all of your clothes. So they start you off on the right foot. You are clean, and all of your stuff is clean. Only I never really feel clean. I get out of the shower at the C.H.I.P. center and right away every fiber of my being is demanding that I get the fuck back in there and lather the fuck up! Right Now!
It’s the smell. That homeless guy smell. The scariest thing about the homeless guy smell for me is the sick never ending fear that it’s coming from me. That that horrible pissed off stench is not wafting off of some other guy, but is oozing from the clogged up pores of my own unwashed skin.
And a couple of times it has been. I’m so sorry. But if you are living on the street sometimes getting clean is the hardest part.
People come to the C.H.I.P. center to get clean all the time. Both physically clean as in a quick shower, and that other kinda clean as in I have to dry out. No more booze. No more drugs. Everyone starts off with a shower and clean clothes. The rest is up to you.
It’s the rest that is the hard part.
Every day is someone’s first day at the C.H.I.P. center. Most days are someone’s last.
Weekends are big for violations. That’s what they call it when you break the rules at the C.H.I.P. center, a violation. People are always going out and falling off the wagon, hell they might even be diving off the wagon head first, and then they come back to the C.H.I.P. center and the administrator gives them the breathalyzer test and boom, they’re back on the street. That’s the biggest rule at the C.H.I.P. center. No drinking. No drugs.
For some staying sober is the hard part. Not for me. My problem is the work. See C.H.I.P. is a work program. When you get to the C.H.I.P. center you have 7 days to get a job. For me the job prospects are pretty grim.
I n summer of 2006, in July, I got to the C.H.I.P. center, and I had seven days to find a job. Before they would assign me a bed someone would be verifying my employment.
I think I spent more than a week sleeping on the floor. It turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me that summer. See after my car accident in 2004, the one that made me a convicted felon, I started to have some neck and back pain. It wasn’t really bad, but it was a pain! It would come and go. Sometimes it would really, really hurt, and others it would just be a minor nuisance. But it was something I was aware of. I sleep on the floor in a homeless shelter for a week and guess what? I’m pain free. No more neck or back pain. The cure was just a few nights on a tile floor in a homeless shelter in Clearwater Florida. I’m still thankful for that.
But things went wrong for me that first time at the C.H.I.P. center. I applied for work at a few places. Sun Microstamping and Hi Tech Electronic Displays are the one’s that I remember. But I never even got a call for an interview. So I wound up in the sewer.
Yup. Telemarketing. It’s the best I could do in seven days.
First Global Services. I would call people and try to get them to agree to attend a travel seminar. Sometimes the seminar was a timeshare pitch, and sometimes the travel seminar was a travel club pitch. People were always agreeing to attend and then just never showing up. I swear we would call them and try and reschedule them to attend the seminar. We called them no-shows! I had a couple of laughs at First Global Services. But it was grueling, thankless shit work of the shittiest variety. It was telemarketing.
They day I started at First Global Services, a homeless guy from the C.H.I.P. center started with me. His name was Mike Hardergree. Or maybe Hardagree. I’m still not sure if Mike pretended to be my friend, wanted to be my friend, or really was a friend. I just don’t know. The best thing about Mike was he had a truck. You could hop into that truck and get just about anywhere in no time. Remember in summer 2006 I had already been riding the bus, public transportation for over two years. Being able to get from point A to point B with out all the bullshit of public transportation seemed like a freaking miracle.
It really did. But Mike had his own brand of bullshit that made it way more trouble than it was worth.
Mike wanted me to move to Orlando with him. I swear I am not making that up. Just the fact that he asked made my skin crawl. I’m a homeless bum, I mean officially down and out and this dude is asking me to move to Orlando with him. And his plan involved another homeless shelter in Orlando. What the fuck?
They kick you out of the C.H.I.P. center every morning Monday through Friday at 06:30 A.M.. They wake you up at 5:30 A.M. and you are out by 06:30. I guess in a city that never sleeps, say New York city, or Chicago, or Los Angeles there may be something to do at 06:30 A.M. but in Pinellas county Florida, in Clearwater Florida, there is absolutely nothing to do. Not a damn thing. You are effectively homeless for a little while each day.
Mike and I would hit a McDonalds or a Burger King to get some breakfast. Mike likes to people watch. I do to, but Mike would start saying all kinds of nasty things about the people he watched, and it really got on my nerves. But what really killed any chance I had of being friends with Mike Hardergree was his mumbling. That’s right. He would mumble. He would start off a sentence and you would be able to hear him just fine, but before he would get to the end of the sentence his voice would just trail off and fade away. I was always saying, “What?”
“What did you say Mike?” I was always asking Mike Hardergee.
So one day Mike Hardergree yells at me because he is tired of hearing me say what all the time. I put my hand like a cup up by my ear. Kind of a universal sign for what? Hu?
What did you say?
Another thing that I disliked about Mike is I got the idea that he was hiding something from me. When we were having breakfast a couple of times he asked me a few questions about my situation and how I got to be homeless. I didn’t give him the long version, but I told him as much of the truth as I could. He never did tell me how he became homeless.
He held out on me. And it irked the fuck out of me. People are always telling you their story most of the time. Not Mike Hardergree.
Then finally I just told Mike Hardergee that I didn’t want anything to do with him, that he was a huge mumbler. He hung around the C.H.I.P. center for a while but then he just up and left. I still see him around Clearwater sometimes. Guess he never made that trip over to Orlando.
I was only at the C.H.I.P. center that first time for a about a month, a month and a half.
The reason I only stayed that long the first time is because I got to the shelter one evening and there was a message for me. John P. Donnelly had called and the message said he wanted me to give him a call. He had tracked me down.
My cell phone had died in a down poor I got caught in, and the phones at the C.H.I.P. center are not exactly convenient. You can only use them at certain times of the day and it just seems like more trouble than it’s worth to me. My point is I did not call my brother. The way I remember it …I was leaving the shelter one morning around 6:30 A.M. and guess who’s parked out on Park Street just down the block from the shelter?
My brother John P. Donnelly.
He wanted me to leave with him right then. He told me he was sorry for how things had turned out and that he was worried about me. He said I could live with him. Again.
Leaving just then was not an option for a couple of reasons. One I was on my way to work at First Global Services, and two once you leave the C.H.I.P. center you can’t go back inside until about 4 P.M. so there was no way for me to get my stuff.
But the next morning I did leave with him. I wanted to believe that he was truly sorry and that he was trying to help me. But he wasn’t. What a mess this turned into.
I stayed with my brother John P. Donnelly in his little two bedroom two bath house at
14216 Chamberlain Avenue Largo, Florida 33774 for less than seven days. Less than a week after my brother came to get me out of a homeless shelter he kicked me out.
But before he did that he did some other crazy things I should mention.
When I left the C.H.I.P center to live with my brother John P. Donnelly I had over 800 dollars in the bank. But 800 is not a very big number especially when you are talking about money.
John took me shopping. For clothes. For bed linens. Hell we drove to several used furniture stores until I finally found a bed I could afford to buy. John was a sport. He paid for the expensive part of the bed. The mattress. There are mattress stores all over Pinellas County and that includes in the city of Largo and Clearwater but for some stupid reason we drove all the way over to some place in St. Petersburg just to get a mattress.
I just can’t even begin to hint at how strange I thought this was. Why drive all the way to St. Pete? Even if we had been there and it was just a convenient stop, why not just drive back to Largo or Seminole and stop there for a mattress? I just didn’t get it.
But at least I had a small room and bed to sleep on. Now I needed a job. Moving into John’s house effectively made me unemployed again. Getting to the office of First Global Services was not doable from John’s place. But I didn’t fuck around. I went out and got a job. In just two days. It was still a telemarketing thing but it was work.
I took a job at a place called Consumer Energy Solutions. They offered a week or two of paid training. The place was owned and run by a Scientologist. I liked it any way because it was just a couple of hundred feet from the C.H.I.P. center and just as close to the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. See in my heart I knew damn well my brother was about to do me dirty. I did not count on it being inside of a week though. So it worked out good that I found a place close to the shelter and the free food.
John started dosing me with the boner juice. The morning we started out looking at used furniture stores so that I could by a bed, John took me through a drive through at a McDonalds, and a little while after eating I was sporting wood. For the love of god.
I’m scouring Pinellas County for the cheapest twin size bed I can find and I have to do it sporting a boner? What the fuck?
I’ll avoid a fight every time. I don’t go looking for trouble like that. So I never said a word to John about the dick juice. I just didn’t want to discuss it with him. Not that morning as we hunted for used furniture, not ever. But during the week that I was at John’s place I was getting regular erections because he was poisoning me with something.
As if that was not enough of a burden for me John wanted me to decide on a life changing career. He wanted me to state with absolute certainty exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But I had no answer for him. The best I could do was offer to take one of those aptitude tests. You know online. You answer a bunch of questions and a computer analyzes your responses and determines what you might be good at. What you might be happy doing. He called a couple of numbers in the phone book. He wanted me to “see somebody”. I was just as happy to do it online. So that’s what I did.
The test taken the answers analyzed the computer told me that I should be a writer, or a film editor. I scratched my head a few times. I needed a computer to tell me this. I have wanted to be a writer since I was about 16. I have wanted to work in the film industry since I saw Star Wars in 1977. I was 10 then. I don’t care how annoying movies and Hollywood can sometimes be, I love them any way. Writing is just plain fun. It’s a quick simple release. Not unlike masturbation really.
I printed the results and showed them to John. I’m not sure he liked what the computer had to say. He was hoping for Fire Fighter or Police Officer, or something a little more tangible I guess.
Now I’m kinda doing battle with him on two fronts, he’s poisoning me with dick juice,
and he is pressuring me to embrace a new career (apparently unaware or unconcerned about the fact that I am a convicted felon), and he attacks me on a new front. Four or five days after moving in with him he insists that I drive around with him and look for a place to live. I have depleted me 800 dollars to something around 200 and now I have to find a place to live? I have just started a new job in telemarketing of all things (you can never really count on making any money in telemarketing it’s simply a numbers game…sometimes the numbers work with you and sometimes they work against you) and the fool is forcing me to look for a place to live. I swear it’s as if he was deliberately
trying to push me over the edge.
Standing at a bus stop with my backpack on, the sun beating down. Waiting.
Then I’m on the bus and before I know it…I’m waiting to get off. Sometimes I’m even in a hurry. No reason why. I’m going nowhere. But apparently I wanna get there right away.
Anyway I found the C.H.I.P. center sometime in mid July of 2006. I had been homeless for approximately 3 weeks. I waited to get in. All day. I sat in the lobby at what is called “the day center”, and then I sat out back behind the C.H.I.P. center. Waiting to get in.
The best thing about the C.H.I.P. center is that it’s right next door to the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. Homeless people eat better than I did when I had a job, and a decent apartment. About the only draw back is you have to wait in line, and you can only eat once a day between 9 A.M and 11 A.M.
For me the worst thing about being homeless is I never feel clean. No matter how much I shower. You get close enough to a guy that has been on the street for long enough, he has that look, and that smell. The smell is like a living thing. It’s alive. It’s really, really mean, and it assaults you. No matter where you are. It gets you. It jumps from him to you and it gets into your nostrils and it slides down your throat. It’s pissed off. And it has its way with you. You can’t react too much. What are you going to say? The best you can do is try and not breathe to much. If you are in an enclosed space-like on a city bus- the smell sets up shop. It gets to work.
Trying to eat at a table with a guy that has been on the street so long he has made friends with that smell is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Starvation made it easy though.
When you get to the C.H.I.P. center you have to take a shower, and wash all of your clothes. So they start you off on the right foot. You are clean, and all of your stuff is clean. Only I never really feel clean. I get out of the shower at the C.H.I.P. center and right away every fiber of my being is demanding that I get the fuck back in there and lather the fuck up! Right Now!
It’s the smell. That homeless guy smell. The scariest thing about the homeless guy smell for me is the sick never ending fear that it’s coming from me. That that horrible pissed off stench is not wafting off of some other guy, but is oozing from the clogged up pores of my own unwashed skin.
And a couple of times it has been. I’m so sorry. But if you are living on the street sometimes getting clean is the hardest part.
People come to the C.H.I.P. center to get clean all the time. Both physically clean as in a quick shower, and that other kinda clean as in I have to dry out. No more booze. No more drugs. Everyone starts off with a shower and clean clothes. The rest is up to you.
It’s the rest that is the hard part.
Every day is someone’s first day at the C.H.I.P. center. Most days are someone’s last.
Weekends are big for violations. That’s what they call it when you break the rules at the C.H.I.P. center, a violation. People are always going out and falling off the wagon, hell they might even be diving off the wagon head first, and then they come back to the C.H.I.P. center and the administrator gives them the breathalyzer test and boom, they’re back on the street. That’s the biggest rule at the C.H.I.P. center. No drinking. No drugs.
For some staying sober is the hard part. Not for me. My problem is the work. See C.H.I.P. is a work program. When you get to the C.H.I.P. center you have 7 days to get a job. For me the job prospects are pretty grim.
I n summer of 2006, in July, I got to the C.H.I.P. center, and I had seven days to find a job. Before they would assign me a bed someone would be verifying my employment.
I think I spent more than a week sleeping on the floor. It turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me that summer. See after my car accident in 2004, the one that made me a convicted felon, I started to have some neck and back pain. It wasn’t really bad, but it was a pain! It would come and go. Sometimes it would really, really hurt, and others it would just be a minor nuisance. But it was something I was aware of. I sleep on the floor in a homeless shelter for a week and guess what? I’m pain free. No more neck or back pain. The cure was just a few nights on a tile floor in a homeless shelter in Clearwater Florida. I’m still thankful for that.
But things went wrong for me that first time at the C.H.I.P. center. I applied for work at a few places. Sun Microstamping and Hi Tech Electronic Displays are the one’s that I remember. But I never even got a call for an interview. So I wound up in the sewer.
Yup. Telemarketing. It’s the best I could do in seven days.
First Global Services. I would call people and try to get them to agree to attend a travel seminar. Sometimes the seminar was a timeshare pitch, and sometimes the travel seminar was a travel club pitch. People were always agreeing to attend and then just never showing up. I swear we would call them and try and reschedule them to attend the seminar. We called them no-shows! I had a couple of laughs at First Global Services. But it was grueling, thankless shit work of the shittiest variety. It was telemarketing.
They day I started at First Global Services, a homeless guy from the C.H.I.P. center started with me. His name was Mike Hardergree. Or maybe Hardagree. I’m still not sure if Mike pretended to be my friend, wanted to be my friend, or really was a friend. I just don’t know. The best thing about Mike was he had a truck. You could hop into that truck and get just about anywhere in no time. Remember in summer 2006 I had already been riding the bus, public transportation for over two years. Being able to get from point A to point B with out all the bullshit of public transportation seemed like a freaking miracle.
It really did. But Mike had his own brand of bullshit that made it way more trouble than it was worth.
Mike wanted me to move to Orlando with him. I swear I am not making that up. Just the fact that he asked made my skin crawl. I’m a homeless bum, I mean officially down and out and this dude is asking me to move to Orlando with him. And his plan involved another homeless shelter in Orlando. What the fuck?
They kick you out of the C.H.I.P. center every morning Monday through Friday at 06:30 A.M.. They wake you up at 5:30 A.M. and you are out by 06:30. I guess in a city that never sleeps, say New York city, or Chicago, or Los Angeles there may be something to do at 06:30 A.M. but in Pinellas county Florida, in Clearwater Florida, there is absolutely nothing to do. Not a damn thing. You are effectively homeless for a little while each day.
Mike and I would hit a McDonalds or a Burger King to get some breakfast. Mike likes to people watch. I do to, but Mike would start saying all kinds of nasty things about the people he watched, and it really got on my nerves. But what really killed any chance I had of being friends with Mike Hardergree was his mumbling. That’s right. He would mumble. He would start off a sentence and you would be able to hear him just fine, but before he would get to the end of the sentence his voice would just trail off and fade away. I was always saying, “What?”
“What did you say Mike?” I was always asking Mike Hardergee.
So one day Mike Hardergree yells at me because he is tired of hearing me say what all the time. I put my hand like a cup up by my ear. Kind of a universal sign for what? Hu?
What did you say?
Another thing that I disliked about Mike is I got the idea that he was hiding something from me. When we were having breakfast a couple of times he asked me a few questions about my situation and how I got to be homeless. I didn’t give him the long version, but I told him as much of the truth as I could. He never did tell me how he became homeless.
He held out on me. And it irked the fuck out of me. People are always telling you their story most of the time. Not Mike Hardergree.
Then finally I just told Mike Hardergee that I didn’t want anything to do with him, that he was a huge mumbler. He hung around the C.H.I.P. center for a while but then he just up and left. I still see him around Clearwater sometimes. Guess he never made that trip over to Orlando.
I was only at the C.H.I.P. center that first time for a about a month, a month and a half.
The reason I only stayed that long the first time is because I got to the shelter one evening and there was a message for me. John P. Donnelly had called and the message said he wanted me to give him a call. He had tracked me down.
My cell phone had died in a down poor I got caught in, and the phones at the C.H.I.P. center are not exactly convenient. You can only use them at certain times of the day and it just seems like more trouble than it’s worth to me. My point is I did not call my brother. The way I remember it …I was leaving the shelter one morning around 6:30 A.M. and guess who’s parked out on Park Street just down the block from the shelter?
My brother John P. Donnelly.
He wanted me to leave with him right then. He told me he was sorry for how things had turned out and that he was worried about me. He said I could live with him. Again.
Leaving just then was not an option for a couple of reasons. One I was on my way to work at First Global Services, and two once you leave the C.H.I.P. center you can’t go back inside until about 4 P.M. so there was no way for me to get my stuff.
But the next morning I did leave with him. I wanted to believe that he was truly sorry and that he was trying to help me. But he wasn’t. What a mess this turned into.
I stayed with my brother John P. Donnelly in his little two bedroom two bath house at
14216 Chamberlain Avenue Largo, Florida 33774 for less than seven days. Less than a week after my brother came to get me out of a homeless shelter he kicked me out.
But before he did that he did some other crazy things I should mention.
When I left the C.H.I.P center to live with my brother John P. Donnelly I had over 800 dollars in the bank. But 800 is not a very big number especially when you are talking about money.
John took me shopping. For clothes. For bed linens. Hell we drove to several used furniture stores until I finally found a bed I could afford to buy. John was a sport. He paid for the expensive part of the bed. The mattress. There are mattress stores all over Pinellas County and that includes in the city of Largo and Clearwater but for some stupid reason we drove all the way over to some place in St. Petersburg just to get a mattress.
I just can’t even begin to hint at how strange I thought this was. Why drive all the way to St. Pete? Even if we had been there and it was just a convenient stop, why not just drive back to Largo or Seminole and stop there for a mattress? I just didn’t get it.
But at least I had a small room and bed to sleep on. Now I needed a job. Moving into John’s house effectively made me unemployed again. Getting to the office of First Global Services was not doable from John’s place. But I didn’t fuck around. I went out and got a job. In just two days. It was still a telemarketing thing but it was work.
I took a job at a place called Consumer Energy Solutions. They offered a week or two of paid training. The place was owned and run by a Scientologist. I liked it any way because it was just a couple of hundred feet from the C.H.I.P. center and just as close to the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. See in my heart I knew damn well my brother was about to do me dirty. I did not count on it being inside of a week though. So it worked out good that I found a place close to the shelter and the free food.
John started dosing me with the boner juice. The morning we started out looking at used furniture stores so that I could by a bed, John took me through a drive through at a McDonalds, and a little while after eating I was sporting wood. For the love of god.
I’m scouring Pinellas County for the cheapest twin size bed I can find and I have to do it sporting a boner? What the fuck?
I’ll avoid a fight every time. I don’t go looking for trouble like that. So I never said a word to John about the dick juice. I just didn’t want to discuss it with him. Not that morning as we hunted for used furniture, not ever. But during the week that I was at John’s place I was getting regular erections because he was poisoning me with something.
As if that was not enough of a burden for me John wanted me to decide on a life changing career. He wanted me to state with absolute certainty exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But I had no answer for him. The best I could do was offer to take one of those aptitude tests. You know online. You answer a bunch of questions and a computer analyzes your responses and determines what you might be good at. What you might be happy doing. He called a couple of numbers in the phone book. He wanted me to “see somebody”. I was just as happy to do it online. So that’s what I did.
The test taken the answers analyzed the computer told me that I should be a writer, or a film editor. I scratched my head a few times. I needed a computer to tell me this. I have wanted to be a writer since I was about 16. I have wanted to work in the film industry since I saw Star Wars in 1977. I was 10 then. I don’t care how annoying movies and Hollywood can sometimes be, I love them any way. Writing is just plain fun. It’s a quick simple release. Not unlike masturbation really.
I printed the results and showed them to John. I’m not sure he liked what the computer had to say. He was hoping for Fire Fighter or Police Officer, or something a little more tangible I guess.
Now I’m kinda doing battle with him on two fronts, he’s poisoning me with dick juice,
and he is pressuring me to embrace a new career (apparently unaware or unconcerned about the fact that I am a convicted felon), and he attacks me on a new front. Four or five days after moving in with him he insists that I drive around with him and look for a place to live. I have depleted me 800 dollars to something around 200 and now I have to find a place to live? I have just started a new job in telemarketing of all things (you can never really count on making any money in telemarketing it’s simply a numbers game…sometimes the numbers work with you and sometimes they work against you) and the fool is forcing me to look for a place to live. I swear it’s as if he was deliberately
trying to push me over the edge.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
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.
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.
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