Finding Happiness?

After we got the hell out of Hollywood, we spent a few years trying to find a "place that fit." (Thanks Patricia for that line) New Orleans wasn't that place, as much as I used to like it, I found I didn't anymore. The catering company I was working for had me going all over the Gulf of Mexico to catch rights and petroleum platforms, and it was wearing on me.

Taylor was next, and although I knew we wasn't going to make it there, I think Dottie was partial to the small town persona, as so we went back. My company put me on a rig where I could catch out of Cameron, Louisiana and that meant I didn't have to worry about where I would be sent to and I could commute from Arkansas. But wouldn't you know the damn job played out, so there we were back in Taylor, almost broke and no job. I took a chance and went to Texarkana, about sixty miles from Taylor and lucked out and got a Linotype job at a print shop there. Don’t you know, the job there went south also . . . Now what?

We hauled it to Nashville, Tennessee where I'd heard of a job at a typesetting place that paid good . . . I got it. Great . . . Are you getting the picture here that I have found a woman who will walk each and every step with me and I can't sit still? You'd be right . . . Uh huh. It took us a year in Nashville before we packed up and went back to Taylor . . . Talk about a glutton for punishment . . . It is almost embarrassing for me to relate it, but what the hell, it happened.

I found the best job I'd ever had with Survey Boats out of Patterson, Louisiana. We bought a house in Taylor (Gasp! Yes, bought!) A little two bedroom wooden house with a large back yard where Dottie made into one hell of a garden, much to the surprise to a few people in town. Whew! Now we were set. We were able to breathe easier. I had a good job, working a good rotation, and the pay was fantastic. I loved my job on the boats, the man, John Chance, Inc. of Lafayette, Louisiana who owned Survey Boats, Inc. had an open account for cooks to order food, and there was no monetary limit to what I could buy. I was able to prepare everything from Lobster to Prime Rib, whatever I wanted. He liked to say that his men had to be away from home and he didn't want them to feel they were missing out on home cooked meals.

I was happy, really happy, but happiness is a two-way street and Dottie, myself and Baby, the little pooch, were wallowing in it. Life was good.
Oh, but little did I realize that it was about to get much, much better. I think I can safely say unbelievably better. How could one heart withstand all the bliss which was heading its way?

My Novels:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742

Heading West . . . Again

The world is always ready to accept and embrace new lovers. Nothing is impossible, no matter the age of these new lovers. When you are infatuated with another's charms everything seems to stop and allow you to have your way. You take chances because you understand, somewhere in your deepest thoughts, that whatever you choose to try will be accomplished beyond your wildest dreams.

Even people such as Dottie and I, who had been around the block a few times, even we decided that the world was, or should have been, at our beck and call. We were in love and we all know that love blinds. Dottie was in the mood to see some of the world I had been seeing through the blurred vision of booze and pills and hypodermic needles. I was more than willing to be the tour guide, another good fit.

We had fun on the drive west, stopping first in El Paso where I took her across the bridge to Juarez. Are you getting a feel of what I'm doing? Retracing all of my old haunts, again, this time dragging along Dottie who didn't know the history of these places that I had. She was stunned – if that's the word – with all the bars that were really whorehouses. We stopped in New Mexico to check out out-of-the-way places, old western graveyards and one monster house which rose out of the desert like a huge white bird. It looked so out of place setting amid cacti and the desolation of the landscape. It was solid white and built round, like an observatory, but it wasn't. We saw no sign of life there, and it has crossed my mind many times as I wondered what the hell it was and where were the people who built it.

The so-called tour I was taking Dottie on, however, as you might expect given my history, was a train wreck in the making. Phoenix was a bust and we didn't last but about three months there before moving on to Los Angeles. Hollywood, actually. The scuzzy part of Hollywood. It was also a bust and we headed back to New Orleans, our tails tucked firmly between our legs with one more slap in the face, this time it didn’t single us out individually, we both were wounded.

My Novels:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742

Joan of Arc of My Soul #2

My meeting Dottie came at a particularly bad time in my troubled life. I was down worse than I had ever been. The failure of my marriage to Nanette really bothered me to the point that I was a walking, talking, mental wreck. I shoved all that in the back of my mind and just basically got down on myself to the point that I did not care about much of anything. I got a job offshore because of the money, but it, nor the money made me happy. My life had come to a standstill. It was meaning less and less to me. What had happened to me, or rather what I had done to myself and to others in the last dozen years of my miserable life was constantly on my mind and it was killing me, to the point that I seriously thought of ending my life.

I know the title Joan of Arc of My Soul might seem a little much to some, but Dorothy Jean Bridges, who I met when I was really down, fulfilled that image in the years to come. Dottie was there for me at the right time. Likewise I was there for her at the right time. We were destined, if there is such a thing, for each other. To say that our love and relationship was smooth and orderly would be insulting, for if the reader has been reading this blog for any length of time they know I was anything but orderly. Still, we merged into one another easily, both taking a chance on the other because life as we knew it was lacking. It was lacking and when we merged into our love what was missing slipped into place without so much as a whimper. It would need some fine-tuning, but it was in place and purring.

Although I was making pretty good money offshore and Dottie was working, we both wanted to leave New Orleans, I seemed to have instilled the wanderlust in her early on. Since she had never been out west we decided on Phoenix as our destination and just left. We did make a quick stop at Taylor (yes, I keep going back, do I not?) before cheeglin' on down the road. Mother was classic mother, but basically the couple of days we spent there were pleasant enough. Then we were gone.

Phoenix tomorrow . . .

My Novels:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742

Joan of Arc of My Soul

After the shock of Nanette taking Patricia and leaving I went on a whirlwind tour which took me from Los Angeles to Seattle, to Dallas, until finally I stopped long enough to catch my breath back in New Orleans. I always seemed to return to that city. I went to my job the next morning and demanded what was owed me. Andy, the owner took one look at me and decided he would play the game of "I'll-send-it-to-you," and pulled cash out of his pocket and paid me off, with a bonus for coming up with something in the week preceding that saved him some money. He was a good man.

I was a street person again and that meant I did things I wouldn't normally do to get cash for the booze and the drugs, but it wasn't until I hit Dallas, Texas that I found myself shoving thin, hollow rods into my veins on a regular bases. The speed I found there very few people knew about. Well they knew about it they just didn't understand its multitalented use. But this guy I met in the print shop I found work in knew and turned me on. Did he ever turn me on. The drug of choice? Ritalin. What? you say, isn't that what they give . . . Yes, it is given to kids (mostly boys who just want to be boys) to calm them down, but when dissolved in water and drawn up in a syringe and then shoot into a waiting vein . . . It is NOT kid stuff.

I survived that, however. You notice all the crap I survived? Was I leading a charmed life, or what, especially when it came to surviving? Not so charmed like when it came to hanging on to the good things which came my way and treated me with respect and even love. I was like the song about the snake who was injured and cold and this beautiful woman happened by and he begged her to take him in. She was afraid, but after the snake said he would harm her she relented and gave the snake shelter. After the snake was warm and safe he bit her. When the woman asked why he had done that after all she had done for him, the snake replied, "But you knew I was a snake." In a large portion of my life I was that damned snake

But when I got to New Orleans I met my Joan of Arc of my soul, and although I tried to bite her more than once, she had the antidote for the bite . . . Love . . . This time I was starved for love . . . Two strangers met, both needed the other . . . After thirty-five-years we still need each other . . . Dorothy (Dottie) Jean Bolton . . . That's her in the graphic at the top of the page.

My Novels:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742

Self-pity/Brightness/Gone

For a few months I seemed to be bound and determined to have my name written in the Book of Departed Souls. After leaving New Orleans I made a beeline for skid row Los Angeles and wallowed in self pity and wine/beer/liquor and any kind of drug I could score, which wasn't much because of my financial state. The city of Los Angeles welcomed yet one more tarnished soul into its odorous jungle of the pitiful and the lost amid the stench of skid row and all that implies. Days and weeks and months went by unnoticed by me as I tried desperately to commit suicide by wallowing in the depths of hell that was Fifth and Loos Angeles Streets in downtown. The bars, huge cancerous, sad places had my kind of people sitting on broken, cockeyed bar stools and at small little tables alone and lonely and full of remorse and hate because of whatever had sent them to this purgatory on earth. My kind of people. My kind of world. A world of desperate men and women bunched together in the bedlam of the moment. Every day there would be a soul freed from his or her misery when they were found dead in alleyways. Free! Great God Almighty! Free At Last!!

At least that was how I was beginning to view the living, just hanging around until death released you from all the agony that being alive entails. Among some fleeting lucid moments as I was on my knees in the slime and poverty of Fifth and Los Angeles Streets Nanette and my beautiful little daughter, Patricia found their way into my thoughts. It was much to horrible to consider and even think about and I sought out drink or pills, preferably both as an antidote. Before I could get to that most powerful antidote I could see how weak and stupid I was and that Nanette and Patricia were paying a far, far worse price than was I because of that weakness. But soon the wine obliterated their beautiful images and I was safe again, locked inside my cocoon of self pity and anguish.

Somehow, I came out of it and through an old friends help, Richard who I was sharing an apartment with when I met Nanette, I managed to climb out of the gutter and find work. After I found work self esteem slipped into my psyche and the thoughts of my family back in New York came to possess me. I called. Nanette agreed and I sent her plane fare and we were going to try it again. Through all of my problems over the years, it was the booze which amplified and made it much worse and I wasn't planning on quitting anytime soon. It was whiskey which caused the fight Nanette and I had after everything had been going along so damn good. I never could even remember what the fight was about, but knowing myself and knowing Nanette, the fight was probably all on me. Whatever it was, whatever I said, it scared her enough that she left the next day while I was at work. That really devastated me, because I couldn't remember what the hell I had done to cause it. I knew we had a fight, I remembered the yelling, me yelling at least, and I can only guess that whatever I said to her scared her enough that she took Patricia and went back to New York.

That was the last time I would see Nanette.

My Novels:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742

I need a break . . . Yesterday's Chapter 51 had its toll on me . . . Whadda you think of my grandson? . . . Handsome, eh? . . . I'll be back tomorrow . . .

Chapter 51 Killed Me To Write

With the help of my influential mother-in-law in New York I was not sent back to Lompoc for the remainder of my sentence. Instead she got a federal parole officer in Brooklyn to take me on and Nanette and I took off for the big city. Flushing, in Queens Borough, was where the in-laws lived and we stayed there until Nanette had Patricia. I found work in Lynbrook, Long Island, and after the baby was born we moved out there.

I loved Lynbrook. I loved my job at Satisfaction Supply company: Label Craft Division . . . Yeah, I know, what a name, huh? I loved Nanette. I loved Patricia. What then, could go wrong? This is where the chapter started killing me, because I don't know why I left. In the book I blamed it on my nomadic lifestyle up until this time in my life. I blamed it on the "ramblin' man" syndrome. It is killing me even here trying to say that I walked away from my family. When I was writing Chapter 51 I had to get up from the computer three different times and take a walk outside to try and calm myself down, but nothing worked and I forced myself to write the chapter. This chapter is, by far, the worst one I have had to write and there have been some bad one.

This is all I am going to say about this chapter, except that it just about killed me, at one point I actually thought I was going to have a heart attack or a stroke . . . Tomorrow . . . Tomorrow . . .

My Novels:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742