November 25

Once again my dad helped me pay off the Georgetown D.A. for all the hot checks, and added this to my tab.  I attended a hot check/felony/*repeat offender* class, which was similar to the one before.

When my parents went on a trip where they were out of town for the weekend (a rarity) my brother and I threw a party.  He bought some weed which we rolled for the occasion and several friends came over and we drank, laughed, got high and generally had a great time.  We cleaned up afterwards but weren’t thorough enough.  Upon their return dad found a beer cap stuck in a crack of the garage wall and mom found someone’s earring in their bedroom.  Philip managed to make up a cover story that was somehow convincing, although I’m not sure what he said.  We also did a lot of clubbing during that time.  I really liked this one place in the stockyards.  I was always on the dance floor when they cranked up the INXS.  I saw a bouncer break up a fight one night, moving out of the way to let him do his thing.  And on another night I saw someone getting the shit kicked out of himself in the alley.  I wasn’t about to go tackle the three guys standing there so I just kept walking to my car.    That was just the way it was.

In spite of the many thins I have written so far, most people who knew me through high school and college would tell you that I was very religious.  Each time I ‘renewed’ my faith and repented of my sinful ways I was very sincere.  My ‘sins’ remained mostly hidden so all that others would see was my very sincere religious side.  My brother had a group of friends who had known him since Kindergarten.  The first time I met them after the separation from Deeanne we sat in the back of someone’s pickup.  They would all laugh when I cussed, and nearly fell out of the pickup bed when I took a monster hit off the joint being passed around.  I was used to the new me, they weren’t.  That night still comes up when I see them.

One day I came home from my temp job and Philip met me at the door.  He was wild-eyed.  He told me dad had found my pot, but that he didn’t know about his stash and he begged me to just apologize and get it over with.  So we had a family meeting.  I was a bit miffed that dad had been snooping around, but even more so that he had flushed my pot down the toilet!  So I told him the truth:  I would respect his house and never bring pot there again, but I wouldn’t swear to never smoking pot again.  My brother visibly shrank when I said that.  He was so averse to confrontation, it was funny.  They never knew that he had an identical stash in the locked briefcase in the floor of his closet.  And I was the black sheep of the family!  Hilarious.

I still talked with Deeanne now and then on the phone but the conversations generally didn’t go well.  But eventually I went back to Georgetown to talk with her and to go see the kids.  They had been taken away from Deeanne when her parents had come over to visit and found the two boys a couple of blocks away from the trailer.  David was inside and stoned or something, and the baby girl was in her crib.  They called the sheriff and got temporary custody and took the kids to their home.  It was the last time those kids ever lived in a mobile home.

At some point I got on yet another bus and made the trip to Georgetown.  This was perhaps the best trip I ever had on a bus (not counting band trips).  The girl I sat next to was a bit careless with her purse and I saw a small set of scales in it.  The next thing you know I traded her some of my weed for a pill.  She eventually said something about me enjoying the pill later, and I said, “I already took it.”  She said, “That was valium!”  Oh well, I enjoyed the rest of the ride to Austin very much.

The trip I do remember taking to Georgetown was when I borrowed dad’s car, yet again.  I stayed at a motel near the trailer park.  Deeanne came over to visit me and we had an awkward conversation.  Eventually we sat on the bed and the next thing you know we were pulling off clothes and fucking like there was no tomorrow.  It was as if each of us was attempting to show the other what they were missing, or what new techniques they had learned.  It was crazy.  And it was ok in the end, but not mind-blowing sex.  It was just pretty hot compared to what we had been giving each other the last several years.  She eventually left and went back to the trailer with David.  Later on during that same visit we drove out to an abandoned retail development site, all parking lot and curbs and nothing else.  It was fairly remote, and again we talked and then she was scooting her seat back and I was on top of her, my knees on the floor.  Remember, this was a Mercury Capri here, not a luxury limo.  But we somehow managed to get another good fuck session in.  It was the last time anything like that ever happened.

During this same trip I went by Deeanne’s mom’s house to visit the kids.  Anna Marie didn’t particularly recognize me.  She was under a year old and had only known me for about six months so this wasn’t surprising.  But David was all over me.  We played with toys, I gave him his favorite ‘airplane’ ride, and generally had a good time.  I even tucked him in, and he asked me if I was staying for the night.  It was probably the hardest thing I have ever done, to say goodbye to him that night.  After I left I didn’t even make it to the next major intersection before I was stopped by a cop.  He inspected the contents of a paper bag I had with me (which contained snack food) and once again I was given the not-so-subtle hint that I was not welcome in this town any more.

I eventually received divorce papers to sign, and it was uncontested.  I let Deeanne keep the trailer and everything in it (and the debt), I got the clothes on my back.  It was over.

This is out of place chronologically, but the last time I was in that trailer was during the time I was staying in the apartment with no electricity.  Deeanne knew I was hot and somewhat miserable so she invited me to stay over while she and David took the kids somewhere.  I am thinking perhaps it was a movie.  So I did.  While they were gone I had the TV on but quickly got diverted.  I made a tape for Deeanne, songs which I thought might remind her of me and what we had.  It was a pathetic last-ditch effort when it was obvious things were over.  And then the phone rang.  I answered.  Hey, it was still technically my house, right?  It was Deeanne’s mom.  She was surprised to hear me on the phone, but I told her what was going on and she acted like she understood.  Within five minutes someone was knocking on the door, more like pounding.  I answered since it was the Georgetown police.  The kind officer used his nightstick to push me down into the nearest chair and pin me there.  He told me to stay put and not move a muscle while another officer began searching the house.  Evidently Deeanne’s mom thought I had killed them all and stashed the bodies, I’m not sure.  But the cops weren’t taking any chances.  They found nothing, of course, and Deeanne and David and the kids eventually showed back up.

While we were still living in Haltom City with my parents my brother and I spent a lot of time at Cliff and Tom’s house.  Cliff and Tom both had jobs.  Cliff worked with my brother at General Dynamics making fighter jets.  Tom was a welder.  But I will always remember them as some of the steadiest, hard-core potheads I have ever known.  I never went to their house when their bong, Earl, wasn’t being passed around.  Earl was a nice ceramic bong, so named because when you took a good hit off of it, all you could way was ‘Earl!’  We would get high, watch porn, and try to find someone who was really zoned out.  That person then  became the target for well-aimed lighters or any object that might get a nice bounce off of someone’s nuts.  Completely juvenile, but hilarious when you’re stoned out of your gourd.  And then we would almost always have to make a run to Taco Bell to satisfy the munchies.

I will always remember the halloween party we had there.  By this time I had acquired a vehicle from one of those used car lots that takes weekly payments.  It was an early 70’s light blue Lincoln Continental Mark VII with white leather interior.  I absolutely loved that car, but the first time any one saw it they instantly referred to it as a pimpmobile.  The name stuck.  So naturally I went to the halloween party as a pimp, complete with a fake fur coat and big chains and one of my dad’s old pork pie hats.  It was great fun all night.  It was the kind of party where someone stays the night and sleeps on the bathroom floor so that the toilet is convenient.  Fortunately that was not me.

Eventually my brother and I realized that living with my parents was cramping our party style so we shared rent on a house in Lake Worth.  It was back near our old stomping grounds so it was comfortable.  I think we found the house through word-of-mouth at General Dynamics.  It was next door to someone who I think also worked at G.D., Gary.  And that’s where I first encountered that wonderful powder of the gods, methamphetamine.