The Day I Saw The Light
I just got out of the Navy and I just turned 23. I had a wife and a child and the Navy had given me $775 mustering out pay. In those days, that was equivalent to about 4 to 5 months pay for the average working man.
I couldn’t get a job because I had no experience, but I had 2 “Sheepskins”, which amounted to nothing as compared to on the job training and experience. So, I was a regular at the local bar. A large mug of beer, at that time, was 10 cents – so for a dollar, you could have a great time. One of the things I began to participate in, was shooting Pool. Needless to say, as a novice, I lost most of the time, which made it worse.
However, I was a quick study and in a few months I became extremely proficient at the pool table. I can remember coming home and asking my wife, “How much money do you have” , she said; “Fifty Cents” I said, “Give it to me, I really need it and don’t worry about milk for the baby, if necessary, I will steal some from somebody’s doorstep”. In those days, milk was still delivered "door to door".
I took the 2 quarters to the pool room and waited and waited and waited some more. I finally saw a man come in that was totally drunk and wanted to play for money. I said I will play for fifty cents, he laughed, but said OK. Well, to make a long story short, I left the pool room with $277.50 . When I got home I gave her fifty cents back and placed $200 in the bible, but didn’t tell her. She read the bible every day.
I was getting tired of being out of work, so I went to a local contractor and simply said, “ I will work for you for free for 2 weeks and at the end of that time we can sit down and discuss a permanent job. He agreed. At the end of the first week, he said I would get paid like everybody else and I could stay as a permanent employee. In today’s world, it couldn’t happen due to insurances and other hiring requirements. I worked there for about six months and got fired for something another worker did, but I couldn’t prove it.
I am out of work again and can’t even use the last job as a reference. I was sitting on my front steps about 7:pm one evening, when my neighbor flatly said he was not going to go to work tonight and, in fact, he was never going back. So, I asked him where he worked and basically, what did he do. He briefed me, so when He was supposed to report to the bakery at 12:midnight, I was there and simply said I was here to take Chuck’s job. He told me he was quitting and I need the job. The boss said, good – Chuck was about to be fired anyway and since I was there to work – OK. Well, what I didn’t know is that it paid $40 a week and the hours were 7 days a week, from 12 at night to 12 noon. There was no such thing as a paycheck, they gave you 4 - $10 dollar bills every week. I learned as much as I could about an Italian Bakery and I could take home as much bread every day as I could carry. One day I was asked about the bread I was taking home as it was a lot more than we could eat. I told him that most of my neighbors were out of work and the bread I was bringing home was feeding my neighbors. He said to take as much as I wanted, any time.
It was New Years Eve and we had made arrangements to go to a place called “Lakeview”. The plans were, my brother, his girlfriend and my wife and I. We did go and we had a great time. It was about 4 in the morning when we decided to come home. My brother was driving his girlfriend’s brand new car and, of course, we were with him. On the way home we had a very bad accident and we were all taken to the nearest hospital. I was unconscious and didn’t wake up for about 2 hours. In addition to us four, we agreed to take home another woman who lived nearby. She was also in the back seat with my wife and I and I was the one in the middle. My brother was hurt very badly, my wife had an injured knee, I was simply just knocked out and the woman we were just giving a ride to, was also hospitalized. My brother’s girlfriend was OK, just scratched a little bit. The woman we gave a ride to sued for $35,000 and got it. My brother was physically hurt as well as having brain damage. He spent the rest of his life as a very slow learner and held the most menial jobs available. For a long time, if you asked him a question, it would take 3 to 5 minutes for him to answer. His girl friend married him anyway, but we found out later, she only did so, at her mother’s request. Her mother owned a bar in Philadelphia and was afraid that if my brother sued for anything, she might lose her bar.
She divorced him after 2 years and he still sadly believes, to this day, that she loved him.
He has lived a useless life ever since and now lives with our half-brother, from my mothers second marriage. All said and done, I was the only one that walked away totally unscathed. I was just knocked out.
The time came when I met someone that could get me a job in the electrical field at Campbell’s Soup Company in Camden New Jersey. Needless to say, I took the job and it paid $100 per week and only 5 days a week. I was doing well after a short period time and bought our first home in a very nice neighborhood. I was still going out on weekends drinking and gambling with a couple of friends. I would shoot pool and for the most part I would win a lot. In fact I was so well known in that circle of activity, I was having a hard time getting anyone to play with me, as they knew that they probably wouldn't win.
The home we bought was 3 houses down from the Chief of Police in that community and I would fix his TV and hearing aid free, for a blind eye. As strange as it may seem, I never missed a day of work, or missed reporting to work – no matter what. But, there were times that I went to work completely stoned to the point I couldn’t stand on my own two feet. I recall once, the guard at the gate held me up high enough to punch in and dropped me on the floor and called my boss. The boss came and took me to a Ladies room and put me on the couch and left me there. When he left, he locked the door and placed a sign on the door. “Out of Order”. He came back about an hour before quitting time and woke me up and told me to clean up so I could quit and go home, as I had not been home since the morning of the day before.
One Morning I came home from being out drinking until the bars closed, and I just happened to look out the window to see a man get out of his car and place something on my doorstep. I went down to see what it was. It was a cigar box, but I was very skeptical about it, so I called the Chief of Police to take a look at it. He took it to the police station, where I had to give a statement. I am not sure how he figured it out, but there was a military grenade in the box and when lifting the lid, it would pull the pin and you had 3 seconds to get rid of it.
I had realized that my kids would have been the first to open it, as it was a school day. I quit shooting pool in that circle and never returned. I still play a good game, but not for money.
One of the things I began to notice, was that I attracted women very easily. I had a very hard time with that, as some of those women were almost impossible to walk away from.
My closest friends that I would go out with would make fun of me because I would turn down unbelievable offers from some of these women. One man called me a “female magnet” and they used to go out with me to get the women that I would turn down. They began to wonder about my sexual preferences or at least make fun of me sometimes. Of course, they knew better.
Strange as it may seem, my wife and I met a woman that had just moved to town from Los Angeles, California. She had just under gone a nasty divorce, but was financially loaded. Literally, worth millions. That was the beginning of even more trouble.
She seemed very nice and My wife and I went places with her. She would, most of the time, pick up the tab. She said she would set me up in business, if I wanted to. I was taken in by that so I accepted her offer. She put up $3500, which at that time was a fortune, sort of like $35,000 would be today. I went into the Radio & TV Repair business and rented a store in the city. Of course that gave her a legitimate reason to see me as often as she wanted to – Part Owner.
She bought one of the reconditioned TV sets from the store as though she was an ordinary customer. It was not more than a week later that she called for repair at her home and that she would be home after 7:pm that day. This happened many times, and I began to believe she was deliberately messing the TV up as all I did was re-adjust it and it was OK. One night she offered me a drink and I fully believe I was drugged , I remember waking up sitting on her couch and I was originally drinking at the kitchen table. She indicated we had sex, which I have no memory of. She also called my wife to share the activity. I was strangely sick for a couple of days after that. All of a sudden she acted as though she owned me. She got back to my wife and offered to give her One Million Dollars to let me go. My wife told me later in life that she simply told her that if she can get me, she could have me. I asked her why she didn't take the offer and she said "I had what I wanted and I didn't want the money".
She soon found out that I couldn’t really be had and decided that if she couldn’t have me, no one else could either. She devised a very unique plan to get me locked up as a fellon without a real future. She said she would hire me as a contractor to go to California to retrieve her furniture from her former home. She was willing to pay me $2500 to cover all expenses and include some profit. I would need a helper to assist me in loading a U-Haul and drive it back. I had a standard contractors tablet of blank contracts that were used in those days for small jobs. So to make it all look legit, I filled out the form and she signed it and I gave her a copy.
Off to California we went, and arrived at the address she had given us to empty and found out that her divorced husband lived there with his new wife. When I went in, I had a key; there was no one there, however it was obvious that people lived there. I wrote a note that I would be back later in the day to remove the furniture that she wanted me to bring back to her new home in New Jersey. I also left 2, 100 dollar bills with the note in order to show that I was not here to steal or rob from the house.
When I went back, the police were waiting for us and we were about to be arrested for breaking and entering and intent to steal the furniture. Here is where the real luck came in. I was checked out as a legitimate contractor, complete with a N.J State Contractor's license and I was able to produce the actual contract that she signed. Her divorced husband recognized her signature. That piece of paper saved our bacon. The question arises again, was that really a stroke of luck?
But now she was in real trouble. We were left go and escorted to the airport and told to take the next flight home. We did. I also kept the money she gave us to do the job. As luck would have it for me, her new boyfriend was a cop and admitted that she set a trap but that he didn’t know about it until we were in California. We were fully cleared after his testimony.
The money dwindled and of course I didn’t have a job at Campbell’s Soup anymore.
We lost the house and decided to move to Brooklyn, N.Y. where my wife’s family lived. I was able to get a job as an electrician and then, an apartment. Life there was not what we had expected. My wife was repeatedly attacked just going to the Deli for groceries. We only stayed there for about 3 months and I decided to go back to the small town I had grown up in. Maybe there would be a good job for me there. I bought a car from a neighbor for $100 to make the trip. The car was worth quite a lot more, but he sold it to me believing that it had a broken rear axle. Of course, he didn't tell me that. I noticed the obvious shaking and took it to a auto repair shop. After they checked it out, they found it was missing a couple of bolts and they were replaced, it ran fine. Again, I always wondered, was that luck or what?
I had decided to come to the small community I was raised in to get another decent start in life.
When we arrived, we had nothing much more than the clothes on our backs, three little girls and no money. The foster family was still there and they got together with a lot of people to see if they would give us furniture they didn’t need. During this period of time, and we needed a place to stay. There was an Inn that was going to be sold, but was totally empty. Somehow it was arranged for us to stay there until I could get a job and a place to live. Also, there was a restaurant about 100 yards down the road from the Inn and they would let my wife and kids eat there – FREE. I, on the other hand had to pay. Within a week, I had a decent job and rented a farmhouse on 5 acres of land attached. Things should have got better, but I was still a problem and went back into the old ways of drinking and gambling.
This time, it was different, I became so proficient at shooting pool, I would give demonstrations and allow anyone to challenge me to try to win. Of course, money was involved again and it would usually draw a crowd in the local bar.
It didn’t stop with the local bar; I would go as far as 30 to 50 miles away to play for money. I was going out about 4 nights a week, or more, and I found out there were other people out there nearly as good as I was on the pool table. That started fights.
My wife will attest to the fact that there was hardly ever a night that I didn’t come home with blood all over me from a fight. Rarely was it mine, but I wasn’t getting away clean. It was obvious that I was in a fight from the bruises that obviously showed and the clothes that were torn. This went on, day after day, month after month, for more than a year... possibly closer to two years. I was careful never to use the Dim-Mak (the death touch) form of Martial art I was taught in the Navy.
Actually, I was a very violent young man as the Navy taught us to be violent and how to use it efficiently. So, when I came home I should have got counseling for PTSD so it took me a while to adjust to normal life. I realized I had to hold my lightening fast temper but without help it was hard. Sometimes I took my temper out on furniture, never struck my wife or any woman as I was taught from childhood never ever strike a woman in anger.
I was making a living from the pool table and believe it or not, I was actually holding down a job too. I am not sure how, but I was getting better at both at the same time.
Needless to say, my foster family practically dis-owned me by now, and had wished, I had never came back. They said my behavior was a direct reflection on them.
One night, I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to walk into town. I went into town and walked some of the streets I had known as a child. As I was walking toward the old homestead where I was raised, I suddenly stopped. It was as though I couldn’t move. All of a sudden I was standing in a circular pool of light about 8 or 10 feet in diameter. I couldn’t see where it was coming from, as there was nothing there except me. The fact that it was not coming from above was also strange too. It was like a bubble and it forced me to see me for the first time, what I really was, and I didn’t like what I saw.
It kind of reminded me of the “Christmas Carol” story of Scrooge.
Anyway, it was at that moment that I decided to become a real husband, father and the kind of person that others might want to be associated with. It was sort of like I was making a promise to somebody, which I did. I was not a religious man then, but it did make me think differently about religion and life.
I went home and pondered about what happened for a very long time. I hadn't been drinking and I never used drugs and I was positive that it wasn't a dream, so I decided it was real and I would keep my promise to the “Light”. The next day I was offered a really good job in another community. I took the job and that became the first day of the rest of my brand new life.
I got out of the Navy at 23, I raised hell for 9 years, and now I am 32.
( There are many more stories I could tell within this period of 9 years, but I think I have made my point.)
There is something about my life that is becoming obvious, but never the less somewhat mystical, see if you can’t see it before the end of my chapters, don’t fret, I will reveal it.
The End Of Chapter 4
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