Chapter 10

                        SOUTH FLORIDA

I took the bus to the end of its route and talked my way onto another for the short hop to my destination. I found a hotel room for the night, switching to a cheaper hotel the next day.  I had asked the cab driver where I might find a cheap apartment and in checking the street I came upon a house that had been divided into a large apartment and an efficiency.  The landlady was in the front yard and I rented the efficiency immediately.

 It was mainly a white street but my next door neighbors were Haitian and the next apartment building was mostly Central American Indians.  The Haitians gave me no problem but the Indians looked like they were going to be trouble on one or two occasions when they were liquored up.

One of the Haitians was named Valery, he and I talked occasionally and I once asked him to tell me about Loup Garru which is a Werewolf in the Haitian religion.  His eyes got narrow and he asked me how I knew about Loup Garru and I told him I had read about it in a magazine.  He said that I shouldn't ask that question, some Haitians might get upset if a white man asked about it.  One of the others who was not religious thought it was funny and kidded me calling me Loup Garru for a while.  Valery finally got him to stop because it upset one of the five or six guys that lived there who was religious. 

I found a construction job within walking distance and soon had a ten speed bike and started taking computer courses at a night school.  The construction company was one of the more interesting ones I have seen.  The company was owned by two brothers and a partner.  One brother was arrested for his sixth DUI while I was there and the other brother got the partner addicted to crack cocaine, the partnership later dissolved when the partner began spending company money on his habit. 

Their father, a former prison guard, worked for their company.  They had a veiled conversation about having something to forgive him about one day with about five of us present.  We couldn't believe what we were hearing.

On the site there was Beard, two hundred and twenty pounds of former Harley Davidson racer, he had lost his driving license for life due too many DUI's.  Several jails in different states had made his acquaintance. 

He had been shot in the back  with a shotgun in his living room, he claimed over a drug deal, and had stumbled out of the house and made it to the road before collapsing.  He showed me a malevolent looking scar and said that he had died once on the operating table.  This had slowed him up quite a bit and he had lost most of his aggressiveness.

There was a carpenter named Steve, he had been an accountant for a firm that had been involved in some illegal dealings and had spent a bit of time in the local Stockade where he had to spend nights and weekends.  He had been drinking during one of the days he was let out to work and had solicited a prostitute who changed right before his eyes into an undercover cop.  More time.  He used to get drunk just before returning to the Stockade and almost missed his show-up time on several occasions.

There was a large muscular black with afro and gold tooth that everyone called Superman.  He had been sentenced to five years in prison in New York for cocaine possession and had done three.  He was starting to get back into dealing and was working up a crack addiction.

There was a iron worker hopelessly addicted to crack who, though he made twelve dollars hour, couldn't keep an apartment and ended up with his few belongings hidden in the woods.  He and his were girlfriend sleeping in one of the unfinished rooms of the hotel we were working on, they sometimes got naked and ran around on the roof at night.  The security guard didn't seem to mind.

There were a few other druggies and drunks and three women, a well built girlfriend of one of the workers, a former topless dancer and a  former stripper whose daughter was a topless dancer despite her protests and attempts to keep her off the path. 

                               *

There was one attempted affair with a young woman I met but our night didn't turn out very well.  I had met her at the shopping center when she had introduced herself to me and had stopped by her place a couple of times for some petting. 

She was going through some pretty rough times; both her parents had died, she said both had molested her, she was in a fight over the will with her brother, she was battling a drinking problem and wasn't getting along with her part time boyfriend who worked on an oil rig. 

I called her one night from school and she said to come over and bring a bottle of wine so I went to see her.  She was already drunk but started drinking more.  We kissed for a while and eventually ended up in bed.  I got her undressed and as I was getting undressed she sat on the bed looking at me with the strangest look on her face. I took out my condemns but they had been in my wallet for so long that they were dried out and tore as I tried to put them on.  I would have preferred they tear from me being well hung but that was not the case.

She fell back on the bed and mumbled something.  I got dressed, went home, got more condemns, returned, got undressed and sheathed, and began trying to arouse her.  She sat up in the bed for a minute, looked off in the distance or perhaps into the past, rolled over on the bed and passed out.  A small puddle of drool formed on the bed.  The Magic Goose died.  I got dressed slowly and stayed with her for a while then went home.  I checked on her the next day and she was ok.

Some time after that her boyfriend, who I found out wasn't really a boyfriend, they didn't have sex, had one of her dogs put to sleep and gave the other one away while she was in a rehabilitation center.  She came over one night after he had hit her and had me call the police but there wasn't enough evidence for an arrest.  She moved out of her apartment and went off the wagon and on the wagon and I lost track of her. 

                               *

I worked at the construction site until it was just about finished then moved to a different company.  Work slowed there after several months as the recession started to affect construction and I went through a period of unemployment.  I borrowed against the inheritance and bought a motorcycle, a Zuzuki 250, to increase my mobility.

Finally I landed a job with a large construction company.  They asked me if I could run a bobcat and I said I could though I couldn't.  It didn't take them long to find out and they put me on a pivot pin front end loader which I could easily handle.

After we finished the earth moving the company said that they had a position open at a school they were just getting started on but that I would have to work as a laborer.  I considered the employment picture, the recession, the closed down construction sites that I had seen and decided; advantage: Construction Co.  Off I went.  It required two half an hour motorcycle rides on the Interstate every day but it was work.  It was a sun baked site where the architects had torn down all the trees, planning to put their version of mother nature in at a later date.  The work was hard and you broke your first sweat early.  There were stories of what it had been like before any of the buildings had been erected.  The project had been going on for almost a year.  The second story had been started on some buildings, the three story gymnasium walls were going up, and several other buildings were just coming out of the ground.  I tore down concrete forms, cut misplaced reinforcing bars, waterproofed walls, built gang ladders, and installed parapet. 

I tired of the ride after a couple of months and once I got to know some of the people on the site I found a foreman who rented rooms to workers.  I rented a room from him and his wife, there was a mechanic in one of the other rooms and the last room was empty.       The foreman was called Pigman because of his love for his three pigs that he kept on some property in the woods, he even had it painted on his hard hat.  Pigman would never tell anyone one the site where he kept his pigs because some of them would begin talking about going out there and getting some pork chops and this would cause him intense emotional distress.  He would also have to be nicer on the site to prevent someone from going out there and actually converting them into pork chops if they developed a severe problem with him.

All of us smoked refer and they occasionally snorted cocaine, or so they said.  He was a gun owner, 357 Magnum, .45 automatic, semi automatic MAC-10, shotgun and a few others so we had that in common.  He kept all of the guns unloaded and secured as there had been a few arguments in the house, I thought this a good policy.

After I had been there for a while I realized that they were dealing on a regular basis.  I decided to move out but inertia took over and I was to stay for two more months.  We did had a conversation about it and everybody decided to mind their own business.  My position was that I didn't know what anyone else was up to because I didn't spend much time at the house.  For a while, everything went well.

There were some interesting people on the construction site but for Monday morning soliloquies Morris had them all beat.

Morris was a big man with a belly that hung over his belt by several inches and a handlebar moustache that drooped down over his face.  He had a deep, loud voice, a bad attitude and didn't like to be interrupted when he had something important to say.  In his way of thinking that was anything that came out of his mouth.  He came into the tool shed office one Monday looking like the end of the world.

"I swear to God," he said as he entered, "I've drank with bikers, I've run with some bad son of a bitches, I've known some people that were just plain crazy, but I've never seen a man as mean as a woman!

"My bags are packed!  My bags are packed!  I've already called my mama and she said that my room was ready and my bed was made.

If it wasn't for my two little girls I'd be gone right now. 

"I swear to God she's mean."

  "I don't know." he said, shaking his head,  "I just don't

 know.  God, what a weekend.  I'm drinking at the bar and it must be 2:30 A.M. in the fucking morning and I finally decide to leave.  I get outside and Rock pulls up and gets out of his truck and slams the door and goes around and opens the passenger door and starts beating on his girl.  I thought he was going to kill her.  He heads into the bar and she goes after him trying to stop him cause she thinks he's going to leave her.  He comes over and asks me to take her to some-fucking-body's house and she's carrying on cause she knows he's gonna go in there and pick up some strange pussy."

"A car pulls up, and I know who these guys are, they're detectives, and one says `What's the problem here' and Rock starts over there saying something and I told him they were detectives but I guess he didn't hear me or didn't want to cause he goes over and punches the guy right in the face and takes off into the woods.

"I told the cops that I'd never seen him before, he was just some fucker that had walked up.  At least his girlfriend had enough sense to keep her mouth shut, he'd kill her if she talked to the police." 

"I've had enough trouble with them fuckers lately.  I tell you what, I've had more trouble from them fuckers since I sold my Harley than when I rode it.  I always got along with them then.  Well, most of the time," he said with a laugh.

"I guess Rock came back and got his truck cause I rode by later and it was gone.  Hell, I guess I'll see him around here sometime today and he'll tell me what happened.

"I don't know man, I think my career is over."  "I think Building D, the building from hell, is gonna be the one to do me in.  I fucked up on building A, that fucking wall was two inches off, but D building I think is gonna be the end."

"Ya'll watch out if I go down because I'm gonna take every swinging dick here with me that I can.  A rolling Morris gathers bodies."

"Oh well, let me get the fuck out of here and do some work before they fire me." 

I recorded this soliloquy right after it happened and Morris saw me writing and thereafter thought of me as a potential company spy.  (To some on construction sites people taking notes are highly suspect individuals and I have a habit of taking notes on interesting events.) 

There was a short affair with one woman while I was staying at Pigman's.  I was drinking in my favorite bar where I had a crush on a bartendress from Tennessee who didn't have a crush on me.  A woman of 40 suddenly appeared and sat beside me and we began talking.  Soon I was buying her drinks and playing at the fake blackjack table and making a complete fool out of myself. 

At the end of the evening we went home together but sex with her just wasn't that good.  I went over there several weekends but things didn't work out.  She was seeing a married man, she acted like a little girl, spoke of herself in the third person, and drank like a fish. 

I woke up one morning at seven and she had gotten up at five to prepare to go to work.  She had drank almost a quarter of my bottle of rum, said she had a little bracer.  What was she bracing herself for, World War Three?  I skipped seeing her for two weeks and she called and said she was going full time with her married boyfriend.  It was more of a relief than a letdown.  

There were some interesting people coming and going on the construction site.  Some rather strange ones too.  Hauling a stack of plywood one day I caught pieces of a game of psych-out being played between a stocky Puerto Rican who was a former boxer with, he said, fifteen knockouts or technical knockouts and a wiry Jamaican who thought he could take him.  It started off as a friendly disagreement but soon the Puerto Rican was escalating the matter.  He called his arms the Pythons and told the Jamaican he would unleash them on him after work.  The Jamaican finally backed down. 

A second Jamaican had become involved in the conversation and soon was engaged with the Puerto Rican.  He was stocky with a full beard and dread locks tied behind his head covered with a kerchief.  He had acquired the nickname of Goat Legs from some of the workers due to his double jointed knees.  He presented quite a sight leaning off the side of the building against his safety lines, working on concrete forms. 

The Puerto Rican escalated the psychological game by saying the they would fight and the looser would be butt-fucked.  The Jamaican took offense at this.  The Puerto Rican, though he flirted with the Roach Coach (lunch wagon) girls had admitted to several friends that he liked younger men and word had gotten around. 

The two traded threats (though it was never close to a fight) with the Puerto Rican finally saying he would butt-fuck Goat Legs so hard that (in a high falsetto voice) "he would wake up in the morning and put a dress on and feel, oh, so pretty and not know why."  Goat Legs made reference to the Puerto Rican being sick several times and the game was over.

This is not to say that the site was full of miscreants.  There were many married men on the site that come only to make a living for their families.  There was one, a lead carpenter who was singularly unimpressed with some of the people he had to work with on the site.  He had worked all of his life and supported a wife and four children for almost twenty years on his salary.  He had learned everything that he knew from doing and had worked himself into a position that provided a good income. 

He worked three stories up on the gymnasium wall on some rather shaky scaffolding, laying rebar, building forms and pouring concrete.  He never asked his younger crew to go anywhere or do anything that he wouldn't do despite the fact that he was well into middle age.  Upon hearing one too many stories of drug dealing, wife beating and abandoned children he told his crew his construction site philosophy: Come to work on time, do the best damn job you can and try not to kill anybody.

There were lighter moments on the site from time to time.  Young men just starting out in construction were sometimes sent to find the Skyhooks.  They would walk around asking workers where they were and those in the know would send them to a different part of the site.  Finally someone would explain that there were no such tools and someone was just having fun.  For a while a new arrival or two was sent across the site to find the West Regional Layout Office.  That being the label above the door on one of the portable toilets.  While this fun was definitely frowned on by the foremen it went on anyway.

The outhouses provided some fun at times.  They were plastic hot boxes with a urinal and just enough room to drop your pants and make a deposit into the pool of blue disinfectant a foot or so beneath you.  As time would pass the pool would rise toward the top and the disinfectant and deodorant would loose its strength causing shorter and shorter stays except among those of fierce determination to take an unscheduled break or those in dire need.     The fact that the waste company profited from the outhouses sitting on the site and not from sending a truck, driver and the attached expense's to vacate them was not lost on the crews when the waste to disinfectant ration ran heavily in favor of the waste.

There was sometimes an interesting comment written on the walls such as:

                        This job sucks

                     Bill Johnson is a fag

             Tom, your request has been approved,

you work in this office now OK

                 Niggers and Haitians go home

           The white man is a blonde blue eyed devil

                  from the cave of your woman

                I've never seen a white man yet

           Harriet, you fat ugly pig, suck my balls

There were always pranksters around who, upon spying a friend about to conduct business in the white palace, would wait an appropriate time and chuck a rock or two against the walls.  This would be met with accusations of incestuous relations with their mother and various and sundry threats.

Of course the mind of man is constantly trying to outdo itself.  One day the high lift operator watched an individual he perceived unlikely to commit anatomical revenge enter the little white box.  He waited a decent interval, positioned the machine a short distance away, lowered his forks at an angle and proceeded to charge the box.  Digging long grooves in the dirt he slid the forks under the outhouse giving the occupant, and the blue pool, a jolt as the back of the forks came in contact with the structure. 

With a flick of a lever he partially raised the outhouse and carried it some fifteen or so feet before lowering the sloshing, screaming box to the ground and dragged his forks from beneath it, the outhouse leaving skid marks in the dirt.  He paused briefly and chatted with the mirth filled audience of whom yours truly was a member, then he and his trusty steed disappeared around a corner, curses and threats chasing them through the dust.

After I had been with the company for about five months I hurt my back picking up a 50lb. box of hex nuts.  My back had been getting progressively worse and I had been seeing a chiropractor for a while after an injury on my 10 speed bicycle and he told me I had a muscle spasm on top of my other problems.  I missed a week of work, drinking rum during the day to solve the pain of the muscle spasm.  The next week my back was still hurting, I was disgusted with construction so I went in, collected my tools and quit.

It didn't take long for my savings to disappear.

  Pigman's wife had quit her job and was developing a definite problem with cocaine, within two weeks Pigman and the mechanic had quit theirs.  They had decided to go back to dealing full time, this was apparently something that they had done before, work a while, deal a while.  I made a definite decision to move out.

igman and I got into it one night after everyone had been drinking too much and he had been snorting coke.  It was over food in the refrigerator and we were quickly face to face.  Pigman began screaming that everything in the house was his, his, his, and he would do whatever he wanted in his house.  

He grabbed a foot long butcher knife from the sink and his wife got between us and they started yelling.  He was screaming that he was going to castrate me and slice me up.  I later figured he was playing psych-out, I had heard of him doing it before, but I retreated outside, drink in hand, until he calmed down.  Pigman had never been known to hurt anybody but wasn't afraid to scuffle.  he always tried to psyche out his opponent with craziness. 

Pigman went into my room and attacked the air conditioner with a blunt object, it had apparently offended him vis a vis the electric bill. I found out later he didn't bring the knife into the room.  Had I not sold my .45 automatic some time before I probably would have stayed in the room and had a definite situation on my hands.  The neighbors had called the police, it was not the first time, an officer came up and asked what the problem was.  We said it was just an argument and he soon left.

After this everyone was polite but things had changed.  Nothing would be forgotten or forgiven.  I went down to purchase a pistol, saw one that I liked that was within my price range, but decided to think about it for a day or so,  when I went back it was gone.  Things had calmed down enough that I decided to wait and buy a much better weapon some time down the road. 

This altercation was soon replaced by another after a Jewish foreman moved into the empty room.  He had beaten his girl friend once too often and torn up one too many apartments one night while drinking, which was all the time, and his girl friend had kicked him out.  More than one attorney was interested in his whereabouts.

One day Pigman, the Jewish foreman, the mechanic and one or two others were out riding around.  A disagreement concerning driving habits erupted between the foreman and Pigman and a fight ensued.

Pigman and the mechanic vacated the car and the Jewish foreman chased Pigman down the side of the road with the vehicle.  I later saw the tire marks in the grass. 

I never got the full story but they had gotten into a fist fight outside the house and the Jewish foreman had left.  He came back up with a bloody lip just as I arrived and told me part of his version.  I let him in and left for the library, it was a good night for reading.

When I got home Pigman was sitting in a chair with his 357 Magnum loaded with hollow points talking about killing the Jewish foreman.  The foreman had tore things off the wall, punched several holes in the door, and tore up his bedroom and left. 

The police had come and Pigman had told them that the Jewish foreman had threatened him and the occupants with death.  I figured it was talk but asked if I could borrow a pistol.  He refused, he had even turned down the mechanic who he had been friends with for quite some time.  Pigman was somewhat paranoid of someone else having a weapon.

The Jewish foreman called and returned the next day to get his belongings and a couple of bags of clothes.  Pigman had left just before he was scheduled to arrive.

I had paid another months rent and I stayed to the end of it, letting them know the last day.  Several of my possessions were missing but I didn't mention it.  I waited for a while and put the wheels in motion for vengeance for the knife threat, a quick call to the Crime Line to notify them of his drug dealing.  They never were able to bust him and it took about five months before they started and completed their investigation.

Pigman broke up with his wife and moved in with his father.  I traced him there and put a letter on him, writing to all of his neighbors telling them of his drug dealing and craziness and hinting at bizarre sexual practices.  I dropped a copy to him along with the addresses of the people I had written to and a copy of the unsigned letter I had sent to the chief of Police.  Someone had done this to him before in a previous neighborhood and had caused him much worry about a neighbor breaking in and stealing his guns and drugs, the police busting him, or someone vandalizing his corvette.  He had eventually moved from the area.

I went to see Beard and he let me sleep on the floor of his apartment for a week for a small sum.  We got along good and sat up a few nights talking about life, he had a repertoire of sexual, racial and ethnic jokes that was inexhaustible. 

Beard had a favorite shirt that he wore when shopping at Winn Dixie, he wore it whenever he was going to slip a steak in his pants.  Once he came back from shopping and complained that there barely had been a steak worth stealing so he took some shrimp too and that didn't look too good.    With a grin on his face he speculated on writing the manager and telling him that if he didn't keep better cuts of steak available he might just take his business elsewhere.

One night while drinking he confessed that it hadn't been a drug deal that had got him shot, the woman he was living with had shot him.  He said he used to beat her quite badly, he didn't beat her all the time but when he beat her he beat her and she had gotten fed up with it.  He was quite embarrassed about being shot by a woman.

Borrowing against the inheritance I moved into an apartment near Beard's for half price, less than fifty dollars a week, provided I clean it up and paint it.  It was not the Taj Mahal.

After eight yard bags of garbage, twelve dead, brown spiders, a great deal of paint and bug spray and three months off the calendar I left to go back to school.   But not before there were a few experiences.

Beard came over one night after he had lost his job due to attitude and asked if I wanted to go rip telephones out of booths and make some money.  I declined the offer and he said he thought I would but thought he would ask anyway. 

He took off the next day in an old station wagon he had borrowed from someone who had it left in their care by someone who disappeared.  I didn't hear from him for quite a while but found out later he was in jail.  The cops had chased him at over a hundred until he went over a railroad track and came down so hard that it split the windshield. 

He didn't have an ID so he went to jail under the name on the registration.  Beard told me later that he thought he was getting away with something.  This person apparently had problems with the law, at the hearing they raised his bail from five hundred dollars to fifteen hundred dollars.  Beard was in the stockade under the other guys name for a couple of months.  Beard spoke quite highly of that stockade, I think he was becoming a connoisseur. 

                             ****

I woke up one morning with a hangover and my unconsciousness hit me with some facts that I thought I had accepted about some people.  It just came bubbling up and boiling over and it kept coming and coming and coming.  Dozens of round about conversations about the situation kept popping into my mind.  PG had told me to my face but I couldn't accept it.  

There can be a hundred miles between intellectual acceptance of something and emotional acceptance.  For several days it was as if someone had pulled a plug, I was totally drained, I couldn't even walk to the store.  Of course when I mentioned it they told me it was all in my imagination.

Then I took to booze in a very serious way, I don't really know how long.  I woke up one morning and saw three 750ml bottles and two liter bottles laying on the floor with another liter bottle just opened on the refrigerator.

When I went to clean up I realized that the 750ml bottles were actually liter bottles and the liter bottles were actually 1.75 liter bottles.  I stopped drinking for a while but slowly moved back into it.  It's a battle I have been fighting for a while. 

                             ****  

When Beard got out of jail I returned the favor he had done me, letting him sleep on the couch while he looked for a job.  He got drunk the third night and tried to borrow ten dollars to go and buy some crack.  I refused and he kept putting his arm around my neck and telling me I was one of the few friends that he had in the world but he had to have ten dollars for a short time. 

I walked off but he kept following me trying to put his arm around my neck and talk me out of the money.  He fell down twice he was in such a state of inebriation.

Have you ever had two hundred and twenty pounds of bearded, toothless, sweaty, drunken, former motorcycle racer and drug dealer put his arm round you and tell you he needs ten dollars and your going to give it to him because he needs it and your his friend, one of the few friends he has in the whole world.

He almost got the money.

I think he might have tried a bit more intimidation, outweighing me by seventy pounds, but I knew that he was wanted for questioning in another state and he hadn't shown up at the probation office under his assumed name.  He finally gave up and wandered around all night.

I kicked him out the next day.

I stayed in that little apartment, working part time for a painter and trying to sort my life out.  I'm still sorting.

Finally I began my memoirs, moved to the next county, took every grant and loan I could find and begin taking paralegal courses at a business school.  The ten unit apartment complex had an crotchety old man as a manager, an alcoholic ex-jocky living off of the proceeds of an insurance settlement (he had been hit by an intxicated driver) two women in seperate apartments who moved in and out quickly (one had mental problems and had the police over there several times), three teenagers, a black lesbian, a black girl in the process of being evicted and who was replaced by a black couple with a child (he was later to be arrested for trying to sell a video recording of a shoot out of a robbery that occured outside the store he worked in), a hard drinking young man of dubious sanity (he had been forced into a mental health unit in his younger days) and his pregnant girlfriend, and the sister of the aforementioned individual who was rumored to turn tricks when not dating her black boyfriend.

It remains to be seen how things will turn out.  (Although we all know where it ends.)

   Mad Dog

Chapter 1   Chapter 2   Chapter 3   Chapter 4   Chapter 5   Chapter 6 Adventures in Belize   Chapter 7   Chapter 8   Chapter 9   Chapter 10

<<<<<>>>>>

 And thus this scribble ended when I lost interest in and put it aside.  Hope to rewrite it and add to it someday but there is much else to do.

Steven Raker

[ Home ] [ a Chronology of the Earth ] [ A Conversation with Herman Goering ] [ Adventures in Belize ] [ Articles of Interest ] [ Civilizations ] [ Divine Inspiration Divine Truth ] [ Economics 101 ] [ Empires ] [ Free Stuff ] [ Hard Times A'comin ] [ Hispanic Challenge ] [ Humor and Stuff ] [ My Memoirs ] [ Predictions ] [ Number 1 Rule ] [ Online News and Opinion ] [ Quotations ] [ Ramblings Rants Raves ] [ Situation Report USA ] [ The Clash of Civilizations ] [ Upcoming Projects ] [ The Wind in the Trees ] [ Black Hamock Fish Camp Liars Lodge ] [ San Antonio Texas ] [ People Places Faces ]

                                  Translate this page

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. DaScribbler has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is DaScribbler endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)