Chapter 9

      THE CHANGE OF LIFE: YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE AND YOU ARE WHO YOU AIN'T; THE DEMON SPEAKS

 I was at my parents house one night when my mother convinced me to take a large red pill as I wasn't feeling very well.  Some time after this I began to feel stranger and stranger.  And ranger still.

  I had gotten tired of the work and quit my job at the irrigation company.  I hadn't been able to save any significant amount of money as I was on a booze and reefer binge and eating out all the time.  By now I was sleeping in my car or staying at Wolfman's or at a cab driver's who had a sort of commune in his apartment.

I kept feeling stranger and stranger, like I was disintegrating.  kept driving faster and faster it was hard to keep under seventy.

  I took a short trip up to northern Florida to Gainsville and back down again the same day trying to figure out what to do.  Then, after an argument with my parents I decided it was time to leave the state and see some new scenery.

I took off towards north Florida, stopping to buy a 1.75 liter  bottle of rum.  I was riding down the road with a bottle beside me and a drink in my hand, something I never do.  I stopped in a shopping center and went walking around.  I suddenly realized I could SEE!  I could see what each person was!  Not on the surface but deep down inside.  I didn't like what I saw.  I finally had to ave the shopping center, it was just too much.

I moved north.  I thought about stopping at a landscaping company that I passed and asking for a job but I kept moving.  I took a side road to a small town and bought some lotto tickets but when I looked at them later they weren't the tickets I had bought, they re numbers I never played.

I knew that I was in the Pipeline and that I was being watched by THEM.  THEM who?  THEM, that's who.  THEM! THEM! THEM!  I knew that they had a vast communications network and that there was always someone watching me.  Everything was planned.  I was in the Pipeline.

I was speeding along the highway at night when I realized there was a demon in the back seat.  He was hanging there in the air, about two feet tall, and talking to me as I drove along.   He spoke in a low gnarly voice.  I couldn't see him.  But I knew that he was about two feet tall.  I couldn't hear him.  But I knew he was speaking to me.  Speaking in a low gnarly voice.  Sometimes the imp would laugh then go back to speaking in the low, gnarly voice.  I think now that he might have been trying to tell me something.

Sometimes he spoke so low I didn't know if he was speaking to me or not.

"Speak up." I said to the fiend.

"Speak up, motherfucker!" I said as I rammed the car through the night.

But the demon just hung there.  Speaking in that low gnarly voice.  Floating in the back seat.  Talking to me.  He stayed with me for miles.  For a while I thought Beelzebub himself might show up and I wondered if he would fit in the car. Beelzebub didn't show.  It was just the demon and I, racing through the darkness of the Florida night.

Then suddenly the demon was gone.  I assumed he left through the window though I didn't feel him go.  Perhaps he left because I didn't listen to what he had to say.  I wonder if he's still out there wandering in the southern night, talking in that low gnarly voice.

I spent the first night in a rest area near Mobile Alabama.  It was a rather sleepless night.  From there I headed through the countryside through dozens of Viedervills and then back onto the Interstate.  I kept pushing further west not sure of where I was going.  I had talked to Brain and he had invited me to visit him in Arizona, that was a partial destination.

The second night I made it into Texas.  I spent the night by a convenience store and pressed on in the morning.  I went deep into Texas, trying to decide what to do.  I stopped in Amarillo and spent the night near an air base where military jets were landing.  The next day I spent most of the day there and spent the next night there too.  I thought about turning south and going to San Antonio, perhaps I would meet up with Anita but then I thought that there wouldn't be much use in that now would there.  I thought about pushing on to Arizona but Brain lived in a small town and I finally realized that there wasn't going to be a whole lot of work there.  The next morning a cop pulled up and it was the strangest acting cop that I have ever seen. He was one of THEM, I knew it.  He told me that I couldn't sleep there and that I had to move on.     There isn't a vagrancy law in Texas, they say that some of Texas's finest citizens have been vagrants at times, but I was camping on some type of official territory and had to leave.  I considered staying in Texas for a while but then decided to head back towards Alabama where my sister lived.

I drove to Little Rock Arkansas and got a few bucks for giving some blood.  The blood clinic was a very strange place, the people there made every movement twice.  I finally realized that they were under the control of THEM.  That they were being kept in some type of purgatory. 

I was low on cash so I decided to stay at the Salvation Army.  I checked in and left my social security card at the desk, they told us the gates were locked after a certain hour and that we couldn't go out. 

I went to the cafeteria and had a bowl of soup.  I salted it before tasting it and gagged on the first spoonful, it had enough salt in it to choke a horse.  I tried to eat it but couldn't and took it back.  Back in the tv room there were strange things going on.  I sat down next to an old guy with a beard and he got up and moved less than a minute later.  The guy he sat next to got up and moved too.  Everybody was acting very strange.

A black guy did a little shuffle across the floor and someone started talking about him having got himself a little money.  I went in to take a shower and kept my wallet with me, my notebook and papers were just outside the shower.  When I finished the shower my notebook was gone.  Upon returning to the room I found that someone had stolen my pillowcase. 

I went out to check on my car and while I was checking they locked the gate.  There was a guy standing there when I got back and I asked him to get the key from the front desk.  He made a fist and twisted it back and forth, meaning, I suppose, you do me and I'll do you.  I asked him to get the guy with the key and he just shrugged his shoulders. 

I went around and got in through the cafeteria and decided I would be better off sleeping in my car.  I got my social security card and hopped in the car and took off, stopping for a meal at a fast food restaurant before pressing on. 

Late in the night I stopped on a dirt road across from someone's house to sleep but later decided to move to a better spot.  I knew THEY were watching from the house.  I pulled off the interstate and drove into a stand of pine trees near a barn and crawled into the back seat to sleep.

At three o'clock in the morning I awoke, ( or was it just a dream?) I didn't feel at all myself.  I lay there in a semi- conscious state and then:  MAD DOG CHANGED.  Arrrrrrrrrooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww----oooooooowwwwww---ooooooowwwwwww-----oooooooowwwwww----oooooowwwwww-------oooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!!

When I awoke the next morning I found that the structure that I thought was a barn was a house.  I had slept in someone's yard.  I took off and arrived in Memphis where I stayed for most of the day.  I eventually headed for Huntsville and spent a short part of the night sleeping in the car near a restaurant.  I arrived in Huntsville early on a Sunday morning.  

Driving around the town trying to get my bearings I knew that THEY were watching my every move.  I knew that Huntsville was a place controlled by THEM.  That it was staffed by THEM.  THEY  could even change the street signs to fool you.  I saw one street sign wobble when THEY had been slow in trying to confuse me.

I found a camping spot in a small stand of trees on the edge of a cotton field.  At the local store I picked up some rice, beans and potatoes, a few other items then settled in at my new home.  I knew that THEY were watching me but I didn't care.  I kept trying to figure things out.  Ooohhhhh, the things that come to body and mind when you go through the Change of Life.

During the four nights I slept there, cooking my food over a camp fire and sleeping on the ground, THEY messed with me incessantly.  One night they crept up and poured out most of my bottle of rum, but I didn't really mind, I had quit drinking for the time anyway.  I didn't like what it did to me. 

THEY snuck up one night and cut holes in my shoes and this drove me to a frenzy.  THEY sent a truck load of longhair backwoods neanderthals riding around the stand of trees but THEY couldn't scare me off. 

Finally THEY sent the police.  The patrol car pulled up behind some bushes, I could hear the radio, a door slammed and after a minute the car came into view.  At the same time the second cop came crashing through the bushes behind me.  They checked my ID

and told me I couldn't camp there any more, there had been a complaint about my fires from the house on the hill by the field.

Thought for the Moment:  Distance, n.  The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs and keep. 

Ambroce Bierce  The

Devils Dictionary 1906

The police gave me directions to a mission but marked it wrong on the map.  I knew THEY had told them to do it and were trying to confuse me but I finally found it and moved in there for a while.      At the mission there was a dormitory style arrangement and the coughing and hacking at night would sometimes keep you awake. They had a work detail every day and I went out on two separate jobs the week I was there.  We had to go to church on Sunday and Wednesday, they served food after the service.  No church, no food. 

The event most talked about at the mission was the fact that the Sky Pilot who ran it was in trouble with the IRS.  It was rumored that he had a mink bedspread on his bed and many spoke of it as truth.  Later I read that the IRS assessed him for a six figure sum.

I borrowed against the inheritance and moved into a hotel.  I knew that THEY were watching me from behind the mirror just as THEY had arranged my jobs including the one at the military base.  Finally I didn't give a shit that THEY were watching me, I just went about my business.  After two weeks I found an apartment. 

I went to the local day labor establishment, Labor Force, who put me to work immediately.  Several of us were to help a crew in erecting a radio tower and building a board road so the concrete truck could get out to where one of the guy wire was to be anchored. 

These were some of the hardest drinking people that I had ever seen.  How they went up to the top of that tower with the hangovers they had I'll never know.  A husband and wife, their son and a fat bearded misogynist made up the company.  They occasionally argued about one of the crew who had been killed the day after a fight with his wife.  He had gone up to 400 feet and tried to get fancy when he was hooking up his safety belt.  He missed and fell.  The misogynist blamed his wife and the others alternately blamed each of them.  It was a subject that they tried to stay off of when drinking, which was every night.

After we finished the board road I was moved to a general contractor building a house on a hill.  We soon made a deal and I said goodby to Labor Force and increased my income.  While I was working on the house I knew that it had all been arranged by THEM.  One of the workers tried telling me about his problems with his wife who had a nervous breakdown and I was a bit rude to him, after all, I knew that he had been told by THEM to say that.

I knew that THEY were watching me and that I would be put to some type of a test and I tried to figure out what it was.  One day four young men came into the house to install the alarm system.  THEY thought they were fooling me but I knew who they were.  They were the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse and they were there to get a good look at me for identification. I knew that later they would take me off in the van.

One of the contractors related that one of the installers told him that I had looked at him funny but I knew they were all in it together and just messing with my mind.  THEY couldn't fool me.

I was walking past a van one day in the supermarket parking lot when I realized a guy with a moustache was staring at me from a black van with tinted windows.  I knew he was one of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse but I couldn't see the others. 

I finally decided that he must be a trainee sent to keep an eye on me.  The sheer magnitude of it all amazed me.  I decided that each of them must only work part time for THEM as they had to make money too.  I knew that it was going on all over the country.  There were always people in the Pipeline.  I knew that I would be put to some type of test at the house on the hill and I tried to figure out what it would be and make my plans.

The general contractor's work slowed up after a while and his partner moved back to Texas and he couldn't give steady work.  I found another contractor to work with but he only provided steady work for a short while.  When he slowed down I started bidding on final cleans for another contractor and juggling the two jobs.  I hired a girl part time who showed up part time and I ended up doing a lot of the final cleans myself. 

I finally figured out that THEY were all in my head.

                             ****

My favorite sister lived in a well to do neighborhood and I had dinner with them several times.  She preferred to come and pick me up as I was not of the same social and financial standing and my car was in need of some repair and a paint job.  She told me they weren't going to introduce me to any of their friends.

Construction slowed and I was forced to find full time work with a landscaping company run by an older man, called Pappy, who had left a management position by mutual agreement for berating the employees repeatedly.  I knew it was going to be a short term job.  The girl had left due to lack of work and I was trying to line up final clean jobs to do on the weekends but that didn't work out. 

The foreman on the job was a full bearded backwoods type named Ulyss who had lied about his age at seventeen and fought with an Airborne unit in Korea.  We had the usual discussion about my brief time in the military.  He told me that when he was younger it would have bothered him but that now he didn't really care.  He was a laid back soft spoken type who had a line drawn that you better not cross.  He was raising relatives children while they went through troubles, he was prone to taking in children in times of trouble.  Being the oldest in the group we occasionally had a talk about life and even had a short conversation about the Change of Life though we agreed that there wasn't much you could say.

There was a constant double bind on the job with Pappy and his son telling us two different things to do.  The son was constantly threatening to leave and start his own business and Pappy always invited him to do just that. 

One afternoon after Pappy verbally lashed us I raised my hand in the one finger salute and said,

"Fuck You, I quit."

I picked up my check at his house the next day and reestablished myself with the second contractor though he couldn't provide steady work.  The car broke down and was too expensive to fix so I ended up walking.  I started taking computer courses four nights a week at a school that was about a half an hour walk from the apartment.  Hard times.

Thought for the Moment: When I think of all the sorrow and the barrenness that has been wrought in my life by want of a few more pounds per annum than I was able to earn, I stand aghast at money's significance.

George Gissing, The                                            Private Papers of Henery

Ryecroft, 1903

If you walk along the side of the road in Huntsville people will sometimes beep as they pass you to remind you that they have a car.  Generally it is the people who have a rather liberal interpretation of the word car.

The walk helped me take off the weight I had put on.  From someone who had struggled to reach one hundred and thirty five pounds in his early thirty's, I moved to one forty five, one fifty five, then one sixty eight before coming back down. 

            THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF CONSTRUCTION

I was unemployed for a while when the contractor ran out of work then found a job a half an hour walk from my apartment.  I ran the high lift and unloaded trucks as they came into the apartment complex that we were building. I got along well with my immediate supervisor, Jeff, who kept a sign in his office that stated: "Need good woman who can cook, clean, and sew, need boat and motor, send picture of boat and motor."  His wife wouldn't let him keep it at home. 

The company liked my work and put me in charge of the labor crew and gave me a small raise.  I had a short black who got along with everybody but drank too much, a eighteen year old kid who spent every penny on booze and drugs and a twenty two year old who did the same. 

There was quite a collection on the site.  There was Carpenter John, who always wore a bandanna and lived across the street, he was working off his second DUI; Big Un and Little Un, a large bearded beer drinking carpenter and his partner who was a short, wild, former heroin user and general degenerate. 

There was Wooly, a thin bag of skin and bones covered with hair with a deep voice that emanated from a beard covered face, a card carrying member of the hill tribes of Alabama.  There was a crew of roofers that smoked pot incessantly and threw pieces of shingles without looking, making it quite dangerous to work underneath them.  Everything you needed to make life interesting.

Wooly was a talker, he was always talking shit.  He would brag about how he had his wife so scared of thieves, rapists and murders that she wouldn't even come to the door unless it was someone she knew.

He had an on going problem with his company.  He wanted more money, they wanted more work.  He didn't seem to realize that his two extra reefer breaks in addition to his extended normal breaks and extra long lunch break for beer and go home early if you were in a bad mood policy might be affecting the companies ability to give him a raise.

Wooly was always talking.  He talked about anyone he didn't like and whoever left the room.  He was constantly telling how he would like to kick this persons ass or that persons ass.  The more creative Wooly could be in his description of the destruction he would wreak the better he liked it.  I came up with something for him to say: That he would kick the individuals balls up to his throat and stomp on them until the individual sang Dixie or Wooly got tired.  Wooly loved it although he had a hard time remembering it, it was a bit long.

He got his chance to jump on someone one day when he left his material in front of where an electrician was working saying it was tough shit for the electrician.  The electrician didn't think so.  He was slinging Wooly's material out the window and across the room when Wooly walked back in. 

Wooly ran and told Jeff.  Jeff told him to keep his stuff out of the way of people who wanted to work.  Wooly almost went home early that day but decided to complain bitterly about the assholes on the site and how a man couldn't get his work done with all the bull shit going on.

He found someone else he didn't like and started talking to me about how we ought to go over there and run him off the site.  I got to use one of my favorite lines.

"What's this we shit, you pregnant."

Wooly didn't like that, he was hoping for me to talk along with him.

The black guy came to work drunk one day, so drunk that a sub-contractor noticed it and Jeff and I had a conference.  It was decided that I would have to fire him, something that I hated to do as he worked more than the rest and got along with everybody.     Jeff said that if he sobered up he might have a chance of getting back on and this gave him some hope.  A lot of us felt sad to see him go, the general consensus was that he was homeless.

Wooly soon became friends with the two other laborers and began talking his stuff to them telling them only the man who signed the check was boss and they could do their job any way they wanted.  They soon developed a bad attitude towards work and I had to spend more time keeping an eye on them.

The young one would come in late and the day after I talked to him he would come in later.  I had a conference with Jeff and the supervisor and a decision was made.  He came in late again, I fired him, he went to see Jeff, Jeff fired him and invited him to let the supervisor fire him too.  He declined and cussed all of us for several days or so Wooly said.  Wooly knew everything that was said since he was the one that sold him the drugs and bought his beer for him at times.

The twenty two year old came in at one o'clock one day ready to work.  He walked up to me glassy eyed, his eyes looking like a road map of New York City, stated that his grandmother had died suddenly the night before and he had gone to the funeral that morning.   We hadn't had a conference on him so I sent him to Jeff.  Jeff fired him.

When Carpenter John heard his excuse he said, "Anyone who'd buy that would buy fried ice cream.  Hell!  That ain't even time to embalm the bitch."

He started cussing the youth of the world for their inability to learn about work but noted that he had been the same, finally he couldn't talk about it any more.

I hired two new laborers, one black, one white, they worked well during the time I was there though Wooly tried to talk both of them out of their jobs.

                               *

There was always something going on around Big Un and Little Un.  They cussed each other and cut up constantly.  Walking past Little Un one day he called to me,

  "Hey man, let's go do some Mexican Mud ( brown heroin).  I'm just fucking with you man, I don't do that shit any more.  Ain't no holes in daddy's arms now.  There's nothing in these veins but reefer and Budwiser." he said with obvious pride, holding his arms out.

There was constant bickering between Big Un and Little Un as they air gunned the siding on the second story of the buildings.  The language here has been slightly altered.

"Hey!  One who has lain with his mother, hurry up and hand me up the intercoursing board."

Intercourse you, I'll hand you the board when I get finished cutting it.  

"I need the sleeping with its mother thing right now.

"There's the damned by God thing, do you think you know how to put it up.

"I'll put it up your rectum if you don't shut your mouth.   

"You better pack a lunch, hell, you better pack two."

"You ain't feces you big bellied SOB.  My daughter could whip your rectum.

"One of these days your going to urinate me off and I'm going to stomp your scrawny rectum."

"One of these days, when, one who sleeps with his mother?"

Eventually they were to get on each others nerves and work on opposite sides of the building.  They were going on like this one day around a group of older carpenters who saved their energy for work rather than profanity when Little Un yelled his favorite saying.

"If women didn't have pussy ther'd be a bounty on them."

Then suddenly had a burst of inspiration.  His face lit up as if he had received enlightenment.

"They ought to make tires out of pussy!" he proclaimed to the universe. 

"You could ride on them forever, or at least two million miles."

The whole carpenter crew cracked up.  No one had heard this one before and Little Un was credited with an original.

                             ****

I finally decided to return to Florida and left the company on good terms.  They said that if I returned and they had an opening I could have a job.  I sold my car for scrap and loaded my possessions on a bus for south Florida, everything fit into two duffel bags and two boxes.

On the trip down there was a young girl travelling alone.  We stopped around midnight for a meal and in the bus station I could see two young black guys circling, each hoping for some white pussy.  She asked if she could sit with me and we began talking.  She wasn't close to being out of her teens and had a kid and a drug overdose so far.  She had moved in with her boyfriend and his parents, her father and mother didn't want her.  Her child was at her boyfriends, where she couldn't stay, and she had been visiting relatives in hopes of finding some place to live.  She was taking life at a gallop.

Things hadn't worked out at her relatives.  She made several phone calls at each stop, talking to friends and trying to find a place to stay if her mother didn't meet her when she returned to Sarasota.  She was afraid she might be pregnant again. 

She sat next to me on the bus then got up and sat with one of the black guys for a while talking.  After a short while she returned and I put my coat around her when she complained of being cold.  She snuggled against my arm and just as I was about to fall asleep the Magic Goose woke up, raised his head, and wanted to know what the hell was that snuggling up against me. 

I could have beat the Magic Goose with a stick.  Absolutely no respect for the laws of the State of Florida.  I finally ordered the Magic Goose to sleep but it took a while for slumber to overtake me.

At the next stop she made more phone calls and since the bus she was switching to had almost the same final destination, I decided change my route and stay with her to Sarasota.  When we pulled into Sarasota her mother was waiting and she was very glad to see her. 

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

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