Of Liberty Lost and Freedom Found

Chapter 2
Life on My Own


I had great parents and that’s why I don’t want to talk about their divorce. In divorce there are no winners and talking about it makes the people involved look like bad guys. In my mind there were no bad guys over the next several years just a lot of atypical behavior on the part of both my parents. Everyone’s great friends now so why ruin it with shitty memories that have no good purpose.

There are no details of my adolescence I can expound upon without casting one or both of my parents in a bad light and that simply would not be fair. Suffice to say a teenage boy not properly supervised is bound to take the wrong path in life and this boy was no exception.
My brother and I lived with my mom in the beach house in New Smyrna. When I was thirteen my parents tried to reconcile and I stayed in New Smyrna with a school friend. We smoked cigarettes, skipped school; hitchhiked everywhere and stole cars at night for excitement.
By the time I was sixteen I was a six foot tall, skinny long haired biker living in Titusville with another friend and his parents. The following year I moved back to New Smyrna to live with my mom and her new husband. That sort of thing pretty much covers the school years.

I graduated high school, fell in love, married, and became a licensed general contractor by the age of nineteen. My ability to become a contractor was motivated by laziness. I suffered from an intractable fear of physical exertion. The application to take the exam required a minimum of four years experience in a supervisory capacity in construction. I was eighteen when I applied to take the exam. How the state thought an eighteen year old kid had four years experience in anything is beyond me, but they fell for it. I took the test three times in six months before I passed it. Two months after my nineteenth birthday I was building houses and going to college full time. I was working hard and had two stepchildren to help support.

My wife was a human-dynamo. My friends would use the phrase “Damn Yankee” because not only was she from the north but had decided to stay in the south, hence the added condemnation of the noun. She was Italian American and from the north east. Her family was well connected and I don’t mean in a good way. I won’t go into that out of my respect for her and her family and a healthy concern for my personal safety. They had quite an influence on this small town boy. They helped me gain a wider view of the world. Mostly my attitude and perception of people and my perspective view of law enforcement. The first was quite helpful, the latter as it would turn out, not so much.

The mid seventies in Florida were extremely difficult times especially in our area. NASA had canceled the Apollo program affecting all of east central Florida. Half of Titusville moved out the next day. Many people abandoned their homes leaving the key in the front door lock. Lots of local boys had gone to Houston, Texas to find work because of the oil boom caused by shortages.
I too tried this. Without wanting to offend the fine people of the great state of Texas, this trip didn’t work out for me. There were miles and miles of houses under construction at the same time. The problem I had was that I didn’t speak a word of Spanish. They needed carpenters and concrete finishers badly and I guess that is the reason I kept getting hired. But this is what usually happened; try to picture me, a skinny six foot two blond haired white boy standing high up in the rafters with three or four five foot tall Mexicans, most of them ten years older than me, taking a measurement for the cut man on the ground below. He is standing down there beside the saw horses with a speed square in one hand and a measuring tape in the other. He keeps looking up at me and shouting, “Darme las meditas, bato. Darme las meditas, pendejo!” No clue. I just keep looking at the amused brown faces around me and say nothing. We all come down for our ten o’clock break and the foreman hands me a check for about twenty bucks after taxes and points to my truck, “Adios, guero.” Lucky for him I did know what adios meant. On the positive side I was able to make enough for gas to get back home. I needed to try something else.

I don’t know about you, but that last thought usually precedes a bad idea for me. And this time the bad idea was a whopper. My wife had a knack for meeting and befriending the criminal element. Where she came from almost everyone was a criminal, so I guess she just felt more comfortable with people like that. You know, they reminded her of home.
She and a partner owned a little beauty shop that by now was at least keeping us fed, barely. After my failed trip to Texas we were even more strapped than before. Her partner’s sugar daddy, Jerry, was the largest cocaine dealer in the area. I actually got along famously with him. I certainly never had to pay for cocaine when the two of them were around and for some time now they were always around.

One night we were all playing cards and having a few drinks and a lot of cocaine. This had become something of a routine with the four of us. Anyway, the wife and I had been whining incessantly about our poverty and pathetic prospects when Jerry said, “What about that bouncer guy you told me about?”

“What?” I said puzzled, “Bouncer guy? What bouncer guy?” I repeated, absently, my eyelids suddenly feeling stuck to my eyeballs.

“You know the one that works at the bar across from your dad’s house,” said Jerry.

“Oh, yeah, what about him, are you going to cut the deck or not?”

“Well, you said he was looking for some weight.”

“Yeah, so did you go see him?” asked I.

“No man. I’m sayin’ maybe you could handle the deal and you and Tina could make some money, man.”

Now I know I was only twenty-one years old and everyone else in the room was a few years older (my wife Tina was six years older than me). And I was a bit green. But green can get you in trouble or worse. Had I been more perceptive, or less fucked up, I would have read the look on Tina’s face differently. Instead of seeing, “Hey what a great idea,” I would have seen, “I wonder if the sucker is going for it?” She had been trying to find a way to get me to sell drugs now for months. I knew we needed money but in my mind this was not the way to make it. Now they were all three in on it together. It was a friendly game of “T-Ball” and I was the lonely little ole’ ball. I had been set up in a well coordinated coup de grace and I didn’t know it yet but I was already beaten.

When we got home I laid down the law. I was not a drug dealer and that was that. So after I sold the ounce of cocaine to the DEA informant bouncer guy with some thirty agents in attendance via high-tech listening and recording devices, I was promptly arrested and sent to jail.

To spare you the unnecessary drudgery of why this and why that concerning legal details, the Feds handed the ball (me) to the state of Florida making the state responsible for pounding salt in my ass and saving the USA the trouble. After a few years of legal wrangling during which time I was in and out of two county jails, we all decided three years would be a swell compromise and the bargain was struck.

 ¹²For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Ephesians 6:12, King James Version)