Arriving in the great, white North...

I drank beer in a deck chair underneath a huge orange heat lamp, and enjoyed the view. We motored through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world for about 24 hours and all I could do was try not to throw up. Hindsight being what it is, sitting in a deck chair, in the middle of January, on a ferry in Alaska, during a major snowstorm, does not seem like a viable mode of travel. But hell, it worked for me. The booze held the fear at bay and kept me from realizing this was a grossly, stupid idea.

Snowflakes the size of paper plates fell all around me, and as the sun came up the dawn got a bit grey and I looked over the edge. The water looked damn cold and there were sea lions playing in the wake. I was the only one on deck as the other travelers had better sense than to stand in a snowstorm, plus, a few who were entrenched in the bar got glimpses of me in various states of disarray every time I came back in for more beer. (I had begun buying them six at a time, and the bartender kept selling them to me. I guess he didn't have to worry about me driving home.)

I didn't appear altogether sane and they were keeping their distance. Good for them. I was not in a state of grace and poking me with a verbal stick was not a good idea. I was getting surly. To whom? No one; everyone, God, the sea lions...I had long since passed functioning.

By the time we docked at the ferry station I had drank myself reasonably sober. The snow had grown to a minor blizzard and I hailed a cab. The road from the ferry station to town was the only road that went anywhere. Juneau could only be reached by air, or water. No roads in, no roads out.

I left a dog eared copy of 'Call of the Wild' under the deck chair. Fuck Jack London...I had arrived.

The road...

A parka and a pair of long underwear later, I was on the bus. (Years later, my mother informed me a girl I was seeing prior to my departure had given birth to my son. She was pregnant when I left and never told me. My wife and daughter were many hundreds of miles away, and I thought we were just passing time until I left. I doubt it would have changed anything had I known...)

The plan was to take the bus to Seattle, then fly to Juneau. Once I landed I would play it by ear. The trip was uneventful until Bakersfield, California. INS pulled a checkpoint in the middle of the night, and three Salvadorans were escorted off in handcuffs. I was sober until Portland, Oregon. Rain mixed with snow and a 24 hour layover made it easy. I met a girl at the bus station. Her apartment was around the corner. She invited me in for a hot bath and a bottle of wine. I still don't know her name.
The next day I arrived in Seattle and began pounding martini's at SeaTac. The blackout hit before I boarded my flight. I was less than lucid.

In 1982, airport security was hovering around around nil and you had to be pretty deranged to warrant a second glance. I got more than a second glance when we made an unscheduled stop in Ketchikan at 3 a.m. I was escorted off the flight. The cold Alaskan air sobered me up long enough to realize I had been seat hopping and trying to start a conga line on the plane. No one was amused. They dumped me on the tarmac and I was met by a bored security guard. I asked him if it was true that marijuana was legal in Alaska. I seem to remember his answer was no.

As luck would have it, I cashed in the remainder of my ticket and purchased passage on the ferry heading north, catering to the inland waterways in Southeast Alaska. There was a bar on board...and it was open.

The call of the mild...

We spent her pregnancy in South Texas. We moved in with her Mother, and I went to work briefly in a cement factory. Six months of that nightmare and we were headed back to Dallas, this time to encamp with my Mom and her last husband. I went to work for awhile as an apprentice pressman in an offset printing company, while she got bigger, and bigger and my mother grew ever more resentful. I stayed grudgingly sober, proving a point and we grew farther apart.
She hated the fact I would rather read than watch game shows with her. She complained she was lonely. I bought her a ceramic parrot and some paint. Mr. thoughtful.

Our daughter was born in the county hospital, on the dole, as I had no insurance. A few weeks later she and our baby were headed back to her Mom's. I had a plan.
The idea came to me one day after our daughter was born and I tried to envision the next eighteen years in a dead marriage, being Joe Lunch bucket, hating life. Nope. No sir. Not for me.

I needed some distance and a way to make good money. I was sitting by my mother's pool working on the tan reading a National Geographic. There was an article on the Alaskan pipeline boom. That was it. Alaska...a new start, the real frontier, filled with individualists singing the lumberjack song. Okay, maybe not but it was as far as I could get without a passport.

I toyed with the idea of joining the French Foreign Legion instead. Flipped a coin, and it landed on Alaska. Maybe I could learn how to be a husband and a father while I was there. As I was clueless on both these fronts, any idea seemed to be a good one.
I herded them onto a bus and began preparing for my departure. First stop-The Army Navy store-...if I looked like I knew what I was doing, how could this possibly go wrong...

A note on parenting...

A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments, soccer games, romances, best friends, location of friend's houses, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams. A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

Bobo goes to Dallas

Prior to my ex-wife arriving in Dallas, I had rented a small duplex. Living alone and drinking can get lonely and one-night stands just too much work so the idea of a pet began to germinate in my head. A dog? Cat? No...didn't really say 'me'. One Sunday I was drinking the heart out of a lovely morning and meandering through the classifieds when I saw it. The ad for the monkey. The bells and whistles went off and I just knew this was a genius idea. Brilliant!

My rent was due, but I had the money. However I did not have money enough for both rent and the ape. Rent was exactly half what the animal cost. A few beers and minor calculations later and I made the call. I somehow talked the guy into letting me make a deposit with the remainder of the money in a week and a few hours later a van pulled up outside. The details at this point were rather sketchy, but they delivered the monkey. I had never held a monkey before and this one clung to my face like Michael Jackson on a cub scout. (Note to all future monkey owners- be they spider monkeys, chimps, or simians of any race or creed they should all wear diapers...believe it.)

I then realized I had no bananas. So I thought he might like a beer. Turned out he wasn't much of a drinker.

My landlady lived a few doors down and I wondered if she might spot me a spare Chiquita. (I had forgotten the rent was due.) She opened at my knock, expecting the rent. She did not expect the monkey. She failed to see the poignancy or brilliance of my story and chose to evict me. Long story short, I failed to pony up the balance on the monkey and the sketchy dude's in the van returned for him. I had been evicted and had a monkey repossessed...all because of one, great idea.

I was bummed. I was going to teach it to smoke.

A thought on mortality...

When I die, I want to go peacefully like my Grandfather did, in his sleep -- not screaming, like the passengers in his car.

Our hero meets the first succubus

So there in lied the rub, or lack of a rub actually. I needed a woman, and not in a purely physical sense, but in a sense of completeness, two parts to a whole kind of thing. Now I am so self centered I won't even buy a house plant (water yourself...) but I thought the saving grace, what I needed to stabilize me or bring me in to the human fold, was a relationship. After all, if someone loved me, how fucked up could I possibly be. (See extremely in the dictionary)

I got a job in a hospital during the day as an orderly and tended bar at night. My sobriety lasted a couple of weeks when one day at the hospital I'm standing in the elevator when a high school volunteer got on the same floor. She was Hispanic, eighteen and beautiful. I was done. Desperation made me bold and I asked her out. For some strange reason she agreed, and here it is 28 years later and I'm still paying her child support. If she had just gotten on another floor...who am I kidding, it would have been someone else...and I would have taken them hostage because they didn't love me "enough" or "in the right way" or (wait for it...here it comes...) "they didn't understand me." To think I used to believe my own shit.

At any rate, we went to a dance and I drank without a second thought. At the time I needed it, so I thought, what I did not need were her parent's walking in to my apartment, (small towns...doors unlocked) the morning after her deflowering and telling us both, still in bed, it was time for her to go to school. That was a little surreal, and it also sealed my fate. I couldn't have gotten away from them if I tried. And I did.

After my shift at the bar I would be invited to parties and I would attend, meet some nubile young honey and begin the chatting up process when there would be a knock at the door. It was her, having driven all over town looking for my car, then following the sound of a party, and she would find me, like a fucking bloodhound, every time.

I even moved back to Dallas to try to get away from her, and she showed up one day at the bar where I was working on lower Greenville. She moved in and off we went, until one day after I had been gone for three days, if I remember correctly, acid (that would be LSD for you folks in Park Cities) and a lot of alcohol contributed to that, I came home and she was apparently out looking for me. I locked the door and passed out on the couch.

She came home, having forgotten her key and pounded on the door. And pounded some more. I never budged. Until she broke a window and crawled in the apartment, retrieved a pistol I kept in the bedroom and woke me while sitting on my chest with the barrel screwed into my forehead. She was pissed.

I talked the gun out of her hand and our daughter was conceived next to the couch on a blood stained, green shag rug. What...you were expecting Love Story?

The innocence of children

Overheard conversation between two eight- year old boys in the backseat of a car returning home from the beach. "Okay, if you had to choose, which would you rather do...drink camel pee, or lick peanut butter off the balls of a hobo? And, you have to answer, you have to!" Wow. And to think I have trouble deciding what to eat at Whole Foods.

Remembering Gandhi

In the words of Mohandas K. Gandhi, as he was jostled by a large crowd in the Bombay railway station- "Hey watch it shiteyes! I'm walking here!"

The South Texas shuffle...

As I had relatives in South Texas who had no idea I was as screwed up as I was I boarded a Greyhound and headed south. I was wired to the gills on cheap speed as I made my retreat.

I arrived so wired my hair was standing on end, but no one seemed to notice. They noticed however after a few days when there was an unfortunate incident involving Irish whiskey, Valium and a loaded .45. There were young children in the house and civilized folk did not behave that way, blackout or no.

I was given a choice, ala tough love, prior to Dr. Phil and the rest...either another bus ticket to anywhere (I sure should have taken that ticket), or enroll in a halfway house, attend a 12 step program and give my head a firm yank from my ass. I did, and when I heard the pop I went cold turkey...the first of many such episodes.
I gave sobriety a very feeble try, but knew there was something missing. I thought a relationship might be in order as my last girlfriend in Germany had said goodbye as she threw beer bottles at me while I stood in a duck pond, waist deep in duck shit, crying and drunk...as usual.

She failed to see the earnest desire in my heart. Damn good shot though...

Running through the fire

To deviate from the autobiographical venue for a bit, I recently determined what my favorite animal is. No, it's not cute and fuzzy, nor will it wrap itself around it's prey and squeeze the bejaysus out of it. It is simply, the Zebra.

The cool striped patterns, (of which no two are alike) notwithstanding, the Zebra has some pretty nice attributes. As a herd animal, if another member of the herd is injured, the remainders will form a protective circle around them. Not too many humans would do that.

But the coolest thing is that in the wild, while others run from a wildfire, exhausting themselves and subsequently being burned alive, the Zebra inherently knows there is safety on the other side of the fire, and runs through the fire to get there. So if you're faced with your personal fire...face it and run through it...there's safety on the other side.

Holiday fun...

My Father married for his fifth and last time my first year in the Army. I can't blame him. She owned her own home. Came complete with a hot tub and pool. At least he was marrying 'up'.

The new spouse and I failed to see eye to eye as is more often than not the case. And once again, I was following a good intention with really poor execution. I was trying to win her over as it were after I was discharged and staying with them during the holidays. I cashed in all my terminal leave so I was in hiatus. Loosely translated that means I was drunk in the hot tub most of the time.

As the folks were working and I was clubbing till dawn, then sleeping till noon and recreating in the hot tub while consuming liberal quantities of hops and barley was the norm I was pretty happy. But being the altruistic sort I was divinely inspired to assist in the holiday preparations. Hot tub plus frozen turkey equaled good time management. My step mother had been bitching about the bird and all the trimmings so I felt I would be in her good graces by acting on this impulse. I eased the poultry into the tub one crisp fall afternoon and began demolishing a case of Coors.

The bird kept to one side of the tub, bobbing and weaving, and I sat on the other, mentally congratulating myself with a fervor.

About five thirty, very close to being really, really drunk, I heard the family car arrive in the drive. Oh goody. I would soon be rewarded with many applause and good will towards everyone. There I sat, grey giblet foam surrounding me...(the bag had broken) empty brown bottles littered the deck and a chlorine soaked turkey still bobbed upon the discolored waves.

My step mother stood in the doorway, frozen. A look on her face which defied gravity...and she screamed, "YOUR SON IS IN MY HOT TUB WITH A GOD DAMNED TURKEY!" My father never missed a beat. He hollered back, "What's he doing to it?"
I was headed to South Texas the following day.