My Career Path, Continued

Alright, so when we got back to the states, it was around Christmas time. When Christmas vacation was over I would be going to the same high school that my Aunt and Uncle went to. This was going to be an exciting thing for me, they weren't in high school any more. But I had started school at their elementary school when they were still going there. But it didn't quit happen that way. We ended up at some god forsaken abandoned Air Force Base in Burns Flat, Oklahoma, “Clinton AFB”. They were sending military families that had husbands going to Vietnam to live there while they were gone. No one had asked me anything about going there. I didn't want to go, and I knew if I asked to stay with a relative would have been out of the question. By the time we got settled in, school had already started. I need to tell you I was not very good at school, if there had been classes for slow people back then I would have been in them. I struggled all through school, with not much help from my parents, my mom dropped out of the sixth grade. My dad graduated from high school, but he wasn't around much and when he was, he wasn't. He would hit the bottle as soon as he got home from work. So catching up with the other guys wasn't going to happen, I think I knew it when they first suggested it in Germany. I tried for a few weeks but just couldn't hack it, so I dropped out of the tenth grade.

There wasn't much to do in Burns Flat, it was just a little ole' town, with a gas station on both sides of town. I guess it shriveled up when the Air Force moved out. So looking for a job was pointless especially at sixteen and a half. March came in like a lion and took me with it. I gave my mom an ultimatum, sign me into the Navy or watch me run away. We had a fight the night before, one of many, because she didn't like me going out every night and she needed me to take care of the kids, yada, yada, yada. Well, I was tired of being father, I was tired of taking care of everyone else. I had wanted to go into the Navy ever since I saw my uncles in uniform. So on March 11th we drove to Clinton, OK. In the basement of the courthouse is where the recruiters offices were. So I went straight away to the Navy office, which was across the hall from the Marines. The recruiter basically told me to go back to school and come back and see him when I graduated. Well, I knew that wasn't an option. Everything I had ever read told me that I did not want to be a Marine. You have to remember I had very low self-esteem at this point of my life. So down the hall I went, the Air Force guy told me the same thing. By this time my mom is grinning from ear to ear, she thinks she's getting her way. I was desperate, so I sat down with the Army Sargent. He told me that since I was volunteering for the draft I would only have to serve two years active duty instead of three and he could guarantee an AIT school (Advanced Individual Training) for me. Which means I wouldn't be a grunt, (infantry) , not that there is anything wrong with being shot at, “I'm just saying.” But they would talk to me about that after the testing in Oklahoma City. When we left there I had Trailways bus tickets in hand for the next day going to O KC.

Tomorrow I'll talk about my time in O KC, and my start in the US Army

In 1966 my mother was pregnant again and had a boy. He became very sick and they had to transport him to San Antonio, the nearest Army hospital that had a heart specialist. While my mom was in the hospital giving birth to my little brother my dad came home late one night drunk. I had already gone to bed. I woke up to find my dad in my bed playing with my penis, then he made me play with his and I don't want to talk about what else took place. I didn't know what to think, he kept telling me that he loved me. My mom had become very sick during this pregnancy and I had to take care of my brother and sister. When I would get home from school it was my job to take care of them till bedtime. I had to feed them, bath them, and put them to bed. So to say the least I was not happy that she was going to have another baby, I knew that I would have to take care of him too. When my dad told me to pray for him, before leaving to escort him to Texas, that's exactly what I did. But I didn't pray for him to live, I prayed he would die. Guess what? He did die, he was missing one of the oxygen tubes to the heart. I carried that guilt around with me till I was an adult. When my mom got home from the hospital I couldn't talk to her about what had happened because she was so depressed about my dead brother, she had her tubes fixed after giving birth to him. The next time my dad did it to me, I tried to tell her but she wouldn't believe me, she told everyone that I was just a trouble maker.
About six months later my dad got orders to go to Germany and this time he took us with him. A couple of months after we got there I found a job working with the Beer-man. This guy, Rolland, had a flat-bed truck and it was loaded with beer and soda cases. He went around to all the American housing complexes delivering the beer and soda. There was 24 bottles to a case, the cases were either wooden or plastic, the beer bottles had those ceramic caps held on with wires, just so you know how much they weighed. I got to where I could carry one on my shoulder and two with my other hand. During the summer I worked with him all day, during school I only worked after school til we were done usually between 7 and 9. Got pretty good money too, and of course I had to pay rent and buy my own cigarettes and what ever food items I wanted for myself. I even had a suit tailor-made for me, it had the Nehru jacket and was made from shark skin material, bell-bottoms pants with a Spanish waist, three buttons on each side above the zipper. I wore it with a turtle neck shirt, or sometimes just a dicky.
My shoulders had already stated filling out because of the hay hauling days, by the time I started playing football in the fall my shoulders were out there. That's why I played defensive guard. When we got to Germany I stated the eighth grade, the school I went to was run by the Department of Defense. The local school only went up to the ninth grade, the high school was in Frankfort about 20 miles away. You could live on campus if your family could afford it, or you could catch the bus every morning at about 6am. When it came time for me to go my folks said they couldn't afford for me to live on campus. They had also heard that there were a lot of drugs on campus and they didn't trust me. School started in August and we were being transferred back to the states in December because my dad got orders to go to Vietnam. So my folks talked me into not going to school till we got settled in the states, I would only miss one semester and would be able to catch up. I don't know why they didn't trust me, when all my other friends were smoking dope I didn't. I didn't start smoking marijuana till I was in the Army, but that's another story for a later time.

My Career Path, Continued

There wasn't much to do in Louisiana and I didn't have a lawn mower so I couldn't go around cutting grass. Back in those days there weren't any aluminum cans. Everything came in bottles, and they were recycled. When you bought a bottle of pop you were charged any where from 2 to 5 cents deposit. Most people were too busy I guess to take them back to the store and like the aluminum cans of today people would just throw them out the car window. That's where I come in. I found another use from my wagon of many colors. I would tie it to the back of my bike. Then I would hit the road picking up bottles as I went, by the time I got to the store I had enough for a couple of dollars.
Then my folks got the idea to move out into the country, twenty miles from town. We lived on a farm with cows, horses, chickens, rabbits, and homing pigeons. The rabbits and pigeons were mine. My buddy who lived in town gave me a few of his birds when we moved. I had two beautiful pure white fantail pigeons. By the time we left, we never stayed any where more than a couple of years, there were over 180 birds in my flock. I started out with two rabbits and before I knew it I had twenty of them. I didn't know how fast they would multiply. My dad worked at the mess hall on base. He was a cook for the Army and he would bring home these big boxes that the eggs came in. I would fill those up with cow dung and sell them on the side of the road going into town along with the rabbits. I would charge $5 per box or rabbit.
In the summer my teacher, Mr. Jetters had a tractor and a hay baler. He would go around to the local farms and cut their hay and bale it. The cutter would cut the hay and pile it in the center of the tractor in a neat row. Then after it dried he would come around with the baler attached and scoop it up and bale it into a three', 12” by 12” bale. The tractor didn't do so hot on corners, that's where I come again. He would pay me to go around to all the corners and rake them into a pile for the baler. When that was all done we would throw these bales weighing about 60 pounds onto a flat-bed trailer and haul them up to the barn and stack them inside. One cutting would fill this huge barn they had.

My Career Path, Continued, background

Let see, where was I? Oh, yeah, making things up. I became quit the little liar, and of course you would believe me. Cause how could a little kid make all this up. And every week people would ask me if we had heard anything yet. Each week I would say, “No not this week.”

Then the unthinkable happened, my mother kept saying that she was through with my father and she would never go back to him. Well, she lied. He showed up on our door step with bags in hand and drunk. My mom took him in, got me and the kids dressed and told me to take them out and not come back for a few hours. This was in the winter. When I did come back everything was fine, we were going to move to Louisiana with my dad. No body asked me what I wanted, just that's it.

I used to do anything to be with my dad. One time my mother made him come out and play catch with me. I had been asking him for a while to play with me, he kept saying sometime but not now. Well, when my mom made him play with me he would throw the ball as hard as he could. Every time it would hit my hand it would burn throw the glove. And when I threw it back to him he would yell that I was throwing like a girl. I mean, who would want to do that again. One time we sat up all night watching a Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon. He had his gallon of whiskey and cigars, and I had Royal Crown pop and tater chips. We made some Jiffy Pop and we made fun of the guests they had on.

After we got there my parents bought a car. My mom had the learn how and get her driver's license when we were going to the base to get the food at the commissary on the Navy base. So they bought this used car. This is the first beating I remember my father giving me. I has wrote a letter to my grandmother telling her how we were doing and that they bought the car. They weren't suppose to know that we got a car because my parents owed money to them. So my father beat the hell out of me, he made me strip down to nothing in front of him. The whole time I was begging him not to beat me. I found out threw time that the longer it took me to strip down the longer he would beat me. Every time until I was sixteen he made me strip down in front of him. When I turned sixteen I said enough was enough. I had done something, or had done something, it didn't matter, I said come on. Went into my bedroom, I didn't say a thing, I stripped down, laid across my bed. When he started hitting me with the razor strap I bit my lip, but I did not cry out, with every hit it would be harder and harder. Finally he threw the belt down, told me to get dressed and come out to the dinning room. When I got out there, he looked at me and said, “I guess you think your a man now?” I knew not to say anything. Then he punched me in the stomach with his fist and said, “That's what a man gets.”

Wait, I know what your thinking, this is suppose to be a story about my career? Well, it is, but I got to put back ground in there so you know where I'm coming from.

Next I'll tell you how collecting soda bottles put spending money in my pocket...

My Career Path, Continued

Well, the last time I wrote I said tomorrow I would do a confession, so you already know that I'm a liar. Now you have to figure out when I'm lying and when I'm telling the truth. We used to say in the trucking industry that if you start out by saying, "You won't believe this." most times it's a lie or an exaggeration. But getting back to the confession, I learned that if I could spin a good enough story, and made people feel sorry for me that I would get a bigger tip, and sometimes they would fix me lunch or take me to lunch. So this is the story that I started to tell people. My dad was with the CIA and he was being held as a prisoner of war. Because he was with the CIA he didn't really exist, therefore we got no money from the government. My mom has to clean houses during the day, and I worked at night doing this delivery service, and all day Saturday. I'm not proud of this, nor am I bragging, but I made a lot of money doing what I did.
Well, next I'll tell you what happens when you take a city boy and move him to the country. Later.