The Redneck, The Pre-Op Tranny, & The Pool Shark Who Never Was

Every single word written here is an extraordinary exaggeration of events that have played out in my head... based on the stories I have heard from people I have met in jail or while I was dealing with my own stupidity and carelessness, resulting from my own addiction to alcohol and drugs. This is in no way a glamorization of drug use, but a tool to lend some humanity to a subculture that has been demonized and written off as a hopeless and worthless part of our human family. I do not condone or promote any of the behavior or activities herein.

Chapter Sixteen

            Our day developed quickly after Milly came and went, or it developed in a complicated way, and it got complicated very quickly.  
            Milly’s visit was short and to the point.  Nobody really talked about what had transpired at her house earlier that morning, but nobody really had to.  Milly didn’t stick to the plan of cash only transactions, and left the house with close to 4 grams after having only given us twenty-five dollars and close to eight boxes of various kinds of pills containing pseudoephedrine. 
           I looked questioningly at Bull as he accepted questionable payment, and then I found myself busy popping the pills out of the blister packs onto the table and then sliding them off the edge in front of me and into a plastic zipper baggie.             Bull’s phone lit up and vibrated with an incoming text message.  Bull slid the phone open, read it quickly, texted a couple of quick words, and then slid the phone shut again.

            “I guess the word must be out," Bull said vacantly.  "That was my cousin, Dale.  I guess he’s on his way out here with some cash and trade.”   
            The only thing I knew about Dale was that he scrapped iron for a living and that his wife was blind, and so big that she rarely got out of the truck that they drove everywhere.  The truck actually leaned towards the passenger side when Dale made a rare solo-appearance to the farm.  Sometimes he would sit in the farmhouse with us for hours getting high while his wife sat idly in the passenger seat of their pickup truck in the driveway.  Once in a while we would here her scream something from the window of the truck, or Dale would get a text message on his phone and he would run out there with a loaded pipe to get her high in the driveway, and then he would be back in the house for the remainder of his visit.  
           He was kind of a strange guy, but we obviously weren’t being real picky about who we unloaded our product to today.  Incidentally, Dale’s son had just gotten sent to prison for the part he had played in stealing some anhydrous ammonia from a local farmers co-operative and "transporting it illegally"... a felony.  Personally I thought the kid was lucky to be alive, as the car he was running from the cops in had gone off the road into a newer area of a cemetery and destroyed 5 large monuments.  The crash tossed everything in the car and ruptured the compressed-air tank he was using to transport the juice.  If he had knocked himself unconscious in the collision he would have surely died from breathing the toxic fumes.  Sometimes I guess you got lucky... and only get sent to prison.

            After Dale’s text came another text from a woman named Charlene who was one of Bull’s longest associates.  Bull told me that Charlene was also coming out with her new boyfriend, Ron.  New people were always complicated, but since it was Charlene bringing this guy out here, I guess Bull didn’t think twice about it.  What Bull and I didn’t know is that I was already familiar with Charlene’s boyfriend.  

           I thought Charlene was interesting because she was dating this guy Ron, whom I had met several years earlier in a bar I was at with my wife.  Charlene’s boyfriend, Ron --the first time I met him-- was dating a peculiar friend of my wife who just so happened to be a pre-op transsexual (meaning there was still a package, as the envelope hadn’t been opened yet) named Bobbi Lynn.  Bobbi Lynn was an oddity in rural Southern Illinois, exaggerated and overstated by her affinity for dressing like an eighties groupie… and Bobbi Lynn had no shame about who or what he/she was.  Personally I thought Bobbi looked like a member of some glam-metal rock band from a bygone musical genre.  This was comically illustrated by the fact that she was dating and living with a guy like Ron --a man who for all intensive purposes seemed as though he was as close-minded and rednecked as every other proud, pickup-truck owner in the area.  

          This was a man who attired himself in cowboy boots, Stetson hat, starch-stiffened-button-down shirt, vest and --no shit-- a bona fide bolo tie.  When he talked, he talked with such a frustratingly tooth-deficient, quick southern drawl that I could only understand every third word of what he said... if I was lucky.  

         In order to absorb what seemed to me like brazen audacity --in the form of this twilight-zone inspired romantic pairing that I had come to recognize in a reputably rough-n-tough bar that night-- I intentionally asked the guy to shoot pool while proceeding to pound shots of whiskey and slam countless beers in my hopes of avoiding any awkward conversations about a lifestyle situation I had always claimed tolerance of, but given wide-berth to for my own comfort.  I found that being drunk and having to listen to Ron’s hyper-ridiculous drawl was amusing enough without having to get an unsolicited lesson in redneck, white-trash, sexual deviance... while my wife and her peculiar and out-of-place friend, Bobbi Lynn, uncomfortably ogled us from their seats at a lonely table on the far side of the bar.

            Years later, when Charlene walked through the farmhouse door with Ron, there was an immediate and uncomfortable silence between Ron and I that must have been confusing to everybody but he and I.  Bull took vocal notice of the awkwardness between Ron and I without hesitation.

            “Have you guys met or something?” Bull asked the three of us, the question taking Charlene by surprise, as she had no idea that I knew Ron.

            Ron turned and cocked his head towards me, acting as though he was trying his damnedest to place me… but I could see frightened and suspicious recognition behind his stare.  Recognition and something else I was familiar with… a silently pleading hope that I wouldn’t out him right here in front of his new girlfriend and their dope cook.  
           As they each sat down at the round table, I turned my head towards Ron so that Bull and Charlene couldn't see half of my face and winked with the eye only he could see.  I was letting him know that if he was keeping a secret that I was the only person in this room who knew, it was safe with me for the time being... as I had no intention of trying to out him or embarrass him today.  In fact, it was usually helpful to have some kind of dirt on just about everybody who Bull or I conducted any kind of business with.  From the first desperate look in Ron’s eyes, this was just the kind of dirt that I liked to play in.

            “Yeah… yeaaaaah..." I nodded and turned back towards Bull.  "I met this fucker a couple of years ago at that Clown House of a bar in Littleton.  He lost his ass to me in pool that night, I think… That was you, wasn't it Ron?”  I stuck my hand out to shake his and reassure him that he was safe for the moment.  He was quick and relieved to shake my hand.

            “Yep… I sure did… yessiree mister.  Lost my ass reeeeeeeal good, I reckon.”  He still hadn’t lost that ridiculous way he talked, but it was a little easier to understand him now.  It appeared as though he had gotten some replacement teeth for the ones he had been missing on the night that I had met him years ago.

            “So, what’s with the air being so thick around here?” Bull asked me directly.  I wasn’t sure he was gonna buy any story I told, but any story would at least buy me some time so I wouldn’t have to drag Ron’s past out right here before a dope deal.

            “Well, honestly, I think it’s probably because ol' Ron here never paid up on the last game we bet on that night...”  I was laying it on pretty thick, so my only hope of not raising any red flags with Bull was to lay it on even thicker.  “See... I sharked ol' Ron here pretty good that night and he called me out on it after that last game.  As I recall, and correct me if I'm wrong Ron," I glanced over at him, "I finally got him to go double or nothin' on twenty-five bucks after we had traded a couple of five-dollar bills back and forth all night on previous games.  Ron was pretty tipsy by the time I dropped that twenty-spot on top of our five-dollar bet..." I paused and lit up a cigarette, then continued, "you know, to 'make things interesting?'  So, anyways, we had been drinking shots of bourbon between games... well... to be honest," I winked at Ron again, this time everybody could see, "mostly ol' Ron was drinking the bourbon, I was spitting mine back into my beer bottle." I laughed as Ron's head suddenly snapped to watch me spin this outrageous fabrication about events that had never transpired... but I was pretty sure he wasn't going to dispute my recollection of events at this point.  In fact, he was probably wishing my tall-tale was true.  
          "Continue..." Bull beckoned as his eyes widened and a grin spread across his face.  
          "Indeed," I said and carried-on.  "Well, I guess Ron never noticed that I had been nursing that same beer most of the night while we played... and he was pretty buzzed when we played the first game for twenty-five bucks... which, you know, he won... as I seemed to be getting pretty sloppy myself.  We went back to the bar and ordered a few more shots.  Ron must have been feeling pretty confident when I pulled out another twenty-bucks... which I sadly reported was all the money in my pockets, and insisted he give me one last chance to win my money back." I was rolling now, and having fun too.
        "Oh Ron... you didn't?" Charlene asked him.  Ron only shrugged and kept watching me lie.
        "Well, sure he did," I said and laughed.  "At that point he had won a couple of games in a row, and I was missing some real gimme's... and looked pretty faded." I took a deep breath.  "I made a stupid mistake though..."
        "Yeah, what was that Pool Hall Paul?" Bull asked.
        "Well, I let ol' Ron rack 'em up for me without seeing his money." I sighed dramatically and shook my head feigning shame.  "You know what happened next?"  Bull and Charlene began shaking their heads silently, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Ron shaking his too... So did Bull. His attention swiftly fell on Ron's mistake and his brow furrowed before he looked back at me.  I winked at Bull and said, "Eight-ball break."
        Charlene gasped, snorted a giggle, and asked, "You're kidding me?"
        Bull shook his head in frustrated disbelief and turned towards his safe, where he was muttering something under his breath while he went about retrieving his dope box.
        "Yeah, I'm kidding around, but I did run the table on Ron that game... before he ever had a chance to cue up.  Ron cussed me a little when he realized what I had done, but we shook hands and agreed that there were no hard feelings... but I was pretty sore when ol' Ron said he had to get his money from the truck and never came back." 
       Bull looked up from what he was doing and smiled deviously.
       "So, that must have been why the air got thick for a second," I said and laughed.
       "Yessir... guilty as charged," Ron was shaking his head and looking around with a look of worry and hope melting over his face.
       Bull frowned and shook his head and looked over at me as if to ask What the FUCK was that all about?

        "Water under the bridge though, right?" I asked. "It was a long time ago. No worries."
      “Let’s see if we can't clear that debt right now, shall we Ron?”  Bull dropped a bag of dope on the table.

            “Nah, no, no, no… ain’t no debt here to be reconciled… me and him are gonna let bygones be bygones, right Ron?” I asked. 

           "If you say so..." Ron said questioningly.

            After that we all sat and smoked dope while he and Charlene dicked around with Bull about how much dope she wanted to get for what shit she brought to trade.  She ended up dropping cash for a gram, but was trying to swindle another gram out of Bull for a working video camera that was so old it used VHS tapes to record.  Bull was interested in it, but only to serve as a monitor camera for one of the outbuildings on the property.  They finally settled on a half-gram for the camera, and Charlene and Ron sailed out the door as Bull’s cousin Dale’s pickup truck ambled onto the road in view of one of the cameras pointed that way.  I knew it was Dale’s truck because it leaned towards the passenger side, where his fat, blind wife sat.

            When Charlene and Ron were in their van and driving in the opposite direction of Dale’s approach, Bull punched me in the arm and asked, “Wanna tell me what the fuck just cost me ten minutes of my life that I won't ever get back while I was listening to that bullshit story so you wouldn’t have to talk about whatever it was you wouldn’t talk about in front of Charlene?”
           "What?" I asked coyly. "What gave you that idea? Ron shaking his head like he didn't know what happened next? Fucking dumbass tranny fucker."
           "What?" Bull shook his head like he had just gotten smacked.

            “Sure, Boss… Ron used to fuck a pre-op tranny that my wife is friends with.  I met him in a bar where my wife wanted to meet up with her friend, the tranny."  I quickly drew in an exaggerated breath as if I were gonna have to hold it in for a second.  "I never sharked that guy in pool.  Hell… I haven’t played a decent game of pool since college.  But ol' Ron probably would have paid me that twenty-five bucks that I lied about him welching on to keep me from blabbing about his freaky past.”

            Bulls jaw dropped, and he slammed his palm into his forehead.  Like I said, people like Bobbi Lynn were a rarity in these parts, and people like Ron were even rarer.  I was spastic waiting to see how Bull would respond to this knowledge.  In typical Bull fashion, instead of re-stating the obvious about Ron, he laughed and said, “Fuck you, man… your wife is friends with a tranny?  That’s just fucked up, buddy.  I don’t know if we can be friends any more…”

            We laughed so hard we were both crying when Dale pulled into the driveway and let himself into the farmhouse.  He stood at the table, looking confused until we collected ourselves.  He sat down and put five new one hundred dollar bills on the filthy round table.

            "I'd like that much of whatever did that to you guys."  

            Bull and I stopped laughing immediately.


This work is the intellectual property of Jerome J. Panozzo

The Trouble With Developing A Conscience

Every single word written here is an extraordinary exaggeration of events that have played out in my head... based on the stories I have heard from people I have met in jail or while I was dealing with my own stupidity and carelessness, resulting from my own addiction to alcohol and drugs. This is in no way a glamorization of drug use, but a tool to lend some humanity to a subculture that has been demonized and written off as a hopeless and worthless part of our human family. I do not condone or promote any of the behavior or activities herein.

            

Chapter Fifteen

              I wish I could tell you that after we crushed up those pills in the pile of blister packs, cracked the tank of anhydrous ammonia, and cooked that dope up that it was the last of our adventures.  I wish I could tell you that, but I would never dream of beginning to lie at this late stage of the game.  Our yield that night was somewhere around thirty grams of dope, of which Bull relinquished about ten grams to my possession without much thought.  I had a giant metal bolt and nut that I had found in a pile of hardware in one of Bull’s garages that I used as a stash spot for the dope I carried off the farm.  I had cut the huge bolt into two pieces at about three inches from the end, and hollowed out the inside of the larger piece with a milling machine.  I could screw the giant nut over the top of that hollowed out piece and close the stash up by attaching the other piece of the

bolt that I hadn’t hollowed out.   If I needed to travel with a fairly large amount of dope (which it appeared I was going to be doing) this could be filled with baggies of product, closed up and tossed in the back of just about any truck on the property, and no law enforcement official would ever know any better, as it looked like just about any other piece of trash or scrap in the back of any other vehicle we drove.  It was heavy and awkward, but not as heavy and awkward as a prison sentence.

            Dayna still hadn’t moved from the couch when we returned to the house just before dawn.  The puppy didn’t seem to have moved much either, so Bull picked him up, much to the pup’s vocal protests, and placed him on the front porch to do his potty business.  We sat down at the round table to get high and think about what we were going to do next.

            “Fuck Boss… what’s next?”  I sighed, as I looked at the pile of dope Bull was unwrapping from the coffee filters we had used to separate the white powder and crystals from the white gas (or Coleman Camp Fuel) we used to rinse it.  The dope wasn’t quite dry yet, which strangely enough was my particularly favorite time to smoke it.  Bull often tried to warn me off of doing this… as he would smile and show off his less than brilliant smile.

            “You keep smoking that wet dope, and you’ll end up with a smile like mine…”

            “I like my dope to be wet and fresh… and when I get a loose tooth, I’ll quit smoking it wet.”  I smiled and started to pack one of the clean pipes on the table.  I produced flame from a lighter underneath the glass ball of the pipe and watched the dope melt and begin smoking.  When smoke began to trickle from the hole on the top of the glass ball, I ignited the smoke with the flame of the lighter and waited for the combustible POOF of the fumes inside the ball to ignite.  We both jumped and smiled at this little trick, and began sharing the first of several bowls of dope between ourselves.  This barely put a dent in the pristine pile of white dope, drying on the coffee filters in the center of the filthy round table.

            “Well, what the hell are we gonna do, Boss?”

            “Well, we either gotta sell, or smoke an awful lot of this dope…”

            “Yeah… I see that…” I laughed uncomfortably, because my next query was going to make things uncomfortable again.  “I meant about Dayna’s boy.”

            “Honestly,” Bull stated matter-of-factly, immediately deflating my failed attempt at killing his buzz, “I don’t think we have time to worry about all that right now… because if the law comes breaking down my door right now, we’re all gonna go to prison until that kid is in college… what with all this dope sitting in front of us.  Who do you know that wants to get high?”  Bull didn’t look up at me, just kept staring intently at the pile of  redneck marching powder in front of us.

            “Well, shit… just about everybody I know wants some dope.  Well… except my wife.”  We both smiled uncomfortably at the mention of my estranged spouse.  Bull threw his phone at me, pulled out his hip knife and scooped out a large pile of dope onto a large square mirror in front of him.  He used his finger to wipe the residue off of the black blade of the knife, and put it back on his hip.  He stuck the finger in his mouth, as it was covered in dope dust, and a trickle of blood from nicking it on his blade.

            “Start working and figuring out who wants some shit… cash only, and trade as a last option.  We need to stop making this shit here at home,” Bull said, and picked up a filthy razorblade from the table and started cutting the pile of dope on his mirror into manageable lines.  After a couple of swipes at the dope with the rusty razor, he flipped the blade on the floor, and said… “Fuck it… who are we kidding… we don’t need no lines.”  He grabbed his hotline tooter and ignited a propane torch on the table.  When the glass end of the tooter was red hot, he simply inhaled deeply from the pile and handed the mirror and apparatus to me.  I did the same and we repeated, exchanging tooter for pipe each time.  By the time this session was done I was numb, high-strung, and thinking not about working on liquidating some of the excessive product we were holding onto, but instead… cleaning the fucking table.  It was filthy.  Not to mention the sub-floor that the table sat on.  It DEFINITELY needed to be swept.  Bull noticed me organizing the garbage on the table into piles and looking frantically around the room at what else needed to be cleaned when he laughed out loud.

            “Hey geeker… We have other shit to do.”

            “Yeah, yeah… we do.   Let me pack this stuff up and put it in The Bolt and we’ll head over her way," I said, absent-mindedly pushing aside all of the garbage I was sorting to make room to package and sort through the dope.
              "Who's way?  Where are we heading?  Don't flake out on me now, brother... I need you on your A-game from here on out."  Bull said smiling at me expectantly.
              "Milly, boss... Milly's house.  I’ll bet we can get rid of most of it in the next hour if we’re lucky.”

            “You think so?  I dunno, man.  Milly is shady… and she has kids at that house.”  Bull said, drawing on the nearly dry pipe, and dropping another rock of dope into the hole on the bowl.  “I’ve had enough of involving kids with the problems I’ve created.”

            “I’ll tell her that her kids better be in bed…  Hell, its only 5 a.m., boss.”

            I texted Milly when we were in the truck, and driving in her direction… telling her that Bull didn’t wanna see any kids, and that hers had better be out of sight when we got there.  She simply answered my texts by saying:

            OK… LMFAO

Don't worry about my kids

            The sky was turning pink, blue, and purple when we pulled up onto Milly’s property.  There were four or five other cars parked in her front yard, and three in her driveway.  I got out of the truck, and started to rummage through the scrap in back for my bolt with the dope, when Bull grabbed my arm.

            “Let’s just see who’s all here… there’s an awful lot of vehicles and lights on in that house for it being as early as it is.”

            “Cool, boss… Let’s go.”  I walked up to the house, and knocked before I let myself in.  Bull followed close behind me.  We walked through her screened-in porch, and knocked on the second door to the house, which I found locked as I turned the doorknob.  I turned around and shrugged at Bull, as we waited for our hosts to unlock several chains and deadbolts from behind the flimsy door.  It was Milly, dressed in pajamas, who answered the door and invited us in sheepishly.

            “What’s going on, fellas?”  Milly asked, as we wandered into the darkened house.  There were several layers of blankets over the windows of the house, and several dimly lit light bulbs from lamps without lampshades provided the light we needed to get to her kitchen, where there was the sound of a group of people all talking at the same time, about what sounded like several different topics.  The kitchen door was closed off by another blanket, nailed to the door frame.  I pulled the blanket to one side, and surveyed the situation.  Milly was right behind me, and Bull was bringing up the tail end.  He didn’t look happy about being here.

            The kitchen table at Milly’s was filled with ashtrays and lit cigarettes.  The room was blue with smoke.  The people I heard talking were a group of kids barely out of high school, and there were several glass pipes traversing the hands of the group.  Everybody turned to see me walk in, including Milly’s mom, who was holding Milly's child, a toddler on her hip... while another girl was lighting a lighter underneath a glass bowl in Milly’s mom’s mouth.  I felt a yank on the hood of my sweatshirt, and turned to see Bull yank his thumb back towards the door we came in.  Without questioning him, I excused myself, and walked past Milly out the doors of the house and back to the truck.

            Milly followed us outside.

            “Hey… wait you guys… My mom was just putting her to bed.  Don’t go.  I’m sorry you had to see that.  You don’t even have to go back in the kitchen… let’s just go handle shit in my room,” Milly pleaded.

            “I told you that he didn’t wanna see any goddamned kids, Mill…” I said under my breath.

            Bull pushed past me and put his finger in Milly’s face, “No, Milly… it’s not that I don’t wanna see any goddamned kids… I love kids.  But Jesus Fucking Christ… your mom is holding that baby while somebody lights a bowl for her…  That’s just fucked up.  Get your shit together.  We lost Dayna’s kid today… I’m not having anything more to do with anybody else losing any more goddamned kids!”  Bull let himself in the truck, slammed his door and started the engine.  “Let’s go!” Bull hollered.  “Milly, I’ll be at home… if you need something, come out there by yourself… and I ain’t done yelling about this shit yet.”

            “Goddammit, Milly,” I said.  “What part of what I said did you NOT understand?  You know he’s just gonna scream at me all the way back now.  Thanks.  You’re a fucking idiot...”  I got in the truck and slammed the door.  Bull put the vehicle in gear, and we sped off down a lonely stretch of gravel road. 

            To my surprise, Bull didn’t say a word about what we saw at Milly’s ever again.  The trip back to the farm was long, and it was nearly noon before we pulled into the driveway of our familiar confines.  We hadn't spoken except to pack dope in a bowl and get high.  Regardless, Bull had fallen asleep several times at the wheel, so he was plenty rested.  On our way up to the porch of the farmhouse, Bulls phone vibrated.  

It was a text from Milly:

            On my way out there  

ALONE  

Im sorry

            “Milly’s on her way, boss.”

            “I figured she would be.”  Bull let himself into the house.  The puppy who had hampered out to meet us, was close behind him.  

I wasn't tired at all.

This work is the intellectual property of Jerome J. Panozzo

Puppies, Dope Cooks, and DCFS

     Every single word written here is an extraordinary exaggeration of events that have played out in my head... based on the stories I have heard from people I have met in jail or while I was dealing with my own stupidity and carelessness, resulting from my own addiction to alcohol and drugs.  This is in no way a glamorization of drug use, but a tool to lend some humanity to a subculture that has been demonized and written off as a hopeless and worthless part of our human family.  I do not condone or promote any of the behavior or activities herein.

Chapter Fourteen

          One event, in particular, changed the course of things forever for Bull and all of us reliant on his talents.  This change came in the form of a visit to the farm by the Department of Child and Family Services.  Bringing up DCFS in front of a group of meth-heads is kind of like saying the word 'Voldemort' to a bunch of non-muggle, magic-folk in the Harry Potter universe.  You just don’t say it without expecting bad things to happen.  Spines tingled, and hair stood up on the backs of necks from thoughts of previous experiences with these people  whenever the dreaded four-letters were uttered during normal conversation.  It was not a joke to anybody, being that none of us were capable of saying that we didn’t know somebody who had had their way of life turned upside down at one time or another by these child-harvesters and home-wreckers. 

People who worked for DCFS were thought of as the enemy, no matter how desperately the children in question needed to be plucked from their tweaker parent’s hands.  Nearly one-hundred percent of the times that DCFS showed up for drug related concerns, the police were not far behind (sometimes hours, sometimes days, but rarely a week) with search warrants, ready to arrest addicts and further separate addicted parents from their kids and begin the lengthy process of prosecution and re-distribution of the family.  I knew this fact-of-life very well, and Bull knew it all to well, as he had dealt with them extensively following one of his lengthier prison terms.

The day that DCFS showed up and took Dayna’s son from the farm I was on an errand which resulted from Dayna and her son losing their puppy, Lillybell, under the wheels of a combine passing in front of the farm the previous week.   Dayna had become increasingly incoherent and incapable of dealing with the boy over the last month, and often relinquished him to willing family members or more functional members of our circle.  The day that Lillybell got crushed by the passing combine must’ve been one of Dayna’s better days, as the days that her boy was with us on the farm were becoming few and far between. 

Lillybell’s death was traumatic for Dayna, but surprisingly not-so-traumatic for her son, who immediately hugged his crying mom and told her that it would be okay, and that they could just get a new puppy somewhere.  I thought that this was a surprisingly detached thing for a boy his age to think, but I immediately jumped at the chance to make things alright.  My friends a few towns over had just had a litter of mini pinschers, and they were looking to find willing homes for several of the pups… and I just so happened to have a couple of friends in need of a replacement puppy.  I borrowed one of Bull’s pickup trucks the following week, and traveled to my friends farm to pick up the puppy.  This was an all-day affair, as my friends were clear across two counties, and I hadn’t visited with them for quite some time.  They weren’t users, which made visiting kind of difficult for me, but they did have good beer and moonshine in the freezer, so I wasn’t preoccupied thinking about dope all day.

When the visit was done, and I had picked the puppy I wanted to take back to my friends, I said my goodbyes and carefully drove every gravel road I knew back to the farm, as I was pretty well hammered from a day of drinking and bullshitting.  I sobered up a little bit by taking a few hits off of a nearly dry, glass pipe, but it was really only enough to agitate my addiction.  The farm couldn’t come into sight soon enough.

As twilight set in, and the sun went down leaving a pink and purple hue in the southern Illinois sky, I pulled up into the driveway of the farm, and was met by Bull who was sulking around outside a darkened farmhouse by himself.  I waved from the truck as I turned off the engine, and grabbed the puppy, which had fallen fast asleep exactly two minutes before we reached our destination.  Before the pup had found a spot suitable for sleeping, it had been everywhere in the cab of the truck, including my shoulders, my lap and underneath the pedals.  There was also a fresh pile of puppy poop on the floor of the passenger side, and I believe it peed by my feet.  It was a nerve-wracking trip, to say the least.

“Hey Bull…” I said as I retrieved the puppy and shut the truck’s door.  I tossed him his keys which he caught without taking his eyes off the puppy in my hand.  I smiled at that little feat of skill.

“Is that it?” He asked.  “It don’t look like much of a dog.”

“Nah, it ain’t much.  But it’s enough for that boy, I suppose.  Where is everybody?”  I was beginning to get a dismal feeling about Bull’s demeanor, and asked, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“DCFS came today… Dayna failed her drug test for them, and they took her son away from her.”  Bull, looking more morose than I have ever seen him, reached over and grabbed the puppy from my hands and held it up in the diminishing light to inspect.

“Shut the FUCK up!  Did they bring cops?”

“Yessir.  They were ready for her to fail before they came out.  I guess somebody called the DCFS anonymous tip-line and reported her as an unfit mother who was addicted to meth.  You don’t know anything about that, right?”  Bull’s gaze fixed on me, and I couldn’t lie to him even if I had tried.

“Fuck you, man… why the fuck would I do that to you guys?  Are you being serious?”  I felt the blood in my knees disappear, and I went numb from my elbows down.  “I mean, for fuck’s sake, dude… I work hard around here trying to make things as easy as possible for you guys.  Why would you ask me something like that?”

“Hell man… I know you didn’t do nothing wrong… but everybody’s a suspect in my world.  You know that.  At least I hope I’ve taught you that much.”  He sighed and looked at the puppy in his hands.  “I don’t know how this is gonna go over with Dayna.  She’s a fucking mess, brother.”

“Well, I suppose it could go either way, Boss.  She’ll either love that doggy, or snap its neck.  Either way we have a lot of cleanup to do tonight, if we want to get that child back in his mother’s arms.”  I started to walk towards the dark farmhouse.  I can’t remember ever feeling like the farmhouse was this dark before.

“You’re right… we do.  Let’s go get this over with.”  Bull followed me to the house.  The puppy was licking his face and he was murmuring something under his breath to the dog.  He seemed to be smiling, but I could hardly tell in the faint light.  The sky had turned orange and black behind the silhouette of the farmhouse.

I opened the screen door, to find Dayna lying on the couch with an arm over her eyes, and a river of  tears flooding down her face.  She took her arm from her eyes and looked at me with red, bulging eyes underneath puffy, bruising eyelids.

“They took him away from…  I’ll probably never see my son again…”  What appeared to be fresh cuts above her elbow had left streaks of pink tears on her face, adding to the horror of the day.

“I heard about that Dayna.  I’m real sorry, but believe me, we’re gonna do whatever we can to fix this situation.  Right Bull?”

“That’s right.”  Bull was pandering to her a little bit, but Dayna didn't seem to notice.  “Look at the present he brought for you.  It’s a male.”  Bull pulled the puppy from behind his back, and at that moment, the puppy who had been silent most of the ride here, and the whole time we had been in the driveway, began whimpering and trying to get out of Bull’s hands.

Dayna’s eyes brightened briefly underneath the glaze of sticky tears and puffy eyelids for a brief moment while she reached for the puppy, which went silent in her hands, as if inspecting Dayna the way Bull inspected him. The pup remained squirmy in Dayna’s hands until she held him to her face where he immediately began licking the tears and pink, diluted bloodstains from her face.  She closed her eyes and hugged the puppy, and muttered “Awwww… thank you.”                   
That was the last we heard from Dayna that night.  Bull and I began to carry on a conversation as if Dayna wasn't there, which in all actuality... she wasn't.      

“I guess that went well then… right?”  I asked Bull and smiled.  We both began walking towards the round table in the other room.  Bull pulled a pipe from his pocket, turned on the overhead light to inspect its contents, and began smoking.

“It could’ve gone A LOT worse.”  He said through thick smoke as he smiled back and handed me his pipe. “Well, I guess we ought to cook up the rest of these pills before we throw everything away, huh?”  Bull pulled a pile of pills and about 15 blister packs out of his jacket and showered them on the huge, solid table.

“Are you fucking serious?”  I nearly choked on my hit, as I stammered with obvious disbelief in my voice.

“When am I not?” Bull replied flatly.  He threw me a small, black duffle bag.  So, without thinking much, and before he could change his mind, I started to gather the blister packs and whatever else we needed from the house and shove them into the bag.  

“You're right you lunatic... lets fucking cook some dope before they come back with search warrants.”  I smiled and said, but I was scared as hell.  But there was no amount of fear that could keep me from doing what we were about to do.  There wasn’t any authority in the world who could threaten to take anything away from me that could stop what we were about to do.  At that moment I loved nothing more than the idea of spinning off another batch of dope.  DCFS or not.  At that moment I realized that I  wasn’t only addicted to meth, but I was addicted to making it… I was addicted to the shared giddiness between Bull and I, and I was addicted to getting away with it.  Bull must have seen it in my eyes, because he smiled that fierce grin, and his eyes looked like a bright blue propane torch again.  It was refreshing after witnessing his morose behavior when I arrived.

“Let’s get on it motherfucker." Bull sneered.  "Johnny Law is coming, and the clock is ticking.”

The clock was ticking, indeed.


This work is the intellectual property of Jerome J. Panozzo

Intermission

     Up until this very moment I have been writing a fictitious story loosely based on my life experiences with one of the most charismatic and intriguing people I had ever met up to that point in my life.  Bull Gunville was both a master of deception and possibly one of the best male friends I had ever had in my life.  He was both somebody I loved deeply, and feared ferociously.  I have taken a break in writing the 'story as I have seen it', to bring to light one of the most miraculous things that happened to me during my time with Bull and our crew of dentally deficient deviants, cutters, whores, thieves, and southern Illinois white-trash.  This miracle took place in the form of my loving, supportive, and ever vigilant wife... Erica. 

      By October of 2011, I had deteriorated to about 130 pounds of black nail polish, dark makeup, and dyed-black shoulder length stringy hair.  I had been high on meth for about a year and half at this point, and had suffered through the loss of our restaurant, and the loss of mine and my wife's best friend in a tragic motorcycle accident.  Our friend had given me everything he could, within his power, to see me succeed or make me feel some sense of self-worth.  We were building a fire department training facility together at one point.  Alas, I had become so caught up in the world of Methamphetamine that he had all but resigned himself of me, and was contemplating coming to the farm and dragging me home by my hair. I loved this friend and so did Erica.  The sense of loss and grief I felt when I carried his coffin that day can never, ever be erased from my soul.  The drug amplified my narcissism, and I began focusing all of my resentment of our lost business, and my deceased friend solely on Erica's resistance to allow me to 'go to hell in my own way...'  The following are scathing and fiery emails that I sent to Erica while I was fueled up on Meth.  Erica, God Bless Her Heart, saw fit to see through my spitfire and venom and prayed constantly for me to come home and come back to her... where I rest easily these days. 

     The following are the emails in their rawest form.  The following is an attempted justification of my horrible behavior at home, and my attempts at pushing Erica further away so I could spend more time cranked up on meth.  All of my accusations of my wife are an extreme example of where I was at in my narcissistic paranoia. This is the monster I had become to the woman who loved me through all of this.  Erica has never wanted anything more than to see me happy and healthy.  Erica never did anything during this time in my life to inflict pain on me directly.  Erica took steps to protect herself and our daughter from what I was becoming, while trying to leave enough wiggle room to allow me to come back home if I lived through it.  Erica never lost faith that this would happen, despite the demon manifesting inside of me during this time.

Email #1:  (I was still getting very high, despite all of the claims otherwise)

I am so sick of your shit. I refrain from telling you all of the things that I know are going on in your miserable head because I am afraid of the threats you have made, and your insatiable desire to see me just as hateful and miserable as you. I have never been so scared and unhappy in all my life as I have been the last couple of years. It never had anything to do with alcohol or drugs, they were just the last cry for help in a situation I never thought would lead to the manipulation and destruction of my desire to better myself in any way. I had done so much and worked myself to the brink of insanity, only to decieve and betray my own family for the sake of your hopeless, control-freak, content-to-be-miserable family. You can't stand the fact that even after a devastating brush with a life-threatening addiction, the friends who survived it with me, and relied on me to help them regain control of their lives are still interested in being my friends, even without illicit drugs or criminal activity. We still love each others company and laugh until our bellies ache. We laugh about the lives we were living and the stupid, life-threatening things we did, the danger we put ourselves in and the fact that at the end of the train crash we still walked away with the ability to laugh about it with each other. Every family of each of these people you loathe and never fail to proclaim your distaste for still stands behind them and loves them, regardless of their actions while they were being controlled by something bigger than them. Every family supports them, and visits them, calls them, and never passes judgement on who they were or continue to be friends with. Every family, spouse, or ex-spouse... except for mine. For the first time in my life I am the odd man out because the woman I believed I wanted to spend my life with for so long refuses to even acknowledge anything other than the fact that her perception of the events which transpired lead her only to memories of how she was hurt. You have no regard for what it is that I was going and continue to go through because I suffer daily through an addiction I will never be able to stay ahead of without the support of people who know what I went through, understand it, lived it, or loved somebody who had. The only persons feeling's you concern yourself with on this matter is you. How did it make Erica feel? How many times did Jerry hurt my fragile little self-esteem and make me feel less than the horrible person Erica sees herself as? Have you ever taken into consideration what horrors I was going through, or continue to go through daily. These compounded with the constant umbrella of suspicion, anger, and what seems to me like perfectly timed threats of orders of protection, or divorce which you keep me under make me grateful that I never gave up the faith I have always placed in the people outside of my family who appreciate me for what I am, and more importantly what I am not, and hope I will never become. Someone like you. What kind of relationship are you hoping for where you try to control my decisions with threats of having the law demand that I stay out of my home for fifteen days, before I can go before a judge and have my friends... witnesses to your threats, caretakers of my emotional well-being, testify against you and prove once and for all that you are exactly what I have been warned about by people who have known you and your family for years. A vindictive, selfish, hopeless, sad example of a daughter, sister, mother and twice forgotten wife. I refuse to bargain my sanity and potential to appease your desire for undivided attention and your need to see my soul placed on some sort of sick, sacraficial altar so that I will only know what life looks like through your clouded, constricted views of how the world should be treating you. You need to work on fixing yourself because I have never appeared to you in this life in any condition to lend a hand to that cause. I think of you constantly throughout my days. What was once anticipation of your arrival home morphed into anxiety over whether or not I was going to be hassled by the local authorities over some false accusations requiring you to be protected from my coming and going from a house that I want nothing more to do with, and now it has changed into thoughts of what your future will hold when I am no longer a part of it. Ever. I don't need you, Erica. I never have needed you to make me feel significant to this world. It would have been nice to see this journey to its completion with you at my side, but I now believe that my happiness and sanity, and maybe my eternal soul will be forever altered for the worse if you reamain in my life as anything more than a regreattable memory. One that I will never be able to reminisce about and smile, or share a laugh about something we did with the friends who want to see me become better, and stronger and fulfill my potential, regardless of whether my decisions include them, or make them feel happy. What you should be concerned about is if I am happy with my life. Not if what I choose to do that makes me happy affects the fragile, little, eggshell ego that you barely maintain. I am not resposnible for your happiness. Only you can be responsible for that. A great truth that I realized long ago about my life is that if I am not truly happy in everything I do then I can never hope to bring any joy to anybody who relies on me for anything. Maybe if you had concentrated more on what makes you happy, and realized how happy I was for you in your decisions and had not been so concerned about how my struggle for happiness, and my desire to find your place in my world affected you poorly, and made you feel angry, jealous, betrayed, or second-rate. You will never be first in my life, Erica. If I only concerned myself with your feelings, how could I possibly ever better myself, or hope to for that matter. You still have so much to learn about people. I'm afraid that you never will. That when you wake up one day and realize that you have grown old and lonely seemingly overnight, while everybody you know has left you behind to seek out their happiness, yet miss you and whatever small way you affected their lives. You will wake up and realize that because you wasted your time and only concentrated on how you could derive happiness from how others made you feel, you have either completely lost memory of or epically failed to learn how to make yourself happy. I wanted you to be a part of my journey for so long that I have failed to remind you that this journey is mine, and your journey is yours. We should have relished in each others triumphs and shared tears when we failed. We should never have tried to manipulate the paths either of us were on with empty threats, schemes to catch one another in a lie, blind accusations, or held each other in suspicion of anything more than perfect love for each other. Love of each other for our staggering successes or tragic flaws. Love of each other for our ability to make our own decisions about which directions our lives went and joyful celebration when our respective paths allowed us to revel in our ability to combine our different experiences in life to overcome obstacles together. What we have been doing is damaging and dangerous to everybody around us, and I want out. I love you, and hope you reread this and save it and share it with anybody you have left who cares enough to suffer through your pity party bullshit.

Email #2 


no... it wasn't just you yelling. It was your irrational anger and you telling me that I did nothing for this family. It was you dropping me off at home so you could run off to your sisters by yourself to get (daughter) instead of taking me with you, probably so you could bitch about how much money I've STOLEN from you and how the gas your dad brought for the lawn mower wasn't needed quite yet, so instead of asking my wife, who along with restraining orders and threats of divorce, arrest, and homelessness, uses money try and control my comings and goings. It was how you wouldn't take me along with you to get (daughter) and then maybe on the way home swing by my friends house to drop off his starter and pick up the fucking sewing machine we needed to finish (daughters) costume that i had been working on all day. It was my irrational fear that if I walked too close to the road while cresting a hill on our road that you might in your anger swerve and try to hit me with your car. It was the fact that in order to remove myself from a situation that looked like it was heading towards more useless fighting and hurt feelings, and very likely a physical conflict that I absolutely refuse to allow myself to get into with you ever again, I felt that my best bet was to not wait for a ride or your fucking permission to leave... it was just to get the fuck out of there while you were gone for however long it would take you to break the speed limit there and back to tell me how useless and horrible I am for wanting to do everything I can for anybody who seems to need me including my family, as long as they don't make me feel like my family isn't important... which my friends never do. Doing things for people isn't buying their friendship... Its helping people you care about. As foreign a concept as this is, being that you leave me scared to ask for the littlest things, or gas to get away from the house where depression lives for a little bit... and I'm your husband... I won't even bother asking you for cigarettes anymore. I don't leave the lights and the tvs on around the house. I clean the dishes and cook dinner, and pick up (daughter) if she's sick, or your too busy fucking with your phone to inconvenience yourself long enough to show her the personal attention of a ride home alone with mom. Don't worry, though... I tell her how much I love her, and I make her laugh, and I hold her hand and tell her that I think she is beautiful just like her mom... I try every time I get the opportunity to let her know how great my life is because she has gotten to be a part of it. So don't you tell me about how I'm hurting her. Your insecurity and low self-esteem are leading you to a place where you allow yourself to make me appear as though I'm the only fucking problem you fucking have, when in actuality I have always been your biggest fucking cheerleader. I will not defend myself against baseless allegations of neglect, abuse or dishonesty. You have designed an idea about who it is that you need me to be, and you will never allow me to live comfortably outside of that idea you hold so dearly in your head. That idea is a fucking lie, Erica... and if you sit the fuck down and shut your fucking mouth for just a couple of minutes and think about the fact that I worship the ground you walk on every day you let me, but you're twisted ideas of what you believe would be an ideal life if Jerry would just do everything that pleases you, and put the things that truly make him feel like he is contributing to something in the trash where they belong... these ideas have left me leading what some people would call the life of a person with a serious personality disorder. I can't help it that I have people who want to be around me because I make them smile, or they can count on me to help them nail some boards into their house and share a conversation with to ease their minds. I do all of these things for you too. And that shit about me ignoring your "exciting' news about a promotion you hated the thought of taking because your daughter might have to learn to be without her mommy for a couple of hours in the evening. How the fuck do you think it makes me feel to know that you were just baiting me to fuck up and waiting for an opportunity to jump my ass about a mistake I made so you could tell your dad and mom and sister and daughter that you didn't take the promotion and make more money for yourself and move ahead in the world because you couldn't trust your husband to be at home with your daughter, who is perfectly capable of handling most things on her own these days, and that is perfectly natural for the record. Your sociopathic lying is so ingrained that you don't even know your doing it, and I refuse to sit back and enable your mental illnesses and worthless self-esteem any longer. You need to apologize to me for all of the rotten things you have done to me over the course of our marriage that have driven me to feel like a dual personality. You need to apologize for every time you make me feel like shit because I want to do something nice for someone, and it might mean that I won't ask for cigarettes for a couple of days.... but I would never tell you thats how I justify it. I just let you be a complete bitch and put all of the worlds weighty problems that you create for yourself on my broken and miserably weak shoulders. I truly hope you think about sucking it up and considering this, because I've been waiting for a long time for you to realize just how good you have it with me around, and how much of your bullshit I tolerate without calling it to your attention and making you feel like the batshit psycho control freak that you are. You need to apologize for expecting me to be someone you want me to be instead of someone I am happy with and can love you honestly with. You need to apologize for making me feel responsible for your moms addictions and suicide attempts. You need to apologize for letting your sister talk to me like I'm a worthless piece of shit, when in all honesty she is only projecting her worst fears of herself onto me when she hates me so openly and talks to me with distaste on her tongue. I have done everything to protect from those poisonous aspects of my family. You seem to revel in the fact that you know if you ever need to bitch about me, you know that your mom and sister will agree with you wholeheartedly and probably point out a couple of things that you would have never realized because your so fucking selfishly stuck on the world you want, that the world you could have had is rapidly slipping through your fingers.
You need to apologize to me for badgering me until I couldn't rest because if I were ever going to be able to love myself or anybody close to me ever again, I needed to tell you how much I resent you for never apologizing to me for anything more than forgetting to pick me up a pack of cigarettes. You need to apologize to yourself, because I do resent you, and resentment lasts a long, long time.

~~~END~~~