It was my favorite time of the week–a Friday at 7:00 pm. I sat in front of my big screen computer, listening to Judas Priest’s “Devil’s Child” at high volume with a full wine glass resting near my mousepad. I drank at an accelerated rate and used my pen as a pretend drumstick. The lid to the pen flew away, and I felt the alcohol re-igniting the high I achieved when I drank 3 glasses of wine between 5:00 and 5:30 before food from supper slowed the absorption into my bloodstream. Suddenly, Daphne stood behind me.
“Mom needs you,” she said.
I followed her down the hallway to the bedroom on the other side of the house where she hangs out when she’s home from work. Anita was looking through her clothes. She was angry.
“I called you 3 times,” she said.
“I was listening to music.’
“I know. I can hear it all the way in here. I want you to hang these clothes in the closet. I shouldn’t have to call you. My throat hurts.”
I put the clothes on hangars and placed them on her side of the closet. I didn’t want her to be angry with me. It was a buzz kill. She rolled into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and I returned to the computer and chose Ozzy Osbourne’s “No More Tears” as my next jam out song. I enjoyed listening to the song, especially Zakk Wyld’s awesome guitar riff, but I couldn’t shake the buzz-killing after effect of the conflict. But then, I was struck with a sense of Deja vu. We had this argument before. And we solved it. The solution was simple. I used to take the home phone with me to the computer, and she would call me using her car phone whenever she needed me. Somehow, we had gotten out of the habit of this method of communication. I couldn’t wait to remind her of the solution. I walked across the house and told her to call me when she needed me, and I showed her the house phone. It was like oh yeah…we forgot.
We never forgot that solution again. Anita makes sure I have the phone when I go to the computer every Friday night between 6:30-8:00. I enjoy a silly, not secret, guilty pleasure during this time and pretend I am a disc jockey, and I share music from YouTube to Twitter and Facebook. I also make stupid, drunken comments in Yiddish and Spanish in the comments section. I have fun.
A selfie of me at midnight on a Friday after a bottle of wine and an edible. I have fun. It is what I live for.
It seems like we have had hundreds of conflicts that were resolved and then the solution forgotten and finally re-remembered, but I can’t think of any others. Many are probably minor matters, but they add up. Remembering the solution is the key to having a good, long-lasting relationship. Anita and I have been together so long, we have had conflicts over issues we already resolved a long time ago, but it was so long ago we forgot the solution until 1 of us remembers.
For a while, I fantasized about putting out a shingle as a marriage counselor. I’m sure I would be better than a trained psychologists fresh out of school.
This chapter is short, but I wanted to include it to illustrate this important point. My memoirs are winding down. I’ve got 1 chapter left.
This chapter is an account of a typical day in my life as a caregiver. Not all caregivers have the same burdens and responsibilities, but this is my experience.
2:00 am
I am sound asleep, a sleep so deep I don’t even have a glimpse of a dream. The room is dark, and I am naked under my green comforter.
“Mark, help,” Anita suddenly blurts out, “I’m about to fall off the bed. Push me closer to the middle of the bed.”
I barely wake up. We’ve gone through this hundreds of times. The mid-brain stroke damaged her sense of balance, and at night she often loses her orientation. On one occasion she actually did roll off the bed, but ever since, I sleep on that side of the bed. The bed is pushed against the wall, so she can’t fall off the other side. I calmly reach out and put my hand on her hip and determine she is not close to falling off the bed.
“You are ok,” I tell her.
“No, I’m not. I’m about to fall off the bed.”
I turn around to confirm she is not close to the edge.
“You are ok. Go back to sleep.”
Soon, she is snoring, but now I am awake. It’s a good thing I fell asleep fast and already have over 3 hours of sleep. I try to relax and fall back asleep. I have a weird dream about confronting an intruder at the front door.
3:00 am
I wake up and feel the urge to urinate. I really don’t want to get up and pee because I know Anita will awake and need to go to. It’s nice and comfortable under the covers. I stop fighting it and make my way through the dark to the bathroom.
“I’ve got to pee too. Get me a Tylenol,” Anita says.
She scoots toward the edge of the bed. I transfer her to the bedside commode. I lay back down, pull the covers over me, and I wait for her to finish.
6:00 am
I wake up and can’t remember transferring Anita back to the bed. I literally can transfer her in my sleep. I feel well-rested and think about naked women, just to determine, if I am still a manly man.
6:30 am
Anita’s car phone alarm rings, telling us it is time to get out of bed. I like to get up and make coffee for Daphne before she goes to work. I wish Anita would stay in bed until Daphne leaves for her job as a telephone operator, but Anita insists on getting up at the same time. I transfer her to the bedside commode and go brush my teeth. I get the coffee machine going and pack Daphne’s lunch, while Anita constantly interrupts me with her demands.
“I don’t want to wear this shirt. I want the green t-shirt in my clean clothes basket.”
“Get me the bra hanging up on the door knob.”
“Help hook my bra.”
I transfer her to her wheelchair and make our breakfast. I tell Alexa to play 680 The Fan, a sports talk show. While I grill my cheese sandwich and toast her waffle and make my tea, I have to open her pill bottles. She has to take a stomach pill, her mental pill, her cancer pill, her thyroid pill, a special iron supplement, a calcium chew, and a vitamin.
“I dropped a pill on the floor,” she says.
Some of these pills are expensive. I turn on the dining room light, get on my hands and knees, and look for it.
Daphne leaves for work, and I throw a handful of cat food on the porch, so the cats won’t get in her way. I check the temperature and write it down in my log–November 6th 42 degrees F.
8 am
I’m in front of my big screen computer, checking my blog statistics, going over emails, and scrolling Twitter where I get into arguments with MAGA fools, anti-Semites, and other assorted idiots. My Twitter feed is interspersed with e-whores shaking their boobs and butts. I see a particularly attractive one and click on full screen…
“MARKY! Help the toilet seat is loose,” Anita yells.
I hurry to the bathroom and fix the seat, while she stands and holds the grab bar. I make sure it is secure before she sits down again.
9:30 am
On Mondays we usually go to the Family Y and Food Lion. I feed the cats on the back steps, so we can leave through the front door. I transfer Anita from her wheelchair into my shiny, black, Chevy Malibu and throw her wheelchair into the trunk. It is only a 15-minute drive to the Family Y. Nevertheless, she has to pee as soon as we get there, and I have to take her in the bathroom and wait for her.
I like the Stairmaster and supposedly climb to the top of the Empire State Building, according to the machine. Body builders with arms as big as most people’s legs pump iron. Some men as old as me lift weights too, but I’m retired from lifting weights. I still do supersets of push-ups and pull-ups at home. However, lifting heavy weights contributes to hypertension, and I’m sure I’ve inherited high blood pressure even though I never go to the doctor to get it taken. Both of my sisters developed it, and one of them is petite and younger than me.
Anita uses a push pedal exercycle that I help her get on and off. We’ve only been here 20 minutes, but she has to pee again before we go to Food Lion.
10:30 am
We arrive at Food Lion and I transfer Anita from the car to her wheelchair and push her inside. I push her to a drink refrigerator where she wants me to get her a soda or a $2 bottle of water. Then she follows behind me as I walk and look at the grocery list. I’ve loaded the shopping cart with produce and some meat when she hollers.
“MARKY!”
I walk back to the bakery.
“These doughnuts are buy 1 get 1 free,” she says.
“It’s not on the list,” I say, but I take them back to our cart.
I put more items from our list in the cart and continue through the store.
“MARKY!” she hollers again.
I follow her voice to the cake mix section.
“Put the doughnuts back. I want you to make this chocolate cake mix instead.”
!*X!*!,” I curse, feeling exasperated.
I walk back to the cart, get the doughnuts, and take them back to the bakery. I know I look pissed off, but I don’t care what people think of me. I continue in the store and get to the freezer section before I realize I’ve lost track of Anita. I always have this fear someone might abduct her in the store as unlikely as that seems. I go looking for her, and she’s picking out birthday cards for my nephew’s kid. I push her toward the front and ask her to pick the right kind of soap. She insists on getting the most expensive brand name products and won’t use much cheaper bar soap. She won’t ever let me buy cheap napkins or paper towels or off-brand Tylenol. By the time I reach the check-out, I’m annoyed.
12:00 pm
We arrive home. I transfer Anita from the car to her wheelchair and push her in the house. The cats follow us inside. They get excited when I unpack groceries. They know new food is everywhere. I lure them outside with cat food and spend the next 15 minutes putting the groceries in cabinets and the refrigerator.
We eat lunch while listening to a Kirby Smart press conference on Alexa. Most weekdays we listen to Countdown with Keith Olberman, but he is off on Mondays, so we listen to what the head coach of the Georgia Bulldogs has to say. I eat smoked kippers on a sandwich, and Anita has an individual mushroom-spinach pizza. I go to take a shower after lunch.
1:00 pm
Now, it is my much interrupted study time. I read and/or try to teach myself a foreign language. Currently, I’m studying Spanish. I give myself a vocabulary test.
“I need a Tylenol,” Anita says.
I get it for her. As soon as I sit down.
“Take my glass and make it half ginger ale and half green tea. Put a Dr. Pepper and 2 green tea bottles in the refrigerator. Bring me a Starry soda and take the ginger ale bottle and put it back in the refrigerator for tomorrow,” Anita orders.
I complete her confusing drink order and sit down. As soon as I find my place in the book:
“I’m sorry to keep bothering you, but I need a Salonpas for my aching shoulder.”
I finally get in 10 minutes of study time.
“Help me to the bathroom to change pants. These pants are too hot.”
3:00 pm
I help Anita from her lounge chair to her wheelchair and from there I help her stand in front of her walker. I hold her safety belt, while she walks back and forth across the living room 4 times. The Paul Finebaum Show is on the television.
“Have you decided what day we are leaving when we go pick up Robin when she gets out of prison?” Anita asks while she is walking. Her sister went to a detention center for 6 months because she sold her prescription pills to her ex-boyfriend.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“When are you going to make up your mind? She gets out at the end of the month.”
“I’ll worry about it when it’s time. Focus on your walking.”
“How much money are you going to give her?”
“!#!&$!***”
3:30 pm
It’s time for Anita’s shower. Her bathroom is handicapped adapted and includes a shower nozzle attached to a snake-like extension. I help her from the toilet to the tub bench and flip a lever on the shower head that directs the water to the nozzle. I lay towels on the floor to absorb the water that inevitably splashes through the shower curtain. I watch television while she showers, alternating between news channels. When she is finished, I carefully dry the floor and the bottoms of her feet to make sure she doesn’t slip when I forcefully grab her belt and lift her from the tub bench back to the toilet. We don’t want to get her wheelchair wet. Instead, I lift her off the toilet and walking backwards while gripping her safety belt, I help her walk to the bed in the adjacent bedroom. There, she gets dressed, and I go to the kitchen to wash dishes and prepare supper.
4:30 pm
I begin to prepare supper. Anita is in her lounge chair looking at her laptop computer. I’m breading pork chops, and the coating is on my fingers.
“MARKY! Help me to the bathroom. I want to put warmer pants on. My legs are cold.”
5:00 pm
I finish preparing everything for supper, and I anxiously await Daphne to come home from work. The sweet potatoes are in the oven, the pork chops are breaded and ready to fry, and the lettuce and cucumbers are prepped. I see Daphne’s car in the driveway and feel relief.
6:30 pm
After supper I wash the dishes and take Anita to the bedroom where she lays on her tummy for a while to help her digestion. I go lay down on the couch and watch tv. Finally, I can relax. I flip the tv channels back and forth between financial news on CNBC and Two and a Half Men reruns. I hear Anita crying in the bedroom. I sigh. I get off the couch to see what the problem is.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“The usual. My hip hurts, my back hurts, my butt hurts, my head hurts, and my leg hurts.”
“Do you want a Tylenol or a Salonpas?”
“Both.”
Listening to her complain about pain is exhausting. Her pain is caused by being so immobile, but there is not much we can do about it. She tries to exercise as much as possible. I give her a Tylenol and place a Salonpas on her hip. I lay back down on the couch and laugh at the antics of Charlie Harper and his brother.
7:30 pm
I transfer Anita from the bed to her wheelchair, roll her to the living room, and transfer from her wheelchair to her lounge chair. She wants to watch Dancing with the Stars, but I have no interest in it. I go to the bedroom and watch reruns of Frasier.
This how to transfer a disabled person. The woman in the illustration needs to squat at least 6 inches lower, or she could hurt her back. Anita weighs 240 pounds. By the end of the day, I some times get tired from transferring her all day.
9:30 pm
Time to go to bed. Anita says she’ll watch the end of Dancing with the Stars on Hulu tomorrow. I take her to the bed. Before she goes to sleep, I have to transfer her to the bedside commode. By the end of the day, all of those transfers get physically exhausting, and I am tired and ready to go to sleep. Nevertheless, I have to wait for Anita to finish peeing. It takes her 20 minutes, and I try not to get annoyed. I transfer her 1 more time (hopefully) to the bed and confront another obstacle.
“Make sure you lay the covers on me right,” Anita says.
During the cooler months she sleeps under a flannel sheet, an electric blanket, a quilt, and a comforter. And they all have to be exactly lined up or she demands adjustments. She also uses 2 head pillows, 2 back pillows, a knee pillow, and a side pillow. I push the back pillows into her back.
“Don’t do that yet. Make sure the covers are on first.”
I pull the covers over her.
“Now, push the pillows into my back.”
I push the pillows into her back. I kiss her.
“Good night, I love you, good night” we say to each other–another nightly ritual.
I get under the comforter. I relax. I begin to fall asleep.
“Mark. I hate to do this. But you need to get up and turn the electric blanket down to 2. I’m too hot.”
The doctor and the technician tortured Anita, while I sat in a corner of the room, reading Finger Lickin’ Good, an autobiography by Harland Sanders. The room was furnished with scary looking and expensive machines along with a standard examining table, and it was dark, so the technician could look at an x-ray image of my wife’s left breast as a chubby middle-aged doctor operated the machine administering the needle aimed at the suspicious mass. They called this procedure a needle biopsy. Click. Every time he sent the needle into her breast it made a clicking noise, like a loud stapler. I tried to concentrate on the book I was reading. Harland Sanders built his Kentucky Fried Chicken business through hard work. Click. He made his fortune by franchising his recipe, and the franchisees paid him a few cents for every piece of chicken sold. Click. I knew the doctor and technician were healers, but still the situation was strange. Society accepts medical torture because the goal is saving a life, but in different circumstances I would’ve wanted to punch the torturers in the head until they were dead. Click.
“You are doing good,” the technician said. She was a young attractive brunette with a good figure. Doctors and dentists always say “you are doing good” when they know they are hurting you. Click.
I tried to concentrate on the book again. Colonel Sanders sold his company to a big corporation in the U.S., then opened up another string of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Canada. He was not overtly racist, but he was opposed to Affirmative Action. People opposed to Affirmative Action fail to understand the institutional disadvantages African-Americans were and still are forced to overcome. Click. I began to wonder how many biopsies they needed. There was more than 1 suspicious mass in her breast. Click.
I recalled the letter in the mail indicating something was wrong a few weeks earlier. A week after her annual mammogram, Anita received the ominous letter. The radiologists wanted her to return for another mammogram because they found a suspicious mass on her x-ray. She cried when she read the letter and called me into the room. I dismissed the letter and said the x-ray reading was probably a mistake. They were just being overly cautious. I really wasn’t worried and reassured Anita it was nothing to fret about. But I was with her when the radiologist looked at the 2nd x-ray.
“It looks like cancer,” he said.
I looked a the x-ray too, but I am not a trained radiologist. I couldn’t really see anything.
The next step was an appointment for a needle biopsy. By looking at samples of the actual tissue, a pathologist could determine for sure whether it was cancer or not and what kind of cancer it was. So now, we were in the scary room together. Click. They were going to send us to a surgeon after the pathologist looked at the biopsies under a microscope. The surgeon would give us the official diagnosis. Anita frequently cries about the pain caused by being so immobile. She didn’t cry during the needle biopsy, but she said it did hurt. Click. This torture, at least, was finally over, but there was more to come.
A needle biopsy machine. The doctors tortured Anita with this device.
We went to the surgeon for the results of the needle biopsy. The room was bright and painted yellow. The surgeon was a young blonde woman who reminded me of a substitute marketing instructor I had in college. The substitute studded her lecture with sudden volume increases to get attention–an ineffective imitation of the regular professor.
“It is cancer,” the surgeon said, confirming our fears. Anita cried. The surgeon offered to step outside until Anita collected herself. This annoyed me because I hate waiting in doctors’ offices, and this would make the appointment even longer. It also irked me that people think they have to stop everything just because someone is emotionally upset.
“Don’t leave. Give us our options,” I said.
“You can have a radical mastectomy and remove the entire breast or a lumpectomy and just remove the tumor. After the cancerous tissue is removed you return every day for 2 weeks for radiation treatment.”
“I want a lumpectomy,” Anita said.
“We’ll get you scheduled,” the surgeon said.
“My mom’s aunt had breast cancer. She refused surgery and lived for 20 years,” I said, not entirely convinced any kind of surgery was necessary. The surgeon dismissed the insinuation.
“That’s unusual. Surgery is the only option. We caught it in time before the cancer spread,” she said.
We scheduled the surgery and 2 dozen radiation treatments. Anita also had an MRI on her whole body to make sure the cancer had not spread to any organs. They put her in a claustrophobic tube to take images of her entire body. Thankfully, they confirmed it had not spread.
The surgeon called us back on the telephone. The boss doctors and hospital administrators overruled Anita’s decision to have a lumpectomy. They decided without explanation that Anita should have a radical mastectomy in conjunction with a plastic surgeon who would then reconstruct her breast, if she chose to have reconstructive surgery. I liked the decision because I didn’t want to take Anita for radiation treatments 14 days in a row. I was dreaming of her getting a Dolly Parton size breast as well, but she wanted a breast in symmetry with the rest of her body. Nevertheless, I was hoping the plastic surgeon might make a mistake and give her a really big tit.
The week of the surgery was a bad one for both of us. My favorite cat disappeared forever on Monday, Anita had the mastectomy on Wednesday, and my mom died on Friday. When I received the news of my mother’s death, all I could think about was the time she discovered my hidden pot stash and flushed it down the toilet 36 years earlier. I know that is a strange thing to think about during a period when a normal person should be grieving. People approach grief in different ways. For 2 years my mother had suffered from rapidly worsening dementia, but I thought she would linger in her Florida nursing home for many years. Her sudden death was slightly unexpected. However, I was distracted dealing with the aftermath of Anita’s mastectomy. I didn’t have time to dwell on it.
Of course, the surgery was an ordeal. It was nothing new for me. I slept in a chair by Anita’s hospital bed on numerous occasions including childbirth, following the removal of her gall bladder, and following the removal of her thyroid. I steeled myself to endure the ordeal, thinking we would get through it, and there would be better days when it was over. I waited for hours in the hospital waiting room along with Daphne and Anita’s mother and sister. The surgeon finally entered the waiting room and told us everything went well, but she did not look happy, maybe because she just mutilated my wife. A mastectomy might be medically necessary, but it is still mutilation. Then, after another hour or so, the plastic surgeon entered the waiting room and told us he successfully inserted the plastic bag under the skin where the implant was to be placed. He emphasized that she was not to use the pectoral muscles on the side of where her breast was removed. The plastic surgeon was a tall, skinny, ancient man. He explained how he was going to reconstruct her breast.
When the serous fluid stopped draining into tubes leading from her armpit into plastic cups, we would come to his office, and he would remove the tubes and the attached cups. Then, on repeated visits he would inject a saline solution into the inserted plastic bag to stretch the skin. When we determined the breast was the right size, he would replace it with a permanent silicone implant during day surgery.
I waited longer while Anita was in recovery. We had to wait for a room, and despite not having much of an appetite, I choked down a sandwich from Subway. The hospital cafeteria was closed for supper, and Subway was the only option. I think Subways are located in hospitals because people can be treated promptly for the food poisoning they get from eating their sandwiches. I waited some more in the waiting room. All the other people waiting for their loved ones who had surgery that day had left. I watched Discovery ID. I read a book. I read a newspaper. I napped on a waiting room couch. I paced the hospital hallways. Finally, they called me and said Anita was in a room on the 6th floor. I anxiously traveled up the elevator, remembering my experience with the elevator from the Twilight Zone (see Chapter 9).
I was not encouraged when I reached Anita’s floor. A sign opposite the nurses’ station bragged about how the 6th floor only had 3 falls in the past week. Even when not recovering from surgery, Anita is at high risk of falling. I found Anita whining in the recovery room bed and complaining she was thirsty. At least she was alive and conscious. I arrived just in time to help the hospital orderly transfer her to the bed in her room. I asked the orderly if the brakes on the other bed were on. (Both beds had wheels.) The short muscular African American gave me a dirty look, as if I insulted his intelligence. I didn’t care. Safety is more important than somebody’s feelings.
It’s a good thing I stayed by Anita’s side. None of the nurses understood her disability. When one of them tried to transfer her to a chair to eat breakfast, she thought she just needed to hold her hand. Anita would have fallen for sure, if I had not been present. To transfer Anita, it requires both hands gripping her safety belt while squatting and using legs so as not to suffer a back injury. She does not have the balance to go from bed to chair without falling. I showed the nurse how to transfer her, but she didn’t need to learn because I simply took over all transfers.
The hospital stay was short because the insurance company was concerned about saving money, but I was glad. Who the hell wants to live in a hospital? While we waited for discharge papers I kept hearing the lyrics of an Animals song. “We gotta get out of this place,” in my head.
“We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. We gotta get out of this place. Girl there’s a better life for me and you.”
Re-establishing our sex life was very important to us after such a deforming surgery. I don’t understand married couples who claim they have a platonic relationship. What are they together for? The arguments?
For the first week of recovery at home, Anita was supposed to sleep sitting upright in her lounge chair, and I slept on the couch next to her. Two tubes draining red serous fluid into plastic cups came out of her armpit. Every 12 hours I measured how much serous fluid was in the cups, then dumped the contents. When the serous fluid draining into the cups decreased to a certain level, it would be time to have the plastic surgeon pull out the tubes. We weren’t going to wait that long to resume our sex life.
For decades Anita and I made love on a regular basis–twice a week, usually on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday mornings. This was my idea. I believe some couples get in the habit of telling their partner they’re not in the mood and eventually their sex life ends. My theory was to set up a certain schedule, so both can make sure they are ready to get in the mood.
I joked with Anita before her surgery that we were going to have bride of Frankenstein sex after her mastectomy. She would be scarred, and after reconstructive surgery she would have 1 artificial breast. The situation reminded me of the bride of Frankenstein movie about an artificial woman made up of body parts. I didn’t care if she had a scar instead of a breast. It didn’t make any difference to me. I wanted to get laid, just like when we first met. It also didn’t matter that she had just 1 breast. If I want to see a woman with 2 big breasts, I can turn on the computer. There are literally millions of exhibitionists who show off their titties on the internet for free.
One morning, we awoke and agreed it was time to re-establish our sex life. I wheeled her to the bedroom, and we eagerly made love. She had a bandage over her scar, and the tubes draining the serous fluid were still attached, but it didn’t stop our passion. After the bandages were eventually removed, Anita started wearing t-shirts during lovemaking, but soon she stopped wearing these too, and now we just enjoy bride of Frankenstein sex.
We jokingly refer to post-mastectomy lovemaking as bride of Frankenstein sex.
My dream of getting to play with a Dolly Parton size breast fell apart. The incompetent plastic surgeon missed the self-sealing valve and punctured the bag when he was injecting the saline solution. He didn’t notice until weeks later when the bag seemed to be shrinking instead of expanding. We decided to give up on breast reconstruction and have him remove the deflated bag. It was my idea, but it wasn’t hard to convince Anita the hassle wasn’t worth it. The process of getting Anita ready for breast reconstruction surgery was tiring. We had to drive to the other side of town at least once a week and stay in the waiting room for an hour before he made his weekly injection. We didn’t want to start the whole process over. We had been going once a week for 5 months. Neither one of us wanted another 5 months of driving across town and waiting in the doctor’s office. We decided 1 day surgery to remove the deflated bag would be the end of Anita’s torture. We were done with the ordeal.
Two women answered my personal ad, and both lived far into the country. I despise driving and my job in the circulation department demanded constant driving, so I was reluctant to add more mileage to the car I was already forced to spend so much time in. But Jeanie, the office dispatcher who wrote the personal ad for me, encouraged me to give them a chance.
“What if she’s your soul mate?” she asked. “All that driving would be worth it.”
I dated Anita first. We met at Vallarte’s, a Mexican restaurant on Wrightsboro Road. She reminded me of a couple young ladies I had spent considerable time with earlier in my life. Like them, she was a freckle faced brunette and bottom heavy. 10 years earlier, I had a puppy love crush on a co-worker at K-Mart, but she moved away just as I was getting to know her. The other was someone who came over to our apartment when I lived in Athens, Georgia and got wasted with us all the time.
After we ate at Vallarte’s, Anita and I went to see a terrible movie–The Lawnmower Man. It was supposedly based on a Stephen King short story, but the movie had nothing in common with that tale and was so bad Mr. King sued to get his name removed from the project.
Anita and I talked on the phone with a comfortable ease, and I went out with the other lady just once. My mother told me to choose the one who I liked talking to the most and that was Anita. We spoke on the phone every day, and I drove to Waynesboro on Sundays after my shift. By the 8th date we were sleeping together, and I stayed at her little white house rental from Sunday afternoon to very early Wednesday when I left for work. (I was off on Mondays and Tuesdays.) We called her little white house the “Love Shack,” a B-52s dance song she used for the cheerleaders she coached.
Anita and I have a funny disagreement over the method we executed for our first coitus. I’m not going to reveal the X-rated details, but we have a quite different recollection of the act. One would think the first time would be something a person could never forget. I can’t believe she doesn’t remember how it was done.
Anita became the most important driving force of my life. She was more important than my lousy job. She was even more important than marijuana, and I stopped buying it. I didn’t have time for it and didn’t want to risk a DUI that would make it difficult for me to see her. I loved her more than anything else in the world.
I started to gain weight. We laid in bed all Sunday afternoon, and she made homemade ice cream. Formerly, I weighed 160 pounds (I like to say I am 5’9″ but the doctor says I am 5’7″). Lovemaking does not burn as many calories as playing tennis and soon, I weighed 170. I tried extra jogging, but the weight wouldn’t be shed. When Anita became pregnant I ballooned up to 210 pounds–my heaviest weight ever. However, after Daphne was born I rapidly lost weight and never became fat again.
I asked Anita to marry me about a year after I met her. I logically decided since we made it together for 1 year, we could stay together for many years.
“…no, I will,” she responded. She meant to say, “you know I will,” but the word, you, was inaudible, so the first word I heard was no.
She grabbed the telephone and excitedly told everyone, and I was glad I made her so happy.
We moved in together during October of 1993. I bought a house for us that was halfway between our jobs. The circulation office was in downtown Augusta, and Anita worked in Waynesboro. The approximate halfway point was Piney Grove Road in south Richmond County. The house is a 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom single story with a brick exterior, and it rests on a concrete slab. I had a big satellite dish installed right away, so I could watch the sci-fi channel. And I began planting fruit trees and preparing a vegetable garden, fulfilling a fantasy I’d long dreamed about. I suspect the neighborhood was originally a long leaf pine savannah, hence the name of the road–Piney Grove. Today, loblolly pine and sand laurel oak are the co-dominant trees. The soil is sandy because it was a beach 33 million years ago, and sand gets tracked into the house and on car floorboards all the time. The front hall is dark, and I often forget to sweep up the sand until occasions when the door stays open for a while, and I can see the accumulated sand in the light. The neighborhood is racially mixed and working class. We still live in this house today.
When Anita and I were dating and were newlyweds we never had fights. I think she may have been angry at me when I smoked the last of my pot in front of her house in Waynesboro once, but she didn’t say anything. (Anita is more of a goody two shoes than I am.) There was some tension when we first moved into our house on Piney Grove Road. She was uptight about keeping the house clean, while all I wanted to do was watch my new satellite fed television. Nevertheless, she saw how important watching television was for me. Before she went to work she would set the VCR to record Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Dark Shadows, and I would watch these shows when I came home for lunch in the middle of the day. I made supper for us, unless I had solicitation or collections in the evening.
Our wedding was on a windy, sunny day in February of 1994. It was my first and last wedding. If I outlive Anita, I might agree to a friends with benefits relationship, but I am never getting married again. The wedding was pleasant and the honeymoon enjoyable. We stayed at my parents’ condo on Harbor Island, South Carolina.
Anita cutting the cake at our wedding. We didn’t shove mouthfuls of cake in each other’s mouths, like some undignified idiots do at their weddings.
Anita discovered she was pregnant during November of 1994. She had stopped taking the pill shortly before we got married. We went to pregnancy classes once a week, and we were one of the oldest couples there. The class hosted more than 1 teenaged pregnant young lady. The more the fetus grew, the more uncomfortable Anita felt. Sometimes, she could just not find a comfortable position, and she complained about feeling itchy. In her final weeks she began to get swollen, but the doctor didn’t say anything when she went for her last appointment. We sure missed warning signs that something was wrong.
The first 3 years of our relationship were a happy time for us. I was devoted to my sweetheart, and the events that occurred after that never broke my devotion.
Most little kids said they wanted to be a fireman or a cowboy when they grew up back in the 1960s, but I wanted to be a mad scientist. I suppose I saw mad scientists in cartoons and cheesy sci-fi television shows and decided it looked like they were having the most fun. I saw how hard my father worked and knew I didn’t want to work those long hours. He worked 12-hour days during the week and also had to go to the hospital on weekend mornings to check on his patients. I didn’t think about it as much as I should have, but regular working-class jobs can be just as hard but a lot less lucrative than being a physician. I never had a job with a decent salary. When I attended college, I worked typical minimum wage level jobs at Dairy Queen, K-Mart, and Piggly Wiggly. When I decided I was done with college, I began looking for full time work. I surveyed lawns and tele marketed for Orkin lawn care 1 spring and summer, but it was a seasonal job. My friend, Chris M., worked for the AugustaChronicle circulation department, and I chose to work there over job offers as a bus driver for handicapped adults (this job required a BA in psychology which I did have) and a manager trainee at Arby’s. I think the main attraction of the job was the weed I could score from Chris M. I ended up working for 7 years at the Augusta Chronicle, until I chose to stay home full time to take care of Anita and Daphne.
My position with the Augusta Chronicle sounded prestigious–district manager. But really, I was just a gopher between higher level management and newspaper carriers who were independent contractors. Newspaper carriers didn’t make any money…they were simply turning their car depreciation into cash flow. I was in charge of 12 paper routes, and when I didn’t have carriers for all the routes, I had to deliver the routes myself. This meant getting up at 2 am because I had to be done by 5 am to make sure my carriers picked their papers up on time. Sleep deprivation is demoralizing and dangerous. My position became open when the man who held the job before me fell asleep at the wheel and was seriously hurt in a car accident. Every manager admitted to accidentally dozing behind the wheel when they were trying to drive in the wee hours of the morning. After the routes were finished, I delivered papers to people in my district who complained they did not receive their paper–more sleep deprived driving. Customers called the office, and the office dispatched the complaints to me over a 2-way radio. The reasons customers didn’t get their paper varied. The carrier may have mistakenly forgotten them, or the paper could have been stolen by a neighbor, carried away by a dog, or drenched into a sodden mess by a sudden rainstorm. Some customers called for a new paper, if it had a slight tear in the corner. This always infuriated me.
An infamous supervisor often compounded the demoralizing quality of the job. J.R. Y. (he passed away in 2015) had the physical build and demeanor of the stereotypical overbearing boss. He was short and pudgy, close shaven and in his 40s. After I worked from 2 am-10 am delivering papers and handling complaints, I’d find myself stuck in his office, my brief case in my lap, waiting for him to turn his attention to me, while he was talking on the phone or pushing papers around his desk. It was a kind of purgatory because I usually had a lot of other work to finish before I could go home, eat lunch, and take a nap. That was a desperately needed break before I had to return to work in the evening for solicitation or collections. Finally, I’d give him my daily report. Then he would give me instructions. Unfortunately, he babbled in a hick accent, and half the time I could not understand what he said. He’d say, “babble, babble, babble, babble, babble.” I’d ask him to repeat his instructions, and he would get annoyed. “I just said babble, babble, babble, babble, babble.” I’d give up. It never mattered anyway because policies often changed from day to day, and nobody could remember anything from the day before due to constant sleep deprivation.
The badge I wore when I worked for the Augusta Chronicle Circulation Department. I was a Relief Manager before I was promoted to District Manager. Relief managers covered for District Managers on their days off and delivered routes when there was a shortage of carriers.
For the first 3 years I worked at the Augusta Chronicle I was assigned to the downtown district. A big, dumb, epileptic carrier delivered papers in the business route. To suppress his epilepsy, he took heavy tranquilizers and was often difficult to arouse at 5 am. I helped him with his route when he was late and always got stuck in a building with the elevator from the Twilight Zone. The elevator never went to the right floor. (Other managers reported getting trapped in the elevator when the door wouldn’t open.) Ever since, I become nervous on elevators and would avoid them completely, if not for Anita’s wheelchair bound condition. She has to use elevators, and I feel like I have to go with her.
Another carrier refused to deliver papers until daylight in a certain apartment complex located on East Boundary, and when she had to leave for her day job, I had to deliver the papers for her in the apartment portion of her route. We called the complex “Dodge City” because of the audible gunfire. Gangs with Uzi submachine guns stood at the entrances of some buildings. Pregnant prostitutes offered sex. Strange men offered crack cocaine. Passed out drug addicts slept in stairwells. Once, I saw a man lying on the ground with a crack pipe in 1 hand and a heroin needle in the other. A white hooker with skinned knees sat next to him. They asked me to give them $5. This made me feel sad.
I ran into all kinds of people in the downtown district including catatonic schizophrenics, winos, and transvestites. I knew 1 of the transvestites from the weightroom at Augusta College. He was a short muscular black man who bench-pressed 300 pounds by day and dressed as a woman and solicited sex on Lucky Street by night. He had another scheme too. He often came to the drop where newspaper carriers waited for their bundles of papers, and he would give them a cock and bull story about how he needed $5 because he ran out of gas. It was a panhandling scam, and whenever I saw him, I ran him off.
Not many people in the downtown district mailed their payment in back then, and we had to go door-to-door every month to collect. We had to get in contact with the customers the day they received their government check, or they would soon be broke and unable to pay. We were like walking cash registers in the highest crime neighborhoods of the city. Fortunately, I was never robbed, but I know of 1 manager who was robbed at gunpoint twice. One of my carriers, an old, retired policeman, had his car stolen when he was delivering his papers in the projects. He left his keys in the car for less than a minute, while he put papers on peoples’ porches. Another manager found his car, staked out the house, and simply took the keys out of the thief’s’ hands when he exited his house. This carrier got into a shootout on another occasion, and a bullet went through his liver. He survived but gave up his route.
We didn’t have to just beware of robbers. There were also psychos. We didn’t have to put papers on the porch, unless the customer was handicapped. Otherwise, routes would never get finished on time. Some macho nut kept insisting his paper be put on the porch, and finally 1 day he stuck a gun in a manager’s face and forced him to put the paper on the porch. I’m glad it wasn’t me.
I did face hostility once in a while. I was delivering papers on an afternoon route when the Augusta Herald still existed. There was an apartment complex on the route. Outside of 1 building in front of the door stood 3 young black men. They placed a grocery bag with a 6-pack in it in front of the doorway, and I had to step over it to get inside. One sported the build of an NFL linebacker, another was a 200 pounder, and the third was of small wiry build. I knew they were trouble, but I was determined to deliver the papers. I stepped over the bag and dropped 6 papers off at 6 doors. It was a 3-story building with a winding staircase, and on the way down, my sense of direction got twisted around, and I started to head out the back door. I could have avoided conflict and returned to my car from the back of the building, but I didn’t want to show any sign of being intimidated. I turned around and went through the front, stepping over the grocery bag full of beer cans again.
“Hey, you faggot. What are you doing? Dirt from your shoe could have fallen in my beer,” said the smallest punk.
Of course, the beer cans were unopened and in a bag. I got back in my car.
“I ought to kick your ass, you faggot. Look at him. He looks like some kind of fag,” said the small punk.
“Talk is cheap. I’m outnumbered here. You wouldn’t say that, if you were by yourself,” I said.
The linebacker came up to my window. His eyes were red as blood.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“He wouldn’t say that by himself.”
I started the car and left. I looked in the rearview mirror, and the linebacker whipped out a switchblade. The little punk threw a beer can that slammed into my rear side window. The next day, I saw the little punk wearing dark sunglasses, acting like he was in disguise, walking on the other side of the parking lot. I was right. He wasn’t such a big mouth without his friends. A couple weeks later, the window suddenly crumbled into hundreds of pieces–a delayed reaction. The little punk cost me $100.
The above experience was an exception. The downtown district was overwhelmingly African American, and most of the people who lived there were pleasant. There was 1 paper route that was perpetually unfilled, and I was always delivering the route and collecting payments on it. The people who lived there liked me so much, they didn’t want to pay the African American manager who took over for me when I was assigned to another district. Many asked, “where is that nerdy white dude?”
By far the nastiest-tempered people in Augusta were the white people that lived in the Harrisburg neighborhood. This part of town was populated by retirees of the textile plants that had long since been closed down, leaving large empty factories on the Savannah River. The houses were about 100 years old, and the people who lived in them were about as old, but age never mellowed their unfriendly, humorless personalities. I imagine them as the kind of people who watched lynchings for entertainment back in the 1920s. Collecting from them was like punishment. Some cussed and acted like I was taking their last dollars. Others gave me the run around. “My wife has the checkbook and she’s not home.” I’d come back later. “My husband has the checkbook and he’s not home.” Others looked out the window, saw me, and refused to answer the door.
There was a racially mixed housing project in Harrisburg. To deliver the papers, a carrier had to leave their vehicle for quite some time. On the coldest morning of the year the temperature dropped to 10 degrees F, and my carrier decided it was a good day to quit. Temperatures this low in Augusta are very rare, and people who live here are just not used to it. For me it was like walking to school in Ohio again, though then I didn’t have a mustache that froze to my face.
There was a notorious brothel in Augusta known as the Shirley Hotel, but the authorities shut it down in 1980 as soon as I was old enough to be a customer. I’m pretty sure I would have been a customer because I was a horny young man but socially retarded. The city government’s politically motivated decision did not end prostitution in Augusta. Instead, it put more women on the street where they were less safe and in a position to harass everyone in sight. I saw many prostitutes every day when I worked in the downtown district, but I never seriously considered using one. I was afraid of getting robbed or contracting an STD. Some street walkers worked daily. There was a beautiful blonde with a stunning figure. A man who looked just like Mike Tyson always stood 10 yards behind her. Another prostitute looked to be of Italian descent, and she wore her make-up 3 inches thick. A 4-foot tall, bow-legged black woman with a nice voluptuous figure always called out my name when I drove by her corner. Apparently, a fellow manager must have told her my name as a joke. She reminded me of the movie, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, about a woman with a deformity who sought acceptance through promiscuity.
The police frequently harassed me because I was a white man driving in a black neighborhood in the middle of the night. They assumed I was looking for drugs or illicit sex. One time, I was delivering papers in the projects, and I parked my car in a cul-de-sac and dropped the paper off at a front door. I got back in my car and found myself suddenly trapped in the cul-de-sac by a police car that seemingly came out of nowhere.
One of the police officers spoke on a bullhorn. “Turn your engine off.”
Both of the police officers approached my car. They looked like they had spent the night drinking on duty.
“What are you doing at that whore’s house?” one of them asked.
“I’m delivering papers,” I said.
“Don’t give us that bullshit. You were seeing that whore.”
“I didn’t know a prostitute lived there. I was delivering papers.”
“Then why were you stopped?”
I didn’t say anything. The question was so stupid, I couldn’t even think of an answer. I was stopped to drop off the paper. Then, I couldn’t leave because they blocked my car and told me to stop.
One of them searched my car with a flashlight and saw the rest of the newspapers.
“It is the paper boy,” he said.
“Don’t deliver papers here,” the other said. And they left and let me go.
I didn’t follow their instructions. I didn’t know prostitutes weren’t allowed to get newspapers.
I often drove by 1 prostitute who sometimes wore a green body stocking, but I think she was wearing jeans and a red shirt when she climbed inside my car uninvited. One busy Sunday morning, I carelessly left my car door unlocked because I thought nothing could happen in less than the minute it took for me to hand a paper to a customer who called the office, complaining their paper was missing. The customer lived in an apartment building that faced a main street, and as I handed her the paper, I realized the prostitute had entered the passenger side door of my car. I got behind the wheel of my car.
“I know you’ve been riding up and down the street looking at me. I know you want me,” she said.
I didn’t want to insult her, but I rode up and down the street as part of my job, bringing papers to customers. People like her were probably the ones stealing them. I was not particularly attracted to her. I prefer voluptuous to chubby. She was lean and had a ring in her nose and was not my type. But she would have been ok, if I was actually looking for sex and not busy working. I made a 2nd mistake and didn’t tell her to get out of the car right away. The dispatchers gave me several more complaints over the radio, including 6 on a route I had delivered earlier that morning. People stole the shit out of Sunday papers in poor neighborhoods. I knew for sure I didn’t miss anybody. Most of the yards were so small, I could hit the porch from my car, and I remembered the papers landing on the porch. If I made it to that neighborhood on time, maybe I could catch a paper thief. I headed over there.
“Kiss me,” she said when we stopped at a red light.
The dispatchers announced more complaints for me to deliver. I realized I didn’t have time to mess with her. I stopped the car by a vacant lot.
“You need to leave,” I said.
“I will not unless you make out with me or pay me $5,” she demanded.
I knew if I fooled around with her it would cost a lot more than $5.
“Get out of my car.”
“No. Put out or give me $5.”
I pushed her toward the passenger side door with 1 arm. She planted her feet on the floorboard and pushed back. Nevertheless, I was able to push her as far as my arm would press. I smelled a vaginal odor.
“I’m going to get my razor and cut your face. I’m going to tear your radio out,” she threatened, referring to the 2-way radio I used to communicate with the circulation office.
She scratched my face, placing her finger on my mouth. I bit down hard, drawing blood. I cocked my left shoulder back, as if I was going to start throwing left hooks at her boobies.
“Ok, I’ll leave,” she said.
She wrapped a bandanna around her bleeding finger, paused in a dignified manner, and exited my car.
I know this seems weird, but after this incident I never felt nauseated on a date ever again. I can’t explain it, but maybe I felt no date could be as unpleasant as this experience. The nauseous anxiety that discouraged me from going on dates disappeared.
I knew better than some managers. I never complained about the ditzy dispatchers who worked in the circulation office. The dispatchers and secretaries occasionally made mistakes that managers had to fix. The managers who complained found themselves sabotaged with twice as many “mistakes” the next day. I had a more important reason for not complaining. I was in my late twenties and desperate for love. I pestered them continuously to start dating me until 1 of them finally had enough and wrote a personal ad to help me find a date. That is how I met Anita.
GeorgiaBeforePeople 