Well, my 11 or so years of wedded bliss being over, I moved in with my college friend John who lived in Alma, about 50 miles South. I at least got to see my kids for a month, after which I was going to go with John to Madison (WI). John had done his under-grad work at UW and although I would have preferred to stay in Michigan, there was just not very much work there. Being a part-time prof at a community college just doesn't pay that well. So, after a month we were off to Madison.
I found a job in under a week. A startup Italian restaurant was looking for a chef and I got hired on the spot. It was a dream job for a chef, they had the best of everything. The owners spared no expense when it came to ingredients and it was a wonderful place to work. You would think I had learned my lesson about younger women, but I started dating Caroline about a month after I started. She was 23, I was 55. Caroline was a six-foot blonde goddess and I couldn't bring myself to say no when she invited me to her house after work one Sunday night "to get high." I was still heartbroken over Heidi, but you know how that shit goes- the best cure for a hangover is another shot of booze. Around Thanksgiving it started snowing. It didn't quit until a couple of days before Christmas. I liked my job a lot but snow, not so much. I called my boss and told him I wouldn't be coming in. He asked for today? I said no, not at all. I had saved about $500 and had bought an old Ford Escort right after I started work. I packed up my stuff and headed to Ft. Smith.
Ft. Smith always held something for me. Ever since I was there before, I wanted to go back... it was like I was supposed to be there. There was something about the people there too- something spiritual. I had tried to get Heidi to move there when we were married, but she wouldn't go. I went to the AA club and they were having their Christmas party, an open house that lasted 4 days. There was an ice storm, the worst in history. We were iced in. My car was stuck to the ground for a week. I had met a guy there who said I should move in with him and his son. I went to the best Italian restaurant in town and asked for a job. I had press clippings about the grand opening of the place in Wisconsin and they hired me. The owners said it would take a bit to work me in, they were restructuring. After a month, I was running out of money. A friend from the program owned several businesses and I asked him for a job. So, I went to work managing cemeteries- my friends started calling me "Dr. Death"... by the time it was all said and done, I was managing all of his commercial real estate too.
I had met a woman in the program named Liza. She was 40 and her kids were grown and so we hooked up. She wanted me to move in with her so I gave the guy I was living with my car so he could get around. Liza had one so I didn't really need it. After a month Liza wrecked her car. The doctors gave her pain pills and some other stuff like valium or something like that. She got strung out on the stuff and it was getting scary, I would come home from work and she would have passed out and the couch would be on fire. The apartment complex we lived in had a bunch of middle-aged women that all lived on pills. They used to swap back and forth, that way nobody ever ran out. I liked her, but I was afraid to go to sleep in case she would light the bed on fire. I had bought another car by this time and it was time for me to go.
While I was with Liza, my brother in law called me. He said Heidi wanted me to contact her. I was trying to keep in touch with my kids and stuff, so this was really good news. He told me that my father in law was arrested for trying to rape my 12 year old niece. It turned out he was a molester. Some things started to come together in my head about that before... While I was in college, I came home from class one day and something was wrong with Heidi- she wouldn't say what. He was there and took off just after I got home. Apparently he had been raping Heidi's sister while she was growing up. It was time to have a talk with Heidi. I called her up and she said it was just her sister, that he had never touched her when she was young. Didn't make sense to me that he would go after one but not the other. I asked her about the day I had come home from school and he was there. She said he and touched her breast but nothing else. I asked why she didn't tell me. She said she was afraid I would kill him. She was right!
Heidi got remarried and suddenly all contact with my kids stopped. I learned later that she had told them that I had just walked out on them. It was all my fault. It was 8 years before I would hear from any of my kids again. My youngest son still won't speak to me. Apparently Heidi had gotten a divorce, nobody ever told me. I didn't know anything until I got a notice for child support. When we broke up, Heidi told me she didn't want anything from me. I told her, if she or the kids needed anything to let me know, that I wanted to help out. So every week, I had to mail in a payment. That was fine except that I always believe that if a man wants to be somebody's father, he should support them- but he should also have contact. But, what do I know?
I had gotten an apartment not too far from work in a building owned by my boss's brother and his daughter. The rent was reasonable and my friend from the monument shop, Junior lived downstairs. My boss owned the monument shop as well and I helped out there sometimes. He and his brother owned quite a lot of commercial property too, but neither of them know shit about business. At one time, their dad owned about half of Ft. Smith, from what I understand. Working at the cemetery was a pretty challenging job, one that I really had no experience with. But I caught on to it fairly quickly. Business to me is really pretty simple... I take a two way approach- find out what the other guy is doing and do it better; and find out what he isn't doing and do it first.
I had met a woman named Diane and we started going out together. Diane had lost her mom and dad within a week of each other. I used to go by the store where she worked and talk to her about it. I was getting pretty good at counseling people that had lost someone. The worst part of the job was when babies died...I hated that. By this point in my life I had given up on happily ever after- getting along was good enough.
Diane had a house so I moved in with her. I really liked her, she was easy to get along with. I still do like her, she's one of my best friends now. Her kids, she has three girls, all look to me like a dad and her grand kids all call me Papa. Diane had this inferiority complex. She always used to say things like, "You're so smart. You went to college." Stuff like that. I told her it doesn't matter, all work is necessary. If everyone was a doctor, who would fix the cars? I told her that people that are successful are the ones that find out what they're good at and capitalize on it. I told her she was great at cleaning house. She was, nobody kept a house better than Diane. I told her I would pay to put an ad in the paper and she could clean houses. Now she's licensed and bonded, has several people working for her and is fairly successful.
In 2009, I got some bad news. I was having problems with dizzy spells and balance. The doctors said I had a brain tumor, a glioblastoma. They said to get my affairs in order, we were talking weeks, not months... I was going to die. See what I mean about every time things start going good the rug gets snatched out from under me? Well, I'm not an easy guy to kill... My friend John in Wisconsin had moved from Madison to a place in the Southwest part of the state. He said it was one of the only places on Earth that the magnetic field was reversed and the Indians called it a place of healing. He suggested I come up there, they had a farm and I could live there for free. With great reluctance, I left Diane and went to Wisconsin. This was the beginning of December. By Feb. 2010 the tumor was one third gone. By July, it was gone completely. I went to Michigan hoping to get together with my kids but that wasn't happening. I stayed a couple of months with a professor friend in Mt. Pleasant and hopped a bus back to Ft Smith.