Bruce Oliver Scott Paullin —- The Early Years This is the part of the journey of exploration and personal writing that I don’t feel too comfortable about, which is the foundational information about my childhood. Putting to words the perceptions and experiences around being a youth, from the current perspective of a nearly 63 year old man, is difficult. My intention is not to resort to “revisionist history” when it comes to presenting the memories and experiences of my childhood. And, I will only resort to editorials where I perceive that it might enhance or develop the story in a way that could not be done so otherwise. I will start with the most basic of verbal descriptions of myself, which is my name. What is in a name, anyway? I was given a name that had links to family members through both my mother’s and my father’s lineage, thus the two middle names, Oliver and Scott.. The English language name Bruce arrived in Scotland with the Normans, from the place-name Brix, Manche in Normandy, France, meaning “the willowlands”, or “brushwood thicket”. The name Bruce came to mean “from out of the brushwood thicket”, to some. Initially promulgated via the descendants of king Robert the Bruce (1274−1329), it has been a Scottish surname since medieval times. The name Oliver comes from an English origin. In English the meaning of the name Oliver is: the olive tree. The biblical olive tree symbolizes fruitfulness and beauty and dignity. ‘Extending an olive branch’ signifies an offer of peace. The name Scott is from an English and Scottish surname which referred to a person from Scotland or a person who spoke Scottish Gaelic. It also refers to a geographic description designating one from Scotland; The earlier race of 2nd century invaders from Ireland called Scoti; Blue Men B One who colors the body blue with tattoos; Another meaning is “one not from here.”. Paullin in Latin has the meaning: small, and/or also of the lineage of Paul (of the New Testament). “From out of the brushwood thicket, an offering of peace, from a man not from here, tattooed by life, with a small, or humbled status, of the lineage of the mystic, Saint Paul”.
I have read in the medical reports that I was fed formula from the earliest of ages, as Mom did not nurse me. My mother was a reader of Dr. Spock, the most successful pediatrician of the day, and she made her best, though, faltering, attempts at mastery of child rearing. My mother started back to work two weeks after my birth, because of the need of my father to pay off debts. I became a by-product of many baby-sitter relationships, as well as loving family connections. I was a fussy, crying baby, and caused much distress within our household. A story about my early childhood was shared with me from a US postal clerk, who sought me out when I started working at the USPS in 1975. He had been an acquaintance of my father since my father started working at the postal service. Apparently, when my father was much younger and working two jobs , both for the Oregonian, and for the USPS, he only had limited time for sleep. Because I was a “crying baby” that kept him awake at nights, mom and dad would bundle me up into blankets and leave me in the garage, in the car, at night, until he left at 3:00am for his first job of the day. He first delivered newspapers for the Oregonian, then he would go to his regular day job at the US Postal Service. When asked, my mother and father both confirmed that this actually happened, though they could see no harm could have been done to me through this isolation.. The intersection of family history and my birth in November of 1955 created some interesting, and, at times, amazing stories for me. My Uncle Worth died in February of 1955, nine months in advance of my own birth. His photo is included here, along with his wonderful wife, Aunt Effie. Aunt Effie also died before I had any awareness, when I was less than a year old. My grandparents , as well as my mother and her brother, my uncle Wayne,. all dearly loved their Uncle Worth and Aunt Effie.
When I was 4 years old, my grandfather showed me his wooden rocking chair. I immediately recognized it, and claimed it as my own. I “remembered fashioning every piece by my own hands, and assembling it together myself”. The actual complete process that was undertaken for making the chair formed as a continuous internal video for me. How could I have possibly have that memory as a 4-year-old? Of course my mother guffawed, and stated that it was a store-bought chair that my grandfather had owned outright since he was young. I “knew better” and to this day, the memory of the chair, and its actual presence in our home, both haunts, and comforts me. It is now known that Uncle Worth was the original owner of the chair, that he was the maker of the chair, and that he passed it down to Grandpa, who then gave it to me. To this day, I still cling to this chair, and I refuse to even consider giving it away.
I still sit down in the chair on occasion, and I feel a mysterious, beautiful peace and completion when I remain seated Looking at my history, I have found a seat in Life’s Mystery. I was born at a northwest Portland hospital in November of 1955. There was nearly two feet of snow on the ground the day of my birth. My mother had to take a taxi to the hospital, because my father was at work at the time of my birth. My father’s employment helped to characterize much of my early years and my relationship with my father. Many of my own earliest needs were trumped by Dad’s compulsion to work often and hard. He carried two jobs for many years, and the affairs of the home were arranged to guarantee that Dad could continue that endeavor. Since I was a crying baby, and my cries kept my dad awake, I was wrapped in a blanket, and stored in the car in our garage at night, until he went to work at 2:15 every morning Mom would retrieve me, and then try to make things OK with me until her own work preparation began, and then Pam and I would be passed on to a baby sitter for the day for our first five years of life. My sister preceded me into the primary family by sixteen months. I will only make a brief references to my sister Pam, and not because I am trying to be disrespectful or unloving towards her. She was with me through the formative years, and she experienced at a soul level much of the same dysfunctional energies that I did. Yet, my sister became my competitor for the attention from the parents, once my childhood sense of me “figured out” that only limited servings of family love and attention was available. Before I learned how to talk, my sister thought that I was the best. She seemed to enjoy playing with me until I learned how to talk, then her attachment to me lessened somewhat. I did not develop verbal abilities until relatively late in my childhood My sister reports that she spoke for me until I developed the capacity, or inclination, to speak. Once I started talking (close to age 4) I proved that I had the capacity for speech, and A LOT OF IT. My father wondered, at times, if I would ever shut up. One of my early memories from age four with Pam is that she would be by my side while I played with my favorite “doll” named Percy. One day I picked up the phone, and started talking to Percy. I swore that Percy talked back to me, while Pam stood next to me. In retrospect, it may well have been the operator, or purely my imagination. Throughout the years, Pam appeared to channel some of my father’s negative energy back to me, becoming the “voice for my father”, especially when she became angry or unhappy with me. Also, the poor girl had to share a bedroom with me for my first two or three years, which I am sure did not go a long way to making her too happy with me. As a child, it appears that I learned that my personal world could be an unsafe place, especially while I slept. I remember most nights lying awake at least until midnight, fearing sleep and its dreams, until I fell asleep out of exhaustion, even if I was put to bed at 8:00pm. I remember using that extra time to rehash my entire day, and everything that I said and did. I would try to see where I could have behaved better, or differently, for a greater advantage. I intuited that if I were a “better person” by day, my nightmares at night might not be so severe. Yet, my day time behavior rarely improved, for I was fairly spontaneous, and I tended towards impulsive activity. I had terrifying nightmares almost every night until I was 8 years old. I would be so afraid that I would stay in my bed and pee it quite frequently, which presented some problems over those early years (I was removed from the top bunk of a bunk bed that my sister and I shared for a while, of course, because of a couple of yellow “waterfalls”, leading to us having separate bedrooms at age 4 for me). Even after I started sleeping by myself, my mother allowed me into her bedroom at night after my typical nightly nightmare terror sessions, as long as dad had already left for work. I remember how protected from my demons I felt, as I lay in bed with her. I also know, now, that I unconsciously sought out women, MUCH MORE THAN MEN, to bond with, with the hopes that the relationship would bring a measure of safety and acknowledgement into my life, which seemed to be quite lacking in too many of my male to male connections. Yes, this was to become an unconscious “center” , yet another locus of energy, in addition to other ‘energy’ centers (such as the fear of being ignored), around which all of my future perceptions were to be influenced by.
My sister and I fought frequently through the childhood years, and more than twenty times we got into wrestling matches and knock-out, drag-out fights. Our last memorable fight gathered attention from the neighbors when we were teenagers, when Pam was fourteen, and me twelve years old at the time. There were lots of screaming, yelling, and cussing, with the occasional body slam and slap to the side of the head. No one was ever injured, other than any onlookers’ sensibilities. She and I were both considered very smart youngsters, yet we were both pretty messed up in the heads, for sure.
I have memories of waking up from sleep, and, with my sister, walking over to the garage window, and crawling up onto my rocking horse to look out of the window, to see if our parent’s car was in the garage. Of course, if the car was gone, we were both distressed by the parent’s absence, and, to this day, we both agree that this event did happen, and it happened several times.
I started 1st grade while I was still 5 years old, having taken an advanced entry exam to qualify me to start earlier. My mother arranged for this because I was so unhappy with the baby sitters that my parents had arranged to care for me. One of the worst baby-sitters was named Jo Stanley. She was a woman who lived on Old River Road, and she was an unloving presence. She also had an abusive teenage son who terrorized me, and had threatened me with sexual assault on one occasion, pulling my pants down and threatening me. I had several other decent baby sitters from age 0-5, but the Stanley’s were my living hell experience. My mother especially wanted to help me, thus advanced entry into grade school for me was arranged.. This ended up adding stress to my first grade teacher, Mrs. Tozier, who had a difficult time accepting me and my “immature” behavior. To quote her, from my first grade report card: “Bruce’s main problem is talking to others and to himself. Some of his behavior problems have disappeared, however, and he is working hard”. One of our first daily activities in grade school was to perform the “show and tell” ritual. Students would bring objects of interest to tell stories about, or would relate their experiences with new or fun activities away from school. Each student would get in front of the class, and have a few minutes to make their presentation. I would go up every day, whether I had anything new to show off or talk about, or not. I so much wanted to be the person who had something to say, and to get positive feedback about it. After a couple of weeks of just standing in front of the class shell-shocked and silent, I was told to weigh and measure my worlds better, which was not part of my tool kit at that age. The need to be recognized and heard, the fear of public speaking and the appearances of suffering and death originated at different points in my life, but became part of one big family in my mind as time went on. In the third grade, Mrs. Tozier had me again, and her final statement about me was the following: “Bruce is a careful worker and wants very much to do his work correctly. It has been interesting and rewarding to watch him develop this year. His main problems are social ones”. I spent a lot of time under the dunce’s cap in the back corner of the room in her class. Mr. Hill, the school principal and Mrs Tozier required that I take medicine for my hyperactivity to continue to be allowed in her class. My mother and my doctor conspired together, and I was prescribed sugar pills, which were placed in a methedrine labeled prescription bottle. The “prescription” was given to Mrs. Tozier, who made sure that I took the fake pills daily. I miraculously improved, though I believe that Mrs Tozier’s behavior also improved through me taking the placebo!
I had fantasies about friends, of which I had so few (or none) in the early years. One fantasy with remarkable staying power is that the only people who will be attracted to me are those that somehow I miraculously saved their life, otherwise people would be uninterested in befriending or loving me, which led into a few real life disastrous situations in early adulthood, and later on. We lived in an area devoid of children my age and sex prior to 1965, and so I grew up fairly isolated from friendship until we moved to a new neighborhood, where it was a much more mature neighborhood, with more options for childhood friendships located closer to our new home. There were many moments in the earlier reaches of childhood when I really loved my life. What I really remember well from my childhood memories are: My love for my mother, my uncle Wayne, and my maternal grandparents (who provided for me a safe, loving home to stay with them at least one weekend a month for most of my childhood), My conflicted love for my father, My love for our pets My love for exploring Nature and the great outdoors, My love for playing with and studying animals, My love for running through the forests on trails, or creating my own trails, My love for building ground forts out of fallen branches, My love for climbing trees and making tree forts, My love for exploring islands on the Willamette River near our home, and , My love for playing with friends, which were especially hard for me to find, or to make while I was young. Sometimes, I felt uncomfortable around people my age, especially the boys. I did not always enjoy playing with the boys, who could be too aggressive. In first through fourth grades, I usually hung out with the girls, and I played kick ball and other non-contact or reduced violence games with them. I would become quite attached to one or two girls, and I was already trying to figure out how to incorporate a girl into my life quite prematurely. I preferred girls to boys, becoming overly attached to girls when I was as young as 8 years old. The girls, by and large, totally lost interest in me by 5th grade, so I had to stick solely with the guys for most of my childhood from that point forward until I was fifteen years old. I usually liked my father, but i was often angry with him. Many times dad was my only friend, and I felt betrayed by him whenever I was over-enthusiastically punished for doing something wrong. I was always guilty of doing something wrong, whether I admitted it or not. If I did not admit it, I was lying, which could lead to yet another swat. As the Course in Miracles has stated, these were unrecognized calls for love, by both of us. The day after the Columbus Day storm of 1962, when tree branches and fallen trees were everywhere, including our large backyard, my dad was so controlling as to how I was supposed to pick up the branches that I got angry with him, abandoned him, and walked a mile to help Steve Roth (son of owner of Roth BMW) and his family clear the wreckage around their home. I liked Steve’s mom, anyway, as she was always so friendly to me. They were comparatively wealthy, and I remember being told by Steve’s mother that my father was not rich, like they were. This was the first time that I became conscious that families existed who were better off than we were. I stole from my father’s wallet sometimes, so that I could go to the store and buy candy. I did all sorts of things that I knew to be wrong, yet I took some delight in going against authority, and boy did I pay the price! There were too many beatings with the belt. Most of the behavior that I was accused of I actually committed, so in Dad’s mind I deserved what I got, though mercy sure would have been a nice charitable gesture, had he offered it to me, or my sister. Looking back at my childhood, I was confused as to the best way to attract attention, and it may have been a subconscious desire to be recognized that motivated me to ’go against the grain’. I was taken to Sunday school at a local church, when I was six years old. I did not like it very much, and I did not nor could not believe that Jesus Christ “died for our sins”. I knew that I was not a “sinner”, at least not the way that they were trying to explain it to me, and that the language of this church was very harsh and confusing. When they tried to tell me that my only hope was to believe all of their vague, boring stories, I balked, and in my own unique passive/aggressive fashion, I just ignored what they tried to teach me. These Sunday School experiences appeared to show me that the church was promoting a bunch of confusing stories with little relevance to my experience. I tried bible study only two more times in our new Milwaukie neighborhood, but stopped when a girl that I was interested in at the time stopped attending. Yes, women were the best reason for going to church. For me, that would prove to be true at least two more times, at times beginning when I was twenty eight years old. My father loved dogs, and would always try to have a dog available for our friendship. He instilled into me a great love and appreciation for the canine species, which I still hold onto tightly. I loved my first dog Nina, who died while running with me while riding my bicycle along a busy road while I was 7 years old, having been hit by a car (my fault for riding too far from home). I, of course, was devastated, and my dad and mom knew better than making me wrong for her death, but I knew it was my fault anyway. Our “replacement” dog was promptly run over by our next door neighbor when he got into his truck and backed over our sleeping dog. Heidi was our third dog, and she was a beautiful Samoyed. She became, without a doubt, the most wonderful creature that I had ever met up until that era of my life. I began to recognize the miraculous power that the ‘love’ for another being has on me. She became the ultimate canine companion for me, as well as for our entire family.
My father started disliking cats, even though he had grown up with a house full of cats. He even shot at the occasional stray cats that he encountered on his property to protect his “wildlife”. I remember capturing a cat during that era, and placing it into a burlap sack so that I could terrorize it. For a brief moment, I felt some strange excitement at the potential for abusing this innocent creature. After leaving it hanging on a tree limb in the burlap sack for an hour, I felt really bad, and released it. I wondered then WHY WOULD I EVER WANT TO HURT ANY CREATURE? My experience with a BB gun reaffirmed that understanding, when somehow a shot of mine hit and mortally wounded a bird. I was horrified by the creature’s suffering, and I suffered with it as I tried to put it out of its misery. My dad liked to tell the story of refusing to hunt with his father because he deplored killing, yet here he was, killing ‘innocent’ creatures, so it was certainly a mixed message for me. I was starting to question my behavior and its source, yet was too ignorant to proceed on that line of reasoning too thoroughly. In the early 1960’s my father felt uncomfortable with how the black race had integrated into the local culture. He would comment on co-workers who exhibited less conscientiousness than he did while at work, and he referred to at least one black person disparagingly. He would also offer pretty judgmental comments against the black race in general, especially when the LA Watts riots of 1964 happened. I could not share in his racism at the time, not knowing any black people, or really understanding what the basis for dad’s prejudice was. My father had a fixation on people’s appearance. He was SO JUDGEMENTAL of women who were overweight, and he was hard on my mother for any weight gains, almost from the beginning of my awareness of them as my parents. I was confused by this as well. I did not understand why Mom needed to be picked on for this. To this day, I still retain some measure of extra self-consciousness around my own weight, and general appearance. Whenever I stray too far from my “ideal” weight, I begin the process to reestablish an approximation of what is acceptable for me. I remember that Mom and Dad engaged in “Punch and Judy” behavior, where they would trade insults/barbs with each other. I never saw them hug once, and I was to learn later that neither had ever learned to hug, until I showed them what a hug was, and felt like, first in 1988. I loved listening to music with my father and sister, and he played songs by Roger Miller, Burl Ives, and Johnny Cash quite frequently, so I grew up to love those performers. My parents were members of the Oakey Doaks, a square dancing group of at least 18 married couples, many with young children. This was the group that was to be the source of many of my mother’s and father’s best friends during the period of time from 1958-1973. It was an activity that also took my parents away from our home, and we were left alone several times when they could not arrange baby sitting at the last-minute. I loved the people that they knew, and I formed many short-term friendships with the children while attending out-of-town weekend events with that group. I loved playing board games with my family, and roughhouse playing with my dad. My sister and I would crawl all over dad while he was on the floor and wrestle with him. Dad really did love his children, and he really spent a lot of his “free” time with us as children. His problem was integrating the children into his busy agenda. He would take us to several of the local creeks so that we could collect rocks for his landscaping projects. Pam and I would earn 25 cents for each filled bucket that we would bring back filled with the smooth rocks of the creek bottom. I became addicted to fictionalized history books, science fiction books and movies, and I loved the idea of becoming an astronaut, so that I could get off of this fucking rock, and explore the” real” universe. In 1969, my father and I attended the movie, 2001-A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick, and I was convinced that space traveling was in my future, after watching that groundbreaking movie. When I scored ultra high on my grade school achievement tests, and then virtually aced my PSAT’s and SAT’s in high school, my father finally started believing with me that I had a really good chance at achieving that goal. He never had quite caught fire with my potential prior to that point in life. He had been “saving” money for college for my sister and I, yet in 1969, lost it all in a stock market gamble with his friend, Roland Mill. If my sister and I were to make it to college, we were going to have to do that one on our own. I loved to climb trees, and the taller that the trees were, the more excited, and fulfilled, I would become. I fell from trees two different times in my life. The first time that I fell, it was from a tree that was leaning over a gravel road near our first home on Steamboat Way. I was eight years old at the time, and when I fell, I landed flat on my back, after a fall of about twenty feet. I got up from the ground, with all of the wind knocked out of me. I feared for my life, because I could not draw my first breath. In a state of panic, I ran for our house several hundred feet before my lungs were to refill again. Another time, in our new neighborhood on Hampshire Lane, I climbed to the top of a big fir-tree, and pretended I was on the mast of a great sailing ship. A big wind did actually come up, and I lost my footing on the narrow top branches, and fell almost eighty feet to the ground. When I awoke on the ground, I had a ten foot length of the top of the tree firmly in the grasp of my hands. I was bruised all over my body, and sore beyond anything I had ever experienced before, but I had no broken bones. The examining physician could not believe me when I told him I had tripped while running in the woods, which was the story I needed to tell to keep from getting banned from tree climbing. I would like to steer a little different direction for a while, and talk about alcohol. I remember loving beer perhaps a little too much. When I was 5 years old, my father was watching TV with me, and was drinking a beer. He left the room, and I grabbed the beer and drank the whole thing. When dad returned, he wondered where the beer went. Twenty minutes later I fell off of the couch because I had passed out, and then he knew. For the rest of my childhood, dad had to be careful with me to keep me from drinking his beer, of which he usually had 6 or 7 cases stored in the basement. By the time I was 13 years old, I probably had already stolen several cases of beer out of dad’s supply, but I never drank more than one individual beer at a time until I was fifteen years old. I never once saw Dad drunk, at least at home, so he really had it under control by the time I started paying attention. My paternal grandfather’s alcoholism seemed to have had an Impact on the way dad drank as a young man. My father enjoyed drinking, and was quite the social person, as well. But, his memory of his father’s behavior probably served as a good deterrent to abusive drinking, though my father certainly drank heavily after work during his earliest work years. One revealing memory is from a 4th grade science class, where the teacher placed a metal object on a burner, heated It up, and then placed it into water, where it was distorted by the uneven cooling. We were to describe in written form what we witnessed, and I had no clue how to describe it. I had to look at another person’s paper to see what they were seeing, because I did not have the language to communicate what I witnessed. Well, this aspect of me also can be translated into how I experienced my upbringing while still being raised. I did not have the language to communicate what was wrong, though I knew that I was witnessing something that was not right (I believe this phenomenon is directly related to the inability of many abused children to articulate their experience to others). I asked to see what a fellow student had written, so that I could write my own version of what he observed. What I did in this situation is a microcosm for the process that most of humanity engages itself with in the creation of our shared, or Collective Consciousness–if we don’t directly experience something, we rely on others’ interpretations, and, after awhile, mistake their assumptions and judgments for the “truth”. My ability to bring personal experience and insight into language would continue to prove the greatest challenge to me in high school, and in the years to follow, all the way up to the present. The childhood feelings of loneliness and abandonment, the frequent whippings with a belt by my father, coupled with whatever fundamental damage that may have been done to my soul through unintentional negligence on the part of my parents during my earliest years, may well have led to the creation (or revelation) of a dramatic story on the dream screen of my mind, which I will now recount. 1964 Dream At 9 years of age I had a most amazing, realistic dream. This was during a period of time when I slept very little, as I usually got to sleep no earlier than midnight, no matter how early I went to bed. I lay in bed and reviewed the day every night before sleep, and see where I could have done things better, or said something a little differently. My dreams had finally evolved beyond the continuous nightmare phase that I was accustomed to, prior to age 8. But, being so immature, and not too worldly in my knowledge, I did not have the necessary background to know what to think about the dream. I had discussed the dream with my older sister, who seemed to have some partial answers to its mysteries (based on her understanding of reincarnation), but so many mysteries remained to be explained. I waited and watched for further answers, and went on with the all of the important business of being a carefree boy, though at times, I fleetingly experienced “self-awareness”. Here is the dream: The priest, having received his directive from “on high”, then returned to his village along the lake in the high mountain region. He gathered all of the villagers together, and informed them that they were to take every golden figurine, every sacred symbol that they owned, and they were to throw them all into the lake, and never to think about them again. Then, he told each villager that they must each go into their own home, and face the “evil one” without any protection or care from any of their gods or their symbols of the sacred. The priest then returned to his own home, having tossed all of his own idols and treasures into the deep blue lake. He stripped himself bare of all clothing, and then began to summon the forces of the dark. He became surrounded by a fog, and as he lifted his hands, sparks started flying out of his fingertips at the unknown force of darkness that lay just beyond his visual field, still hidden beyond the boundaries of the fog. The priest refocused his energy into his arms, and hands, and the sparks grew into a steady energy field, extending from his body, his heart, and his spirit, towards his unknown adversary. He was determined to overcome this force, this dark energy, and he redoubled his efforts. The priest’s heart began to race out of control, he began to sweat profusely, and a growing sense of fear and dread began to take hold of his entire being, as he finally understood that his energy could not last forever. Yes, for him to continue this battle, he must sacrifice all of his life force. Yet, he felt that he had no choice but to keep engaging the enemy, to finally see the face of the force that had terrorized his village since time began. He desperately strained and stretched to see the object of his fear and disdain, even as the ebbing energy field flowing from his fingertips continued to cut through the fog. Suddenly, a face began materializing before his faltering gaze. As he collapsed to the floor, almost drained of all life, he could no longer fight an undeniable truth– the face of the evil one might be his own! The dream of the mountain lake community of people, with the priest fighting the force of darkness, is still quite alive in my mind, and remains a major teaching for me as both a child and now, as an adult. Being so immature, and not too worldly in my knowledge, I did not have the necessary background to know what to think about the dream at the time. I discussed the dream with my older sister, who seemed to have some partial answers to its mysteries (based on her understanding of reincarnation), but so many mysteries remained to be explained. I waited and watched for further answers, and went on with the all of the important business of being a carefree boy, though at times, I fleetingly experienced “self-awareness”. I was required to take a World Geography class in the 7th grade, Mr. Vaught was the teacher, and also a Milwaukie Elks lodge member, as was my father. Mr. Vaught would report to my father during Elks club meeting about my wayward behavior and attitudes, and of my insufficiency, probably in an attempt to goad my father. Mr. Vaught was very rude to me, and considered me to be obnoxious, and dull, as reported to me by my father. It was through Mr. Vaught’s class that I was introduced to the Incan civilization, though, and Lake Titicaca, which is on the border between Peru and Bolivia. This was, and still is, a very sacred lake, and, according to the lore of the Incan people, it was where the origins of the human race began. I had an eerie sense of familiarity with the lake, and with the people of the area. I actually felt like Lake Titicaca was the lake in my dream from three years earlier. I proceeded to consume every book on the Incan civilization that I could find. I became hooked on the idea of traveling to Peru someday, to seek out some answers, and to experience its culture, perhaps for a second time? I eventually traveled to Peru in 2014, having a remarkable experience that has been documented elsewhere. As mentioned previously, I was an isolated boy prior to 1965, and I never clicked well with people outside of my family. I was small for my age, plus I had advanced placement early in school, which resulting in the insertion of a relatively immature boy into challenging peer situations. I had a limited number of friends, and I seemed to draw the “outcasts”, be they the eggheads, wimps, crazies, or quiet ones, to my circle of friends. One can see the kind of person that I was, by the people who were drawn to me. I would become intensely loyal to whoever would commit to friendship with me, no matter what their limitations or faults were. Usually, it was the girls of my age group that I more readily befriended, until the age of nine years old, when we moved from West Linn to Milwaukie. Boys were in limited supply in our first neighborhood, and many were prone to be antagonistic towards me. When I moved to Milwaukie, Oregon in 1965, I met three boys almost immediately. My next door neighbor was Craig Salter, a quiet, introspective, slight build of a boy, who loved technical books and fantasy novels. Tony Mecklem was a small build, private sort of young lad who lived down the road, in a fairly primitive home built by his father out of masonry blocks. But the main friend was Randy Olson, of whom I will speak extensively about later.
Here is a telling memory about how some members of my family saw me in public, as represented by my older sister in the public school system. I remember being in the 3rd grade, and my sister already having a boyfriend of sorts from her 4th grade class. That “boyfriend” had a younger brother, who was in 1st grade, who accompanied him. The older boy was a bully, but instead of pushing me around, he ordered his younger brother to attack me. I had never been in a fight before, and I was overwhelmed by the bellicose energy shown to me. The boy threw my unsuspecting body onto the ground, and he proceeded to punch me, bite me, pull my ears and hair, and yell little kid obscenities at me. Not knowing what to do (of course, my dad never taught me how to defend myself), but finally angry enough to do something, I began to imitate the lad, and overturned him and pulled his ears, and punched at him, and everything else he did to me, all the while being ridiculed and humiliated by my sister and the older boyfriend. Hmmph, this kind of bullying was to happen in several different forms again over the next several years, as my sister seemed to draw young men into her experience that thought picking on me was the way to her attention and affection. Another aspect of “family shaming” was evident whenever my father came to sports events that I was involved with from 6th through 8th grade. He never took the time or effort to teach me or coach me on sports, but he was overly critical of me and my level of play on athletic teams. One of his famous public humiliations of me was when I was pitching on the mound one day, and dad yelled out “you couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn!” That is just an extension of the same “blanket party” behavior that he adhered to whenever he felt the need to garage my baby body. I won’t go further into the details of the discipline that was administered to me over the years of my childhood at this time. School was not a problem for me in the new neighborhood, as the quality of the North Clackamas School District, at least in the grades schools, was substantially lower than that of the West Linn area from which we had moved from, so I was already a bit ahead of my peers, at least in math and English. And, if the truth be known, I was starting to really get a handle as to how to succeed in school, by watching others who were doing well. I noted at the time that I despised, at times, the competition to get good grades at school. Teachers graded on the curve, meaning that a small percentage of the students got A’s, as well as the same percentage got F’s. Part of me had associated getting good grades with getting love and acknowledgement from my parents, and I hated the idea of having to compete with others to get love at home. It was this experience that led me to sometimes feel good about other student’s failures at school, since it might mean that I would thus have a better opportunity to score some attention points. Collaboration was definitely out of the question for me while living in this scarcity consciousness. A little secret that I carried is that many times, I could “access” certain information that I had never officially learned before, and use it to succeed scholastically. What does this mean? Well, in addition to a nearly photographic memory that I had when I was young, which I lost shortly after I started smoking pot, from time to time, especially during the stress of testing, information would just start appearing in my mind, and I would just fly through whatever academic challenge was presented to me. It felt like I was cheating at times, and I did not understand it, or question it too much. I was probably recalling information that I had already stored, albeit unconsciously, but when I re-read more of my story, I have to wonder if consciousness can be much more shared than we normally experience, at levels both “above and below” verbal levels. After examining my awakening to the “reality” created by words, I could see that embedded into each word that we are able to understand is the whole of human verbal experience. Each word is a hologram of the wholeness of our verbal reality. If we truly understand ONE word, in its wholeness, we can perceive other aspects of the whole, as well. I as to later see that this insight also applies to the human being, as well. If I can truly see the one, I can see the All. I am sure that this will open up or continue some discussion somewhere, if somebody ever reads this obscure document. I started to become a bully to some girls around the age of 10 years old. If they were not attractive to me, they were susceptible to gentle, and not so gentle, ribbing and ridicule. I found a behavior where I could get support from other boys, but it was damaging behavior on my part, and was to bring shame to me when confronted at a later time by victims of my abhorrent communication style. A real “marker memory” was when I was in the sixth grade, and playing outdoors during recess. I noticed a group of people surrounding two fifth grades boys. In my curiosity to see what was going on, I walked over to observe the crowd. The boys were in the midst of a fist fight, and there was lots of yelling and screaming. I watched, and moved with the crowd as needed to avoid the fighting boys. I had not ever witnessed such an activity before, and it was mesmerizing. Suddenly, one of the fighting boys, Corey Sears, came over to me, and punched me in the face, and then went back to his fight with the other boy. Not knowing what to do, I went to the Principal’s office, and complained about the fighting boys, and the punch thrown at me. The Principal then scolded me for not intervening in the fight, and trying to break it up. These boys, though in the grade below, were actually as big or bigger than I was, since I was their age, and not the ages of the kids in my grade. I certainly felt no physical superiority or skill, or moral authority, to step in and mediate a dispute such as this. Yet, it left me wondering how I was supposed to behave in relation to the poor behavior of others. One time when I was 15 years old, and waiting for a bus in downtown Portland, a young woman walked up to me, asked my name, and then asked if I knew who she was. I had no idea. She then told me how I victimized her with my poor humor, and made her pee her pants once. I told her that I was sorry, that was not who I was now, but I felt ashamed. I met another of my victims when I was close to 40 years old in an Oak Grove Fred Meyers store, and I sought her out, introduced myself, and apologized for what I had wrought upon her. She had long ago forgave and forgotten, but I had not. It felt good seeing her living a successful life in adulthood, complete with a happy family. Yes, I was part of the oppression of the feminine spirit, until I became conscious. One of my childhood friends, Craig Salter was my next door neighbor in our new Milwaukie neighborhood. He was of slight build, and he was a slow talker. He may well have been a creative genius, but his “dreamy” state of existence was indicative of some fundamental issues going on inside of him. I suspected from the beginning that his mother was mentally ill, as she was quite peculiar, and apparently quite a hypochondriac. What concerned me was Craig’s similarity to his mother, as far as his mannerisms. And I also suspected that Craig was bonkers too, but, hey, he was my neighbor, and as far as friends go, I could not be too choosy, eh? I still wondered why I deserved to have such strange friends. He was smarter than most people, yet he did not consistently apply his smarts to school, which was too restrictive for him. On his own, before he was age 15, he had already designed a sophisticated internal combustion engine totally unlike what we use in today’s world. He also designed and built his own models, FROM SCRATCH, of supersonic jet airplanes, complete with spiral staircases made of pins and tiny pieces of paper glued in a spiral fashion. He was also already designing transistor circuits by age 14, which just blew me away at the time. HE WAS AMAZING! I wanted his creativity so bad, as I felt that I had none. My abilities appeared to be quite mechanical, which left me having the sense that I was just another boring automaton, that I was just parroting/repeating other’s thoughts and behaviors. I enjoyed building model airplanes and ships from the WWI and WWII eras, and building sailing ships from kits that were based on sailing ships of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. I enjoyed building them, but then I would be so critical of my efforts, usually by comparing them to the “perfect” models that Craig could produce. I would become so unhappy with my projects, and an unusual perfectionist phenomenon would occur where I would feel pleasure at destroying my great works because they did not measure up to some (presently) unattainable standard that I had set for myself. This is huge, as it reflects something “fundamental” about an aspect of darkness of my human soul (see “He just wanted to watch the world burn”). There were many nights when I slept outside and gazed into the night sky with either binoculars or one of many telescopes that I, or my friend Craig, owned over the years, searching for flying saucers, or other interesting otherworldly objects. I needed to know that there were other options for life, life away from the trauma of this planet. Craig and I became obsessed with building rocket ships and developing our own rocket fuel. We were both quite impacted when between 7th and 8th grades, a friend of ours (Charley Davalos) died when his fuel cell exploded, sending shrapnel to cut his jugular vein. Undeterred, I still became an avid rocketeer, building rocket ships and installing manufactured solid fuel booster cells into them, and then launching them thousands of feet into the sky. Craig was stay in my life until 1987, though I only infrequently saw him after my first college years of 1973-1976. Danny Beauvais was my neighbor from just down the street, who moved there during my seventh grade. I did not hang around him much, because he was quite aggressive, and had a “hair trigger” when it came to his emotions. He behavior frequently got him into trouble, His father was a paratrooper in the war, and had lost a testicle for his efforts during a mishap He had a very attractive mother, who garnered more attention from other men than his father cared to experience. I will just share one story about Danny, which involved a private conversation that my father had with Danny’s father. In that conversation, Danny’s father noted that his marriage was failing, and that his wife was not faithful. One day, in casual conversation, I noted that Danny’s mother had more interests than just his father, and Danny proceeded to get me into a body lock with his legs, and tried to squeeze me to death, until I took back what I said. I kept asking him, in between painful grunts, why he wanted for me to take the truth back. It did not matter to Danny, he just did not want to hear “the truth” from anybody, but himself. I would not take back what I said either, and I paid a very painful price for that “stubbornness”, so what played out here is classic male communication around “painful truths” (I might be interpreted as still practicing that behavior). We did not associate with each other after that He ended up in prison a few short years later for assault, and many other crimes during the intervening period of time.
Jeff Tobin was a boy that I had met in the 5th grade. We were not neighbors, but we were friends at school, and we were both quite energetic lads. Both of us had excessive energy, and this did lead to both of us getting into trouble both alone, and together once or twice. I was elected class president in sixth grade, which was not to last long. I walked into the boys restroom, and Jeff and several other boys were flooding the urinals. I did not have the common sense to leave immediately, and in a need to “fit in” I continued to flush one of flooding urinals, just as the principal walked in. Well, I was immediately removed from my symbolic position, and I felt considerable shame.
One time I was beat with a tennis shoe by health teacher John Pavlichek, after being accused of making farting noises in class. It was actually Jeff who made the noises. Jeff was not so significant to me at this level of relationship, where his significance increased was 11 years later when I resumed by friendship with him and worked with him in the PAMS (Portland Area Mailing System-an experimental locally developed electronic mailing system implemented in the Portland Main Post Office). I worked with Jeff in the PAMS unit for about one year. He resigned after his first suicide attempt. I was to meet with Jeff one year prior to his death, when Sharon and I crossed paths with him on the Oak’s bottom hiking trails. He successfully committed suicide when he turned 55 years of age, and the trust that his deceased father had set up for him ran out of money.. I tried out for the cross country team, because I was in great running shape from training throughout my eighth grade with Craig’s older Mark (who ended up designing the sophisticated software for the US Defense Department to use in the computers of their top secret spy planes). Mark was 3 years older than Craig, but he was much more athletic and was incredibly involved in the community. He was an inspiration to me, and I trained with him because he was so smart and motivated, and I wanted to hang with him. I ended up running 3 miles a day for a whole year while in 8th grade, so I thought that I might be a good runner in high school.. Craig and I attempted to run cross country, but I quickly became discouraged by the “faster” runners who were already on the team, so I dropped out. My father certainly was not involved in encouraging me to be a runner, though he did come to one of my freshman football games, which was to be my last game when I finally figured out that I was much too small to endure the pounding from young men almost twice as big as me. I joined the chess club and the golf team my freshman and sophomore years, then dropped both of those options when I started using pot. A most telling acknowledgement of my social maladjustment and mental state as a youth is when the church that our Boy Scout Troop had its meetings at needed landscaping work. I needed to perform several community service activities to earn a badge to become a “Star Scout”. My attitude was that I wanted to give NOTHING back to the community, or to the church that supported our Scout troop. My father actually understood that attitude, and supported me in my antagonism towards service work for the community. Of course, I never earned the community service merit badge, which meant that I could never earn my Star scout level, or move upward to Eagle Scout.. My antagonism against community support and participation became quite an ingrained part of my personality structure, and was to be the precursor to all future problems.. Bruce Oliver Scott Paullin, was a name cobbled together by my parents, to represent my nature, and indicate the true potential for my life. Yes, there is a huge difference between potential, and actuality, and my life in my later years has become a “miracle experiment” for me in my own attempt to actualize my true nature. The revisiting of my times as a youth gives me a chance to bring compassion and understanding to those parts of my life that did not receive such compassion and understanding when I needed them the most. Revisiting is quite helpful for reintegration, and healing, if done with the right intention. The parts of our lives that we resist the most, are the parts that resist healing, and eventually get repressed, and we end up making them the unconscious influences and manipulators over our behaviors for the rest of our lives.
High School and BeyondDan Dietz I first met Dan Dietz in 1969, when I saw him as a freshman in high school. He came from Oak Grove grade school, and I came from Concord grade school, to join the freshman class. We did not associate with each other, at least initially, and rarely acknowledged each other until the sophomore year. An associate of his, Mark Anderson, was in my PE class, so that is where I first made contact with the “greaser” group that they all belonged to. There was Bruce Chapman, Dan Dietz, Mark Anderson, Barry South, and the many drop-ins that associated with them throughout high school. Bruce Chapman had a garage outside of his home, where he perpetually worked on his 1955 Chevy race car. Bruce’s Garage took on an almost sacred connotation in all who knew him over the next few years, as it became THE GATHERING PLACE many weekend evenings. Lots and lots of suds were consumed there, and soon I was to join them in their weekly celebrations of hops, marijuana, and fairly close friendship, it seemed.
In 1970-1971, during my sophomore year, I started smoking pot, as related in another section of this manuscript. I felt really uncomfortable in my body at the time, and I was experiencing maximum anxiety around my self-image, and how I was failing to fit in with the high school community. I was already trying to find my group, who to hang out with, because I just did not seem to fit in anywhere. My friends from grade school were finding their own way, though we still stayed quite connected even during the turbulent high school years. I was still having “social issues”, as a telling public rebuke from Mr. Griffith in my sophomore class of social science would indicate. He berated me for appearing “haughty and distracted” and accused me of being a “pseudo-intellectual”, and laughed when he stated that I would not know what that meant. I proceeded to give him the correct definition, much to his chagrin, and to the amusement of my classmates.. Having been rejected by every girl I showed an interest in, and bullied a few times by the more mature freshman and sophomores, I finally figured out that my physical immaturity had finally caught up with me. Being 13 years old, weighing 92 pounds, being a freshman in high school, and not even having had puberty yet, made things really uncomfortable for me in the locker room, though at long last I got my first whisker somewhere between my freshman and sophomore year. I gave up on the girls for a while, and continued trying to establish who might be my “core group”. In my search for another source of pot, Dan Dietz came into my awareness, and, thus, we were to begin a deep, though at times troubled, friendship. Dan was a big young man, with little athletic inclination. He was already well versed in the art and science of heavy drinking by the time that I met him. He found me some pot, and invited me to smoke it with him. I then was introduced to the “gang”, and the rest is history. We hit it off fabulously, and I found my mission in life, which apparently was to drink and use until I died. I got drunk for the first time in my conscious life with Dan, at age 15. And I knew that I was an alcoholic from the very beginning. After a couple weekends of drinking, I admitted to myself that I was an alcoholic already. I got so “high” off of alcohol, it was like a narcotic. And I always drank until I was drunk, as there was no middle ground here.
It was here that I had the realization that I would die from alcoholism, that there was nothing that I could do about it but hold on tight, and ride it out to its self-destructive conclusion. My statement to myself was that I would either quit alcohol and drugs by age 30, or I would die, perhaps by the destructive effects of the disease itself, or by my own hand. Yes, hopelessness came early, but there was still a lot of fun and experiences to be gained through its use while my ship of life sank over the next 16 years, and I did not go easy on it. There were several nights my senior year in high school when my mother would have to hold a bucket under my head while I released extra beer from the stomach reservoir, which I would always overfill. She investigated Alcoholics Anonymous for me, but I had no desire to connect with a bunch of boring old people, and I steered WAY CLEAR of anything approaching sobriety in high school, or in the two attempts for Bachelor’s Degrees at the University of Portland that were to follow over the next 10 years.
I have one more story about Dan Dietz, which I hope indicates more of the nature of our relationship. I was 21 years old, and my best friend at that time, Dan Dietz (RIP), and John Durkin, went with me to the Faucet Tavern. I was already a “seasoned drunk” by the time I had arrived at the age of 21, but being able to “legally” enter taverns and bars seemed like a big deal at the time (I had been getting into bars since I was 16 years old, usually accompanied by Dan). The southwest Portland Faucet tavern seemed like a great place to visit, as it was famous for its turtle races, and its all-around “party hardy” atmosphere. Dan and I bought a bottle of booze, and we kept it in the trunk of his car, to “sip” from, in between beers at the tavern. I started out my birthday evening by playing several games of pool, gambling $5 a game with some “locals”. At that time of my life, I was a very good pool player, and I removed a few bucks from some very unhappy patrons. One unhappy patron followed me out to Dan’s car, where I was grabbing a swig off of a whisky bottle. He let me know that he did not like me having so much fun at his expense, and tried to fight with me. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but somehow the fight got “postponed”. I walked back into the tavern, and enjoyed a couple more beers with Dan and John, and played some more pool. I was quite the “happy drunk”, though my behavior did not make the outraged individual I had already taken $20 from feel any better about me. The next time I walked out to Dan’s car, that unhappy man grabbed two of his friends, and they all tried to “teach me a lesson”. Dan looked out from the tavern door at his car, and saw that I was in trouble, and secured the bar manager. But it was too late, one guy pulled a knife, and the fight was on. There were a few lunges at me with the knife, and a couple of punches thrown (none quite hit me). There was a lot of loud voices, and some yelling and screaming. The manager called the police, but at that same moment, the guy with the knife took a final stab at me. According to the reports from Dan, I spun kicked the knife out of his hand (which was an act of pure, unadulterated luck on my part), and then I threatened to take his head off with the next kick. The sirens of the police cars about to arrive there scared the three attackers away, and it also scared Dan and John, who quickly threw me into the car, and we drove off up Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway towards Wilson High School. I got angry with Dan for not coming out to help me with the attackers, and he told me that calling the police was the best that he could do. He then not so politely, invited me to walk home from close to Wilson HIgh, to Milwaukie, about 7 miles or so. I was fortunate to make it home in one piece, and not be arrested for being drunk in public, or for drunken walking. I visited Dan the next day, and apologized to him. He was in really bad shape, and he was still pretty hung over. And he was the designated driver! Employment At the US Postal Service (June 1975-July 1985) I will try to cover my employment with the US Postal Service, as well as my attempts at “higher education”. I worked as a floor clerk, a letter sorting machine operator, and finally as a maintenance mechanic/electronic technician for a total of ten years, beginning in 1975, beginning when I took a summer job with the US Postal Service. I applied for this job and took the Civil Service exam in the spring of 1975, scoring a near perfect score. i initially thought that it would only be employment for the summer break between my sophomore and junior years. I was supposed to quit work when fall term for my junior year began, but instead I continued full-time swing shift work, while going to school full-time during the day. This was the same office that my father worked out of, and it certainly was not even close to being my dream job. Add to that time management challenge was trying to manage my alcoholism and drug addiction, and a mentally ill significant other, and it was pretty easy to see that this story does not have a happy conclusion. Donelle’s family was ready to put her out on the street, literally, so in my need to protect Donelle, I was forced to move out of my parent’s home, and find residence with Donelle in Vancouver, near where she still received psychiatric treatment at the Columbia River Mental Health Center. Things did not go well, of course. I ended up dropping out of college my senior year, with few credits left to secure to get a degree, and even fewer units of personal desire to do so. School had the potential to become all-consuming, and I probably needed sobriety to have any hope in the first place. So the best decision for a practicing alcoholic/addict is to keep the job I already had, and give up on the degree for a while. That was the second major life goal that I literally smoked and pissed away, I had resigned from the ROTC my sophomore year, when I could not spend the required six weeks of training in Mountain Home, Idaho for Air Force training and education. Donelle’s fragile mental health, and her demands upon me and my time, just would not allow for my continuation with my dream.. Somehow, I had developed a guilt complex that made me feel as if I was somehow responsible for Donelle’s deterioration, and this guilt was to motivate me for several more years to come, keeping me in a self-destructive linkage with Donelle... I met some really interesting and damaged characters while working at the main office of the US Postal Service. Some were incredibly diseased human beings, while there were a few diamonds who found a way to sparkle. Larry was a Vietnam veteran from the Marine Corps, and he would tell stories derived from the front lines of the war. He was involved in the fragging (deliberate killing with a hand grenade) of an American Lieutenant, and that story disgusts me to this day. Greg worked in the maintenance department, and he would funnel stories and literature to me about the right-wing American patriot movement, its militias, and their plans to take over the country with the help of the US military when the right American president is elected (actually, a president a lot like Donald Trump). Paul and I spent a lot of time together after work, drinking and video gaming until all hours of the morning after work. But he had a dark side as well, and I suspected him of being the arsonist who set fire to his disabled Uncle’s home, which resulted in his uncle’s death. But I met some good people, as well, including David Valdivia, who I still am in contact with, mainly with him being my late father’s and my insurance agent. He left his postal career before the idea that he could do nothing else imprisoned him. I worked in the PAMS (Portland Area Mailing System) unit from 1979-1980. This was an experimental mail forwarding operation headed by Don Cannard, both a mechanical and a software engineer. There were eight employees who joined the operation, which operated during the swing shift. Jeff Tobin was to join me in this unit, the man who was my “partner in crime” during the sixth and seventh grades. We were both focused workers, each outperforming expectations within the unit. We ended up resuming a form of friendship, and would go out for drinks and pot smoking after work. Jeff drove like a “bat out of hell”, and I feared for my life whenever I rode in his racing truck. He definitely had a death wish, and was mentally unstable, even more so than me.
Jeff Tobin, RPHS 1970 yearbook photo One time, he offered to buy some pot for the two of us, and took our money and bought a big bag of weed. The weed was of extremely poor quality, and Jeff felt very bad about it. He punched himself and bloodied his face and eye, to make it appear that I had beat him up, so that he could try to coerce the guy who sold it to him to get our money back. I was blown away by this extreme behavior. Donelle was undergoing yet another nervous breakdown during this period, and Jeff tried to be as empathetic as he could be with me, which I appreciated. But, one evening, for unknown reasons, Jeff did not report to work. He called in, after being taken to the hospital for a suicide attempt. He quit his job during the phone call, which he did not intend to do. The Postal Service would not give him his job back, once he “recovered” which was another blow to Jeff. I could not even bring myself to visit Jeff while he was in the hospital, even at the urging of our supervisor. I was selfish, and just too spent from my own problems to be of any help to Jeff. Note: Jeff was to eventually succeed in another suicide attempt, shortly after I saw him again thirty years later while we were both walking in opposite directions on the Oaks Bottom trail, at the age of fifty-five years. His trust from his deceased father ended when he turned fifty-five years old, and the economic stress of that loss may have been too much for him to bear. I was eventually promoted onto the maintenance team, where I started as a maintenance mechanic in 1980. What I had hoped to become was an electronic technician trainee. I did work on some older mechanical or electrical-mechanical mail sorting gear for a couple of years, which was quite boring. Because I was the new low guy on the totem pole, I was last in line for all promotions, no matter how qualified, or unqualified, I was for any new or more favorable positions that opened up. About one year before the start of the maintenance position, I again I applied at the University of Portland Engineering Department for readmission, but they were still unimpressed with me because of my meteoric fall from academic grace 3 years earlier. I went from a being a scholarship student, with a strong B+ average in college, with advanced math placement, to a student who no longer showed up in class. I apparently did not show the right initial interest, because I was told to attend a community college for a year, to prove that I was really interested in going to school. So I attended Portland Community College, Sylvania Campus, for the 1979-1980 school year, to see if I still “had it in me”, getting straight A’s in the most difficult science and math courses offered. I also took some philosophy and religion based courses, knowing that they would help me with the University of Portland readmission project that I was undertaking. Eventually I get word that I am readmitted to U of P, at about the same time that my new maintenance position begins. Will this new marriage work? Knowing me, that is an easy question to answer. Since I was a new hire into the Maintenance Department, headed by John Zimpleman, I was relegated to performing the least favorable duties that the Main Post Office had to offer. I was usually blowing dust off of equipment, adjusting and tightening conveyor belts, replacing motors, resetting photocells, adjusting timing on the parcel sorting machine, or other sundry and mundane tasks that my predecessors had dutifully performed prior to my “advancement” into their ranks. Right after I started, I was referred to the Employee Assistance Program, which was run internally to the US Postal Service. My attendance had been fairly poor up to this point while I was a clerk, so this was a carryover from those days, too. Larry and Mike from the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) tried to befriend me, and tried to get me to admit that drinking and/or drugging had something to do with the poor attendance, but I stood unaffected by their suggestions. I had to go to 5 AA meeting to meet the requirements of the EAP, which I did, but I had a quart of beer stashed under my car seat for immediate consumption after each meeting, so the “message” fell on carbonated ears. Well, after I worked for less than a month on graveyard shift I KNEW THAT I NEEDED TO DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT. So, once again I combined work and college in another vain attempt to succeed,. My wife Donelle was no longer in the picture, at least at this point (she was to return in the latter part of 1981), and I thus would be able to retain my focus, and not collapse into the confusing quagmire that I fell into after from trying to maintain a marriage with a paranoid schizophrenic person, work and go to school at the same time, like I attempted 3-6 years previously. From 1981-1983 I attended the University of Portland while working graveyard shift at the US Postal Service. I did not create the time to drink alcohol excessively, except for on weekends, where I usually let it out a few notches beyond reasonable levels. For the first year, I had great grades, perfect attendance, and a lot of hope for myself until I hit the last semester of my junior year. During the same period, Donelle came back into my life, after I found her hitchhiking along a busy road near my parents’ home. She had been released from Dammasch State Hospital, and placed in an apartment complex on Roethe Rd. near my parent’s old home near Rex Putnam High School. She was on Social Security Disability, and was receiving outpatient care as needed for her mental illness. I did not immediately resume my marriage with Donelle, however, and we were still legally separated since the original commitment to Dammasch. Eventually, after several weeks of contact with Donelle, I was encouraged enough by her progress to want to resume our marriage. On the night before I was to move back in with her, my friend Paul, from the letter sorting machine gig, and I went out and really tied one on. While in a bar near his home in northeast Portland, we came upon two female co-workers from the letter sorting machines, Candy and Lorna. Candy was six foot tall, attractive, but outweighed me by forty pounds. Lorna was a redhead, of reasonable dimensions, but very plain looking. Paul had partied with both of them in the past, so he knew them quite well. I had no idea what was about to ensue, however. In a near blackout state, I accompanied Paul, and the two women, over to Paul’s house, where we continued drinking, smoking pot, and playing some video games. I was ready to go to sleep, when Paul took off into the kitchen with the two women. When he returned, I asked him if I could sleep on his bean bag chair. With a big grin he proclaimed “Why hell yes, you can. But first, you get to pick which woman you are sleeping with tonight!” “Umm, Paul, I am not really prepared for this one. Uh, uh, uh, Candy, would you like to stay and talk with me until I fall asleep?” The truth was that I had no desire for either woman. Neither of them was appealing to me in the least, yet I selected Candy out of some sort of need to protect the woman’s feelings. Candy was quite pleased to join with me in Paul’s living room, where the bean bag chair was located. Lorna accompanied Paul into his bedroom, and they closed the door behind them. I was still quite drunk, yet I felt a little self-conscious. We could hear laughter and raucous activity coming from Paul’s room, and we figured out what must be going on. Somehow, without me remembering exactly how, my pants disappeared off of my body, as well as all of Candy’s clothes. I awoke the next day, naked, and laying beside Candy, who was still asleep. I got up, wrote a note apologizing to Candy, and stated that I had made a mistake, and to please accept my forgiveness for having sex with her while drunk (while sober, I NEVER WOULD HAVE CONSIDERED SUCH A PARTNER FOR LOVEMAKING). I felt diminished somehow, for having sex with her. For the next two months, she chased after me at work, called me at home, and eventually gave up, when I never returned her calls, and continued to spurn her. Some disparaging writing ended up on the walls of the bathroom stalls in the Post Office women’s bathrooms about me and my penis, which brought huge laughs to the janitorial core, and, eventually, to the maintenance core, who shared the same locker room. The joke was that Candy might be better suited to maintaining the Postal Service’s equipment, where blowing the dust off of equipment was a nightly endeavor. Ouch, emotionally, for both of us. I felt quite embarrassed, and it took way too long to live that one down. I also felt bad, because even though I did not technically cheat on my wife, I was feeling like I had. My self-destruct cycle resumed, and I restarted my active party mode, with my attendance at work tanking. My attitude at even being there was in the dumps, as well. I moved Donelle into the apartment in Milwaukie, and I joined her there, much to the disappointment of my parents, who continued to warn me about the potential for another horrible outcome. She, of course, had that breakdown, resulting in the rape by Dan Dietz alluded to earlier. While living across the street from Donelle’s apartment on Harrison in Milwaukie, after her breakdown, my father came to live with me for about three months. He had been kicked out of his house by my mother, after she found out about his ongoing affair with the company nurse. I was not too impressed with my life and my family, having an insane wife, and my parents marriage in a state of collapse, and now my own father spending time in my own apartment, when he wasn’t sleeping at his girlfriends’ home. My new normal was anything but normal, yet I seemed to have few choices. Dad eventually had to end his relationship with the nurse, and moved back to his own home. I had warned him that I would not be too friendly with him if he left my mother, so it would be best if he could work things out with her. Donelle was kicked out of her apartment across the street, for being too disruptive during her breakdown. Her neighbors did not appreciate her talking loudly to herself at all hours of the day and night, as well as her bizarre behavior. I took her in, but it was really difficult for me, as well. Her middle of the night screams and crying and carrying on were too much for me, as well. I was finally able to force her to go back to her psychiatrist, and get on the latest medications for schizophrenia, which helped her immensely. We decided to move to Cedar Hills Apartments, the same apartment complex that Randy Olson was living in. I quit going to school once again, this time leaving the Electronic Engineering/Computer Engineering degree on the garbage pile, with just one year to completion. My addictions resumed in earnest, with my introduction to Gary Graham, a local cocaine dealer and serious party monster and new friend. Donelle was becoming too burdensome, demanding to go out almost every night to “party” and listen to live rock and roll music, and she eventually collapsed into yet another “nervous breakdown” by early 1983, so I was between a “rock” and a hard place. I finally attempted to kick her out of our apartment, which she initially agreed to go, to hang out with her new rock and roll friends. I was already finished with enabling and supporting her mental illness, and I was extracting myself from years of guilt and shame around my relationship with her and her illness. One day, when she came back to the apartment after a night of partying with her new friends, I insisted that she get all of her clothes, and leave my unit for good. She balked, and a yelling match ensued. I opened the door, and pushed her out of the door, after she started pushing at me. She called the police, and we were both arrested for Class C felonious assault. Randy picked me up within two hours of incarceration, but Donelle had no one to bail her out, so she sat in the jail overnight. We both had to appear in court the next week, and the charges against both of us were dropped, but she was advised to not step foot into my apartment again without permission. I met Cindy Dahl, a letter sorting machine clerk, in 1983. I was invited out to Legin’s Chinese food restaurant near Foster and 82nd avenue (a great party and dancing hangout), and another letter sorting machine clerk introduced us one night. This was during the period of time during the final nervous breakdown that I could tolerate of Donelle’s. It is a funny thing, I had no intention of going to bed with Cindy, but that night, we hit it off so well that she came home with me that evening, and we had a wildly great time together. We slept in the same bed, and bedroom, that I shared with my estranged wife, who was now going out on her own, and not coming back some evenings. I never asked where she was, because I did not want to face one of my Toxic masculine internal stories that I told myself, that if my wife ever cheated on me, I would kill her. Well, Donelle walked through the door that very next morning, while we were still in bed, and grabbed some clean panties out of the top drawer of her dresser, smiled, said hello, and left. That old toxic need to punish a cheating wife just miraculously disappeared, when I saw that we both appeared happier by our final separation from each other. My relationship with Cindy did not last long, however She tried to get me to hook up with both her and her very attractive female roommate, but I was too insecure to even consider threesomes and the complex possibilities of interrelationship. After getting an assignment to travel to Norman, Oklahoma for three weeks more of training, Cindy told me that she was getting her breasts enhanced during the period of time that I was gone. She was warm to me before I left, but when I came back, she wanted nothing to do with me, and I did not even get a chance to look at, let alone feel, her new chest ornaments. All I Can Do Is Cry, by Savoy Brown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2T3IyFShfs I had learned a lot about computer and electronic engineering up to this point, and my new education placed me well ahead of most of my peers, and caused some concern among some co-workers who thought that I might try to parlay this education into a pogo stick to jump over their place on the seniority roster. Shortly after joining ranks with the maintenance department, I was sent to Norman, Oklahoma for training on troubleshooting and repairing some of their letter sorting equipment. This was the first time that I had ever flown on an airplane, and it was my first great adventure by myself away from home. I stayed in the University of Oklahoma’s student dormitory, which was shared with the USPS during the summer months for all students. My roommate was Bill Y of New York City, who also was a maintenance mechanic/electrician from that area. He happened to be a black man, and he is the first black person I ever had any relationship with, other than through basketball adventures throughout Portland that I used to engage in. Bill was damaged goods, being a veteran of Vietnam, and still suffering from some very concerning aggressive tendencies and attitudes. But, somehow, he held himself together. One Saturday evening, six of us Post Office Maintenance Trainees drove a substantial distance from Norman to a bar in Oklahoma City. There were five African-Americans, including my roommate Bill, and Jermaine, from New Jersey (who had a huge bag of weed that he just grabbed into and freely distributed to all who liked to partake) and me, the one pale-faced party warrior. I loved being with these guys, and I have never experienced more camaraderie and mutual respect than running with this group of men. There was a bonding that I just did not understand, but I later learned one of the fundamental tenets of their group energy. When we arrived, the parking lot was full. It was a huge club, with all sorts of action going on outside, and, I was to see, inside as well. We found a decent parking spot, and all walked up to the door together. Bill led the way, and the greeter held us all up, because of me. They did not allow “white people” into their place. Bill explained to the man who I was part of their team, and I was not a “white person”. The door man told Bill that he would have to register me with the club, and so I was signed into the club, with the other five people with me signing the same paper, vouching for me. I was told that I was not to dance with any of the black girls, and to keep with my group so as to keep the peace. The place had several hundred black people partying and carrying on, and I got more than my share of searching, and many times, dirty looks. Somehow I kept my cool, and paranoia would not have helped me that evening. I settled in eventually, and enjoyed a couple of strong drinks. Bill went outside, to share a joint with Jermaine, while the rest of us hung out to one side of the dance floor. Suddenly, Bill came back in, with Jermaine in tow, and started waving his gun around in the air. He started yelling very loudly, proclaiming “I don’t want anyone to get hurt here!” and authoritatively stated that someone had blocked our car in, and unless they moved their car immediately, someone was going to get hurt. My other three friends surrounded me, and we all started walking to the door, with the express intention of leaving without anybody slowing us down. A parting of the crowd, like Moses with the Red Sea, occurred, and we made it outside, awaiting the offending driver to move his vehicle. Two tough looking dudes came outside, with a following entourage of onlookers, and moved the car, all the while with Bill still waving his firearm in the air. The offending car was moved, we all piled into the rental car, and Bill assumed the driver seat, laying the gun in his lap. We tore out of the parking lot like a bat out of hell, and we all watched to make sure that we were not followed. Bill later expressed one of his fundamental values, which was that we have to be willing to lay our lives on the line for our friends, and make whatever sacrifice that is necessary to protect each other from danger. I began to really understand why I had never felt so safe and protected while with this group of men. This was the civilian equivalent of a small military squad in a war zone, which, apparently, Bill still felt that he was in. I have never felt this way with any other group of people in my life. It was exhilarating, fun, bonding, challenging, hair-raising, and enlightening to run with this group for three solid weeks. I was someone I had never been before, respected, accepted, and honored as being a part of a family, where we were accountable for each others’ success and safety. I was accepted into the field of human energy where I was unconditionally accepted as a brother, and a friend. Well, I returned back to the everyday, boring world that I had left from after the training. I still worked graveyard shift, and my ex-wife, Donelle, who was now a homeless person living on the streets of downtown Portland, started to haunt me at work every night. She would show up in our fourth floor cafeteria, which had accessibility to the public, and wait for me to take my lunch break around 3:00am every morning. She would always be crying and behave erratically, drawing stares from others, and I would feel quite uncomfortable, and distressed by her presence. She would always want money from me, which I did not have much of because of my own wayward spending habits revolving around excess alcohol consumption. I would dread going into work most nights, knowing what awaited me at our office. I continued to drink heavily every morning after work until around noon. And my life entered full collapse mode with myself, and with my employer. My employer was fed up with my poor attendance at work, and I had already lapsed into the severe depression and anxiety, and alcohol and pot were just not getting the job done. It was suggested that I try the Physicians and Surgeons Hospital Care Unit for alcoholic recovery by our EAP (employee assistance program). After weighing my options, which I really did not have any, I accepted alcoholic recovery as a good option, and checked into the unit in April of 1984. The first two days, I basically spent in bed, while they detoxed me from any physical addiction symptoms through the use of the drug Librium. That first day I was, basically, unconscious, by the request of the attending physician. I spent thirty days in the unit. I met many other people who were also attempting recovery. My roommate was Tom Cravens, a man who had spent more than his share of time in trouble with the law, and with his drinking. He became like a big brother to me while I was there. Tom told me about his relationship with Steven Kessler and the 1968 Oregon State Prison riot. That information seemed inconsequential at the time, but Kessler’s life wreckage would subsequently impact my life directly, in 1986-1987. I befriended an ex-Hell’s Angel’s motorcycle gang member by the name of Scott. Herm Gilliam (now deceased) of the 1977 Portland Trailblazer championship team was there. I made a short-term friend with Steve, who was a committed church goer, and who encouraged me to join him at Hinson Baptist Church. I actually went out and bought my first suit so that I would like somebody other than the bum I normally looked like, for when I attended church with Steve. So I was not alone in recovery, and it eventually became a unique, healing experience. I almost came to regard the group therapy, talking sessions, and attempts at personal inventory to be like taking a vacation from life. My personal inventories were pretty weak, and appeared to be only people pleasing efforts, which was the best that I could do at the time. My favorite pastime was smoking cigarettes, and I was up to four packs a day of smoking Player menthol 100’s, probably the most toxic kind of cigarette on the market. Claire was my personal counselor, and she also happened to be a Four Square Church minister, so I sure got a lot of Christian slanted recovery information, as well. I was not too big on Christianity when I got in there. Claire was an attractive woman, and that alone helped to keep my attention focused on the good messages that she was trying to communicate to the groups, and to me as an individual. I was not very fertile ground, with fairly shallow soil at the time. I had spent about a month in intensive study of Christianity in December of 1980, spurred by the course work of a University of Portland Theology class that I was required to attend. which somehow had kept me sober for close to a month, as well. But as has been already mentioned in another section, I met three drug worshiping rich brothers in January of 1981 whose access to the alternative “higher powers” of highest quality drugs captivated me, and that first adult Christian leaning quickly dissolved. Yes-Changes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omhNnvX3Sx0 The last three days I was at the Care Unit, I started to feel the stress of impending release. It was easy stay clean and sober in the hospital, but the thought of carrying a new attitude towards sobriety that had not yet really taken root into the real world was quite threatening. We were set up with phone numbers of fellow graduates, and the internal counselors, just in case we were to need any support. We had a family meeting the night before release, where the patients all had their family members attend, so they could get a little crash course in how to live with the recovering alcoholic. My parents attended, and I learned something about my father that was pretty disturbing. My father had internalized my struggle so much, that he thought that he needed to stop alcohol, that somehow I was in the Care Unit because of his drinking. It took the therapist a long time to explain to my father that the drinking problem was my own, and not his. My therapist noted to me later that she saw that my father showed characteristics of a man attempting to live his life through his son, which was why my addictions and alcoholism impacted him so severely. I was discharged back to my home that I shared with Randy Olson, I was regularly attending Hinson Baptist Church at the encouragement of another Care Unit graduate. I started attending AA meetings yet again at the Alano Club on Lovejoy, as a direct result of my attendance at the Care Unit. Since I live only 500 yards from the Alano Club, I did not have too many excuses for not attending meetings, but I found a few, anyway. Randy continued his beer drinking behavior undeterred by my sobriety, which suited me just fine. This was the period of my life when Di Di Mcloud returned to my life, for around two weeks. Even on the uneven path of newly acquired sobriety that I was trudging upon, I was granted a short-term view of what love might look like, if even only for a couple of weeks. Di Di had no intention of living a long-term sober life with me, but for a couple of weeks, she did not drink or use while in my presence. I returned back to work in the maintenance and technician department, to experience much of the same energy as before. After repeatedly being denied an opportunity to take the same training that my peers in the electronic tech corps were receiving, I applied directly to the training facility in Norman Oklahoma to challenge one of the preliminary courses in computer logic that the technicians were required to pass in order to move forward. My local employer decided I needed some training in maintaining the manual letter sorting machine, so they sent me back to Norman in May of 1984, which is a significant date because I also had just one month of sobriety at this point. The national US Postal Service Training Center was located, adjacent to the University of Oklahoma campus, and we had full access to their campus and sports facilities, which was awesome. I passed the regular training with flying colors, and on the last day was my test scheduled for the class challenge. I breezed through the written portion of the test, on computer logic and electronic design, by scoring 70 out of 70 correct. The practical portion of the exam I was quite concerned about, as it referred to equipment that I had no training or background on. I only needed to answer one question out of the last 6 correctly to successfully challenge this course, and I could not do it. It was right there that I decided that when I got home to Portland, I was going to get drunk. I called my friend Craig, and requested that he meet me at the airport to pick me up. I WAS BUYING!! As Spirit would have it, my Care Unit counselor Claire Z got onto our airplane on our layover in Denver, and she rode the trip back to Portland on my plane. I avoided her like she had the plague, and I never let her know that I was on the airplane. The problem here is that I had already said YES to relapse, NO to sobriety, and to talk with Claire would have helped me stay sober, which was not what I wanted. Looking at my history, I saw that I often resisted its healing Mystery I rode that relapse through the rest of 1984, and it prepared the foundation for my relationship with Alcindia. About five months into that relationship, I became sober again after being “successfully treated” for depression. On a July 4th holiday camping trip, after six months of sobriety, I relapsed through smoking a joint. I was so ashamed of myself that I walked away from my “life-time guaranteed job” by calling in sick in 1985, and never returning to work. I never knew such despair and hopelessness, as I did when I finally left that job, which also coincided with the termination of my relationship with Alcindia.. Alcindia Ford Alcindia represents an era with great overall darkness in my life. I met Alcindia at “Bannisters”, a bar in Beaverton, after Randy and I moved into an apartment near 117th avenue late in the summer of 1984. I danced with her one evening at the bar, then I brought her back home to the apartment that I shared with Randy. She was a cute younger woman, who worked at the Aloha Intel Fab as a chip maker. I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, other than I was a lonely man, and Alcindia might be a good short-term friend. We hooked up that first night, and there were no strings attached, at least not initially. I continued to live with Randy, while still working the graveyard shift as a maintenance mechanic. Randy had a live-in girlfriend at the time, by the name of Claudia. Randy thought that she might have psychological issues, noticing that she might be manic/depressive, or something along those lines. She had come from another relationship where she lived with three guys, at least one of who was bi-sexual, and, according to Randy, she may have had relations with all three men over a period of time. I rarely talked with Claudia, not knowing exactly what to think of her, and my schedule kept me away from Randy and her the vast majority of the time. Empty (Bruce Paullin) Oh, those ephemeral loves, I wish we had never started, Just vacant wayside stops in life, from which I soon departed. Standing alone, though seemingly surrounded by others, Desiring just one, wondering who would be my next lover. Searching for that one, to share in a new life’s dream, Disgusted by the many, who were not quite what they seemed. Needing attention, and wanting to share love, That’s what all of my dreams seemed to be made of. My life has become quite empty with only darkness looming ahead Without an inner change of heart, quite soon I will be dead. Running on life’s mysterious road, one final journey to start, With no maps to follow, save those presented by my empty heart. (poem found on a napkin upon which I had written while in the Care Unit) The week following Alcindia spending the night at our apartment, Claudia became “interested” in me and my life for some reason. I did not think much of it initially. One morning, I came home from work, showered and went to bed at about 8:30. Randy had already left for work, so it was just sleepy me and Claudia. I was just falling asleep when my bed bounced, and a naked Claudia appeared next to me in bed. Not knowing what to think or what to do about it, nature somehow knew what to do, and did so three times, and left me wondering how the hell I was going to explain this one to Randy. I did not tell Randy right away, feeling shame and remorse. I continued to see Alcindia, who came over on my weekend and spent one more night with me at our apartment. Since we were just “friends” there was no need to tell her about my indiscretions. The next day I was visiting with her and her friend Baby at their apartment, trying to get to know Alcindia better. Out of the blue, she starts telling a story to Baby about another girlfriend’s boyfriend who slept with his best friends’ girlfriend while his best friend went to work. As she told her story, she repeated back to Baby, and to me, some of the language that was used during my soiree with Claudia, even recalling that there were three sexual interludes. I was to learn, at a much later time, that she had placed a voice activated recorder under my bed. I had my suspicions, but never confronted her about her “story” to Baby. As fate would have it, Alcindia also had sexual abuse issues in her background, which definitely impacted our 16 month relationship in various ways. But, these issues did not lead her into the psychosis like it probably did with my ex-wife. Unlike my sexually unresponsive first wife Donelle, Alcindia at least found a way to experience an orgasm, and she brought the fruitage of that exploration into our shared sexuality. On a physical level, she was a small step up. On an emotional level, it remained an often times confusing, stimulating, sometimes happy, but mostly challenging relationship.
When we hit an early “rough patch” in our new relationship, In a shameful moment of weakness, I gave to Alcindia a copy of Di Di’s poem. I did not ever tell her that I had not really written the poem for her, and that I did not even love her. I tried to fool myself from the very start that this woman was worth my time and effort, but we were BAD for each other. Have you ever heard of the term “slumming”? It was an unholy match, compounded by my own selfishness, loneliness, lack of integrity and honesty, and drug addiction and alcoholism. On a spiritual and emotional level, our relationship did nothing to enhance a shared vision of wholeness, instead, gradually becoming a source of pain and suffering for the two of us. How a one night stand turned into a dark 16 month relationship is anybody’s guess, but my poor self-esteem, loneliness and need for female friendship sure played into it. Baby, and her boyfriend, both were to become quite prominent in our shared story, but I will keep their story at a minimum. Suffice it to say that Baby’s boyfriend, who belonged to a motorcycle gang in Hillsboro, had access to pure rock crank/speed, which, at that time, I had never experienced before. This is a very significant event, and I became an immediate, ardent fan of the drug. This “friendship” would later accompany me into my underworld experience.
Our relationship of 14 months cemented my unconscious determination to self-destruct through continued drug abuse. After becoming sober yet again in January of 1985, after having a toxic event around drinking and using anti-anxiety medication prescribed for help with depression, I was yet again hospitalized, this time at the Cedar Hills Hospital, for recovery from mental illness and alcoholism. I profoundly disliked the atmosphere in this place. I witnessed the abuse of mentally ill people, and it was disturbing and heartbreaking. I watched three male attendants rough up a woman about my age who did not immediately respond positively to one of the attendants requests. The three of them ganged up on the unfortunate women, and proceeded to forcefully remove her from the room, and attempt to tie her down unto a bed. She screamed and cried, and was subjected to quite a beating. The only way they would later release her from her bondage was by getting her to apologize for her “indiscretion” to the attendants and the other witnessing patients. The victim was apologizing for having to get beat, and this is how it really was. Cedar Hills did have a recovery team on site for treatment of substance abuse issues, and they treated me with respect while I was there. I was expelled after only three days because my health insurance had run out, and I did not want to pay close to $1000 a day out of my empty pockets, Dr. Beavers prescribed me a high-powered antidepressant called Nortriptyline, which suddenly turned my whole understanding around. It was like a light went on in my mind, and for the first time in my life I was happy. I happily stayed clean and sober for over six months, and found a renewed passion for life, my job at the US Postal Service, and even for the highly dysfunctional girlfriend that I had in Alcindia. I began to work out in our local fitness center where we lived, and I started developing some serious leg muscles. I also gained about thirty pounds, ballooning up to 208 pounds, from eating a half-gallon of ice cream almost daily. Food in general tasted almost too good, while taking this wonder medication. But, I did not feel comfortable attending AA meetings, because my integrity misinformed me that taking this anti-depressant was somehow part of a relapse process, and that by being on medication that made me feel that good I could not honestly practice the program, and I felt some shame around that. Alcindia had no interest in discontinuing her own use of drugs while I practiced sobriety. She made it a point of not using them while I was around, but I was aware of her consistent use of speed and pot, and an occasional psychedelic drug. During this period of time, Alcindia’s mother moved in with us. She suffered from severe depression, and psychosomatic ailments, and she became a disruptive, though friendly, presence in our apartment for the rest of our relationship. Things went well until Alcindia and I took a week-long vacation around the July 4th holiday in Bend. In the middle of the week, I happened to see a partially smoked marijuana joint spill out of Alcindia’s purse. Rather than replacing it, I somehow justified in my mind that it would be better to smoke pot and get high than take antidepressants. This messed up reasoning caused me to experience extreme shame, guilt, and self-consciousness, to the point that I would not return to work after our vacation. I called in sick for several weeks afterward, and I never returned to my “lifetime guaranteed job” of working for the US Postal Service. After ten years, I sacrificed that career so that I could smoke a joint. It was a fast downhill slide into depression, alcohol and further drug abuse.
By November of 1985, which also corresponded to when I finally was terminated from the Post Office for failure to appear back at work, I also abandoned my now nightmare relationship with Alcindia, and left her for good. PAIN (Bruce Paullin) Dark clouds looming on the horizon Waiting, Advancing Hovering, Thundering, Misting, Then breaking into torrential downpours Eroding, Stripping back, Layer, Upon Layer, Upon Layer Of consciousness. Exposing Long forgotten mental relics Dangerous old memories Self-destructive habits And tendencies Stinging, Hurting, Piercing to my core Obscuring visions of glorious futures With the suffering spawned from the Darkest past Washing away Tenuously held possessions of Sanity and hope Uprooting new foundations of a life Desperately But futilely Trying to reconstruct itself Carrying a Helpless, Hopeless, Powerless soul Into a chemical valley Amid a swirling depression Ravaging, Drowning, Decaying Pain, Why? Part II Growing without roots, with a will that won’t bend, Weathering life’s storms, which never seem to end. No longer waiting for the sun that was once promised to arise, How could truth’s light possibly shine in dimmed eyes? Having reached with futility for all the high goals of life, With no spiritual growth, while consumed by inner strife. Devoid of healing affection, and a stranger to real love, Unrealistic hope was what my failed dreams were all made of. Despair meets each day, summer has now changed into fall, Looking at life, I am totally disgusted by it all. Dying of loneliness, and holding life by only a thread, With me rotting inside, hopefully, I soon will be dead. Pain, Why? Sean Tucker I first met Sean Tucker in 1972, when he moved into our area from his mother’s home in Colorado. His father was estranged from his mother. His father was a manager with the Bureau Of Indian Affairs, and Sean had chosen to live with him. He drove a perfect four door baby blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, which was his distinctive chariot for most of the time that I knew him as a youth. Sean had long hair, and always wore it in a pony tail. We met at the Owen Sabin Occupational Skills Center, where I was learning Electrical Construction, and he was learning Printing. Sean was a handsome young man, and he really had an easy time with dating women. We both liked to smoke pot and to drink. But Sean’s favorite drink was wine, which I did not develop a real love for. We used to visit the Henry Endre’s Winery along Clackamas River Drive, and purchase half gallons of Mead, Rhubard, or whatever the seasonal wine choice was. The winery did not ask for age identification, so we took advantage of that laxity frequently. Sean became my best, best friend. We did so much together, and I looked forward to having adventures with him, all the way until he joined the Air Force in 1978. We took long drives out into the country, we played pinball at all of the local bowling alleys and arcades, we partied with all of the other local party animals on weekends, and we shared many family events and meals at my parents’ home. Sean did not include me in his family events, however. I had many drinking and using friends, but Sean seemed to exist in another realm for me, where spirit joined with love and friendship and shared values and meaning. We would listen to Alan Watts on Saturday night, and while “high” sometimes laugh and giggle together at Alan’s wisdom and insight, though we might catch an occasional AHA! from our listening efforts. We talked a lot about what God might be, and how we might encounter it in our journeys. Sean was not a church goer, nor was I, so we were not limited by structured understandings at that time. We would play with meditation sometimes, after hearing that a more prolonged “high” could be experienced through meditation than could be obtained through the use of drugs and alcohol. One time I was meditating in a full lotus position on the pool table in my parents’ home basement, and my mother saw me, and was surprised and shocked by what she witnessed. I was embarrassed by her discomfort with me, and shortly after that, ceased all attempts at meditation. Late in 1977, when Donelle was in the middle of another relapse into schizophrenia, Sean, Donelle, and I undertook a road trip through much of Oregon in my 1962 Buick Skylark. We traveled to the Oregon Coast, then into Crater Lake National Park, where we illegally camped along the lake rim, and finally into Eastern Oregon around the Bend area. Sean and I had our normal complement of pot and alcohol, as well as a couple of doses of powerful psychedelics, and Donelle had her mental illness, and all of the disturbing, bizarre manifestations of it. Sean had known my wife almost since the beginning of my relationship with her, and he was always a kind, supportive presence for her. But, Donelle’s symptoms were hard to understand, and we were both quite helpless and felt out of control in the face of her disease of the mind. One evening, we all sat around the campfire, and Donelle continued her sometimes bizarre behavior. She was hearing some sort of collection of voices, and she would talk to herself, and sometimes confuse what we were talking about with what was going on in the secrecy of her own mind. Sean and I would cast uncomfortable facial expressions to each other, and try to engage in conversation with each other solely, especially in the moments when Donelle became overly detached and unresponsive. In a moment of insight, I spoke of my helplessness in the face of managing Donelle’s disease and treatment, and the futility of all of my attempts at understanding her mental illness. I remembered that I had a form of LSD with me, which was a powerful mind expanding drug, also known for creating temporary symptoms resembling a form of mental illness. It was then that I wanted to take the drug, and see if it would provide any insights into Donelle’s mindset, as well as how I might manage my relationship with Donelle. Sean thought that I should give up on that thought, and stick to the pot and alcohol. But I insisted, and I took the psychedelic. I did not receive the desired illumination, but it showed that my deepest desire was to be of help to Donelle, as well as to try to understand the nature of mental illness, and how to bring a measure of healing to a most difficult life situation. Sean went into the Air Force in 1978, and married a woman named Natty, who happened to own a bar near Sean’s Air Force base in the Philippines. She was of Christian orientation, and Sean adopted the fundamentalist mentality through the course of his relationship with that woman. A deep, spiritual brotherhood was to gradually, over many years fade into nothing but memories, as his work, geographic location, family, and Christian orientation took him far, far away from the possibility of a shared heart and friendship. When I got married in 1979, my first choice for best man would have been Sean, had he been available. I settled on Dan Dietz and Randy Olson, my other best friends, but these two just did not share quite the same spirit with me as Sean did during this era of my life. I had one amazing experience around Sean, and it revolves around the time the rock group Heart was to come to town in 1984, to play an outdoor concert at Delta Park. I had not heard from Sean for over four years at this point, as we both had become quite busy in our respective lives. Sean was stationed in Madrid, Spain at the time, and he did not ever write or telephone me, nor did I back to him. I awoke one Saturday morning, in August of 1984, and I JUST KNEW THAT SEAN WAS ABOUT TO CALL ME. No sooner than I had the thought, Sean called me, and told me that he was going on leave, and would be coming to Portland, during the same week that Heart was to play. We were both quite excited about the prospects. As I looked at my life’s history, I have been forced to listen for the call from its Mystery. It was hard to reestablish our connection when he arrived, however, as he seemed to have a lot of agendas that did not include me. We did attend the Heart performance together, yet he got so drunk on Henry Endre’s wine that he became almost insane, and out of touch with me. When it was time for Sean to fly back to Madrid, we promised each other that we would stay better in touch, but we both reneged over the years. We rarely contacted each other again, except through an occasional phone call, or, with the advent of the internet, an email. In 2010, Sharon and I were car traveling through the southwest of America, and I contacted Sean to see if he could receive company for a day. He could, and we drove 800 miles out of our way to travel up to Colorado Springs to visit with Sean, Natty, and their boys. Sean immediately took me aside, and warned me not to talk about our past, or anything we had done together in the presence of his family. I was left with nothing to talk about with Sean, except his religious beliefs, my spiritual beliefs, and superficial matters around employment and family. Our friendship had come to a rather quiet end, indeed. Nobody had to die this time, which seemed a better end, for sure. Relationships sometimes end well before the body dies, or before the last time we say goodbye to each other. I have experienced this sad fact several times over the course of my life. This is a heartbreaking process, and the death of a relationship can cause a sense of loss as deep as the actual death of a person. I must grieve the loss of a friend, letting go of any illusions of future connections, and attempt to finish my emotional and spiritual commitments to the person.. This is hard stuff, and I forgive myself for “kicking the can down the road” for so many years. I always held out hope that somehow I could resume a friendship that had actually died more than a generation ago. The despair was crushing, though through that door the next step in life was to be taken into the unknown. The Dark Side Of The Moon Mental health has become an issue of national concern. I share in that concern at the deepest level. Throughout my life I have witnessed the oppression of our mentally ill, and to this day it continues to distress me. The repression of powerful aspects of the basic human spirit by our culture with its political, religious, and economic enforcers as well as by many of those practicing their “mental health” professions, sometimes borders on helplessness, powerlessness, and even institutionalized indifference. On that down side, there are those within our culture who misunderstand or ignore, over-medicate, ostracize and marginalize, Isolate and imprison, abuse and punish, degrade and dispose, and just plain “give up on” the mentally ill. On the up side, there are many family members, therapists, psychologists, spiritual advisors, and psychiatrists who have given their lives, hearts, and souls to the care and healing of our mentally ill, and my heart sometimes breaks FOR ALL OF US, as we struggle to manage both our own lives, while also being of service to these fallen fellow members of our family and society. The oppression by our culture of our mentally ill continues to distress me. The repression of the basic human spirit by our culture, and by many of those practicing their “mental health” professions, sometimes borders on witchcraft. On that down side, there are those within our culture who misunderstand or ignore, over-medicate, ostracize and marginalize, Isolate and imprison, abuse and punish, degrade and dispose, and just plain “give up on” the mentally ill. On the up side, there are many family members, therapists, psychologists, spiritual advisors, and psychiatrists who have given their lives, hearts, and souls to the care and healing of our mentally ill, and my heart sometimes breaks FOR ALL OF US, as we struggle to manage both our own lives, while also being of service to these fallen fellow members of our family and society. The psychiatric profession would do itself wonders to finally gain the necessary insight to understand the underlying message here, for we are all being impacted by our cultural INSANITY, and far too many American citizens will continue their own unconscious descent into darkness and mental illness. The mentally ill need better guidance, and our sick society needs better guidance, before it is too late for all of us. Chemicals can carry a disabled personality only so far, and then the river of spirit, with healing and insight, must carry the diseased human being the rest of the way to sanity. Yet, better than treatment is a plan for prevention, which a resistant society will not take the necessary measure to enact. Early in my recovery from alcoholism, in April of 1987, I volunteered at the Lovejoy Care Unit for mental illness and alcoholic recovery. I had spent a month there in 1984, and I wanted to give back to the institution, as well as offer some of my own experience, strength, and hope to those who sought recovery from their problems. Tony D had a psychology degree, with a focus on recovery issues, and was a volunteer there as well., He had substantially longer term sobriety than my own. Tony was responsible for assessing incoming patients, to help determine if they should be channeled to the alcoholic recovery wing, or to the mental illness wing. My role was to assist with Tony, as requested, and also to facilitate in-house AA meetings. One story that still stands out for me is Mary J., a young woman who passed through our office. Jane, the nurse, brought her in, needing a fast evaluation for Mary, to see where she could be helped best. Tony had his canned questions to determine drug/alcohol related illness, or non-addictive mental illness status. I noted that his questions appeared out-of-place, and irrelevant to this person, sensing there was a lot more to her “condition” than Tony’s superficial questions could address. Tony immediately judged her as “mentally ill”, without allowing for me to question Mary further. There was a part within me that had detected that Mary was hiding her addictions, and needed a little more time to reveal herself. I believed that I might help to protect her from the assault of unnecessary medications, if I was allowed to delve deeper into her history. Tony came down hard on me, and accused me of being more fucked up than the woman being evaluated, for even considering that he might be wrong in his assessment. My volunteer position immediately became vacant, and I did not wait for him to even say goodbye, as I headed for the door. Enlightenment does not come to the “fat and happy” people of our world. People who do not feel the pain of their own lives, and of their own poor choices, are not ripe for the experience of change. And, enlightenment is NOT a gentle process, merely attained through reading books, practicing affirmations, talking with our friendly therapists, and attending a few workshops and conferences. To find true enlightenment, a path through personal, and collective, insanity is REQUIRED. Watch out for the so-called ‘professionals’ of our culture, or those latest pseudo-spiritual gurus, who continue to try to oppress this movement, and repress those impulses within themselves, and others under their ‘spell’ or control. Many of our children are destined to journeys through abuse, darkness, isolation, abandonment, and insanity, because those are the qualities that permeate the minds of our unconscious parents. We can all quote from the Bible, Koran, Talmud, Bhagavad Gita, or the sayings of the “enlightened masters” such as the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, or more recently Krishnamurti, the Dalai Lama, OR ALL OTHERS, for the rest of eternity, but until we face ourselves and our diseased minds directly and honestly, NO TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE WILL OCCUR. The same is true for our country, and for our world. I will see you, and be with you for as long as necessary, on the “Dark Side Of The Moon”, until Light is brought to our world, and our children cease to be the victims of our oppressive, abusive natures.. Our children deserve much better love, care, and concern than the vast majority of the parents with culturally conditioned insanity can attempt to give. While incarnated into human form, with our poorly illuminated human minds, we can only witness the projections of our minds. All that we will ever see, unto whatever eternity that we can possibly conceive of, is our self, so the most important question for each day is “how will I see myself today?” The answer to that question determines whether I can see through the eyes of the truth of this moment, or just the limited eyes of the past. Our children pay a horrible price for our dark, ignorant projections of our selves, and our unfulfilled needs. Each child deserves ultimate respect and love, or they eventually become just another dead illusion of our culture’s aging, decaying, conditioned mind. The insight gained through mindful self-examination can erase the blocks to Love’s awareness, and imbue all life with a new meaning. And our children can be seen for the Spirit that they really are, and be allowed to grow into the magnificent beings that they were meant to be, without the detours to greatness that poor parenting introduces. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning. – Nelson Mandela Ain’t it fun when you’re always on the runAin’t it fun when you’re friends despise what you becomeAin’t it fun when you get so high, well that you, you just can’t comeAin’t it fun when you know that you gonna die youngIt’s such fun, good fun, such fun, such fun, aah such funSuch fun, such fun aah, yeah, fun, such fun, suchAin’t it fun when you’re taking care of number oneOh ain’t it fun when you feel like you just gotta get a gunAin’t it fun when you just can’t seem to find your tongue‘Cause you stuck it too deep into something that really stungIt’s such fun, ahWell, so good to me, they spit right in my faceAnd I didn’t even feel it, it was such a disgraceI punched my fist right through the glassAnd I didn’t even feel it, it happened so fastSuch fun, such fun, such funAh such fun, such fun, such funAh such fun, such fun, such funAh such fun, such fun, suchAin’t it fun when you tell her she’s just a cuntAin’t it fun when you she splits and leaves you on the bumWell, ain’t it fun when you’ve broken up every band that you’ve ever begunAin’t it fun when you know that you’re gonna die youngIt’s such funSuch fun, such fun, such funAh such fun, such fun, such funAh such fun, such fun, such funSuch fun, such fun, such funSuch fun, such fun, such funSuch fun Guns & Roses: Songwriters: Eugene Richard O’Connor / Peter Laughner I have joined the stories of several important friends, lovers, my first wife, and one employment experience together, during the course of this chapter, which loosely represents my life experience, mostly from the time period from 1971 through 1985. These characters and experiences have been referenced in other chapters, though they will now receive an in-depth study. The stories are woven into each other as if by a drunken artisan, for intoxication and mental illness are what characterized my life during these times. Each prime character is developed within their own independent time lines, though there will be some intersection points and overlaps between the “vignettes”. Other than within the section in this chapter about my ex-wife, I keep editorializing and proselytizing to a minimum, as I expose the structure and manifestations of my “unexamined life” during the period of time prior to my thirty first birthday. There will be little revisionist history lessons here, as I have attempted to accurately portray important elements of an immensely troubling era. Alcoholism, distraction, addiction, escapism, avoidance, loneliness, depression, despair, heartbreak, hopelessness, powerlessness, insouciance, and humiliation were some of my companions during these dark times. The story is presented in a fragmented manner, and one should not expect that a neat and tidy story can be created around an extremely painful and broken life experience. As a final introductory remark and a speculative question for myself, I often wonder if I had received more timely and appropriate positive feedback and acknowledgement as a youth from my family and culture, would I have had as much futility with my search for love and recognition in my teenage and early adult years. The following characters and situations do not provide the easy answer to that question. Randy Olson I first met Randy Olson when I was in fifth grade, after he moved up to Oregon from California. He lived about 3/4 of a mile down Oatfield Road from us, and we rode the same bus to school together, for grades 5-8. He had many friends, with me becoming an important friend to him, but not his only friend. He was an extremely gregarious fellow, with a great sense of humor. He grew up awkwardly, at least physically, with his legs being too long, and out of proportion with the rest of his body. He shot up so fast in 7th grade, and became so much taller than his peers, that he was given the nickname “Lurch”, a name from an extremely tall character in the 60’s TV series called “The Addams Family”. We all played pickup basketball, football, and baseball games every spring, summer, and fall together, as well as shared all of the normal sleep-overs, camping trips, bicycle rides, pool and ping-pong games and activities that others our age would engage in, through our freshman year in high school. Then, in his sophomore year, Randy got his first car, and that car opened up all sorts of new vistas for all of us.
Randy Olson 1970 yearbook He immediately found his first long-term girlfriend, a young woman by the name of Terri-Lynn Barr, a person that he met at the Portland Rose Festival. Terri had a friend named Sharon Denman, who befriended Tony Mecklem, another of our mutual pals, and they both had their first “almost adult” relationships starting at about the same time. I felt a bit left out during this period of time, though I did finally get a couple of friendships going with some girls in the same approximate North Portland area that Terri and Sharon lived in. Terri-Lynn had a step sister named Donelle, and one day Randy drove Donelle down to Portland, where I had my first chance to meet her. This was not a date (it was far from a date) but when I first laid eyes on Donelle, I was hooked. She was the most beautiful young woman I had ever met, gorgeous beyond all description, and she was incredibly intelligent, and sensitive, too. I had a sense that I had witnessed my future, when I first saw her. I did not see her again for several months, but she had left an indelible mark upon my soul, and I just could not forget her. Since I was still not driving at the time, there was no way to go up to meet with her on my own, so I just let all thoughts of re-connecting with her just slip away. She already had a boyfriend in Vancouver, Washington at Evergreen High School anyway, according to Randy, and I had such a low self esteem that I knew I could not compete for her affections. I stayed busy trying to cultivate a few friendships with young women who lived near my grandmother’s house, as the girls in our high school had NO INTEREST in me. These “friendships” ended with the ending of summer in 1971, so it was back to just hanging out with my male friends for my sophomore year. Well, Randy did bring Donelle down again our junior year (Rex Putnam High), and I made my move. Eventually, Donelle and I, and Randy and Terry, became couples that shared much time and love together. I did not always get along with Terry, which was a trend that was to continue through most of Randy’s relationships with women that were to follow. For some reason, Randy’s girlfriends always eventually saw me as some sort of impediment to their relationship with Randy. Perhaps the fact that some days I had already finished a six-pack of beer by 9:00 in the morning might have something to do with it. One time, in the summer of 1973, we were all camping at Short Sands Beach campground at the Oregon Coast, and Terry became so irritated with me that she pulled the tent stakes out of the tent that I was sleeping in. That is only one of many stories that show that I did not always have the best connections with Randy’s girlfriends, though there were a couple of times to follow, in later years, where my connections became a little bit too close with some of his ex-girlfriends, which brought me some additional learning experiences. I will fast-forward from 1973 to 1984, since this is the period of time characterized by my relationship with Donelle, which will be covered elsewhere. Randy and I stayed in contact during those years, and, in fact, he was one of my best men at my wedding to Donelle in 1979. I was to later move into the same apartment complex as Randy in 1981, which opened up a whole new world of choices for partying, meeting new people, and abusing drugs and alcohol at new levels of exuberance. I had started living with Randy Olson beginning in early 1984, until late fall of 1984, after walking away from Donelle in the fall of 1983. Randy was always there to offer a helping hand, and always counseled me to look ahead. He knew that I could find another direction for my life, and that it was important for me to enjoy the present moment as much as he did. Randy could never offer the sobriety direction, however, as he enjoyed his beer more than the next guy, and, I am sure, he could not envision a life without the support of the spirits of the beer keg. A typical evening of partying for Randy and I would start with each of us drinking the equivalent of eight to ten beers, and then going out on the town, and drinking eight or ten more hard liquor drinks. Sometimes we would be fueled by cocaine, depending on whether Gary, our friend and supplier, had anything good to offer. Randy and I had roamed the Cities of Beaverton and Portland for many hundreds of nights, enjoying the music, the people, the temporary friendships of others, and the support of a multitude of friends that Randy had developed over the years, including his many girlfriends. There were many evenings when the party did not end until nearly dawn, or later, especially on weekends. Randy found a great apartment near downtown Portland in February of 1984 We lived on the 22nd floor of the Panorama Tower, and it was at this home that Randy first brought Di Di (Diane McCloud), who had recently broken up with Gary, into our shared lives. Di Di was an incredibly sexy, yet spiritually and emotionally troubled, woman, who we had known from our friendship with our cocaine peddling friend, Gary Graham. She hung out with Randy for a few days, then lost interest in him. Randy and I continued to party together only on the weekends, because of my shift work. But, my partying got the better of me, and in April, I was placed in the Lovejoy Care Unit for thirty days, to recover from drug addiction and alcoholism. Upon my exit from the Care Unit, Di Di came back into my life. Somehow, we hooked up, early in the summer of 1984. I wrote my first love poem, when I became lovers with Diane (Di Di) McCloud. Di Di was quite the free spirit, as well as a drug addict, but she certainly had appealing qualities in addition to her troubles.. This most beautiful woman professed her love and willingness to stay connected with me, but we did not stay together for long, and parted ways about two weeks after starting our relationship.
Bruce with a 1984 look (Randy suggested the pure blond look for Bruce for the summer) Randy always stayed in contact with me throughout the years, and, in fact, I lived with him both after walking away from Donelle, and, then, two years later, after walking away from my relationship with Alcindia. Randy was always there to offer a helping hand, and though he felt bad about what had happened to me, always counseled me to look ahead and find another direction for my life, and to try to enjoy the present moment as much as he did. Randy could never offer the sobriety direction, however, as he enjoyed his beer as much as the next guy, and, I am sure, could not envision a life without the support of the spirits of the beer keg. Randy died alone, still a smoker and drinker, in 2013. He died at the same age that his father had died, who also drank and smoked.
Randy Olson (left-1955-2013) Dan Dietz (1955-1997). This is a wedding day photograph from September 17, 1979. Donelle Mae Flick (Paullin)
Mental health has become an issue of national concern. I share in that concern at the deepest level. Throughout my life I have witnessed the oppression of our citizenry, and our collective mental illness, and to this day it continues to distress me. The repression of powerful aspects of the basic human spirit is encouraged by our culture. Our political, religious, and economic enforcers, and those whose practice resides within the domain shared by all mental health professions, have found that they have limited options for dealing with the disease, resulting in feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, and even institutionalized indifference. On that down side, there are those within our culture who misunderstand or ignore, over-medicate, ostracize and marginalize, Isolate and imprison, abuse and punish, degrade and dispose, and just plain “give up on” the mentally ill. On the up side, there are many family members, therapists, psychologists, spiritual advisors, and psychiatrists who have given their lives, hearts, and souls to the care and healing of our mentally ill, and my heart sometimes breaks FOR ALL OF US, as we struggle to manage both our own lives, while also being of service to these fallen fellow members of our family and society. The psychiatric profession would do itself wonders to finally gain the necessary insight to understand the underlying message here, for we are all being impacted by our cultural INSANITY, and far too many American citizens will continue their own unconscious descent into darkness and mental illness. The mentally ill need better guidance, and our sick society needs better guidance, before it is too late for all of us. Chemicals can carry a disabled personality only so far, and then the river of spirit, with healing and insight, must carry the diseased human being the rest of the way to sanity. Yet, better than treatment is a plan for prevention, which a resistant society will not take the necessary measures to enact. Early in my recovery from alcoholism, in April of 1987, I volunteered at the Lovejoy Care Unit for mental illness and alcoholic recovery. I had spent a month there in 1984, and I wanted to give back to the institution, as well as offer some of my own experience, strength, and hope to those who sought recovery from their problems. Tony D had a psychology degree, with a focus on recovery issues, and was a volunteer there as well., He had substantially longer term sobriety than my own. Tony was responsible for assessing incoming patients, to help determine if they should be channeled to the alcoholic recovery wing, or to the mental illness wing. My role was to assist with Tony, as requested, and also to facilitate in-house AA meetings. One story that still stands out for me is Mary J., a young woman who passed through our office. Jane, the nurse, brought her in, needing a fast evaluation for Mary, to see where she could be helped best. Tony had his canned questions to determine drug/alcohol related illness, or non-addictive mental illness status. I noted that his questions appeared out-of-place, and irrelevant to this person, sensing there was a lot more to her “condition” than Tony’s superficial questions could address. Tony immediately judged her as “mentally ill”, without allowing for me to question Mary further. There was a part within me that had detected that Mary was hiding her addictions, and needed a little more time to reveal herself. I believed that I might help to protect her from the assault of unnecessary medications, if I was allowed to delve deeper into her history. Tony came down hard on me, and accused me of being more fucked up than the woman being evaluated, for even considering that he might be wrong in his assessment. My volunteer position immediately became vacant, and I did not wait for him to even say goodbye, as I headed for the door. I mention this story only because it points to a problem with professional bias. Each patient is trying to tell the world a secret, yet presently cannot reveal it. The mentally ill, like all semi-conscious human beings, do not yet have a safe container for their troubled feelings around whatever has traumatized their lives. It takes each patient a unique period of time to connect with the willingness to access the source of their pain and suffering. And it takes a specially trained listening ear to hear the broken person’s deepest meaning, as it can be buried among ancient pain relics from far distant places and times, and, in the extreme, disassociated personalities. Many patients in need of healing may well head for the door, figuratively or literally speaking, if there is a perception that they are not being listened to with compassion and empathy. That is the primary reason many never even reach a professional’s doorstep, for the isolation and fear informs the broken person that there is nobody alive who will understand them, and embrace them with love anyway. My first wife, Donelle Mae Flick Paullin, suffered from what the psychiatric professionals labeled as paranoid schizophrenia. She developed this disease near the end of her senior year in high school. We had known each other for two years at this point, having dated for the last eighteen months. I struggled mightily to both help and understand her, over the many years that I stayed in relationship with her. I gained insight not only into her “disease”, which also devolved into multiple personality disorder, but also into the very mind of mankind. Mankind suffers from aspects of this disease in a collective sense, and the oppressed and victimized, and most innocent and sensitive people in our society are most vulnerable to developing such mental illnesses. ALWAYS REMEMBER, our mentally ill population, including the addicts and the alcoholics, are society’s “canaries in the mine”. We will all die of spiritual asphyxiation, should we neglect to listen to the stories being told by our most vulnerable, and damaged, family members.
I will now develop Donelle’s story of mental illness, by delineating five phases of her life. These phases are fairly arbitrary, and are useful only for breaking the her story into descriptive segments. I have made references to other friends from my youth, I have editorialized in places, and I have revealed some dark secrets from within my own life, as well. “We are only as sick as our secrets” is an aphorisms frequently heard in recovery meetings. My present understanding is that We are as sick as our secrets, while being victimized by society’s secrets, as well. Phase 1: Donelle was never able to speak out against the abuse that she experienced throughout her life. Being born into a socially diseased family, where the mother’s narcissism and selfishness, and neglect of her young children, and the mother’s poor relationship choices that resulted from her own brokenness, led to the conditions of sexual abuse and assault against Donelle when she was but 6 years old. Her mother Marlene was a young bride, who married Donald Flick, in 1954. Don owned 2 sections of land in North Dakota, which he managed and leased out, as well as being a full time worker at the Camas Washington Crown Zellerbach paper mill. Don would work so much at the mill, that time at home was quite limited. Marlene would have parties at their home while he was away, and she would invite single men. There was always alcohol being served, and Marlene tended to promiscuity during that period of time. While she would be taking leave to the back bedroom with her latest “friend”, she would leave her young children vulnerable to whoever was left without a partner. Donelle, being about 6 years old during this difficult period of time, was selected and abused by Bud Barr, who was a child predator, heavy drinker, and all around bad attitude man. Bud would repeatedly abuse Donelle, and it was also later learned that he abused his other daughter from his previous marriage. Marlene and Don’s marriage collapsed, and they were divorced. But Marlene married the abuser Bud, and they moved in together near Five Corners in Vancouver, Washington. Donelle lived with her mother the majority of the time, due to the conditions of the divorce decree. Donelle had to face the threat of sexual attack from this criminal for the next ten years of her life, though her brothers told me that Bud was not allowed to be alone with Donelle, after Marlene and Bud moved in with each other. Yet, the damage was already done, and the little girl knew trauma intimately. Donelle’s mother, Marlene, divorced from Bud Barr in 1973, after she found a new boyfriend from her work at Parker Furniture in Vancouver. Tom was the new lover’s name, and he tolerated both Donelle, and me, for a little while. But after Donelle graduated, Marlene and Tom insisted that Donelle leave home, trying to foist her onto her father, who lived in Camas. Don Flick accepted Donelle conditionally for awhile. Don had remarried, to a woman named Alice, who also worked at the Camas Crown Zellerbach paper mill. Alice was kind of quiet, slow and dull, and was not too expressive, at least initially, of Donelle coming to live with them. But after eighteen months, Alice was ready to have children, and her patience with Donelle, and with me visiting them at their Camas home, ran out. Now, Donelle was still being treated for schizophrenia, and she remained quite brittle, psychologically. Donelle pleaded with her mother to let her stay at their home, and Marlene relented for a little while. But after three months, Marlene and Tom insisted that Donelle move out, and she had nowhere to go. Donelle’s family was ready to put her out on the street, literally, so in my need to protect Donelle, I was forced to move out of my parent’s home, and find residence in Vancouver, near where she still received psychiatric treatment at the Columbia River Mental Health Center. My parents were aghast, as was the rest of my family. How was I going to provide for myself, my wife, and continue with college? Phase 2: Donelle and I got married in September of 1979, and she was doing quite well at the time. Her mental illness was being well-managed by the latest anti-psychotic ‘miracle drugs’ by all appearances, and she was studying to be a Sous Chef at PCC Sylvania campus.. She was getting good reviews and grades there, and because she had stabilized so well, I finally felt comfortable enough to marry her, having delayed marriage since 1973 because of our tumultuous experiences around her variable mental health. My relationship with her family was usually civil, but I had serious issues with the poor family support Donelle had always been the recipient of. There was a time several months before our marriage that I wanted to hurt both Bud and Marlene very badly, for mistreating and abusing Donelle. Under the right set of conditions, I had the will, and the potential, to bring the greatest harm to Bud, but I never acted upon my disgust and hatred. I broke my collarbone fighting with her oldest brother Keith once, when I made confrontational statements against Marlene, and Keith felt obliged to defend her. Keith later apologized, and told me I had every right to be upset, but not until I wrestled with both him AND his wife, who had jumped me too. Our marriage started off well. Yet, one weekend near New Years, 1980 our step sister (Keith’s wife) had promised that Donelle could baby sit their two children over the weekend. Donelle loved their children, and felt honored and really looked forward to caring for her niece and nephew. One of her challenges was that she could not be a mother right now, and it hurt her knowing that we could not have any children until she showed at least two years of good mental health. Her sister-in-law reneged on the baby-sitting offer, making horribly erroneous judgements against Donelle, and broke her heart. Donelle had the most devastating nervous breakdown of her life three days later. By January of 1980, she had collapsed once again into another ‘nervous breakdown’ which included “hearing voices”, talking to herself, and generally experiencing the ravages of her paranoid schizophrenia. She would repeatedly exclaim: “I am controlled! I am controlled!” yet be incapable of communicating with me who or what was controlling her inside. I moved out of our shared apartment on Harrison St. in Milwaukie, and moved across the street into another apartment, so that I could stay in close contact with her. I needed to stay in other quarters because she was so disruptive because of her horrible disease. She would not sleep at night many times, and she would hear screams from the basement of the Milwaukie Police department, where she claimed they were torturing civilians, and she would cry out in anguish because of what she was “hearing”.. Dan Dietz was my best friend up to that point in time, and he was also the co-best man at our wedding. Dan had known Donelle almost as long as I did, and he knew all too well her limitations while she was in her “breakdown mode”. Dan was quite the drinker and party animal still, and Donelle, even in her diseased state, still liked to go out and listen to live music, and drink liberally. I demanded that Dan stay away from Donelle while she was in her breakdown phase, but he instead took her out one night, and they both drank to extreme drunkenness together. When I came over to Donelle’s place the next morning, I noted that her panties were on the floor, and that she was partially dressed, and still woozy on the couch. She told me that she awoke to Dan raping her after she had passed out. When I confronted Dan about it, He said that he did not remember anything, but I went ahead and broke my hand on a door that he stood in. I told him to leave, and i never saw Dan alive again. Donelle was to eventually receive new medications, which stabilized her enough for us to resume our marriage, which lasted for just two more years until early 1984. We divorced, and Donelle eventually became a frequently victimized homeless street person in Portland, Oregon Phase 3: I first met Sean Tucker in 1972, when he moved into our area from his mother’s home in Colorado. His father was estranged from his mother. His father was a manager with the Bureau Of Indian Affairs, and Sean had chosen to live with him. He drove a perfect four door baby blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, which was his distinctive chariot for most of the time that I knew him as a youth. Sean had long hair, and always wore it in a pony tail. We met at the Owen Sabin Occupational Skills Center, where I was learning Electrical Construction, and he was learning Printing. Sean was a handsome young man, and he really had an easy time with dating women. We both liked to smoke pot and to drink. But Sean’s favorite drink was wine, which I did not develop a real love for. We used to visit the Henry Endre’s Winery along Clackamas River Drive, and purchase half gallons of Mead, Rhubard, or whatever the seasonal wine choice was. The winery did not ask for age identification, so we took advantage of that laxity frequently. Sean became my best, best friend. We did so much together, and I looked forward to having adventures with him, all the way until he joined the Air Force in 1978. We took long drives out into the country, we played pinball at all of the local bowling alleys and arcades, we partied with all of the other local party animals on weekends, and we shared many family events and meals at my parents’ home. Sean did not include me in his family events, however. I had many drinking and using friends, but Sean seemed to exist in another realm for me, where spirit joined with love and friendship and shared values and meaning. We would listen to Alan Watts on Saturday night, and while “high” sometimes laugh and giggle together at Alan’s wisdom and insight, though we might catch an occasional AHA! from our listening efforts. We talked a lot about what God might be, and how we might encounter it in our journeys. Sean was not a church goer, nor was I, so we were not limited by structured understandings at that time. We would play with meditation sometimes, after hearing that a more prolonged “high” could be experienced through meditation than could be obtained through the use of drugs and alcohol. One time I was meditating in a full lotus position on the pool table in my parents’ home basement, and my mother saw me, and was surprised and shocked by what she witnessed. I was embarrassed by her discomfort with me, and shortly after that, ceased all attempts at meditation. Late in 1977, when Donelle was in the middle of another relapse into schizophrenia, Sean, Donelle, and I undertook a road trip through much of Oregon in my 1962 Buick Skylark. We traveled through much of the Oregon Coast, into Crater Lake, where we illegally camped along the lake rim, and Eastern Oregon around the Bend area. Sean and I had our normal complement of pot and alcohol, as well as a couple of doses of powerful psychedelics, and Donelle had her mental illness, and all of the sometimes bizarre manifestations of it. Sean had known my wife almost since the beginning of my relationship with her, and he was always a kind, supportive presence for her. But, Donelle’s symptoms were hard to understand, and we were both quite helpless and felt out of control in the face of her disease of the mind. One evening, we all sat around the campfire, and Donelle continued her sometimes bizarre behavior. She was hearing some sort of collection of voices, and she would talk to herself, and sometimes confuse what we were talking about with what was going on in the secrecy of her own mind. Sean and I would cast uncomfortable facial expressions to each other, and try to engage in conversation with each other solely, especially in the moments when Donelle became overly detached and unresponsive. In a moment of insight, I spoke of my helplessness in the face of managing Donelle’s disease and treatment, and the futility of all of my attempts at understanding her mental illness. I remembered that I had a form of LSD with me, which was a powerful mind expanding drug, also known for creating temporary symptoms resembling a form of mental illness. It was then that I wanted to take the drug, and see if it would provide any insights into Donelle’s mindset, as well as how I might manage my relationship with Donelle. Sean thought that I should give up on that thought, and stick to the pot and alcohol. But I insisted, and I took the psychedelic. I did not receive the desired illumination, but it showed that my deepest desire was to be of help to Donelle, as well as to try to understand the nature of mental illness, and how to bring a measure of healing to a most difficult life situation. Sean went into the Air Force in 1978, and married a woman named Natty who owned a bar in the Philippines. She was of Christian orientation, and Sean adopted the fundamentalist mentality through the course of his relationship with that woman. A deep, spiritual brotherhood was to be gradually, over many years fade into nothing but memories, as his work, family, and Christian orientation took him far, far away from the possibility of a shared heart and friendship. When I got married in 1979, my first choice for best man would have been Sean, had he been available. I settled on Dan Dietz and Randy Olson, my other best friends, but these two just did not share quite the same spirit with me as Sean did during this era of my life. Phase 4: In 1987, I visited Donelle at her apartment near Camas Washington. We had been divorced since 1984, but I still kept in touch with her on occasion, because of my concern for her. I had just gotten sober, and I wanted to make amends to her, as part of the program of working the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (total sobriety was to last for me for over 20 years, until I developed a pain killer addiction in 2007). This time, she was in the middle of a complete MPD (multiple personality disorder) type of nervous breakdown. She had candles lit throughout her apartment, and the setting was quite eerie. I sat down with her to talk, and I noted that she looked so young and innocent, and I was struck by the change in her appearance and countenance. As she spoke to me, I felt like I was witnessing a 6 or 7 year old girl, with the new persona that was now speaking through her. For some reason, I was inspired to give her feedback about her “six year old self” that I was witnessing. I told her that she was not responsible for the sexual abuse that she experienced from Bud (and perhaps one or two unnamed others during Marlene’s drunken soirees). I tried to be as forgiving and compassionate as my heart would allow to the naive, innocent child making its presentation before me. We both cried together, and my heart was broken, and I hurt like I had never before hurt as a human being. I can only imagine her own terror and fear around her own abuse at the hands of her elders. Later in this visit, another “personality” appeared. A calm, composed mature person then “incarnated” into Donelle. I asked who I was talking with. She told me that she was “God”, and proceeded to give me the wisest, most loving feedback that I had ever received as a human being up to that point in my life. “I have many faces, butyou have recognized mine, and you have reached the point of being able to accept beauty in your life. You have made peace with your past, but peace does not last forever. You have much work to do, but your work will have love guiding it, and protecting you.” As I was open to “God” at that point in my life, it was a miracle that “God” could use the vehicle of a damaged human being to talk with me. That is how “God” works sometimes. Looking at my history, I remained open to the revelations from the Mystery Who can say with certainty what reality truly is? Those who cling too tightly to what they think that they know, can unintentionally exclude a “whisper from God” that might be experienced and revealed in the newness of each moment, no matter what or who the source may be. Donelle’s reality was a most challenging one. I am distressed by the abuse that men over the course of her life heaped upon her. She was the most loving, kind person that I had every known, and she got bulldozed by our culture and community, and her diseased response to it. Nature, or nurture? Had Donelle been lovingly nurtured since birth through her adulthood, I would only hope that the disease would not have erupted. Traumatization of our most innocent cannot lead to happy outcomes. Over the many years that i knew her, i tried to be the best support person that I could be, but I was damaged goods, as well, so I failed in my mission, too. She deserved better that what I could give her, because I suffered under my own limitations of selfishness, addiction, and sense of personal powerlessness. With mental illness, we all tend to fail together as a family, as a culture, and as a human race. Those who can bring forgiveness, insight, compassion, and a sense of the Spirit are the true blessings for the sick within our society. I am not so sure about the ones who distribute the medications, however. They may help in the short term, but they tend to deliver a mixed bag of goods, that is for sure. The great gift we can give is a non-judgmental listening ear, and to keep our hearts open to the stories that are told. Phase 5 In 1992, I was still in communication with my ex-wife, Donelle. At this point, she was in the mental hospital at Fort Steilacoom, Washington. She was committed yet again in 1990, and was languishing in there when I visited her. This was the 3rd time I had visited her there. She always had a shopping list for me to fill, invariably with some types of makeup. She still liked to make herself look as pretty as possible, but the effects of the medication over the years on her had taken a horrible toll. She was twice her normal weight, and she could not keep her food down consistently. The most beautiful woman I had ever met was no longer that, and I was quite saddened, once again, to have to connect with her while she was so diseased. The medication was quite the “double edged sword”, and had been for all of her adult life. I don’t know what drug cocktails they were giving her this time, but they had the same conflicted end results. (I now have little respect for the drug industry, or for a system that prescribes these drugs to people, rather than treating people in a more holistic manner). This particular weekend, my wife Sharon was running in the annual Hood to Coast relay race. At this point in my life, I was not a runner, having hung up my running shoes in high school, and also having retired from recreational basketball in 1985 due to back problems. My only responsibility was to drive to Seaside to pick Sharon up at the end of her adventure, after my visit with Donelle. I was quite down after my visit, and the drive to Seaside from Ft. Steilacoom was very dark, and subdued. When I started to enter the outskirts of Seaside, without even seeing one H2C (Hoot To Coast) participant, I picked up on a new energy that just started “vibrating in the ethers”. I came to name this energy “TEAMWORK” after the fact, not knowing what else to call it. It was the energy of collective support, love, companionship, and goal achieving, and I had never known that as a youth, as I had never experienced that on grade or high school sports teams, of which I never qualified for. It was like a beautiful “spell” had come over me, and I was totally captured by it! Running through my life’s history, I seem to have stumbled over a greater Mystery. Donelle, and the mentally ill in general, suffer from extreme isolation, and are insulated from emotionally satisfying and connecting relationships. Donelle desired such connections intensely, yet did not have the capacity to make them happen due to the chaos and distress that her mental illness brought to her. A person will never know a greater heartbreak, than to know and love a mentally ill human being who cannot or will not respond to therapy, medication, and treatment. Yet, there are some who are considered extremely mentally ill, who have actually connected with the higher truth of life, creativity, self-expression, and spiritual awareness. It is a dangerous road to travel, the one where insanity and mental illness is one of the fog lines, and spiritual enlightenment is the other. To bounce back and forth between those lines creates a turbulence unknown to ninety-eight percent of humanity. Enlightenment does not come to the “fat and happy” people of our world. People who do not feel the pain of their own lives, and of their own poor choices, are not ripe for the experience of change. And, enlightenment is NOT a gentle process, merely attained through reading books, practicing affirmations, talking with our friendly therapists, and attending a few workshops and conferences. To find true enlightenment, a path through personal, and collective, insanity is REQUIRED. Watch out for the so-called ‘professionals’ of our culture, or those latest pseudo-spiritual gurus, who continue to try to oppress this movement, and repress those impulses within themselves, and others under their ‘spell’ or control. Many of our children are destined to journeys through abuse, darkness, isolation, abandonment, and insanity, because those are the qualities that permeate the minds of our unconscious parents. We can all quote from the Bible, Koran, Talmud, Bhagavad Gita, or the sayings of the “enlightened masters” such as the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, or more recently Krishnamurti, the Dalai Lama, OR ALL OTHERS, for the rest of eternity, but until we face ourselves and our diseased minds directly and honestly, NO TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE WILL OCCUR. The same is true for our country, and for our world. I will see you, and be with you for as long as necessary, on the “Dark Side Of The Moon”, until Light is brought to our world, and our children cease to be the victims of our oppressive, abusive natures.. Our children deserve much better love, care, and concern than the vast majority of the parents with culturally conditioned insanity can attempt to give. While incarnated into human form, with our poorly illuminated human minds, we can only witness the projections of our minds. All that we will ever see, unto whatever eternity that we can possibly conceive of, is our self, so the most important question for each day is “how will I see myself today?” The answer to that question determines whether I can see through the eyes of the truth of this moment, or just the limited eyes of the past. Our children pay a horrible price for our dark, ignorant projections of our selves, and our unfulfilled needs. Each child deserves ultimate respect and love, or they eventually become just another dead illusion of our culture’s aging, decaying, conditioned mind. The insight gained through mindful self-examination can erase the blocks to Love’s awareness, and imbue all life with a new meaning. And our children can be seen for the Spirit that they really are, and be allowed to grow into the magnificent beings that they were meant to be, without the detours to greatness that poor parenting introduces. Not everybody appears to have equal access to our infinite spiritual potentials. Had my first wife Donelle, a most beautiful human being, not been severely traumatized as a youth, a much different life experience might have occurred, and many, many people would have benefited by Donelle’s conscious presence in her own unique, spiritual experience of life, healing, and humanity. Traumatic experiences keep us chained to our launching pads. Healing is not so certain for those whose psychological damage is so profound. I have both witnessed and experienced great benefit from many people who have meditated upon their own unique illness and suffering, and we have had, literally, our trauma points reveal themselves to us, sometimes taking the form of actual ‘beings” who have taken residence within the body/mind of the sufferer. Most mentally ill people would benefit greatly from trauma therapy. I remain hopeful that all mentally ill people will find a measure of healing for themselves, once the conditions for the application of that miracle are better supported within our society, or are mastered by individual healers within consciousness, and integrated within our collective experience… The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning. – Nelson Mandela Donelle, and the mentally ill in general, suffer from extreme isolation, and are insulated from emotionally satisfying and connecting relationships. Donelle desired such connections intensely, yet did not have the capacity to make them happen due to the chaos and distress that her mental illness brought to her. A person will never know a greater heartbreak, than to know and love a mentally ill human being who cannot or will not respond to therapy, medication, and treatment. Yet, there are some who are considered extremely mentally ill, who have actually connected with the higher truth of life, creativity, self-expression, and spiritual awareness. It is a dangerous road to travel, the one where insanity and mental illness is one of the fog lines, and spiritual enlightenment is the other. To bounce back and forth between those lines creates a turbulence unknown to ninety-eight percent of humanity. The Underworld and the Search For Truth“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson The Sound of Silence (Original Version from 1964) (musical interlude) It remains no mystery to me as to why many people choose continued mental illness, addiction, and/or suicide over recovery and healing. Invisible wounds are the hardest to heal and the easiest to stay in denial about their life-threatening potentials. I was starting to see the end of my own road, with my out-of-control car crashing through all of the safety guardrails and continuing the race towards the finish line of my dead-end life. I knew that my problems could not be solved, at least not on my level, and I knew of no other levels that were accessible, or available to me. The time period of January of 1986, through March of 1987, was to become the time container for my descent into the furthest reaches of hell and darkness. I moved back in with Randy in December of 1985, after ending my relationship with Alcindia in a rather dramatic fashion, and I continued to stay with him until March of 1986. He had relocated into a smaller apartment in Beaverton, from the apartment that we had shared in 1984, after my divorce from my first wife, Donelle. (note: at this point, Donelle, though still quite mentally ill, was no longer living on the streets of Portland as a homeless person). On January 26th, 1986, after yet another night of fighting depression with the hops and yeast antidepressants, I woke up upon Randy’s living room couch at 8:45am, with him emerging from his bedroom, screaming to my clouded mind: “BRUCE, WAKE UP AND TURN ON THE TV!! THE CHALLENGER JUST EXPLODED!!!”
After watching that horrific event over and over, I had the crushing realization that my life was also over. Of course, to me, the explosion of the Challenger represented the final destruction of my childhood dreams of becoming a US Air Force pilot, and, ultimately, a NASA Astronaut. I saw mirrored in the Challenger disaster the total destruction of all of my hopes of realizing my life’s potential, and I made the decision right then and there to end it all, and fulfill a 15 year pledge that I had made to myself when I was just 15 years old. I had known since then that I was a hopeless alcoholic and drug addict, and if I could not shake the disease by age 30 (and if the disease itself had not already killed me) I would take matters into my own hands. I just held on as best that I could for the intervening years, and I tried my best to adapt to my self-destructive life situation. I never told another soul of my self-imposed 15 year “pull date”, should I fail at sobering up. I only needed to refill a prescription for some antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication that I already had secured from Dr. Dan Beavers, a psychiatrist that I had been seeing since 1985, and I was going to take them all at once, and call it a life. I went to the pharmacist, with the intention of seeing the deed completed immediately. While standing in line, I was to see Mike L. who also was at the same Fred Meyer pharmacy. Mike was Alcindia’s sister’s friend, who I had known through a few parties organized by Alcindia, and I started to share the smallest part of my story with him. He immediately shut me down, stating that he had no time for other people’s problems, which reaffirmed my understanding of the other people’s tendencies towards indifference to each other.. The pharmacist would not fill the prescriptions, however, even though I had one refill left on each one, and he told me that I needed to see the shrink again. I was not to be deterred. I scheduled an emergency visit to my psychiatrist for that afternoon. He perceived what might be happening within me, and he elicited a promise from me that I would not kill myself with the medication. Dr. Dan had just had another patient, Scott M. kill himself using the same medication that I had prescribed to me, and Dan was still grieving mightily, and could not tolerate another such event from a patient of his. So, he got the empty promise from me that I would not commit suicide. I immediately placed those pills under the front seat of my car, for easy access and immediate use, should the conditions of my life prove that it needed immediate termination. I never intended to take those pills as prescribed, instead telling myself that unless I found a reason to live, that I was leaving this planet, without a rocket ship. Thus, began my official “search for truth”. I called my old friend, Sean, who was still stationed in Madrid, Spain for the US Air Force. I was still suicidal, and told him that I had a fatal brain tumor, and that I was going to die soon. He offered for me to stay with him in Madrid for a while. The thought of a geographic change brought a little hope to me, so I secured my passport, and applied for my pension from the US Postal Service. I was going to take that money, and use it for airfare and support to get me to Spain.
I also filed for unemployment benefits, to help with my immediate income needs. I filed for bankruptcy, as I had no intention of meeting my financial obligations, which were immense. I had student loans, credit card debts, credit union loan debts, personal debts to my father, and other debts that totaled close to forty thousand dollars. I wanted the slate to be clear by the time I was gone, and bankruptcy seemed like the right process to engage in. The bankruptcy was to eventually become official on the exact day of my thirty-first birthday, November 20, 1986, the final day of the expiration year that I had long ago accepted to be my own. I happened to run into DiDi again, in early February. when I was driving back to Randy’s apartment. I saw her walking near her own apartment near the infamous Facet Tavern. I was see her again two weeks later at a bar in Beaverton, and we then decided to travel to the beach together to Seaside the next day to spend a few days together. She was somewhat distracted, and in the intervening eighteen months since I seen her last she had deteriorated in her appearance, looking a little worn. We traveled to Seaside together the following day, and I did not really know what to expect, other than there would probably be some more partying, and maybe some connecting on a more personal level. We drank at several local Seaside bars until late in the evening, until I no longer had any desire to drink anymore. I told her that I was going back to the hotel room, and left her the extra key. She stated that she wanted to keep the party going, and continued drinking and carrying on with some of the local folks. She returned to the hotel room at two in the morning, all excited about some new “friends” that she had made, and the great cocaine that they had shared together. She wanted to bring the two guys back into the hotel room to continue the party. “No thanks, this is where I take my leave!” I announced in a rather angry tone of voice. I grabbed my overnight bag, and headed towards home, even though I was drunk, almost to the point of being in a blackout. Somewhere along Highway 26, beyond the Elderberry Inn, I crashed my car into a guard rail, nearly going over a cliff in the process. I could not get out of the driver’s side door, it was so crashed in. I quickly got the car back onto the road, in my attempt to get home before any more trouble befell me. When I finally reached North Plains, I fell asleep at the wheel again, stepped on the accelerator, and rammed into the back of another car at freeway speeds. We both pulled over, and I was able to bribe the owner of the car not to call the police, since I was DRUNK, by writing him a check for $471, which was every last penny that I had in my checking account. My car was totaled, but somehow I was able to make it home, miraculously escaping death or a DUI citation. Di DI called me a month later, wanting to talk, and wanting a copy of the love poem that I had given her two years before. When we met, she told me that the poem was the most beautiful gift that anybody had ever given her, and that she was sorry that she did not find the spot in her life for me. We both cried, and parted company on rather sad terms. We were never to see each other again. She died one year later, when she was killed in a drunken driving related automobile wreck in Lake Oswego. I was to receive the retirement money by the end of March. By this time, my immersion into the Portland underworld was about to get underway. I felt under incredible obligation to repay my father what I owed to him, which was nearly $3,000. I no longer had enough money to give me sufficient support for a final trip to Spain, so I was stuck at home. I then began to travel the darkest, most desperate roads that our city had to offer. I needed every bit of my retirement money from working at the US Postal Service, where I had worked for close to ten years. This money supported me as I wandered through the city’s dark underbelly. I lived out of my 1977 Datsun 310, when I was not crashing in abandoned or empty homes with other homeless people, while connecting with all manners and types of damaged, and dangerous, people..
It is a funny thing, I was nearly dead, or so I thought, so I had little fear as I met new people and befriended them. Most were people who I never would have associated with in my more ordered past, but in this phase of my life, I did have a strong curiosity to get to know those who I would have avoided in the past. My only intention was to find the truth of living and of being , IF THERE WAS SUCH A THING, and I intuited that the Truth might be hidden somewhere in this darkness and unknown. I engaged will all types of individuals, and I had conversations with them about what life meant to them, and what they felt about God, Good, Evil, Darkness, Light, and human relationships. I carried my suicide drugs under my car seat, so that when the pain got too real again, I would make my departure from my world of little or no meaning, no peace of mind, and extreme personal suffering. My Datsun sedan was to become my main home for the next year, having eschewed all associations with family, and friends from my past. This vehicle served me well. I then began to undertake my own unique journey, which took me into Portland’s underworld community of drug manufacturing and distribution, homelessness, witnessing of crimes against self and other, associating with and befriending homeless teenage victims of sexual predators and child abuse, friendships with members of motorcycle gangs and their hit men, felons, murderers, and undercover federal agents, some of whom were still investigating the criminal tentacles remaining from the Stephen Kessler, Wayne Harsh era when in 1982 a prison guard was murdered during the famous prison escape from Rocky Butte Jail, and, also, when DEA records were stolen from a federal facility by the same, infamous, Stephen Kessler.. I ran with my new “friends”, and my only intention was to be the best person that I could be, while living out the final moments, days, or weeks of my life. My intention was to bring harm to no one, and to practice the 12 steps of AA, even while still avoiding recovery from drug addiction and alcoholism, which I had totally given up on ever successfully completing. My AA book, which I carried in my car wherever I went, would later come in handy, but not in the way Bill Wilson, the originator of AA, ever had in mind when he co-wrote it.. My first “realization” was that I needed to avoid sex. I committed to no new relationships with women, including no sexual encounters (pretty easy decision for me, as I was so beat up by my history of misadventures with women over the previous 14 years). My second “realization” was that I could no longer smoke pot, because it made me feel paranoid, and wanting to keep isolated, and in my need to find ‘truth”, those characteristics were counterproductive. Pot also dulled my emotions, intellect, resourcefulness, and curiosity, and I needed those qualities of being to survive in my new world, with all of the new people who I was to associate with. I made a commitment to hang with the type of people who, in the past, I never would have befriended. The way I saw it, the people who I had judged against may well have had some of the answers that I was searching for. In my mind, I was already a dead man walking, so past fear of society’s undesirables receded into the background, and I now considered myself a fellow traveler in darkness. I met well over a hundred new acquaintances over the next year. I spent hundreds of hours in conversations with all manners and types of emotionally disfigured human beings, the same human beings, that while living my life of “white middle class privilege”, I never would have associated with. Yet in my “final journey through life”, these oppressed, maligned, and misrepresented human beings became my best, and only friends. I was to later realize that the same spiritual disease that afflicted my underworld friends also terrorized my privileged white middle class friends, only the privileged had better ways to mask their disease from themselves and others. Methedrine, crank, speed, go-juice, or one of any number of other street names of the same street stimulant became my primary drug of choice, as it made me feel “social”, connected and conversational with all others. I would not sleep for up to one week at a time, while running with my peer group. The Punjab tavern on Foster Road became my main hub or center for social contact with many of the social branches of the tree of death that I was now climbing. Many a night, and after hours’ parties, were spent with a revolving group of my new friends there, with a main core group of people who had mutual interests. I don’t know how to tell the rest of this phase of the story, except for inserting a series of “vignettes”, where I am able to document and describe some of my major interactions with others. The following descriptions will, once again, appear fragmented and incomplete, which is a great descriptor for my life during this same period of time. I will begin my story of the underworld with Ralph. Ralph was from Scappoose, Oregon, or so he said. He was the center point for much underworld activity, and I quickly became his friend, and driver, through many underworld adventures. Through him I met drug chemists, motorcycle gang members, hit men, armed robbers, practicing felons in possession of firearms, prostitutes, homeless victims of child abuse, heroin addicts, and Steve (not his real name), who was an undercover federal agent, and who would figure strongly in my future release from personal HELL. Steve deserves a story devoted all to his self, as he saved my life when I stood at the final brink, early in March of 1987. I learned to really love Ralph, who was an incredibly damaged soul, and his excessive drug use would sometimes cause concern for me. I noticed that paranoia was creeping into his mind, and we would joke about it, but he became my first living example of the damage that excess meth use causes. He was one of my “protectors” in the underworld, and would redirect others who were tempted to bring harm to me, because I did not fit in too well at times with Portland’s dark underbelly, being too healthy looking, too educated, and too well spoken. My appearance would quickly change, however, as I lost 70 pounds, receding to 136 pounds by November. My big vocabulary betrayed me on several occasions, and I was counseled to use smaller words wherever possible. One time I was “busted” for using the word “magnanimous” while sitting at the bar, and I was told that people who use “quarter words” where a “nickel word” is enough were not welcome there. One quick little story about Ralph before I leave him for now. Once, I had all four tires of my car slashed while parked overnight for a party with Ralph and his minions. Ralph put the word out on the streets that this was unacceptable behavior, and whoever did the deed would answer to him personally, and to lay off of that car. I felt strangely safe, and protected, while with Ralph, even though there were continue threats against my safety and well-being. While jacking up my car for tire replacements, I had to use my AA book to help with extra elevation, which attracted some strange looks from those who already thought that I was a stranger in this strange land. Hey, I had finally found a constructive use for the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I actually felt a little pleased with myself. Ralph told me to “ditch that evil book”, and I kept it hidden from all sight from that point on, though to this day, I still own that very same book.
In his appreciation for me, Ralph also offered to me Sarah, his long-term girlfriend, who he had an “open relationship” with. But I had already eschewed all connections with women, other than platonic ones, because I feared that they would distract me from achieving my goal of either killing myself, or finding some new truth that would sustain my will to carry on. But I did share many adventures with Sarah. While hanging out with Sarah, we would occasionally visit incarcerated friends at the local jails. One day, she decided that we needed to visit Jake, who was being held in Clackamas County Jail until his transfer was completed to a federal penitentiary. I knew Jake on the outside, and he was always so kind and friendly towards me. I wanted so much to express my sorrow at his long-term imprisonment. It was on the way there that I learned that our “friend” was a “hit man” for a regional motorcycle gang that distributed drugs, and one ”hit” went horribly wrong for him, apparently. Sarah and I snorted some of the latest designer meth creations from our favorite local chemist just before arriving at the jail. It was just after that I had either a stroke, a prolonged seizure, or I was struck dumb, and speechless, for two full days, perhaps by the realization of the potential danger that I was in. When we met Jake at the reception area for the jail, all that would come out of my mouth were awkward grunts and squawks. Yes, the stress created by the meeting, coupled with the drug interactions, probably caused my loss of the ability to speak, thus contributing to the “conspiracy of silence” that my own drug use and addiction enabled. I cannot comment at length on Wayne Harsh (this is his real name) right now, as it would be inappropriate. I met Wayne one day while with Sarah, and he actually seemed to remember me from our childhood. The last time that I had seen Wayne was in the late 1970″s, when he was a Clackamas County Sheriff. I had seen him driving his police car, and I had thought, at the time, what a great coup it was for him to become a sheriff, based upon my limited understanding of who he was as a person. He and my childhood neighbor Jack Brownlee actually took a chainsaw to one of the fir trees supporting my tree house, causing it to fall in the woods. This was the same tree that I had fallen out of when I was in fifth grade, while waving to Jack’s younger sister, Marcia, who I could see in the next cul-de-sac from my elevated vantage point. Wayne and I talked briefly, yet I was not to befriend him under these conditions. I wish Wayne nothing but the best, and I remain unconvinced that he is the “bad person” that the press made him out to be, for supplying the getaway car to Stephen Kessler.. Hal was a tall, lanky fellow, who wore black rim glasses. He had always seemed to have a cigarette going, which was common with the crowd that I was now running with. Hal was the alternate transportation for Ralph, when I was unavailable. Hal lived in downtown Portland, near the Scientology office. We became friends for a while, and spent a lot of time processing information together about the insane people and situations that we were experiencing while hanging with Ralph and Sarah. There was never a dull moment, that was for sure. Hal was from a devout Catholic family background. His family was economically disadvantaged (POOR), and Hal had to work even while in high school to help his mother make ends meet financially. He had taken four years of college, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in forestry, and he was no dummy, that was for sure. He had a strong work ethic, when he was employable, but now he was suffering from the after effects of some sort of emotional breakdown. To support his income stream, he peddled speed at some of the local strip bars and taverns. It was a high risk proposition, as he had to make exchanges with some really damaged people, as well as potential exposure to informants and snitches. He tried to present a happy face, though whenever I saw him. I felt a strange, sad feeling. One time, while visiting him at his home, I saw a copy of his college degree from Oregon State University. His photograph was next to it, and it was only from six years previous. yet, he looked twenty-five years older now. I was a little surprised that I could feel my own heartbreak around the loss of human potential for somebody else, yet not even feel it for myself. From time to time, we would get involved in discussions about religion, philosophy, psychology, and society, in between snorting lines of our latest shipments. He was the best person for animated discussions, which were accentuated by the stimulants that we liberally used together. Hal loved to make extensive commentary about the Pope, or about the state of American Catholicism. I would usually just listen to him after he got all “fired up” because I just did not share the same sense of oppression that he experienced because of his religion while he was growing up. I certainly was oppressed, no doubt, but at this point I did not have a really good clue as to why I felt that way. He would always end his religious take downs by stating, unequivocally, that heaven and hell are right here on earth, nobody has to die to get there. Just look around, he would say, the evidence is obvious. “I carry heaven and hell in my own mind, Bruce. I don’t need the Church to tell me how to feel, behave, or believe, for they just add more layers of hell for me to sort through to find my own little piece of heaven”. “Hal, I don’t really follow the Christian religion, or Catholicism too much. I only know that I carry more than a nodding familiarity with Hell. Since I do not experience anything resembling heaven on earth, I guess that is why the church people hope that it exists after we die, because we sure aren’t drinking from its fountains right now!” “Bruce, there was a time when I occasionally knew peace of mind, and that is when I first knew that I did not need any God, any Jesus and his crucifix, or any Pope to lead me into my own greater good. But after walking through this world for the piece of time that I have, I have somehow lost all hope that it will return anytime soon. The damage in the world is becoming the damage in my own mind. I despair that the world will ever change, and I doubt that any change is even possible for myself” “Hal, wow, I actually might be your long-lost brother from another mother. I don’t have any answers. I stopped using pot because I wanted to see if it was preventing me from accessing important parts of myself. I use speed now, because it helps keep me engaged with the world in a more social way, yet I am no happier than I was before. I stopped using antidepressants last year, and now I am just riding this bucking bronco until I get tossed for the last time. I am not planning on picking myself up again, when I hit the dirt the next time.” Yes, our discussions never ended on a positive, life-affirming note, but how could they? Hal was to get arrested, and charged with drug distribution, when another “friend” of ours, Cowboy Ron, snitched on Hal to save his own, sorry ass. I won’t give Cowboy Ron the honor of much comment. No, I did not change Cowboy Ron’s name here. I only hope that he sees himself here someday, if he survived his own private hell. Cowboy Ron hurt a lot of people, including his wife and children, but that is another story, for another day. Sometimes the predator becomes the prey, and maybe that was what he was really looking for, in the end. People do bad things to hurt themselves, and other people sometimes just become collateral damage. I did not enter the underworld to judge anyone, including Cowboy Ron. I sometimes ran with the wolves, but this rabid dog challenged me in ways that made my flesh crawl. Robert was a convicted armed robber, who was recently released from prison in May of 1986. One night, fate gathered us both together to sit at the bar in the Punjab tavern. The bar was a long, semi-circular arc, which seated up to 14 souls. The bar had two pool tables, and several tables and booths where people could be comfortably seated. And, there were several video games, which drew my attention at “after hours’ parties” where I was usually quite wired, and needing extra entertainment. I was sitting at the bar yet again one evening, conversing with the owner Jack, who was to become another friend to me, when Robert slid in, and sat right next to me. He was dressed in a leather jacket, which was popular at that time, and fairly new jeans. He was about my age, 30 years old, and looked like he wanted to talk. Let us “tune in” to a conversation that we engaged in that evening: Robert: Hey, I have a plan for this seat, is it OK for me to sit next to you for while? Me: Why, of course! Where are you coming from, you appear to be already having a good time. Robert: Well, tonight is the night for good times, for sure. I just needed to get out, and get some “fresh air” and hook up with some old friends. I have been out of the neighborhood for a long time, and I am hoping to find some old friends. Me: Well, maybe a new friend might show up, say, right next to you this evening?! Robert: That would sure be nice. Me: My only requirements are that you are not a murderer, because if my life has to end tonight, I want it to be by my own hands (I said this half-jokingly) Robert: Hmm, I was just released from prison, having spent ten years behind bars for a pretty famous robbery committed in 1975. Me: Oh, really? You really made the news, eh? I think that your notoriety won’t get in the way. Robert: Umm, I killed a man while committing the robbery. Me: (gulping, I am feeling rather uncomfortable and stupid now, and my thoughts began racing). Robert, everybody deserves a second chance, let me buy you another beer, and let’s turn our attention to the present. Robert: Sounds good! We clink our glasses together, and each take a big drink. An ‘old friend’ of Robert’s comes up to the bar, and accompanies Robert into the restroom, leaving me at the bar. I ask the bartender for a shot of whiskey, which I quickly down, and then wash the bitter flavor away with a big drink of beer. Robert returns to the bar, sans his “old friend”. Me: Well, what is up for the rest of the evening? Robert: (slurring his words noticeably, and his eyes had lost their luster) I think that I will just hang out here for as long as I can, then move on down the road a piece. He then closes his eyes, and slumps down, face onto the bar. Then, he falls off of the chair, and tries to right himself on the floor. Me: Bartender, I think that my friend here just got sick, should we call an ambulance? Jack: Heck no, Bruce, he is right where he wants to be. If you could, please help him over to a booth in the corner where he can try to get his shit back together. Me: Jack, did he just shoot heroin, or something? Why would he do that to himself? I just don’t understand, because I want and need to talk to people now, and that would be so counterproductive. Jack: Bruce, SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST WAITING FOR A BETTER DAY. Today is not the better day for Robert, and it may never arrive for him. The Needle And The Damage Done, by Neil Young https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0t0EW6z8a0 Me: Wow, thanks for that, Jack, I did not really understand, but I think that I do now. Let me get him out of view before we all get into trouble. The Conspiracy Of Silence claims yet another human being. The heroin completely shut him down to his humanity, and left me wondering what my own fate might be,. This story goes on, through an almost endless array of struggling, spiritually darkened humanity. I will continue this story with many other human beings that I had the privilege, honor, and distress to meet and converse with. Each one of them helped me to find the next step on my own path to recovery, and to finally embracing the path to truth and love within my own heart. Dorothy was a young woman in her early 20’s, who had two young children. I was invited over to her house one evening, and was privileged to have a fairly intense discussion with her about our life’s issues. She was a heroin user, becoming dominated by the needs to use, and she was also “shadowed” by a former lover, Jakob, who was incarcerated in jail at the time of our connection. While I was there, I noted her “scraping” used spoons, so that she could get together enough heroin residues to give her a fix. Her supply was out, and she was waiting for her next delivery, so things were getting a little “tense” for her We spoke of what we thought the real powers of this world were, and it got a little interesting. She did not believe in the power of “God” or “Jesus”, having long eschewed any connection with such concepts. She lived for the moment, and knew all too well that “shit happened” regardless of how “good” or “bad” a person was. She believed that her criminal boyfriend, Jakob, had extraordinary powers, and could “astrally project himself” out of prison at night. As long as she had company (friends, or heroin), Jakob could not materialize into her home, and threaten her and dominate her, as he did when he was not imprisoned. “There is only darkness, Bruce, and all of the people who attempt to use it. Those who use to help others are considered “good people” yet, these same people will turn against others in a heartbeat, should the need arise. Good people do not really exist, just fucked-up people who occasionally make helpful choices for themselves or, inadvertently, for others, usually while they are really just trying to selfishly take care of themselves”. “Dorothy, I believe that we all have both energies, and it may only be that if we stumble upon the right understanding, we can act more from a not-so-dark, not so selfish position, and occasionally help ourselves and each other to have better lives” “Well, how much time and energy do you put into having a better understanding of yourself, and being more helpful to others?” “Good point, Dorothy. But I actually try to look at the forces of darkness within myself, to see where I might also be negatively impacting myself and others through a lifetime of not fearlessly confronting those energies. I have no idea what will be revealed, if anything, if I ever successfully overcome my own darkness. I continue to search for the reasons to stay around here, and see if there is any real value to staying alive. My old way of seeing life sure has not brought any lasting happiness or social responsibility to me. If there is no Truth to stumble upon to keep me going, then I may as well allow the darkness that I already know to finish swallowing me up, and take me away from my own suffering”. “Heroin is quite helpful for me, Bruce, have you considered trying it? My supplier will be here shortly, and I can give you a little bit.” “Dorothy, thanks for talking with me, and making the offer to share with me, but I have to return to some other business that I am attending to, so time for me to leave”. My search for Truth would have ended that day, had I stuck around Dorothy’s home. I was only minimally tempted to try heroin that day, as I felt quite disturbed by the darkness that I felt coming through Dorothy. I never saw her again. Steve belongs in a special story all to himself, but I will include him here because he had ultimate importance in my “search for truth”. I met Steve at the same time that I met Ralph. Steve was a very intelligent, well-dressed man, about 8 years older than me. He drove a nice 1982 Chevrolet, which somebody had tricked out (I did not think that he did it, however). Shortly after becoming a “peripheral person” in our rotating community of characters, his car became impounded by the police, and he could not get it released back into his care (or so he said). That is where I first became “suspicious” of Steve, because I sensed that he was looking for somebody who might have an “inside track” into our Portland Police Department, and its inner workings. Steve and I shared a lot of time together over the 12 months that I wandered over the underworld landscape. I could always count on him to give me good insight into others, though he held the truths about himself close to his chest. He became a ‘big brother” to me, at times, and would not spare me criticism, if I appeared out-of-place, or out of touch. He would criticize Ralph’s excessive drug use, all the while using extremely small amounts of the same stuff, which he poured from a very tiny vile. He initially could not understand why I thought it necessary to be where I was, either, though he was the only person that I ever told that I was on a “search for truth”, while continuing to use speed, and alcohol. I did not understand, at the time, how he could “get by” with so little use of drugs. From time to time, Steve would seem to “test” me, by exposing me to new situations and people who required some sort of help or intervention. Through Steve I met Georgette, a 15-year-old runaway girl, who was escaping a sexually abusive father by being homeless in the southeast Portland area. She was hanging out with another sexually abused homeless young man, named Greg, who was three years her senior, and already skilled in the art and science of locating abandoned or temporarily vacated homes, for their own temporary residences. Greg was always accompanied by five to ten other “friends”, who would be his assistants in illicitly securing property or goods for resale, and, I was to learn, help distribute freshly manufactured methamphetamine. Greg, I would learn, was also about to “peddle” Georgette, for added income. Georgette was a tiny young woman, no more than five foot two inches, and ninety-five pounds. When I first met her, I noted her innocence, and my heart almost broke, and I felt helpless, though I wanted so much to protect her from her fate. She had developed “pink eye”, and I saw an opportunity to break her free from this group of itinerant thieves and junkies. I had her grab her meager belongings, and I placed her in my car, and we talked for hours. She was the younger sister, or daughter that I never had, and I wanted to keep her safe. I finally whisked her away from the gang, and drove her to Outside In, where she could get necessary medical help and counseling. I had recently received a retirement payout from my 10 years working at the Postal Service, and so I had some extra money, which I stuffed into her pocket. I told her, in no uncertain terms, that I never wanted to see her again with her “friends”, or there would be serious hell to pay. I never saw her again, though a tape recorded message of my conversation with her would mysteriously show up a few days later. One evening the next week, I was sitting at the bar in the Punjab tavern, which was my second home, talking with Jack and a couple of acquaintances when a cassette tape was thrust across the floor, originating from a table on the other side of the tavern. There were four men seated at the table, and none would maintain eye contact with me when I looked their way. I got off of my bar stool, leaned over and picked up the cassette tape, and looked at it with Jack and the two men sitting on either side of me. We discussed what it might be, and none of us wanted to confront the table where the tape originated from, for we all had our own paranoia and suspicions of strangers. Jack walked to the back of the bar, and grabbed a cassette recorder, and inserted the tape into the player. My voice started speaking from the machine, and a fear took over me like I had never felt before. When I saw what the subject matter was about, I asked Jack to please stop playing the tape, as it was making me extremely uncomfortable. I asked Jack for the tape, which he gave to me. The other people at the bar started regarding me suspiciously, as well, and all that I could offer to the listeners was that Georgette must have been miked, and that somebody in the bar wanted to “out me” for having befriended her. Greg (Georgette’s ‘handler’) was to later engage me, and asked to speak to me in private. “Bruce, I hear that you might be able to help in my situation. I have a friend who has set up a trailer near 82nd avenue, and we can hang out there, and use it as our base of operations” “Greg, I am not sure what you are asking of me. My time is quickly running out, I am afraid, and whatever “help” that you are seeking, I probably do have sufficient assets to draw from”. “Well, we have a pretty good operation going right now. I am getting lots of merchandise stockpiled, and, in fact, we have filled an entire basement near 52nd avenue. Before you say no to anything, let’s go over and check it out”. “OK, but I can’t be tied down to any one place, any one situation, or any one person. I certainly do not have any interest in buying or selling stolen items. I will go over with you and have a look at the house, though.” We drove over together to the home on Duke Ave. near Brentwood City Park in my Datsun 310, talking about a wide range of subjects. Greg appeared to be only about 17 years old, yet he told me that he had been on the street for over six years. I could tell that he was “feeling me out”, asking me many leading questions. My paranoia, which was a gradually increasing inner experience for me over the last several weeks, was barking at me, the closer we got to the safe house. As we entered the driveway to the home, Greg then asked me “Bruce, you sure don’t talk like anybody that I have ever met. You talk about things that I don’t like to think about, or would normally not even consider. You are so different, and you sound a little strange at times, I think. I think that we should be partners. I can tell that you do not like women by the way you have ignored all the girls we hang out with, and you should know that I have little attraction for women, as well. I only feel a strong bond to men”. I think that I then swallowed a golf ball sized lump in my throat “Greg, I don’t think that you understand. I am not sexually attracted to ANYBODY. I want to meet people and make friends with no ties, sexual or otherwise to anyone. I have to travel light, because I am going to be leaving very soon.” “I have heard you say that before. Where the hell do you think that you are going to go”? “I got a passport earlier this year, with the intent to travel to Spain, to start a new life, or maybe to die. I think that my journey will not be taking me too far from home now, though”. “I don’t understand. Why do you talk of death? Are you dying?” “I am really not sure what I mean anymore. I know that something feels like it is dying inside of me. I won’t know until more time passes, and I meet more people. I will then know for sure what I mean” “You don’t make any sense. Maybe when you see what we have in the basement, it will be easier to make up your mind whether to stay or to go”. We exited the car, and walked up to the front door together. Greg knocked on the door, and a nearly fifty year old woman of unkempt appearance answered. “Greg, come on it! I have missed you! Umm, I have not been able to organize everything yet.”“Martha, this is Bruce. He is OK, don’t be afraid of him, I’ve known him forever Don’t worry about the mess, we can take care of that later” There was some more small talk, and then we walked downstairs. Martha had merchandise almost stacked to the ceiling covering almost the entire basement, of which I estimated it was 1500 square feet. There were brand new boxes of retail merchandise, as well as some “used” items of very good condition. It was like an unofficial hardware section of Home Depot, and the clothing section of Fred Meyer. I saw chain saws, table saws, drill motors, hand guns, shotguns, military style guns like an HK 91, toys, kitchen pots and pans, appliances, car parts, lawn mowers, bicycles, clothes, shoes, and just about anything one could imagine. We walked into a closed off section of the basement, with Martha becoming quiet, and almost reverential. “I want to show you how the lab is progressing. Dieter has made great progress, and has secured all of the hardware and chemicals necessary to get started. We have not been able to get Jeff bailed out of jail yet, so we may have to kidnap one of our other chemists for a week to run a test batch or two” She opened the door, and there were three tables filled with Erlenmeyer flasks, beakers of various sizes, Bunson burners, propane tanks and fittings, glass cookware, coffee filters, some sort of automatic stirring or mixing device, stainless steel pressure cookers, and a host of other tools that I did not immediately recognize, even though I had taken chemistry lab several years before. There were also several Mason jars and mayonnaise jars filled with substances of various colors, some of which were liquid in nature. I do not remember if they had made provisions for ventilation, though there was a window that looked north located near the ceiling that would have been adequate. I made sure not to offer up to them the fact that I had some background in chemistry, as the thought of being trapped in a lab as an assistant for a week or more sounded a bit like imprisonment to me, no matter how much free drugs might be made available to me. “Well, let’s smoke a joint, and celebrate the good fortune that we are about to have!” Martha then pulled out a stick and lit it up. When it got to me, I declined. “Aren’t you a partaker of the wacky tobacky?” “Not today. I’ll stick to my crank now. I need to keep my head clear, and the joint just gets in the way of what I am trying to do”. “I don’t get it. Pot is the best stress relief available, save for the brown or black holiday”. “I am trying to figure some things out. It is hard for me to function at the level I need to while high on pot”. “Are you sure you are OK?” “Oh yes. By the way, I could use a line of crystal, can you send me a life line?” “Now you are talking! Let’s get the party started.” And with this group, another one week run starts, with no sleep, little food, and too much conversation. I was never quite sure what to make of Martha. I never saw her again. Greg lost interest in me, and found himself a “friend” to hang out with him at his trailer. I saw him from time to time after that. He looked worse and worse every time that I saw him, and I think that he reflected back to me my own disease and disfigurement. I continued an incredible downward spiral into addiction, and Steve commented to me, in November, how I looked like I could be the “Aids Poster Boy” because I had become so slight of figure, and so unhealthy looking. I had started “hearing voices”, and I had become paranoid, as well. Yet, I did not let on to others that I had become so disfigured internally, though the signs were starting to appear. I “heard” that there was a major undercover operation active in Portland, and that dozens of criminal indictments were immanent. In reality, that was partially the truth, yet I should not have known that, let alone warn a few others of those “facts”. Steve wanted to know how I knew of these indictments, and I would not tell him. I noted that people were tailing me almost all of the time now, and that some of my conversations were being recorded in my car. One day I tore my car apart, searching for the transmitter, or the recorder. I had two different people stop by, and try to interrupt me from the search, which only added to my own paranoia. I did not locate the transmitter, but I really began to fuck with any listeners’ mind, by talking dark shit, and renaming myself “the Wild Card”. I let my world know, in no uncertain terms, that I was no longer aligned with anyone, as I was on my way to my own death. I will fast forward through three months more of Hell. My main core group had collapsed, with Ralph relocating himself to protect himself. I had lost touch with Steve, my last connection with sanity. I was running with a new group, and most were intravenous drug users. I met Doctor Dave, a short, friendly man, with a severely pockmarked face, a man who also recently was released from jail. He introduced me to intravenous drug use. He ever so carefully shot me up with speed, for my first time of ever using the needle, and most subsequent times, as well. I could not shoot up by myself, as I feared needles so much. But the incredible rush I received from intravenous drug use made me want to use this hastened path to Death frequently for the final two months of my drug abusing life. I will share a story of Frank, and Steve’s providential return to my life. Another house had been commandeered near the intersection of Holgate and McLoughlin Blvd, and that became our new hangout. Our new leader, Frank, organized a big party, and we had over 70 people show up. This was in early March of 1987, and I was ready for my swan song. My mental health was irreparably damaged, and my “search for truth” had apparently only uncovered a hastened path to Death for me. Frank had just secured a fresh batch of speed, and heroin (which I had never used before), and he was mixing up his renowned “witches brew”, and invited me to join him. Sure, why not? I had nothing to lose, but a life that was already dead. I started to accompany Frank to an upstairs room, when I spotted Steve talking with a healthy looking 30-year-old woman, a person that I might have been attracted to, had i been healthy. I overheard her calling his name, and it was NOT Steve. “Steve” saw that I heard his real name, and he then knew that I knew. Steve took me aside, and tried to explain. I instead stopped him, and told him that I had suspected him all along of being undercover. I also told him that his secret was safe with me. I told him my journey was about to end, that I was going upstairs with Frank, and if I survived that experience, I was going to return to my car, and grab the pills under my front seat, and finish business, once and for all. Yes, I was finished. “Steve” grabbed my arm, excused himself from his ‘girlfriend’, and took me outside to his car. We then drove to my father’s house, and “Steve” then commanded to me “Bruce, I can no longer keep you protected and safe. Your search for truth has to end within this dangerous world. Now your real search for truth must begin, starting with your relationship with your father. I never want to see you again, but believe me, I am going to try to help you, any way I can. You deserve so much better of a life than you have given to yourself.” We arrived at my father’s house, and he let me out. He and his partner drove my car to my dad’s house later that evening, and I never saw him again. The pills had disappeared from under the driver’s seat, as well. There was no way that I was going to go back to Dr. Beavers, as I was too ashamed to have anybody see me in the state that I was in. Note 1: One year later, he called me, to check and see how I was doing. I was a year clean and sober, and, in tears, I gushed with my love and gratitude for “Steve”. He was the best friend that I never knew I had. Randy Olson was to return to my life, yet again. I was still a mess, strung out from months of drug abuse, alcoholism, gambling, and I still only weighed a mere 135 pounds. My face was all broke out, and I had the most horrific shakes, and I “heard voices”. I had experienced convulsions several times.. I was still drinking, but I was no longer using drugs very much. I invited Randy Olson over on March 13 of 1987. He came over, and he, and his girlfriend and I proceeded to down an inordinate amount of my fathers’ booze and wine. My parents were still “snow birding” in Arizona, and would not be home until the end of the month, so I was still able to keep my dysfunctional momentum going. Well, after partying with Randy until about 10:00 PM, Randy had to go home, so I was left alone with my horrible problems. HURT, Sung by Johnny Cash written by Nine Inch Nails https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt1Pwfnh5pc It was then that I entered into a blackout, and picked up one of my father’s loaded guns, and drove, quite drunk, to Brock’s home in the Milwaukie area. This person was an associate of one of the drug chemists in the underworld culture that I had just emerged from. I have no idea why I went down there, but I awoke from my blackout when the gun in my lap discharged, shooting a hole in the front door of his apartment. He had two sleeping children on one room, and a sleeping wife in another room, and I was fortunate to have not brought harm to anyone. He then brought a hypodermic needle out, and injected me with crank/speed (I still would not inject myself.) I immediately snapped out of my drunkenness, and proceeded to talk with this guy for 24 hours. I got one more injection, and then clarity finally hit me. Literally, a light went on in my mind, and I saw the utter insanity of the person I was with, and the insanity of my life. I stood up, laughed at the guy, called him, and myself, nuts, and walked out of the front door, got into my car, and drove back to my parents’ home. I was changed, though I just didn’t know how much at the time. As I had only five dollars left to my name, I needed to make a decision. Either I needed to buy more beer and cigarettes, or I needed to get some gasoline for my car, and go visit my grandparents in north Portland. I kept the five dollars, and drove to family. My grandparents were happy to see me, but were concerned for my appearance. I claimed to have the flu, and grandmother nursed me back to some semblance of health over the next five days, while I detoxified and had withdrawals from cessation of cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, all at the same time. I returned home to my parents’ home after a week at the grandparents. It is another funny thing, two days later, out of the blue, Craig Salter called me, for the first connection in three years (he was a childhood friend that both Randy and I had known since the 5th grade, and the same person that I chose to have my relapse with after my Care Unit experience), and asked me if I wanted to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with him. He was required to attend meetings due to the conditions of the court that had prosecuted him for a DUI. Of course, Craig was not an alcoholic; at least he thought that he wasn’t. I knew that he was, though. I, in fact, was the person that got him drunk the first time in High School, when Craig was 17 years old. I actually may have started him on his own horrific decline into his own alcoholism, just like Randy Olson had started me on my first drug, which was marijuana, and may have indirectly contributed to my own eventual decline. Anyway, I went to that AA meeting, because the way I figured it, since God was such a big part of AA, and since I was searching for TRUTH, there must be a relationship between those two forces, and AA must have an angle on that. I proceeded to attend over 270 meetings in my first 90 days, since I had nothing else to do, having lost my job, and, basically, my life, to my disease. Craig eventually stopped going to meetings, after his court ordered attendance ended. I continued to attend them, feeling like I had finally found my spiritual home. I did fall into a temporary trap at the HInson Baptist Church, thinking that my personal TRUTH must somehow be hidden in the church system, and that I could unearth some more by attending church, and being baptized. I then literally spent thousands of hours over the next several years in AA meetings, communication, investigation, reading, writing, meditation, associating with all types and manners of people, and, eventually, healing my relationship with my parents (especially my father). I was enlightened by a new teacher, a recovering alcoholic by the name of Jack Boland, who had released to the world many series of tapes on recovery and spirituality. I was given one of his tape series of recovery by a co-worker at the Fred Meyer warehouse, John Johnson, of whom I will be eternally grateful to, on May 16, 1987. I then listened to these tapes over and over, during the Memorial Day weekend, and something miraculous happened afterwards, probably as a result of my openness to the experience brought about by listening to these tapes, and practicing some simple steps from the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous Alcoholic Anonymous Twelve Steps 1). We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable. 2). Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3). Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. 4). Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. 5). Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. 6). Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. 7). Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. 8). Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. 9). Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. 10). Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. 11). Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. 12). Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. My search for Truth, which had taken me through the darkest regions of hell, was about to give me wings, and enable me to fly to the sun, and beyond. Yet, the prison guard with one of the primary keys to release me from my own spiritual imprisonment was my own unhealed relationship with my father. Overcoming a lifetime of oppression and control by others is no easy task. It also must be done clean and sober, for the true depth and healing of the experience to permanently take hold. I began a new relationship with my father, starting with my new-found sobriety. The real fruitage of healing from the relationship was not to become apparent until many, many years later. That is another story, for later. Note: Stephen Kessler was recently denied parole, and will spend the rest of his life in prison. He was regarded as the most dangerous criminal ever encountered, by several federal agents. Wayne Harsh was a friend of my neighbor while I grew up near Rex Putnam High School, and he eventually became a Clackamas County Sheriff prior to his own fall. We knew of each other, and he was well-known for his connections with automobiles, and, in fact, either intentionally or inadvertently supplied the getaway vehicle to Stephen Kessler during his prison escape. Coincidentally, I was roommates with Tom Cravens in the Physicians and Surgeons Hospital Care Unit in 1984, when we both sought sobriety (Tom was successful, but I was not). Tom was one of six co-conspirators with Stephen Kessler during the 1968 prison riot, where a lot of the Oregon State Prison in Salem was burnt down,, and shame was brought to our Oregon Governor, Tom McCall. While growing up into the beast that he became, Stephen Kessler also shared the same school as my present wife, Sharon White, and, in fact, beat up a teacher while in the same classroom that he shared with my wife (end note)
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