Chapter 13 – Damaged: High School, Friends, College, Employment, and Beyond

Dan 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.

Dan Dietz 1970 yearbook photo

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.

Bruce Chapman (lower left), Tony Mecklem, Randy Olson, and myself, clockwise

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.

Dan Dietz (left), Tom, Pam’s boyfriend from the US Forest Service, at my first wedding party

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 during my summer break between my sophomore and junior years.  This was the same office that my father worked out of, and it certainly was not even close to being a dream job.  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.

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. 

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 Normal 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.

Alcindia and Bruce at Mom and Dad’s 1984 Christmas

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.

1985 Bruce, Alcindia standing, Baby sitting. Yes, those are my “church clothes”, though we were definitely NOT going to church that night!

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.

Alcindia on fateful camping trip to Bend of July 4, 1985

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

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.

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. 

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.

Donelle Mae Flick (Paullin)

My first wife, Donelle Mae Flick Paullin, suffered from what psychiatric professionals labeled as paranoid schizophrenia. I struggled mightily to help, and to 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.

Dan 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.

Dan Dietz 1970 yearbook photo

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.

Bruce Chapman (lower left), Tony Mecklem, Randy Olson, and myself, clockwise

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.

Dan Dietz (left), Tom, Pam’s boyfriend from the US Forest Service, at my first wedding party

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 during my summer break between my sophomore and junior years.  This was the same office that my father worked out of, and it certainly was not even close to being a dream job.  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.

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. 

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 Normal 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.

Alcindia and Bruce at Mom and Dad’s 1984 Christmas

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.

1985 Bruce, Alcindia standing, Baby sitting. Yes, those are my “church clothes”, though we were definitely NOT going to church that night!

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.

Alcindia on fateful camping trip to Bend of July 4, 1985

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