Too close to the bone

This first story somewhat overlaps all the other Texas-related accounts in chronological terms, as it describes the circumstances leading to (and/or surrounding) everything else in the book.

Fools and their adventures

College was letting out for the summer. Steve had suggested we might all have a grand time by getting construction jobs somewhere down south.

(all of us being financially poor college students meant we typically worked full-time jobs of some sort any time we weren't in school-- and often part-time jobs even when we were attending class; only some months before this we'd all traveled to Louisiana and worked construction jobs there, during the month-long Christmas break)

As Steve was literally our fun and adventure guru, we naturally seconded the motion, and that was that.

Our little convoy consisted of my car Shadowfast, Will's 1970 Mustang, and Steve in what I believe was a 1968 Mercury Monterey belonging to his parents (I can't recall the status of Steve's personal vehicle(s) at the time).

We were all fairly packed to the gills even before Lloyd showed up with his huge CRT TV set and golf clubs, plus suitcases.

Lloyd was a fraternity brother of Steve's and Will's, and a huge Elvis fan. At school he'd entertained us with a surprisingly good impersonation act, and seemed easy to get along with.

Apparently Lloyd had heard we were headed for an exotic faraway locale to get some sort of exciting jobs, and persuaded Steve and Will to bring him along.

To give you an example of Lloyd's naiveté in all this, he showed up at the trip's start with something like a 19 inch TV set and a bag of golf clubs. He didn't own a car, so the rest of us had to divvy his stuff up to carry in our own vehicles. His TV ended up on Shadowfast's spacious rear shelf. I can't recall who carried the golf set. Maybe Shadow there too.

Even Will, Steve, and I may have been packing more than we needed for living in a strange land a thousand miles from home for three months. But again, inexperience was playing a big role here.

I may have been the most over-equipped of all, considering all the extra gear I deemed necessary to support Shadow in his supercar role.

At least some portions of the drive south may have had much in common with an early Cheech and Chong comedy film. For Steve in those days tried his best to make everybody around him feel like life was one big never-ending party. That was likely one reason he was so popular with practically everyone.

But there was more to the light-hearted and hedonistic attitude than Steve's influence, of course. It was also a celebration of being free from school for a while. Plus, a continuation of some bad habits from Steve's, Will's, and Lloyd's campus fraternity. And maybe some anticipation of brand new good times to come from this-- our most long distance adventure yet.

But we were being excessively optimistic there, as well as acting like amnesiacs in regards to our past adventures, many of which had been hair-raising at best (and horrific at worst).

This trip to Texas would pretty much fit that same mold. We just preferred to ignore the probabilities.

I seem to recall we first drove to Baton Rouge Louisiana (where Steve and Will's parents were living at the time), due to their father being a construction supervisor there. We may have been hoping to get hired on again, since we'd all (all of us but Lloyd) worked in Baton Rouge that way the previous Christmas vacation.

But their father advised us to go west to the vicinity of Houston Texas instead. So we did.

I was a bit surprised by this. As I'd raced some of Steve's fraternity brothers to and from Houston not long before, in a combination race and scavenger hunt.

That trip hadn't really allowed me to learn much about Houston or Texas, since all I'd done was basically go to the Houston space center there and turn around. To my mind, doing that didn't truly qualify as a visit to Texas; but maybe this second trip would.

Although I find it hard to believe now, I actually allowed Lloyd to drive Shadowfast at one point on the long journey. I believe during the Mississippi leg. Utterly un-chaperoned, with me riding in one of the other cars. It proved scary, as although he was a licensed driver, he was woefully inexperienced in the cockpit. And Shadow was an awful lot of car to hand over to just anyone. And lastly, let us not forget the huge temptation all that power under the right foot has for young American males.

Fortunately his turn at the wheel happened far from any metropolitan area, on an almost perfectly straight stretch of interstate at least tens (if not hundreds) of miles long. And there wasn't a lot of other traffic for long spans at a time. So it was about the safest possible place for me to turn him loose.

He blasted about all over the place in Shadow, weaving in and out among cars, playing like a kid might in traffic.

I guess it was a spectacle I wanted badly to forget, for I can barely recall anything of his antics now.

If memory serves, he'd been pleading to drive Shadow the whole trip, and I only relented when I myself badly wanted a break from driving.

Anyway, I pretty quickly changed my mind and got the message to him as soon as possible to turn Shadow back over to me again. Perhaps via CB radio.

Somehow Lloyd managed to break my tape player during his few minutes in the driver's seat. Or else it was one heck of a coincidence that it stopped working right then. Whatever the actual cause, losing my tape player sure wouldn't make the rest of my stay in Texas any easier.

Things got rough pretty quickly once we reached our Texas destination. I think we'd gotten the jobs lead from Steve's dad, who'd pretty much worked construction all his life, even when he had his own business.

In a sign of things to come, Steve got confused by how Texas towns tend to have non-interstate roads running parallel to the interstates along their lengths. And of course Steve being our leader we were all following him. So our convoy ended up getting off the interstate onto one of the parallel roads, then turning around and...well, I'm not sure myself exactly what happened. But after going in a circle a time or two (maybe three or four!) we began recognizing the fact and trying to correct for it. Immediately after this Steve inadvertently led us the wrong way up a one-way street and everybody began honking their horns at us as they tried to avoid hitting us.

It was embarrassing. But we finally got straightened out.

And that memory was a keeper. Because it was one of the rare times I ever witnessed Steve's natural navigation prowess fail him.

But finally finding our way into town wasn't quite the victory we expected.

The little Texas town where the jobs were wasn't very appealing at first sight. Basically the town was to the nearby giant oil refineries as a human being's appendix is to the rest of their body.

Much of the town looked old and worn out. And poor. Even poorer than the little Tennessee town from which Steve, Will and I hailed. And that's saying something. For our hometown may have reached 18%-26% unemployment fairly frequently during much of my lifetime.

What was weird was there seemed to be plenty of jobs here, but still the town was impoverished looking. Like the life had just been sucked out of it. At least that was my initial impression.

We rapidly used up our remaining cash for a hotel room and food, as we looked for jobs. I'm unsure now how long the job search took, but maybe Steve got one first due to his much more impressive construction resume, and I second. With Lloyd last. I think it was somewhere around this time that Will decided to part ways with us. Maybe because he thought he could make more back in Louisiana, where his dad was currently working on a site. Or maybe because of the mounting tension he sensed in the group. I don't know. But he left. And it was a pretty wise move on his part; one I'd have to emulate later.

Steve found us an apartment in Houston, roughly 25 miles away from our jobs. The rent was prohibitively high for our incomes, leaving us with precious little after paying for the place.

It was one bedroom too. Which meant our beds were crammed so closely together as to almost make one big one.

Being men, we pretty much all abhorred that.

We had to keep the air conditioning running constantly, and still it got warm in there.

When we initially moved into the apartment, it was something of a relief as we were completely out of money and could no longer stay in hotels. We also thought that we'd finally get some use out of the extraneous junk we'd lugged a thousand miles just for Lloyd's hopelessly naïve notion of what the trip would be like. Namely, the TV set. We excitedly set it up in the apartment, eager for a break from what had become for us by then a grueling daily slog.

The TV picture slowly brightened to reveal a huge black spot smack in the center of the screen, taking up maybe a third or more of the whole picture. So the television set was useless.

All we could figure was that it'd gone bad on the trip, maybe from the jostling of the many miles traveled (keep in mind it was riding in Shadowfast of the ultra-tight suspension). Or maybe the oven-like heat which built up in flat black Shadow in the Texas sun when he was locked up tight in parking lots had damaged the set. To this day I can't say for sure. But I believe at the time Lloyd might have suspected I sabotaged it somehow (which of course I didn't).

I'm not certain about it, but something adverse (from Lloyd's point of view) may have happened to his golf clubs too on the trip. Maybe Lloyd was forced to pawn them? Or maybe the rest of us destroyed or damaged or threw them away in anger? Like I say, I'm not sure now. Maybe they actually survived the trip after all.

After pronouncing the TV a total loss, we were forced to radio or recorded music of some sort for entertainment.

The apartment complex had a pool, but I don't think any of us used it.

We got to hurting so bad for money that for quite a while we lived exclusively off Shadowfast's emergency food supplies. I kid you not: at that point in time it was a whole case of pork and beans donated by my dad from discounted salvage goods at his food plant workplace (dented cans and the like). Steve tried to add a little variety to the beans every night for his relief and ours. Maybe once a week we were able to afford some bacon to cook up with it for beans and bacon. Or hot dog wieners for beans and franks.

Somewhere around this point, Lloyd spent our last dollar or two on cigarettes. Just for himself, as Steve and I didn't smoke. We went ballistic, but in fact the money was gone, and all we could do was flush his cigarettes down the toilet in retribution.

This might also have occurred before Lloyd himself even had a job yet (I'm unsure).

I'm kind of guessing now about the flushing of the smokes. But we surely did something along those lines.

I don't think Lloyd ever realized how much mortal danger he put himself into that day.

Pressure cooker

The tension in the single bedroom Houston apartment was palpable every evening after work. We were rapidly beginning to hate one another simply for existing. But especially Lloyd. To Steve and I Lloyd often seemed downright deranged. For example, every single night we spent in that apartment Lloyd would drop a plastic comb in the toilet and refuse to remove it. And every night either Steve or I, exasperated, would have to fish it out. We never could figure out why or how Lloyd's comb would regularly get in there. Looking back on it now I think he must purposely have been trying to provoke us, or get back at us for our growing animosity towards his behavior in general.

The tension got so bad that once the money situation improved to the point where we all finally had a few precious dollars to spend on non-essentials, I bought myself some sleeping pills.

Unfortunately in those days it was extremely difficult for me to swallow pills of any kind. I was wholly unaccustomed to such things, and maybe had built up a pseudo-phobia over it. But now I felt I had no choice but to take the sleeping pills nightly.

The pill thing worked fine for a few nights. Except for the swallowing part. I felt I had to throw my head back to get the thing down.

The very last night of the pill experiment I did my exaggerated swallowing routine and noticed something odd afterwards. Something not quite right. Something different from anything I'd ever felt before.

But the pill was no longer in my mouth. And I hadn't spit it out. So it must have went where it was supposed to, I reckoned. I tried to dismiss the unusual sensations, and laid down to sleep.

What I didn't figure out until a little later was that throwing my head back had caused the pill to go the wrong way: up rather than down.

You see, the human throat is like an elevator shaft in that it has several different stops. One of course is the stomach. Another is the back of the mouth. But there's a third that many people may never realize is there: the sinus cavity.

If you enter the throat from the mouth and go up rather than down, you enter the sinus cavity. That's the same path that nasal discharge from illness travels (in reverse) in order to coat your throat, and how milk entering the mouth can make it up and out your nostrils by accident or for fun.

So my pill had traveled up and into my sinus cavity. And I could feel it there. Feel it sitting there smack in the middle of my head, underneath my brain. But I'd never felt a solid object in that spot before, and so didn't understand the significance.

It didn't take long for the pill to begin dissolving in the warm and moist environment, just as it was supposed to do-- only under normal circumstances in the acid bath of the much tougher stomach.

There's another very important fact about your sinus cavity: that's where your olfactory nerve tangles are-- or the means by which you perceive scents or aromas. This delicate item can be severely damaged by certain infections or chemicals. Chemicals like those being released by a dissolving sleeping pill, for instance.

And apparently your odor detecting nerves aren't in there all alone. There's a substantial bunch of pain receptors in there too. To alert you in case something bad happens in there.

And boy did something bad start happening then.

It felt like the inside of my head suddenly caught on fire. In an instant I put two and two together and figured out what was happening to me. But fixing it was a whole other issue.

There was no time to get to a hospital. I was burning internally, and it was getting worse with every passing fraction of a second.

I frantically tried to flush my head out with water from the bathroom sink through my mouth, to no effect. I ended up jumping as-is clothes-wise into the shower, the cold water running full blast, angling my mouth and nose so the water could rush in and out there as freely as possible to put out the not entirely metaphorical flames in my sinus cavity.

Thankfully it worked. But I never took another sleeping pill. And worked hard to get over my problem about pill-swallowing in general after that. I've tried to never throw my head back that way again for a pill.

Striking out on my own

Things came to a head one day as Steve, Lloyd, and I were walking along a sidewalk in the little town, near the main refinery I believe. Either I made an uncalled for smart-ass comment (which was entirely possible), or Steve and I got into an argument over something-- I'm not sure which-- and he punched me in the face. Which also broke my glasses. A major bit of damage for a time when money was scarce, and considering I was near blind without them.

I think that's all there was to the altercation. I believe I was stunned that Steve would strike me. But keep in mind the pressure we were all under. I don't think I struck him back.

Steve was my best friend, after all.

No. What I decided in that moment (or soon after) was I was going to exit this impending train crash of a joint effort, and find a better way to live in this place. I was sure I could do better than our present circumstances.

I guess I should interject here that in hindsight Steve was under quite a strain early on in this adventure. He was our de facto leader, and as such we likely depended upon him a little too much. In reality, Steve had roughly the same amount of knowledge and experience for making it away from home as the rest of us-- and yet we basically looked to him for guidance like a couple of pet dogs.

Steve did have the advantage of being somewhat trained as an electrician by his dad (so he could command a higher wage than the rest of us here), as well as the awesome natural abilities imparted to him genetically and by the rigorous raising he'd received from his extraordinary parents.

I say somewhat trained as an electrician, because he may have been a little lacking in safety discipline for the job, leading to his near death by electrocution once during our stay in Texas. However, that came quite a bit later chronologically from the period written of here.

Anyway, Steve was ill suited to serve as surrogate dad for the rest of us under these circumstances. But heck if he didn't try to meet our expectations.

But it was too difficult. The environment and circumstances too demanding.

Lloyd's presence made things still worse, as he was less competent to face the present challenges than even Steve and me. Lloyd had apparently led a very sheltered life. Never even held a job before that summer I believe, while Steve and I had at least a handful of past jobs under our belts, and I had a bit of self-employment too.

I don't think any of us-- outside of our college dorm living of course-- had ever before spent more than a couple weeks or so at a time away from our respective families' homes.

(I'd stayed with Steve and Will and their parents in their cramped apartment in Baton Rouge that previous Christmas for a month, to work construction; but still that'd been in the bosom of what was for me very much like a second family at the time)

Lloyd and I always had to ante up the majority of cash from our paychecks at the end of each week to Steve, so he could turn it over to the landlord for rent.

I had no intention of stiffing Steve on my fair share of the rent, so he got my mine too, that last day of my stay with them. Which left me with very little to finance my exit. I also had no place lined up to stay, but for the Great Unknown. But I had otherwise quietly prepared to take my leave, over the days since the punch in the face.

In normal geek fashion I'd repaired my eyeglasses as best I could.

Steve and Lloyd didn't learn of my intentions until Friday night, after I wrapped up all my obligations in regards to the apartment, and told them I was out of there. This abrupt announcement was my most direct response to Steve's face punch, of days before.

I believe when I climbed into Shadow to crank him in the apartment parking lot his battery was dead. So I had to get out my booster cables and persuade someone to boost me off.

(This was back in the days when I was still learning I had to be cautious with my battery capacity due to its unusual location in the car, and extra long battery cable; I believe it may also have been the case that I hadn't driven Shadow for quite a while before that (possibly weeks), due to us trying to save gas by all commuting to work in Steve's car)

Living on the run

I spent many hours that night looking for a place to camp out; for I had camping supplies in Shadow. All but food, that is. As we'd consumed all my onboard emergency food supplies by then.

Yeah, I'd find me a spot and stay there until I'd saved enough money to get a regular place of my own. That was the plan.

Try as I might though, I could find no suitable camp sites anywhere in the area. It didn't help that I knew practically nothing about the place, and had no map. I just naïvely figured that camp sites would be as easy to find here as in the vicinity of my home town. I was wrong.

So I became a suburban wanderer for the following weeks. I preferred staying in the parking lot at work overnight, but the cops regularly came through there checking for people doing exactly that: sleeping in their cars overnight.

Fortunately the parking lot was pretty big, and pretty undeveloped. There were multiple long graveled lanes, separated by grassy spots and even the occasional tree or two. And as the refinery was a 24 hour operation during the week, there were almost always quite a few cars there.

But still I had to work to evade the patrols. Sometimes I had to spend a few hours in the parking lot of a large 24 hour open supermarket instead. Or a large hotel lot.

Hotel lots were problematic though. For I'd worked at a hotel before, and knew the employees could easily notice and report somebody staying there in their car. Maids did their rounds cleaning rooms during the day, and busboys delivered room service and picked up trays at night. Plus various other random tasks compelled the staff to run about all over the place. And regular customers would report things, too.

At the hotel I worked in my hometown, the big boss made it a point to stay close to the local police, I think maybe by letting them eat free or something. So there was almost always an armed cop or two around to grab by the elbow if there was trouble.

And the boss himself seemed to frequently stay overnight in a random pick of the hotel's rooms-- plus walk around the whole place pretty often. So he was more likely than anyone else to notice car sleepers-- and maybe awaken them with a trip to the pokey.

So I tried not to use such locations at all where possible, and when I had no other choice, I stayed extra vigilant.

Besides the regular police patrols through the refinery's parking lot, there were also some incidents incurring special visits by same. One of those instigated by myself. Sort of.

One night I was awakened a bit before two AM by unusual noises in the lot. It turned out to be a developing scuffle a dozen or more cars away. I'm pretty sure no one knew I was there. And I didn't want to alert them to my presence. But the conflict looked to turn dangerous, with someone getting hurt or even killed.

Keep in mind that all I wanted was peace and quiet and some shut eye. But I couldn't do nothing and maybe let somebody get killed.

Plus, a death in the lot might make the place far too hot law-wise for me to stay there future nights.

I thought for a moment about my options. Then smiled as I remembered I was in a supercar.

Making sure to keep my head low in order to stay invisible, I maneuvered around to switch on my ignition, then turn on my siren.

An awful wailing soon filled this half of Texas, and the combatants broke off and fled, likely thinking the cops were about to pounce.

I made sure to switch off the siren as soon as I was certain its job was done. But unfortunately the local cops still ended up making an extra pass through the lot that night, around twenty minutes later. So I had to slip out and return again around dawn (Shadow being completely blacked out, and me having a switch that kept even my brake lights from lighting up, helped much there).

So while I lost some sleep that night, at least I'd kept the lot safe for sleeping a few nights after that! And who knows? Maybe prevented some injuries to somebody as well.

As I presently had quite a few things packed up and stored on Shadow's rear shelf, I couldn't sleep there. Plus, I needed to be able to get into driving position quick for various contingencies. So I slept across the two front seats and the console between them, with my legs bent at the knees. Ouch!

I think I used a folded up towel and/or wads of clothing to pad the way.

To make this still more uncomfortable, the refinery parking lot had a train which regularly ran past it, as well as various randomly shrieking alarms and other noises from the refinery itself. It was summer time, and often stiflingly hot. But if you cracked your windows the mosquitoes got in and punctured and sucked on you all night. Agh! But despite all this, I still felt that parking lot to be my best available choice for overnight stays, most nights.

I had an Igloo brand lunch box I carried my lunch into work in every day. In the evening I used soapy water in the lunch box and a towel to wash off as much as I could. That box was the kitchen sink, bath tub, and lunch bucket for me all rolled into one.

My most difficult moments cleansing-wise came when I actually got something like crude oil on me at work. Somehow I managed to get it off, although the details escape me. Maybe I had some lacquer thinner in the trunk that helped. Me and others back then used that and gasoline quite often to clean up some matters (but all that stuff's poisonous, and not recommended for contact with skin either).

I managed to find a free water spigot alongside a building which faced the parking lot itself.

Being a man, I only needed a small secluded space and a couple minutes to do my thing regarding urination. In a pinch I could use a bottle in Shadow and dump it somewhere later. For more robust duties I visited fast food places.

I lived off peanut butter sandwiches and water those weeks. Keep in mind that despite Shadow's impressive credentials as a supercar, he sported no refrigeration capacities of any kind. So I couldn't keep anything cool in there. Especially in the Texas sun. Shadow's flat black paint and all black interior became as hot as an oven during the day, partly because I kept him locked up tight while I was working. This meant my peanut butter was usually in a liquid or near-liquid state during daylight hours.

The small town buildings near the parking lot also housed something like a flea market place, where used books were sold. Eureka! That became my prized source of entertainment for the hours of daylight left between the time I got off work in the afternoon, and my bedtime-- when darkness fell.

Somewhere around this time, one day I had Shadow parked at a gas station along the same road I would later meet Briggs. Not at the gas pumps, but off to the side. I guess I was doing a maintenance check or something. Or maybe a minor repair.

Anyway, this rough looking short bed pickup truck with a hand-built camper on the back resembling a little house, came rolling into the lot too, with a section of a blown tire regularly slapping the pavement on the rear end.

The truck parked maybe ten yards or meters away from me. Then a little old man who appeared to be at least eighty got out of the driver's side. A little old lady remained in the truck.

The little old man slowly shuffled straight over to me, much like Tim Conway used to do on the Carol Burnett television show.

He finally made it to me, stopped, and asked me to change their tire for them. Maybe he thought I worked there or something; I don't know.

As is evident from my story, I had plenty of my own problems to deal with at the time. I felt pinched. And when you feel pinched, you're much less likely to feel or act generously towards others.

So I tried to get out of granting the old guy's request. First by explaining I didn't work at the station, and he should talk to someone who did (this was the 1970s, and the station was a full service spot which performed repair work on cars of various sorts, with at least a couple of built-in garage stalls for such jobs).

I don't know if he couldn't understand me, or he was simply sticking to his guns. But he just kept repeating his simple and straightforward request of me. No matter what I said or did.

I finally gave in to his persistence and had him show me where his spare and related equipment was. Maybe hoping he wouldn't have the required components, and I'd get out of it that way. But he did have them. So I jacked up the truck, and changed the tire-- the whole enchilada.

It was a bit tough to understand his speech. Plus, all this happened more than 30 years ago-- so my recall is fuzzy. But I don't think he thanked me after I was done. Just smiled at me (well, I suppose that could count as thanks). He returned to his truck, and left. I'm positive the old lady sharing the cab with him didn't thank me. Or even smile. Maybe she was frightened. Or just worn down by life itself.

I thought that tire change a paradoxical moment of this period. Due to me, a homeless construction worker, being charitable to a retired couple likely on their way home.

I was off from work on the weekends, which was something of a problem. For I couldn't stay in the refinery parking lot due to too little cover from other cars (other workers were off too). So I was forced to travel two days a week.

These little episodes spanned maybe three weekends total-- it's difficult to recall exactly now, so many years later.

Basically I was forced to burn gas and try to stay out of trouble. Once, I visited what Texans in the vicinity called a beach. But what everyone else would call a bunch of rocks and oily water. Yech!

I tried to do something like journal writing there, but I don't think much of value was produced.

I also visited the San Jacinto monument, with its gigantic star on top and astonishingly thick walls at the bottom. I lay down on the grass there looking up at the spire towering high into the sky.

I traveled through a tunnel which ran underneath a waterway in the region. Etc. Did quite a few touristy type things.

I hesitate to relate some experiences of this period, because they'll offer way too much information for those striving to fix the true dates involved; namely, those related to gas shortages.

Yes, a major gas shortage hit Texas during my first stay there. Some sort of rationing was put into effect, where even-numbered license plates got gas on certain days of the week, and odd ones on others. Something like that-- I'm not sure on the details now. But it was a royal pain. There might also have been quantity limits on what you could buy at one time. Yikes!

Fortunately for me Shadow got 24 miles per gallon in cruise, which I did my darnedest to stay in during this period.

Unfortunately, being homeless forced me into doing lots of otherwise unnecessary driving, such as on weekends, and even during weeknights on occasion, when the cops were patrolling the refinery parking lot.

Talk about being dependent on your vehicle! This was likely the most dependent I ever was on Shadowfast for a normal person's kind of time frame. I mean, of course my life literally depended on Shadow's prowess in our road racing travails-- but those rarely lasted more than a matter of minutes. Here and now I had to depend heavily upon Shadow for hours, days-- even weeks! Not just for transport, but shelter too.

As you might expect, I tried my best to keep a low profile during this period on the street-- since it was now my home. This too was unusual for me, as I'd gotten a little cocky I guess back in my home territory, being equipped with Shadowfast and all. But here Shadow and I were it; it was us against the world, and so I basically tried to melt into the woodwork and hope the world didn't take much notice of us while we were so vulnerable.

Shadow's stealth paint job helped a lot at night, but stood out badly during the day.

Fortunately on weekdays his presence in the refinery parking lot was deemed okay by the authorities.

You know those Mexican immigrants often discussed in the news? Well, it was during this time that I got to find out a few things about how they lived. For I was doing much the same.

For instance, local banks refused to cash my pay checks unless I opened an account. But I couldn't spare the money to open an account!

So I ended up cashing quite a few checks the same place the Mexicans did-- seedy little shops which cashed checks for a fee-- i.e., a cut of your pay.

Ow! But in the short run it was cheaper than trying to cash them at the bank.

Keep in mind I was a full-fledged US citizen working at possibly the biggest oil refinery in the USA, for maybe one of the top two or three construction firms in the country. So it wasn't like I was trying to cash a check from some obscure source at the banks. Sheesh!

But of course I was astonished by several things in Texas during that time. Like vending machines for water. To me, that was like vending machines dispensing air.

But anyway�!

The gas shortage thing finally caught up to me and Shadow on one of our involuntary weekend drives. Because lots of gas stations simply weren't open for lack of gas, and those that were had huge waiting lines, so drivers tended to drive around for a while trying to locate a shorter line.

I gave up looking for a shorter line, when there seemed to be only one station open for 30 miles, and took my place at the end.

And yes, my gas hand was past empty. Yikes!

It was after this that I would institute my personal rule about always keeping at least half a tank of gas in the car.

Shadow ran dry just as we were next in line at the pumps.

As luck would have it, this particular station had been designed so that its pump island stood atop a huge mound of concrete, which towered in altitude over the rest of the station's paved area. So I actually had to push Shadow to something like a bulging dome in the lot, and then up that dome to the pumps at the top. Sheesh!

Of course there was no way I could do it alone. For although I'd stripped Shadow to a pretty light weight vehicle for his class long before, he still came in at roughly a ton and a half. Rolling on flat pavement, sure I could push him. But up a relatively steep incline? No way!

Luckily, those waiting behind me were eager to lend a hand. And so Shadow got what few gallons of relief we were allowed that day.

And in yet another show of resilience, Shadow cranked right up again once the fresh liquid reached his carb. Even after sucking in the dregs of his own tank, he was fine.

Over the years, I witnessed quite a few cars not return to life again so easily, after having sucked their tank dry. Indeed, it wasn't unheard of in those days for a car's engine to be ruined by running out of gas just a single time-- because of the possible harmful dregs in the tank.

After a couple weeks, I'd managed to locate a trailer park with rental rates enormously better than the Houston apartment. If I recall correctly, the Houston apartment had been costing us each around a $100 a week, which back then was a [expletive deleted] fortune. And something like 25 miles away from our jobs, too! Agh!

But now I found me a sweet deal where I got my own two bedroom trailer all to myself (maybe it was a 60 or 70 footer?) for like $50 a week-- with some of the utilities free. Wow!

Of course there were a few caveats. Like thousands of cockroaches I had to exterminate before I could move in. The floor literally had a living carpet when the fleets were on maneuvers.

But some repeated applications of spray poison and airing out of the place took care of that temporarily. And for the long term, I applied boric acid where walls met floor. For this wasn't my first anti-roach campaign. The trailer was about as roach-free after that as could be for an old trailer in a Texas summer, surrounded by others of the same ilk (roaches always try to re-colonize from existing strongholds).

I hadn't had a refrigerator in the college dorm. Now I had my own full-sized one, devoted just to me. I quickly learned to buy milk in small quantities, or it'd go bad before I could drink it.

I had no TV, but I did have a radio. And the book source I'd discovered while homeless. Early on in my new home I set about putting my affairs into better order, like opening a bank account to start saving for school (my original purpose for the trip) and stop paying the check-cashing fee. Along with some other nudges from various directions I soon attained a much more secure place in the Texas infrastructure.

I also managed to get a great deal on a new set of eyeglasses to replace those broken by Steve. Either Texas state law made for a powerful discount, or the discount had something to do with my job. I forget the details.

During this time I was living alone in my trailer was when I got to know some of the local police a little better...(but we'll get to that later).

My construction job of the period

The construction job itself was hard work, but usually a relief from the night and weekend escapades.

Although my job was exceedingly dangerous, I actually felt safer during work hours than any other time. This was despite my being surrounded at almost all times by maimed men missing various fingers or more from their previous experiences on the job. Men who often told stories of guys they'd personally known who'd been killed on the job. Usually the number of missing digits was directly proportional to the guy's rank in the construction gang hierarchy. Our main supervisors often had only three or four digits total left, counting both hands.

I frequently rode around on the back of a diesel powered machine everyone called a 'cherry-picker'. It was an impressive piece of equipment. Basically it was a small mobile crane. It could lift loads so heavy it had to have extra steel legs to put down in place of its huge tractor-like tires for maximum efforts.

The cherry picker was also weighted to offset the loads it picked up. This, combined with the really hot summer days, often made the tractor tires leave behind grooves in the soft asphalt when we made hard turns.

One thing I loved to do on the job when I got the chance was slide down the steel girders as a rapid transit to ground level. Sort of like sliding down a fireman's pole, only much more dangerous.

I wore fairly heavy work gloves on the job, plus reasonably robust boots (maybe even US Army issue boots during this stint). But both gloves and boots would be literally smoking hot after a fast descent down the girders this way from four or five stories up (most of the construction in the refinery rarely rose higher than that, though at least twice I did work on things much taller).

My gloves and boots would get that hot from the friction despite getting a second to cool off whenever I had to periodically let go of the girder with both feet and hands to bypass various connections along the way, like cross-members and intersections. A few times I had to fling my gloves completely off to avoid burning my hands, after hitting the ground.

Later I'd learn that some girders had dangerous long metal splinters sticking up in parallel fashion to the main beam, which could be hard to spot until too late. Had I ever slid over one of those, it might have sliced off a chunk of my feet or hands, protective coverings and all. Yikes!

There were places in the refinery where processes involving lots of acid were performed. All the pipe work in such spots exhibited awful signs of corrosion, and there were little emergency shower stalls placed every few feet in case you got too much acid exposure and needed to wash it off.

The weird thing was the acid traveled invisibly through the air itself. You could feel it, even through the long sleeved and totally buttoned up shirts we had to wear despite the sometimes incredibly hot outdoor temperatures. The longer you stayed in such an area, the worse you'd itch all over.

The acid wasn't the only unseen menace in the refinery. The place was also dotted with little emergency alert stations, where automated equipment regularly sampled the air passing through, and if something particularly dangerous was detected a revolving light would come on, along with a siren. Maybe there was a voice recording, too. I think the light was either red or orange. But big signs posted all over the stations warned you that if you ever saw the light come on-- or heard the alarm sound-- to run for your life, because a deadly invisible gas was in the vicinity.

I think my crew found themselves in the area of just such an emergency 'get the hell out' warning two or three times while I was with them. So far as I know none of us died or got sick from it. But we also ran away as fast as our pick up truck would take us.

The crew rode in the bed of the truck, while our supervisor drove. We were usually accompanied with a heavy construction equipment vehicle everyone called a cherry picker (as mentioned before), which was basically the right arm of Hercules on wheels, and could also stretch out a ways like Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four comics. I often watched in awe as the cherry picker operator displayed his prowess with the machine on the job.

The lives of everyone on the crew often depended on the skill of the cherry picker operator. But of course, even the best operator couldn't prevent other things from going awry.

For example, one time our cherry picker driver threaded a large pipe hanging from his hook through a maze of pipeworks maybe a couple stories up in the air so we could position it and then weld it into place. We were often laying all new pipelines over a course of miles through the refinery, you see. Sometimes at ground level with very little else close by of man-made construction, and sometimes in an amazing thicket of pipes and girders built by others before us.

Anyway, that maybe thirty foot long pipe-- which had to weigh at least a ton or so-- dangled on the end of the cherry-picker's hook directly over us time and time again as we worked it through the array of pre-existing pipe work, and then into its own planned location for attachment.

Everything went like clockwork, as we were a pretty efficient team by that point. Then we were finished, and began vacating the site for the next one on our list.

The next work site wasn't far, so me and the rest of the crew were walking to it on a refinery road, with the cherry-picker following behind us. The vehicle operator had withdrawn the big arm crane, and parked it atop its host vehicle in an arrangement similar to some old style wheeled artillery pieces packed up for traveling. This left the arm extending horizontally straight ahead of the vehicle maybe 30 or 40 feet, with the huge hook dangling on its cable at the end several yards behind, and maybe several feet above, we the crew.

So we were walking along and suddenly heard a great thud behind us. We all turned to see the great hook with its weighted ball had completely detached from its cable to fall and hit the pavement.

This had happened with no load on the hook at all. Just maybe ten minutes previous, that same hook had been holding over our heads a pipe heavy enough to mash us all into a close facsimile of table ketchup.

So boy, was that job dangerous!

One of the things which made my job more dangerous than it had to be, was the smoking of the crew.

Keep in mind we were working in one of the largest oil refineries in the world-- maybe number one! Surrounded almost constantly by enormous tanks and pipelines filled with gas or other volatile commodities.

And yet it wasn't unusual at break time for us to be standing directly underneath a million gallon or whatever gasoline tank, with several crew members casually smoking cigarettes and using butane lighters.

But at the time I wasn't even sure if that was the worst smoking problem with the crew. For our pipe fitter smoked too. Only he smoked pot. And not just on breaks, but often on the high steel, even as we were man-handling giant pipes, and walking on other, much skinnier pipes, a hundred feet up.

Our pipe fitter had shoulder-length stringy blonde hair hanging out from under his hard hat, and one glance at him was guaranteed to classify him as a true hippie in many people's minds. The constant pot smoking would only have confirmed the label for them.

But amusingly, he was at least somewhat Texas Republican in his views, and often railed about what a mistake it'd been for Texas to join the union. For instance, Texans wouldn't be suffering a gas shortage now if not for shipping all their oil out to the other states during the present crisis.

But despite my concerns, I can't say the pot use seemed to cause our pipe fitter to make more mistakes than a non-user. He was remarkably capable on the job, for all his drug usage. Of course there's no way to know how much better he might have been without it.

In my youth I was usually a pretty enthusiastic worker. More than once my co-workers urged me to slack up some for their sakes.

This enthusiasm was present at my Texas construction job too. Partly because I felt much safer working in the refinery compared to evading the cops while off-work, during my homeless period. And before that glad just to be out of the awful Houston apartment.

But the job often felt like an honest-to-goodness adventure to me, too. Almost like I was in the armed forces or something, due to the ever-present danger of explosions, fires, being torn limb from limb, etc., etc.

One morning, before entering the gate, I witnessed a mile long length of winding pipe jump a foot or two in the air in its two story tall pipe rack. That pipe and its cradling structure were indistinguishable from the ones my crew walked over practically every day, with no safety harness attached to anything (because when traveling any distance at all, you simply couldn't be hooked).

Somewhere in the refinery a valve had been either opened or closed. And the resulting drastic change in flow of hundreds or thousands of gallons of liquid inside had been what made the pipe jump up in its rack. I'd heard the crew talking about such things before, but that was the one and only time I ever actually saw it for myself.

What struck me most was how such an event would immediately plunge a worker to their death, if they happened to be walking the pipe at the time, among high steel. Or crush a worker caught in a tight spot between the moving pipe and other structures.

Anyway, the wiser and older members of my crew tried many times to temper my enthusiasm down to safer levels. For instance, they often told me I shouldn't run so much. For like a kid, I usually ran every time I got the opportunity. To fetch a tool or whatever. I didn't like to keep the team waiting.

And of course all the warning signs I mentioned before, urged running for certain contingencies anyway.

But one day I experienced a perfect lesson regarding why I should minimize my running on the job.

We were working in an area with maybe an eight foot deep, five or six foot wide ditch running across a large expanse of ground. I think a pipe was being laid there, but I can't really remember what the crew's job was that day.

Suddenly a rainstorm hit us with a deluge, and everybody went to huddling under storage tanks and the like. Within a few minutes, our boss showed up in the pick up truck, and motioned for us to climb in for leaving.

Being that it was raining so hard and all, I don't think I was the only one hurrying towards the truck. But I was apparently the only one who forgot about the huge ditch.

The drenching rain had covered the entire open space in water. Including the enormous ditch, which somehow had filled and overflowed in almost no time at all. So the whole area looked like solid ground with a thin layer of water laying atop it. Which of course most of it was. Except for the ditch.

I ran for the truck, and some of my crew tried to yell warnings at me. But it was too late. Suddenly I was completely underwater. As surprised as I could be.

I didn't get hurt or anything. And it had to be hilarious to the crew (though I don't recall them bugging me much about it at all). But it was truly shocking to one second be in full flight across apparently solid ground, and the next find yourself totally and unexpectedly submerged. With not even enough warning to take in a chest full of air before the dunking.

Another time my crew was working in an unusually open and spacious area, somewhat removed from the rest of the refinery. The refinery's outermost perimeter fence may have been on one side of us, and some 30 yards away the nearest standing pipe work structures of the refinery itself.

We were going about our normal duties when we heard an explosion, and turned to see a building-sized mushroom cloud ascend from maybe 50 yards away inside the refinery proper. I believe some alarms went off and we all scurried behind some big concrete pipes sitting nearby that were awaiting installation.

Although the whole place might well have blown up around us then, it didn't, and after a few minutes everybody returned to work. There was no fire to speak of, either. That may have been the first time I ever learned that even small non-nuclear explosions can produce mushroom clouds.

I also witnessed another, much bigger explosion, at one of the other plants in the vicinity while I was in Texas that summer. Sort of. For I was off-duty, and with Steve at a mall in Houston I think. A tropical storm had rolled in from the gulf of Mexico, and the skies were unbelievably dark for daylight hours. The thunder was frequent and loud. But suddenly one blast of thunder came that was louder than all those before, shaking the ground beneath like God himself had slapped the Earth.

Everyone there knew it was a powerful blast for thunder, as it might have even knocked a few people to the floor in the mall. But still I think we all figured it for a nearby strong lightning strike. Or at least non-Texans like me and Steve. Later that evening or maybe the next day we'd learn lightning had struck a pipeline feeding a tanker ship in the channel, and the resulting fire had backtracked to the feed tank on land, causing an explosion. So we basically witnessed the strength of the blast from maybe several miles away that day.

Although Steve and I saw our share of storms in and about the refineries where we worked (as well as off the job too), Lloyd actually witnessed a water spout while working in a ship channel I believe. The channel was some sort of waterway which had something like a levee running through it, or alongside it. On that levee ran an access road, and Lloyd's crew happened to be there for some job, when an impressive water spout spun up not far away. I'm sure it was one of the most amazing things Lloyd had ever seen up to that point in his young life.

Steve and Lloyd's not-so-excellent adventures

So what happened to Steve and Lloyd after I left? Well, for a while Steve had to take care of Lloyd on his own. Which was surely more than enough punishment for his punching me.

I believe the loss of my paycheck soon forced them to seek cheaper accommodations. But that was something they needed to do regardless, just as I had.

At some point they switched to a better apartment deal, only still in Houston. So they still suffered a long drive in to work (unlike me). I believe Lloyd was on a different crew in the same giant refinery I was, while Steve was working at a much, much smaller experimental synthetic fuels plant a little ways down the road. Plus, their second apartment's square footage, while slightly bigger than the first, was still considerably smaller than my trailer's.

I visited them a few times in Houston after that, on the weekends. One of those trips would turn out to be especially memorable-- and scary! But we'll get to that later.

I'm not sure if I ever fully understood their arrangements regarding that second Houston apartment. So that may be one reason why I'm unclear on the details today. Maybe only Steve and Lloyd were living there for a while-- and after Lloyd left Steve had it all to himself for a brief spell. Or maybe for a week or so they shared the place with a third construction worker. Like I said before, such details elude me today.

One weekend when I was visiting them in Houston I rode with Steve and the possible third room-mate(?) in the room-mate's 1970s Ford Maverick on some errand. I think it had a four or six cylinder engine. Anyway, the car was in horrific condition. The throttle mechanism was in dire need of repair, as the car idled at full throttle or close to it. The driver had no control over the gas at all. It was always wide-open.

How on Earth could someone drive a car like that? Very, very carefully! Ha, ha.

Seriously though, the small motor helped. Otherwise the brakes and transmission were both heavily abused to keep the thing in check. Especially at spots like, say, red lights and stop signs(!)

I think Steve got me to come along in it mainly for the amusement park ride quality-- and to see just how crazed and desperate the Maverick's owner was.

Steve's always been somewhat amused by folks in still more dire straits than him and me. Decades later he'd recommend the Sean Penn movie U-Turn to me: one of the most appallingly depressing films I ever saw. Ugh! But I do have to admit the various predicaments of Penn's character in the film reminded me a lot of many of me and Steve's own worst moments.

Steve's brush with death

But that same desperate Maverick owner had saved Steve's life at work. For I believe Steve (or someone else?) neglected to properly lock out an important electrical switch while Steve was supposed to be working on related cabling, and the current caught Steve in its deadly grip.

This might have been something like being struck by lightning. With one difference being the lightning stops after a split second, while here the flow continues until it's shut off or somehow your connection to it is broken.

And no, the victim can't just let go. For the human nervous system is overloaded or short circuited at such a time. Pretty much all a person can do in such circumstances is fry. Like bacon in a pan.

The Maverick owner was an older and much more experienced construction worker than Steve or I. And luckily for Steve, had been nearby when Steve got caught in the current. The Maverick guy thus knew the danger not only to Steve but himself in regards to a rescue-- for touching someone being electrocuted can electrocute you too. And often the electricity paralyzes your voluntary movement control; which is why you can't let go. Yikes!

So the guy tried to save Steve with momentum. By making a great sweeping motion with his whole body to snatch the back of the waistband of Steve's pants (or maybe his safety belt), and rip him free before the paralysis caught him too.

Technically the guy probably lost voluntary control a few tenths of a second after he touched Steve, but the other laws of physics kept his body in motion sufficiently long to break Steve free in time.

Wow!

And so they became something of buddies after that. For a while anyway. I think I only met the Maverick guy once or twice.

Exit Lloyd

But anyway�at some point Steve's Mercury gave up the ghost one day in his plant's parking lot, and somehow he contacted me for help. After my arrival on the scene I looked it over and determined it was dead, pending major repair efforts (recall that this was near the pinnacle of my own car mechanic days).

This put Steve and Lloyd in a bind work-wise, with the commute to Houston. So somehow we figured the easiest thing to do was for me to provide them their ride back and forth, and live with them at their new apartment until other arrangements could be made.

Those other arrangements ended up being packing up and shipping Lloyd back to Tennessee on a bus, finishing out the month on their apartment rental, and Steve moving in with me in my trailer, much closer to our respective workplaces (my trailer had an extra bedroom that Steve could use).

I believe to accomplish this I ended up staying in Houston with them around two weeks or so, sleeping on the couch (I sure have slept on a lot of couches in my life!). This memory's pretty firm, because when I finally got to return to my trailer, something unspeakable was living atop the dirty dishes I'd left in my sink weeks before. Recall this was Texas summer time, and the trailer's air conditioner had been off the whole period for something approximating two weeks. The trailer interior temperature had likely gotten as high as 100 degrees or so during the day.

I'm not sure if I tried to clean those dishes and pans or just threw them away and bought new ones. Something like a miniature version of an H.P. Lovecraft monster had taken root on them.

I would end up helping Steve find and buy an old pickup truck too with which to replace the Mercury. Unfortunately Steve couldn't afford very much truck at all. I believe he'd have to replace it too only maybe a year or so later.

So that left us rid of Lloyd, and Steve with less to pay rent-wise-- and closer to work to boot.

Little did I know the best (and worst) parts of this trip were yet to come. Wow!

An extremely rare photograph of Shadow (left), parked next to Will's more conventionally equipped 1970 Mustang.

Some of my original construction work gear. Although I believe the hard hat is from a Louisiana job, it sports in the back my Texas job badge. I guess I moved the badge when I gave a brother the other hardhat for a dangerous job. The belt is a dark green military type affair.