Heaven or Hell (12 page)

“Who knows.” Teresa turned to her son. “JJ, push the button for the nurse, or better yet, go and get her. I think he needs some medical attention.”

Teresa led Jessie to the chair by the wall and Jessie allowed her niece to guide her there.

“I don’t get this. It’s all so odd,” Jessie said. And the more she recalled all that had happened, the more surreal the whole day seemed.

“Yes, this whole thing is strange.” Teresa looked around the room. “After all these years, and there he is.”

Jessie thought about the distress her brother’s absence caused her niece, and yet during this visit Jessie was the one who’d been the hardest on Joe. She’d reared up on him and hadn’t given him a second to breathe, even though in the past she’d been the one to make excuses for him, over and over again. What had gotten into her?

Seconds later, the doctor and nurse entered the room, and quickly checked Joe’s pulse and poked around at him. The diagnosis came that … Joe was asleep. Evidently being in a coma could be exhausting, so Joe had fallen asleep.

The doctor sent the family out of the room to give Joe some space to recover. At the same time, the nurse requested the family stay close, since Joe was on a day-by-day watch. He wouldn’t be sent to an extended care facility because he was expected to die soon. Jessie, Teresa, and JJ stood in the hallway and looked at one another.

“I think I’m going to go home for a few hours and come back later. Are you up for meeting here again in about two hours?” Jessie asked.

“We can decide in a while,” said Teresa. Jessie could see her niece was trying to get a grip on herself. “We’re going home. I have some work to do and JJ has homework. Call me later and let me know what you’re doing.”

Jessie hugged Teresa and then headed to her car. She wanted to return home and finish reading the journal Joe had put together. Something he was trying to communicate to them gnawed at her. Jessie believed the writings held a clue or two, and if he woke up, she wanted to have the journal with her, or at least full knowledge of it so she could understand him better.

She realized she needed to relax a little around her brother and maybe even talk to him alone when he woke up—if he woke up again. Such craziness he’d caused, and now for him to be talking in circles …

At home, ten minutes later, Jessie found the notebook on her kitchen table where she’d left it. Then, with a fresh cup of coffee in hand, she sat down and took up reading from where she left off.

At first, I thought the alcohol was causing me to see and hear things. I was certain these were illusions, or better said, I was delusional. I kept hearing Marion’s voice over and over in my head, and at times whispering in my ear. “Save her. Your daughter needs you.” I’d drink more to drown her out, but she’d yell louder. “You fool, you’ve ruined everything! Stop this nonsense now.”

It could’ve been about a year after Marion’s death or at some point around this time. I woke up in a dumpster in South Los Angeles with my head pounding, my mouth dry, and my body sore as hell. I think I’d been beaten and dumped in the trash bin, but I couldn’t be sure. Up to this point, not knowing what’d happened the night before had been a running theme the entire year. The blackouts occurred so frequently and were so total that I have memory gaps covering weeks at a time. It’s either dumb luck that I’m alive, or Marion’s angels—or my own angels—because by rights, I should have been dead by now.

So on this day many years ago, I’m lying in a dumpster on a pile of stinky trash feeling like I’ve been run over by a steamroller or two. Then I heard Marion’s voice, plain as day, as if she were standing over me. She said, “Joe, get up and go to the house. Take a shower, clean up, and move as many things as you can into storage.”

The woman meant business—I could hear it in the tone of her voice. If that was a hallucination, well, it sure did scare the crap out of me. And I was in bad shape then. But I got up and moved my tired, hungry, hurting body toward the house. And when I made it home, later that day (after a few drinks to stabilize my brain), I saw the notice on the door. Our house had been put into foreclosure. The bank was going to seize the property.

It took me a few minutes to figure out the date the bank was going to take possession. Somehow I understood that I had about a week to either pay up or get out. I think I also realized at this point that I’d been living on the streets for over a year. What a fool I was.

And then, I remember looking for Teresa in the house. As if my teenage daughter would be right there, living and going about her business with her mother, sister, and father all gone. I really wasn’t thinking straight, especially when I became disappointed to find the fridge empty.

Teresa’s room had been completely cleared out, and Angela’s room was how we’d left it. The house smelled stale and stuffy, and it appeared to have been abandoned for quite a while. I opened the windows and went into the bathroom, where I was shocked to learn the water worked. Though there was no hot water and no electricity, I took a cold shower and managed to pull it together for a short while. In fact, I had more time than the notice said. I spent about a week or so at the house and I called in some favors from friends I hadn’t seen in quite a while. I somehow got the important pieces out of there.

We managed to put a few boxes and some furniture in a storage unit, though I’ve not been back to the unit since I sobered up. I want to make sure Teresa has access to these things. She can sell them or keep them, it’s up to her. I’ll make sure my friend Father Benjamin has the details and the key. Oh, and the unit is paid for five years or something like that. So she can let it sit for a while and get over the ugliness of the situation before she has a look.

I’d like to say I sobered up at this point, but I didn’t. Seeing the family home and just simply coping was extremely difficult, and this is not an excuse, but I kept drinking. My demons had taken over and they were winning. After I finished packing up the items I thought would be important to Teresa, like her grandmother’s dining room table and some of the kitchen items, well, I left the house and never looked back.

Oddly enough, during that week for those few days, for brief spells here and there I had moments of clarity. I was so clearheaded that I knew exactly what to save and put aside for Teresa. I believe to some extent I was guided or bossed around by Marion. I didn’t hear her voice again, for a while, but I believe she was working inside of me. Here I was out of my mind, falling down drunk, and then for a while I pulled it together, getting the house in order simply to lose it.

I wasn’t completely finished when they came for the house, but I was definitely intoxicated. As sick as it sounds, I thought I’d hit pay dirt when I found some cash in one of the dresser drawers in the master bedroom. We bought a bunch of whiskey and beer, enough to last throughout the ordeal of sifting through my dead wife’s things. Vinnie was with me at the time—he had a beater of a pickup truck. I remember when we made our last pass from the house to the storage unit. We’d loaded up his truck and we were backing out of the driveway when some suits showed up with the sheriff.

Vinnie freaked when he saw the official car, and what he called “the Man.” But they weren’t there to bug us in the least. I told him they only wanted the house. I kept telling him that, but he refused to stop. We drove off with what became our final load, and I never returned. I did, however, go back to the storage area many times. In fact, I lived in it—off and on for several years.

After Vinnie dropped me off with the load of stuff and what was left of my booze, I put the key to the unit on a chain around my neck. I carried my suspended driver’s license and any dollar cash I had in the bottom of my shoes. My change was put in a small bag I tied to my belt loop and kept inside my pants. Oh yeah, I was good at being homeless.

When I first went to stay in our house, I had to throw out the clothes I was wearing at the time. My goodness, I lived with myself for so long I had no idea how smelly I was until I took that cold shower. Because of that experience, afterward, over the years, I made every attempt to keep somewhat clean. You do get used to your own smell and lose track of time going for weeks without a shower, unless you make an effort to think about it. Later on, I often used the water hose on the far end of the storage unit, hidden behind other units and cold as hell … But, it worked. Some of the homeless shelters had showers, it’s true, but too many rules.

After that, my life, my behavior, didn’t get any better. I was picked up for loitering, being drunk in public, and a few other things. I went to AA meetings off and on and tried to get sober. I’ve woken up in so many godforsaken places, yet somehow I’m still here today.

Throughout my ordeal, or more specifically my trip to hell with my demons in tow, one thing remained constant—Marion’s voice. My wife was really pissed off at me. Not a little, but a lot. At first I heard words from far away, and it’d be pieces of sentences. She wasn’t whispering at all, it sounded like she’d been yelling from a far away place.

One night—I think I was under the bridge warming up by some guy’s fire and lit up from some homemade beverage he’d made from potatoes—the voice started in on me, and it sounded like a radio with a broken-down frequency. Marion’s voice was coming through to me in my head and I couldn’t quite get dialed in properly.

I heard sporadic words, just enough to know what she meant, “… your fault … daughters … sober up … jackass.”

I asked my friend if he heard the voice and he just laughed. I remember how pissed I got at the noise in my head or near my ears. It was weird. The sound, her voice, was coming at me from around my head, but sometimes in my head. I grabbed that crappy old moonshine and guzzled it down, anything to shut her up.

My friend laughed more when I told him I thought it was my wife. He said, “Keep drinking, she’ll shut up. If that don’t work, focus on the fire, and maybe you’ll pass out.”

That was some bad advice, and it’s exactly what I did. Not one of my proudest moments at all. But my gawd, I kept at it, over and over again, and Marion wasn’t nothing if she wasn’t persistent—she kept at me. Eventually the sound waves must have cleared up or gotten better—who knows, maybe all of her practice at communicating had started to pay off. I could hear her clearer and better over the years.

When I sobered up completely, sometimes for weeks at a time, the voice would go away during the day, but then my wife would haunt me in my dreams.

It started with these beautiful cloud dreams. My daughter Angela would be floating in the clouds, peaceful and serene. Then Marion’s voice would come in like a bad voiceover in a B-movie. She’d say something like, “… you see what you’ve done to our youngest daughter. Put the booze down and fix the mess you created. This is not what we planned …” She’d go on and on. So I’d wake up and hit the bottle, because I refused to face my life.

At one point I believed I was schizophrenic, but eventually I learned this was not so. I lived through that voice crap. Oh, she’d stop for a while and then as if the mute button would come off, it’d start up again for days at a time. And at one point, about ten years in, I began talking back to the voice. That worked out well for me when it came to street cred. Those badasses all thought I was nuts and not one of them would come near me. “Shut up, woman. Leave me alone!” I’d yell to my right side and then to my left.

One time I helped an older woman on the streets. She was shaking real bad and most folks stayed clear of her. I can’t remember her name, or maybe she didn’t tell me, but she was in a real bad state. I helped her with her things and actually walked her to a shelter. I shared some cocktails with her, which seemed to help her shake a little less.

When her head cleared up she freaked me out. She said I was haunted and the female who was tied to me would never leave me alone until I set right the error of my ways. Man, that was weird. The old woman told me the dreams would never stop and the voice would keep on talking until I fixed it, though she wouldn’t tell me what “it” was. Also, I never told her about the dreams and the voice.

Then the old lady told me to get away from her. She said she didn’t like my energy and that I was tied to some “bad shit.” She rambled on about how I had a lot to do to make it right with the world. She affected me a little because she knew things that no other living being could’ve known. I had a chill going up my spine for a while after I met that woman, and I never saw her again.

After that episode I tried to clean up. I went to some meetings and worked hard at staying sober. I was scared. God, I wish I could say at that time I held it together, but I didn’t. Like I said, my demons were some bad boys, and they refused to let me go about my business.

What’s so odd about this comment now is that as I sit and write about it, I’m not the least bit triggered. Used to be … speaking about it, or thinking about drinking would set me off. Now, the thought of drinking, or smoking crack, or partaking in any substance abuse makes me sick to my stomach. It’s unfortunate that for me to reach this state of being has taken so long. But I am grateful that I have no desire or need to take a sip of alcohol or ingest any other mind-altering substance.

I’m still not sure how I survived that crazy time. And that is all I want to say on the subject. I’m sorry about those I hurt, because the list is long.

So, how did I get from street slug, mood-elevator connoisseur to sober saver of the free world? Ha, ha, ha … or LOL as the kids would say these days. Over five years ago I had some heartburn that turned into radiating pain. I walked around for a few days with it and when I couldn’t stand it any longer I went to the hospital.

The nurses made me wait, and for hours I was doubled up in pain, groaning in the waiting room. I had my own corner because nobody would come anywhere near me. I thought I was going to die—in fact, I wanted to die. I whispered to the voice to take me away, get me the hell out of this world. As you can imagine, the people in the hospital thought I was crazy. I think I heard somebody say that nobody wanted to tend to the crazy homeless guy in the waiting room. But that could’ve been me being paranoid.