A Failure at 57 — Part I

A personal account of time, work, and how life unfolded

I didn’t start out broken. I started out loved, ordinary, and convinced that time was on my side.

This story is being told in parts.

I was young once. Had dreams. Ideas. It felt like I had all the time in the world.

Funny how life just keeps going along until it doesn’t.

I’m a failure at age 57.

No retirement. No savings. Don’t own a home. The car isn’t running.

It’s funny, but life has a way of humbling a person.

I’m about five days away from the inevitable. Eviction from the home my wife, son, and I have lived in for over eight years.

But to back up a little, I haven’t always been this fucked up.

Most of my life, I was fairly successful.

I grew up in a pretty routine, middle-class household. I had two awesome parents who went to great lengths to adopt me.

As a kid, I was very shy and had a slight stutter. Nothing super obvious, but when I was nervous, it showed.

I usually had one friend. Typically, another kid who wasn’t very popular. Often foreign.

One of them, a Japanese kid I was in first grade with, reached out to me on Facebook about five years ago. He thanked me for being his friend. It was incredibly sweet, mostly because I didn’t realize I’d made any impact at all. I was just a kid.

He told me that, as an immigrant who didn’t speak English, I meant a lot to him for befriending him and not shunning him, as most of our peers did. I guess being a recluse worked out for both of us.

In second or third grade, a kid who had come from Yugoslavia also became a friend. Like my buddy from Japan, he didn’t speak English either. Luckily, as I mentioned, I was pretty shy, so I didn’t have much to say anyway. LOL.

What’s funny is neither of them took English as a second language classes. The school just plopped them in with us and called it a day. Within a year, they both spoke English pretty well.

Most, if not all, of the teachers back then were pretty cool. They didn’t try to brainwash you or steer you. Two of my teachers were gay. A few were clearly very liberal. Yet they just wanted me to be me. Not a mini Marxist. Not a social activist. Just whatever I wanted to be.

Up through fifth grade, life was uneventful.

I lived near a private golf course, but we weren’t members. My dad loved golf and probably could have afforded it, but he didn’t want to pay that kind of money.

I used to sneak onto the course and collect golf balls from the tree line where golfers shanked them left or right. At one point, I had a pretty sizable collection. Then it hit me. Not literally, lol. I could sell these.

For some reason, my mom had a bunch of empty egg cartons. Not sure why. I do remember eating a lot of eggs as a kid. My grandma lived with us, too, and she had some, too.

I asked my mom and grandma if I could have them. They asked what for, and I told them I was going to clean up the golf balls, polish them, and sell them back to the golfers.

Back then, nobody questioned kids about stuff. I could have said I was building a bomb, and my parents probably would have said, yeah, okay, sounds good. Parents were just different back then. I also tried to build an airplane. Same reaction. LOL.

I polished the golf balls, packed them into egg cartons, charged five bucks a dozen, and sold them all. I made about sixty dollars and went looking for more. It was like a regular job. Pretty good money for a ten-year-old in 1978.

Moving into junior high, things got weird.

Back then, middle school was only seventh and eighth grade. Not sixth through eighth like it often is now.

Up until then, I didn’t have much interest in the opposite sex. Nor did they have much interest in me. I was still mostly a loner, but I did have one friend named Tim.

On one of the last days of seventh grade, we were standing in the hallway. Some kid twisted up a rubber band and flung it into the air. It landed in Tim’s hair, unspooled, and got tangled.

I didn’t laugh. I didn’t even really know what was happening. But for some reason, Tim turned around and punched me straight in the nose.

I didn’t know what to do. I had tears in my eyes. It was awful.

Like something out of a movie, kids started chanting, “Fight, fight, fight,” waiting for it to happen. I walked away scared. I had never dealt with that kind of confrontation before.

Summer vacation started, and after getting punched in the nose, I knew I had to figure something out.

There was a high school track near my house. I started going there to exercise. To get in shape. To get stronger.

One day, that kid from Yugoslavia showed up and asked what I was doing. I told him I was training.

He said, “Because that Tim guy punched you in the nose at the end of the school year?”

I said, “Yep.”

He decided to help me. We ran laps, did pushups and sit ups, boxed a little, wrestled, and did our best Chuck Norris impressions all summer.

Eighth grade rolled around, and I was ready.

On the first day of school, I waited for Tim. I walked up to him, gave him a shove, and asked if he wanted another shot at me. I dared him to hit me again.

This time, I was ready.

He looked shaken. I asked why he hit me in the first place since I hadn’t done anything. He said he didn’t know. He was just mad.

We agreed things were good and left it at that.

Later that year, in math class, I befriended three girls. Or more accurately, they befriended me.

The first thing they asked was, “Weren’t you the kid Tim punched in the nose last year?”

Man. LOL.

I told them yes, but that I had given Tim a talking to and he wouldn’t be bothering me anymore.

I went through puberty early. By eighth grade, I had hairy legs, armpits, and a mustache. Nothing impressive, but a mustache nonetheless. I was one of only two kids in the entire eighth grade with facial hair.

Just as I was starting to feel good about myself, the three girls told me that if I could just get rid of the chin zits and maybe fill out a little, I’d be pretty hot.

Point taken, but that one stung.

High school, though, went much better.

By sophomore year, I was actually kind of cool. I joined a rock band as a drummer. I’d been playing since third grade and was pretty good. Years later, a guy from high school told me he loved the way I played.

He told me that I always played like I was mad at the drums.

Around that time, I got into printing through a friend. He had printed some notepads that read “A Grave Message Awaits,” each with space for a short note. I took the class he was in and bingo, instantly employable.

I was playing in a rock band and figured I could print flyers and business cards. I ended up taking the lead on getting the band’s name out and building a following.

They already had a decent fan base when I joined, but the flyers we plastered everywhere really helped. I wasn’t the frontman. That was our guitarist and singer. But I contributed a lot to the band’s success because I worked part-time at a print shop, I had a steady income, and a steady supply of free flyers.

That year, I met a girl. It had to happen, right?

I’d had a couple of short romances in eighth and ninth grade, but this one was different.

Up until then, my grades were mostly As and Bs. I kissed those goodbye. Between being an all-around rock star in my own mind and being in love, my grades slipped. Not disastrously, but enough for my parents to notice.

Heading into my junior year, life felt pretty great.

We played steady gigs every couple of weeks. My girlfriend was hot. I was making decent money.

What could possibly go wrong?

I was living the dream.

Then my girlfriend told me she was pregnant.