Originally Posted by Iowanian (Post 12394459)

This isn't My best story but I didn't know where to put it.

So, tonight I came home from a long day at work and decided I needed to mow in between monsoon rains.

I climbed on the mower and mowed as quickly as I could move in wet grass. About half way I realize I am running out of gas and run to town to fill up. After picking up s couple of buckets of apples for the compost pile or a trail camera I get back to it.

Half an hour before dark I make a lap along the pond and when I get under the trees I start feeling something distinct. A burning sensation I. Different parts of my hands, neck and arms. Son a bitch that is starting to hurt....and then I see them. I had ran over a ground hive of yellow jackets and those bastards are mad. They're hitting my left hand, they're up my shirt sleeves, they're stinking ing the shit out of my right arm, neck, by my eye....

I've been stung multiple times before while mowing or raking hay, but me per like this.hell, yesterday I helped get honey from hives and didn't get stung but once.

These bastards were the angriest, most persistent assholes o have ever personally encountered. It pissed me off and I went and grabbed a new can of flying bee and hornet spray and go back down for payback....my dogs followed me down and went to the noise and got their asses stung off,,,,then I sprayed and sprayed until it was gone. it just pissed them off and got me stung 3-4 more times. That listed me off so I got the last half gallon of gas, threw it on the ground where they were still swarming and flipped a burning rag on it.

If it is the last thing I do I wills mash or muder every wasp or yellow jacket I find.

I spent about an hour barfing and dry heaving, generally feel like shit and feel life I wrestled a porcupine. Those bastards.

Originally Posted by Detoxing (Post 12168335)

Big Blue: Our money making, drug running machine. (Heroin Era….and the beginning of the meth era)

Cars have always been an influential part of my life. Ever since my pre-kinder years when my uncle lit up the tires in his ’81 Trans Am, I’ve been infatuated with them. I would day dream about my car to be, and I would eventually run away from home, chasing that dream. That dream car now sits in my driveway. Even now, I have a career in the show car industry. It pays the bills.

But I have special memories with a blue, 1985 Ford F150. We called it big blue and it was our work horse. I had a special bond with Big Blue…after-all, we shared the same birth year.

My dad considered himself a working class hero. He had a ton of pride. He was born in North Carolina, and even though he spent the vast, vast majority of his years as a SoCal beach kid, he thought that being born in North Carolina somehow made him better than everyone in SoCal. He called himself a “Carolina Cowboy”, had staunch republican values, and considered himself a southern gentleman. He wore blue jeans, cut off shirts and a black faux Stetson that he lifted from Wal-Mart. As such, he had to have himself a working man’s truck. And like any good, drug addicted working class hero, he put the down payment on the truck, drove it off the lot and never paid a dime in payments.

He worked two jobs. My dad was a lot of bad, bad things, but lazy was not one of them. He used the truck for local jobs hauling shrubbery and when not doing that, he worked for a moving company that was directly across the dirt parking lot of the motel. The moving company of course, was owned and operated by heroin addicts. They’d shoot up before work, go to whomever’s house, move their furniture for them and go back and shoot up after work. Debbie, one of the whores and his soon to be “girlfriend” got him the connection.

At night, He, Debbie and I would drive around to various construction sites stealing the rolls of copper wire and collected money for them at the recycling center the next day. He used bolt cutters to break through the fence and would lift the construction materials in the dead of night. We spent many afternoons sitting around in the Home Depot parking lot. Debbie would go out and search the parking lot for receipts. If we found receipts with items of high value, my dad would go in and lift the items on the receipts and then Debbie and I would go in with the receipts and items in hand, and then collect the refund money. Debbie and I would go because a woman with a child looked less suspicious. That was my dad’s reasoning anyway. He used that reasoning a lot.
Sometimes we would run out of money and dad couldn’t afford to pay the rent for the motel. The back of the moving trucks became our motel. I spent many nights sleeping in the back of moving trucks, using the thick blankets as bedding. In the morning, we’d get up, clean up and my dad would be off to work for the moving company.

The police knew Big Blue pretty well. They’d stop us quite often just to see what my dad was up to. They knew him by first name. They’d often threaten him but they’d never arrest him. They’d threaten to have me taken away. They’d threaten him by saying things like, “I have warrants for your arrest and a rap-sheet a mile long”. But they rarely did anything. My dad punched the shit out of the front windshield of Big Blue, putting spider cracks all throughout it. You couldn’t see out of the windshield on the passenger side because it was fractured so bad. He did it in a fit of rage because Debbie refused to stop trickin’. The ****ed up front windshield gave police further incentive to stop us.

Once, my dad and I woke up to a squad car parked right outside the motel, behind Big Blue. The cop was scratching the registration stickers off the back of the truck. My dad yelled at him and ran down there. The cop didn’t like that we had just registered the truck (finally) and accused him of stealing the tags. He told my dad that if he said anything about this that he’d have him arrested and me taken away. The cop was full of shit. I KNOW the tag was legit. I was there with my dad at the DMV. I put the sticker on the plate myself. I pulled the sticker out of the plastic baggie myself. But what could he do about it? Nothing. So we drove around with no registration tags so the cops would have more reason to pull us over.

My dad would eventually get jailed after being hospitalized for a bad infection caused by the Heroin. But, you see, when he would get jailed, he would kick the habit of whatever he was abusing, and then subsequently pick up a new habit once he was released. I watched him OD on Heroin a few times. Debbie and I dragged his lifeless ass down the motel hallway and into a cold shower. He was foaming at the mouth. It was gross but I knew he wouldn’t die. I never worried about that. I remember being mad more than anything.

Eventually I would meet the man who supplied the Heroin. I black man who’s name escapes me. He was somewhat thin, older, in his 40’s. He dressed like a professional, always clean cut with reading glasses and a gold bracelet. He didn’t look like a drug dealer. He looked like a professional middle class black American. He sold everything from Heroin to weed to Meth. He was a cook…as in he cooked up crack rocks. He had an apartment he rented in Oceanside, a coastal town to the west of Vista and Camp Pendleton’s southern neighbor.

The apartment was empty. Nothing but a couch and cooking ingredients. My dad would help him cook. I would sit and wait on the couch while they worked in the kitchen. He owned a big, beautiful house on a hill where he resided. It over looked San Juan Capistrano Park; I spent my last birthday with my mother at that park. The last time my mother would ever see her little boy’s birthday was right there at that park. I would lean over the fence, looking down at the park as a kid, and even then the irony of that didn’t escape me. “Oh how life comes full circle” I always thought.

My dad became the dealer’s right hand man. The dealer would cook and my dad would deliver. Big Blue became a delivery truck. We delivered all over North County. I always went with him because my dad thought having a kid in the car made it less suspicious. We’d meet people at pay phones most often, sometimes at parks and other times it was home delivery. My dad wasn’t paid in cash for this, instead he was paid in Meth, which kicked off the “meth era”.

***************************************

I have a lot more to add to this guys, but im out of time and need to get back to work. There’s simply too much to tell. I’ll finish this up later with the fate of Big Blue, as well as the time we were chased out of an apartment by shot-gun wielding gang members during a drug deal gone wrong. Oh, and the time I had to drive Big Blue on my own. The events leading up to that were some of the most surreal events in my life.

Originally Posted by ThaVirus (Post 12887642)

Damn it, Jermaine!

LOL For real, though. I hate dudes like that. I had a good friend from high school who was similar. He tried WAY too hard to get laid all the time and if he sensed that he had no chance he'd just say the most off the wall, offensive shit.

Cockblocking asshole.

Originally Posted by phisherman (Post 12887638)

I pretty much knew that this story was going to go south after hearing about your Freddie Jackson Plenty of Fish stories, Roger. :)

Originally Posted by ChiTown (Post 12887640)

This was a helluva read. If you have more, I'd love to read it. That's an amazing childhood you lived.