Life at 26
My 26th birthday party was full of fun. Dave and Larry came from Biloxi with guitar in tow and the trailer was packed with people coming and going the entire day. We did some extensive jamming on "Stairway to Heaven" and other classics, and I soloed "American Pie" for the first and I believe only time. I remember it sounded great, which I attribute to the magic power of marijuana and alcohol. Denise came by late that evening to give me a gift and we made plans to go on a kayaking trip with some friends a few weeks later. It was on that trip in early August when she asked me to marry her and I said yes. Never a traditionalist, it still yet bothered me that she had moved so fast, as I had not an inkling of doing this, but I could not find a reason to say no. In hindsight, I think I knew she would move on if I had rejected the proposal, and I was too happy with the situation to lose it.
We planned a wedding for October 13th, on the beach at the state park. Those two months of prep are a complete blur in my mind, but not so the night before, when Lem and Jeff took me out for a bachelor party. Despite the insane amounts of tequila I consumed that night - at least a fifth - I remember many of the events with crystal clarity. After we had made the rounds of several beach hangouts we came back across the bay to Panama City searching for Denise and her entourage, as she was having a girl's version of the same pre-nuptial frolics. Somehow, without cell phones existing in 1984, we located them at a bayside nightclub. We settled in there at a big table and the libations continued. Lem started egging me on to go swim in the bay. Au nautrel, that is. I was way past uninhibited, so I immediately jumped up and started stripping, joined by Lem. We got naked in front of at least 100 cheering people, then ran down the dock and dove into the water!
I was having a grand old time, and kept swimming even after Lem got out and put his trademark jean shorts back on. Another guy came down the dock to where I was. He was quite straight-laced looking and that made what he asked me extremely suspect.
"Hey man, got any DRUGS (with ridiculous emphasis on the latter)?
I had choice words for him instead. "YOU'RE A FUCKING NARC!"
Shocked at my unexpected reply, he stood frozen as I climbed back onto the wooden dock and ran, still naked back to the patio.
"ATTENTION EVERYONE" I announced, "DON'T SELL THAT MOTHERFUCKER ANY DRUGS CAUSE HE'S A FUCKING NARC!"
I turned back to look at the guy who now had hundreds of eyes staring him down, and he proved my assertion true by literally setting a sprinting record running from the dock to the parking lot to escape my scathing wrath. Having saved half of the crowd from possibly being busted (not an exaggeration in those days) I relented to Denise's entreaties to put my clothes back on. And that's where the clarity stops.
Until the next day that is. We had a house guest, an older friend of D's in her late 50's who was her ex-boyfriend's mother and with whom she had retained a close relationship. I was shocked back to consciousness by hearing her piercing scream, then I took in my surroundings. I was in my bathtub, completely naked with the shower head gently raining down water on me. She was screaming at discovering me there when she pulled back the curtain since she had gone to bed long before we returned and had no idea that my sister and others had tried to revive me with this approach after I had passed out, but to no avail. They simply left a sign propped on the tub - "Denise, we did everything we could."
And thus began the worst hangover of my life married to the worst day to have it - a wedding day where I had to deal with all of the details. Cake and food to be picked up, kegs to be bought and transported, people arriving from out of town. I was too nauseous to even hold down coffee, so my circle of self-torment was complete.
I knew from that day forward I was capable of any physical challenge, as I persevered through it all. Around sunset at six-ish o'clock, Denise and I were married on the beach, with more than forty people in attendance. The reception was held at a local hall we had rented for the night, and once I had some food in me, it was game on with champagne. I still have good memories of that night, even though the outcome of the relationship was less than desirable.
We settled into a somewhat domesticated pattern and I remember the first few months being happy ones. The first jarring issue came about when we were invited for an evening out with her co-worker Sherry and her husband Bill, who was an ex-airline pilot and a prodigious alcoholic, albeit the very fun kind. After an evening of wine and lobster at a restaurant on the Gulf, the other couple started dropping some not-so-subtle hints about swinging. This non-verbal part of this request was communicated pretty clearly to me by Sherry snaking her hand up into my crotch under the table while Bill looked on smiling. Denise wasn't exactly saying no so I sort of went with the flow, curious to see where this escapade might go since she and I had never had a clear conversation about boundaries. As events turned out, we should've had that talk in advance.
We took off in our cars, with the idea we would follow them back to their apartment and continue to drink. When I brought up the 800 pound gorilla in the corner, Denise acted as though it was MY idea and proceeded to rip me a new asshole for even thinking
that she would do this. For my part, I was trying to navigate a delicate situation without offending anyone, and for my troubles I had an insanely angry, jealous wife whose malcontent passed over into the next day. At work, she confronted Sherry about the night before, and this escalated into a verbal fight. Since the two of them worked in a space of less than 200 square feet, it became toxic. The next day, Denise resigned her job.
Only a few days later, more chaos entered our reality. I went to work on my normal 3-11 evening shift, and was asked by day shift people about doing a specific test that though I had done before in Air Force labs, it was not officially offered at this facility. Apparently, someone on the day shift had supposedly promised the doctor who was doing gastric juice secretions that we could do pH testing. The only instrument capable of doing it was in mothballs, and there was no written procedure. When the problem was shifted to me, I only responded that I would "try" which meant I would have to get approval from the pathologist in charge of the lab and then attempt to bring the equipment to life, which was a long shot.
I repeatedly dialed the pathologist's pager and left messages on his service but as the hours went by there was no reply. Meanwhile, the charge nurse began calling me demanding results, and she would not accept my explanations. As the hours went by, the samples degraded and even if I could have made miracles happen it wouldn't have been valid anyway, so I repeatedly told her that there would be no testing. She began threatening me so I called the assistant lab manager's number. No response. I looked up the manager's number, then remembered she was on vacation. So I had no backup with a mad-as-hell nurse and doctor blaming me for everything, including Kennedy's assassination and the Great Plague.
I wrote a long missive for the assistant manager explaining in detail every step I had taken to try to make people happy, but in the end it was impossible. I went home, slept well that night, and woke the next morning to the phone. It was the lab manager who apparently had been called on vacation. I was being fired for insubordination.
What.The.Actual.Fuck.Just.Happened???
Here was the postmortem of the debacle. The doctor had gone nuts because he CLAIMED he had been given assurances the testing would be done. This was in the era (still may be true) that doctors, even though not employees of hospitals, wielded tremendous power over the lives of support staff. He wanted someone to fry for it, and they offered me up as a sacrificial lamb. Why me? Because I was low man on the totem pole and the person who may have misspoken in the first place was a favorite on day shift. How could they get away with it? Because, as I found out during the labor board hearing a month later when I contested this blatantly illegal firing, they presented as evidence the explanatory letter I had written. I had ended my description of the massive clusterfuck with an ironic sentence, "Oh well, fuck it." The hospital claimed that this presented evidence of my insubordination. The hearing officer literally laughed his ass off at their flimsy attempt to avoid culpability. Unfortunately, as he went on to explain, since Florida was an "at-will" state, they didn't need a reason to let me go, but he gave them a parting shot, calling their evidence "fabricated" and "shameful."
That was an empty victory, as I was de facto out of the med tech market in the area since the pathologist, one Dr. William Sybers, also ran the other hospital's operation. And herein lies the ironic postscript to the whole shebang. That man, who should have answered his pager, should have returned my calls, and should have explained to the doctor what he wouldn't accept from me, that man was at those moments tangled up with his mistress instead of being home with his wife, a wife that oh by the way he just happened to murder some seven years later using an injected drug so he could be with said mistress in perpetuity, a murder that he was convicted of a decade later. So, indirectly, I was a patsy for a (future) murderer.
News story about Sybers case
By Christmas, the sting of my unfair termination had subsided somewhat. Denise had began working part-time at the other hospital; and I worked temp jobs to make up the difference. Her parents were extremely old-school birds that I will speak of in other chapters. Denise always ran hot and cold with them and the holidays were no exception, as she took offense at some act/omission of her mother's, and they were estranged for the next several months. Not coincidentally, this was probably our best stretch together with low work demands and lack of controversy being injected. I re-embraced long distance running, working my stamina eventually up to 11 miles at a go and ran in several 5K and 10K races. We had a broad social life and in general I remember these few months fondly.
In February, I gave up my string of temp jobs and took a position selling cable television door-to-door at the beach. I will speak of this further in the next chapter, but it deserves mentioning that this was my first attempt to overcome the angst created by my father forcing me to do this as a child. In the balance, it was good therapy for me and I was grateful to have the steady income for what would prove to be our last calendar year in Florida
We planned a wedding for October 13th, on the beach at the state park. Those two months of prep are a complete blur in my mind, but not so the night before, when Lem and Jeff took me out for a bachelor party. Despite the insane amounts of tequila I consumed that night - at least a fifth - I remember many of the events with crystal clarity. After we had made the rounds of several beach hangouts we came back across the bay to Panama City searching for Denise and her entourage, as she was having a girl's version of the same pre-nuptial frolics. Somehow, without cell phones existing in 1984, we located them at a bayside nightclub. We settled in there at a big table and the libations continued. Lem started egging me on to go swim in the bay. Au nautrel, that is. I was way past uninhibited, so I immediately jumped up and started stripping, joined by Lem. We got naked in front of at least 100 cheering people, then ran down the dock and dove into the water!
I was having a grand old time, and kept swimming even after Lem got out and put his trademark jean shorts back on. Another guy came down the dock to where I was. He was quite straight-laced looking and that made what he asked me extremely suspect.
"Hey man, got any DRUGS (with ridiculous emphasis on the latter)?
I had choice words for him instead. "YOU'RE A FUCKING NARC!"
Shocked at my unexpected reply, he stood frozen as I climbed back onto the wooden dock and ran, still naked back to the patio.
"ATTENTION EVERYONE" I announced, "DON'T SELL THAT MOTHERFUCKER ANY DRUGS CAUSE HE'S A FUCKING NARC!"
I turned back to look at the guy who now had hundreds of eyes staring him down, and he proved my assertion true by literally setting a sprinting record running from the dock to the parking lot to escape my scathing wrath. Having saved half of the crowd from possibly being busted (not an exaggeration in those days) I relented to Denise's entreaties to put my clothes back on. And that's where the clarity stops.
Until the next day that is. We had a house guest, an older friend of D's in her late 50's who was her ex-boyfriend's mother and with whom she had retained a close relationship. I was shocked back to consciousness by hearing her piercing scream, then I took in my surroundings. I was in my bathtub, completely naked with the shower head gently raining down water on me. She was screaming at discovering me there when she pulled back the curtain since she had gone to bed long before we returned and had no idea that my sister and others had tried to revive me with this approach after I had passed out, but to no avail. They simply left a sign propped on the tub - "Denise, we did everything we could."
And thus began the worst hangover of my life married to the worst day to have it - a wedding day where I had to deal with all of the details. Cake and food to be picked up, kegs to be bought and transported, people arriving from out of town. I was too nauseous to even hold down coffee, so my circle of self-torment was complete.
I knew from that day forward I was capable of any physical challenge, as I persevered through it all. Around sunset at six-ish o'clock, Denise and I were married on the beach, with more than forty people in attendance. The reception was held at a local hall we had rented for the night, and once I had some food in me, it was game on with champagne. I still have good memories of that night, even though the outcome of the relationship was less than desirable.
We settled into a somewhat domesticated pattern and I remember the first few months being happy ones. The first jarring issue came about when we were invited for an evening out with her co-worker Sherry and her husband Bill, who was an ex-airline pilot and a prodigious alcoholic, albeit the very fun kind. After an evening of wine and lobster at a restaurant on the Gulf, the other couple started dropping some not-so-subtle hints about swinging. This non-verbal part of this request was communicated pretty clearly to me by Sherry snaking her hand up into my crotch under the table while Bill looked on smiling. Denise wasn't exactly saying no so I sort of went with the flow, curious to see where this escapade might go since she and I had never had a clear conversation about boundaries. As events turned out, we should've had that talk in advance.
We took off in our cars, with the idea we would follow them back to their apartment and continue to drink. When I brought up the 800 pound gorilla in the corner, Denise acted as though it was MY idea and proceeded to rip me a new asshole for even thinking
that she would do this. For my part, I was trying to navigate a delicate situation without offending anyone, and for my troubles I had an insanely angry, jealous wife whose malcontent passed over into the next day. At work, she confronted Sherry about the night before, and this escalated into a verbal fight. Since the two of them worked in a space of less than 200 square feet, it became toxic. The next day, Denise resigned her job.
Only a few days later, more chaos entered our reality. I went to work on my normal 3-11 evening shift, and was asked by day shift people about doing a specific test that though I had done before in Air Force labs, it was not officially offered at this facility. Apparently, someone on the day shift had supposedly promised the doctor who was doing gastric juice secretions that we could do pH testing. The only instrument capable of doing it was in mothballs, and there was no written procedure. When the problem was shifted to me, I only responded that I would "try" which meant I would have to get approval from the pathologist in charge of the lab and then attempt to bring the equipment to life, which was a long shot.
I repeatedly dialed the pathologist's pager and left messages on his service but as the hours went by there was no reply. Meanwhile, the charge nurse began calling me demanding results, and she would not accept my explanations. As the hours went by, the samples degraded and even if I could have made miracles happen it wouldn't have been valid anyway, so I repeatedly told her that there would be no testing. She began threatening me so I called the assistant lab manager's number. No response. I looked up the manager's number, then remembered she was on vacation. So I had no backup with a mad-as-hell nurse and doctor blaming me for everything, including Kennedy's assassination and the Great Plague.
I wrote a long missive for the assistant manager explaining in detail every step I had taken to try to make people happy, but in the end it was impossible. I went home, slept well that night, and woke the next morning to the phone. It was the lab manager who apparently had been called on vacation. I was being fired for insubordination.
What.The.Actual.Fuck.Just.Happened???
Here was the postmortem of the debacle. The doctor had gone nuts because he CLAIMED he had been given assurances the testing would be done. This was in the era (still may be true) that doctors, even though not employees of hospitals, wielded tremendous power over the lives of support staff. He wanted someone to fry for it, and they offered me up as a sacrificial lamb. Why me? Because I was low man on the totem pole and the person who may have misspoken in the first place was a favorite on day shift. How could they get away with it? Because, as I found out during the labor board hearing a month later when I contested this blatantly illegal firing, they presented as evidence the explanatory letter I had written. I had ended my description of the massive clusterfuck with an ironic sentence, "Oh well, fuck it." The hospital claimed that this presented evidence of my insubordination. The hearing officer literally laughed his ass off at their flimsy attempt to avoid culpability. Unfortunately, as he went on to explain, since Florida was an "at-will" state, they didn't need a reason to let me go, but he gave them a parting shot, calling their evidence "fabricated" and "shameful."
That was an empty victory, as I was de facto out of the med tech market in the area since the pathologist, one Dr. William Sybers, also ran the other hospital's operation. And herein lies the ironic postscript to the whole shebang. That man, who should have answered his pager, should have returned my calls, and should have explained to the doctor what he wouldn't accept from me, that man was at those moments tangled up with his mistress instead of being home with his wife, a wife that oh by the way he just happened to murder some seven years later using an injected drug so he could be with said mistress in perpetuity, a murder that he was convicted of a decade later. So, indirectly, I was a patsy for a (future) murderer.
News story about Sybers case
By Christmas, the sting of my unfair termination had subsided somewhat. Denise had began working part-time at the other hospital; and I worked temp jobs to make up the difference. Her parents were extremely old-school birds that I will speak of in other chapters. Denise always ran hot and cold with them and the holidays were no exception, as she took offense at some act/omission of her mother's, and they were estranged for the next several months. Not coincidentally, this was probably our best stretch together with low work demands and lack of controversy being injected. I re-embraced long distance running, working my stamina eventually up to 11 miles at a go and ran in several 5K and 10K races. We had a broad social life and in general I remember these few months fondly.
In February, I gave up my string of temp jobs and took a position selling cable television door-to-door at the beach. I will speak of this further in the next chapter, but it deserves mentioning that this was my first attempt to overcome the angst created by my father forcing me to do this as a child. In the balance, it was good therapy for me and I was grateful to have the steady income for what would prove to be our last calendar year in Florida
 |
| Logo of the cable tv company I worked for |
Comments
Post a Comment