Toward the end of my stay in Chicago (in 1984) things were getting a bit sticky. We decided (and by we I mean Tommy) to move out of the one bedroom apartment off of Rush and Division and move into this living area above the company’s downtown headquarters. That probably would have been Ok if we’d given some warning to the person we were subletting from, but we didn’t. And he was pissed at the short notice and suddenly having to cover the rent and stuff there.
It also didn’t help that he was the son of on of the owners of the company. Not a good person to have pissed at you because he was also somewhat of a dick. Felt he was above it all because he was born with a silver spoon, you know the type.
So we moved into the headquarters, which was free, and this is where Rabbit took the piss off the fire escape, if you are following this blog at all. One night after work we went to a watering hole that was close to the job. We got all gooned up. Drinking like mad, coke, pot, whatever else (memories are understandably sketchy) and I decided I had had enough already. I couldn’t drive and I didn’t know how to get back to the slums we were living in, so I walked (staggered, crawled) back to work. Here’s where I made my mistake, but in that state, I was lucky to find the yard, let alone be thinking straight.
I took a short cut by hopping the fence, and staggered out to my crane. Now before you get to thinking “really, how stupid is this guy? He can’t drive, but he gets into his crane?” I didn’t start it up or anything, I just crashed in it. By this time I had been on the job for months, so the area around the engine was set up for lunch time naps, and I slept there. Somehow around 6AM I woke up and went to the locker room and changed into my work stuff, so I was on the job on time, doing my job and no worries, right?
Somehow the guards got wind of my escapades and the boss pulled me into the office and sends me home for not checking in at the guard shack the night before.
OK, maybe I should have done that, but would they have really let me in? And if that wouldn’t have happened, where would I have ended up that night, wandering around a seedy area of Chicago, drunk and high? I probably would have been mugged or killed. Seriously.
So I was getting sent home for a unpaid vacation, and I got a case of the ass and I quit. For some reason they let me stay in those crappy living quarters until I got my papers and went into the Army. Probably because Tommy still worked for them. Who knows, really?
But the thing is, I had to quit drugs so my urinalysis to get in the military would be clean. So I was stuck in Chicago, jobless, bored and sober. I was also really depressed about the way my life was going, and somehow I got hooked on TV evangelists and became saved. I must have been a pitiful mess at that point. I did get saved, but eventually I got better.
A really sad lowlite of that time was I wrote a sob filled love letter to some girl I knew years before. I never got an answer to that letter; hopefully it never got delivered. Perhaps if I am famous someday, she will surface and that letter will be another black eye. It certainly won’t be a feather in my cap.
