The Tarnished Shooter

by Charles James

  Another night out at a bar, I was talking to a co-worker sitting at my left. When I turned to my right, I made eye contact with a cowboy looking guy sitting on the next stool. He said, "Buddy, if you look at me in that tone of voice again we’re going at it out in the street.” I never knew I had such powerful eyes. For some reason, bars weren’t the best places for me to hang out. I either got into a fight or got so drunk that I acting like a fool and ended up in jail.

  A few weeks later I got a place of my own. I was getting used to living in Colorado’s high elevation. I stayed clear of the bars and instead did a bit of exploring, hunting for gold and gems on my time off. Colorado was gold country and I figured with my luck, maybe I would stumble into an abandoned mine, or something just as exciting.

  I was out poking around in the mountains one sunny afternoon breathing in the fresh mountain air looking for anything precious. I looked for quartz deposits hoping some streaks of gold would be attached. It had always been a fantasy of mine to discover an abandoned goldmine somewhere and become an instant millionaire. I didn’t find any gold, but I found an interesting large rose colored stone. I dug the huge gem out of the ground and took it to someone in the area who knew about gems and minerals. The gem expert examined the specimen through all kinds of magnifying glasses while looking through books and manuals. He scratched his head then told me the find was topaz, said it was worth about eighty thousand dollars. What! I almost fell down after hearing that. I looked up to the heavens and whispered, “Thank you, God.”

  The expert also said that if I hung onto the gem for a couple of years it would more than likely increase in value by as much as twenty percent. I didn’t believe him at first, but stashed it away in a safe deposit box like it was a life insurance policy. The gem tortured me knowing that it sat in a little box when I desperately wanted money. I had plans for that stone. I needed it locked up and safe.

  To my surprise, the job ended after three months. On a Monday morning, I was accused of walking off a concrete pour the previous Saturday. On the day in question, I told my supervisor I was sick with the flu and was going home. The only thing our crew had to do that morning was pour a slab on the second level. I stayed until the pour was complete and then went home. But when I went to work the following Monday, the jobsite superintendent called me into his office and accused me of walking off the pour. I denied it, and said I told my lead man, but the superintendent wasn’t buying my story and fired me on the spot. I was pissed off for being fired like that. I was supposed to get three written warnings before I could be fired. I figured there was no sense in hanging around so I decided to get even and go back home and file for unemployment just for spite.

  Once again I had an interesting battle to win. I filed for unemployment and was denied. I appealed the decision and the second time around I was awarded unemployment compensation. Hallelujah, there is a God! I kicked back and collected almost two hundred bucks a week for a year. I figured if nobody wanted me to work or needed my services it didn’t matter, I had to survive anyway I could. I never believed I was fired for allegedly walking off that concrete pour. I believe it was something else, something with my past that caused the problem. Someone must have been poking around looking for some dirt. The shovel full they found must have been enough. It seemed to me that that was the American way. Never award anyone for good deeds, just find a hand full of dirt to smear on their face.

  Back home I told the story of the gem find to anyone who would listen to my ten minute adventure tale. Everyone wondered if they should believe me. If it were true, I would be a rich man and a good catch for a greedy woman. I knew about and understood how greed worked and what people would do for some easy cash. Soon I was dating all sorts of different women because they all wanted a piece of my topaz stone. I played it up good always claiming I was going to head out to Colorado to retrieve the valuable stone and sell it. I learned how money was another piece of the dating game puzzle. If a guy told a good story and there was money involved, it increased the chances of getting lucky by maybe tenfold.

  I rented a room in a rooming house on the north side of town for a hundred dollars a month, and spent my time going to the YMCA and the library while I collected a years-worth of unemployment compensation. It was a nice little paid vacation; I figured I’d earned it. I worked up in the cold mountains humping it day-in and day-out, ten hours a day sometimes six full days a week for people who didn’t give a shit about anything but the project. They sure didn’t give a shit about me.

  At the YMCA Jack and I did some full contact sparring. We had taken karate lessons above an old ice cream parlor a few years after I had gotten out of the Marines. We were still occasionally sparring and fighting each other using full contact karate and boxing techniques. Jack had a heavy bag and a speed bag set up in his garage so we could practice and stay in good shape for fighting in the oriental combat tournaments held in Chicago. At the very first tournament we attended I took second place in the red-belt fighting division and Jack took first place in the forms division. It all got to be too expensive with dojo dues and belt ranking costs climbing to almost two-thousand dollars a year, so we quit taking lessons, but continued to practice the art. We practiced two hour sessions three or four days a week investing two years learning from a second-degree black belt. We each managed to earn a red belt which is just one belt shy of a black belt in Tae-Kwon-Do. Jack became a deadly master with wooden nun-chuks. They make baseball bats look like silent slow motion movies compared to that weapon’s speed and accuracy.

  The Tae-Kwon-Do sparring teamed up with my Marine Corps hand to hand combat training and street fighting experience made me pretty confident when it came to kicking ass and taking names. Fighting had become a way of life, so I practiced until I developed my own style without having to think. Defending myself became automatic with violent consequences to an attacker.

  Chapter 27

  After a year my unemployment compensation came to an end. Needing money again, I placed a bunch of ads in the local papers advertising my services.

  Even with all the ads I placed in the newspaper looking for work, I only found odd jobs that didn’t pay much and eventually I ended up broke again. Flat broke and kicked out of my room at the rooming house, I asked my sister if I could move in with her for a while until I got something together. She had two small kids and lived in an upper apartment above my cousin. I applied for food stamps and city relief again. Getting city relief was a real experience. The city provided a rent voucher for a specified amount which had to be earned by cleaning city municipal buildings. Two days a week I had to show up to wash windows and sweep floors. I didn’t think much of the situation, but I had no choice. Joanna agreed I could stay with her for a while since I had the rent vouchers and food stamps. I would have to occupy the back room where the stairs lead to the downstairs apartment.

  The room was like a hallway with cardboard on the walls. I referred to it as the cardboard palace, and then went to work building a rack so I had a place to hang up my few clothes. My worldly possessions at the time were a tool box full of carpentry tools and a pile of architectural drawings of houses and other things I wanted to build someday. I slept on a mattress on the floor. It was strange to sleep in basically a hallway, but it was better than the street. My sister had a couple of cats and one night when I wanted to crash, I was surprised to find a huge pile of cat shit in the middle of my made up mattress. I was angry I had to live in such miserable conditions, but at the same time it was all I had, and I was grateful Joanna let me stay with her.

  I was angry I couldn’t find any work and even more pissed off because I had all kinds of talent and dreams with no way to make anything happen—like I was stuck in a rut with spinning wheels. It seemed like no matter what I did, nothing ever worked. Whatever I did never led to anything but a dead end. I started thinking of myself as a one trick pony, because one shot was all I ever got. I spent my time trying to hustle a few bucks here and a few bucks there shooti
ng pool or doing odd jobs. Mostly I just liked to sit alone and think of ways to get rich. Then I would think to myself on some occasions that I would never be half the man my old man was.

  Maybe I was stupid. I was filled with self-doubt and started having panic attacks which made me feel like I was going to die right on the spot. It started happening everywhere: in elevators, in stores, in crowds. I didn’t know what the hell was the matter with me. When I went to see a doctor he prescribed Librium or Valium, or some other form of downer. I thought about all the chances I had and how, one way or another, I had blown them. Maybe it was my subconscious setting me up to fail. I knew I had get off the pity pot and get moving.

  To erase the doom and gloom my sister and I went out drinking once in a while. We tried to have a good time and meet others. She had divorced the Army vet she’d married at eighteen. His explosive episodes of violence scared her so much she feared for her life. For a while they lived in the country far from any neighbors. She came home one night from work and found the inside of their house totally destroyed. The broken-in- half cast iron frying pan was what sealed the deal. It would have taken a good deal of rage to break that pan. She got custody of the kids and tried to live a normal life, if that was even possible for any member of the Barker clan.

  One night in a dumpy little tavern she introduced me to an interesting character by the name of Baxter Shultz. He was a former teacher who taught for one year during the sixties but was fired for some reason which he never really wanted to discuss. When I met him, he was wearing a dark blue billed hat with a gold braided rope-like band that wrapped around the visor. He had a full red beard, perfect teeth, was tall, and thin. The whole package made him look like some sort of a ship-less Norwegian fisherman.

  He liked to boast about how educated he was to a point that edged on snobbery. He sounded to me like a kind of political, radical windbag. His philosophy about slave wages and not working for useless man-made objects appealed to me and my out of ordinary way of thinking. I liked to own only what I could carry away in a suit case. He said most people were all a bunch of uneducated peasants slaving away just to pay for useless large screen TVs or fancy cars. He seemed to be still living in the sixties and was as cheap as they came. His only mission in life was finding free meals and cheap beer; even though he claimed to have money and didn’t have to work. He said he had invested some money very wisely when he held the teaching job. Those investments afforded him the life of a free spirit so he could do as he pleased.

  I thought he was an interesting guy until he drank too many beers. Baxter lived alone in an upper apartment in the ugliest building on the block, just a few steps from the downtown unemployment building. He had his favorite dive bars he liked to hang out in. It was always entertaining to run into him at one of those bars because he usually bought me a cheap beer and told me stories about the women he chased, but could never seem to get in the sack. He irritated women to a point of needing to carry a handkerchief to wipe his face from drinks that angry women threw at him. He was mostly left alone and avoided. There was a look and voice about him that for some reason gave attractive formally educated women the willies. When I met women in a bar, then introduced them to Baxter, it wasn’t more than five minutes later and they had to go. When I asked them what the problem was, they said they couldn’t stand to be around the guy.

  Then one night when I ran into Baxter he was jacking his jaw with a deep voiced architect named Parker Madison. Parker was handsome, dark skinned, and always wore a white cotton shirt and a light colored panama hat in the summer; he could have been mistaken for a Hispanic or Native American. He liked the booze as much, or even more than he liked designing buildings. At any time of the day or night one might find Parker sitting at one of his favorite bars smoking a cigar, reading the sports page, while pounding down a house whiskey and water. The night I was introduced to Parker we started talking about construction. Hitting it off, he invited me to come down to his basement office and take a look at some of the projects he was working on.

  When I showed up at his office the next day for our appointment he wasn’t there—after fifteen minutes I left. I saw Parker a couple weeks later in one of the bars I frequented and he apologized, explaining he forgot about our meeting and didn’t get to his office until much later. He did a lot of work for a lot of people who didn’t appreciate his talents. They often didn’t pay on time or even pay at all. They just kept buying him drinks until they figured they were square with the bill. I had customers who sometimes didn’t want to pay me, so for me to learn that—it kind of pissed me off—to know there are so many people out there willing to take advantage of talented people like us.

  Not long after I met Baxter and Parker, I also met a young accountant at a dance bar on the fourth of July. There she was, standing near the dance floor next to me and somehow I knew it—as if I knew the unknown—I had just bumped into my future wife.

  I had been drinking that evening at the park while watching the fireworks. I stopped in to see if a couple of nurses I knew who had hung out at that bar were around. The spunky little blonde kept bumping into me as the crowd fought for personal space in the over-crowded bar. I stood with my hands sprawled along the rail separating the dance floor from the rest of the floor like I owned the place. She was drinking a Pepsi which clued me in she wasn’t a boozer. After the third or fourth bump I started making small talk and then I asked her to dance. She was a charming young woman with warm blue eyes and a generous smile. The scent of her sultry exotic perfume captured me in a timeless grip of lust and intrigue.

  As the two of us danced she asked the usual questions about employment, or if I was from the area. I put my fiction mind in gear and began spinning a tall tale. I was a big contractor working on a project in Milwaukee, but I was home for a visit.

  I told her every truth and half-truth I could come up with. I had a grand total of about a dollar and a half in my pocket, which was just enough to buy her another soda. I figured out a way to make a clean exit before she needed another drink. It seemed like a victory for me because I asked her for her phone number which she gladly shared. Before I left the bar we kissed and I promised to call her the next day.

  I walked home and thought about all the bullshit I told her. I wondered if I should just forget about calling her. But I was caught with the sultry scent of her perfume on my shirt collar. The more I thought about her firm body against mine along with that magnetic scent of her perfume it was enough to create a powerful feeling of want. I had to see her again. All the other women I had dated and slept with were all just out looking for a sugar daddy to take care of them. Not this woman. There was something worldly genuine about her. Now I had the opportunity to date someone who I thought had some moral fortitude, someone who wouldn't run off or stab me in the back. All I could think about was my experiences with Ashley.

  I asked myself, but how could I date someone whom I considered to be an educated, prim and proper woman, and then bring her up into my rat hole, “that cardboard palace” I lived in. My possessions were a bunch of drawings of the houses I wanted to build someday and a tool box full of carpenter tools. All I had to offer her was unfulfilled dreams. I felt embarrassed by not having my own place at my age and thought she would think I was king of the losers. What about all that nonsense about the big job in Milwaukee, how was I going to get myself out of that tall tale?

  I called her the next day anyway, but said we would have to meet another time because of my over indulgence the night before. She understood and we made arrangements for another date a week later. Out at the bar, my friends were shocked to learn I had met someone like her. They were surprised she agreed to even go out with me. I think they were just jealous, especially Baxter.

  During our conversations about my new girlfriend the subject changed and Parker accused Baxter of mooching off the system and never contributing anything to society. Baxter accused Parker of being a womanizing drunk. They haggled back and forth at each other
like a couple of old women. I couldn’t help but laugh at them both. Baxter liked to think he was a barroom philosopher arguing his point until he either drove everyone around him away, or he ended up too drunk to know what the hell he was even babbling about.

  The three of us usually hung out at the bars or restaurants where Parker was doing some design work. Drinks were on the house while we talked about business. The woman I had met had some single sisters. I teased Parker and Baxter about fixing them up with one of her good-looking sisters.

  Her name was Lana Sorenson. The night we met her face and hair were all made up. She was wearing a form-fitting skirt and high heels. To me she looked and moved-about like a movie star. But what kind of a woman was she? Was she the type who wanted to turn me into putty she could mold to her satisfaction? Was she going to be like Ashley? It would prove to be Lana who believed in me and my dreams. She would later provide some financial support I’d need to get my construction business off the ground. I signed promissory notes for the money she loaned me and would pay her back once I started rolling in the cash.

  My family thought Lana was a real catch and liked her, but they were a bit taken back because she was not the type of woman I usually dated. I had always dated trashy, cigarette smoking, foul mouthed bar women. Lana wasn’t like that. I had a hard time just getting her to laugh at my dry jokes.