Chapter 3

My first weekend in Sanford was filled with anxiety and yes boredom. My decision was made and it was carved in stone, but the first day’s progress on the apartment didn’t show any movement. Nothing seemed to be happening that first day. At least nothing I could notice during a drive by inspection. I spent the day riding my scooter around in what seemed like circles. I discovered that in spite of what I thought, my endurance lasted only about an hour on a cold damp day. After that I had to get to something on which I could recline. If not that, at least stretch somehow, or at the very least change positions. Since I’m not really an idiot, I knew that it would happen. I just didn’t know that it would be so often. At least I knew by then to keep a place handy.

It had taken me the full to years to completely kick the opioid habit. Mine wasn’t too hard to break since I couldn’t go out and buy my drugs at first. The second year was all about pain management. That is why they kept me in some level of care for the whole year and a little more. When I got released into the world a couple of weeks before that weekend, I had been opioid free for two months. That is not to say I didn’t have a desire now and then to float off on a cloud. Probably the worst thing about being me was that there was not enough to do to keep my mind busy. Every day began as a clean slate, but I was determined to end that. I couldn’t start all over like a government could. It would take more than the wave of a pen for me to get a do over.

What I had in mind would take many, many swipes of a pen. I discovered that if you don’t need to get paid for it, there is a place on the net for every storyteller. I had never been much of a writer, but I never had so much time on my hands either. I found a place called stories on line and posted my first attempt at a short piece of fiction there. The story was called ‘Raid’. It was loosely based on a drug raid in which I was involved. It was back in the day when I was first a copper.

Being a cop on probation I wasn’t allowed to think for myself, but I was allowed to secure an exit all alone. My big thrill of the night was when I prevented a man from running with a bag full of drugs and cash. The man was desperate to escape. I found out later why. Evidently the city council didn’t pay well enough, so the councilman moonlighted making drug deliveries. Cops in the town would never have made a ‘stop and search’ of him, but since he was caught in a drug house they did search him.

The cop in my story refused to walk away, even when the chief made it an order. That cop unlike me had a friend working at the local TV station. That friend got it all down on tape. So it brought down the whole corrupt police department. It was my first offering and it was well received. The neatest thing was the story never ended up coming off the shelf, so the audience kept growing.

I could work on a story when I had nothing else to do, or I could stop in the middle of a dry spell and do something else entirely. It was a grand hobby for me. Since I was not the organized type, the story had to ring true. I didn’t know how to make the story all about structure, so I just plugged names into stories I had heard about. It had to ring truth or I couldn’t fine an ending.

I had the idea that someone might find the stories interesting. I knew that I had never done anything like it before, so it might be interesting to me as well. I gave some thought to a longer story. If I went with roughly my story, I felt I needed a less complicated injury. as a back story. No one would ever be able to relate to two years of reconstructive surgery. What it did was I went with a simple loss of a leg below the knee. It wasn’t near the amount of damage and therefore the amount of real disability, so I could pretend to be a real man. It was more a matter of improvisations, than being completely honest.

While I was making those early decisions, I decided to go with the scooter, since I was learning all about it in real life. It might prove to be an interesting and a quirky vehicle. So of course I had my hero, or anti hero purchase a scooter like mine. I didn’t figure he would last long with such a toy, but it was a place to get started.

Since the motel was only about three miles from the downtown, which was where my apartment was going to be, I used my room to stockpile my purchases until the apartment was ready. The morning after I talked to the owner of the consignment shop building, I arranged to buy a bike trailer from the Walmart store. I had to wait a few hours while someone assembled it, but I didn’t have to do that job myself, so I was happy to wait.

While the owner had the apartment painted and cleaned, I found a scooter dealer who could make the little bike trailer work before I agreed to buy it. He just had to build a small plate and weld it to the side of the rear wheel strut. He provided me with a couple of bolts of different sizes to attach the trailer to the scooter. I seriously doubted that the little trailer would be road worthy, but I should be able to move small things from the motel to the apartment.

Since it took almost all day to collect the trailer and attach it to the scooter, I had a short time to collect anything I wanted to move in the first load. I did not intend to be caught after dark on that death trap. What I did carry to my new home that night were some additional diet cokes and snack food. I did that, so that I could write over there after the weekend.

I also bought an electric tea pot suitable only to boil water. I had left one just like it at the house were I lived before my discharge. With that I also had to have a cone to pour water over the coffee grounds. The cone was a stainless steel wire strainer. It was the way I could make coffee fresh in the motel room, while I waited for the new place to be ready.