Sh*t Magnet: An Autobiography

By Stephen J. Schrader

Forrest Gump meets James Bond and delivers a Sergeant York for America's Intelligence Wars.

For his seventh book, Sh*t Magnet, Stephen J. Schrader delivers himself. A warrior raised to thrive in a world without medals or parades. Where the only reward for winning a battle is another assignment, and the prize for winning a war is an opportunity to teach the next generation of agents. He describes a life where the rewards to be earned are as astounding as the price to be paid is devastating.

A shocking personal event turns a teenaged "High Functioning Moron" into an individual with the physical capabilities of a professional athlete and the mental powers of a rocket scientist.

What he does with his newfound gifts and an enthusiasm for life combined with a love of adventure will have you standing up and cheering!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Foremost Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781936154593

Stephen J. Schrader

You might say that my beginnings were fairly common. Born and raised in central Oklahoma. Grew up hunting and fishing. Earned my spending money as a kid delivering papers, mowing yards, hauling hay, chasing stray cattle out of the brush, mortician's assistant, that sort of thing. I learned to love reading the works of Verne, Wells, Asimov, and Heinlein. By the age of fifteen I'd determined that I wanted to be a writer. I'm a former career U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agent, a disabled combat vet and divorced father of two. When I left the service, I decided to fulfill that childhood dream and started writing science fiction novels. And with each book, each storyline, I've been able to go further and further "out there" challenging people to rethink everything they thought they knew about: first technology and the world, and now God, the Universe, and the very meaning of what it means to be human itself.

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SH*T MAGNET

An Autobiography

Stephen J. Schrader

Published by Foremost Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Stephen J. Schrader

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This work is dedicated to Carolyn Sue Schrader, my mother. With an example like hers, how can I do less than try to be the best me that I can?

Preface

First, I should explain the title. There are certain people who just seem to attract trouble. I had always wanted to have an interesting life, and I’ve gotten exactly what I wished for.

However, I had never really noticed how truly interesting my life has been, compared to the usual run-of-the-mill lives of others, until I was fifty, and training to be a 911 Dispatcher with the California Highway Patrol.

I had been sent for a month’s training at the most interesting Emergency Call Center in the world, The Los Angeles Center.

Talk about a place that has an overwhelming call rate! And the calls that come in!

However, it was when at the end of my first day, my trainer—someone who had had almost twenty years of experience there—turned to me and said, You’re a ‘Shit Magnet,’ you know that?

And, when I thought about it, I had to admit she was absolutely right.

And, I believe by the time you reach the end of this story, you’re certain to agree with her.

Enjoy!

CHAPTER 1

I guess you could say the defining event of my life came in the spring of my thirteenth year. Before that I was effectively a high-functioning moron. I know, that’s not the correct way of putting it. However, since I’m describing myself, I can put it any way I want and those correctness police out there can go hang. Anyhow, after the events of that day . . . well, let’s just say there’s a reason that after that I was dedicated to a life of Going, Seeing, Doing!

Now, before I go there I should start by describing the kind of stock I came from.

Like many families in the 1970s and ’80s, one of our members went and documented our roots.

The first Schrader of our line was an orphan, attending a Prussian military school in Berlin. In 1870 he was drafted into the Prussian Army for the Franco-Prussian War.

With his unit, he marched all the way from Berlin to Paris—Or that is, he would have, if it wasn’t for the unauthorized side trip to Belgium, and being forced to catch the first boat to America that would get him out of that insane war.

Anyhow, he eventually ended up in Oklahoma, what was then called the Indian Territories. He managed to obtain a government contract, supplying horses and cattle to the Army at Fort Sill.

There’s no record of his ever owning a ranch. But, he always seemed to have plenty of horses and cattle to sell to the Army.

We like to think he was a good horse—trader. That’s it. He was never officially caught doing anything else so that’s the line we stick to.

A couple of generations later we get to my father. He was a very large, and very strong, dark cast man. He was a man of few words. But, when he spoke everybody listened. While I believe he never raised his hand against any man, that was probably because he never had to.

That’s my father’s side, my mother’s . . . well, I guess you could say the thing that most illustrated her style can be found on the day of my birth.

They were a couple of teenagers. He had just from graduated high school; she never completed her junior year.

They met and married in Purcell, a small town in the dead center of Oklahoma. Me, I was born about ten month’s after they were married.

While they claimed nothing ever happened before they were married, they certainly got busy after the ceremony. That may explain why they were in such a hurry.

Anyhow, they were living in Sherman, Texas at the time. My dad was a roughneck working the oil fields of the day. And by rough I mean rough; he had broken his arm and had his arm and shoulder in a cast, and was still working on the rig.

When my mom went into labor, she declared she was going to be damned if she was going to give birth to a DAMNED Texan.

Oh, I should mention that she, like my dad, said what she meant and meant what she said in a very literal sense.

Anyhow, she demanded that my dad drive her the several hours back to their hometown, Purcell, for their baby to be born.

Yes, there they were, she’s in the last stages of labor, no pain meds, no doctors. And my father, driving a stick shift with his arm in a cast, driving cross country. (That was before the U.S. Interstate System, so two-lane blacktop all the way.)

Well, they didn’t quite make it. That’s why my particular birthplace was the hospital in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma.

Now you can see what kind of people I came from.

Later my sister came along. Though not in quite as dramatic a fashion.

My first memories are from 1963, when I was five years old.

For me, the sight of my parents in fear for the first time really was an eye-opening experience.

President Kennedy had just been shot, and many people, my parents included, thought it would mean nuclear war at any moment.

No matter how self-reliant and capable you are, there’s no help for being hit in the kisser with a nuclear fireball.

It must have been even more terrifying for people who had never really feared anything.

Anyhow, we were living in a trailer in Pennsylvania. My father was still working the oilfields. That lifestyle meant that every year or so, you had to pack up and move to where the work was. A gypsy lifestyle indeed.

That was also the first year I ever got to experience a real classic winter with long-lasting snow and everything.

Then, the third event of that year.

A family emergency, a death I believe, back in Oklahoma caused them to make one of those practical decisions they were so good at making.

My mom took my sister and me, and made the long trip back to Oklahoma by bus, alone. Meanwhile my dad packed up the entire household, hooked up the trailer, and drove it all back to Oklahoma separately.

Like I said, the novelties of that year are branded in my mind forever. Traveling with my mother and sister was a five-year-old’s first Go, See, Do adventure.

Anyhow, after that was a blur, until a day about a year and a half later.

My dad got lucky. He landed a job as a teamster, working a freight dock in Oklahoma City.

Literally, the next day, my mom found a house for sale, had the bank draw up the paperwork, and had my father sign them.

She declared she had found the place where she would live out her life and never move again.

I have mentioned she was a woman who said what she meant and meant what she said, right?

Anyhow, that’s where we settled down, in a small, classically suburban neighborhood on the northern edge of, you got it, Purcell, Oklahoma.

Now, we get to my narrative. Sorry folks, it had to happen sometime.

I was now seven years old and started in a brand new school.

A strange boy in a small town school.

A boy who was larger than the norm, strong, slow, clumsy, who was effectively a high-functioning moron, and who had to really struggle just to make passing grades.

In other words, the perfect school punching bag.

There I learned to fight the best I could. No matter the odds. If the assailant of the day didn’t feel he was up to the match, they had no problems bringing friends.

My parents’ opinion: Nothing broken? Then learn to fight your own battles.

Not cruelty or sadism, at least not on the part of my parents, just that you really do have to learn to fight your own battles, and the other side rarely cares for an even fight.

That, boys and girls, is and always has been a fact of life. No matter what the modern sensibilities would try to say.

Anyhow, it was about this time I learned another lesson: stoicism.

While I was the target of many assaults, I was far from unpopular. I seem to have become the defacto protector for all the other misfits in my school class.

One in particular, Hal Woodrow, who I met in the third grade. He had several items that made him a target; he was a Catholic, and he was blind in one eye.

I became his protector; he became my friend. The one person I talk about anything with, and still a friend I can depend on and who can depend on me for anything to this day.

Anyhow, back to stoicism.

At that time the lot behind my house was a very large, grassed over field.

Occasionally the owner would have somebody come by with a brush hog (big field mower) and clear it.

This was always a red-letter day for kids in the neighborhood.

We played a little game we called Popping Bunnies.

See, the cottontail rabbits would be terrified by the sound of the mower. But, being rabbits, they would respond by hunkering down in the grass, until the shadow of the mower passed over them.

Then, they’d break cover and sprint in the erratic style endemic of the species.

Our game?

We’d cluster around the mower waiting for the rabbit to break cover.

Then, try to snatch them up by the ears and whip-crack them to break their neck.

That easy the family had pot meat for the night.

Hey, different world, people. What do you think your children and grandchildren will think of the games that you play today?

Anyhow, don’t worry, that was the theory. Naturally, we weren’t any good at it. Ever try and catch a rabbit by hand, in mid sprint?

However, on this particular day, I saw a flash of brown and, quick as lightning, I snatched it up.

Yes, I actually managed to grab it. . . . Did I mention I was considered to be slow and clumsy? Well, that was when it came to reading, running, and athletics in general. But, I’ll get back to that later. . . .

However, there hadn’t been any time to actually identify what it was that I had just grabbed. . . .

Turns out, it wasn’t a rabbit; it was a very large field rat, and it was in the process of chewing its way free of my hand.

I was quite disappointed. I simply wrung its little ratty neck, tossed it aside, and went back to playing with my friends.

Again, please note the stock I came from.

Later, when I got back home, my mom asked my what I’d done to my hand. While the bleeding had stopped, the scabs were quite spectacular.

I told her what had happened. She promptly scolded me for being an idiot. I should have immediately brought the rat to her.

That’s so they could have tested it for rabies.

Well, we went and tried to find the rat.

No luck. Trying to find something that relatively small, camouflaged to be where it’s at, in a very large grassy field? Nope.

So, I got to go through the rabies series.

At that time, it was fourteen shots in the stomach. One shot a day for two weeks. With a three-inch needle. A very large shot.

And, for such a routine matter, the doctor let his charming little-old-lady nurse do it.

In a misguided effort to minimize the pain, she made a point of doing it real slow—for two weeks straight.

I learned two lessons from this. One, it’s a pointless waste of effort to scream when it doesn’t do any good. And two, well, I obtained the opinion of doctors, nurses, and medicine that I’ve held to this day.

Oh, and a third thing. I also obtained the one weakness I have: a distinct leeriness of needles.

While I can certainly overcome that fear, I have been known to pass out at the odd occasion. Like the one time I actually tried to give blood.

Ah, I digress.

Since school was such a charming place, and such hard work, I grew up to be a loner by choice, and an avid outdoorsman by not having much else of a choice. It being small-town Oklahoma in the ’60s and ’70s after all. And, I turned out to be an expert shot.

I loved hunting and fishing. I got my first gun, a single-pump Daisy BB gun at the age of five. My first real gun, a single-shot Stevens .410 at the age of seven, and my 12-gauge Browning pump at the age of thirteen.