Dave's House: Love, Loss and Life in the Redwoods

By Dave Silverbrand

HIs wife died in front of his house. Then he got married to a Dominican woman in an internet scam. Finally, someone stole his Thompson Sub-machine gun. With heart and humor, Dave Silverbrand tells the tragic story of his wife's death and his quest on the internet for new love. All this happens against the dark backdrop of marijuana and meth and the surreal world of broadcast news. He shares advice on surviving the worst life has to offer and the joy that is yours for the taking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098301293

Book preview

© 2020 David Silverbrand. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-09830-128-6 eBook 978-1-09830-129-3

Table of Contents

Prologue

One Story Left to Tell

May 1, 2013

Tough Lessons Growing up

To Live and Die in Lompoc

Keeping Logs of Love

Innocent Love

First Love

Seduced by Those Latinas

Bomb-Makers Revenge

Who Invited You?

Brotherly Love

Exploring Life

Humble County

Open Up Your Golden Gate

A Nina on the Richter Scale

Operation Daly’s Department Store

I Dream of Jone

A River Runs Through It

About Nina

Dave in TV Land

Small Town Values

Running Away from Home

Be On the Look-out

The Miracle of Cannabis

The Travel Bug

Live at Five

Holy Jiminy Glick!!

Outbreak

Ride ‘em Cowboy

The Baby Bump

Milk of Human Blindness

Amadeus and Fiona

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Bonding with my Brotherhood

Our First Home

Life with Nina’s Son

A Mother’s Love

Cleats for Kids

Night Moves

Family in Mourning

Journey of Faith

Choirs of Angels

My Sanctuary

The Missing Tommy-Gun

One Way Out

House of Memories

First Dominican Kiss

The Cost of Faith

Once Upon the Mattress

Turning the page

The Last Rodeo

Barking up the Wrong Tree

Terminal Sameness and A Tree Named Jerry

Dude, Where’s My Car?

Understanding Yahindi

Yahindi’s Loss

A Monumental Proposal

The Dominican Marriage

Learning to Love Yourself

Brian’s Song

Monkey Land

Faith

Why Am I Here?

Yahindi’s Arrival

The Driving Lesson

Leticia

The Promise

Book of Love

Epilogue

Prologue

What day is it? my doctor asked, staring intently at me. He doubted my cognitive skills, an understandable concern given the state of my health. I couldn’t breathe, speak or walk due to a life-threatening heart condition.

It was only the latest obstacle in a six-year odyssey of death, life and love. To process it, I wrote incessantly, recording my thoughts, fears and dreams.

I have shared my life through the California North Coast daily Times-Standard newspaper column. They have become the timeline of my life, its strength fueled by faith and humor.

Dave’s House puts those narratives together into one tale of love and redemption, the love of a beautiful woman who died in front of my house and the perilous quest to find love again.

My story is an engrossing journey through the heart and humor of my life. My hope is to entertain but also to inspire you to appreciate the quality of your own life.

One Story Left to Tell

I felt vegetative. I couldn’t read or walk, speak or think clearly. I was sure my life was over. Doctors diagnosing severe heart disease said as much. I planned my funeral so my wife and daughter would not have to.

I wanted only two things, time and clarity to tell one more story. I wanted people to know how I wound up in this place lost and then loved.

Jumbled on paper, my thoughts would contain the image of a woman I loved, dead in the street. They also would include a woman in the poorest of countries, raising two children. Finally, I would have a picture of a stolen gun, my Thompson .45 with matching 100 round magazine and accessories. To this day, I wonder where it is.

Who but me could put those thoughts together? How could I do it, from memory? That’s a laugh. My doctor had already questioned my cognitive skills as he took away my driver’s license.

In one weekend, I had turned from a vibrant TV reporter into an invalid peeing into a bottle.

You may not believe it. I don’t. But you may be inspired by it.

It started with one fatal mistake, a flash of light and the distant moan of sirens. That’s my story, true but never told. It began on a deadly May Day morning and has never ended.

May 1, 2013

There is a pounding on my front door. A woman shouting.

David!

I don’t have pants on, I respond.

Well put them on and get out here, she says.

I dash outside the two-story house i to the glare of the early May First morning. I hear the idling of the firetruck in the intersection of Buhne and S Streets. Eureka Patrolman Louis Altic is busy directing traffic.

In the street lay a human form under a body-bag, my wife Nina’s dark hair, wavering gently in the breeze.

Somebody help her, I shout. She does move and Altic restrained me in my panic.

Word spreads quickly through the neighborhood that someone had been struck in the crosswalk of this intersection, just a short distance from Zane Junior High School. Perhaps a student had been hit on his walk to the school.

People dash toward the sirens to see what I cannot look away from: the short figure lying lifeless under tarp. But they can’t feel what I feel. It is an altered state of numbness.

Nina! I scream, convinced that I am watching a movie in which none of the players is speaking. Why aren’t they helping her?

Nina! I scream again.

No response. Just the ominous groaning of the fire engine and the wordless horror of those who gather nearby.

They begin to realize that it isn’t a child but a woman, the sweet Korean lady who walked her dog through the neighborhood each morning. My friend put her arm on my shoulder.

I think I saw her foot move, I say as my friend walks me away from the accident scene.

Maybe she is just unconscious lying there in the street.

Why isn’t someone helping her? I ask again.

They can’t, my friend says as we walk back to the house.

And just like that, my partner of 20 years, the one who nursed me through serious health crises, gone. If only I had time to tell her what it meant to me.

I retreat to our bedroom to be alone in thought.

***

Thirty-five hundred miles away in the Dominican Republic, motorcyclists dart through morning traffic. They rarely wear helmets, a legal requirement, and traffic death is the number one killer of the country’s men. Sometimes whole families die in motorcycle crashes. Such is the casual regard for human life.

It is likely that as Nina lay in the Eureka street, someone in the island nation had just died the same way.

That May Monday morning, a young single-mother was dressing her children for work and school. Yahindi Marcelo Perez was a child-care specialist at a church after-school program, taking her own kids to the same venue.

Yahindi was loyal to her church because it had given her the job as well as a place to live. It was a small second-floor apartment in a crowded hilltop neighborhood. Though born Catholic, she had to the Evangelical sect and loyal to its protective pastor.

Through the internet, she was about to meet a grieving man in California, a widower looking for friendship and, perhaps, for love. I am that man.

Tough Lessons Growing up

Nina’s death is a chilling story, Nina’s son rushing to her aid to find her killed instantly. As a career reporter, I would have had a tough time covering the story. How had it happened? Who could I talk to? What chance would there be that any of Nina’s family would have something to say.

Instead, I drew the toughest of all assignments—not as the reporter but as the survivor, watching the sad aftermath of something so horrible.

As a child, I had seem something equally grisly: a man who had lost control of his pick-up truck on a winding road. His head had been crushed. But the hardest thing to see was the driver’s wife running up from a nearby trailer-park She was gasping as she identified the truck and screamed as police retrained her.

I never again wanted to witness such a thing. But there I was, a character in a sad and haunting play. My childhood innocence had not prepared me for this. What could?

My two brothers-- Peter and Richard-- and I, were born to educator parents. My father, Edmund, taught U.S. Air Force glider pilots during World War II; my mother, Elizabeth, was a public school- teacher. Thanks to my brothers, our childhood was filled with family drama.

We spent our teen years in a wood-framed farmhouse on the outskirts of Oxnard, California. It wasn’t easy being a family of five in a one-bathroom house. Peter, 19, made it all the more difficult by taking his time when he used it.

When my 11-year-old brother Richard screamed his need for the toilet, my father sprang into action. You come out now! he bellowed.

Our father was always snorting about something it seemed. Peter had had enough. I’ll come out when I and good and ready, he announced.

That pushed Pop over the edge. He thrust his shoulder against the wooden door, splintering wood as it crashed open.

As Peter walked by, he sighed defiantly, My, my.

Our father never again mentioned the incident and quietly puttied over the damage he had done..

I created my own drama through a Sherlock Holmes obsession. I loved the way he could slink through London fog deducing things and bringing masterminds together.

I read every word of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, my favorite being the tale of a milk slurping snake and the murder he was used to commit. In The Speckled Band, the snake had slithered through a hole in the wall toward a saucer of milk. From there, the snake snapped at the victim’s neck, killing him instantly with its venom.

As a 13-year-old, I hungered for mysteries like that. Still, I thought it unfair that a snake was used in such a gruesome crime when he was only following his instincts.

So, too, was the peacock that chased me each morning as I emptied the garbage. I would take it—table scraps, orange rinds and coffee grounds, to the dump site behind our house.

From the trees, the peacock would emerge, spreading his plumage and chase me screaming through the woods. I remember his dark, beady eyes fixed on me as he galloped through the leaves. What part of hell had this bird come from?

He never caught me. That’s because I tossed the garbage container as I ran. I soon realized that is what he wanted, the garbage and not me. Peacocks still frighten me and it doesn’t surprise me that the Cassowary, a similar bird native to New Guinea, has been known to kick his victims to death.

From pugilistic birds to speckled snakes, the world was full of colorful but frightening creatures.

To Live and Die in Lompoc

My role as an eternal humorist came to flower in my teen years, the summer Peter and I were hired to hoe mustard weed in our Lompoc school-yard.

The yellow flower grows everywhere. And while it is purported to have medicinal value, it makes cows sick and repels dogs and cats. That Lompoc summer, it didn’t do much for my spirits either.

Herbicides would have been the easy way to rid the yard of them. But then Peter and I would not have had the chance to enjoy their native beauty.

Groundskeepers, our bosses, had a more practical way of eliminating the weeds, a tool in the true Amish tradition. It was a hoe, sharp and glistening, the simple tool of chain gangs throughout the country. Thrust with force, the hoe would hit the ground, decapitating the plants at their roots..

Our boss, an arrogant young man, told us how to do it. He said to grasp the