Searching for Sanity: Sanity Series of Books 4

By Mike Reuther

Steve Sloan is searching for ... what? Happiness?

That is the theme of the series of stories the longtime newspaperman is writing. But is he searching for his own happiness when he sets out to interview the many different people for his project? Or is Steve in pursuit of something else? Steve is a man on a mission, but the people he encounters along the way, including those from his past, may help him find the answers he seeks. Written with humor, compassion and his own unique brand of storytelling, author Mike Reuther presents his fourth book in his Sanity series of novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Reuther
• Release date: Mar 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393212980

Mike Reuther

Mike Reuther is the author of the Amazon bestselling book, Nothing Down, as well as other novels and books on writing. A journalist, baseball nut and flyfisherman, he makes his home with his family in central Pennsylvania near some of his favorite trout streams.

Book preview

I respectfully decline the invitation to join your hallucination.

Scott Adams

Chapter 1

Mondays were the worst. He would rise from bed, and after a brief period of noting his aching joints, his general malaise of having to shake off the morning lethargy to face the day, he realized it was another work week – a long endless parade of assignments he dreaded, and the overall feeling that something might go wrong, a foul-up of a story, a sudden pink slip.

But that was his life, at sixty-one, the wall he faced, until that door to retirement would creep open in a few years, that is, if he could afford it.

Steve Sloan didn’t ask for much. Thoughts of stardom, fame, riches he’d long assigned to that dusty bin of youth, when anything was possible, before reality creeped upon him, and life’s miseries had smothered him.

What he wanted, perhaps like every human being, was the feeling, that wonderful high, of late adolescence. To be eighteen again, when the world appeared as a carnival, when everything was there to taste and sample and partake, when anything really was possible.

He saw them come and go in the newsroom, where he sat at his cluttered desk, the twenty-somethings freshly sprung from colleges, eager, wide-eyed, hopeful of careers. He wanted to tell them, to shout at them, that it was all a myth, that careers, perhaps especially in journalism, were over-rated. But who was he, a miserable, frustrated old man, to issue such opinions? Let them dream, let them live, let them be crushed by reality. Was it not the best way to learn?

And yet, he too remained hopeful. Rays of sunshine penetrated his dark and depressed thoughts, and lit his soul. He could get fired up. Every day, the internet was filled with stories of outcasts and wanderers and even fools who shook off their demons and became rich entrepreneurs, reality TV stars, Tony Robbins-like cheerleaders, and even celebrated authors. He felt it silly to fall prey to such dreams. And yet ...

For months the story obsessed and haunted him. Steve had come across another one of those stories of an otherwise obscure writer, a scribbler of short tales, who had suddenly crashed through the literary barriers, and emerged as a success.

Tom Waiter. Yes. That was his name, a heavy equipment operator, living out an otherwise anonymous life in some tiny town in North Dakota, for God sakes, when his book had become this literary sensation.

He was fifty-nine, nearly as old as Steve, when he’d caught his big break after years of scribbling out stories in longhand on his kitchen table. The story Steve pieced together from various sources he’d read on the internet was that Tom Waiter had tried unsuccessfully for many years to sell his stories to publishers.

Literary agents, those cruel gatekeepers to the publishing world, had informed him time and again that his stories, while perhaps good, were just not right for the reading public. Short stories didn’t sell, they said, especially tales of blue collar people and other unremarkable folks living out their lives on The Plains.

Waiter was a bachelor, who, until his recent success had never been farther east than Des Moines. As he told one interviewer, he had no mentors, and growing up as a farm boy, no real visions of being a writer. There were no books in my home, he stated. He hated farming and saw how farmers like his hardworking parents struggled and were forever at the whims of Mother Nature. He perceived his only hope out, and perhaps of gaining some degree of security in life, was to join the Air Force.

He had hopes of becoming an electrician, though he had only vague notions of such a job. It seemed to him a solid, perhaps viable means of launching a kind of career. But he scored too low on the military aptitude test to be considered for such training and was instead placed in the security police career field.

For four years, he lived out his life on Air Force installations, in Texas where he stood sentry next to B-52 Airplanes loaded with nuclear weapons, and later, reporting to work at a missile site in an underground bunker in his native state of North Dakota. Working security was lonely, boring, unchallenging work.

I had a lot of time to think, he told yet another interviewer. Many times, I would just stand there in front of a plane in Texas while the wind was blowing off the flight line, or when I was down in that bunker, and just make up stories in my head.

After his four-year military hitch was up, Tom Waiter returned to his parents’ farm.

I was only home for two weeks when the tragedy happened, he told an interviewer on a podcast.

It was the first recorded interview of Tom Waiter that Steve had come across. Tom Waiter’s voice was that of a plain, shy, soft-spoken man, of someone truly reared in a lonely, cold, unforgiving and altogether forgotten place such as North Dakota.

He went on to explain how his parents had been in the barn milking cows early one windy morning when the roof collapsed on the two of them, crushing them to death.

Things kind of changed for me after that, he said simply.

Tom Waiter went on to explain how he sold off the dairy cattle. As an only child, and few relatives living in the area and no one to take over the farming, he didn’t relish the thought of milking two-hundred cows every morning. I hated farming. That bit of family misfortune, you might say, was my way out of agriculture.

He found jobs on construction crews, doing just about any of the work that needed done. Eventually, he got familiar with driving bulldozers and other heavy equipment, but he grew tired of working for other people and started his own business, contracting his services out to companies. He built up a small fleet of bulldozers and dump trucks and half-loaders and added a few employees, working out of the family farm.

I got restless, he said.

The rest of the story Steve pieced together from different interviews Tom Waiter had granted to magazines, newspapers and other sources. A podcast, and it turned out, the last interview Tom Waiter gave anyone, filled in the rest of the story.  

He was tired of the daily routine—of talking to customers, and heading out to worksites to move around dirt, and dealing with the hassles of bills and employees and maintaining the equipment. Many days, he wanted to quit. But what could he do? He had no training or any formal education beyond high school.

On his thirtieth birthday, he decided he was going to get drunk. It was a story he had told time and again to interviewers. He was not much of a drinker at all. He really didn’t like the taste of beer, and he’d only ever been drunk once in his life, when he’d downed too many Budweisers at a keg party next to the softball fields back at the Air Force Base in Texas. A couple of his fellow airmen got him back to his barracks and put him to bed fully clothed, where he fell into a drunken stupor and spent much of the following day throwing up into a latrine toilet down the hall.  

He had vowed after that to never get drunk again. But now, years later, he felt that he deserved this night of revelry, this little misadventure, so contrary to his reserved nature and sober, uneventful life.

There was a roadhouse out on the highway, a place that drew a variety of locals—ranchers, farmers, young blue-collar workers. Basically, a shot and beer kind of place with a single television set at the far end of the bar where Tom Waiter took a seat and ordered a beer.

He had a plan: To drink slowly, and carefully. He figured, as a non-drinker, it would take just a few beers for him to get drunk anyway. He wouldn’t again make the mistake of slamming down beer after beer as he had foolishly done a decade ago back in Texas.

But after ordering a draft, he sat before it, staring at the yellowish, brown liquid in the mug. He recalled the day following his single drunken night, the churning of his stomach, his vomiting into the toilet. Beer, he thought, looked like urine.

He looked around him. It was early in the evening–happy hour–and the bar was mostly filled with drinkers well on their way to getting drunk. He touched the outside of the mug with a single index finger, noting the chill of the glass from the beer. He noted the foam from the beer and the tiny bubbles rising in the glass. Yes, he concluded, there was something perhaps to this idea of having a beer. Something altogether romantic.

He slowly lifted the glass to his lips and took a sip. Immediately, he was repulsed. He set the mug down on the bar and stared at the beer. Maybe he needed something to go with this foul drink, to perhaps neutralize the awful taste. Spotting a small bowl of peanuts nearby on the bar, he scooped up a handful of them and stared