Escape to Another Reality: Memoirs of a Reluctant Messenger

By Jack Groverland

“I once believed like you, that I was an objective observer of the world around me. Then at age 22, I was arrested and bound for prison. Suddenly, I had a mental shift which felt like an invasion of my mind by an unknown entity and it had me running for my life under a hail of bullets.

In the terrifying process I did not just escape the police, the city and state I was arrested in, but I escaped reality as I knew it, running past buildings that were sky high, and flat without definition—people were taller, cars longer and the street I was running on narrowed all the way to the horizon like a surreal painting. In this psychedelic state, everything appeared to move shower, allowing me to dodge gunfire and miraculously escape the police. When the hallucination ended I was in a different City. Without money, personal I.D. or a place to sleep, I was forced to live in a different reality, one which included an unseen power that meddled in my life.” WARNING: Jack’s memoirs include miracles ,mayhem, love and murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Oct 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9798765233696

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Copyright © 2022 Jack Groverland.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Cover Background PhotoCredit Caren Aronson©2022

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3368-9 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3367-2 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3369-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022915950

Balboa Press rev. date: 12/19/2022

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1Life Changing Trouble

Chapter 2The Orphanage Miracle

Chapter 3The Wagon

Chapter 4Hard lessons at an early age

Chapter 5Fight Or Flight

Chapter 6Without A Clue

Chapter 7The Growing Insanity

Chapter 8A Book Beating

Chapter 9Cutting Cards With A Grifter

Chapter 10A Friend In Need

Chapter 11It really only takes one to Tango

Chapter 12Lady Luck, Slayer Of Proud Gamblers

Chapter 13Broke In New York City

Chapter 14Life At The York Hotel

Chapter 15The Show Must Go On

Chapter 16Always Steal Alone

Chapter 17The God-Sent Girl

Chapter 18How Do You Get to Broadway?

Chapter 19A Time of Radical Changes

Chapter 20Eating Crow

Chapter 21How Much Is Enough

Chapter 22A Door Never Closes but Another Opens

Chapter 23Writing A Farfetched Film

Chapter 24Bloodbath In Chicago

Chapter 25At Least We Have Our Health

Chapter 26The Sleeping Prophet

Chapter 27Of Signs and Lady Luck

Chapter 28Then I Met Jesus Personally

Chapter 29In Search Of Trees

Chapter 30All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Chapter 31The Last Straw

Chapter 32Clueless In Limbo

Chapter 33Lafayette Or Bust

Chapter 34Masters Of Divinty

Chapter 35No Farm—No Orchard—No Housing

Epilogue

PREFACE

All the events written about in this book happened. I know because they happened to me with me but not always because of me. This is not an autobiography per se, but more concisely a compilation of the significant events that influenced my life, from early childhood to this present day.

I have tried to write about most of the events from a perspective of who I was and how I thought at the time each event took place. There was no way to convey these events clearly and honestly without using a modicum of profanity. Looking back upon the experiences of my life has allowed me to see the humor in most of them, even those that were painful and tragic at the time.

I have written this concise autobiography in much the same way I would write a novel. This method was helpful because reviewing memories of my past and the feelings evoked, requiring me to fill in some reasonable description and dialogue.

In many instances, I have changed the names of people and places to protect the privacy of those involved.

Certain events in my life did border on the miraculous, and to sustain the credibility of this biography I have written such events in a matter of fact reporting style. Less significant events in my life have been left out in deference to those that had a greater influence on me.

From the advantage of hindsight, it became clear to me just how many unanticipated, improbable, often unwanted events affected my life over the years. Others reading this may also discover, as I did, that many of the unanticipated events in their lives smacked of a cosmic intrusion by an unseen power.

I use a number of names for the unseen Source intervening and pulling the strings in everyone’s life. The names for Source include Meddler, Cosmic Source, Divine Intruder, Lord of Karma, God and the Deity.

Note, the word punk in the opening chapters has a different meaning than the word as it is used today. Back in the days and neighborhood of my youth, punk was the common label for mean-minded kids, juvenile delinquents like myself, who grew up ignorant and cruel under the harsh realities of poverty and back-alley thinking. Punks used fighting and stealing as their distorted way of gaining self-esteem.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank my wife, Norma, for hanging with me through the many challenges of our early married years—for always playing the honesty card when I was dealing from the bottom—for always putting her personal life and dreams on hold to work for the fulfillment of my dreams—and for her attempts to always side with those unfairly treated and to rescue every underdog she could on her path.

OTHER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INCLUDE

PROOF READING AND SUGGESTIONS:

Professor Cathy Comstock

Wonder Woman, Gail Waggoner

Devoted Friend, Lori Inman

Mike, The Magician, Schadle, whose technical mastery I relied on totally.

EDITING: Marco Degatano, Terry Schuler and

Sheree Zink

Art Director & Project Manager: Robert Castellino

Cover Art : Mark Johnson & Robert Castellino

CHAPTER ONE

LIFE CHANGING TROUBLE

Stupid is as stupid does

-Forest Gump

I was twenty-two years old when real trouble caught up with me. I had been standing in line at the unemployment office, where in those days you had to show up to collect your weekly check. But on that (possibly fated) day my life crashed. On that day, the woman at the pay-window stood up and waved her hand high in the air. Instantly, two plain-clothes detectives rushed me, had me spread eagle up against the counter, searched me for any weapons and cuffed my hands behind my back. One detective recited the Miranda to me.

A sick feeling engulfed me. My legs were shaking and about to collapse as the detectives escorted me outside to a police car. Weak, on the verge of fainting, I did not mentally process anything on the ride cross town except the screaming siren, which served no real purpose except to bolster the egos of my captors. I remember the entrance to the downtown police station, with the precinct number imbedded in bold brass above the entry doors. I also remember the two stairways running pyramid style up to the flat concrete platform at the entrance. The arresting detectives took me from the police car and shoved me up the stairs into the main police station. They booked me at the high desk in the center of the room; the desk sergeant commenting, You’re a little young for this level of felony. Then the two detectives walked me downstairs to a brightly lit corridor that ran through the middle of the detectives’ section. The corridor separated offices on both sides and opened into a large, square room that contained a holding cell and a long table with fingerprinting equipment. Instead of putting me in the cell, they led me into a small, dimly lit room (6’ x 6’), with an arched window similar to an old train station ticket window.

One of the detectives removed my handcuffs, while the other left the room, showing up a moment later on the other side of the ticket window. He slid a large manila envelope through the window and told me to put all my belongings and money into it. My mind was whirling but I decided not to turn in my pocket cash, thinking I will at least be able to buy cigarettes in jail. After surrendering my watch, ring and wallet, the cop behind the window counted the money in the wallet, wrote the amount $26 on the envelope and had me sign it. The detective beside me said, Sit down, indicating a wood bench jammed between the two walls. He might have said to his partner, "I gotta take a leak, I don’t know—but he left me sitting alone on the bench under the gaze of the cop behind the window.

I remember staring trancelike at my shoes. Then I was bending over them pulling the laces tighter and tighter before triple knotting them. I was not planning to escape—my mind only obsessing at the idea of going to prison. I became aware of cold sweat running down my body from my armpits when something beyond any contemplation or logic of my own compelled me to run. Totally out of my mind, I leaped from the room and raced down the lighted corridor, not hesitating at all when a detective appeared, having just stepped out of his office. I ran right into him, bowling him over as, I continued down the corridor to the stairs. Adrenalin coursing through my body, I flew up the steps three at a time to the main floor. I tore through the main precinct past the sergeant at the desk who shouted STOP as I fled by him...

Too late, I was already all in, live or die. From the concrete platform outside I jumped beyond the steps to the sidewalk, pulling free of my heavy coat while running in full freaked-out stride over the rain-soaked sidewalk. Before I reached the corner, I heard gun shots and police shouting Halt simultaneously. I leaped into an alley that ran between the buildings to get out of the line of fire. Seconds later gunfire echoed around me as I raced over the slippery cobblestones out of the alley. I was facing another long city block and instinctively dashed across the intersection, racing to the next street over with a single thought shouting in my mind, Get out of the line of fire! I fled around the next corner to behold the longest city block in the world, there were apartment buildings on both sides. It was the wrong choice, a horrible heart-stopping mistake. Suddenly, everything morphed surreal. Buildings became skyscrapers with flat, shining facades, people appeared taller, cars longer, lower, sleeker and the street narrowed like a road in a painting, all the way to the horizon.

No way to get out of the line of fire—no option left but to duck into the first building on the corner. I yanked open the outside door lunging into a small vestibule with a locked interior door. On the wall beside the door was a brass column of nameplates with doorbells beside them. The locked door would not open unless one of the tenants buzzed me in. I ran my hand down the column of bells. I looked back through the glass windows in the outside door to see cops in the street with guns drawn, looking uncertainly around. I was afraid they would see me and fill the vestibule with bullets. When the inside door buzzed, it sounded like an explosion. At that moment, I fully entered an altered state of consciousness. I was not escaping but watching my body escape, something, or someone else in control.

When I shoved the inside door open, I lunged full speed toward the steps at the end of the lobby. It was like observing someone who had lived in the building for years and knew everything about it. I did not have to think about the advantages of taking the steps to the basement instead of to the roof. There was no need to choose. It was beyond evident that the steps to the basement had all the advantages. Waiting for the elevator was never an option, with the police ten yards behind me.

The basement was a vast storage area, with metal slatted sheds containing bicycles, baby carriages, furniture, tricycles—the sheds were so filled with belongings that the walkways through the basement were also obstructed with furniture, bed frames and toys. I scrambled through the congested storage area as though I knew there was an exit on the far side of this immense basement, and there was. Going through the fire door at the far end and up one flight of steps put me in the lobby of the adjacent apartment building. Outside, sirens were blaring, deafening—people were gathering on the rain-swept streets even though bullhorns were commanding, GET OFF THE STEETS! THERE’S A FUGITIVE ON THE LOOSE! Everything was now appearing like a grotesque dream scape. People were abnormally tall, cars bigger, longer, buildings rising to the sky, while I appeared tiny, ant-like as I stepped out of the lobby into the rain. I knew I was hallucinating, hoping it was from the adrenaline flooding my body and not the fleeting images of a man already shot dead. I started walking as fast and calmly as I could through the curious bystanders, acutely aware that I was conspicuous, my clothes drenched and my hair hanging like a wet mop. Two police cars, sirens screaming, raced past the crowd. Suddenly, a man in a uniform, not a cop, maybe a bus-driver, possessed by a vision of heroism, grabbed me, shouting, This is the guy! I got the guy!" Grabbing me in a bear hug, while leaving my arms free was beyond stupid. I was running for my life, terrified, with enough adrenalin coursing through my body to tear his head from his shoulders. He must have sensed that because when I grabbed his head he fainted like a wet rag to the ground. I hope he fainted. I started running again.

I turned the next corner and fled over the driveway of an orange brick housing complex into a vast central quadrangle containing a long row of tenant garages. Still hallucinating, the orange buildings glowed and the metal garage doors looked like separate waterfalls. Abutting the walls of the surrounding buildings were these double storm doors over what I assumed were basements. Police sirens were filling the air outside the apartment complex as I ran to the nearest set of storm doors. I yanked them open, jumping down into the darkness and closing them over me. I was crouched down on the steps that led to a door with a small window letting faint light through. The door was locked, blocking access to the actual cellar. Suddenly, a German Shepherd appeared at the window silently observing me, as though every day of his confined life he had looked out at a stranger cowering on the steps.

"WHY ISN’T HE BARKING? ISN’T THAT HIS STUPID JOB? YEAH, HE’S STUPID—NO WAY AS STUPID AS ME, HIDING LIKE A RAT—HUNTED—IDIOT—ESCAPING ON FOOT—TO WHERE? ANY F***ING WHERE! I CAN’T HANDLE PRISON—FOR WHAT, TWO YEARS, MAYBE THREE—NOW WHAT???

JG%201%20-%20Head%20Shot%20Youth%20RFP.jpg

Jack Groverland at 22 years old—before the God-sent trouble.

I’M F***ED! THE COPS ARE OUT FOR BLOOD—SHOOTING AT ME BEFORE SHOUTING HALT! I DON’T WANT TO DIE!

Soaking wet, mind-blown and shaking with fear, I just stared at the dog panting behind the window. I felt so alone, lost, so incredibly hopeless that I had to fight back tears. A single option came to mind, something I never tried before. Yes, in that bleak moment I uttered my first prayer. It went something like this:

God, I don’t know who you are, or what you are, or even if you exist at all. I’ve never been to church, but you probably know that already. And I don’t have a clue how to pray, how it works. But, I’ve really screwed up—I’ve screwed up lots of things in my life and I’m sorry. I really need your help right now—just one more chance and I’ll change my ways. I promise you, if you get me out of this, get me out of here, free—no jail time, know what I mean? If you get me out of this mess now, I’ll pay you back. I swear it!

I waited a moment, hoping there wouldn’t be an explosion of laughter from the sky, followed by a bolt of lightening reducing me to ashes.

Suddenly, things seemed very still. The sound of police sirens circling the block seemed far away. Instead of thinking about myself, I started thinking about my mother—how my being shot dead would kill her too. My poor mother, who never really had a life to begin with, not a life anyone would want. She had no formal education, finishing the sixth grade in the orphanage where she grew up. She never thrived but survived, giving her children the best that she could come up with, filling in for all that was missing with love. My mother, hardened by a life of never-ending struggle, had no use for religion, but believed in miracles.

CHAPTER TWO

THE ORPHANAGE MIRACLE

Angels and ministers of grace defend us.

Shakespeare

S he was left on the doorstep of a Brooklyn, N.Y. state-funded orphanage which housed approximately fifty children, ages 3 to 16 years of age. The three-story brick building was divided into two sections, one for the girls and one for the boys. They never co-mingled. Having no religious affiliation, the orphanage was most likely governed by a state appointed board or committee that made the rules and regulations. The matrons, middle-aged or older women, were at liberty to impose their own interpretation of the rules and administer any disciplinary procedures they chose. Probably, the treatment of the orphans was formal and strict, with punishments being metered out for the slightest acts of disobedience. My mother remembers the worst punishment was a wooden paddle spanking that would leave the guilty child with a swollen, blistered behind. Unlike a few fortunate orphans, my mother had no relatives to visit or send gifts on holidays. Each orphan traditionally received a candy cane and toothbrush as Christmas gifts from Santa as well as a piece of cake with the evening meal. My mother, known as little Charlotte had suffered her share of punishment at the orphanage.

At age seven, when she would walk with other school age orphans, to and from the local grade school little Charlotte made a foolish agreement. She agreed to buy a dollar’s worth of tootsie rolls for a younger orphan who didn’t attend school yet. The younger orphan had received a dollar for her birthday from a relative. For buying the candy, the younger girl promised to give my mother one of the tootsie rolls.

As promised, my mother bought twenty, (inch long), tootsie rolls at five cents each from the candy store on the way to school. However, while in school, temptation got the best of little Charlotte and she decided to eat her tootsie roll. Not long after that, the lingering taste of chocolate in her mouth tempted her to eat another and another, until by the end of the school day little Charlotte had consumed all twenty. When the bell rang ending the school day it struck feelings of dread in Charlotte’s heart. She knew she was in for the worst paddling of her life. She was sobbing uncontrollably by the time she entered the dark cloak room to fetch her coat. A couple of her friends asked why she was crying, but she didn’t tell them. Alone in the dark she thought about running away or jumping in front of the trolley, when something on the floor of the closet, crumpled up in the corner got her attention. It was a dust-covered brown paper bag. She picked it up and opened it. Inside were ninety-seven pennies turning green with age. On the way back to the orphanage she bought nineteen tootsie rolls and skipped the rest of the way. That night, before going to sleep, she thanked the angel she believed had left her the pennies.

AS I KNEW HER

Mom was 5’ 2 tall and rarely dressed up or wore makeup. She would never be considered pretty outwardly—her hair haphazardly held away from her face with bobby pins. But she was beautiful to the three children she raised in the slum area next to the Hoboken docks on the Hudson River. Picture me back then, age 5, a scrawny white kid, with flaxen hair unevenly cut across his forehead and over the top of his ears. My sister Katherine was a year older—a chubby cherub", also with chopped hair across her forehead and barely covering her ears. My brother, Johnny, was a year younger, also scrawny, also with chopped dark hair, likewise hanging over the tops of his ears. Mom’s only objective in cutting our hair was to get it out of our eyes. She got away with it until she unwittingly brought our first mirror home from a rummage sale. Consequently, we beseeched her to get the scissors sharpened when the knife and scissors sharpening man came around.

CHAPTER THREE

THE WAGON

"Is it in heaven a crime to love too well?

– Alexander Pope

I t was my 5 th or 6 th birthday and I was outside the entrance of our dilapidated apartment building for Mom to come home from work. She often had a bag of groceries in her arms that I would carry upstairs. On my birthday, she came at a hurried pace down the street pulling a beautiful Red-Rider wagon with silver wheels and handle. I knew it was my birthday present. When she got to the entrance, she rushed me and the wagon into the vestibule where she paused to catch her breath. Let’s take this down to the cellar and paint it, she gasped, still trying to catch her breath.

"Why? It’s beautiful,’’

She responded with one of her favorite quotations, Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.

With that, we carried the wagon down the back staircase into the junk-filled cellar, scrambling the rats on the overflowing garbage pails. Mom flipped the light switch igniting a single lightbulb in a socket dangling on a wire from the cob-webbed ceiling. The smell in that cellar was indescribable, for there is nothing in the world dead or alive that could compare. Undaunted by the rats, roaches and smell, mom tore through the piles of junk—rusted over radiators, broken sinks, doors, cabinets, bed- springs, rusted oil cans—finally emerging with two cans of paint with rusted lids. How Mom knew she would find paint in that cellar hints again of things mystical. All I could think about at the time was how we were about to muck up this beautiful Red Rider wagon.

Using an old spoon, she pried off the paint lids, revealing brown paint in one and kelly green in the other. Skimming the dried out, rubbery layer off, she found some liquid beneath which she stirred back to life with a stick. Going through the piles of junk again, mom found a hairbrush and some rags which we used to paint the almost new red wagon. Surprisingly, mom took her time to paint the wagon carefully, wiping away any paint that dripped or smeared outside the delineated areas. (There was probably an audience of rats hiding around us, peering out between garbage barrels at the artist in their midst.)

Mom decided to leave the silver trim on the wheels and chucked the unyielding brown rubber paint back into the junk. We left the green and silver wagon there to dry while we went out to buy a birthday cake and some turpentine to remove the evidence from our hands. As we left the cellar, mom took my hand and said, Your brother and sister don’t have to know we painted your birthday present.

She made up no story and told no lies to try to gloss over the fact that she stole the wagon. I didn’t ask. She loved me so much that she would risk anything to make me happy. And I loved her so much that I already planned to remove the silver handle from the wagon in the morning and replace it with an old rope.

You may be thinking, what a terrible thing to do, steal some other child’s wagon. You may think that my mother’s actions hardly fit the definition of love. Before you judge her too harshly, keep in mind that she was only two when she was left on the orphanage doorstep. She was raised in this crowded institution where personal love was in short supply. She had no family, no visitors ever. Never adopted, Little Charlotte left the orphanage when she was fourteen, entering the care of an elderly couple who put her to work as a waitress in the German restaurant they owned. This is where she met my father years later.

My father was a German immigrant, who came to America several years before World War II. He was a man of average height and build, thin and receding sandy-brown hair, above a clean-shaven round face, with grey eyes, vacant and ever-compromising.

My mother and father were estranged from each other. I do not remember them ever living together. I rarely saw my father back then, so I was duly surprised when he showed up one summer morning to take five year-old me for a ride in the linen supply truck he drove for a living. (We didn’t own a car, refrigerator, TV, phone, vacuum or carpets to vacuum.)

The ride turned into a full day on his linen supply route, the one day he delivered to the upscale hotel-restaurants in the Catskill Mountains. Until that ride, I never believed mountains were real. I thought they were fictitious, like the castles and mountains on comic book covers. I hadn’t gone to school yet and we never went to church—and God was never mentioned except as an angry exclamation.

Driving into the Catskills was like entering a dreamscape, a wonderland of forests, and green fields, with huge white houses and red barns. Many of the fields had beautiful black and white horses or cows grazing in them, some near the fence looking up at us as we drove by. We occasionally drove past a river or lake alive with swimming ducks and fishermen in baseball hats and sunglasses. All the cars on the road looked shiny and new, nothing like the dented jalopies that shook and shuddered through the dark narrow streets of my slum-ghetto. The sun shone everywhere and at certain turns in the road I saw actual snow-covered mountain peaks. On that day I remember thinking, This must be heaven— only the rich live here.

In the middle of my father’s workday, we stopped to share a hero sandwich and two Cokes he bought at a grocery store in town. We ate in the truck, which he parked in a hotel parking lot. We didn’t talk much because we didn’t really know each other. At each stop he would give me a bundle of linen aprons to carry into the hotel kitchen. Some of the workers, chefs, or waiters would shake my hand and ask my name. Later in the day we stopped at a German hotel-restaurant where everyone in the kitchen spoke German with my father. Before he bagged the dirty linen, one of the cooks snuck my father something wrapped in a linen napkin, which he quickly threw in the dirty linen bag and carried to the truck. That night, back in my father’s furnished room he removed the T-Bone steaks from the napkin and cooked them in butter and onions. I ate steak for the first time in my life. It was delicious and I said, This is what the rich people eat.

My father replied, Beats stewed tomatoes, don’t it!

He made me laugh because stewed tomatoes with saltine crackers was understood to be the meal for the down and out hobos who lived under the viaduct and after whom the town was named. They were not the only ones who survived on stewed tomatoes and crackers. When the bills weren’t paid and the gas and