Baby Steps

By S.O.B.

This book may not be for you. If you have all your ducks in a row and when every spin on merry-go-round earth you’re able to snag the brass ring, then put this down. But if you’ve ever struggled with a drug or alcohol addiction or knew anyone who has; if you came of age in the 1960s hippie era or are fascinated with the culture, music, and protests, then read a few pages. If you’ve ever been in prison or want to know what incarceration is really like, read on.

This is my story—personal, raw, and soul-baring. It’s written in the style of a one-on-one conversation. I’m not famous or rich, nor do I possess any degrees beyond a high school diploma.

So it seems you have a choice. Are you curious what a fellow flawed human being has to say?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662420962

Book preview

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Baby Steps

S.O.B.

Copyright © 2021 S.O.B.

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-6624-2095-5 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-2096-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

Take a thousand emotions, put ’em in a blender, and hit Liquefy. That’s the state of my brain right now, a gray mess.

It’s a Monday, April 10, about midafternoon in Benton County, Arkansas, in the city of Bentonville, in the Benton County Jail. I’m surrounded by a cast of characters Hollywood wouldn’t dare dream up, yet I fit in—pathetic. There will be no life lessons here. I learn some varying number of things every day, and one of them is how much more I have to learn. No, not even close to figuring this all out. My situation falls somewhere between the That’s it! You got a gift, and the This is what you need to get you closer to God crowd. The responses one gets when dropping a major bombshell seem to be a spot-on reflection of the status in society we imagine ourselves holding.

But wait, there’s more! Call in the next five minutes, and we’ll double the offer! Congratulations, you won! Send just $1,500 to cover tax and distribution. He doesn’t want to meet you. If your money can’t walk, there’s no deal. Whoa, hold up, we don’t pop into this out of nowhere. There are a thousand baby steps on the path here.

Isn’t life simple? When you’re a child, the world is so small. However, it’s really just as big, stupid, and messy as it is now, but not to a young mind. Our childhood memories are sparse because we build them slowly, one layer at a time. There are few elements. Whatever I can see with kitchen-table-height eyes. There are parents, in my case, two. Some have other adults around who have the clout of parents in the sense that they can squash you, but not the authority. Siblings, a dog or a cat, the feelings of wind on my face when I ran. We all, for the most part, start this gift of life with equal opportunities from a physical standpoint. With the proper training, effort, anyone can become a bodybuilder, musician, business leader, math genius, scientist.

What intrigues me is the variety of development of character, intelligence, hobbies, and interests. Have you met someone with good morals and little education? Just as common is the snake with a college degree opposite people growing from common soil. If a father and son are mechanics, often you find that one is an outdoorsman, while the other rarely steps on unpaved ground.

So what does any of this have to do with jail? Like I said, Baby steps. Lots of them. Mostly insignificant, a few life-changing. This is the story of a firstborn son who’s given an abundance of love, choice, freedom and who’s provided for but not hovered over.

Chapter 1

Somebody in 1891 bought five acres of land and built a ten-room house at the highest point. These facts are accurate-ish. No research will go into this, nor is it necessary. In the 1950s, maybe 1940s, my grandparents ran a small store. As was often the case with entrepreneurs, they saw a void, applied some thought, and created a unique and thriving business. They sold meatballs and sauce as a takeout at a time when that was uncommon. Homemade Italian sausages, credit, home delivery if you had no car.

We, as a society, are so quick to trade the mom-and-pop store for the big chain supermarkets with their slightly cheaper prices. First though, an unforeseen event presented my folks with a challenge. The store burned to the ground. I saw a cardboard jackknife display card, a few pictures, and a junk drawer of miscellaneous stuff. I can only assume it was a tragedy and a blessing. Maybe there was insurance on the store, or credit was available for a prominent business owner. Again, the details don’t matter; fill in the image however you like.

My grandparents, with my dad and his three sisters, moved into the ten-room house across the road from the ashes. With one carpenter for guidance, my dad and Pepere built a new store—a cinder-block supermarket, one of the first of its kind. It measured 120 feet × 80 feet, with four big plate glass windows upfront with in and out doors ten feet apart between the plate glass. There were eight compressors on one side and four on the other, covered in long sheds. With all this refrigeration for store-length coolers, freezers, meat cases, milk and dairy coolers, produce display cases, all but half the three available walls were refrigerated. Four sets of gondola shelves split the store into five aisles for groceries. By today’s standards, it’s no big deal. But on a dirt road on the south side of town with little industry, the South End Supermarket was an optimistic gamble. This gamble paid off.

The plastics industry was born in Leominster, Massachusetts. DuPont Chemicals—making nylon stockings and other related goods, rope, etc.—was developing polystyrene, polyethylene, (remember, no research) basically, plastic polymer before injection molding ever existed. The first thing made with an injection-molding machine was a comb. At one point, there was a billboard on Route 2 that read Welcome to Leominster, the plastic capital of the world.

I guess it was true. The city swelled to thirty-thousand, all employed in factories. Our so-called twin city, Fitchburg, enjoyed the same industrial boom. Paper mills, steel factories—all hummed along the Nashua River. When I was a teen, it was just accepted that the river ran green or red, depending on the paper mills’ run that day.

Now all these people needed things—car dealerships, shoe stores, clothing stores, hardware stores, gas stations, and yes, grocery stores. The South End Supermarket could go through one hundred crates of chicken in one weekend. Route 12 became a paved highway stretching twenty-six miles to Worcester, the second-largest city in the state.

My mother was the firstborn to the Girouards, a family with two boys and two girls. She lived not five hundred yards from my dad’s in a house paid for with DuPont money. My grandfather Girouard invented a machine that secured the bristles in toothbrushes with a piece of wire. DuPont bought the patent for $5,000, which is enough money in the 1930s for a car and a house. The one small tidbit I can relate is my mom telling me he swept her off her feet. Sounds about right.

The earliest childhood memories are, for me, like short clips of scenes. Many of them were a few seconds long. While I’m certain every scene helped shape my brain, my interests, fears, and strengths, only a few truly contributed to a fully developed person. My brother Mike was my constant companion. We were allowed to go and do almost anything. Go out and play was just that. We weren’t told what to play with or to not leave the yard or even when to return. It was as if our parents trusted that their kids wouldn’t do anything stupid and only stepped in when we did.

Like most kids, we played with our toys, watched cartoons, wrestled till Mom stopped us. I had no idea we were well off. But by the time I was in school, both of my dad’s parents were dead. I should say gone, because in my mind, Memere was a vague memory, and Grandpa, or whatever I called him, went from a sickbed (stroke) to just gone. I didn’t ask; they didn’t tell me. The idea was to shield me from the grief of death. In hindsight, it was probably a good idea. I loved him and hung around in his room, fetching things and playing simple games. I don’t remember this, but I was told he once shaved his eyebrows just to make me laugh.

So I can only guess about how much time was spent with Mike. I spent a lot of time alone. By choice. I’d explore the woods behind my house, the brook, and small ponds. I tried to make pets out of any critter, be it field mouse, red elf salamander, garter snake. I’d pick wild flowers for Mom, often unaware that laurel, the state flower, and lady slippers, were both protected and illegal to pick. The meat cutter liked to scare Mike and me with stories about wild Indians in the woods. He’d give us a bone and tell us to hide it in the woods, and when we’d report the next day on the missing bone, he’d jump and wave his arms, saying, Injuns got it, and laughed so hard.

We had so much to keep us occupied. It’s a wonder we got into mischief. There were strict rules about what us four kids could get from the store. We were allowed one candy, one soda, one ice cream, one bag of chips, and one toy per day, and really, the rules were not enforced. It wasn’t till I got to school that several kids told me I was rich. I don’t know if rich was how I felt or if I felt embarrassed from a silver-spoon perspective. I just wanted to blend in. I never considered that most of my class shopped at Rockdale Discount department store, and not at individual shoe and clothing store, downtown.

We were Catholics, so I got to go to a parochial school, which were taught by nuns—the Sisters of the Holy Ghost. Yeeaah, it took years to get over that shit. Oh, it was a good education, with a side of religion. These nuns were dedicated. One small ancient nun would shake the devil out of misbehaving kids. Another big nun would stick you under her desk. They were allowed to bathe once a week to reduce sexual situation in the rectory where some thirty nuns lived. Hard to say if the shaken baby or the stinkin’ crotch worked the best. I know I got scared straight, almost. Chewing gum meant forty-five minutes kneeling on a hardwood floor. Each nun had her own style.

There was a nun who caused me to have nightmares. Her description of hell, designed to illicit fear of the punishment awaiting sinners, included a big talking clock that repeatedly said, Never get out. Always stay in. Add to that was the bimonthly air-raid drills. Well, it partly explained the dream with countless rows of tall stairs and a Nazi holding a crucifix at the top. If you kissed it, he’d kick you into a pot of boiling oil. If you spit at the cross, you were led down safely to…

By the start of my seventh grade (St. Cecilia’s was an eighth-grade school), I had friends in public school starting junior high school. Junior high was seventh to ninth grade, and the idea of a different teacher for each class and wearing anything you want versus uniforms was so foreign to me. It seemed out of reach. School was already in its third day when I bravely declared I want to attend public school!

Mom said, Okay.

What? For real?

Well, we have to go get you enrolled.

That was a good day. It was not so much because of public school. That would have happened at ninth grade anyways. No, that day stood out because I learned to speak up, and from that point forward, my life began to change. Good or bad choices—they were my choices.

Now bear in mind, the year was 1966—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, long hair, drugs. The fourth day of school was a Friday, and with one look around, I had some catching up to do. By Monday, I had a couple paisley shirts, some bell-bottom jeans, thick corduroys, and turtlenecked sweaters. Growing long hair couldn’t happen fast enough. I had already tried to play guitar, like John Lennon. My dad bought an orchestra-sized Vega electric. I took lessons for a year, then sold it for $30, which was the price my friend wanted for his minibike. It turned out that guitar was handmade in Boston, and today it’s worth $15,000–$20,000. But I did take a page from the growing hippie scene. I got John Lennon–style glasses. The optometrist tried to dissuade me, saying finally, But I sell these to nuns! I knew what I wanted.

Gallagher Junior High’s building was three stories high, right in town. In fact, it later became city hall. As a school, it hosted what the organizers called sock-hop dances, complete with a huge disco ball. This was way before disco. The goal was to create a hip thing to give the kids something to do besides drugs and sex. Well, no one took their shoes off. Mostly, it was just the girls dancing, but it did end up being the best place to find pot and meet girls,