Alive: A True Story

By Kurt Richard Spinner

Death, dying, and the dreary theory of the afterlife. These taboo topics are talked about minimally throughout our culture unless attending a mourning service. Alive is a true personal account detailing a near-death experience that a New Jersey native had while in his twenties.

Originally wished to keep quiet, the individual later felt compelled to publish his story in order to have it out there for others to know. That every single person will one day die. A notion not too many are concerned about. Including himself, until having to deal with dying first handedly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098058647

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Before you begin reading my story, I would like this to be known. Currently I do not take any medication whatsoever, and the last pill I had to ingest was in June of 2017. Taking trips to the hospital and visiting doctors is now a thing of the past. I’ve been employed full time at a property management company for a few years now. Primarily I drink water and regularly exercise five days per week. After what I went through, I won’t even drink coffee anymore. Sure, I’ll have a beer or two with dinner or hit a joint on the weekend if I’m out with friends. But I no longer null my senses like I used to do to get drunk, wild, and crazy.

In order for this book to pertain to a like-minded individual such as myself, I wanted that to be clearly stated. The following is a true personal account on what I experienced in my life from 2013 to 2016. There is a brief summary on the background of what life had been like up until this point so you could get a feel for the type of person I am. Mostly so you could see that this could have happened to pretty much anybody, I’m an average guy. But the tale I have to tell is far from ordinary. Certain characters’ names have been altered in order for the individuals’ referenced to maintain their privacy. But all the events that occurred are real. The following is a true story.

Cruising

Home has always been Northern New Jersey for me. It’s quiet enough for you to enjoy the stillness of nature, but the people seem to have an urban temperament about themselves. You can easily hop on the highway and arrive in New York City in under thirty minutes if you wanted to, which could explain the fast-paced aura carried about by people residing in the area.

During my childhood, I grew up in Packanack Lake, which is about twenty miles west of Manhattan in the township of Wayne. My home was on the quiet street of Sleepy Hollow, which is right behind the eighth tee box of the town’s golf course. It sounded bizarre to people when I would give out my address, Sleepy Hollow. They’d ask if the location were based on the Halloween movie or if I’d seen the headless horseman galloping around like they have heard of. Mostly I’d joke back with them about seeing Ichabod Crane out in the woods, but overall it is in a very nice area.

From a financial point of view, I was raised fairly well off. My father was a successful corporate bank bond broker in New York’s financial district at the time. He had always disciplined me to work hard and not to be lazy as many of the kids in my neighborhood tended to be. A majority of children were being raised in this lax environment and turned out to be spoiled once they reached adolescence. Pops never had much money during his youth and had to work hard at a very young age all on his own to get to where he is. He wished to instill that same sense of work ethic in me too, despite having a sound financial upbringing. If I wanted a toy, he would tell me that I needed to earn it, to work for it. He’s not going to give me a present because I wanted whatever the latest fad happened to be. The way he was brought up, he needed to wash cars by hand or drive a taxicab to generate cash.

In order for me to experience somewhat similar work conditions, he started me off by doing simple chores around the house. This allowed me to begin earning a weekly allowance by doing the dishes, taking out garbage, or sorting out the recycling. These were very basic tasks to complete, but I began earning my money in order to purchase the POGS and Tamagotchis that children my age had been receiving from their folks for free. For me to receive something that I wanted, all I needed to do was work for it, which felt fair. That things were not simply handed to you, and if you put forth a bit of effort, you could achieve whatever you wanted.

To add money into my piggy bank, I started mowing lawns in the neighborhood by assisting a landscaper. While most of my friends were in a pool relaxing for the summer, I would be cutting grass in a dirty and sweat-stained tee shirt. As a twelve-year-old, this looked unusual for someone like me to be doing. It’s not as if I worked like a dog. I’m saying a few days a week I did this when most people my age didn’t consider working to even be an option. This established a sense of character in me that most people did not have in their youth.

When I wasn’t working, I still managed to enjoy myself thoroughly as a young rich brat. The lake held summer camp for the kids to participate in many different outdoor activities while on summer recess. Games of roller hockey could be played each morning that the older counselors set up for the younger children. There was a sailing team that I joined to race the other boats in the lake during the afternoon hours. On the beach, we had running bases tournaments and fought one another with water balloons. We could take a break to munch on pizza and slurp down Slush Puppies. I was still a kid, don’t get me wrong. However, I knew what the work life was like, so I learned to appreciate my recreational freedom at a very young age.

Knowing that work needed to be completed first to earn the things I wanted, I found a job as a golf caddy at North Jersey Country Club. It was my first documented job on paper, and I loved it for a number of reasons. Aside from having to wake up early on the weekends to get to the course, the hours weren’t terrible. You could finish a day’s work by one or two in the afternoon with a solid $80 cash in your pocket. Earning that amount of money at the time was not typical for a young kid. Being outside was gratifying, and the main thing that you had to do is keep on top of wherever the golfer’s ball landed. In a sense, you’re an extra set of eyes for the golfers in case their ball slices out into the rough. Carrying a leather golf bag on each shoulder is tiresome, but once one of the older rich golfers handed you a few twenty-dollar bills at the end of the round, it made everything feel well worth it. Plus, I’d still have the rest of the afternoon to do as I pleased. Which usually meant playing Age of Empires on the latest dial-up modem that just came out. The internet was beginning to enhance the computer gaming world and was becoming an obsession for me and most of my friends. Considering I was outside sweating all day, being indoors in front of a computer with the AC blasting was now enjoyable and relaxing. As a youth, my childhood consisted of playing different sports at camp or working a small job to earn a bit of extra money.

High school was approaching, so I decided to join the football team even though I’d never actually played the sport. Soccer had been more of my game but felt that football players were looked at with much more respect overall. The summers were used to train the incoming athletes by having everyone run laps and hit the weight room during the hottest months of the year in muggy North Jersey.

Since I hadn’t began drinking booze yet, I got into excellent physical shape toward the end of that summer. Running and lifting five days per week for a few hours each day will definitely get you shredded. By the time classes began in September, I felt like a completely different person to start off high school. Now I was an athletic freshman on the football team instead of being a cheesy-looking middle schooler. But to be honest, freshman-year football blows. You are at the very bottom of the ladder in terms of respect amongst the older varsity football stars. The seniors looked like two-hundred-pound juiced-up gladiators compared to a skinny little freshman twig. However, when you compared the other freshman classmates to those on the football team, we looked like the elite, so I stuck with it. There were only a handful of games I played as a wide receiver since I didn’t have much experience with the sport. It wasn’t as spectacular as I thought it to be.

On the weekends, I continued caddying when I didn’t have any games to play. My motivation had really been to work in order to earn some extra loot to buy my first car. Pops agreed to double the amount of money I earned to help finance my first car as a birthday gift once I turned seventeen. This was my incentive to continue working all throughout high school and save every dollar that I made. As a young male, the first vehicle you drive around in is a huge deal, especially for me since my first word as a baby wasn’t mommy or daddy; it was actually car. Whenever I’d see one drive down the street as a toddler, I’d point and say cah, cah. To own a nice automobile was a personal priority of mine; therefore, work needed to be up there along with it.

During my sophomore year, our family purchased a vacation home in Beach Haven, Long Beach Island. It was a cozy three-bedroom ranch-style house on the popular surfing beach near the bayside of the island on Holyoke Avenue. Throughout the years, we had always vacationed in LBI during the summer for a week or two. The beach in that area is very relaxing, and I had loved it down there each time we visited. To hear the great news of now owning a home down the shore was like a dream come true for both me and the entire family. This interfered with football practice however since training would be in July and August to prepare for the fall season. Double sessions would essentially cut my summer in half if I wanted to continue playing the sport.

Earlier in the summer, I tried balancing out both the beach and football practices, but I wasn’t having it. On the weekends, I’d head south and have a great time bodyboarding in the ocean, then have to go back to Wayne during the week for summer football sessions. During the week, I was running, lifting, and sweating while my new friends I had just made were soaking up the sun and relaxing on the beach all week. It was a far better way of life living down there for the summer as opposed to being up north, so I decided to quit football and found a job as an ocean lifeguard instead. Running and sweating up in North Jersey without earning any sort of income didn’t make much sense for me to continue doing. Plus, my prime concern had been to make enough money to buy a sweet ride. Caddying only on the weekends wasn’t going to cut it, so I dropped out of my class for football that year.

Physically I was able to pass all of the lifeguarding tests since I had already been training for football all year long. Sprinting down the beach and diving into the ocean to see how quickly you could respond to a distressed swimmer would be a pass or fail grade. Since I could keep up with most of the veteran guards and swim swiftly, the job was mine. In my head, I thought to myself, So I get to swim, run, and hang out at the beach all day while getting paid? Who wouldn’t want this job? Now I could live down the shore full time for the entire summer instead of only coming down for the weekend. Plus, the job was great. Each morning consisted of a daily workout with either running the beach or swimming out to a marker a few hundred yards past the breakers. The workouts would vary on a day-to-day basis and could be pretty demanding physically. The reason the exercises were so intense had to have been to sober everyone up from partying the night before.

Jumping into the chilly ocean first thing in the morning is a shocking wake-up call if you’re feeling a bit hungover. Right away, your entire body jolts back to earth if you had been feeling tipsy from the prior night. Quickly I learned that drinking booze was the lifeguarding lifestyle after working down there for a few weeks. Guards would throw keggers at different peoples’ parents’ beach houses since they were usually vacant during the workweek. Obtaining the alcohol was never an issue since most of the guards were in college and over twenty-one years old either way. The average day would be basking in the sun from nine to five then to party all night till about 2:00 a.m. with the other lifeguards. Their objective was how to bring girls they had picked up on the beach during the day back to drink with everyone at nighttime. Each night was constantly entertaining because most of the girls were on vacation for the week and wanted to unwind themselves.

Once you reported back to work at 9:00 a.m., everyone would be stone-cold sober after finishing the hour-long workout that the captain had planned. This was a complete 180 from what football sessions consisted of back up north. In Wayne, I had been sweating in the heat on a football field like a slave without earning any sort of income. Down here, not only was I getting paid, but I also experienced the adult life of partying and drinking alcohol for the first time, all while getting a solid tan for the entire summer and working out each day as part of the job requirement. The choice was clearly the correct one in moving down south for the summer.

As a rookie guard, you are placed throughout the township of Beach Haven on various beaches to sit with the more experienced lifeguards. This teaches you how each beach can be very different from one another. Surfing beaches will have huge breaks out near the rock jetties that become mobbed with surfers when the conditions are ideal. The sandbars are set back farther out, and that’s where the surfers are permitted to ride. You have to be sure that these surfers stay in this area and away from the average swimmers. A surfboard lacerating an innocent person isn’t an event that anyone would like to deal with.

Other streets are geared more toward the large amount of hotel patrons that pour into the town for the summer rental season. These sections have wide swim zones to help manage the huge number of vacationers that are dunking into the ocean. Anything could potentially happen at a moment’s notice, so you needed to be alert at all times. Despite the stereotype of being a tanned beach bum chilling out on the stand, you do need to be aware of everything happening around you. We communicated between beaches with radios that had frequencies set to the police station and fire department if anything serious were to occur. The majority of the time, the ocean is calm and quiet during the months of June and July. Saving a distressed swimmer out from their swim zone or bandaging up a wound would be the most you’d hear about. However, once the summer begins to wind down in August and September is when it begins to get more lively. This marks the start of the hurricane season on the east coast, and the ocean transforms from calm waters and into dangerous rip tides. That’s when you’ll hear about spinal injuries over the radio with patrons getting smashed by the massive shore pounds. The waves can easily reach heights higher than your own head, and the accidents happen much more frequently.

With the rescues occurring this often, adjacent beaches would have to send in their spare guards for assistance in saving some of the patrons. That is when you have a heightened sense about everything happening around you. All eyes are on you when you need to dive into a dangerous current to pull someone out who is in distress. After becoming accustomed to how things operated as a guard, I was able to pick my own beach to report to for the following year. The street I chose was a few blocks away from where my new beach house was. That way, I was able to interact with many of my new neighbors that I was beginning to meet for the first time. Overall this beach was relatively quiet compared to the others and didn’t have any strong currents to be on high alert about. For the next five summers I worked at this location from my junior year of high school and into my junior year of college. Surely things have become far stricter down south, but back in 2003, this was the place to be.

Going back to high school, I had transformed from being on the football team and into a surfer dude from South Jersey. Come September, I felt more mature being that I had gotten used to drinking with the older guards who were in their early college years. When I got back home, I wanted to show my friends how much fun it was to party like it was down the beach. It didn’t matter because they were already on board about it either way to my surprise.

Returning back to Wayne, everyone was beginning to get their driver’s licenses, and they too were interested in searching for alcohol. Since we weren’t legally able to purchase booze yet, we would either have to raid whatever we could find in our parents’ liquor cabinet or have an older sibling purchase it for us. We could cruise into our neighboring town of Paterson to easily purchase beer with a cheap fake ID, but that always felt sketchy. Seeing a car full of white kids in this part of town throws a red flag out to the police officers. The only reason a bunch of white boys would be rolling around Paterson are for drugs or alcohol, so we’d only come to town as a last resort later at night. Most of the time, I would have a few friends over to play beer pong or flip cup. It was entertaining, but since my folks were home, we had to keep the volume level down. It wasn’t like the raging guard parties I’d been accustomed to over the past summer. With most of our friends now able to drive, we would take off and search for anyone’s house to drink at that didn’t have any parents present. This was the new way of life for juniors and seniors at my high school, searching for the next party to go to.

Despite all of the heavy drinking I was doing throughout high school, I still maintained a strong work ethic. After quitting football, I kept my job as a golf caddy during the fall and spring months. Earning cash each weekend like that on a constant basis I wasn’t about to quit. Since football practice no longer took up any time during the week, I had also found a job working for a local gardening nursery. After school, a few days per week, I’d load up bags of mulch/rocks for customers into their cars to make some extra money from tips. With all of the money I had earned between the nursery, caddying, and lifeguard paychecks, I was able to purchase my first vehicle. My father helped me out with it as he agreed to do, and we purchased a white 2002 GMC Envoy. Having a big SUV with a loud music blasting sound system was how you wanted your whip to look like during this era, so I followed suit. My truck was tinted out with twenty-inch chrome rims, and I installed an alpine subwoofer system to blast rap music wherever I drove. MTV Jams always showed rappers and the sick rides they had, so I made sure that my first truck looked similar to what they were rolling around in.

In the early 2000s, this was the latest trend to follow through with at the time. Hooking up your car with neon lights, an MP3 head unit, and a subwoofer bass box set. All of my friends had these crazy systems hooked up in their cars to play the latest mix we had been able to rip off Napster. Once we left a house party, we could keep the festivities going in whatever car we roared off in. Beer pong was becoming the new sport to play, and all of the students were getting involved with drinking.

Each weekend, everyone would meet up in the parking lot, blaring their systems in search of the next party to go to. Once we heard about an open house, everyone would peel out to attend the next vacant house to crash. It was like an event each weekend, whose house to show up to next for the party. So between high school house parties and working as a lifeguard during the summer, my teenage years were pretty thrilling. All summer I was able to earn money as a guard and party down the beach. Once I headed up north to return home for the fall, I had money saved and was in time for high school beer pong and flip cup tournaments.

The next step as