All The Wrong Roads

By Paul Armento

This is a brief description of what a wasted life really looks like, when your family and daughter
don't even speak to you and you have no one to blame but yourself. So, I decided not only to
change my life but to help other people change their lives also, because It's a hard road to
travel all alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hawes & Jenkins Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781637842188

Book preview

All The Wrong Roads

Paul Armento

ISBN 978-1-63784-217-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63784-218-8 (digital)

Copyright © 2023 by Paul Armento

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. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Hawes & Jenkins Publishing

16427 N Scottsdale Road Suite 410

Scottsdale, AZ 85254

www.hawesjenkins.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Growing Up

Chapter 2

My Father

Chapter 3

The Military USAF

Chapter 4

My First Love

Chapter 5

My First Wife

Chapter 6

My Second Marriage

Chapter 7

Getting My General Contractor's License

Charter 8

Going to Jail

Chapter 9

True Ghost Stories

Chapter 10

Divine Intervention

Chapter 11

Retirement and Congestive Heart Failure

Chapter 12

My Road to Success

The Ride

My Love

God

A Single Step

About the Author

Introduction

As I have just retired at sixty-seven years old, I had gone to Oregon last year to flip a house for a friend, and by the time I got back six months later, seven people I knew had died of drug-related illnesses and another three from a drug overdose. I had two minor heart attacks last year and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and possible kidney failure and was told I'd be lucky if I lived another three years. So I did some research on the Internet. Everything I read said to write about something you know and are passionate about. Being a general contractor most of my life, I found that writing about how to build a house might be a little boring. But writing about fifty years of drug addiction and spending around $1,500,000 on drugs and partying and how you turn around and find you've wasted your entire life and just how easy it is to do might be a little more interesting. I found it very difficult to write about my stupidity, but if it helps one person not to go down these roads, it's worth writing. I had to take a hard look at my life and found I could give a new meaning to the word regret. Until I wrote this book, I don't think I understood what regret really is and how it can bring up so many more emotions and pain. But I now use the pain and guilt to push myself harder than ever to succeed so as to have the ability to help people to a life of success instead of failure, where the possibilities are endless if you believe in yourself. And I finally know why God kept me alive through more near-death experiences than I care to remember and to finally have a goal in my life.

Chapter 1

Growing Up

You have to understand that my father was the epitome of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as I grew up. I only have vague memories of my childhood. It was as if I woke from a dream in the seventh grade, but these are the few things I can remember as a child. My mother told me he started spanking me at three months old whenever I cried, and when my mother tried stepping in, he would slap her across the room. You have to understand that my mother had no idea what she had gotten herself into until it was too late. When they met, she was only fifteen years old, and he was twenty-six. She was just one of the kids to him.

So my earliest memory started at five years old when I would wake up in the middle of the night with my underwear rolled down to my knees and wondering how I had moved to make that happen. I realized years later that it wasn't done by me. My father used to do a lot of fighting when he was younger, so he taught me to punch, and before I could walk, I knocked the head off my teddy bear. He told me when I was three that my uncle was playing with my younger sister on the floor, and I walked up and punched him and gave him a black eye. I don't think he ever liked me after that. And then when I was in kindergarten, we were all in the milk line, and this Hispanic kid cut in front of me and then turned around to glare at me as if to say, What are you going to do about it? Well, a left and right into his stomach and then a left uppercut, and he went down crying like a baby. Needless to say, I got in a lot of trouble, but not with my father. He was proud that I had stood up for myself.

We moved to Denver when I was six years old, and this kid wanted to fight me, so my dad said fine, and as we were fighting, I slammed him against a plate glass window. This was before the tempered glass was created, and it was by the grace of God that I had slammed him against the glass but then pulled him back to slam him on the ground because big chunks of glass started to fall and would have cut him in half. Just like at the end of the movie Ghost.

While we lived in Denver, we lived in a brick apartment building, and my mother found out that my father was having another affair with a woman in the complex. So when he left for work, she packed up all seven kids, and we took the Greyhound back to Los Angeles. We moved into her mom and dad's house, and it was roach-infested to the point that if you moved anything, roaches would scatter in all directions. Well, needless to say, Dr. Jekyll showed up, and my mom told me years later that he said he would kill her and all seven kids if she ever left him again. I'm not sure if he molested all her brothers and sister and threatened to kill them if they said anything to anybody. He was truly a monster who ruled with fear. Well, needless to say, I was molested by family members but blanked most of it out except for one incident where me and my uncle, who was fifteen and I was seven, were in the garage, and he was showing me how to masturbate when my father kicked open the door and caught us. He told me to go into the house and proceeded to beat the shit out of my uncle. My mom tried to step in, and he backhanded her across the yard. It's funny, but I remember this like it was yesterday. I went inside and started watching Superman, and it was the one where he was flying around, trying to find some criminals hiding in a lead-encased building, and my father walked in and said, Get in the car. To say I was terrified is an understatement because I've been whipped for a lot less. So I got in the station wagon, and he started asking me exactly what we were doing. We turned onto Garvey Boulevard in Rosemead, California, and as we were going over a bridge, he said, Show me, and that's all I can remember. My memory stopped, and as hard as I try, I draw a blank. Somebody said I should go see a hypnotist to help me remember, but I would just laugh and explain that whatever happened, I blanked out for a very good reason, and although I was molested many times by various people, my mind knew how to deal with it.

We moved to a ranch in Anaheim, California. I remember my father getting a cattle prod and chasing me around, shocking me with it, and laughing his ass off. He taught me to shoot a 22 rifle at seven, and he would tell me to stand in a field about twenty yards away with a Lucky Strike in my lips and say, Don't you move, as he shot the cigarette out of my mouth with the 22 rifle with no scope. I know, what kind of father is that. Thank God I didn't sneeze or cough. I did get to see a bull being butchered. When we would go visit my grandparents, my uncle would take me to the drive-in, but we didn't have a car, so we would lay a blanket on the ground and watch the movie, and on the way back down these dark alleys, my uncle would look into the windows and do what I don't remember. It's funny, but my mind always blocked out the sexual abuse. My father would put us all in the car, and we would go to these big 10×10 yellow Goodwill boxes with a pull-down door, and he would drop me inside to hand him bags and boxes, and if somebody pulled up or the police drove by, he would drive away, leaving me in the box too terrified to make a sound in pitch-blackness, and I could hear something moving around, which were rats. I'm still claustrophobic to this day. He would drive to check a couple more boxes and come back half an hour later and talk about learning to control your fear.

As a child, I always had a recurring dream that I was in a room with flat black walls that were covered with chicken wire, and there was no door, and bright-lime-green slime was running down the walls, and I was cringing naked in a corner. I would wake up terrified and could never figure out what it meant. Another thing he liked to do was go bird-dogging. That's where you drive up and down the streets on trash day and ask people if we could have their trash. I hated doing it because sometimes, it was in my neighborhood, and I went to school with the kids that answered the door. I would beg my father not to make me do this, and he would just reply, It's either that or an ass whipping. Needless to say, it was a humbling experience. Years later, my friends would ask me if I wanted to go dumpster diving, and I would just reply, No, thank you.

So after we collected all this junk, we cleaned it up, and I had to go to bed early because every Friday and Saturday, he would wake me up at 3:00 a.m. to load the station wagon so we could get to the swap meet early to be first in line to get a good spot. It wasn't that hard to wake up because if my feet didn't hit the ground instantly, a belt across my ass would come next. I hated the swap meet because, again, my classmates would see me selling their trash. I wasn't allowed to sleep or eat while we were there, although he would make between $50 and $100 a day and tell my mother he made nothing. When my father drank, he sometimes got violent and would put my mother in a chair and all seven kids on the couch and start slapping her and calling her a slut and whore for hours until he was tired, and we were forced to watch because if the older