#nathan taveres

[luckythecog]

A Modern Fairy Tale - Part II

As I descended the steps of the Greyhound on that hot July day in 1981, my eyes meeting Kim’s, the butterflies swarming in my stomach were the size of Mothra from the Godzilla movie. My heartbeat was pulsating in my ears and my entire face felt like it was in flame. I felt like the schoolgirl finally being asked to go steady from the beau she’d had a crush on.

I had never had this feeling before, and I could imagine a life of bliss at the bottom of those stairs. As I took the last step from the bus onto the pavement, my legs felt like elastic strips and my head was swimming and all of a sudden, I was scared. What if this was a mistake? I had just spent the last 40 hours on a bus to embark on a life with someone I really knew very little about, but here I stood and the only thing I could do now was put one foot in front of the other.

Joei, who had taken to Kim immediately over the summer, yelled his name and jumped off the last step and plowed into his legs with a big bear hug. Kim scooped him up in his arms and gave him quick little kisses all over his face.

Here was a twenty-two-year-old guy who accepted Joei as his own. This wasn’t an act, as I had carefully watched the interaction between the two during the early part of the summer. Kim’s feelings were genuine, and he had an air to him that few people have. The kind of individual that seems to have a spotlight on them when they walk into a room, and everyone wants to be around. He was just magnetic.

He embraced me with the same gusto he had shown Jo, and his embrace was tight, enveloping and warm. I felt shielded and safe from my teen years that had been filled with so much pain and desperation.

In late August, Joei’s dad wanted him to live with him on the other side of the state, explaining to me the emptiness he felt without his boy, that the daycare and pre-schools in his area were top-notch and, his folks sorely missed their grandson. I agreed, and we settled on a visitation plan. The gap of his absence left a bit of awkwardness as it does when a child has been the center of conversation and observation between two people. It was as if we were experiencing empty nest syndrome at such an early age.

To our surprise, there was no awkwardness after he left. With Jo now living with his dad, we began to learn more about one another, and there was an uncanny ease to doing so. It was comfortable, effortless and familiar. We shifted into enjoying what was left of summer, which was full of laughs, loves and wonders. Every day seemed like a vacation and the mundane wasn’t ordinary at all. This was the first time in my memory that I looked forward to getting out of bed each morning.

One afternoon, as Kim and I were standing behind our humble little shack, or, if we want to be real here, migrant housing, that sat on several acres of apple orchards his mother Dot owned. We were looking at the flower bed below the kitchen window and talking about how well the flowers had grown over the summer. I looked up to the eves and the pitch of the roof and then slowly turned my face toward Kim’s. I was hit with the strongest case of Déjà Vu I had ever experienced, and it must have shown on my face. I explained to Kim that several years prior I had dreamt of this very scenario, except I couldn’t identify the man in my dream. “It was you” I said. “This whole thing, looking at the flowers and up at the roof, it was with you”. He then told me that the next time we went to his mom’s house, that she had a story that would knock my socks off, and boy, did it ever.

As Dot sat in her stool at the kitchen counter, she recounted a story when Kim was six years old. She was outside hanging laundry on the clothesline and Kim was playing in the yard. Suddenly, a face, plain as day, came across her field of vision. It frightened her so badly that she left the laundry in the basket, scooped up Kim and ran in the house. Her eyes met mine and she uttered “It was your face I saw that day”.

A million tiny needles filled my arms and legs, and my heart jumped into my throat. Dot’s story on top of my dream was a bit too eerie, even for me, but at the same time, confirmed what I had felt deep in my heart about this man. He was my soulmate.

 Our days were filled with barbecues and horseshoes with plenty of friends. Evenings were occasionally spent at parties listening as friends played guitars and harmonicas while everyone huddled next to bonfires. Laughter and talk were abundant.

That year, Kim taught me how to play cribbage and pinochle, and many hours were spent at the kitchen table, just he and I, playing cards with good tunes wafting from the stereo. It was the best times of our lives, and the love that was building inside of me was growing exponentially by the day. I had never felt real love before, and it was amazing, but at the same time completely unsettling. I could feel the safety net surrounding the walls that guarded my heart begin to fall away, and that left me feeling vulnerable. Because of my childhood and teen years, I had built quite a wall around myself, and a part of me was very nervous to let it fall.

We married in November of 1981, at Dot’s home with just a few family members and friends. After the ceremony, we arrived home to a party that was well underway. Before we even pulled into the driveway, we could hear bass thumping from the stereo, and as soon as we walked through the door, cigarette and pot smoke was as thick as fog with everyone shouting and laughing over the tunes. There were a lot of bets taken that night about how long this marriage would last. I think the longest bet was two years, and Kim and I have had a good laugh many times over the years, wishing we could find everyone that placed those bets, because we would own an eighty-foot yacht on the Mediterranean by now.

Our first child came to us in October of 1982, a son, who I wanted to name after Kim. He put his foot down explaining to me that having a name like that in school brought out the bullies, so we chose Nathan. It seemed to fit our little guy to a T. When Nathan was six months old, I had a flashback of a dream I had when I was newly pregnant. The little six-month old tot I was on the floor playing with, was the same child in my dream. Same round face and deep brown eyes. So, that made three. Three eerie predictions in the lives of two people.

The 80’s were a crazy time. Music was blossoming into several genres not heard before, drugs were prevalent, and it seemed like the entire area was a party zone. Kim and I adopted the belief that if we were to die tomorrow, we were going to get as much living as we could fit in, today. It proved to be a most destructive path.

Cocaine was plentiful in the 1980’s, and it seemed everyone in the valley was using it and we were no exception. We had become best friends with another couple, Jay and Dani, who had a daughter Nathan’s age, and the four of us would stay up sometimes two or three days straight, playing cards, snorting coke and taking turns watching the kiddies.

In 1984, I became pregnant again and all partying came to a halt. Dot proposed that we purchase the tract of orchard we were living on, along with another plot of acreage. Kim had been managing both orchards for the last few years and an agreement was made. One of the stipulations from our loan company, FHA, was the shack would have to go. It was to be replaced with either a home or double-wide mobile home. Kim and I were both excited but saddened by this. This little shack was home. It was comfort.

By March of 1984, our humble little home had been torn down and replaced by a brand new double wide. It looked as though a new life was unrolling right in front of us. In June, we welcomed our daughter Erin into the world, and she rounded out our little family perfectly. Nathan absolutely doted on his little sister, playing with her constantly and acting every bit the big brother. Even when I was pregnant, he would giggle wildly when he felt her move in my tummy. I knew they weren’t just going to be siblings; they were going to be best friends. We now owned a home and apple orchards and had two beautiful children. It was idyllic.

In August of that year, despite how well everything was going, we jumped back into the party scene. We were selling massive amounts of cocaine, staying up for 24 hours several times a week and receiving red-carpet treatment at many bars and restaurants, due to the owners being customers of ours. It seemed the kids spent more time with Jay and Dani than they did with us, but we were completely snow blinded.

 I remember one night, there was an altercation at the house when an acquaintance of ours, Vicki, showed us a .38 pistol she had just bought. We were in the back office and Kim excused himself to go to the bathroom, which adjoined the office.

Vicki raised the gun and pointed it towards the bathroom and to my shock, pulled the trigger. I couldn’t believe she would bring a loaded gun into the house. At the same time the gun went off, Kim ran out of the bathroom, his eyes as wide as dinner plates and before we could yell at her for being such an idiot, Vicki ran out of the house double time in complete embarrassment. We never saw her again.

Oddly, the sound of the gun didn’t wake the kids, and Kim and I walked into the bathroom to access the damage. The bullet had gone through the wall, chest level, exactly where Kim would have been standing just seconds before. It went through the opposite wall into the living room and lodged in the stove pipe of our wood stove.

I’d like to add here that Kim was born almost three months premature. At the time, they gave Dot a fifty percent survival rate and Kim, zero. In his teens, he jumped off a twenty-foot high wall of an area they don’t allow diving any longer for obvious reasons and hit a boulder straight on with his head. There was also the time in his late teens, while getting quite inebriated in a local tavern, a Marine punched him in the face throwing him headlong into a pool table, which he moved two or three inches. This was either the luckiest guy on the planet or he had reinforced steel for a skull and an army of Guardian Angels by his side 24/7.

One night in the autumn of 1987, after we had already been up for 24 hours and were working on the second 24, we were out on our deck. We both spotted what looked like the glow from a cigarette in the orchard. Kim and I ran down the deck steps into the pitch-black and as we were running like madmen through the rows, we thought we heard someone running several yards in front of us. After about ten minutes, we gave up, panting and out of breath and went back to the house. I can’t speak for Kim, but I felt like I was just way too high and the whole thing was a figment of my imagination, and I felt embarrassed because I’d gotten so out of control. If someone would have looked in our eyes that night, they’d have tossed us in the loonie bin.

The next morning, I wanted to look in the orchard in the light of day, to see if someone really had been out there. As I neared the area, I spotted a piece of paper on the ground that turned out to be a receipt from one of the local stores dated for the previous day. I also saw three perfect circles evenly spaced in the dirt near the receipt. As I studied it, it came to me that it was the footprint of a camera tripod. I ran as fast as my feet could carry me and bounded up the stairs of the deck and blew into the house to tell Kim. My heart was pounding wildly in my ears and I was sure it was going to blow right through my chest.

In the backs of our minds, we knew that by selling coke, we could become a target with the Sheriff’s department. But, as it happens when you’re young, you don’t really think anything bad will happen to you and unfortunately, when you’re using drugs, you just don’t care. Seeing those tripod marks gave us a glimpse of reality, albeit hazy. It is extremely difficult to sort out reality and paranoia when drugs are involved. You try to shake the cobwebs loose, but you still tell yourself it’s not really real, that there just has to be some other explanation. Anything but the stark-naked truth of it.

There had been rumors floating around town for several months about upcoming drug busts. There were a lot of paranoid people out there and they would be more than happy to bend your ear if you’d let them. There hadn’t been any arrests, and other than seeing the receipt and tripod marks, we wouldn’t have given it a second thought.

Using illegal substances is a funny business. You know the difference between right and wrong but when you are in the throes of getting high, you seem to toss your moral compass right out the window and damn the consequences.

I remember at one point; we owed our dealer roughly a thousand dollars. My wedding ring had been custom made by a local jeweler, using a diamond from my grandmother’s engagement ring, and I offered it to Jose to hold until we could pay him. We were now using up our profits and it was unlikely I would ever see my ring again.

On an early autumn morning in 1987, a gentleman who introduced himself as Arnie, along with his Golden Retriever Red, arrived at the house. He explained he was working with the local sheriff’s department, heading up a drug task force. We learned that we had been on the watch list for quite some time, and we were currently second on that list for arrest. We also learned that Red wasn’t your garden variety Retriever. He was a drug sniffing canine. Arnie explained that our arrests could mean twenty years in prison for each of us, and most likely foster care for the kids if a family member was unable to care for them. When we mentioned the receipt and marks in the orchard, he verified they were indeed real, that we had been under surveillance for several weeks and plenty of photos had been taken.

To this day, I’m still unsure why he gave us forewarning, but he told us that he was there as a courtesy because he said, “You two have a family and seem like good folks who got caught up in a bad situation”. He was giving us the chance to get our shit together and keep our family intact.

Kim and I took to Arnie right away and we met again several times. There was something likable about him. He was one of those warm individuals that you just felt comfortable around and trusted instinctively.  We told him we planned to get sober and put our lives back on track once again and put all the nonsense behind us. Arnie let us know that time was of the essence and we needed to take care of things right away because drug raids were in the starting gates and once that bell rung, it would be too late. We had already tried two treatment programs to sober up, but it didn’t take long to get right back into the life again once we got out. This time, we just absolutely had to make it work. This was as serious as it got.

During that time, we also received a visit from a woman from the Department of Social and Health Services, who told us that the kids were in danger of being placed in foster care due to our drug use. She knew Arnie, and together they were doing their best to give us the benefit of the doubt. She told us if a family member wanted to, they could apply for a foster care license to avoid our babies going into the court system. Kim’s sister Trudi and her husband Ron did just that. They applied for an emergency foster license and Nate and Erin were placed with them. It was a horrible situation we were in, but the only positive in it was that the kids would be with family in a warm, loving and stable environment during the time it took Kim and I to get our act together.

Because we had been so detached from reality, loan payments on the orchards hadn’t been made in close to a year. Shortly after our initial visits with Arnie and DSHS, the bank took the orchards back. Our mobile home, household items, vehicles and our boat were sold with the proceeds being applied toward the loan. It barely made a dent. Once on top of the world, we’d now been stripped of everything. It’s just you and me against the world Honey.

We loaded our last remaining car, a 1968 Mercury Cougar, with some blankets and a few clothes and stayed with a friend in Chelan for a couple of weeks. We spent those two weeks doing the Pity Party Last Waltz. I think we partied harder in that two weeks than we possibly had in the last three years. We were doing our best not to remember how badly we fucked up. The arrangement with DSHS dictated that we were not allowed to see the kids until we could prove we were off the drugs and could provide a stable home environment. In my opinion, there is no experience worse than losing your children. Material things come and go and don’t mean a thing in the grand scheme, but losing your babies is agonizing.

When we were good and done with our pity party, we began the long walk back to civilization and normalcy. Dot provided us with a single wide trailer in a local trailer park.  We moved in and began new jobs on a road construction crew across the lake. We had no furniture of any kind any longer, so we hit yard sales and second-hand stores when we could afford it, and Dot helped a tremendous amount. After two months, we got Nate and Erin back, and it just can’t be expressed enough, the heavy heart that lifted the first time we were able to visit them. Having them back in our fold was euphoric. This was the first time we had truly been sober in over four years and it felt wonderful. The only black spot was realizing what we’d lost. Not so much in terms of stuff but Kim’s family orchards. His dad died in the spring of 1977 and I know losing those orchards hit Kim particularly hard. I believe he felt he let his father down.

One afternoon there was a knock on our door and when I looked outside, I saw it was our old drug dealer Jose. Kim and I let him and his wife in, and as we talked and explained to him that we were out of the life, I noticed my ring on his pinky finger. I felt a hole open up in my stomach. I couldn’t take my eyes off it and I wanted to say something in the worst way but, what could I say? We still owed him over a thousand dollars and realistically, I couldn’t see getting him paid any time soon. This wasn’t just a ring, it was the diamond from my grandmothers engagement ring that made it special. It meant everything to me. I guess this was one material piece I didn’t want to see go.

Despite us still owing Jose the money, he and his wife were genuinely happy to hear we were on the up and up, and they shared that they were also out of the life, and after a half an hour or so, they left. As I watched them get into their car, the pang of regret hit hard. It would be the first of many to come. A few minutes later, there was another knock on the door. Jose had returned, and as he came in, he told us again how happy he was for us and slipped the ring off his pinkie and handed it to me. I could feel the sting of tears welling up in my eyes and I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to say anything without completely losing it.

        If you’re out there Jose, thank you.

           We’ve made roughly fifteen moves in the last 30 years, with the longest stretch living in the Columbia Basin. While visiting very good friends of ours who lived there, we told each other that we would absolutely never live in the area. We were there nearly thirteen years. Go figure.

Ours has been neither a life of ease nor regularity. We have learned to adapt to virtually every kind of situation and have stood by one another through it all, except for the few times I climbed aboard the crazy train and opted to flake out momentarily. Despite that, my husband took me back in his arms and loved me as if nothing happened. For those of you reading this that know Kim, you know the kind of man he is. People are just drawn to him because there is just a genuineness that is rarely seen anymore.

We’ve had money and been so broke that we counted quarters to get milk. We have both been overweight and rail thin, but one thing that has always remained is the love we have for each other. I’ve only been in love with one man so I have no idea about another couple’s relationship mechanics, but I can tell you the number of times that we have had the same thought at the exact same moment, are too numerous to count.

As a footnote, I’d like to add to the “eerie” dreams, premonitions and other weird stuff; In 2007, Erin was playing around on Ancestry.com and found that my great grandfather and Kim’s great grandfather not only served in the service at the same time, but were in the same regiment. Now, for a girl who moved to Washington State from California to meet her husband, who was born and raised in North Central Washington, thinks that’s the cherry on top of this sundae.

38 years ago, as we sat on the porch steps of that little shack, we’d laugh about the thought of the two of us old and gray, sitting in rocking chairs.

Okay Honey, here we sit, and my love for you is a thousand times more now than it was then. Here’s to the next 38.