Equity

Four years ago I was homeless: living out of a car. Not even my car. Not even one car. I lived out of any car or house or hotel I could weasel my way into, and I sold drugs to feed my habit while I awaited my sentencing that would eventually lead me through prison and treatment where I made the choices that lead me to today.

Four years ago I could not comprehend the thought of me owning a home, or even having the wherewithal to start even thinking about the process of buying a home. Today I took the first big leap toward the biggest of investments in Maple Lake at Wright County Community Action where I sat through eight hours of information and lectures.

 

It was very personal, and I felt like they treated me as if I were the only person in the room. In fact, I was the only person that showed up on the student side of things. As the day progressed, a mortgage expert, a real-estate agent, an, uh…. title-insurance-closer-deed-guy thing, and a homebuyer advisor, took turns tailoring their information and advice to my situation. I was honest in what I was interested in and gave them some insight into my past and my credit and it went back and forth and it all moved unbelievably fast and I felt incredibly relieved and inspired when I left. I thought this class would fill me with fear and anxiety, but I left with confidence that I can be in my own home in under a year. Well, I have to be or this certificate expires and I have to do the class again to qualify for certain loans and down-payment assistance.

 

This array of paperwork has every bit of material that we covered and more. If you think it looks like a lot, it is. It’s a lot to wrap my head around, and it seems like a lot of people want my money, but it also appears that there may be some free money around for me to apply for. The First speaker said that somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy people are involved in the home-buying process—not all of them visible—and they all get a little cut. Shit.

As always, I want this to reach the struggling addict or alcoholic who doesn’t think there’s a way out or hope for the future. I’m doing all of this less than three years out of prison. When I got out I started working at a laminating factory for $10 per-hour, and I lived with my mom. I kept my head down and I ran hard, and I never stopped. I kept going to meetings, kept meeting with my sponsor, and traded-up my job twice for something I loved and I just kept moving forward. It was a lot of hard work, but none of it was as tough as living out of cars and hotels, giving away my dignity and my pride.

I’m sick of paying rent. I want something I can call my own. Well, our own. Although Amanda wasn’t with me today at the workshop, she will be a part of everything else moving forward--I hope. We will be meeting soon with a mortgage broker who will assess our finances and combined income and credit to pre-qualify us for an amount we can work with to start searching for our home.

For now, as we discussed for the first hour of the class, I need to draw up a savings and budget plan and stick to it. We need to do that. We are not in that great of shape financially, but they will still lend me hundreds of thousands of dollars and that’s kind of scary. I am capable of turning that $200k into $43 real quick-like with some old habits. Today is the first day of the rest of my life in which I am more responsible economically (said the guy with a $2,500 tattoo commitment.) But I have it in me to set and follow plans and goals, and as long as Amanda is on board, we will do well. I know this.

 

Tattered

I left my last post abruptly for good cause, and I have a two-hour window today due to a cancelled meeting to use as I see fit, so I thought I would try to hammer out something more substantive with my newly found spare time. These unplanned writing intervals usually lead to my best posts, so here goes.

The winter of 2001 was brutal for me. It wasn’t the snow, the wind, or the cold; it was my helpless addiction to everything at once with no source of income other than theft and swindle. I was living on the couch of another addict—I’ve started many posts similarly. I had spent the previous three weeks drifting in and out of blackout as a result of a 16-gallon keg out on the side porch that had gone flat because of the freeze and thaw. I brought it inside after finding out nobody else would drink from it, and I poured cup after cup until oblivion overcame my already fractured mind and the demon took over. It was in this condition that I made my brightest decisions both morally and physically. This is when I would do what I needed to do to get my drug of choice at the time, crack cocaine. Night after night, I would brave the cold in nothing more that a frayed and tattered hoodie, and ragged and ripped jeans.

Often I would go out at night searching unlocked garages for gadgets or unlocked cars. Lawnmowers and snow blowers would frequently fetch me $20 or the equivalent, and the occasional find of actual money in a car could net even more.

One night, toward the end of winter, I was out looking for trouble. I found a garage with an open door and spotted a snow blower inside. I casually walked in and rolled it out, making as little noise as possible. I walked it toward the end of the block and hid it behind a fence, where I would pick it up later.

I walked back to my friend’s house and called around but found no interest: all of the dealers had enough of me and my stolen goods. So, I called my best friend Mack and told him I wanted to get out of the house for a while and he agreed to come pick me up.

 

I had known Mack for a few years and we hit it off right away. When we met, we both smoked weed, and that was all. Over the years, my addiction grew, and our lives grew apart but we remained in communication, and on occasion, would get together and laugh about my life.

 

Twenty minutes later he was there and I got in. I told him to drive to a specific location, and he shyly agreed. He was not privy to the situation, although he knew my M.O. I told him to stop and he saw the snow blower and I asked him to pop his trunk. I could tell he wasn’t happy, probably because he wasn’t that kind of criminal. He liked to smoke weed, and that was it. He got out and opened the hatchback and just then we heard screaming from the corner about a hundred feet: the jig was up.

“Go, go, go!” I yelled.

I ran as fast as I could up the alley, but he just stayed there. I knew he was going to get busted.

I ran through a park and anxiously dodged lights of regular vehicles and cop cars, some of which by now were probably on the way to the scene. I walked and I walked to his parent’s house where I knew I could safely spend the night on a couch in his brother’s basement room.

The adrenaline left my body, and the alcohol lay me down to rest. Several hours later I awoke to Mack with his fist in my face. He was mad at me for some reason. He explained that the man yelling was informing him that he had his license plate written down, so he couldn’t leave. He had to wait for the police to arrive and when they did, they arrested him.

The police brought him downtown and interrogated him but he did not give up my name. Since nobody actually saw a crime committed, there was nothing they could do about it, and they released him without charge. But I was still responsible for that incident.

A little over a year ago I saw him at a funeral for our friend. He had recently had a child and was happy to see me doing well, and we chatted for hours. He told me a story about when he went to Canada on a family vacation and was denied entry because of an arrest in 2001 for which I was responsible. And that is why I am writing this post.

That is one critical reason I still write this blog. I need to access the past and jog my memories for amends that still need to be made, and that is a big one. He said he was over it, but I am not. My actions from back then still influence the lives of those involved now, and I need to fix what I have done. So, I will type up a letter to him instead of writing my next blog post and as usual, I will keep you posted.

I recently (about a month ago) wrote a letter of amends to The Bent Wrench which was one of the resentments I had held on to for a little too long. I haven’t heard back, but I did my part and maybe someday I will have the chance to repair that damage.

This work I do is never over. I do things constantly that let me live in harmony with my past, and I make great strides to ensure I do not create any more harm. The road is long, and I need to keep in mind that no matter how far along the path to recovery I have travelled, the ditch is just as close to  either side of me as when I started. It is up to me how much work I put into myself to keep going straight.

Snow Day

I awoke to howling winds and a persistent tapping on the windows. There’s less noise in a winter storm than in any other season because there is no resistance from the tree leaves, but the frozen rain (not snow) was making an effort to outdo its summer counterpart with a nearly horizontal attack on the windows. I’m a light sleeper, and I could see just the break of day through the curtains and I knew it must be around 6:30am, when the light usually peeks around the horizon. It was time to get up.

6:30 is a late wake up for me, but I knew I had things to do this morning because the kids would not be going to daycare or school today: it is a snow day! So, I went to the gym.

While I was in the middle of my new set of interval training exercises, I had the thought that it was stupid that I had to pay rent and shovel and snow blow the driveway. I have never been a renter and been responsible for such things. I then thought of the future, and the day I finally get to buy a house, which is possibly not that far away.

This coming Saturday I am attending a first-time homebuyers class put on by Wright County Community Action. It’s an eight-hour course in which all of my questions about buying a home will be answered, and all of my fears about buying a home will be confirmed. It was only $30 to register for the class, and although it will take up most of my day off, I am excited to tackle this first vital step of the home-buying process. I will keep you all posted.

 

Right now I am watching Life with Pets. It’s a children’s cartoon movie and it’s the same movie we watched last night. This is a common theme in the life of children. I can’t blame them, I could watch Office Space or Burn After Reading every day if I had the time, but these girls take things to the extreme and will possibly watch this very movie again on this very day, as will I because I have little choice; I’m snowed in.

This is a chance for me to bond with the girls. In fact, I’m going to get off the computer now so I can be present in their lives. To be honest, I can’t think of much else to write on at the moment, so this is it.

The Start

Good morning from Bridge House Coffee and Café in the beautiful, frosty town of Delano, MN. Many of you know who I am and have followed me from the very beginning, I call you my stalkers. Some of you are new to the blog and have only recently started following and/or reading my recent posts which generally follow a message of life after the bottom. I like where this blog has been heading as it chronicles my daily life in the position of an accountable male, new to the world of children. There are trials daily, and some days are better than others, and I am still figuring out how to live with another adult, but my worst day in sobriety is better than my best day of addiction. So I continue on because love is the new answer to my old problems.

 

I said all of that to say this: infrequently, I like to return you all back to the beginning, especially if you’ve never been there. I haven’t read the old stuff for about a year now, but every now and then I get the urge to remember what it was like in confinement. Not because I want to be there, but because I don’t. Here is a link to the home page of the original blog. It started nearly four years ago while I was sitting alone in a prison cell in the E-House block of St. Cloud prison. I started writing my story before the blog concept was ever conceived by my mother. I used the five pieces of lined paper and my two flexible three-inch safety pens which are both part of the “welcome to Prison” packet to write out a brutally honest version of the beginning of my addiction. It was graphic, sarcastic, and maybe a little over the top. I was writing to shock, but I had nobody to write to. I threw the original version of the beginning of life away. I sat and contemplated life for a couple weeks until I was moved to B-House.

B-House is where I lived when my mom approached me with the idea of telling our stories respectively, but interwoven through time. Maybe the time jumping was my idea, as it seemed to fit the life well. I told her I loved the idea and I had already started but would start again. And I did. My first envelope I believe contained 17 pages—back and front—which made up the first few posts from my side of the fence. It was such a great concept. I kept writing, and eventually it was published and I got to start reading my own stuff, which is great for somebody who lives a self-centered life. What I didn’t consider was the other side of things—addicts never do. I started reading and I learned a lot about what I was putting others through, namely my mom.

In a cell, alone one day, I read a post about a particularly frustrating situation for loved ones of those incarcerated, and I really started to understand the beginning of what I would learn over the next few years: accountability. I am fully accountable for my thoughts, feelings, and actions, and all of those have consequences—good and bad—and they affect others.

These days I need to be fully aware of all of my actions, words, and even my body language. Things I do and say have the capability of setting the mood for others, and I am no longer in control so I constantly ask for help from the thing I don’t comprehend that I call God, and what I ask for is the ability to make the next right move; ask Him to remove selfishness, resentment, dishonesty, and fear, so I can only put good things into the stream of life. I have to do this constantly, along with everything else I do to continually fight this demon inside me that never wants to stop fighting. I WANT TO BE SELFISH! I LOVE BEING DISHONEST! But I can’t be those things anymore if I want to be happy and loved.

The link above will bring you to the beginning of all of this. When I started, I still held onto my character defects. I wrote to become famous, not to heal. I told stories that I thought people would want to hear, and even though they were good and they really happened to me—that was part of the problem, I was doing it for me.

These days I’m part of something that helps others. When I write each post my only hope is that I inspire hope in somebody that is just beginning their adventure in recovery. I hope somebody with a loved one who is suffering finds the courage to reach out and help. I am no longer part of the problem. I am part of the solution.

Outside

I’m writing today because tomorrow (Monday: President’s Day) I will be taking the oldest girl (a six-year old) to the Science Museum of Minnesota. It will be her first adventure there, and she’s as excited as she should be.

This week contained a Valentine’s Day that will hopefully not soon be forgotten. As much as I would like to tell you all what I had planned and orchestrated, I will leave it in Amanda’s hands if she would like to share what transpired. I don’t gloat, and I don’t share things with you to make you think I’m a great guy: I focus on others and actually try to be a good person.

At this moment I am standing at the kitchen table, watching Amanda make gluten-free cookies. Both of the girls are trying to help but it appears to be adding an element of frustration to the process. From three feet away, I enjoy the scene…

 

Outside these walls the struggle is real. Everywhere are souls searching for another way of life that once seemed so attractive. People I know from the program are falling by the wayside and some with whom I spent six-months of treatment hell that I left nearly three years ago are back in—with some pretty substantial charges. One of my squad mates recently received a 15-year sentence for assault and will not be eligible for release until 2027. Several more have been in since our release, and a couple of them are back out. I think of all that I have been able to accomplish while in the real world, and I wonder how many wrong turns I could have taken, especially at different points in my life while sober or not. I am nearing the end of my pronounced 50-month sentence which coincides with my sobriety date. I see my parole officer infrequently, and soon it will be not at all.

My relationship with my parole officer is…bare. I’ve met with her three times since I decided to move to Delano, and every time we part ways, I get the sense that there aren’t many on her caseload that consistently do the right thing, or even communicate with her. She bluntly told me that people were “dropping like flies” and in and out of jail.

I can’t do that shit anymore.

I’ve moved from standing to sitting at my normal spot at the dinner table (which also functions as a lunch table, and in a lesser capacity, as a breakfast table.) Across from me is a child who is just beginning to understand the world around her. She knows me as Vince. She depends on me to feed her, clean her, and teach her. Not just me, there is her mother who raises her equally. To my left is a six-year-old. She won’t stop talking and it’s a little maddening as I sit here and type about how I’m supposed to be a nonesuch (look it up). She looks to me as a (I just asked her for a word that describes me and I was going to insert that word here, however, she said, “You have a beard and a mustache.” Fucking priceless.)

As exasperating as life can be on the daily, there is nothing I would do to risk what I have now. There is no measure of frustration that has pushed me in the wrong direction, and no tool that I do not use when I find myself thinking negatively, or wondering if I have put myself in all the right places since my release from the prison of my mind and body. I am here now, and I can’t wait to stay.

No Gamble

Well I’m at the coffee shop and even though I fully charged my laptop, my battery icon indicates that my time remaining on this computer is just one hour. That’s usually enough time to type up a post, but now I feel pressured…

My last post harvested some emotional and well phrased comments both publicly and privately, but once again, the darkest posts bring my mind to the darkest places and throughout the week I’ve been reliving the event in my mind periodically.

I wrote only of that one night, but the theme was recurring in that part of my life. I was in and out of jail, and stealing from everybody I knew, and many people I did not. I wasn’t particularly good at stealing—I would say I had a 50% success rate—and I caught my first felony when I was just 18 for theft of a bicycle.

That felony from 1997 is still on my record because of how long it took me to successfully end my probation (8 years for a one-year sentence.) Sometime in the year 2005 I received a letter stating that my rights had been restored, but the felony would remain active and a part of any sentencing process for the next 15 years. So, in 2020, my first felony will be removed from my permanent record.

 

Processing my past mistakes and writing them out for the world to see has been part of my healing, and even though I replay a lot in my head, the idea of getting high or drunk has left me entirely. I have no desire to imbibe or ingest all those things that made me feel good. I feel good on my own now and it’s because I put the same effort into my recovery as I did into my criminality.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.”

Albert Einstein

Vincent Maertz

There’s no way I could maintain the relationships I have currently with the thinking and feeling I used in my addiction. The most important thing—and I’ve recalled this numerous times—is love. I don’t mean that I now have this ability to love other people and things, I always had that. I mean that I now know how to feel, accept, and process the feeling and words of love from those that surround me in my home and family life. When I receive a compliment, I do not shy away or retort with sarcasm (well sometimes I’m sarcastic, but only when it’s super funny, which I always am, just ask me.) I can embrace that which makes me feel good.

I feel love every day. More often than not, I am greeted with hugs and jumping and screaming. I tell Amanda to stop jumping on me but she just gets so excited. But really, these two children have been such a blessing in my life, and I am grateful that I have this unique opportunity to impact their lives with love and laughter, and I show them gratitude by showing up in their lives as a responsible adult. Gratitude goes in both directions for me, and I have to give away this freedom and newfound love of life that I have been gifted. Maybe that all sounds cliché and sentimental, and I definitely repeat these same ideas over and over, but like I said earlier: I repeated my mistakes over and over until I was at the bottom, now I have to do the opposite to survive. It’s that simple for me. If I stop the cycle of gratitude and love, there’s a certain gamble that I will fall back into the world of hate and mistrust and shame.

There’s no more room for gambling in my life. The direction I’ve chosen is a sure thing. The 12-step program with which I’m affiliated has all of the answers I need, and although the work is hard, the reward is precious.

A Night

It’s easy to write about what life is like for me these days because it doesn’t generally—actually, at all—bring about painful memories, or make me wonder if I’ve fully amended certain areas of my past. For this post, I’m going to stray away from my current life to bring you a harrowing story of redemption and heroism all the way back from the year 2000. Now when I say redemption and heroism, I mean degenerate crack-addiction, just to clear up any confusion in what I’m about to portray.

Dreamy fade to the year 2000. (Think the Wayne’s World dueduladeudela noise.)

The 1900’s were over, see, and I was just coming up in the world of skillful distribution of street pharmaceuticals. I wasn’t very good at it because I was always disinclined to heed the advice of N.W.A.’s Dope Man or Biggie’s Ten Crack Commandments, which I believe all stemmed from some counsel by one Tony Montana: Don’t get high on your own supply. It’s great information that should be strictly adhered to in the dealing business.

In my case, it started back in the 1900’s with weed. I would front an ounce of weed and I would start smoking off of it right away. Then I would get my friends high, and then I would owe and struggle to find new criminal ways to pay my debts. I would fail, succeed, and fail again, and eventually find a new source and start the cycle over again. On and on it went for years until I found the hard stuff. Cocaine changed everything for me: it was a new game.

Now I would go get my bag of weed and sell it all and take that cash and give it to the crack dealer. It wouldn’t take long for that to be gone, so I quickly burned all of the bridges. I burned the cars, too, (Like Eagles fans!) and anybody else that I could get to, like my mom. People became metaphorically flammable.

After a particularly vicious cycle, and very possibly shortly after being released from jail, and also just after being responsible for allowing my closest and most honorable friend of years get arrested (but never charged or convicted) for a crime I committed, and shortly after stealing cocaine from a friend and replacing it all with baking soda, I found myself back at my mom’s house. Again.

Now, I don’t know how many times I had landed back in that situation, but as far as I recall, this would be one of the shortest stints and the catalyst for a very long cruel winter that saw me couch-hopping and eventually land me in a treatment center where I desperately needed to be.

 

I recall one night in particular, it was bad even for my standards. My mom went to bed and I was left on the chair in the living room all alone. I had a liter of whiskey which I had cleverly hidden while she was in the room with me, and I could finally drink freely. It took me about two hours to polish off the bottle. When I get whiskey drunk—and I mean liter of cheap whiskey in two hours drunk—I’ve been known to make decisions that I would later in life reflect upon, much like I am doing right now.

I made a choice. I’m fairly certain I even slurred the words in my head, “I’m gettin’ high.” Of course, I didn’t have my own money, but I was sure my mom did. The first place you look for woman money is a purse, and that’s where I found the jackpot: her A.T.M. card (they still had those back then.) I also found her keys, which was great because I was in perfect condition to drive, which I did.

I hopped in, went to the cash machine, and drove down Marshall Avenue until it became east Lake Street. I never spent much time in Minneapolis, but I had spent many years as an active drug addict, so I knew that when I saw the guy and nodded to him, he would know what I wanted, and he did. He brought me to a nearby crack house (twice) where I spent everything the card would allow me to withdraw. I gave the stranger a small portion for his work, and I headed back home without incident.

I smoked on the venomous  intoxicant through a pop can the entire night, alternating between sweating profusely and peeking through the blinds as a result of paranoia, and playing scrabble with myself.

When my mom woke up, I pretended I had also just risen, and played the good son by offering to start her car for her (because I wanted there to be a reason there was less gas than when she parked it the night before. It made sense then.) She didn’t say anything to me then, and she didn’t know the weight of what had occurred for a while, but much later in the day she left me a note telling me to leave. I did just that. I didn’t want to deal with what I had done, so it was time to move on to the next heist.

 

There is the biggest difference between an addict and a drug user. I was an addict. My decisions affected other people and society. I didn’t care about what you had or how you got it, if I needed to get high, I would do anything I could to take what was yours. And I didn’t care. That is the aspect that still haunts me. That is why I go to any length now to stay clean, because it is still within me to go to any length to destroy whatever you own. I was the literal definition of detriment to society.

Years later I found out that what I had taken from her account amounted to everything she had (in that particular account). It took even more years to really feel the burden that I had assessed onto loved ones, and to try to make things right. I’m still in the process of writing my wrongs, and righting my crimes. I may never be done, but it’s important for me and you that I keep working on it.

This all happened on just one night in roughly 15 years of steady addiction, some nights were worse. Every night was a story.