Chapter 3

Finding my Bottom

Every drunk has a story to tell most of them just can’t remember it. In said story there is always a moment where you can  pinpoint  the exact time in which you lost control. My story is no different. If someone were to look at my life through a microscope to determine the exact time that I crossed over from being just an average drinker to graduating up to drunk status, I’m sure the moment would have had something to do with Jane Mayo (See excuses). While I will admit that the groundwork was already laid for me to become a drunk (See Peacock History) the fire burning in me was a small one and my relationship with Jane just added fuel to that fire. Let me explain.  I was crazy about the girl and she loved her family. Her dad especially. Unfortunately for me he was a drunk too and he already had his degree in drinking. It became clear to me that in order for my relationship with Jane to continue to grow that I needed to impress him. This was easy at first because I was respectful and I was making pretty good money. Lets go back and we will find that exact moment that I lost control of my drinking. I was Produce Manager at I.G.A., which was the largest grocery store in Quincy at the time. Every night that I got off I went over to Janes and had a few beers with her family. I liked the buzz. Her parents smoked and I found that my buzz was enhanced if I took a hit off of a cigarette so I started to smoke completely ignoring those Surgeon General warnings I spoke of earlier. I was grown now and so much smarter or so I thought. Janes father was named Bob and he was a mans man. Bob was one tough Son-of-A-Bitch and I wanted to be just like him. He drank every day so I started to drink every day. With a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other I felt taller. Up until this point I had always tried to conjure up a reputation for myself as being a bad boy but I wasn’t what you would call mean. I was learning fast. One night Jane and I had gone bowling with some friends of ours and we had a little to much to drink. As I was driving home from the bowling alley Jane decided that I had flirted too much with some of the other women there (I probably had) and she started to raise hell. Her tantrum got worse and worse and before I knew it she slapped me. I hit the dashboard of my car and busted it, screaming that she better not ever do that again. So, she slapped me again. This presented a problem. What would a real man do? Hit her back or just take it. All sorts of things ran through my head. If I hit her back and her daddy found out that would be the end of me. If I didn’t hit her back she would think I was a wimp. I was living in the moment so I slapped her back. I had never hit a woman as I had seen Earnest beat the hell out of my mama when he got drunk and I swore that I would never do that but I was breaking all kind of promises to all kinds of people so breaking one to myself probably wouldn’t hurt. I didn’t get the reaction that I had expected. A look of shock came across Janes face and a single tear ran down her cheek. “You hit me”, She said. I remained quite waiting to find out what the repercussions were going to be. “I never saw that side of you”, she said. “I like it”, she purred as she slide closer to me and started to give me the reward that real men sometimes get. Note to self, this was good. Sometimes you just got to whip a little ass to be a real man.

This journey into being a real man and a real drunk got another boost a few weeks later when Janes dad and I went out together one night to do a little gambling and drinking. We went to the Jai-lia fronton that some rich folks from Miami had built here in North Florida right smack dab in the middle of a cow pasture. I guess the plan was to get even richer by taking us country hicks money two dollars at the time. The owner of the Jai-li establishment didn’t fare so well when it came to me. Don’t know what it is but I have always had a knack for money. My problem never has been making it my problem has been keeping it. Even with me being a drunk and spending money by the barrel full I have always been able rebound and make more money. Jai-li was no different. Bob and I went on this particular night to see if we could win enough money for him to be able to pay his rent on the house they were living in. Bob lost all he had. I hit it big, winning about $800 dollars. A reasonable person would have celebrated a little and taken the rest of the winnings home to pay the rent with. Our problem was the celebrating got in the way of being reasonable. Bob was a binge drinker. A binge drinker is someone that will drink for day’s even weeks until they either get arrested or they run completely out of options in obtaining another drink. We went on a binge. My first one. It was fun. There are no rules when you are on a binge drunk. No set time to go to bed. No set time to get up. On a binge drunk sleep is accomplished by passing out and this can be done anywhere. Bob and I went to Tallahassee that night and closed all the bars as they shut down at 2’oclock in the morning. Mr. Mayo being quite proficient in this kind of drinking knew of some white jukes in a the neighboring counties that would stay open all night, allowing the celebration to continue. We visited them all. It seemed that Mr. Mayo was quite popular with the ladies too and even more so since he had a pocket full of money in which I gladly supplied him with. I convinced myself that my stock would go up with Jane because I was bonding with her father and if that meant entertaining a few of these older ladies that Mr. Mayo introduced me to, then all the better. In the end though this binge drunk that I had with Bob was actually the downfall of mine and Janes relationship because I had not taken into account the influence that Mrs. Mayo had over this whole situation. Bob and I eventually ran out of money and we drove all the way back to Quincy to get a check from my house that we would cash and go back to Jai-li to replenish our funds. That was the plan anyway. As we pulled up to my house we ran into Jane and her mother Alma, who was looking for us. Our options were about to run out. Mrs. Mayo was not happy with us at all. Jane wasn’t mad one bit because she had grown up seeing this kind of behavior from her Dad and as far as she was concerned it was just a right of passage that real men were allowed. It kind of made her look up to me. Mrs. Mayo begged Bob to not go back out and so he made the decision that we would end our little binge-drinking episode. While Mrs. Mayo pleaded with Mr. Mayo, she did not take the same course of action with me. She cussed me up one side and down the other. She emphatically told me that her daughter would not marry me because she would see to it that Jane would not be subjected to a life of having to live with a drunk as she had done. I didn’t help the situation because a few weeks’ later Janes brother and I went out one night and we did not come home until the next morning, and this allowed Mrs. Mayo to point out to Jane that I was the common denominator.  She was right. I tried to get back into the good graces with Mrs. Mayo, I bought Jane a car and I helped the Mayo’s out by giving them money when they needed it, a light bill here and beer money there, but to no avail. Over time she turned Mr. Mayo against me too and that was the beginning of the end for Jane and I. Mr. Mayo came over to my house drunk one night to kick my ass for some reason or another and we wound up getting into a fight. My cousin who was a police officer was there and he arrested Mr. Mayo. This was not a good thing in Janes eyes of course and for the next few weeks she had to listen to her parents tell her that I was no good. They were right. I wasn’t. I want to take this opportunity to do something that completely goes against the character of a drunk. I want to take responsibility. For a long time I blamed Jane parents for breaking us up but the truth be told it was nobody’s fault but mine. I have already revealed how I cheated on her and how I drank all the time. The Phyllis episode happened while Jane and I were dating too. Once Phyllis put a hickey on my neck and Jane saw it the next day. I convinced Jane that she was the one that did it. I was the bad guy here. I got the big head and thought I was Gods-gift-to-women. I even hit on her sister, Kathy. Kathy was not as popular as Jane but she had humongous ta–tas. Jane didn’t. I just stopped by Kathys house one night while I was drunk and told her that we needed to hook up. We could keep it our secret. She wanted to think about it. Jane eventually found out about all of this and presented me with an ultimatum. We get married so she could get away from her house or we break up. I wasn’t ready to slow down with my party life and get married so I told her that we should break up. I thought she was bluffing. She wasn’t. Jane was engaged to be married to someone else in less that a month. I was crushed. I hit the deep end and this is the moment that I put everything I had learned about drinking to good use. It was own now.

It wasn’t long before I had a reputation as being the town drunk. Well Jr. drunk anyway. The title of town drunk belonged to a married couple that everyone in town  everyone called Six-pack and Half-pint. They walked the streets and begged for change. In Quincy they were a fixture, kind of like Otis of Mayberry fame. They were made fun of and looked down on. Six-pack and Half-pint were quite pitiful and I looked down on them too, which is kind of ironic since they were only making a path that I would walk down myself. I quit working at the I.G.A. and got a job at a gas station mostly to get away from Jane since she still worked at the grocery store. Besides pumping gas is a much more appropriate job for a drunk than being a produce Manager. The hours at the gas station fit my drinking schedule much better anyway as I didn’t have to be at work until 2’oclock in the afternoon and was off at 10’oclock that night which was just in time to go out drinking again. I was closing the bars every night and getting so drunk I could barely walk. It got to the point that I didn’t want to stop drinking when the white bars closed, so this is where I discovered the fact that blacks jukes would be open all night and that I could get a bottle. The law in Gadsden County stated that all establishments that sold alcohol had to be closed at 2’oclock in the morning but this was during the early 1980’s when crack cocaine had invaded the landscape and the black jukes were making a handsome profit off of its sale and when you are selling crack cocaine getting caught for selling liquor after hours is not a big concern. Racism played a huge part in this situation as well. The County Sheriff was white, W.A. Woodham was his name and he pretty much had the feeling that he wasn’t going to send his men down to them black jukes into harms way to stop their illegal behavior because as long as them folks were just killing each other it was no concern of the decent folks. I am not saying the Mr. Woodham was a racist, he was a politician and in many cases that can be a lot worse. In order for me to be able to continue to drink I was going to a place that even the police thought was to dangerous at 3’oclock in the morning. I had friends here; people that I had went to school with who had either became drunks too or had made selling crack cocaine a career choice. Like I said I have always had a knack for making money and this situation presented itself with unique opportunity for me to make some cash in which I could continue to party with. I was to scared to sell crack besides being the only white dude out here this late at night it would not have taken long for someone to just take my supply from me so I recognized another way to cash in. There was a loose network of Jukes that sold crack and after hours liquor here in Gadsden County, Busy B, Bookwoods and The Blue Moon Lounge just to name a few. I discovered that none of the dealers understood the concept of price versus demand. I could fill that void and make a few dollars so I could keep drinking. If the dealers at one of the Jukes ran out of product I would load them up in my car and take them across town to another Juke where they could purchase more of the drug and then I would bring them back to their starving clientele where they could charge twice the price they had just paid. I would do this for a small charge of course, which I would quickly exchange for another bottle of liquor. Everybody was happy.

After a few years of this my reputation as the town drunk was fully intact. My mama would hear about my late night adventures and she was embarrassed. She worked at the same grocery store that she had worked at for years and people would come in and tell her in front of everybody how they had seen me falling down drunk. Mama is not only a hardworking woman but she is proud too. She tried everything she could to stop me from drinking but all she could do was watch my downward spiral. Eventually my drinking caused me to loose job after job and my drinking had gotten so out of hand that it was out of the question for me to live at home. Mama helped me get a trailer at Holmes Trailer Park and I would say that this was the low point in my life except there were to many low points to give that distinction to just one period. For a variety of reasons this little place became my own personal little hell. For one, the locks on the doors did not work and therefore there was absolutely no security and when you are a drunk and you are living in an environment full of drunks then security is a must. Adding to my purgatory was the fact that Mrs. Mayo was now my next door neighbor and every time I stumbled out the door of my house she was there to remind me that she had predicted that I was going to be nothing but a drunk. Mr. Mayo had been killed in a car accident on the Florida Skyway Bridge and Mrs. Mayo had taken up with another fellow who lived in the trailer park. I didn’t help matters with her because I went fishing with another son of hers one day and while at the pond I ran out of liquor whereas I borrowed his car to go and get some more and I completely totaled it, which gave Mrs. Mayo another reason to hate me. I lost my license for that wreck so I had to walk everywhere I went including work. The park was located next to a railroad track and so I would hit the tracks everyday to walk to wherever I needed to go. I was quite aware that everybody saw me walking the tracks and that they were developing an opinion about me and my fall from being the most popular guy in school. I was now the town hobo. My drinking soon outpaced my common sense but it probably wasn’t much of a race to begin with. I drank heavy every day and I drank hard liquor. Drinking alcohol in itself never really presented itself as a problem; running out of alcohol was the problem. Withdrawal it’s called. Regular drinkers have what is called a hangover but I had long bypassed the simple hangover and now when I was forced to stop drinking by finances my body would crave the alcohol that it had become so accustomed to and my inability to replenish it sent my nervous system into a frenzy. I would be in the bed in my trailer going through the sweets and the shakes as my body tried its best to detoxify itself. Night was the worst time of all because that meant sleep, which doesn’t come easy during withdrawal. Every time I would manage to drop off to sleep I would see demons and ghost coming to get me. For the first time in my life I experienced fear. Most of the demons were imagined but in fact some of them were real because as the locks on my doors did not work and I had become a pushover to the other neighborhood drunks my house was invaded many a time whenever a fellow drunk needed a toilet or bed or something else to drink. I would wake up covered in sweet as the alcohol was finding a way out of my body through my pores only to find that the demon in which I was dreaming about was only an illusion but just as likely the it was another drunk who had let himself into my quarters to cuss me out for one reason or another. It would take days for me to recover from these bouts with alcohol and the less interaction I had with other humans the better I liked it. On more than one occasion my mama rushed me to the hospital because she had happened by and she thought I was going to die. The hospital would hook me up with an IV that would replenish my body with the nutrients that the alcohol had robbed from it due to my drinking for weeks at the time. I remember one time as the nurse was standing over me she said to another nurse that she didn’t know why they even bothered keeping me alive. She wondered out loud that it would probably be better it they just put alcohol in the IV and let me stay drunk because that seemed to be what I wanted to do. Now I’m sure that she meant that as a put down but I remember thinking, “Can we do that”?

My time at the trailer park was short lived because my mama hated to see me be a victim as I was on most days. I had taken over from Six-pack and Half-pint the position of town drunk and I understood how they felt being treated as less than human. My physical condition was such that I did not have the ability to defend my honor or myself so mama moved me back to the trailer behind Big Mama’s house (The greatest person who ever lived). Mama had inherited Big Mama’s place after she passed away and she figured I would be as safe there as anywhere and at least I would have a roof over my head. It was a convenient arrangement for me because the property was only 5 doors down from a liquor store.  I didn’t have a job but mama kept food in my cupboards and the lights on in the trailer and with the bar so close by I had all I needed. I made money by doing odd jobs around the neighborhood and if I was on a really good drunk I wasn’t against selling the steaks and pork chops from the freezer that mama had supplied me with. One day I needed a drink real bad in order to postpone the withdrawals but I had no money. I walked up to the liquor store in hopes of finding someone who would I could beg a couple of bucks from so I could buy myself a half-pint. I approached a fellow that I thought was a good candidate to borrow from and ask him if I could get two dollars from so I could get rid of this hangover. I recognized him as a man named Bruce but I couldn’t recall his last name. He was younger than me but I called him sir anyway because I needed him at this particular moment. Bruce was headed into the liquor store so I had just figured that he would understand my desire to avoid a hangover and he would gladly deposit two dollars into my hand. It didn’t go down quite like I had expected. Bruce may have drank on occasion but I soon found out that he didn’t particularly like full time drunks like me and he proceeded to tell me so calling me every name in the book including but not limited to white trash. I knew I was white trash, I didn’t need to be reminded of that, what I needed was two dollars so like a wiped puppy I turned to walk away and that is when Bruce did something that makes this story worth repeating. He spat on me. You don’t have to be from the South to know that spitting on someone is the ultimate insult because I believe it is an international putdown but around here it is cause for an ass whooping. I just didn’t have the energy. I needed a drink. Liquid courage. A man, whom I didn’t even know, saw the whole in incident and told me to come here. He ask me what I wanted and I explained that I just needed a half-pint of liquor to rid myself of this terrible hangover. He bought me a pint. Nice fellow he was. It all worked out anyway. As for Bruce our paths would cross a few years latter but the circumstances would be quite different.

I headed back to my trailer and to my old ways with Mama and Tina the only people left in the world that still believed in me. Why they stuck with me is a question better ask of them because to this day I still couldn’t tell you. I went back to my old ways of staying drunk and of making money by running the crack dealers around so they could fetch their merchandise. I wouldn’t say that I ever got addicted to crack. I wouldn’t say I ever even tried it but the fact that I woke up many a morning and with a television missing or a whole in the wall where an air conditioner use to be suggested that I probably did. In those particular cases my black-outs came in rather handy. I did have moments of brilliance though like the night I took a guy up to the drug hole to buy some crack and when the dealer ran up to my side of the car I flashed a twenty-dollar bill to let him know I was a customer. The dealer snatched the money out of my hands and ran off into the darkness. I quickly weighed my options and decided that a white boy chasing a black drug dealer at an all black juke probably wasn’t my best option. Though that particular deduction was a pretty good decision I would make and even better one before the night was over. You see, this drug dealer had not only taken my money but since there was about three of us in the car he had also bruised my pride in front of my boys. That was unforgivable. I said nothing as I cranked up my car and drove all the way back to the trailer whereby I went inside and retrieved my 12 gauge shotgun. I drove back to the juke and circled the block until I saw the son-of-a-bitch that had stolen my money and my pride. I told all three of the other guys to get into the front seat and I lay down in the back with the barrel of the gun pointed out of the window. I had loaded the gun with a slug and if you don’t know what a slug is, I’ll just say that it was sufficient enough to do more than twenty dollars worth of damage to his ass. I leveled my gun and placed the sight dead on the drug dealer’s chest and then I pulled back the hammer. He never saw me. He was too busy hitting his crack pipe that was full of the drug that I had just purchased for him. I watched as he blew out a plum of white smoke and a look of euphoria came across his face. I could change that feeling in less than a second by just squeezing the trigger. I just sat there watching him. The guys in the front seat were whispering, “Do it”, and “Shoot Him”, but I just sat there. Finally I allowed my thumb to ease the hammer back into the safety position and that is when I had that brilliant decision I alluded to. A decision that saved two people’s lives that night. I said, “Let’s go home”.

        I had held down a welding job for quite a while but eventually lost it because one day when I was a tad more drunk than usual I almost flipped a forklift that I was driving too fast on inside the shop.  Mama and Tina held it together for me by keeping a roof over my head and love in their hearts for me. Finally one day Mama had enough and she came by the trailer and she was on a mission. She said that she had a plan for me. Mama told me that she was going broke trying to get me strait and it was time that I helped out in some way and she figured that since I couldn’t hold a job that I needed to file for food stamps and disability or welfare or something so I could contribute to the cause. I was taken aback. I was just too proud to be on food stamps. I threw a fit. What would people think if they found out I was on disability? What would they think if they saw me using foods stamps? Mama never one to bite her tongue said, “They probably wouldn’t say anything any worse than they say when they see you laying drunk in the ditch. She had a good point. I gave her my best arguments but to no avail. You see when someone is paying your way you are obliged to do pretty much whatever they tell you to do, especially when it affords you with the ability to stay drunk. I saw this as the first time that she was putting her foot down and making me do something for myself. She had spent years paying my way and bailing me out of jail and trying to keep me out of trouble. Finally she was trying to get me to do something for myself.  I guess she figured me being a burden to society would at least shift some of the burden off of her. It didn’t quite work out though. The food stamp office gave me $10 dollars and the Social Security office where I applied for disability turned me down. That was the best damn thing that ever happened to me.

Eventually mama came up with a plan that she would pay for me to go to barber school. I was 24 years old at the time and I had no future and my past wasn’t much to speak of either. I had two uncles that had done well in the barber business and they owned their own shop in Venice Florida. She did pay for the first semester of barber school but I soon found out through the campus gossip mill that since I was on food stamps I could easily qualify for a grant that would not only pay for my tuition to barber school but it would also provide me with a stipend of about $350 per semester. I could have used the money to pay Mama back since she had done so much for me. Seriously? I partied my ass off once a month. Actually I partied the whole time I was in barber school but with the grant money I was able to tie a really good one on. This whole time Tina was still there. She still believed in me. Tina is the only person in the whole world who has been able to talk to me without saying a word. Her eyes have always said to me that she believed in me. Even when I didn’t deserve it.

Chapter 5

Missed Opportunities

 I was sitting at in the trailer one night and I was drinking alone as usual. This particular bottle of liquor was very satisfying because of the undertaking I had to go through just to acquire it. Earlier in the evening at just about dusk I needed a drink very bad so I scraped up all the change I had in the house which consisted mostly of pennies and I walked all the way to the liquor store. The lady that worked at the liquor store was named Kathy and she was a bar-fly who knew me from the days when I was able to go to the bar and control myself to some extent but now when I drank my behavior could not reach the high standards set by most bar-flies. I think she felt sorry for me because she helped me count all my pennies in order for me to purchase a pint of liquor even loaning me a few cents to reach my goal. As I left the liquor store I had a death grip on the bottle to be sure that I didn’t drop it and break it on the concrete so as not to waste the medicine it contained, medicine that I desperately needed. I walked all the way back home and it was completely dark now but as I reached for the door I lost my grip on the bottle and it dropped from my hands and  crashed onto the concrete  and busted into a million pieces. I was crushed as well. I sit down on the steps and started to cry. I didn’t want to go back into that lonely house without my liquor because I knew that without it there would be no sleep and my night would consist of cold sweats and delirium tremors. I started to walk back to the liquor store even though I had no money.  I was in no particular hurry but when I finally made it I went inside and just stood there as the door slowly closed behind me. I didn’t say a word. Kathy must have seen the look of horror on my face because she never said a word either. She simply reached behind the counter and grabbed another bottle of liquor,  same size and brand that I had just purchased and dropped and  she gently placed it on the counter. I just stood there. So did she. Finally she pushed it forward a little and like a scared dog that was desperately hungry I stepped forward slowly ,waiting to see if she expected me to pay or if she was giving it to me. Neither one of us ever said a word. I picked the bottle up and tried my best to give an appreciative smile. When I finally made it back to the trailer I stepped over the broken bottle and rushed into the house falling into my recliner while simultaneously twisting the top off and guzzling down a few swallows just to settle my nerves. I was sweating something terrible but I had my cure for the moment so I continued to drink and I started to watch some T.V. as my demeanor started to slowly change back into something that was somewhat human. I remember that Ronald Reagan was on the television and he was giving a speech about something as he was the president at the time. He was describing the American can do spirit and how we can accomplish anything that we want to. I immediately thought of my mother and Tina who were both trying to get me to change. As I got drunker and I listened to his motivating speech I created in my own mind a theory that eventually I would put to good use. I called it my allotted energy theory. Remember, I was drunk at the time. I had spent a lot of energy just to get this bottle of liquor that I was drinking. I had been spending a lot of energy for a lot of years trying to stay drunk. I thought to myself what if I just spend the same amount of energy trying to get somewhere in this life. No more no less, just the same amount. Staying drunk was hard work as this very night had just proven. It wasn’t a sudden change but it was a start and for the first time in a long time I had hope.

I opened the letter from the Florida Barbers Board right there at the mail box because I wasn’t so sure that I had passed the exam. I knew the material frontwards and backwards because on most days I actually taught the class since I had charmed the barbering teachers and I liked the attention I got from being at the head of the class. As usual I had found a way to gain an advantage on the other students because I had noticed that the headmaster Mr. Wilson seemed to have a special affinity for the young ladies and he and I use to talk about them quite openly. On more than one occasion he had me rent him a hotel room in the seedy part of town that was for his brother to come to town for an overnight visit. Wink wink. I gathered my needed hours for completion of school rather quickly. The reason I was nervous about opening the letter was because I had gotten drunk the night before the exam and barely made it to exam room in time for the test. I made an 83. Good enough to get my license. I got a job and bounced around to a couple of different shops before landing at the biggest shop in town called the Northwood Mall Barbershop.

Tina had continued to sneak around to see me and everybody knew it but nobody talked about it. Finally one day her mother called me and told me that she wanted to meet with me and talk about something. I assumed she wanted me to take the high road and to break it off with Tina and set her free since everybody knew I wasn’t worthy of her. For me the high road was uncharted territory. The conversation was exactly the opposite. Mrs. McDaniel told me that she knew that Tina loved me and that it was obvious that wasn’t going to change. She concluded that even if we did break up that Tina would have lost her chance for true love. She decided it would be best if I ask Tina to marry me and just let the chips fall where they may. Mrs. McDaniel was a frail woman but her request also had a warning because she in no uncertain terms told me that if I hurt Tina she would see to it that I would be hurt to. I knew she meant it.  Mr. McDaniel never said a word to me either good or bad. He didn’t approve of his daughter dating me but he never belittled me or confronted me. Mrs. McDaniel on the other hand probally took some heat from him for allowing us to start to openly seeing each other. Mrs.McDaniels conversation with me allowed Tina and I to be somewhat less secretive about our relationship and one night while we were on the way home from a date I pulled over to the side of the road and told her how much I appreciated her for standing by me. I promised her that I was going to be somebody and I would make her proud of me. I meant it too except I also told her that she could never demand that I stop drinking. I ask her to marry me. She accepted. Love truly is blind which Tina would soon find out. Tina, Mrs. McDaniel and my mother started planning our wedding along with Mrs. Prince at the Faceville Baptist Church. It would be a small wedding but every girl dreams of her wedding day. They went about doing whatever it is that ladies do to plan a wedding including buying Tina her dress. I assume a few thousand dollars was spent but not a dime came out of my pocket because I still spent my money at the bars every night. As the wedding got closer I started to get drunker until I eventually went on a full fledge binge staying drunk for about a week. Tina assumed that I didn’t want to marry her and she cancelled the wedding but that was not the case. I did want to marry her; I was just doing what I do. We got married about a month later by a Judge at the courthouse in front of Mrs. McDaniel, Mama and my sister. Mr. McDaniel refused to come.

I continued to work at the Northwood Mall Barbershop and the money was pretty good. I still drank but now I realized I had a problem so I had evolved into more of a binge drinker. I would go for six months without a drink and then I would fall off of the wagon. The time that I spent being sober allowed a fire to erupt in me that I had never allowed to burn before because I had kept it extinguished with alcohol. I was going somewhere in this world and nobody was going to stop me, except maybe myself. I considered my newfound motivation to be the promise I made to myself on that night many years ago when I got drunk with Ronald Reagan or perhaps it was the promise I had made to Tina. Either way I was on a mission. Tina said when I was sober that I was actually on a dry drunk and that I was angry. I guess maybe I was but I’m sure that I had a damn good reason to be. She didn’t know who I was angry at, perhaps the Peacocks or just my station in life but she said that while I was moving forward it was not a fun ride because I was full of hate. I expected the best from myself when I was sober and I demanded the same from everyone around me which was pretty much mostly Tina. I wanted my own business or at least the money that came with starting your own enterprise. My first step into the business world came when I decided to sell Christmas trees one December. I had gone to a tree farm and bought a bunch of Christmas trees and set up a station beside the road to sell them. There were a couple of problems with my Christmas tree business though. First I was at work all the time at the barbershop so Tina had to stand beside the road and sell the trees in the cold weather and she was pregnant at the time. Her father and brother helped her and on the day before Christmas they sold the tree that allowed us to break even. I found out that selling Christmas trees just wasn’t my thing so I had to find a different way to be successful. I decided that I wanted to be a lawyer so I started taking night classes. Since I had barely graduated from Shanks High school- an f-rated school in Quincy Florida-I think I may have set my goals a little high. Never one to let reality get in my way I signed up and started attending community college at TCC.  My getting educated started to give me the big head and I told Tina that I was leaving her behind. Yes sir, I was on the road to enlightenment and I fussed at Tina about her weight and constantly told her that she wasn’t good enough. Tina lived in fear not knowing which Garry was going to come through the door. When I got drunk I was mean and I would tell her that I didn’t love her. She never fussed back. Tina went on unhealthy crash diets and did everything she could to keep me from getting mad. The irony of me getting the big head about going to college is that Tina already had her B.S. degree and was only a year away from getting an accounting degree when she decided that being an accountant isn’t what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. I couldn’t understand that someone expected to be happy with their job because to me that wasn’t what having a job was about, it was about making as much money as you can. Tina understood something it would take me a few years to figure out, that being successful is a nice goal to try to obtain but it is empty if you don’t enjoy the journey.

Hunter, my son was born on Saturday October the 6th 1990 during the Florida State versus Miami football game so I spent most of my day yelling push, push and then run, run. It was a moment I will never forget, his birth not the football game. I didn’t want to be in the delivery room when he was born because I just didn’t think that is where men were suppose to be during the delivery ( a redneck tradition) but Tina wanted me there so I relented. To this day I am glad I was. Hunter’s maternal grandfathers name was Chason so I wanted to name him Hunter Chason Peacock but I was overruled and so we went with my middle name, Allen. Mr. McDaniel was there of course the day that Hunter was born but we still weren’t talking to each other which was just fine with me. As Hunter grew up he got to see the ugly side of his farther and I failed to realize how much it affected him. My attitude was that at least he got to know his father since my father was a sorry drunk and I never really got to know him.  Hunter may have thought that not getting to know me might have been a better better deal. When Hunter was about 18 he got a tattoo on his arm that says ‘Breaking History” obviously referring to the drinking history of his ancestors. I guess maybe my behavior did affect him a little bit after all. Since our family had grown Tina and I decided to move from the trailer into the house where big mama (the greatest person who ever lived) had lived. Mama sold us the old wood frame house because after big mama (The greatest person who ever lived) had died she had left it to mama basically because mama had paid for it anyway. This is where our lives should have started the happy journey as a family together but I still had demons that I could not seem to shake. That is if you think the over consumption of alcohol can be called a demon. I was making pretty good money at the Northwood Mall Barbershop but we were not happy because I was either getting drunk or raising hell at Tina about something. The house wasn’t clean enough or she needed to lose weight or her hair wasn’t cut right. I had become a miserable ass and I wanted everyone around me to be miserable too. While Tina was willing to stick by her decision to marry me she wasn’t willing to raise Hunter that way so she moved back in with her parents, which was just fine with me since it freed me up to be able to drink more. Except that more drinking created more problems.

It was about 1:30 in the morning when I ran out of liquor and I needed something to drink. The closest store to me was in a small town called Gretna and it was about 5 miles away from my house. Gretna was a very small community and it was about 95% black and it had the reputation that it was not a safe place for a white boy to be, at 2:30 in the morning. Crack was Gretna’s primary crop and it was traded late at night by roving gangs that hung out at the bars and the convenience stores. Gretna did not have a police department so any law enforcement was done by the county sheriff’s department and since the city was 95% black there wasn’t a great deal of concern for policing the area by them either. I decided to take the chance that the store was open and even if it wasn’t on more than one occasion I had for a small fee gotten one of the dealers to get me a bottle from a bootlegger. I was driving a car Tina had bought herself before we had gotten married. On this particular night the drug dealers were not interested in making a few bucks for doing me a favor they wanted everything, my money and my car and I thought my life. I pulled up in front of the closed store and about three dealers approached my car and I rolled down the window. Instead of asking me what I wanted as was the usual mode of operation, one of the thugs reached in and unlocked my door and then he unlocked the back door. All of my car doors opened at the same time and before I knew it I was being dragged out of the car and was being kicked and beaten. Others joined the commotion and within seconds it was a free for all. They searched the car and my person rather quickly taking anything of value and then proceeded to entertain themselves with a game that can best be described as playing “piñata with the white boy”. In a mob situation there is always at least one person who is crazier that the rest of them and this particular fellow cranked up the car and raced it up and down the street squealing  the tires and yelling out the window every time he passed by the ass-whooping scene that was still taking place. Somebody retrieved my I.D. from my wallet and shared the information that my last name was Peacock and it was common knowledge in town that the local projects was owned by slumlord named Billy Yawn Peacock who was actually a distant cousin of mine. The beating got a little harder now as they taunted me with their newfound information that my family was keeping their people down. Each kick just gave me another reason to hate the Peacocks. They teased me with the taunt that they were going to kill me. I didn’t know whether to believe them or not but I knew that this was not my generation of black friends. These guys were different and I had to get away. During a lull in the kicking, as I lay in a fetal position near a campfire where I had fell during the last barrage of beating I saw a metal rod that was half in the fire and half out. One end of the rod was fire red and I reached for the other end and while it was hot it was manageable. I grabbed the rod and jumped to my feet and ran for my life. Some of the gang began to chase me and they were laughing and yelling that I better not call the cops or they would kill me. One of the young thugs finally caught up with me and grabbed me from behind but when I turned around with the steel rod and pointed it right between his eyes he quickly decided that he didn’t like the odds now that they were 1 on 1 and he stepped back. I ran to a house and banged on the door. The occupant told me to leave. I hid for about 20 minutes and then I ran to a phone booth that was outside a store across the street from where the gang was. They saw me but they did not attempt to approach me although they did continue to yell their warnings about not calling the cops. I called the cops. The dispatcher stayed on the phone with me until the Deputy arrived. It was Jeff McDaniel. Tina’s cousin, the deputy that had whooped my ass only a few months earlier. I was getting it from every turn.   

It took me about two weeks to recover from the beating with the worst part being the cracked ribs. I took time off from work telling them I had been in a car wreck. I guess I wasn’t really lying because my life had become a car wreck. I was starting to build a clientele’ at the barbershop and I was learning a lot. I was still going to school with my dream of being a lawyer some day but this barbering thing was making me some pretty good money. I learned a lot from the Northwood Mall Barbershop because it was a throwback to the old fashioned barbershop that used to rule the South in its day. In the decades of the 70’s and 80’s the Salon had taken over the haircutting industry with its fu fu approach to hairstyling and the barbershop business had almost died, but this place was popping. I took note of that. The Northwood Mall Barbershop was longer than it was wide and had double sided benches that ran down the middle. There were barber stations that ran the length of the room on each side of the building and mirrors that ran down the length of both walls as well, casting  their reflections back and forth creating a never ending barbershop scene. Kids laughed and played but always at a respectable sound level. Cartoons or Sports blasted from the television depending on which day it was. Saturday mornings belonged to kids. Different days meant a different clientele’. There were no rules that made it this way; just tradition. A line would form at the gum ball machine making the penny spendable currency once again. When you step into the barbershop you take a trip back in time, a more laid back peaceful time, a time when strangers spoke to each other, watched out for each other’s kids and even scolded them if need be. If the world is progressive and always pushing for change the barbershop is the place to get away from it, even if for only a few minutes at the time. Sometimes a feeling can be in the air, like Christmas and the barbershop atmosphere is like that. All of the barbers at the Northwood Mall Barbershop were old-timers who were 55 or older and I was the young blood added to the team because business was good and they needed workers but I’m certain I was added also because I would work for a lot less pay. I remember thinking that while Don the owner was lucky that he wasn’t a very good businessman because he wasn’t even trying to be successful it just kind of fell in his lap. There was no marketing or advertising of the shop and while the shop had personality and location I thought that somebody could take this idea and  improve upon it and make a lot of money with it but that somebody wasn’t going to be me because I was going to be a lawyer.

With Tina not living with me I was able to drink a lot more, not that I ever let her slow me down any when she was here but I had no boundaries whatsoever.  I was showing up to work every day hung over. The old timers that worked at the shop were not against taking a drink every now and then, as a matter of fact they hit the bottle pretty hard themselves. I learned a trick or two from them. The best way to get rid of a hangover was to keep a bottle of liquor at your station and add a nip to your morning coffee. That usually did the trick for them. I did this for a while and it seemed to work except for the fact that it didn’t take long for me to prove that I was not like the average drinker. After a particular rough night out drinking the coffee trick just was not working for me so during my lunch break I slipped over to the Fourth Quarter Sports Bar and had lunch which I washed down with about 6 good stiff drinks of bourbon and coke. I was feeling no pain when I went back to work. One if the unsettling things about alcohol is that it is hard to measure the buzz correct every time. Correct buzz measuring is vital when you are working with sharp objects. What feels good right now might just be too much 30 minutes from now. In all probability a drunk will always lean toward having to much before he will make the mistake of not having enough.  On this particular day that was exactly the case. When the affects of those 6 drinks hit me they hit me hard. My first customer back from lunch had the unfortunate incident of loosing part of his earlobe. He received not only a haircut but minor surgery as well. As I was clipping away at his hair one of his ears got in the way (by now there were two ears on each side) and the next thing I knew part of his earlobe was lying on his shoulder and flopping around like a fish out of water. My tools must have been extra sharp because he never moved and the first sign I had that something was wrong was the massive amounts of blood that he was losing changing the color of his white shirt to red. In the haircutting business we keep a product on hand that is called Steptic and it is used to stop bleeding. I used a whole bottle of it on him and I glued his missing earlobe back on and hurried him out of the door. He tipped me three dollars. I don’t know if it was for the haircut or the great job I did in fixing his ear. It was the next customer that got me into trouble. His name was Tommy Gore and he was a police officer and I had grown up with Tommy as he had been my next door neighbor for years. Tommy wore a flat top and he always liked it to be abnormally tall and I had become very good at doing it (when I was sober) as it was a very hard haircut so Tommy always waited on me. All went well until I started cutting the top and instead of going extra tall I went extra short. From across the room another barber named Chester who was the shop trouble maker noticed that I was having trouble and came to my “rescue”. He quietly told Tommy to take me home and to come back and he would fix the haircut for him the best he could for free. Tommy being a friend of mine agreed and got me out of the door before the manager noticed anything but as soon as we left the “troublemaker” had a field day not only telling everyone what had happened but adding his own version to it as well. He didn’t have to do that it was bad enough if he had just told the truth. I was just glad he didn’t see the ear incident or he would have made it sound like I had beheaded the man. Either way I was fired. They hired me back. (They always did. I was a very hard worker. Most drunks are. I had been let go and hired back at Publix, Winn Dixie, Nokomis Septic tank, Vorverk Vacuum, Inland gas Station, a Go-Cart manufacture and Mo-trim just to name a few) Oh they eventually fired me again a few weeks later.

Word travels fast in the haircutting business and each successive job is usually a pay grade down from the last one you had. At least in take home pay anyway and that was the most important standard I used to determine how good a job was. I went to work at shop that had been in town for years and it was called Designer Cuts and it was owned by a man named Marvin Stewart. Mr. Stewart was a very good businessman and I learned a lot from him. Most barbershops paid their barbers a percentage of their total daily take but Marvin charged booth rental which meant he got his money regardless of how much the barber made. I didn’t make a lot of money at Designer Cuts with the only experience worth telling from my time there was when we went to the hair show that takes place every year in Orlando. One of the girls who worked at Designer Cuts had won a trip to the hair show along with some free accommodations at a very fancy hotel. We went to the hair show first class. Mr. Stewart drove his car and about 5 or 6 of us were invited to go. I stayed drunk the whole trip but I pretty much held it together- all things considered – If you are willing to use drunk standards for holding it together, that is until the day we were to leave Orlando and head back to Tallahassee. I woke up with a terrible hangover and I needed a drink something awful.  I found my chance to acquire a drink when Mr. Stewart told me to take his keys and go down to the parking garage and move his car up to the front door and the barbering crew would meet me there with the baggage and we could leave. Opportunity had knocked. I would leave the parking garage and run across the street to the liquor store and get myself a bottle which I could suck on during our trip back to Tallahassee curing my hangover or if nothing else postponing it for a time.  It seemed like a good idea except for the fact that as soon as I purchased the bottle and made it back to Mr. Stewart’s car my body demanded that I partake in the evil liquid before I maneuvered my way back to the hotel. That wasn’t such a good Idea. I’m a country boy. Country boys can drive pretty damn good on country roads, i.e. the dukes of hazard. This big city driving would confuse me even if I happen to be sober but after giving in to the demands of my body, I wasn’t. Hell, I was lost in the overgrown parking lot of this humongous shopping center and then after I gathered myself and tried to head back to the hotel instead of pulling across the street back to my destination I somehow accidently got onto  the interstate. I was headed in the wrong direction with no way to get turned back around. I eventually got back off the interstate but had lost my bearings and couldn’t remember the name of the hotel or the phone number. I was lost in my boss’s car somewhere in the middle of Orlando with my co-workers sitting in the lobby of the hotel with their luggage waiting for me to get back with the car. My only comfort was that I had plenty of liquor. A tank of gas and 4 hours later I found my way back to the hotel. I got fired from that job too. He hired me back just like all the rest of them.