It is the first cold morning of a Florida fall. I don’t know what the temp was when I got up this morning before daylight-but trust me…I was huddled beneath a quilt and a large furnuture pad with two small dogs sucked in around my knees and a cat on top of us all and all of us warm from each other. But I had no choice but to get up…its my first of two days in a row for the trip into the city for the VA. My therapy.
I have to get there early-usually way over an hour early. I have to self hypnotize myself to feel comfortable in the building and the veterans hospital is connected by tunnel to the medical college across the highway-that place is 11 stories tall,so my morings both begin by walking through the veterans hospital and through that tunnel and at the end is a flight of stairs that goes all the way to the top so I climb them and once there I turn around and walk back down to the first floor and then hike myself across the hospital to the huge atrium and sit there on a bench and watch people. By then I have become acustomed to the sounds and the people and the breathing the building does-that wierd murmering hum. The 11th floor has a restroom right as soon as I come out of the stair well and it has never had a person in it any time I’ve gotten there…so I feel safe in it and am usually able to pee with out being afraid.
It was nice getting in there this morning-into the buildings and the warmth and it opened my mind as to what is about to come ahead in the next few months. My house is more less a roof with some walls. The back…it is a mobile home-an old old mobile home-the back is wide open and the mosquitos got in thru the summer and now it is going to be mighty testy during the winter. Usually it is that end of the house I stay in during winters but this summer I thought I was going to get some money…which I did not get , but counted my chickens too quick and demo’d the room for a ‘makeover’??if theres any such thing here.
I live on social security because of my stroke-otherwise I’d probrebly be spending another winter in a truck somewhere trying to earn a few bucks and keep to myself but that ended nearly ten years ago after my stroke. I was 46. Oddest craziest thing…my life was’nt too bad living and working in trucks. It was warm in the winter cool in the summer-there was always groceries at the end of the haul and I was always where I needed to be-with a truck that was the way it is,you are always there.
My check comes tomorrow-I call it being rich for six minutes which is all it takes to get from the bank to the post office and buy the money orders to pay the bills. Hopefully I can squeeze out a few bucks to buy a couple of quarts of beer and build myself a nice fire and relax and feel good about it all. I called the power company yesterday and said it’d be another day before I could square the late bill away and so I bought myself a few more days of relief-its going to get cold.
a males life after rape 