Chapter 23

     The coal company Marshall worked for offered me a job for the summer of 1979.  I went back to Butler to stay with Marshall and went to work during the second shift.  It was very good money, and I knew that by the end of the summer I would be able to buy a better car and have enough left over to last the school year.

     We were given work assignments as general labor.  The first one was on a dragline that they had split the decks on, to weld up the cracks in the interior.  We would crawl down into the belly of the beast and fire-watch as the welder would work.  They would often tell us to go ahead and take a nap stating should a fire break out, no one was going to beat them out of there.  I never could.  I just sat there all night keeping a look out.  Easy work though.

     The next job I was assigned was to drive bolts through these one-inch-thick plates of steel being attached to the side of the machine to seal over and strengthen cracks that had been welded.  A sledgehammer and slow progress made this a harsh job. 

     It didn’t take long for Marshall to start doing the crazy mental thing.  He would come into my room before he went to work and tell me he was going to kill me one day.  I lasted about a month.  Finally, I decided after Marshall coming into my room at 4:00 a.m. telling me that he was about to kill me and that one morning I would just not wake up, that it was not wise for me to stay.  I packed up that day and returned to Springfield.  

     After a few weeks, he tried to get me to come back but the mine had canceled my contract for the summer.  I was relieved.  I never went back to the coal mine.

     The rest of the summer I worked for Kentucky Fried Chicken.  I started out being trained to clean the big new deep fryers.  There were four locations in Springfield, and I would go around to each once a week to clean each of them.

     This would get me twenty hours or so per week and then I worked as a cook to get in forty hours per week.  One Friday I was working as a cook, and the place was just so dirty that I just couldn’t stand it.  Another cook felt the same way and we came up with a plan to pull everything out of the back and hose it down, scrub the kitchen from top to bottom, and put it all back together during the slow time the next afternoon.  We did all this, though without permission.

     On Monday I was called to the main office and questioned about what had occurred.  I thought I was about to get fired when the owner changed his tone and offered me a manager job.  I went through a few weeks of training, and they put me in a location where I cleaned it too, and then they moved me to another where I did the same.

     After I had cleaned all four locations, the supervisor came in one day and fired me.  I was surprised to say the least, but I had been taking college classes which I had agreed not to do.

     I had made a bit and had some savings, so I decided to take some time off from work for a while as I was going to school full time. 

     I was a bit depressed over all that had happened that summer but most of all I kept thinking about my dreams and how if the one dream had come true, did this mean the others would too.  

     I started getting even more depressed and slowly started going downhill.  I got to the point where I just didn’t really want to go through all this and thought it would be better to just check out.

     My thinking had been that if I could just keep the relationship with my dream girl going past a year and a day that somehow some of these other events might not come true.  I had failed and the obvious was before me.  I began to question if all was worth continuing and maybe if I wasn’t here, it would not happen.

     I had been out of my body before and thought maybe it was time to make it permanent.  It got so bad I would wake up in the morning and it would take all I had in me to stay alive till noon.  Then, it would take all in me to make it till evening.  I had truly hit bottom.  So, it went on for several months.  Some days were worse than others. 

     I made it through the winter and by summer I was feeling like I could live again and figured somehow, someway this would all work out in the end.  Having decided to do what I could and put my trust in God that somehow, he would help me through it all. 

     The biggest issue facing me was, to figure out how to feed all those people in the aftermath of the “Big Event” and wondering if it could be done at all.