Derek,
I now reside in Portland, Oregon. I arrived here two years ago in a beat-up truck with everything I owned crammed into the bed and cab. I was fleeing Lee’s Summit, Missouri, where I had worked for a shady sub-contractor for the Justice Department—blowing the whistle led to my termination. I lived with a woman in Blue Springs who was 15 years older than me for a while before that. We ended up having an affair (she had a boyfriend), things ended badly, and I moved out. See, I didn’t even want to go to Missouri, but I needed to attend the main campus of Park University to finish my bachelor’s degree, which I did. But before I could do that I had to travel from North Carolina on four bald tires, after I quit my job working for a strange electrician. I spent hours crawling under houses pulling wires for him because I needed the money to keep from losing my house. See, I’d quit my high-paying job at the cryogenic plant, and times were tough. I was a cryogenics mechanic in the Marines a couple years before, that’s how I landed the job; those were some strange days, especially the six months I spent in Italy. I blame my decision to enlist on the poor job market in Waterville, Maine (the geographical opposite of where I live now). I learned how to wire houses at a tech college in a neighboring town just a few months after graduating high school; I still had long hair and wore an earring. I was what many considered a “˜strange bird’ in those days. They should have seen me as a small boy, acting out scenes in the back yard by myself, playing with small cars and talking to myself, kissing a girl on the mouth when I was only two years old. Maybe it’s not so strange. But when I was born, the doctor did tell my mom, “This one’s a whole other breed of cats.”
Derek ““ Age 33 ““ Portland, OR
From 400 Words, Issue 1
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