My Early Years

 I was born in 1972 in Decatur, GA. My mom and dad were both alcoholics and mom was a drug addict to boot. Needless to say they had their problems and when I was four years old my father left my mother and left me with her. As he would put it 'when I planned how to kill her and had friends willing to help me get away with it, I knew it was time to go'. To say things got better when he left would be a complete and utter lie. She started drinking more, doing more drugs, whoring around to anyone who would notice her, buy her drinks, give her drugs, etc. Most of the time, thankfully, she wasn't around and I staid with my God Father or Grandparents. However, when she was around it was a constant struggle to survive. Between the ages of 5 and 13 I was repeatedly beaten (to within an inch of my life), suffocated, drowned, starved, poisoned, molested (by mom and several of her boyfriends), locked in closets/trunks/pantries (even once a dryer) as well as shot and stabbed. At least twice my grandparents had to rescue me and by the time they got there I couldn't move. I could barely breathe and talking was out of the question. Both of those times I laid on their couch for over a month before I could even get up on my own. A few days after I turned 13, I had had enough. So I went to school and told the counselor to get me in front of a judge that day. A few hours later I signed myself into Temporary State Custody (for one month) while they investigated my claims.

I would love to say that things got better after that, but the truth is they didn't. My first foster family was amazing and they wanted to adopt me but as soon as they mentioned it the state yanked me out of their home. What followed was the worst year of my life. In one year I was in over 30 different foster homes, emergency shelters and group homes. The last group home I was in was Murphy-Harps Vashti United Methodist Children's Home in Cedartown, GA. Things got real bad when I arrived here. There where multiple older kids that thought I was their personal punching bag and of course I got in trouble for it, not them. Then there were the staff members (all male) who repeatedly made sexual advances towards me or downright took it upon themselves to have their way with me. I ran away like 28 times, 27 of them went straight to the police and reported the abuse only to be taken right back to the group home with no report filed. The last time I ran away I went to my grandparents house 80 miles away. When the state found me they told me I was crazy and sent me to Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital in Rome, GA. A psychiatric hospital....really.....the day I arrived in Rome the Georgia Bureau of Investigations came and questioned me and that same day shut down the group home and arrested a dozen or so staff members. Did the state believe me then, hell no....they left me in that damn hospital for 3 months. In fact the only reason I got out was because I tracked down my father whom I hadn't seen or spoken to in 10 years and got my custody transferred to Texas so I could live with him.

Finally, something good is going to happen.....think again! After ten years apart and a hell of a lot of animosity towards him for leaving me with her things did not go well at all. In fact it was a fight pretty much from day one, and I mean knock-down drag-out fist fights. I had reached my limit on being abused or mistreated, by anyone and began fighting back. At home, in school.....wherever I felt abused, neglected or ignored! Needless to say at 15 I ran away and the State of Texas emancipated me rather than try and track me down and bring me back.

My Teens/20's

I wound up spending the next 5 years hitchhiking around the country, living on the streets for the most part. Finally, in 1992 I got into the US Navy and was all set to turn my life around. I would love to say I did, but way to many things went wrong while I was in the service and I wound up losing a whole year of my life, or at least my memory. For years afterwards I wondered if it was while I was in the service or after I got kicked out. I petitioned every year for my military records and finally got a Texas state senator to help. After 14 years of trying my military records finally came, except they are freaking blank. They show me going through MEPS, arriving at boot camp and then nothing until my discharge....not even my court martial is apart of my records. Furthermore, my Discharge paperwork says I was stripped of rank and kicked out but my DD214 shows me being discharged as an E4 and states my designation as Inactive Reservist. After getting out of the military in 92/93 (not really sure when) I spent a few more years on the streets and wound up in Fort Lauderdale, FL where I made many many bad decisions. In my mid 20's a composer I knew from a bar I hung out at asked me to come learn how to use his computer and then teach him. He offered me $25 an hour to teach him, once I learned it. I spent the next 2 weeks teaching him how to compose his music scores on the computer using a midi keyboard, then how to edit and refine the music. 

When I finished teaching him, I had learned so much about computers that I though, hell I can make a living of this. So I went and got a beeper and printed up a metric butt ton of flyers and began taping them to every damn light post in Broward County, FL. It didn't take long until I was off the streets and making good money. Then the tech stocks crashed in 2000 which resulted in computers getting so damn cheap no one wanted to fix them anymore. Needless to say my business tanked in a hurry. So I moved back to Texas (to live with my dad) and tried restarting my computer business out there. After a few years of 'going hungry' I said screw this and went to Truck Driving School.

Trucking

In September of 2003 I graduated from C1 Driver Training in Fort Worth, TX with my CDL in hand and was ready to conquer the highways and byways. A few weeks later I went to work for Lisa Motor Lines in Fort Worth, TX. They where owned by Frozen Foods Express (FFE) out of Dallas, TX at the time. They paid off my driving school in exchange for a commitment to drive for them for 6 months. At 6 months and 1 day I told them where to stick their fucking trucks and promptly quit them. Not long after I went to work at US Xpress and staid with them longer than anyone else, mainly because I got a bunch of tickets and couldn't leave. After a few years I quit US Xpress and tried to restart my computer business. I did okay, but only because I did a lot of work for other companies as a Field Service Technician. I traveled all over Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas and began to hate computers, especially after I almost lost my life in a car accident on January 9th, 2006. I was working, solely, for a global company at the time and they wouldn't do crap to help me get another car or get back to work. Soon after I said screw this and I loaded up and headed back to Fort Lauderdale, FL.

Before I could even find a job in Florida, then president George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act. I saw that as the first step in stripping American's Constitutional Rights and decided to leave the country. (See my previous post about spending 4.5 months backpacking Europe in 2006/2007)

Needless to say I came back to the USA and went back to driving a truck in 2007. First with Super Service, Inc. out of Somerset, KY, then to Air Ride, Inc. out of Swanton, OH. When Air Ride, Inc. went belly up in 2008 I moved back to Texas once again to live with my (at that time) step-sister. A few months later I got a call from a close friend (who I call my sister). She was a dispatcher for an Over-Dimensional Load truck company in Fort Worth. She had sent all three of her drivers to the Joint Research Base in Fort Worth to pick up a load and all three had gotten arrested at the gate. She asked me to recover two trucks and then bring the third truck (load and all) back to the yard. The owner paid me $500 for about 6 hours work. A week or so later she called me again and offered me a job hauling OD loads, so I took it.

In 2010 that company went belly up and I briefly worked for a company in Brooksville, FL hauling Super Loads.

Then back to Texas I went, again and back to doing computer work. After a few years I wound up getting married and moving to Salt Lake City, UT and went back to driving in 2012 for James H. Clark. I wasn't making enough money there so I went to work for a US Freightways out of Elk Grove Village, IL (where my now ex-stepsister worked). While working here my wife and I separated. I worked there almost 1.5 years until I got an offer to become a partner and first driver at a new trucking company (OE Trucking, LLC) out of Atlanta, GA. It sounded like a dream come true so I jumped at the change. Shortly after starting here my wife and I got divorced (December 16th, 2013). Two years later I shut down the company in October 2015 after losing just about everything I owned. I took the last bit of money I had left and bought a 1983 Winnebago Minnie-Winnie and moved to LA (Lower Alabama). Robertsdale, AL to be exact. Of course I blew the head gasket, threw a belt and burned up 3rd gear in the transmission getting down there.

So I wound up going to work for Seminole Express out of Seminole, AL driving a truck, again. After 7 months with them I got a job offer to go back to doing Over-Sized loads which brings me to now. On my 3rd trip out with this new company I had a super single (double wide tire) explode on my last Friday in Sikeston, MO. When it blew it took out the entire right rear and center of the truck. Busted the fuel tank, ripped the suspension out form under the rear axle, locked up the brakes, busted the airlines and who knows what else it did. So I have been sitting in a motel for the last 6 days waiting on the truck to get repaired.

If there is anything else you would like to knew, please do not hesitate to ask!