I should point out here that neither my biological father, nor my stepfather, cared too much about where we lived, or the condition of the house. Looking back, my alcoholic stepfather was just crazy, spending his paychecks without much concern for paying bills, like rent. He also made sure he’d tear the place up every month or so, requiring the cops to be called, further embarrassing me as a kid trying to make friends and go to school. One time he moved us to a trailer in the middle of the woods. The trailer turned out to be stolen, and we were on the run again with a U-haul truck. I think we were probably one of U-haul’s best customers at that time. My mother had only married Chuck out of financial desperation, and he soon got her pregnant with my youngest sister, Candee. It was a dumb move, as my mother has always admitted, but when you’re looking for a place to stay as a single mother of two children, you take what you can. My mother was pretty in those days, so it was easy to attract men. It was just the quality of men that was in question.

The last house we lived in before Chuck finally deserted my mother was in the state of Maryland, just outside Baltimore, and it was owned by his mother—the very house where his father died of an Aneurysm! It was an old brown house with flaking white trim-paint everywhere and a sagging porch with no attention paid to it in many years. The inside was worse, as the kitchen sink ran almost constantly unless a weight was place perfectly over the on/off valve. The bathroom had no workable sink and no shower, only a very old tub, forcing us to bend over the tub to brush teeth in the mornings before school. The toilet never filled up in the back, so we had to run a hose from the tub to the tank in order to flush. My sister’s bedroom had a broken window and the furnace died soon after we moved in. I had made the attic my bedroom, and felt a certain privacy there. It was my escape from the trouble and financial stress of downstairs. It was a place for me to listen to my rock music that I adored without irritating my stepfather, who always called it noise.

Of course Chuck never fixed a thing and no one in my household understood my being embarrassed to tell anybody where I lived. I would even have friends from school drop me off a block away. It was especially difficult because the rest of the neighborhood was quite nice, and the high school I attended was full of mostly rich kids with beautiful homes..

We soon had to move from that house since Chuck left, and at 17 years old, I rented a U-haul truck, and moved us to nicer looking house, which felt amazing. I loved the soft new carpet, high-pressure shower that I’d missed so much and the exterior that fit right in, boosting my self-esteem immediately, but trouble was brewing with my full-blooded sister Jani, which caused problems between my mother and me, so I moved out to live at a friends house. This brought on unsustainable financial pressure to my mother, and soon they were on the run again.

My mom had found another boyfriend to help her financially, but Jani was continuing to cause an incredible amount of problems as they had moved back to Florida, and things weren’t going so well. When I say trouble, there’s no way for me to explain the amount, and severity, of trouble I’m talking about. It was later discovered that Jani had serious mental problems of disillusion, manic behavior, bi-polar personality, obsessive and anger that would explode like an erupting volcano. Not knowing the seriousness, because she was still a teenager, I wanted to help the situation, so I rented a small apartment near my job near the Baltimore airport and had Jani come stay with me. Mistakenly, I thought I could straighten her out since we’d both had a rough childhood and despite our turbulent relationship I really believed we were close through blood and bonded together, not unlike soldiers that had experienced war side by side. Most of that proved to be wrong, and taking her in only brought out terrible things in me, and the stress was unmanageable. Jani had an uncanny way of pushing every button on a person, bringing most people to the edge of insanity. So, these days, I take comfort knowing I’m not the only one that lost control of my life, even my own stability trying to help her..

I fully admit, at 21, my head wasn’t on completely straight either, and I had grown up with too much confusion and no guidance. Frankly, I was a pressure cooker ready to blow my lid, and there was a great depression that was buried deep in my mostly upbeat personality. I believe it was that very depression that led to a car accident that nearly killed me, but did manage to leave me paralyzed as a quadriplegic with limited use of my arms. One night, after work, I met some of my co-workers at a bowling alley for some recreational drinking which, in my case, got out of hand too often.

I survived the accident, and after 6 months in two hospitals and almost a year in a rehabilitation facility, I was searching for a home again, only this time in a wheelchair. Unlike many of the guys that I met in the rehab in similar circumstances, I had no where to go home to, and accessible housing is extremely limited for a quad in a wheelchair that needs a roll-in shower and hospital bed. So, I literally tried to stay in the rehab center for as long as I could in order to have a place to live. Besides, it was a safe environment where I felt comfortable. The outside world had become foreign, cold and made me feel like an outsider to civilization, but I knew my stay had to end soon. It was time for this bird to fly the, proverbial, nest!

After nearly a year in the Maryland Rehabilitation Center, it was becoming clear I had to go somewhere, so I teamed up with a few guys in the rehab that wanted to take a stab at living on their own away from their families. My soon-to-be roommate, Sam Gatto, was a young man, like me, in his early 20s, suffering the effects from a high-level Spinal Cord injury due to a car accident, where he was a passenger. Sam was an extremely handsome guy of Italian descent with thick black hair and chiseled facial features, and clearly looked like he did well with girls before the freak accident that resulted in his C4 level injury, rendering Sam to a power wheelchair and very limited arm use. My second inseparable friend was the very smart and funny Ralph Turner, who was one of my best friends in rehab. Blond, and looking somewhat like MacCaulay Culkin, Ralph’s physique was that of a boy around 12 years old, yet he was closer to 20. Ralph’s youthful appearance was caused by his Cystic Fibrosis disease, which robs the body of oxygen, as I understand it, but believe me, he was just like any other 20-something dude, and the fun we had was memorable, and missed even to this day.

After living with my two compatriots for nearly eight months in a not so accessible apartment where brushing your teeth and showers were quite difficult—not to mention the cold winter days that made me yearn for warm sunshine—I moved back to Florida, where my father lived in Miami, aunt and cousins in Tampa and grandparents and mother in Ocala. I hadn’t seen my father since I was about 11 years old, but I asked him to find me a small efficiency to make my great escape. The accessibility was even worse, but at least I was in the warm sub-tropical Sun, which was much more important after becoming a quad because of lack of circulation and body movement which generates heat. The warmth of Florida that greeted me after leaving the raw cold of Baltimore was more than welcomed, it was like an epiphany!

Miami was a great change, but it was a dead end for me, as I had no transportation, the efficiency was tiny and the immediate area was dangerous with very savory characters. I was happy to had developed some kind of relationship with my father, but to be fair, he had no idea my injury was as severe as it was, and my dad never quite knew exactly how to address this son who shows up in his life paralyzed and now an adult. Don’t misunderstand me, we had a love, but not much history together, or bonding, and so it was more like an old friendship. We never talked about my accident, or injury. I believe my father was fearful of anything negative, and so we learned to dance around most serious things, except music. We would discuss music almost every conversation. That wasn’t a bad thing, I loved, and still love, the social phenomena of music—how it reflects people’s lives, or a region, or an era of time. And my dad was quite knowledgeable with music history, as he taught a Jazz History class at the community college, at times.

I eventually moved to the Tampa Bay area, and after years of living in inaccessible apartments without being able to enter the bathrooms and literally showering at public access showers at the beach, my Aunt made an offer to purchase a house with her good credit and a loan of down payment and money to renovate the house to make things wheelchair friendly, including roll-in shower, wider doorways, sink I could use and ramp. The house was in dire shape, and not a very good neighborhood, but it was a great start, and I’ll never forget the elation I felt inside when I realized it was our new home. I can honestly say it’s an excitement that stays with me to this day, 20 years later.

I must say here that the gratitude I have for my Aunt Cowboy, as I’ve called her all my life, to reach out to help in my lowest moments is something I can’t express in mere words. It’s not enough to say Thanks, and I have always felt a responsibility to make good of my life to somehow not take that act of kindness for granted. Cowboy took a huge risk not knowing if my mother and I would live up to our obligations to repay, but it was done through love, and that made the risk worth it. I cannot forget my late grandmother, Mary Weaver, who got the ball rolling by showing an interest in my mother and I living in better conditions. As I remember, my grandmother was always looking out for others.

Over the years, I managed to pay my Aunt the loans back, fix the house up with one project at a time and, as of this year (2007), pay the mortgage off. Believe me, the fight to hang on to this tiny piece of rock has taken on many dimensions throughout my time here, but they could never steal the glory of owning my home. In fact, the battles only made the success sweeter. Owning my own home has truly been, the ole clichÈ, a dream come true.

In this fight was my dear mother, who, in the early years fought so hard at some of the most difficult jobs you can imagine as a Certified Nurse’s Aide in nursing homes to bring in enough to meet bills. In those days I was going to college and paying bills with my Social Security check. Sadly, my two sisters were both very troubled souls, and their extremely bad behavior was, both, stressful beyond words and expensive, not to mention very embarrassing. At times, they worked against our dreams to own this home, even becoming our enemy determined to destroy us at times. To this day, I have very little to do with either sister, although I love them, and they have absolutely no appreciation of what my mother and I have accomplished.

In 1993, I started working for a company that I’m still with today, making it 14 years now. The job worked out perfectly as my mother has aged and lost the ability to work, transferring the financial weight to my shoulders. After hundreds of chaotic episodes with my two sisters, both have moved away, and now the sibling-crisis, that still exists, is mostly over the phone.

It has been a high priority of mine to give my mother a peaceful life, free of financial worries and drama. Her mind is not as sharp as it was, and her body is tiny and frail, but her spirit is still is lively, loyal and grateful for the opportunity to share this dream of mine—finding my home!