Ignore all the touchy-feely rhetoric and look around. He’s right. I live right by USCB and go through the campus almost everyday. There’s very few white male students. So, you see, those “open minded” people are the actual “Nazis”. And they, unfortunately, have controlled the media for a long time. You were given the snow job of the millenium.

Between what I learned about my childhood, what I learned in California, what I learned as a freewheelin’ contractor and what I learned as a homeless person, I’ve come to some conclusions. In this final chapter I’m gonna break them down to you.

My stepfather was involved with the U.S. military and had acquaintances on the Chicago police force. I knew that as a child. With some additional knowledge gained later in life, I know exactly what happened to my family in the 60s.

Though my father was in the English army during WWII, he was from Poland. That country became communistic after the war. Flash forward to the sixties and my father, proud of achieving “The American Dream” has on numerous occasions invited friends from his country to visit him. This is during The Cold War and The Cuban Missile Crisis. Well, that certainly got the attention of a few people.  On top of that, he was a successful immigrant. He had three kids in Catholic school, a wife that didn’t need to work, and a rather nice house. They preceded to gaslight the hell out of him. I researched the media at the time. They went so far as to have a babysitter teach lyrics to a five year old.

My stepfather never intended to get my mother pregnant. That was an accident. You have to remember that he didn’t marry my mom for years. He continued to see his wife for a very long time. Eventually, he was trapped and had to. He died in the house I was living in while I was in high school. He survived both of my parents.

My father was an old school European that spoke five languages. My mother’s affair pretty much destroyed him. My mother, before she died, was a slightly crazy, black woman. They never told me this, but I suspect she committed suicide.

I am now 62 years old. I spent a good part of my life figuring out why and how this happened. I created a website, years ago, specifically to tell the people in the world what happened and to warn them. I’ve waited until now for obvious reasons. What I’m going write in this concluding chapter is going to cause me a lot of grief.

The present mess this country is in started a long time ago. You have to go back to Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. Eventually, the entire infrastructure of the United States, including Hollywood, would become the personal revenge tool of a group of people. With the easy availability of fake identity papers in the past, it’s not always easy to trace people and money. However, it’s hard to hide the outward manifestations of money.

The Union Army during The Civil War was helping escaped slaves from the south via “The Underground Railroad”. Military intelligence from that group, in a nutshell, morphed into a group of people that basically control the world now. I’ve seen what they can manipulate globally.

Why? You have to read history. It goes back a very, very long time.

There’s much I can’t tell you.

© John Bielecki 2024

My Story

Computers and the Internet became such an important part of my life, that I decided, like music, to devote an entire chapter to this subject alone.

Unlike the students of today, we didn’t have computers in our schools. We didn’t even have them in our high schools. I kinda learned how to type on an IBM Selectric.

In the early 70s if you wanted a home computer, you had to build it. The first pre-built computer I owned was a Timex and it was a piece of crap. It wasn’t much good for anything other than playing chess on your TV, but it taught me some coding.

I actually went to school for computer technology, but never went into the field. Yes, I once knew how to fix computers…now? That was quite a while ago.

I once wrote a history of the internet. When I first got on what we now know as the internet, it was all text based. The network was designed for academics to communicate. So, guess what folks? In the early days of the net, I got to communicate with some of the smartest people in the world. They were the only people using the network. It was all intellectuals. You had none of the bullshit you have now.

I’ve met some people that, in one way or another, have made a lot of money off the internet. I did OK in the cable contracting business for a minute, but nowhere near what some of these people subsequently accomplished in the cable industry, in the computer industry and on the internet.

Like a lot of mass media, I’ve come to ignore much of what is now on the internet. I’ve seen the change and it is no longer the animal it used to be. It happened to MTV. The internet, though still good for careful research, is now nothing more than another part of the worldwide propaganda machine. The Terminator film is really quite true.

© John Bielecki 2024

Having been born in 1961, music, specifically Rock music, became a big part of my life. I decided to write an entire chapter on that subject alone.

I bought my first record from a fine Irish lad in the fifth grade. This guy and I would sing Rain Drops Keep Failing On Our Heads to one of the prettier girls in class. That first piece of prescient vinyl was Day Tripper by The Beatles.The flipside of that 45 was We Can Work it Out.

Well, due to the circumstances of sixth grade, I started to listen to a lot of music. In high school, I started to meet musicians. That still happens occasionally, but I don’t exactly run in those circles anymore. Drummers, as you may have guessed, are some of the craziest people in the world.

One of the artists that were involved in my magazine adventure had a degree from The Art Institute of Chicago. He had done album covers for some recording artists. I’ve actually been in this studio and knew musicians that used it.

I went to my first concert while I was still in junior high school. I saw Chicago and The Doobie Brothers. I got my first contact high then without even realizing it. The place was totally filled with pot smoke and after a while I started to feel tired. I actually laid down on one of the entrance ramps for a minute. That was the first of many concerts to come. I saw many of the big name Rock groups of the 70s.

I’m obviously biased, but I think Rock n’ Roll hit its peak right around the year 1977. There were a lot of fusions back then. Classic and Rock fusion groups like ELP were touring with entire orchestras. The line between Jazz and Rock became indistinguishable. Artists like Jean Luc Ponty, Jeff Beck, and Eddie Jobson erased it.

I was Johnnie Johnson when I first came to Santa Barbara in 1988. Since this state has one helluva grapevine, certain people knew I had a connection to “The Industry”, but they were not sure in what capacity. While at the same time, a few people did. This town has a long history with Hollywood.

For the next four years I was kinda off the grid. With the exception of some Hollywood people, no one knew I was here. I mean no one, not even family or friends.

I got really healthy. The first four years I was here I never had a single joint or a beer…nothing. I took to the beach/fitness culture almost immediately. I started running, cycling, swimming and going to the gym. The East Beach bathhouse has workout facilities. The only thing that prevented me from entering a triathlon at one point was my swimming speed. I’m just not that damn fast.

Santa Barbara was a lot different in 1988. It was much more bohemian. We still had these semi-weird Grateful Dead children hanging out. Rents were a fraction of what they are now and there were several dive hotels in the downtown area. (These places are now off the hook in price.) Like most desirable places, it has changed.

After those first four years, I started working in the telecommunications industry. Not only does Santa Barbara have Hollywood history, it has Internet history. UCSB was on the original Arapnet. Stanford, the birthplace of Google, was also on that precursor to The Internet. The Internet was never designed for graphics. When I first got on it, in the stone-age, it was all text. A few years later, you could download a crappy black and white picture, but it would take minutes. In the early 90s when the web started becoming graphical, cable companies all over America were scrambling to update their infrastructure, and we were there. Some of these people, unfortunately I wasn’t one of them, were making a pretty good living. Middle managers, without college degrees, were making a half a million dollars a year.

For years, I would come in and out of Santa Barbara between contracts. I saw a large part of this country, but always came back. Among other things, the weather here spoils the crap out of you. A not so good benefit of that profession was that I was around a lot of cable cowboys. We drank.

Practically every town I worked in, I got to know the dance clubs. Frankly, this is where my co-workers would go to pick up chicks. These guys had no bills. Based on the length of the contract, the firm would rent us out hotel rooms, apartments and even houses. Many of them drove company trucks, so they didn’t even have that expense. They had a lot of disposable income.

At first I didn’t join my cowboy cohorts in their carousing. That didn’t last long. I finally broke down and become a designated driver. (You never realize how stupid people are until you’re cold sober and they are drunker than hell.) That didn’t last long. Sitting in a downstairs dance club, (in all places, Boise), I looked at my buddies and their girlfriends and told the rather sexy barmaid that “I’ll have one of those”. I proceeded to party in every town I in worked in. Got drunker than shit in the French Quarter, on Mississippi riverboats, in Vegas, in Reno, even at Mickey Rats…and all points between.

Well, now on my returns to Santa Barbara, I was no longer hanging out at the beach, I was hanging out on State St. Santa Barbara is a great town to drink in now, but it was even better then. The live music scene was more vibrant and there were more buskers. The subsequent “aggressive panhandling” laws put a damper on that street music.

You could drink on the beach, providing it wasn’t in glass, and in the parks. On the beach, people would have huge bonfires and pits. In any park, people were always partying. The yahoos destroyed it by constantly doing stupid crap in front of tourists. The authorities had to crack down. Hell, I saw it coming a long time before it happened.

At one point, I lived in The Californian hotel. This was obviously before its remodel. It is now outrageously expensive. Back then, there was a bar downstairs called “Rocky’s”. Go out the backdoor of that place and you’re facing the elevator that goes up to the rooms. Across the street was a 24 hour coffee shop with a helluva internet connection. Behind that coffee shop was the warehouse space of one of the local street artists. I got to know him as well as some of his friends. They offered me painting lessons. I never took them up on it.

I’ve done a lot of partying here, but I’ve also gained a lot of knowledge and a little bit more humility. While my ex-wife took away some of my Chicago edginess, Santa Barbara removed a lot more. There are some incredibly nice people here, but since great good attracts great evil, we have some not so nice people.

To show my appreciation to the “nice” people in this town, I created this website.  This is the latest iteration. It has previously existed under different URLs. I got a little more egotistical in 2013 and turned my name into a domain. I had purely good intentions, but all I did was shoot myself, as well as some of my friends, in the foot.

I can’t write a chapter on Santa Barbara without mentioning some caveats. I stated this numerous times already, but wealthy and famous people attract weirdos. Not to freak you out too much, but even Charles Manson lived here a little while before he thought The Beatles were sending him secret messages. I knew a chick named “Billy Jean” who was arrested for breaking into Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch because she thought his song was about her. She did it multiple times. The scientologists used to have a big building downtown. It is now a boutique hotel. They are/were a clever bunch. They have you fill out this personality inventory before they even talk to you. Afterwards, these people know all your buttons.

Being the drinking town that it is, people occasionally get “Public Intoxication” tickets. More often than not, these tickets will be dismissed if the offender attends a few AA meeting. Well, you guessed it. Many of these groups are infiltrated by weirdos that are not even alcoholic. They are there simply to hear the repentant confessions of an occasional wealthy person, celebrity or slightly frightened student. I’ve seen some of the results.

To close on a positive note, this town has always had good pot.

© John Bielecki 2024

I have previously written on homelessness. I will expound a little further on the subject in this chapter.

The last place I live in with my ex-wife was three houses down from PCH. Surfers would go by in the morning, either walking or on bicycles. It was a little expensive, so we had an English girl as a roommate. I went from that to walking around with all my belongings on my back in a very short period of time. I initially was bewildered as hell. Like Virgil’s Beatrice, I met a woman that showed me the ropes.

I really don’t know much about this woman. I’m not really sure why she was homeless. She had no substance abuse problems, was relatively easy on the eyes, and was smart. She had a mischievous side, but not to the point of criminality. I’m sure that wasn’t the problem.

After my divorce there were people that were looking for me. I legally changed my name a couple times to make their chore a little more difficult and to prove a point. I go on a bus-tripping/hitchhiking odyssey from Mexico City, (I was going to go to Guatemala, then realized I didn’t have a passport), to British Columbia. I’m really trying to get lost. I purposely stayed away from my ex-wife and child because I knew they would be used as weapons against me. I eventually failed in my attempt to shield them. Though they were not hurt physically, it was implied that if I mentioned certain things… Then I met some Hollywood people.

Like many people when they are young, I wanted to be famous. I specifically wanted to be a famous writer. When the opportunity for fame, in another area, presented itself to me, I carefully weighed the pros and cons. I realized that I would ultimately become a prisoner and often indebted to people I didn’t particularly like. Besides, at that point in my life it would have killed me. I turned it down.

The people in Hollywood knew me as Skip P Johnson. It was a joke. The “p” stood for nothing. So, even though I’ve yet to really do anything at this point, I’m kinda famous by osmosis and I don’t really like it. There’s a lot that went on during this period. Some of it involved screenplays.

Between the shenanigans I saw in the finance industry, the insights I received from “The Industry” and the subsequent figuring out of the Charles Manson thing, I had this OMG! Epiphany. It is at that point that I quit paying any serious attention to the mainstream media. That was decades ago. I still don’t pay much attention to it.

I quit partying after my divorce and even stopped smoking after a year. I eventually ended up in Santa Barbara, where I got really healthy. That’s an entirely different chapter.

© John Bielecki 2024

I was not sufficiently prepared for California. My impression of this state was based on Beach Boys songs and hippie videos from “the summer of love”. In reality, it is far from that. It is prison politics on a societal level. And all those stories you hear about nutty people? There’s a reason for that. We have a rather large population of toxic, gaslighting assholes out here. Wealth and fame seem to attract people like that.

There are people here that have been getting away with murder, (in some cases literally), for so long that they often no longer even attempt to hide it and are actually arrogant about it. They throw it in your face. Hey, I’m breaking the law and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. I’m sure you’ve seen numerous stories in the media. Those are biased and don’t even begin to tell a true tale. This is Hollywoodland. You can’t really expect the mainstream media to accurately report on problems that they themselves have created. The film Network does have some basis in reality.

The Spanish, then the Mexicans, have controlled the infrastructure of the state for a long time. The film making industry has been here for over a century. That business has always been black in sentiment. Between those two groups of people and a couple more that have been taught to hate by the media, the average white person in California is being gaslighted in some way. It’s a fuckin’ mess. Well, when I first came here I did not know this. I was still in my Pollyanna phase.

There’s a lot of obvious hate in California, but some of it is well hidden. Some of the best actors here don’t even work in Hollywood. The “limousine liberals” really have no clue as to what the hell is going on. They are so insulated by their wealth that they don’t see, on a street level, what their political actions are causing. Everyone is on their best behavior around them, so they usually have a distorted view of reality. Even some of the law enforcement personnel are haters. Not so much here in Santa Barbara, (we live in kinda a bubble), but I’ve seen it quite often in other places. I’ve seen black police officers let black perpetrators go after they committed crimes. While I lived in Chicago, a number of Cook County custodial deputies were indicted for being gang members and supplying drugs to inmates. You think these were unique situations?

I have to go on a slight tangent here and give you a quick civics lesson. I had a fake ID at the age of fourteen. It wasn’t difficult to get. Guys, this country use to be kinda a joke. As late as my high school years, many State IDs didn’t even have a picture on them. Before I986, when the I9 form was implemented, an ID and a SSN card were not even required for employment. California in 1985 was the wildest west of finance and had been that way for a long, long time.

It’s 1985. It’s Southern California. Some of these people are not only the biggest crooks in America; they are the biggest crooks in the world. They are the “Big Dogs”. Smart people, good attorneys, certain loopholes in the way things were done, and an elastic morality made for some interesting consequences. I’m sure there are several Scarface type scenarios that have played out throughout the years.

I was once a licensed private investigator. (That is easily verifiable.) It’s not nearly as glamorous as The Industry makes it out to be. I sat in a cubicle, read and starred at a computer screen. I did no fieldwork. That job taught me some skills.

I worked in the finance industry. The mid-eighties in that business, at least in California, were kinda like The Wolf of Wall Street. There was a bar downstairs in one of the places I worked. Many of us would end up there at the end of the day. Girls in that office would go down to the parking structure on breaks and lunch. They would snort coke using the doors of the glove compartments. That job taught me some more skills.

The things I learned on those two jobs, and the things I observed around me, finally woke me up to realty. I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. During this time, I’m also starting to figure out some really sketchy shit at work, talking with my wife about a reunion, and living in a nice apartment with two friends. One day, she shows up.

I married a cowgirl; now a horse woman. She has the accompanying spirit. She drove all by herself, pulling a trailer of our belongings, from Illinois. I wasn’t exactly prepared to see her, but I loved her.

She gets a job with this very cool English couple that own a business and we soon bring our child out from Illinois. Things are alright for a minute. Then, the crash and burn.

I’m attending AA at the suggestion of a vice-president of a financial institution I was working at. These fuckin’ people are gaslighting the shit out of me and I’m thinking it has something to do with the stuff I’m finding out at work. (They do that shit here. Rich people=Weirdos.) Though I did very little previous fieldwork, I did some on what I was working on at the time. I was starting to find out things that were a little overwhelming and a little scary.

My marriage finally destructs and when it rains, it pours. It wasn’t very long after our divorce that I found myself homeless. It was literally one thing after another in a very short period of time. Individually, each problem was doable, but…

I will try to explain homelessness in my next chapter.

© John Bielecki 2024

In 1981, I was still living in this Pollyanna fantasyland. At this point in time, I was quite literally color blind. I was partying with everyone and living in a kind of bubble. That would change after I moved to California. There was a lot going on that I didn’t know about. My biggest concern at the time was having fun.

I’m a slightly spaced out, latter day hippie. I meet a guitar playing, blond, blue-eyed, German, Catholic girl. She’s a little like me, (thank God for her, not completely), and she’s nice. We connected and moved in together. Three months later, we were married. Six years later, we were divorced. That marriage produced a child.

Of course, there’s a little backstory here. She was a friend of mine long before I started dating her. I had a girlfriend. She had a boyfriend. I break up with my girlfriend. Her relationship is not going well. We’re at a party…

While it’s perfectly fine for me to air my own dirty laundry in public, I’m certainly not going to discuss extremely intimate things about my ex-wife and ex-girlfriends. That just isn’t polite. My comments on my marriage will be brief. I will have to convey a few anecdotes just to give the general vibe of the marriage.

We took LSD on our honeymoon. I would only do it a couple more times after high school, this being one of them. I am in no way advocating the use of this drug, but, to be quite frank, we had a lot of fun.

With a start like that, you can probably guess what followed. We partied. I was nineteen. She was eighteen. Our child was not born until our third year of marriage. Between her friends and mine, there was this pool of couples and singles that would trade off having parties and dinners. (Nothing weird here guys-no partner swapping.) All these events included alcohol. Many had marijuana. A few had drugs.

This union was doomed to failure from the start. People have been trying to fix me up with black chicks for a very long time. As early as sixth grade, I remember one of my fellow students expounding about the wonders of certain parts of a black girl’s anatomy. Black girls have been hitting on me for almost as long. At the same time, there’s always been this heavy push for me to convert to Protestantism. I did the exact opposite of what “the powers that be” wanted me to do.

Her father didn’t particularly like me and, in retrospect, had reasons not to. Though he did his share of drinking, he was a fairly conservative Catholic. I, by all outward appearances at the time, was “white trash”. There were also other dynamics involved.

The “honeymoon” part of our marriage lasted about two years. Then, the company I was working for shut down. That was the beginning of a downward spiral.

I was working at a mail-order catalog house. I started as a union forklift driver. After I got married, I was promoted into a department called “the sample room”. This is where the merchandise buyers would hang out a lot. As a consequence of that position I got to known some of them, as well as some of the advertising people. The people on our end that interfaced with our contracted photographic studio were cool.

Everything in a catalog has to have a picture, of course. In those days, rather than send artwork, sources sent actual products. (Photoshop was not invented yet.) Once those pictures were taken, most of the items were not returned to the vendors. This was everything from furniture to clothes. They would sell those items at ridiculously cheap prices. I, of course, bought some of those items. I can remember buying an expensive fur coat for my wife. I paid only a fraction of its worth.

So, life is not bad at this point. My wife and I are both working. We have an active social life and a fair amount of disposable income. We have been at parties with some of the advertising people and it looks like I’m on the fastrack to becoming a buyer. Then, my company was bought out by The Wickes Corporation.

I will forever have a grudge against that company. They bought us specifically to use as a sacrificial lamb. Wickes was having financial problems, bought our company, filled our warehouse, and then filed bankruptcy. I was there. I saw it. They put thousands of people out of work, many who had been there for decades. That corporation still exists.

Once the announcement of our imminent closure was made, Titanic mentality took over. It brought out some strange behaviors, even in some of our top executives. Since I’m not a rat, I won’t be going into any specifics.

I knew how to drive a forklift, so I was one of last to go. During our liquidation period, I was carpooling with an older gentleman that had been a forklift driver for decades. He was, for lack of a better description on my part, one of those “salt of the earth” types. Like many in the blue-collar south suburbs of Chicago, his “American Dream” was crumbling right before his eyes. Though I semi-recovered from this corporate bankruptcy, he did not. My serious crash and burn would occur a few years in the future.

When I load one of the final pallets of merchandise into a truck leased by one of the “job-lotters”, I knew what it felt like to be a turncoat Jew in a concentration camp. This was a company that had employed many friends of mine and I, as one of the remaining survivors, was feeding the last bits of its corpse to vultures.

And the hits just keep coming. After the business failure, one thing after another went wrong in our lives. My next job did not pay as well and we all know what that lead to. We were also no longer getting many items at substantially reduced prices.

There was sabotage in this relationship from several different fronts. Those doing it will of course say it was self-inflicted. While self-sabotage was often a reaction to this subversion, (thus, giving them fuel to justify their innocence), there was a lot of dirty shit going on.

Our child was born a year later and our partying slowed down. Even that did not save our slowly disintegrating marriage. Before my child even started school, we separated and I moved out to California. That…Oh shit!

© John Bielecki 2024

From the age of seven onward, my home life was slightly dysfunctional. Even when things improved externally, (better neighborhood, etc.), there was always a lot of negative energy there. My eldest sibling couldn’t take it and left home when he was sixteen.

Though I wanted to go to college, the desire to get out on my own was stronger. I just couldn’t stand living at home anymore. Among other things, I had partying to do.

I know why a lot of young people are pissed off. They can no longer do what I did right out of high school. I worked a couple different jobs during this two year period, but I managed to maintain several different places with several different roommates. This was the Midwest in the last year of the 70s, rent was relatively cheap. I also managed to have a vehicle, pay insurance and still have plenty of money to party with. This just can’t be done these days, even in the Midwest.

Let me give you a brief primer on partying in the Midwest in the mid to late 70s. Since it‘s cold in the winter time, we’re not exactly cycling and playing volleyball. People throw a lot of house parties…numerous keggers. Some people would even rent out VFW halls, get a couple bands together, have a few kegs of beer and throw a helluva party. We would rock out and get drunker than shit.

During this point in time, I was also hanging with musicians, artists, photographers, copywriters, as well as other artsy-fartsy people. At one point we were trying to put a magazine together. We had the funding, but there were problems on my end. They wanted me to be an entertainment writer, but I was only eighteen years old. Getting into bars with a fake ID is one thing, reviewing them in a glossy rag was an entirely different story.

Before the first issue was even printed, myself, a photographer and a few other people went to an almost exclusively black nightclub that was having a talent show. Since we were “Press”, we were given a good booth and asked to be on the judgment panel. After a few acts, I had a cigarette. My lighter looked exactly like a nickel plated, 32 caliber automatic. I placed it on the table. A big bouncer, (think Mr T archetype here), came up and asked me very politely if I would mind putting it away. He didn’t know it was a lighter. That’s Chicago in 1980.

This particular photographer was basically a successful hippie. He had a degree in photography and actually made some money with it. He had other creative outlets that brought in additional funds. He photographed some of the entertainment scene in the Chicago area and was the “official” photographer of a band we both hung out with.

I was pretty irresponsible in those days. Additionally, I didn’t think it was a good idea to publicly admit to breaking the law, so I left the project. The magazine idea never came to fruition, at least under the name we originally agreed upon. I, of course, continued to party.

An important delineation of the time was the difference between a “bash” and a regular party. A bash was usually a free-for-all; anyone could come. These sometimes had interesting consequences.

I once rented out a house with a guy who was a long haul truck driver. Since he would be gone for long periods of time, I would throw some parties. During one particular multi-day “bash”, things went south. There were a lot of people coming and going. This wasn’t so good. I passed out at my own party, woke up and found all kinds of stuff missing. Some of the things missing belonged to my roommate. I freaked out a little bit, but I had to go to work. I’m in my house after putting in eight hours when an ex-girlfriend, that lived next door, came over. She said that my roommate was back and that he was going to kill me. My roommate was a badass; an ex-paratrooper. If we were going to fight, he was probably going to win. I grabbed what I could, threw it in my car and took off. I moved in with some other friends. My bash throwing days were over.

There is a lot that happened in the two year period between 1979 and 1981. There are some things I just will not write about. Sex is one of them. I started having that at a relatively early age…with girls in case you’re wondering. (A man’s butthole has never appealed to me.) This was the post-hippie, pre-AIDS, disco era. It wasn’t extremely difficult to get laid. Other than that, I’m not going to reveal much in that area. Frankly, it’s none of your business. However, I will continue to recount some of the more amusing tales from that period.

I was once at a house party where everyone decided to leave and go to another soiree. Well, they forgot about me. I was passed out in one of the bedrooms upstairs. This guy’s wife comes home from work to change and meet him at the other shindig. I had not met her yet. I woke up looking at a very nervous lady with a double-barreled shotgun pointing at my head.

I go on a beer run and come back with a keg. I slip on the icy steps and the keg goes rolling. It busts through the front door and ends up in the living room. They were pretty happy about the beer and didn’t say much about the busted up door. They were so grateful, that a few of them offered me some MDA to shoot up. MDA is Ecstasy. In the 70s and early 80s, we snorted it like cocaine. Now, I have never put a needle in my arm, but these people looked like they were having a good time. I got really close to trying it.

During this period I was doing a lot of drinking. Though I tried a few different drugs in high school, that activity tapered off afterwards. I had to be somewhat responsible. I had rent to pay.

There are millions of stories out there that describe the wonders of alcohol. I have a few myself. I’m pretty drunk one day while riding around on a motorcycle. I’m going through unfamiliar territory at approximately eighty miles an hour when the road takes an unexpected turn. I hit a mailbox that was attached to an iron pipe cemented into the ground. The bike obviously ended up in pretty bad shape. I rolled several times and ended up on the other side of the street. Thank God, there was no traffic. I, amazingly enough, didn’t get seriously injured. There are a couple times in my life that I came pretty close to death. That was probably one of them.

I partied with a lot of different people during this two year period. One of them was a girl that would eventually become my friend, my girlfriend and then my wife.

© John Bielecki 2024