It was affectionately known as 18 Mile Road. It ran north-south from Mustang Island to Padre Island in the South Texas Gulf Coast. Officially called Park Road 53 back then and today is known as Texas Highway 361. I recall being on it for the first time in June of 1984. There, a little south of Beach Access Road 1A, a large billboard screamed a happy message: "Welcome to Miller Time!" Framed in fluorescent palm trees. Then in much smaller letters at the bottom of the full-size billboard, it helpfully added, “ and Port Aransas”. The sign sat like a guardian to the island I called home on a long 18-mile stretch of sand that had the Corpus Christi ship channel to the west and the vast Gulf of Mexico to the east.
Here, now, I was getting acquainted personally with the 18-mile road as I walked along it picking up pieces of shrapnel with Mopar serial numbers on them, then also an entire driveshaft that will never pull duty again. I messed up.
The irony is, there was another driveshaft with a front universal joint on it sitting in the trunk of my now very damaged 72 red and black Dodge Dart. I had let it coast as far as it could after the violent storm that had ripped apart the underside of the car minutes earlier.
I would learn that this one simple thing had single-handedly cut two big holes under the floor of the front seat. Smashed open the tail shaft housing and bent the output shaft of the transmission. Broke the exhaust, and sent metal through the power steering pump and radiator. Something really bad did happen today after all. The odd thing was, I knew something was waiting today. Don’t get me wrong, this is not some weird auto mechanics 6th sense, although, in the years that followed, I can boast some car whispering credentials. No this was something else. There are just a few days and even sometimes minutes when a person stands on the brink of two forevers, completely encased in fog. You don’t really know that the tracks you are standing on are the switch, but to your very core, you can feel it. Time has gravity. I have felt this gravity manifest itself in three peculiar ways. The first, when something is about to literally explode and you are right there, time happens in choppy sort of photo frames. I believe this is because our senses naturally activate to a magnified super level that allows us to see microseconds expanded so we can read them. The second gravity time displays is the weird conduits it can draw. Noah was in the PICU in 2009 not being able to breathe, again the first time gravity was at play here too, then the conduit to my Dad telling me about not being able to breathe. It brought Noah to 1996 and my Dad to 2009. I then existed in not one time at a time, but strangely all of them at once.
The third gravity of time is what was happening on this day, March 4th, 1985. This is when you are on a pivotal day and you can feel the gravity of your different life pulling at you and the gravity of the life you have been living pulling you the other way. It is an odd but unmistakable feeling.
Something was different. For two months, I have been working in an oil refinery in Northwest Corpus Christi, on the Corpus Christi Bay. I was an instrument fitter's helper working under my dad‘s lifelong friend Jeri. The days were long and cold. Working high off the ground in hard hats and safety harnesses. Sometimes as high as 263 feet off the ground. There were fires and explosions, and the company put a $1 million life insurance policy on you when you began working there. This was a fact but I tried not to let bother me. Despite the fact that Jeri had at any given moment anywhere from 12 to 20 cars parked in his yard, I always drove my 1972 Dodge dart with a slant six motor making it the most economical vehicle out of any that we had between us.
I woke up at 1:15 a.m. in my Port Aransas Texas home. I was due to pick up Jeri in Flour Bluff around 6 a.m. on my way to the refinery. Port Aransas is on Mustang Island which is in the Gulf of Mexico just north of South Padre Island Texas. It was always a very long drive to work, but back in those days, you had to do what you had to do. That morning I could feel that something was different. I was on the precipice of change although a very involuntary one.
I wrote a poem that morning over my cup of coffee called, “Taking What is at Hand”.
Around 5 a.m. I headed south on Mustang Island on the long dark 18 Mile Road that led to South Padre Island. When Jeri got into the car I told him that I felt like I had stepped out of bed and into the Twilight Zone this morning. Something very good or very bad is going to happen today. Unfortunately, my money was on something bad. After all, I worked as high as 263 ft off the ground and it was not exactly out of the ordinary to have accidental explosions happen at the refinery. Gravity was everything.
Amazingly the whole day went by and nothing out of the ordinary happened. Driving away from the refinery and out onto South Padre Island Drive I breathed a sigh of relief believing that I was in the clear. I was just a weird 19-year-old with a lack of sleep and a wild imagination.
Just as I was slowing down for a traffic light however my car began to vibrate really hard. I knew that the front universal joint in my 72 Dodge Dart was close to going. I was going to change it, I really was! I had even bought a used driveshaft with a joint on it from a guy at work for 15 bucks.
We made it to Jeri's house and normally we would have just jacked up the car and taken care of it with the one I bought. But Jeri didn't have any tools because they were all in our toolbox at work. we made the heavy-hearted decision that it would probably make it if I took it slow.
People in our income status on the island did not have telephones. Realizing that I was going to have to drive the car back to Port Aransas Jeri wisely told me that when I got to the island I should go to a payphone call person-to-person collect and ask for myself. When he answered he would say that I was not there and he would know that I made it home safely. Anyone my age and older know that this method of confirming info was standard procedure back in those days. Calling long distance was very pricey.
After picking up the pieces of my car all over Park Road 53, I sat back down in the driver's seat. The realization that it could be a very long time till I drive this car again and perhaps, maybe never again. When it is the only car you ever owned, that's huge. I think it was the shock of the consequences that I felt as I sat there. The shock wave was still unbelievable. I worked like 50 miles from where I lived!
There was more at work here. I was miserable. All of my youthful ignorance had been thoroughly taunted, mocked, and challenged. "My" friends were actually my Dad's friends. I had made none in the last 7 months that I was here in South Texas. My days learning how to be an adult working at A Auto Supply last summer did little to break my immature defiance that was facilitated by not having my Dad during the years that I really needed him.
Working in a refinery with a bunch of construction workers as a helper was constantly like a brutal initiation. It is a painful road to travel. My cushy little teenage life in which I thought I had it all figured out was being smashed daily in the ring of people lining up to kick my figurative butt into something else. I will say it was working. The long drive back to the island gave me time to reflect on myself and slowly, I was turning dials and making adjustments to who I was.
While working at the refinery, I was bitter and I felt broken. I wanted to go where I felt like I used to. Where I felt I had control, oddly, getting drunk and having no control. I wanted my old life back, at least the fun part. I never paid attention to what I would actually do with my life. I was just thinking about Lone Oak Campground, partying with my friends. As I worked high up on those metal vessels that looked like Mercury rockets with ladders, landings, pipes, and instruments on them, I kept telling myself: "I am doing this for Connecticut. I am going back."
Of course, in my stupidity, I did not know that this was going to make my life even more pathetic than it already was, or at least how I thought it already was. But this morning, March 4th, 1985, I stood on the edge of two different lives. I did not know that, but I knew something was amiss. Yes, Mike, "something very good or very bad" was going to happen to me today. Check. Very bad, right?
It seemed like an hour had passed. Then I saw it on the horizon. A dark green storm moving at me at the speed of sound, or so it always seemed. Jeri NEVER drove slow, he totally did not know how to. He had so many speeding tickets that now when he was getting pulled over, he and his wife would swap seats so that she got the ticket so he would not lose his license. That one 1965 Chevrolet Super Sport coming at me at a high velocity was coming to my rescue.
Jeri skidded to a stop just ahead of me on the side of the 18-mile road. His face fell with remorse when I told him about all of the smashed vital components all over the road. He tied a rope from the back bumper of the 65 to the front bumper of my Dodge and towed me back to Port A on a rope faster than I have ever been towed in a vehicle before.
My first car, sat in the driveway indefinitely broken needing so much work before it would ever see the road again and my life continued. I had to start driving Dad's 74 Chrysler Town and Country wagon, a loud, rusty, 440 cubic inch motor, 5100-pound monster of a car to work. It was a $10-a-day trip and in 85 that was stupid money.
The 18-mile road event was an explosion that set things in motion that from that day on, would not have happened otherwise. Connecticut could not even be thought about as the Dodge was the only way that could happen. I bought a 73 Dodge pickup for $75 from Cliff on the island. It only had 2nd and 3rd gear which would have been fine! But, the prissy little Connecticut boy in me "needed" 1st and reverse. Brat! So I was on a crusade to find a transmission and in 1973, Chrysler contracted these out to small machine shops which made it so there were so many different ones. The month of looking around South Texas junkyards was amazing like a world of its own. In the end, I found one for $150 in 1985, and since we were finding others for $15 but they did not fit, was like spending $1800 today.
My 15-year-old sister had just moved in with us from Connecticut and there were more expenses. Until now, I was really bad at assisting Dad with the household expenses, despite telling him that I would when I convinced him to move from his little dune-side cottage that was smaller and cheaper than the old 1950s mobile home that we now lived in that we rented from Jeri. The million-dollar transmission was a pain point between Dad and me.
The truck leaked a ton of oil, so I had to fix it. I was not always good at working on cars, and this was during that time. It took me a stupid amount of weeks to change an oil pan gasket. I hurt myself and threw plenty of tantrums. My respect for my father runs very deep here. He was quietly patient, but should probably have backhanded me several times to set me right.
The morning after I cut my knuckle open on the side of the sharp oil pan, it had gotten infected because it was dirty with sand and grease and my hand blew up like a balloon. It was Sunday Morning Gentleman's Club time. This was our excuse to drink beer and throw darts on Sunday morning between 10 am and noon or 1. You could not do that on the beach as open containers were not legal until noon Sunday. I could not really play that day. Dad, in a most uncharacteristic way, looked at me and said, "Here Mike, let me look at that under the light.' I placed my hand in his, and he gently turned it and looked at it as a concerned parent, gingerly touching my infected hand. Then suddenly, the full force of his grip engaged and he crushed my hand in his, pulling and ripping the skin back and forth. I screamed in agony, swearing at him as I went to my knees and yelled, "What did you do that for?" He let go of my hand and said, "Well, you thought you were feeling pain before, what about now?" I should have known, this was a typical Joe Jackson thing to do. Those eyes bore hard into mine, and very sternly he told me, "Now get into the bathroom and wash that cut out like you should have last night!"
My friends, if you want the definition of a real loving parent, there he was. There is no way I could ever have done that. There were no medical facilities on the island. It HAD to be cleaned as it was full of car grease and sand and bacteria. My father never backed down from doing what hurt him when he needed to hurt us for our safety. He was beautiful.
Driving to Corpus was getting old. I think I may have only driven the truck one time to the refinery, so the rest of the time it was Dad's car that was eating me alive in gas and he was walking to work, because of my stupidity with the joint. When Little Jimmy, the first person I ever met in Port A got fired from the public works department of the City of Port Aransas, Dad told me to jump, and I did. I was a shoo-in for the job that no one really wanted, cleaning the skid-o-kans on the beach. My dad pointed out that when you have a job like that and you do it right, no one messes with you.
It was amazing, my life became so different right away. I was still having my butt handed to me in my innocent arrogance and honestly, things always seemed to go better if I could just shut my mouth and listen. I was frustrated at times, but I was not above learning from my Dad and others too.
At the end of May, I went on a date that got set up with some friends that I worked with. Talk about stepping on the proverbial banana peel, it happened to me. One moment I was this single 19-year-old trying to figure out who I was and who I would become. The next moment I was living with a 26-year-old who got married when she was 14 and had 3 kids, ages 10, 8, and 6. She had just gotten out of a very abusive relationship that had lasted 12 years. We were definitely not what the other needed but it happened and it was a firestorm that was so out of control in a coming of age in a tornado sort of way that by the end of the year, she moved back to the travel trailer that she was living in previously. The both of us had the good sense to realize that she needed to be an individual and so did I, and within a month, called it quits altogether. We still loved each other like people love each other when they endure a disaster together. We remained friends but she changed me forever like no one else ever could. The complexities of that relationship set things into motion in me that defined who I became in the years to come. By the time I was 22, and living many miles from here, people would look at me after I told them how old I was and they would shake their heads and just say, "Lots of miles."
Working for the city, I grew up. My Dad did great things with and for me and I made friends along the way. Because Dad and I were best friends, our friends were usually mutual, and I was ok with that.
Somewhere along the way, with all of the fine-tuning I did in the wake of lessons hard learned and dealing with consequences, I became a different person. At the core, there still was some me, but I shook it all down and found a much more refined person. When my life seemed to be repetitive within the confines of my little island, I wanted to move to Maine, to start a new adventure. I wanted to write books and songs, something I did in much of my spare time now. I started to realize that I could have whatever life I wanted.
I left Port Aransas in October of 1986 and never did make it to Maine. I did get stuck in Connecticut for almost 2 years before finally making a life in New Hampshire in 1988. My previous relationship made me a daredevil when it came to relationships and my life felt like an endless barfight. I was extreme in all the choices I made and I was so impulsive in making them.
I believe that March 4th changed my course. Had I stayed where I was going, I would have had a pretty predictable, pathetic meh life, but I did not. That moment on Park Road 53 changed all that. Eventually, after more self-destruction in Connecticut and New Hampshire, I once again found myself in Port Aransas in 1989. I had the pedal to the floor, racing into self-destruction and not caring what anyone thought.
But then, there was Joe Jackson. What is a good dad? My answer would be so appalling to the average person. My Dad loved so clearly, in a Grand Torino sort of way. In the figurative sense, his life was given so I could actually live mine. He really did not know that he was doing this. He did not even remember what he did. That thing that saved my life he did, made him feel ashamed when I told him. But he chose the nuclear option in order for my life to finally begin. I became a different person on September 9th, 1989, when that full can of Budweiser came flying from the kitchen and into the side of my head exploding all over me. Yes, it took more than a day of absolute rage inside of me to subside, but when it did, I knew more than I ever have and more than I ever could without this brutal wake-up that I was going to die soon if I did not change.
March 4th, 1985 was a turning point in which my life turned from what would most likely have been a benign, job, home, vacation, blah, blah, blah. It took a hard right turn into a life in which I never knew where I was going to be later that day for many years. That is the stuff that made me. Like it or not, this is how I arrived, waking up on the floor and not remembering how I got here.
