Chapter 4-1997-2004 The best years of my life

(Cue theme song from “The Jeffersons”… Hey-Hey we’re ah movin’ on up!!) As 1996 arrived I finally got my chance.

After being on a waiting list for seven whole years, I was able to move up to the penthouse of our building; top floor-center apartment, wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling glass, a private balcony covered in my hand-grown flowers and vegetables, and a great view of the downtown Columbus skyline.

As you can see, I'm pretty good at growing flowers. One year I had four big palm plants out there... so the neighbors began referring to my balcony as "Gilligan's Island." Here are samples of recent balconies over the years…

In photo number…

1. Well, that’s part of my view anyway. This is a shot down my balcony railing. I found some planters that would just barely fit in the space between the bottom of the railing and the floor of my terrace. There are all different kinds of petunias that I trained to trail over the balcony in a multi-colored “waterfall”.

2. Another year I had white, peach, pink, red, purple and lavender geraniums in the floor planters, along with yellow and orange giant marigolds. It was the first year I got brave and tried growing tomatos in 5-gallon buckets. The hanging baskets have trailing petunias and geraniums. If you look at the pictures long enough you can smell the flowers.

3. Those big red flowers are Hawaiian Hibiscus plants. A friend of mine manages a drug store that sells live plants every spring. On the first day of the sale, I was amazed to see Hibiscuses for $4.99 each!?!. I went in to ask him if my eyes were deceiving me and nearly fainted… They were supposed to be $24.99 each and had been mispriced. He was so grateful that he let me buy as many as I wanted at $4.99. I got the three of the variety that grow like a 4-5 foot tall tree, as opposed to the bush. To the right of them are my infamous bragger tomatos.

4. Ahhhh the wonders of Miracle Grow. There’s actually a comical aspect to my balcony that I’ve never taken a photo of. A couple of years back I hung up two big wooden birdhouses on opposite ends of the ceiling of my overhang. About two months later I heard the chirping of baby wrens… from both little houses.

A commotion arose out there one day and I looked to find a male wren flying from one house to the other and then back again. At first I thought he was stealing food or nesting material until I realized that I had a little “Payton Place” going on. The cocky little male bird actually had two wives and families!!!

A really dumb move to have two wives living next door to each other. Eventually they worked it out and there was peace…

…until it was time to teach all those kids how to fly. They would fumble out and down to the floor; only to be bewildered as to which house they should try to get back too.

5. I’d learned my lesson after the previous year when I put up four tomato plants, because I wound up giving a ton of them away when I couldn’t eat them fast enough. My landlord had a small fit because he was worried about them falling off the vine and hitting people below… which never happened.

If you look close enough you’ll see that nestled in the bucket with the tomato plant is a green bell pepper plant.

Do I need to describe the spaghetti sauces I and my neighbors made that year?

6. If you look carefully at the very top of this shot, you see the roof of my terrace. After the tomato plants grew 8 feet tall I had to run twine between each of the hanging basket hooks to train the tomato vines to grow sideways… otherwise they’d have tried to top the roof!

Yes, my neighbors were beginning to call me Oliver Wendell Douglas of "Green Acres," with his corn stalks on his Park Avenue terrace. The only thing missing was Lisa sneezing.

Life on the road had taken its toll on my body. What with all that pasta and fast food on the go, and hotel room service catering, it was playing hell with my waistline. With less and less time in the gym, I lost my fantasy physique nearly as fast as I’d gained it.

Oh well, I got to be a “hunk” for only about a year and a half of my life, but then just like Cinderella’s gown and slippers-at midnight, I was becoming the out of shape troll I was before I started all of that weight training. It’s true what they say about being a slave to a muscular body-you have to constantly maintain it 24/7 or all those muscles turn to flab… no worst-make that blubber, unless you’re on steroids, which I refused to use...

...but I was very tempted… oh so tempted.

I found out later that some of the things my co-body builders were injecting me for pain or muscle spasms were indeed steroids and I'd suffer greatly for my ignorance in allowing them to intorduce me to them...

I sometimes go back and look at those pictures from that era and shake my head in disbelief that I actually looked like that. It all comes at a price though, because you wonder if you get opportunities because of your skill or your looks. You also pay for it in health problems later in life... just ask Ahnold the Governator.

I was still driving the tricked-out Cobra T-bird on art business trips and as the seasonal business cooled down around the end of October of 1997 I used it to deliver pizzas in. I decided to give a needy assistant manager the Volvo 240 DL that I was looking to get rid of, as a gift that he could recondition for his son. On the way to a delivery near my home downtown, I took him with me so he could drive it back to the shop. I laughed and showed him how the mighty big-block Ford could press you into the seat, and pointed to the tack and told him we were already doing 100 MPH, which actually was reading 1000 RPM.

The idiot actually believed it, and as thanks for my generosity, the bastard reported me to the company for doing 100 in a 45 zone!!! They forced me off delivering and gave me an inside job. The previous year, I'd been presented with a big bonus check (in the thousands) for going ten years without a single at-fault accident or ticket. I was getting offers from a competing company to come over to them as a delivery consultant and guidebook writer anyway, so I bid so-long to them the following March.

With Jet’sArt custom Illustrations and Jet’sArt custom business forms going full-time now, I had a staff by then who’d research what color that old hotel used to be or if any pictures of a long forgotten founder of a town were still in existence.

I was becoming a successful businessman with art clients, invitations and more flirtations in the adult film industry on the west coast and/or New York-mostly as a writer and an occasional line producer.

Being on the road all the time also cuts into your social life, and the more I worked, the less I had time for a lover.

I'd lost several lovers because of my absences, though life on the road was never lonely. I was determined to change that too, by staying closer to Columbus and finding most of my art clients locally. I was afforded more time at home, and stared working on my other hobby... gardening. (Cue theme song from "Green Acres"

As I said before, I’d discovered that I was good at writing map/guidebooks for pizza shops. The manuals would have streets sectioned off by color instead of map coordinates, and included hand-drawn apartment complex maps and instructions on how to get to all streets in a given area. I’d devised a system whereby a brand new delivery driver would be able to route deliveries without any help on the first day he worked, just by delivering only to one color on the map, which was listed on the delivery ticket. Just to make sure my instructions were accurate,

I’d drive the delivery routes there for a while in order to see/record/offer suggestions for any problems that a driver might encounter. As I stayed home more, I actually began enjoying delivering pizzas as a sideline.

In June of 2000 I actually had two different major pizza chains bidding against each other for my books.

I paid cash for a white Sebring convertible (which is what I usually rented when I was on the road), which I used to drive to business stops in Chicago and the surrounding states, ah the good they do die young. With its untimely death and more improvements to my bank account, I went looking to put a major down payment on a brand new set of wheels that had caught my eye on a whim.

On July 17th of 2003, I picked out an inferno red '04 Chrysler Sebring convertible to tool around in. At the time I thought leasing a car was like renting a car-only for a longer period. The company that owned it took care of the maintenance and upkeep, and I paid for the gas. Boy was I wrong about that! But I leased it anyway, not caring about the expensive required insurance. Unbelievable as it sounds, it turned out to be one of the smartest moves I’d ever made.

It still boggles my mind that my family never caught on, or even asked how I could afford such cars on a pizza man's earnings.

A good friend and client of mine in Pittsburgh had a computer lab and asked me if I wanted to beta-test a voice command system he was working on and hoped later to sell to Chrysler. He’d originally built one for the T-Bird and wanted me to road test the new and improved version.

Nowadays, if you hear people talking to their car you don’t bat an eye, it’s becoming commonplace, but back then, they would look at me funny when I'd walk up to my convertible and then tell it to start, turn on its sound system, change the CD and even tell the top to go up and down... that was until the car actually did it right before their amazed eyes! Back then it was really fun to watch people's reaction.

From what I understand some of the technology actually made it into cars and I’m kind of proud that I might actually have had something to do with that. I would send him e-mails of problems I was having with mine, and he’d work out the bugs and send me new breadboards or software fixes for it. The remote top now appears on the new Sebring hardtop Convertible!

As my business and reputation grew, I was spending less and less time at home again. We have a great private gym in our apartment complex, but I rarely got to use it as more time was spent out of state. A few times, I tried recapture that fleeting body that I used to have, but I'd get caught up in some distraction and gain the weight back and lose the muscle tone I'd gained. I’d find out later I was a diabetic and didn’t know it.

Eventually as the economy cooled, I found myself at home more than traveling too, and pizza delivery was to temporarily become my primary source of income. Why? Well it's hard to explain, but creating art is something that I enjoy... when it became a business and I had to churn them out as a living, suddenly the fun is gone.

Oh don't get me wrong; I was still putting out good work, just not as often... To paraphrase the Righteous Brothers "I'd lost that lovin' feeling."

I tried my hand at being an office manager for a good friend’s restaurant. I found out later that he wanted me to run the place into the ground as a tax right off. By the millennium he’d consumed all of his profits in cocaine. I hung in there through the disputes and bounced payroll checks, not wanting to be the first rat to abandon ship. A week later his mother came in and fired me, since no matter what was thrown at me I wouldn’t quit.

I got a phone call from the supervisor of “the Pizza Shop” wanting me to do a custom delivery map and guidebooks for a new area they were going to try to dominate. That led to another and another, until I had a little office/cubbyhole at their headquarters where I could cut and paste maps together and over-use their photocopier.

With a new supervisor, came objections of how much it was costing. Never mind that I was saving them tons of money on the time it took to train new drivers.

I went back to delivering pizzas… with the occasional trip to San Diego.

When you travel a lot, even if you can afford to pay cash, you inevitably use your credit cards to make airline, rental car and hotel reservations on-line. If you don’t pay attention, they can add up on you, especially if you have money to spare. 2004 rolled around and when resolutions were considered, I decided to forgo extra expenses like health insurance and started paying down a $20,000 credit card debt by sending Visa $1000 to $1250 a month and MasterCard $600, and did it without it even denting my budget.

With each passing year the economy slowed, and my business clients started cutting back on interior and advertising budgets. Clients couldn’t afford my landscapes for their offices and waiting rooms either. I found myself delivering pizzas more to make ends meet, but the tips were great towards those credit card bills; besides I liked the people I worked with. As the year progressed I'd spend more and more time in Columbus and delivered full time and did artwork less.

It wasn’t really a problem, in fact I was thinking of trying to heal the rift between myself and my father by getting some investment advice, because I had quite a tidy sum in the bank by then.

I'd still fly to San Diego on "business" occasionally. During the big fires I contributed cash backing to convert one of our warehouse/studios to temporary living quarters until they could get the insurance companies to help. I didn’t want a payback, I just liked helping people, I’ve lost count of how many people keep trying to read something sinister into that.

By October I'd completed all of the contracts I had for client’s Thanksgiving and Christmas graphics and newsprint ads. I settled into a well-deserved two-month hibernation over the holidays before I’d have to start working on “President’s Day” and Valentine stuff for the first quarter of 2005.

As usual by mid- October I’d get bored and “antsy”.

One particular pizza chain considered "full time" 33 hours!?! It was a good way to make fast extra money for big payments toward paying off my credit cards. It also meant extra pocket money towards Christmas presents and expenses if I wanted to fly out to see family in Pittsburgh or Oregon.

One thing I loved to do was to determine which of my friends were the neediest, then determine what I could do to help. This usually entailed driving around at about 3AM Christmas Eve, and leaving two or three bags of groceries on several doorsteps and sneaking away hopefully unnoticed. There were also the Christmas cards taped to the window of a friend’s front door window with an unsigned money order for between one or two hundred dollars.

No one had to know I’d done it. I knew and that was all that mattered. I’d start planning these sneak attacks months in advance, and have the route and a budget planned out by early October.

Little did I know it wouldn’t happen this year…

As the 2004 election went into a fever pitch, I chipped in and bought a bunch of copies of "Fahrenheit 911" to give out as door prizes at a sponsored "get out the vote" event at some of the local gay bars. One of the highlights was getting to meet John Kerry when he was in town along with Christopher Reeve's wife. Well, that's stretching it a little, I got to shake his hand for all of maybe five seconds, and exchange some chit-chat before he moved on to the next volunteer in the row. Four years later I'd be furious with him for dumping John Edwards to support Obama for president. I wasn't a big Edwards fan, but doesn't loyalty count for anything anymore?

November 2, 2004 I did my best to vote Bush out of office.

Four days later my life as I knew it would come to a crashing end. Not all at once mind you no, it is a slow painful death that almost five years later is still grinding me under its heel…

Chapter 5-November 6, 2004-A Pizza Delivery Nightmare...

Saturday November 6th, 2004 was in some ways a better than average day.

For obvious reasons I’m going to refer to it as “The Pizza Shop.” When the Ohio State Football team had a game on Saturdays, we were allowed to wear an OSU football t-shirt and jeans instead of the usual uniform. That sunny fall day the temperature was in the upper 60s, so I wore a long sleeve gray sweatshirt under my buckeye attire and jeans in order to keep warm during deliveries, basically because I insisted on doing them with my convertible top down. I’d stash the pizzas in the passenger side foot well with a couple extra bags on top of them to keep the food hot with the dashboard heat cranked up.

I loved to refer to it as “cruising around with the top down and the stereo up.” Customers would wave at me and I’d tap the horn and wave back. I had more than a few customers that’d request I deliver because they thought it gave their neighborhood a little class bragging that even their pizza delivery guys used new Chrysler Sebring convertibles instead of the expected competitor’s junkers.

My typical Saturday entailed working lunch from ten in the morning till around nine or ten that evening. I’d made it a tradition to come in early and create a big breakfast pizza for everyone using scrambled eggs instead of sauce and piling it high with the typical western omelet toppings and Velveeta cheese, and then I’d run it through the oven with some hashed browns and all of us would have a super breakfast on me.

From today, looking back four years, it’s really hard to remember how the early part of the workday went, so I’d say my tips were a little above typical. We had a very diverse delivery area with low-income housing projects, vast plots of middle-class streets interspersed with the usual businesses and gas stations you’d find next to the average expressway exit.

The day seemed to wear on forever and by 4PM I was hoping it’d turn out to be a slow day so I could go home early.

No such luck.

At the 4PM shift change we were short of help so I started counting the hours till 9PM. After delivering the evening rush with about four or five other drivers, I was told to take one more delivery run of three stops and then I could call it a night. The evening stayed warm so I left the top down.

The pizza shop is located in a big one-way traffic circle with cars traveling counter-clockwise. It had businesses including our pizza shop-blue circle on the inside and apartments around the rim on the outside, with middle class homes in the surrounding area. I checked my stops, shrugged that they weren’t likely to be tips and grabbed my parcels and cokes, after first dropping most of my money in a lock box in the store.

According to the totals I’d probably have to make change for three twenties since the welfare checks had just come out a few days earlier. I had a huge pocket full of change, and by the evening when I’d get tired of being stiffed at pizza runs, I’d give them 2-3 dollars in pennies, nickels and dimes half-heartedly apologizing that the last delivery took all my currency.

My first delivery was into the apartment complex surrounding our circle and by about eight that evening it’d already gotten dark. After using an alley I made it to the address. Three black guys were milling around a van two slots over. A young couple had exited their car and was in the process of carrying grocery bags through a door further down. I thought nothing of it because people were normally outside on warm evenings, and they were talking to each other openly and I think one even waved.

The long building had sixteen apartments arranged within four separate doors. Inside each outer door was a stairwell to the left that led straight ahead and up to two doors on an upper landing, and to the right it was a narrow hall that led to two doors directly below side-by-side one being behind the open stairwell. The apartment I’d delivered to would be on the first floor straight ahead to the right. Red Circle

I entered the building and knocked. A woman answered the door, I smiled and gave her my cheerful “prerecorded banter” and accepted a check from her. As expected the check was written for the exact amount with no tip. I checked her I.D. and no sooner than I had, the door was closed in my face before I could thank her. I shrugged and headed back outside to the car.

I’d done this hundreds of times before here; our Pizza Shop was no more than a couple hundred yards from the complex and I was more interested in getting the deliveries done so I could go home after a long day. The complex was going “Section 8” which meant low-income customers and no tips.

As I exited, I stuffed the check into my pocket, and from the front door headed for my car. The parking lot was now deserted and I told my car to start, (see an earlier chapter) turn on its headlights and then start the CD player, as I made my way to it.

From out of the corner of my eye I spotted them coming from behind the van and thought nothing of it. I had people approach me all the time asking for directions after getting lost in the apartment complex, or they’d overheard me talking to my car and came over to tell me how “sweet” it was and ask if I’d do it again.

Tossing the bags in the passenger side, I’d almost gotten my door open when all three began sprinting toward me. I’d jumped in, but they caught the door before I could close it. I tried saying, “lock-panic!” to my car but only got the first word out; resulting in only one chirp acknowledgement. The car was now in a "standby" mode. It would now ignore any voice commands and I'd have to hit the disarm button on my remote to drive it anywhere.

The first word only "locked" the car in whatever mode it was in. It was part of the anti-carjacking feature, so that in cold weather I could leave it unattended and running if I needed to run into a convenience store for something. The keys would've been locked in the ignition had I managed to get them in the slot. However at least the gearshift was frozen (small comfort.)

Unfortunately I hadn't managed to get my foot on the brake either. If I were stopped at a traffic light and a carjacker opened the door with my foot on the brake, I could flee the car to safety and call the cops. The anti-theft feature activated, and the carjacker would have control of the car for about five minutes, then all of the controls would freeze, leaving them where the police could find them-five findable minute's distance away, stranded after the engine shut itself off, the keys magnetically locked in the ignition, and the alarm sounding.

I looked up to find the business end of a .45 automatic in my face.

The young one in the middle seemed to be trying to tell me in heavily accented English to get out of the car. Later I'd surmise that the only words he knew in English were the ones he was using because he didn't seem to understand anything I said to him. The area had recently been invaded by Somali refugees, none of whom seemed to speak our language, resulting in most of them being unemployed.

The three 16 to 18-year-old young men were black, and the parking lot was dimly lit. The one in the middle had the gun and the two on either side were jostling with each other to get to me first. The car continued running without the keys in the ignition. Had I gotten the word “Panic” out, the alarm would have started going probably scaring them away.

To this day I'm still beating myself up for not holding down the lock button on the remote that I had in my hand. Things were happening to fast to me and I didn't think of it.

The only thing to do was to do exactly what they said; it's really the only way to survive a robbery, because if you piss off someone that's scared, which most robbers are, you're likely to get shot by them out of frustration.

They grabbed me by my T-shirt, yanked me out of the car, and then threw me to the ground. After dark I always stashed my wallet in my lock box back at the pizza shop for safekeeping. Terrified, I kept telling them I’d give them anything they wanted if they’d just leave me alone. One began kicking my left chest hard with a grin, as the one who spoke broken English demanded money. I only had about $48 in currency plus my big pocket of change. They were furious at what little they'd have to split three ways, and began going through my pockets as I lay in a protective fetal position on my right side.

One stopped and jumped into my convertible. I had one moment of clear thought and threw my keys under the car where they couldn't be reached. The moment he hit the brake the engine died. He started babbling at me in a language I didn't understand and then jumped out of the car to rejoin his friends.

It quickly became a beating in revenge for them having to split only $50 three ways.

Coins clattered to the asphalt parking lot and the one with the gun began repeatedly beating me over the head with the butt of his weapon while demanding the rest of my money and my wallet. I gave him the customer’s check, which only made him madder. The other two began kicking and stomping on my left leg and foot while their leader continued beating me about the face and head.

Oddly enough, I don’t remember being in pain then; I remember the sound of the impacts, but no pain—probably because by then (the doctors later explained) I was in shock. It occurred to me that if they’d meant to or were able to shoot me they would’ve done it by then, so I started screaming for help at the top of my lungs. They immediately panicked and ran away into the darkness between the buildings.

All I felt was terrified fear and panic, but I knew that the first thing to do was to get away from there. My car controls were frozen so that even I couldn't drive it away for about another three minutes, so I ran back into the apartment building. I knocked at the door of my customer and they refused to let me in or even open their door...

That’s when I saw blood on my hand from where I’d just scratched my head.

I urgently and then loudly told them that I’d just been robbed, I'd been hurt, and to call 911. I also asked them to call the pizza shop, reciting the phone number. I got no reply, so I tried their neighbor’s door to the left. They wouldn’t open their door either and I was beginning to fear that the robber trio might come back to shoot me in order to keep me from identifying them to the police.

I was starting to feel dizzy but still not really in pain. The neighbors yelled through the door that they’d called the police and I slumped against the wall under the stairwell hoping it’d hide me. Suddenly the neighbor opened the door, took one look at me and screamed, then slammed the door shut again. It startled me into jumping away from the door and my back hit the opposite wall next to the customer’s door.

That’s when I saw it.

The wall where I was leaning before was covered with blood. I looked down and my shirt and jeans were stained reddish-purple. I started panicking/pleading with them to give me first-aid and that I was bleeding. The neighbor lady opened the door, threw a wet washrag and a dry towel at me and slammed the door closed again.

I wiped my face and the white square of terrycloth came back bright red. I slumped down to a sitting position against the wall and heard the sirens approaching.

Two policemen cautiously burst through the front hall door, guns drawn and anxious. One put on a pair of surgical gloves and checked my head, then radioed the ambulance to get its location and told it to hurry. I kept trying to stand, but he kept pushing me down and saying to relax. Still not feeling any pain, but with a tightening chest, I got up anyway and told the cops what happened. I didn’t have health insurance, and figured that it was just a few cuts on the top of my head and nothing to worry about. My stupid pride or the stress of the situation prevented me from realizing that any medical costs would’ve covered under workman’s comp.

Two of my assistant managers arrived and looked at me like I was the walking dead. I knew I’d be tied up here for a while so I turned over the pocket key to my drop box, my receipts and money, and one of them left with my other two deliveries, while the other assistant manager stayed with me. I refused the ambulance driver’s offer to go to the hospital because I was still not feeling any pain. They wrapped a bandage around my head and gave me an ice pack and told me again to get it checked out before too long.

I nodded after signing something and they left.

Another cop came in and told me that local TV station vans were arriving and I knew that if I couldn’t identify my attackers, they might be able to find me by my face plastered all over the local late-evening news, so I took the cop’s offer to get me out of there before the TV news set up shop.

I was beginning to feel an odd sensation in my left foot, almost as if there were holes in the floor whenever I walked, but I didn’t feel any pain, so I didn’t think anything of it. For a moment I panicked, thinking they had the keys to my car, but remembered I'd thrown them under it and fished them out.

Arriving back at the pizza shop everyone blanched and asked me if I was all right and I said I was. I always had Sundays off and I figured after some rest I’d be back to work by Monday. The manager looked skeptical. He had my paperwork and after giving me the $175 or so in tips I’d gotten from the long day, he said I was $51 short, which is how much the thieves got.

An extreme effort was made to keep me from going back out through the dining room where the customers would see me.

He called company security and told them what happened. Our area supervisor called in and he said it looked really bad and they insisted I go to the hospital. I kept refusing and saying I was all right, so I sat with him in the office for half an hour and coworkers all filed in, took one look and left whispering to each other.

Apparently I was deep in shock and didn’t feel my injuries.

The shock began to wear off... then the pain started.

By 10PM I was really starting to feel an aching sensation in my left chest, so I drove myself to a private urgent care place about half a mile away… it was closed. I knew of another a mile or so away and drove there… it was closed too. The only option left was to go to St. Anne’s hospital.

After circling the parking lot of the unfamiliar complex, I found the emergency room. Each time I'd gotten out of the car only to have to get back in again had gotten increasingly more agonizing. By the time I'd found Saint Anne’s, it was too painful to even open my car door without squeezing my eyes tightly and clenching my teeth in agony.

I seem to remember walking into the emergency room and the attending nurse took one look at me and her jaw dropped. I think I said something like, “I think I need help,” then I felt weak and nearly fell to the floor.

To their credit someone caught me before I collapsed. Thinking back on it, the next day I was shocked at how completely blood-soaked my clothes were. I was run through a cat scan and was told the results. I had nine deep cuts in my scalp where one of them tried to beat me to death with the butt of his gun. They were stapled closed along with two cuts above my left eyebrow. I had two broken ribs, at least one or more fractures in my knee, and a broken foot. My hair was all matted down with dried blood.

Apparently I’d lost a lot of blood.

They issued me orders to see a foot and ankle doctor, a pair of crutches, a prescription for Percocet and sent me home. I couldn’t feel any pain in my foot yet, but my left side beneath my armpit was nearly unbearable. The crutches under my arms were killing my chest, so I walked to my car carrying the crutches instead of using them settling for the lessor of two pains.

I barely got in the car, screaming out loud, and then stopped at the local CVS Pharmacy and got the pain medication. Again it didn’t occur to me until I got back to the car that the pharmacist was probably scared of me all covered from head to foot with blood. Just the effort of moving my arms to open the door was impossible to put into words. It took me another ten minutes just to start the car.

I drove the twelve miles home and it hurt just to turn the steering wheel. I made it into my apartment and found a message from our young assistant manager Matt at the pizza shop, calling to see if I was alright. I decided to call him tomorrow and got painfully undressed and fell into bed.

If only I’d known I wouldn’t be able to get back out of it the next morning…