Chapter 9: Set in Concrete

The day finally came. I had smashed my ring finger between two concrete blocks and it looked awful. I had a huge blood blister under my fingernail. I had to wear this awkward tuxedo. When the whole thing started it was going to be very casual and inexpensive. Then her parents wanted to get her a nice dress, which led to a nice veil, which led to professional pictures, which led to flower arrangements, which led to nice cakes, which led to me being in a tuxedo! Funny how these things snowball. It really wasn’t that big of a deal, it was just funny, that’s all. I wrote her a song and sang it at the wedding. My mom and grandfather flew in for the wedding. River was my best man and Jason was a groomsman.
I really didn’t think that many people would show up, but there were a lot of them. The place was full. The only thing I could think about was that everybody here knew we were going to leave that building and go have sex. It was so distracting. I knew that when her dad shook my hand that he was thinking about us having sex… and so was everyone else. They probably weren’t even thinking that at all. The whole thing was very surreal. By the end of it you don’t really feel any different than you did before. We were both like “That’s it? That is the big deal? You just say a couple of lines in front of some people. Oh well. I love you. Now we are married.”

We got a retarded amount of presents though. It was a lot more than I expected, which was nothing from anyone. We went to some hotel for a couple days and made up for lost time. It was weird to introduce her as my “wife” now. I’m sure we had that stupid, guilty look when we checked into the hotel as if they wouldn’t believe us or something. As if they cared is probably more accurate. We spent money on stupid pointless stuff just because it was our honeymoon and we could. It was a lot of fun.
We got married on Friday, May 20th, 1995. There was a guy that we both went to church with named Al who was at our wedding. I shook his hand and we laughed and talked that day. The next day his daughter graduated and he celebrated that. The day after that, Sunday, he died. We went to the funeral while we were on our honeymoon. It was sad. Death is a weird thing. You can be talking to someone one day and thinking nothing of it. Nothing special or unusual happens and then BANG they are gone, never to return... here anyway. Open casket funerals are always weird too because they always look so fake lying there.

I always cry at funerals. I don’t cry because I feel sorry for the person in the coffin. I cry for their families that they leave behind that will never really heal. And I cry because I know one day it will be me in that box. Don’t think for a second that that makes me sad. They are tears of joy and hope. One day I will be home. One day I will leave this place of pain and brokenness. One day I will see Jesus face to face. One day I can thank him for everything he has done for me. One day I won’t be tempted anymore. I will be done with the race, the struggle, and the fight. One day, I too, will come home to my reward!

A long time ago I came to grips with the fact that I will surely die one day. We all will. As I am now I can’t enter into glory. I am unworthy. For a tree to be all it can be the seed must die to itself so it can be much more than just a seed. I too will die to myself so that I can be so much more. I cry at funerals because no matter how good my life is here, I am always jealous of the person in the box. I remember one morning I woke up in Washington when I was 18 years old and I noticed my heart beating. I know that seems trivial, but I thought, “This thing in my chest hasn’t skipped a beat my whole life. One day though, it will stop beating... forever.” I wrote this song:

This Lonely Heart

One day this lonely heart will beat no more,
Oh what a happy and glorious morn’,
For though my body has met the greatest pain on earth,
And to death I have fallen,
My soul is now with the Lord and I am now in heaven,

My time on earth is over; the veil has been lifted,
The two who were divided now meet,
My Lord and I, we talk face to face,
He says my son was that such a feat?

For we have forever, you are mine and I am yours,
And by the way “Well done with your chores”,
I know it wasn’t easy, but was it really hard?
After all I was with you all the while

I ended up going back to work early because my father-in-law, Bill, needed me. Working for that man was almost as fun as flossing with sandpaper. I would get up at the butt crack of dawn and drive 30 minutes to get to the plant. I ran it so I had to be the first to get there and I was the last to leave. It was so white trash! We had a gravel parking lot with a small building on it. We kept some equipment in the building and a phone. It leaked and was rat-infested and stinky.

There were a few thousand plastic forms for these concrete blocks stacked on pallets. There was a washbasin that we poured diesel in. We had drilled a hole in the bottom of the tank and hooked a pump up to it. The pump went right up above to a few sprayers that would spray the diesel on the forms (diesel lubricates the forms so that when you take the concrete out it doesn’t stick to the form as much.) So, one guy would stand there pushing forms through this white trash diesel sprayer we rigged up. It was always clogging and messing up somehow. He would push the forms to the next guy.

There was a ramp that we made out of some railroad ties and gravel. Concrete trucks would back up onto the ramp and pour their concrete into a makeshift funnel we had made out of some old iron. There was a lever that would open and close the chute at the bottom of our funnel-thing. It never worked right, ever. So guy number two had to grab the form from guy number one and shake this funnel contraption until enough concrete poured into it to fill the form. Then he passed it to guy number three who would get a stick and scrape off the excess concrete.

Guys four and five would then stack the heavy concrete that was now in forms onto pallets. Then I had to jump on the forklift and move the full pallets to a drying area. We did 3 full trucks a day. In between trucks we had to break the concrete out of the forms that had been sitting around for a few days. We had these loud, obnoxious vibrator machines that we had to slam the forms on and then hit the back of them with rubber mallets and then stack them down. Then we had to shrink-wrap them and stack them in another place until the eighteen wheelers would come and then I would load them on the eighteen wheelers and they would go to the job sites. We also had to constantly regrade the parking lot and clean all the machinery. All that concrete was messy!

I did the math on it once. Every guy out there lifted about 250,000 pounds of concrete a day... by hand! I was the boss, which meant I actually lifted more than anyone else. We used temporary labor since nobody in their right mind would ever want to do a crappy job like that on a regular basis. They would have the option of coming back the next day, which almost never happened. What that meant was that I got to train a brand new crew every single day. What fun. This would have been a hard enough job with intelligent individuals, but of course I was dealing with the bottom feeders and the underachievers in the world.

These were truly the least dependable people on the face of the earth. They were only late every single day... that is if they showed up at all. There were times I had to do entire truck pours completely by myself! That is a lot of work. The concrete truck drivers are also some of the laziest individuals alive so they would just watch me running around trying to do everything alone. Then they would get impatient, like “Would you hurry up?” They gave me a hard time every day. It was so frustrating.
My workers were mostly homeless people from Dallas. They made minimum wage, but we had to pay twice that for them. They had to pay for their ride out there. They paid for their gloves and boots. They paid for the ride home. Then they stayed in the shelter at the temp service, which cost them more money. By the end of the day they would make about $30. I couldn’t really blame them for being lazy. I wouldn’t do all that work for $30 a day. It was sad to hear them talk. Most of them were criminals. Some were rapists and murderers. Almost all of them were alcoholics and drug addicts.

They would always talk about what they were going to do that night with the money they had made that day. Those conversations consisted of a lot of drinking and drugs, fried chicken, and “chicken head”. Everyday a new crew and everyday the exact same conversations. I finally asked what chicken head was because I couldn’t figure it out. They all laughed at the stupid white boy. Apparently, chicken head referred to crack whores who would give you oral sex for $3, but if you got 10 guys they would sometimes give you a deal and it would only be $2 each! I couldn’t believe my ears! At what point in life does that become OK for someone to do? How is it possible to stoop that low? It was disturbing.

I would spend our breaks and lunches trying to inspire them and encourage them in whatever way I could. Sometimes I would break through a little. It was hard when I knew I would only see each of them for one day. I heard a story about a girl on the beach. Thousands of starfish had washed ashore and were dying. She ran frantically back and forth throwing them back in the water. A man saw her and he stopped her. He said “Little girl, why do you even bother trying? You will never get them all back in the water. Why don’t you just give up?” She paused, but only for a moment. She looked down at the one dying at her feet, picked it up, threw it back in the water, and said, “You are right. I will never get them all back in the water, but I bet that one appreciates it.” Then she went back to the job at hand which was saving the helpless.

I don’t know if I ever made a difference to any of those guys, but I hope I did. I often pray for my friends and family. I try to communicate the gospel to them, but sometimes they just don’t listen. So, I pray that someone else will come into their lives and translate the gospel in a way that I couldn’t and that their eyes could be opened. I know that there are other people praying the same thing for people that I meet everyday. I also know that the workers are few.

So, I try to remember that EVERYONE I meet has some loved one praying for them and that is why they met me. They met me as an answer to the prayers of their loved ones. So, I try to do my part. I try to live a holy life and set a good example and always be attentive to what isn’t said underneath all that they do say. People are fragile and you never really know how much of a difference you make in some stranger’s life. I know lots of strangers have made a difference in my life. So, I want to do the same. The task at hand is never as important as the person doing it. If there is someone hurting on my crew I will make it a priority to meet that need and then deal with whatever work needs to be done.
I got to talk to a lot of guys at that plant. A lot of hard-working guys that were down on their luck and were being taking advantage. Granted, they had made some bad choices, but we all have. Sometimes they would stick around for a few weeks. I was a trooper. I stuck around for 6 months, which was about 6 months too long!

There would be times when I had to work on other jobs Bill had going. We did erosion control. So, we were always working with heavy machinery and dirt. We used backhoes, track hoes, loaders, bulldozers, tampers, forklifts, sky tracks, trenchers, and anything else you could think of. I got to learn how to use them all since I was the foreman. We were always working in some creek bed or river or lake trying to redirect water and stop erosion, which is a lot harder then it sounds. It is also very expensive. I learned a lot about big numbers working for Bill. Him and his partner would be talking about spending millions of dollars as if it were nothing. They couldn’t be bothered with petty cash like a few thousand dollars here or there.

I also saw how easily you could make millions of dollars and blow it all on poor management and lack of quality control. There was always money moving but there was never a profit! It baffled me, but I learned from the experience.

I will give you a few examples of what a day on the job was like. One day we were neck deep in a river with rakes. It was over a hundred degrees outside. They would dump a bunch of gravel in the water with a track hoe. We had to hold our breath and then go under water and rake the gravel into the right places all day. At one point I came up for air and looked and there was a snake swimming right towards me. I killed the snake, naturally.

Another time we were on the job and I got poison ivy all over my body. I also got eaten up by chiggers. And I was covered in mosquito bites. Oh yeah, and I got bitten by a male black widow spider. That was all in the same day! I was an itch fest. I had to get some antibiotics for the spider bite. I looked like Job from the Bible. I still worked. I wouldn’t stop working for anything.

So, one day I was waiting for a concrete truck to come. I was waiting for my workers to come. I had done everything around the plant that could be done. While I was sitting on a huge pile of broken blocks waiting, I wrote this song:

Feeding Frenzy

Feeding frenzy with poisoned food,
Smile as I backstab you,
Run, run, fast as you can’t, you can not catch me,
I am but a dream, I am but a dream, I am but a dream
Pleasure Island is a game,
See who wins fortune and fame,
To win you sin, and to sin you lose,
I mock you, I mock you, I mock you

Run, Kill, Steal,
Forsake all to have my fill, alone I die,
Naked as I came!

Tension builds, I’m too busy to care,
My riches fly away like chaff in the air,
I kill to reach the top of greed,
It hasn’t fulfilled a single need.
Not one single need, I feel hollow inside,
I feel like dying, but I’ve already died!
At the top of the bottom, I cry alone,
The more I have the more I need,
But still I run.
Still I run, perhaps in vain?
Agony within, I must win this game!

Run, Kill, Steal,
Forsake all to have my fill, alone I die,
Naked as I came!


I was ready to move on from this job. I talked with Bill. The plant wasn’t making money like he wanted it to. He asked how long I thought it would take me to get back into construction. I told him it would only take a few minutes. He was always one for schemes. He had heard that you could make money by buying junk houses and fixing them up and selling them. He asked if I wanted to do that. I agreed to look into it as soon as Lana and I got back from a belated honeymoon.

I had saved about $7,000 and so I took a month off of work. Lana didn’t work, of course. We drove with no set schedule or time to be back. We saw the entire western half of America and we stopped at every tourist site we could find. We went from Texas to New Mexico. We saw the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest, which was more like the petrified log. We went to Arizona and saw the Grand Canyon. Wow, The Grand Canyon! I have seen a lot of things in my life. Usually what you see in real life is a disappointment compared to the pictures you have seen of it. The Grand Canyon is the opposite. Pictures can’t do it justice. It is breathtaking, truly.

We went to Nevada and then to California. We saw the Golden Gate Bridge, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento. We went to the beaches and swam. We saw all kinds of things. We saw a huge herd of seals. That was pretty cool. We visited places that I had been when I was younger. Then we drove to Quincy, California to see Kyle, my college roommate. We stayed there a few days and visited.

Lana had been trying to track down my birth father in her spare time. Not having a dad never bothered me, but she seemed to want to find him. Kyle’s dad was a cop and he told us off the record that my dad had lived in Eureka and Arcada, California. So, we drove to the northern coast of California and found the towns. We asked around and got a few leads, but we never found him. It was the pot-smoking capital of America. I don’t know if that is per capita or actual numbers. Either way there was a lot of pot smoking going on there.

We drove up through the Redwood Forest, another breathtaking sight. We went up through Oregon and then went to Tomfest, which was a big Christian festival. River was up there. So we met him and James. We stayed there for several days. It was a lot of fun. We went swimming in the lake and camped out the whole time. We actually camped out on the better part of the trip.

Then we drove to Seattle. We found out where Rick, another friend from college, was and drove to his house. We stayed there for a few days. His parents needed their bathrooms remodeled so I did it real quick. I made a couple hundred dollars and they got two new bathrooms. We went through Canada. Then we drove to Republic and visited everyone up there. I saw Phyllis and Jamie and Jeff and everyone else up there. I gave Lana a tour of the goldmine and the sawmill.

Then we visited my mother and my brother Chris and Bill (my mother’s husband). We stayed for several days. We drove to NNC and saw some old friends. There were only a few left. We went through Montana over to Wyoming and went through Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. We drove south through Utah and Colorado and back across to Oklahoma to visit some friends at SNU. Then we drove home. We had a lot of fun. That is the longest period of time in my life since I was 15 years old that I haven’t worked. It was very nice. We did everything we wanted to do. We saw everything we wanted to see. Then we decided to move back to Arlington, Texas.

I found a HUD home and Bill said he would back me on buying it. He would supply the money and I would do the work and we would split the profit. I put an offer in on it and put down some of my own earnest money because time was of the essence. I got the house and then Bill backed out.

So, I had to find an investor to buy the house from me, quick! It was a crappy move on his part, but I made the best of it. I found someone to buy it. I went to close on this house with no money at all. I sat down at a table and bought the house with some other lady’s money. I closed on it and then we passed the paperwork down the table. She was buying it with someone else’s money also. So she closed on the house and then they passed the papers down one last time. The last guy was using his own money so he actually got the house. I made $1,500. She made about $3,000 and the guy got the house. I’m sure he just fixed it and sold it right away.

Then I found another house. They only wanted $25,000 for it. I offered them $10,000. We agreed on $15,000. I got a loan and bought the house. It was condemned. The roof had holes; the floor had holes and was rotted. The plumbing didn’t work. There was no electricity or gas. There were holes in all the walls and so on and so forth. But we loved it. We moved all of our stuff into Lana’s parents garage and moved into her old bedroom for 6 weeks or so.

Her parents didn’t like that at all. They told everyone that I was a loser and that they were going to have to support us for the rest of their lives and now here we had moved in with them. To top it off they didn’t like us sleeping in the same room, but we were married so we did anyway. Right after we bought the house Lana got pregnant. That added fuel to the fire for them.

I worked night and day to get that house fixed. As usual, nobody believed I could do it. They all thought it was too big a task for me and that I would fail and go bankrupt. I almost tripled the size of the house. It was 700 square feet before and I made it 1880 square feet. I added a second story. I put in a corner Jacuzzi bathtub with two faucets in the shower. We had custom tile. We had hardwood floors everywhere. There were skylights and there was recessed lighting in every room. We had custom cabinets that I made myself. I rewired the entire house and did all new plumbing, gas, and phone lines. I put in a satellite system and huge walk-in closets. There was an 800 square foot deck and a tool shed in the back. It wasn’t a mansion, but we did it. We did it quickly and inexpensively. The total cost of the house was $40,000 with all the remodeling. It seemed like a lot of money to me at the time, but it was really very cheap for all that we got.

We moved in as soon as we closed on the house and we moved out of her parent’s house. Everyone was amazed that we had done it. The Bible says that faith without action is dead, like the body without the soul. I have always been a firm believer in putting my faith into action. I believed I could do it. I counted the cost, and then I did it. Most people just want to sit around and talk about how they could do something, but they never actually do it. I am not that guy! I say it and the next time you look, it is already done! Faith in action is powerful. Try it.

As soon as I finished the house I already had jobs waiting for me. Everyone wanted to get me to fix something of theirs. After all, if I could do all that, I could certainly fix their piddly little problem, right? I started doing a lot of jobs. Since I had been out of the state for a year or so River had gotten a job answering phones for a television evangelist. He had also gotten married to his wife, Kishta, who also worked there. It just so happens that they needed to remodel a huge building and they wanted an individual to do the work instead of a company so it would be cheaper for them. I looked at the job.

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