The year was 1999 (Best New Years party ever!) and I was working as a working supervisor at a textile plant on 3rd shift. I had already been at this company for about nine years and didn't really wan't to leave but the plant had a dark future ahead. In fact, when President Clinton started NAFTA and shipping American jobs overseas, the majority of good jobs in my area started evaporating. The companies were opening plants in places like Honduras and Mexico. Both of my parents lost their jobs not once, not twice but three times due to plants shutting down over this. My job had slowed down and we had already began shipping work over to these places. It wasn't long before we built our own plants and started training foreigners how we done things. I had already made up my mind that I was not going to work in textile or hosiery mills for the rest of my life like my parents have, but what was I going to do?
Since I was a little boy I have always been asked the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and to be honest, I have always struggled with honestly and truly answering the question. My dad was a cop for a short period of time when I was a kid and I always thought that was really cool. But his profession also brought our family much drama and danger and so he chose to get out of law enforcement and support us by other means. It's a complicated story but while my dad was in law enforcement he dealt with a professional hit-man named Dennis Stockman. My dad pissed Stockman off and while Stockman was incarcerated, he threatened to kill my dad and all of us. It wasn't long after he made those threats that things started happening around our house. Someone slashed all the tires on my dads car while it was at our house and he was at work. While my dad would be at work at night, someone would all of the sudden start beating on the back door like they were going to break it down and then leave. They would pull our mailbox post out of the ground and lay it across the road. One day while my dad was on patrol, my mom, sister and I was in our house by ourselves during a warm summer day. My sister and I was really young at the time and I only remember bits and pieces of this incident. All of the windows were open in the house to let the summer breeze blow trough. We lived in a one story, three bedroom town house at the time this took place. I was in my room playing and my mom was cleaning in the kitchen, I'm not sure what my sister was doing. The phone rang and my mom answered it in the kitchen. When she answered the phone, a man on the phone started to laugh and at the same time a man started laughing outside of her bedroom window. Keep in mind that this was before cell phones were invented. My mother began to freak out and scream hysterically. She began closing all the windows and telling me and my sister to stay in our rooms. I think this is the most frightened my mom has ever been in her life. She called dispatch and told them what had happened. My dad obviously came home as fast as he could and when he got home, my mother met him at the door with a .38 revolver stuck in his face! Thank god she didn't shoot him! She was just so scared and was trying to protect her children. It wasn't long after that incident that my dad decided that being a cop wasn't worth putting his family in that kind of jeopardy.
Here's a photo of Dennis Stockton. He was executed in Virginia in 1995 via lethal injection for shooting a man in the back of the head and cutting off his hands just walking distance from my house.
Getting back on topic, I was also interested in joining the military because both of my grandfathers were in the military, one was in the Army and the other was in the Marines. I always had an infatuation with weapons and excitement. I loved T.V. shows like the A-Team, CHIPS and Magnum P.I. and whenever I played outside or inside for that matter, I usually played the role of an officer or a soldier. I often had to use my imagination, using sticks as guns and so forth.
I would often change my mind and think that I wanted to be a carpenter or a mechanic. My grandfather on my mother's side was a carpenter and brick mason after he got out of the Army and my other grandfather worked for General Motors when he got out of the Marines. My father was also very handy and was all the time building stuff and fixing things so I started my own collection of hand tools. I remember one year for my birthday as a kid I asked for a toolbox. My grandfather ended up building me my own tool box which I still have packed up in storage. I took carpentry classes in school as well as auto mechanics classes but the interest started fading away. At one point I wanted to become an electrician and started studying and learning that trade.
I loved working with my hands but I also loved excitement and there's not much excitement in stripping wires or turning bolts. I began to get heavy in to martial arts and absolutely loved it!
I found something that I was good at and that I really enjoyed! But this was just like a hobby and not a career, but it was helping mold me and guide me in to what I really wanted to do with my life.
I also found out that I'm a speed demon and it's like an itch that I just have to scratch. I was a good kid that didn't do drugs but was definitely addicted to adrenaline!
I started drag racing and road racing. I raced everywhere I went, it didn't matter. I once out ran a Virginia State Policeman but that's an entire different story all together. My point is that I loved adrenaline and wasn't afraid to push the envelope to get it.
To be continued
Here is the link to Part one if you haven't read it yet.
@bluelightbandit/my-life-in-law-enforcement-a-true-life-story-1
