Moving Out & Moving On

It’s the end of 1987 and I just got home from spending seven weeks at my military school learning combat engineering and I reported into my reserve unit on 35^th Ave in Phoenix. I moved back into my parents’ house in Mesa for about a year. I found a job as a driver for a blueprint company, dated my girlfriend, and hung out. 

I ended up signing up for a Computer-Aided Design and Drafting degree from ITT Technical Institute in January but the classes didn’t start until April. This meant it would conflict with my two weeks of military training in the summer and so it was arranged that I could go to the 29 Palms Marine Corps base in CA in February. This was an interesting trip. We were supposed to be part of a military exercise but they forgot we were coming and so we spent most of our time sitting in barracks in the middle of nowhere waiting for something to do. 

On my AT (annual training) I learned how to play many variations of poker. We played penny-poker because nobody had much money. I also got my first helicopter ride. It was in a CH53 and we went to the middle of nowhere and helped hook up cargo nets to the helicopter so it could move the equipment somewhere else. After a week with nothing to do they finally enlisted our help in building some A-frame huts. We did this for the last 4 days. 

Shortly after I got back from my AT, I ended up breaking up with the young woman I had been dating for the past 2 ½ years and shortly after that I ended up dating a co-worker for the next eight months. I started my classes at ITT and for the next year my schedule consisted of working all day, going to ITT from 6pm to 10pm, going out on the weekends except the first weekend of each month when I would show up at my drill weekend. 

Financially, things got really tight and so I also started going to the blood bank twice a week between work and school to give plasma. On Tuesday I’d get $10 and put gas in my car and on Friday I’d get $15 and use that for groceries. I probably did this for about two years. I still have scars on my arm where they drew out the plasma.

A few months after starting school at ITT, the Fall of ’88, I had become friends with a couple guys and we decided to get an apartment together. One of the guys lived up in Fountain Hills with his parents and found an apartment nearby. I loaded all my stuff (bed, dresser & clothes) in the back of a pick-up truck and moved to Fountain Hills for the next year. With work, school, church, military, and a girlfriend, I didn’t spend very much time there.

In January of ’89, I was footloose and fancy free and I remained that way for many, many years. I had the occasional date but for the most part focused on trying to pay the bills. Most of the time, I was working two jobs. I stopped going to church. By April of ’89, I had graduated from ITT Tech and had moved into my own place, a four-plex, in Mesa near Gilbert and Broadway and I lived there for about 1 ½  years. I sent out about 50 applications and received three responses, all not interested and I kept driving for the blueprint company.

In 1990, although the timing is fuzzy as to exactly what happened and when, I started working for a pager company, Ameritech, and as a taxi driver for Execucar. For the next four months I worked 80-100 a week until I just could not handle working two jobs on four to six hours a sleep a night. In the middle of the year, I stopped driving and only did my job at Ameritech. 

Near the end of the summer of ’90, I moved to an apartment at the request of my dad. It was a “couldn’t say ‘no’ to my dad” moment that I knew was not in my best interest but did it anyway. I’ll tell this story later. I was rescued from this apartment and the financial woes that came with it at the end of the year when I headed to Saudi Arabia due to being activated for Desert Storm. Again, it’s another story for another time.