Abandoned by God-5

By the time I was 16 I was running the gas station that we purchased and doing the maintenance work on my dad's truck. The gas station, Galloway and Son's Leonard Service, was in the middle of a gas war. I sold gas for 19.9 cents per gallon for almost a week. Things seemed to be going well, the truck was running and hauling a lot of sand and gravel. Work on the freeway by Ypsilanti was busy and would be good for a few months work. In the midst of that I was always waiting for the phone to ring about my mom or something else to happen.

Well, the something else happened. During the middle of the day my dad drove into the parking lot of the station, looking like he was slumped over the steering wheel and almost taking out the gas pumps. We thought he was having a heart attack. After a lot of tests and waiting the doctor told us that he had suffered a major stress attack. He needed to take some time off from driving.

After some time off my dad was back at the wheel. I got on the work program at the high school so I could work at the gas station pretty much full time. I used to kid my dad about my pay. I figured I made about 13 cents per hour plus all of the pop I could drink, as I had the only key to the pop machine. So, all in all, I didn't do to bad. I could drink a lot of pop.

About one month later the truck broke down. We towed it to the station and realized the motor was shot. As cash was always tight we didn't have the money to rebuild it. We decided to sell the station and the inventory and invest the money into a new tractor with two aluminum trailers. We found the equipment and began the business work to discover that the inventory was sold to us illegally, as it was on consignment. The seller never disclosed this and we were out. The inventory was worth about five thousand dollars and an attorney wanted close to half of that as a retainer to bring suit against the seller.

My relationship with my dad fell apart. I blamed him for not having enough business sense. I blamed him for not having the guts to sue the jerk that screwed us out of our business. I was really mad for the loss of Tag's insurance money. Within weeks I left the house and headed north, convinced my dad was a jerk and didn't know a damn thing.

REMEMBER PLEASE. My perception of right and wrong, just and unjust, good and evil, is at best stressed and at worse warped and very distorted.