THE TWO-KNOCK GHOST would not cease tormenting me. It was making its annoying presence known at least three or four times a week—far more often than I was having the devil dreams. Over thirty years had passed since the greatest moment of my life. Now I was stuck in this new reality without Christine but replaced with the devil dreams and the Two-Knock Ghost.
I was now in my fifties, living in a modest two-bedroom, two-bath, 1,200 square foot condo in a retirement community called the Beaches of Paradise in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Christine was living a few miles away in a 3,600 square foot, $400,000 home on Snell Island. The kids were grown, all graduated from college, married, and living in various parts of the world. They were all as happy as Christine and I were, in the first couple of years of our marriage, prior to my family’s accident.
Now Christine and I were living alone, sort of. At least she was alone. A large portion of my current life, I was living with the devil and a pesky ghost. Christine had asked me to leave about a year before the spirits intruded on my living space. She told me that my drinking had become too much for her to live with any longer, that I needed to get my act together, conquer the drinking, and alter the behaviors that had driven a wedge between us. She was gentle with me saying that if it took me a few months to find my own place, she wouldn’t have a problem with that.
She didn’t have to ask me twice. I could see the anguish in her eyes when she asked me to leave. And I didn’t want to hurt her any more than I knew I already had by denying her the request that was killing her to ask of me. We had talked with each other about my drinking a few times in the past. But each of the handful of times was several months apart, covering two, maybe three years. Obviously, I hadn’t placed enough credence in her words. For a long time I had thought that I was faultless. I never raised my voice to Christine. I never cheated on her. In fact, we slept in the same bed together every night, and as far as I could figure, I was always, at the very least, affectionate with her.
She told me that after I got back to my old self and completely conquered the drinking, we could resume the living together part of our marriage.
“I’m still in love with you, Turf,” she had told me. “And I know you’re still in love with me, but I’ve hit my nadir with you, and by sending you away, I’m hoping that will help you hit rock bottom soon, forcing you to change and come back to me fully, 100 percent.”
I was beyond hurt. I was devastated. Part of that devastation came from the fact that in the first place, I didn’t think I was an alcoholic, and in the second place, I couldn’t figure out what I had done to Christine that hurt her so much that she would ask me to leave, what I thought was, our happy home.
I had a tremendous amount of work to do. According to Christine, I had to probe my alcoholism and I had to figure out why a guy who didn’t even believe in the devil or ghosts was being besieged by them.
My usual confidence in myself had been shaken to the core. I was a psychologist for God’s sake; I was the one who had been helping people for decades, and I didn’t even begin to know where to start to transform myself into a better man without the baggage of alcohol and the spirit world.
I decided, after Christine asked me to leave, to stay focused on pragmatic things initially. I needed to find a place to live, and I needed to continue my practice. I was planning to work another ten years or so then spend the rest of my life traveling the world with my wife. The traveling and wife part of that equation was now in jeopardy. But I had to work because I loved it. And I didn’t want to shortchange my patients.
I found the condo at the Beaches of Paradise, and I put as much of my restless heart as I could into my practice. Three months after I moved away from Christine, I was living in limbo in most areas of my life. But my psychology practice was thriving. The nights were the worst. I had begun to fear their approach. I never knew when the devil would attack me in my most vulnerable state—sleep. And I never knew when the Two-Knock Ghost would strike. It was always the same, knock, knock and nobody comes in. Knock, knock and no face or form was revealed. The Two-Knock Ghost wasn’t merely pesky, it was annoying, frightening. I was in the midst of a devil dream, brutalized by the unmistakable form of the red devil with his ivory horns and his tail snapping side to side like a cracking whip. Then there it was—knock, knock—upstaging the devil’s sadism. Sometimes I was having a good dream. It might have been one of many of Christine and me sharing a tender moment. Then knock, knock, usually at my front door but occasionally at my bedroom door. The beauty of my moment with Christine had been destroyed. And never once did the ghost have the decency to show itself. Why? I tried figuring out a reason. I could not.
As the days passed the ghost became more intrusive. Five months into my life at the Beaches of Paradise, the ghost knocked on my closed office door in downtown Saint Pete. I had fallen asleep while writing notes on one of my clients who was suffering PTSD after being robbed at gunpoint as a customer in a convenience store holdup. I was actually dreaming of my client, of ways I might be able to help her. Knock, knock so loudly, so close, and in my workplace. Before those mind blowing thuds on my door, my office had seemed like a sacred place. It was where I did most of my best thinking. The knocks scared me immediately to consciousness. I leaped from my desk and bolted for the door. Of course, and for the umpteenth time there was no one there. Why again? These knocks really scared me as for the first time, I equated myself with the kids in the Freddie Kreuger movies. Had I turned the corner where every time I fell asleep I would be harassed by the Two-Knock Ghost?
I began to wonder if there could be anyplace where I could sleep or even nap when I would be exempt from the obnoxious ghost. I first thought I might find a Catholic church and take a nap there. Even though I no longer believed in Catholicism, I surmised that maybe the Two-Knock Ghost would be frightened of bothering me when I was on sacred ground. Then I came up with what I initially thought was a great idea. The beach. Plain and simple, there were no doors on the beach … no place to knock. I was sure that I had figured out two places that I could go to escape my pesky nemesis.
I still wanted to contemplate my PTSD patient more. I decided on the spur of the moment to drive to the beach, bring my notes and a pen, pull out a beach chair, and continue my thinking.
I left my office and drove straight down Central Avenue all the way to Treasure Island. The beach was serene, the temperature about 70 degrees and the beach was nearly deserted. It was 7:15 and almost sunset by the time I got there. A gentle breeze lifted the waves just enough so that they made a soothing splash when they broke upon the shoreline. I was extremely concerned about my robbery victim, Mary Bauer. She was a pretty woman, five feet two inches tall, maybe 105 pounds, thirty-three years old with blond hair and gorgeous blue eyes, nearly comparable to Christine’s. She taught third grade at Melrose Elementary on Saint Pete’s south side. She was the perfect prototype for a third grade teacher. She was witty, creative, and engaging with her students. She did everything she could not only to teach her students the required curriculum but to help teach values that would fortify them throughout life. Most of them came from the immediate area surrounding Melrose. It was a rough area. Poverty and drugs abounded. She found that her students were nearly desperate for the love and attention she willingly gave of herself.
One day after work she noticed that her gas gauge was on empty. She decided to take Sixteenth Street and head for a little gas station/convenience store on Ninth Avenue and Fifteenth Street South. She had never stopped there before, primarily because it wasn’t her turf, and that fact was obvious. There were often four or five thugs hanging around there or directly across the street. They were often very animated, usually unkempt and scary looking. But this particular day nobody was hanging around the store or across the street. There wasn’t even anybody pumping gas. She decided to stop for gas and a Dr. Pepper. It would be five minutes in and out.
Pumping the gas was easy. She could have paid at the pump, but it had been a challenging school day and she wanted to indulge in the Dr. Pepper treat. She walked into the store, smiled at the Indian storekeeper, located the cooler, and made a beeline for it. She was about to pick up the can of her favorite soda when she heard a commotion a few feet from her. She turned to see three masked men racing into the store, each carrying a handgun and heading straight for the cash register.
“Give me the money!” one of the men shouted at the terrified man who stood in front of countless cartons and packs of cigarettes.
“Hurry up!” another man shouted.
Mary could only stare at the action, frozen in fear, wondering what might happen to her as well as the petrified store owner. She could not see any of the three robbers’ faces but she could tell they were black; their hands fully exposed as they wielded their weapons.
The attendant quickly opened the register and began pulling the bills from their individual slots within the drawer, implicitly complying with the gunmen’s demands. Unfortunately, he was too slow for the robber who stood directly in front of him. Without warning, the masked man raised his gun and in a single, swift unbroken movement reached over the counter and smashed his gun into the left side of the attendant’s skull. The impact was of such force that the recipient crumpled into an unconscious heap on the floor. Then the gunman leaped over the counter, grabbed the bills from the attendant’s clenched fingers, and returned to the cash register, pulling out every remaining piece of currency and coin from both the drawer and underneath it.
It was while this was happening that the third thug noticed where Mary was in the tiny store and hustled toward her. He placed his gun against her temple and yelled at the top of his lungs: “Give me that purse, bitch.” As Mary obliged, he screamed at her, “I bet you’ve never had a real man before, have you?” As if he actually expected her to answer. His left hand immediately went for her breasts while his right hand held his gun against her brain. When the other two robbers finished cleaning out the register while making certain the storeowner was still passed out on the floor, they immediately moved to their buddy and Mary. They expanded on the rudeness of their partner, raising Mary’s skirt and putting hands and fingers onto and into places on her quivering body they had no right being.
The first man to reach her snatched her purse from her left hand and shoulder while the other two men continued their groping. Even though Mary wasn’t sure she would have life beyond the next few seconds, she tried frantically to observe any facets she could distinguish about the three men. It was difficult. The only visible characteristics she could see were the similarities in the men’s heights and weights. Each was about six feet one and weighed a solid two hundred pounds. Beyond that there were no discernable differences. As much as she wanted to focus on the idiosyncrasies of each man, she felt herself closing her eyes through much of her ordeal. Though the abuse seemed to be flowing relentlessly, she was able to find a miniscule of comfort in the moments in the dark room behind her shut eyes.
What, in reality was taking only two minutes, felt like an eternity to Mary Bauer. The sum total of the negativity that had befallen the loveable teacher her entire lifetime did not equal what was happening to her these one hundred twenty seconds.
A car pulling up to get gas spooked the three robbers and as the last man to reach Mary bolted for the door, the first man pulled his gun away from Mary’s temple, brought it back toward himself then swung it with full force into the same temple he had moments before threatened shooting. Perhaps it was a good thing that Mary’s eyes were closed at the moment of impact. The thin flap of eyelid had protected her eyeball from being scratched as the gun slammed into the side of it. Mary dropped to the floor, hitting her knees first and then her chin and nose. Her neck snapped ruthlessly, tearing muscles all the way to both shoulders. Three thin streams of blood began to emanate from her head wounds as she lay on the floor oblivious to the robbers making their escape in a 1996 dark blue Saturn. She also had no clue as to the emotional pain that would assault her a few minutes later when she awakened in an ambulance on her way to Bay Front Hospital. Contemplating what to say that could help her was the primary reason I had driven to the beach. To avoid the Two-Knock Ghost, if I fell asleep, was my secondary reason. I knew myself pretty well in most areas of my life—so I thought. About one thing I was absolutely positive: that I could fall asleep anywhere and quickly. Since I had passed into my fifties, that fact had become even more real. And tonight was no different. As I thought about Mary, I watched a series of clouds pass silently in front of the three quarter moon. It was almost like watching a choreographed sky dance, except there was no music. It was, nonetheless, hypnotic and within the half hour, I had slipped from the conscious world into a wonderful dream in which Mary Bauer and Christine were best friends. They were driving through a desert in a 1967 Mustang convertible. Christine, who I was certain had never fired a gun in her life, was loading a .357 Magnum while telling Mary uncharacteristically: “We’ll find the sons of bitches, I promise. And when we do, I’ll make sure they suffer for what they did to you.” They looked like Thelma and Louise, except shorter and Christine was talking in a voice that sounded eerily like Clint Eastwood’s character, Dirty Harry.
As I was dreaming the dream, I was excited that I might get to see my tiny wife extract some vengeance upon the robbers who had hurt Mary. Instead, the two women pulled into a small gas station in the middle of nowhere. Christine had to use the bathroom, so while Mary pumped gas, Christine began walking to the women’s bathroom on the side of the building.
“Don’t go inside the store until I finish my business and go with you, okay?” It was a gentle command.
“I won’t, Christine.”
But as my wife sat on the toilet, she became me and in an instant I fell asleep on the pot and began dreaming. I dreamed of an army of angels, all wearing uniforms and swords in the style of the Roman soldiers in the time of Christ. Their leader spoke to me, “We’ll help you find the robbers, Turf. And when we do, we’ll make them answer to a higher authority.” As quickly as the angels had materialized, they vaporized.
Suddenly and inexplicably, I was dreaming about how vulnerable I felt when my daughter, Lena, was a baby and I was worried incessantly whether she would survive and how I could ever survive if she did not.
It was then that I heard it. Knock, knock. It shocked me. My dreaming dream self jumped up from the toilet and bolted for the bathroom door. I opened it, but once again, no one was there. My dream self shouted “shit” loudly and frustratedly and my real self woke so abruptly that I almost fell out of my beach chair onto the sand. I was so angry for many different reasons. My first thought was that I had been wrong about the beach being a safe place to dream. I had not thought prior to this moment that dreams have buildings and those buildings have doors that a ghost can knock on. It didn’t matter that the beach was doorless. I was angry, as well, because I wanted to see Christine and Mary wreak some havoc on the three bad guys. I was angry because of the way this initially exciting dream had gone awry. Christine had morphed into me while sitting on the toilet. What was up with that? It was as if I stole a beautiful dream from the two women and made it about me. And then the Two-Knock Ghost stole the dream and put its frightening imprint upon it.
Lastly, I was angry that I didn’t come up with any ideas of how to help Mary. During the Thelma and Louise part of the dream, I thought something interesting might be revealed, but moments later, when the action of the plot was upstaged by Christine’s transformation and the Two-Knock Ghost, the only possible idea I came away with that could even remotely help Mary, was to suggest that she hang out with strong women in the future. I certainly was not going to recommend to Mary that she start packing a .357 Magnum.
The Two-Knock Ghost had ruined my dream. And I couldn’t help but wonder why Christine had changed into me. Was there something inside my psyche that made me change the dream, setting up the appearance by the Two-Knock Ghost? For the first time, after thinking that thought, I wondered if I could have any responsibility for creating the Two-Knock Ghost. Could the ghost be some manifestation of something from within me, some weakness or need?
Not only had the ghost ruined my dream, it destroyed any tranquility that being at the beach had provided. I actually wanted a drink right then. I wanted to leave the beach and stop at any one of a number of bars that dotted Gulf Boulevard. I wanted that drink badly. I grabbed my beach chair and headed for my car. I’d be having that drink in a few minutes. It was only about a six mile ride back to the Beaches of Paradise from Treasure Island, and I’d be picking a bar on the first half of the ride home as opposed to the second half. I didn’t have to go to a bar. I had plenty of rum and Coke at the condo. But I wanted to sit at the bar, think some more about Mary and some of my other clients, take my notebook with me and write down ideas while I sipped my drink. I knew if I did that at home, I’d be asleep by 10:00 p.m. I’d never fallen asleep in a bar before, and I had no reason to think that tonight would be different. I decided to go to the “R Bar,” a local favorite only two minutes from the beach. I ordered a rum and Coke from a tall, friendly, young bartender whose name tag said “Dan.” There were three other people at the bar other than me. Two were a distinguished-looking couple in their late fifties and the third was probably a local who looked like a beach bum, or maybe a fisherman, with rough hands, in his forties, sitting on the last stool at the far end of the bar at the opposite end from me. I made brief eye contact with the couple and we all smiled, gave a head nod and went on with our business.
My drink came and I began sipping and jotting ideas. I missed Christine. Though I was here to think primarily about Mary, my mind wandered continually to Christine. I was four months out of the house from her, and I still had no clue what I had done to hurt her so much that she would ask me to leave our home.
Every other night until tonight, alcohol had given me comfort. But tonight, after several sips, each time I thought about Christine I almost cried. A couple of times, I looked up to see whether the handsome couple or Dan was watching my eyes well up with tears. But nobody was looking. They were all very busy within their own little realms. I noticed that the couple was being very affectionate with one another. They were about the same age as Christine and I. And when I saw them exchanging tenderness, I thought of Christine again; then ordered more rum to try to achieve that point of a high where sadness transforms into tranquility or at least numbness.
I could not achieve that point on this night. Finally, nearing 11:30 p.m., I decided to pack it in and head home. I paid and tipped Dan, gathered my notes, and headed out the door for my car. It was only eleven or twelve minutes from the bar to “The Beaches” and I couldn’t wait to get home because I was growing tired. Slightly less than a mile away, a couple of hundred feet before the light at 140th Avenue, right in front of the Candy Kitchen (a wonderful retro candy store and ice cream shop), a bike darted in front of my path. I slammed on my brakes, while at the same time the bike rider panicked and squeezed both her brakes. I smelled burnt rubber emanating from my tires as I focused on the petrified face of the young woman on the bike. She was probably in her midtwenties and was wearing a terror-stricken face the depth of which she had probably never worn before. My car was stopped in the right lane in which I had been driving. I opened my door, quickly stepped out of the car, and mostly as a courtesy asked how she was.
“I’m okay, sir. I’m very sorry. I should have never cut in front of you like that, especially since there’s no traffic. I’m just tired and I wanted to get home.”
“It’s okay, ma’am. I’m just glad that I didn’t hit you.”
“Thank you, sir. I’m sorry I scared you,” she said politely. Then she was off. She might have been shaken a little but the incident was probably over for her, except for an occasional reflection in her mind in the next couple of days.
For me, however, it was a different story. I had been lucky. But for a couple of feet and a second or two, I could have killed the girl. Between the moment I slammed on the brakes and my driving away from the near tragic scene, only two minutes had elapsed and only two cars passed us, both coming south on the opposite side of the street. Neither of them had been a Madeira Beach police car. That municipality was known for patrolling their streets strictly and giving out late night tickets. I reflected, as I made the right turn at 150th Avenue and headed toward Bay Pines, about what might have happened had a Madeira Beach police officer gotten out of his car at the near accident scene and inquired what the problem was. He would have seen a young woman shaken up and breathing heavily, and he would have observed a middle-aged man with a worried look on his face. He probably would have questioned the woman first and unless she had told him the truth—that she had darted in front of me from an unseeable angle and relative darkness—he might have approached me totally differently. Under any circumstances, he would have eventually come close to my person. I asked myself, “What would he have seen?” He would have seen my eyes. They would have been glassy, with some redness from being tired. Having been trained in such matters, he would have detected a slight slur in my speech. He would have quickly seen that I was nonthreatening and professionally dressed, so he would have allowed himself to come close enough to me that he could easily smell the liquor that was on my breath. He would have asked me: “Sir, have you been drinking?” And I would have honestly answered, “Yes I have.”
At that point, it would no longer have mattered that I was innocent of causing a near accident on the street. I would have been just another drunk that he would have to put through the paces of sobriety testing before hauling his ass off to jail.
By the time I reached Bay Pines Hospital, one hundred seconds later, I realized I had just done something I swore I would never do. I had driven drunk. And it wasn’t the first time either. I had become the person who had killed my family so many years before. I was a lucky monster. I could have killed an innocent woman whose only sin was that she had made a careless decision to dart in front of me to save a few seconds because she wanted to get home. I could have been arrested, gone to jail, been fined, gone to trial, been found guilty and gone to prison for several years of my life. Why? Because I couldn’t handle life without the crutch of alcohol.
By the time I reached the left turn lane at Bay Pines Boulevard and Park Street, I had begun to realize why Christine might have grown tired of me. I was not the same alcohol-free man I was when we had met. The decision to drive home high that night had been a bad one. I was already pondering what other bad decisions I had made around my wife that had made her less tolerant of me. Suddenly, I felt an emotional pit in my stomach, missing Christine immeasurably and feeling utter shame at the man I had become. These feelings, added to the fear of being pulled over by a cop for some driving infraction the last eight minutes of my ride home, ripped open that hole in my heart that had haunted and plagued me for years. I hadn’t lost Christine, but we weren’t together intimately, as we had been for decades. Suddenly, and for the first time, I felt our separation as nearly a death and my body quivered with a race of physical torment through my veins.
By the time I made the right turn onto Fifty-fourth Avenue, I realized that I was powerless over alcohol and that I’d better get my ass to AA quickly. In a moment I arrived at the Beaches of Paradise, as a wave of relief passed over me. I may not really have been in paradise, but at least I was in a safe haven away from law enforcement and potential vehicular disaster. The traffic incident, plus the ensuing reflections and emotions, had rendered me exhausted. Tomorrow would be a busy day with six clients scheduled, all with varying problems. I needed to be rested and alert to be able to give them my best.
I wanted to go right to bed, but I was jittery and more lonely and nervous about what had happened on the way home than I was tired. I went to the kitchen, opened a cabinet door, and took out my bottle of rum. Then I went to the fridge and pulled out the half-empty bottle of Coke. I selected an eight ounce glass, poured about three ounces of rum into it then poured Coke into the rest of the glass.
That oughta do it, I thought. I turned off the lights, made sure the front door was locked, and walked into my bedroom. I felt so lonely I would have taken a teddy bear with me to bed, had I owned one, and held it all night. But I didn’t own one and pulling the covers up to my chin would have to suffice. I sipped on my drink and thought of Christine and Mary Bauer. I had so much to do to contribute to the betterment of both of those women’s lives. Christine’s, I had unwittingly ripped apart. Mary’s, I wanted to help put back together. Christine’s rebuilding might take longer, but I was determined to do it. It would require insights into myself that I either didn’t know or hadn’t admitted to myself. I swore that my journey of self-exploration and evaluation would begin tomorrow, but right now I wanted to knock myself out. I was tired of thinking and I wanted to escape consciousness and hide out in sleep.
That night the devil invaded my peace once again. This time there was no pummeling. There was no throwing me around the room. He merely appeared in the dream bending over my sleeping body. He was straddling me with one leg on either side of my stomach.
“Wake up, Turf. Wake up, sleepyhead. I have something I want to tell and show you.” Slowly, I awoke from my dream sleep and immediately looked into his red, evil face that was only inches from mine. Each hand was forcefully pinning down one of my shoulders.
“I’ve got you now, Turf. I’ve got you now.” He said nothing more. The sneer on his face slowly morphing into a show of his huge frightening teeth.
Then he snapped his head and upper body down and began eating my face. I couldn’t move as I screamed beneath him in excruciating pain. Bite after bite he de-chunked my face. Finally he arched back upward, my blood and body parts falling from his mouth. He thrust his tongue out and licked his chops, all the while sneering victoriously. A moment later he bent down again with the intention of going for my eyes. It was at the very instant he was about to eat out my left eye that I heard it. Knock, knock on my front door, and Satan heard it too. Instead of continuing with his cannibalistic meal, his body snapped upright and he turned quickly to look from where the sounds had emanated. He appeared surprised, not as if he expected more of his minions to join him in devouring me from face to toe.
Thank God he had been distracted. He ceased his attack but bent over me a final time, pinning my shoulders once more to the bed.
“I’ve got you now, Turf. I’ve got you now.”
Then he flew off me backward right through the ceiling without chipping a piece of plaster.
For an instant I felt relief that Lucifer had exited my bedroom. Though what was left of my face was in horrific pain, his assault ended. For one split second, I experienced a break. Then I heard it again, knock, knock. Utter terror grasped me again as I anticipated some monstrous demon blasting through the front door, sprinting through my living room, ripping off my bedroom door, and continuing the onslaught. The Two-Knock Ghost had never knocked two times twice before but again it didn’t reveal itself. I, for some reason not understood by myself, was now more frightened by the Two-Knock Ghost than of the devil. I lay in my dream bed, on blood-soaked sheets, in unrelenting agony, trying to figure out why the occasional two knocks from the Two-Knock Ghost was more frightening than the devil and his myriad prior assaults upon me. I concluded that I was more afraid of the unknown than of the known. I actually feared that there could be something more devastating than Beelzebub. Maybe behind those knocks were dozens of demons, hundreds, endless thousands, waiting to ravage. My final dream horror that fateful night was the realization that each night I could dream many dreams; that each different night could be a new set of dreams. How many times could Satan and the Two-Knock Ghost—whatever it turned out to be—intrude upon my sacred sleep time?
At the moment, I conceived that halacious question, I woke with a start. I was lying on sweat-soaked sheets, and I popped up with such force that I almost passed out. I turned the light on and sat upright in my bed shivering with fear and worry. None of this was right—not waking in terror at 2:42 a.m., not waking without Christine beside me, not waking with an empty 8 ounce glass that only two and one half hours earlier had held what I thought was my greatest ally, but what could have been my worst enemy. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t merely the external things around me that were wrong, it was the flaws within myself that had caused the things around me to be far off kilter and ugly.
I had never felt worse in my life, not when my family was killed, not when I carried my suitcase out of the home that Christine and I shared, not when I worried that Lena might die. Never. I was sitting in my bed alone at the absolute direness of my life, when merely a few hours earlier I thought I had so much good stuff going on. Maybe I still did have so much going on inside of myself and around me to live for. But I didn’t feel it at this moment. I had lost myself. It had been replaced by shame. My god, I had almost killed someone earlier that night—a young woman. I had almost taken her life. And for what? So my senses of emotional pain and worry could be dulled by the magic elixir of rum and Coke?
I was out of control. Maybe that’s what the devil stood for. Alcohol. Maybe that was what’s eating me alive piece by piece. Maybe the devil was me. I had already become the one thing I swore when I was younger that I would never become—a drunk driver. A surge of desperation sprung within me, beginning at the base of my stomach and erupting like a volcano. I gasped twice for air as the surge passed my throat then gigantic hot tears began cascading down my cheeks. I was no longer a man. I was a polluted shell. I needed physical and emotional detox, and I needed to refill myself with character, strength, and absolute honesty.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t think I was a bad guy. I knew I wasn’t, although I had almost become a killer of a human being a few hours earlier. What I did know was that I was a weaker man than I had ever been before. I knew that I had hurt people that I had loved especially my wife in ways that only she was aware of. And what about my kids? I had three beautiful children and I never until this night thought that I had been anything other than a good dad. Had I hurt them too and not had a clue about it? Had I hurt them and they never told me, then drifted away from home one by one, clutching their secrets close to their fragile psyches?
Until this moment I thought I knew so much about psychology. I had been a product of a good home. I was well educated from books and learned scholars. I had helped thousands of struggling souls over a thirty-year career when they were passing through trials and tribulations. But suddenly I understood that I had only scratched the surface of what psychology was. I needed to go on an expedition to the center of my being. And I needed to begin immediately before I lost everything that was near and dear to me, including myself, forever.