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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781477256978 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 08/27/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 301 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Screwed Without Intercourse
By Gordan Stevens
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2012 Gordan StevensAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4772-5696-1
Chapter One
I was a student at a state university in town, working towards getting my baccalaureate degree in Nursing. I lived on my own, working 40 hours on the weekends at a local hospital as the office clerk in the X-ray department.I began to date one of the employees in medical records, an oriental woman named Mindy. Mindy was completely Americanized; she had no accent from her heritage. When I met her, she was separated from her husband, Bob, of 15 years.
They had been apart for 3 years, and Bob had given Mindy $0.00 in financial support for their three kids. This was a necessity for Bob, since every extra dollar he earned went to feed his methamphetamine habit. His crank habit also happened to be the reason that Mindy told him to hit the road; they filed for bankruptcy protection that year. It was 1989.
When we started dating, Bob had been out of Mindy's life for so long that all three children constantly asked Mindy when dad would be around again. Unbeknownst to either of us, he would suddenly decide he wanted Mindy back as soon as he found out she was dating someone, and he was willing to confront any man who stepped in his way to take back his property. Who would have guessed that Bob would have the law on his side?
One night while Mindy was over at my place, someone knocked on the door, loudly and forcefully. Instantly, both of them knew who was at the door. It was Bob. Instead of opening the door, I called 911 trying to avoid a confrontation.
Now, mind you, Bob was a Phillipino, small in frame, topping the scale at 150 pounds, maybe 160 after a meal of pizza & beer, and standing around 5 foot 3 inches. I was a champion swimmer as a youth, weighed in at 175 pounds, and stood 5 foot 11 inches. The notable size difference made me the obvious victor in any hand-to-hand combat that may take place. So why call 911? Why not just go out and kick the hell out of him? I had my reasons.
Mindy had told me of the violent rages Bob would go into when under the influence of crank. And he was a Vietnam veteran, exposed to all the death & destruction that went along with it. Active duty equals Combat. Since I was never enlisted, I had no active service time, let alone active duty! Thinking that Bob was highly trained in combat and had killed before, I was quite reluctant to confront the smaller man, despite my size advantage.
By the time that the police arrived, Bob had already left my property, and was driving down the street. I was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, alerting her that the police had just driven by Bob in his car. They turned around and apprehended Bob. He had an open container in the car, a can of beer. The police took him downtown.
However, after holding the intoxicated driver overnight and listening to his terrible story, about how I was stealing his wonderful wife away from him and destroying their wonderfully tight family, the Valley City police department released him. No DUI, no charges at all. It wasn't his fault. He had a right to protect his property, according to the police. And Mindy was his property.
This happened two more times, the last being on New Year's Eve of 1990. Each time, I remained inside, trying to avoid a confrontation. Each time, the police spoke to Bob, but after learning of the situation, took his side and filed no assault charges against him. Their advice to me: quit seeing Mindy. She's married to him, and that's the way it is. Even my dad told me it was time to stop seeing Mindy, insisting that this relationship was going to lead to no good.
But the police and my dad were wrong. Something special had started between Mindy and I, and we knew we had a future.
Our lives on this planet are finite; there is an end to them. Some of us search for happiness our entire existence while others seem to run right into it. When I first saw Mindy, she was dressed in a long, blue velvet dress. The kind that hugged her small frame, showing all the curves that drive most men crazy. Hell, even gay men were turned on by her! I was not immune to her beauty.
But there was something special between us. Mindy felt it too. Many people don't believe that love just happens. Some say that love must grow and flourish and be nurtured to be anything worth keeping. We did not have a chance to work at loving each other; we fell in love the moment we first met.
And then on April 7, 1990, the unthinkable happened.
Mindy came over that night to spend some time with me. After going to sleep early that evening, we were awakened by a phone call. It was Bob.
"I want you out of that house and back home with your family where you belong," he told her. "If you're not home in 30 minutes, I'll come over and smash the windows and slash the tires on his truck.
But Mindy wasn't afraid of him. Her only concern was that I not be involved in this crap anymore. So she got up and left. But Bob showed up at my place anyway.
He pounded on the front door at around 2am. I jumped out of bed and grabbed the first thing I saw; a buck knife folded up on the dresser. "If he's gonna slash the tires on my truck," I thought as I hastily headed to the front door, "then he's gonna be armed with a chain, maybe a bat, and/or a knife." Armed and ready, I went out through the front door. Directly in front of my house was a street lamp, which shined a bright light on the entire driveway of my corner house.
"4 times the police have been called because this asshole is assaulting me. 4 times they have let him go. How many more times will this be allowed to go on?" I asked myself.
"None," was my answer. What ensued was a fight to the death between two men: one scared to death, the other 'amping' out on crank.
Since it was 2am and the streets were deserted and quiet, I remember my voice echoing off the surrounding houses. I walked hurriedly up to my assailant, shouting, "Why did you come here?"
I saw a flash of light in Bob's hand, and the thought that he was armed as well gave me all the reason I needed to go on the offensive. Something happened to me in that next moment.
It was as if something had caused me to leave my body and become a third party in what was about to occur. Like an out-of-body experience reported by patients who have been legally dead and are then brought back to life, I could see myself as he and I came together. The anger welled inside me, an anger I'd never before experienced. Like an animal that has been backed into a corner, the feeling of dread that I must either fight or be beaten, kill or be killed, I must do for myself what the police would not.
I kicked him in the midsection, causing him to bend over at the waist. Without giving him a chance to react, I swiftly and forcefully brought the buck knife in my hand down on his back.
On the first strike, he twisted as the knife entered between the 5th & 6th rib. The 4" long, ¼" thick blade snapped off in his chest, sitting ¾" from the tissue that surrounds the heart. I continued to stab at him as he twisted around in circles like a tornado dance performed by an American Indian. What I didn't know was that I no longer had a 4" blade at the end of my knife; it was now only about ½" long.
As he spun around, I slashed frantically with the knife in my right hand while holding the lapel of his leather jacket behind his neck with my left hand. With each rotation, the material bunched up more, and after 3 rotations, I had to let go.
He fell to the ground in the crawl position, suddenly realizing something is in his chest. Before he could think about his next move, I let loose with a kick to his chest, much in the same way a football place-kicker would kick a football in the attempt of a 60 yard field goal.
He flew through the air as he saw the kick coming and jumped upward. As my kick connected with his chest, he was already on the way up by his own power, and the added force from the kick lifted him completely off the ground, as if he'd sprung from a springboard.
He landed at the foot of the streetlight. On all fours, he grabbed his chest and saw the blood for the superficial wounds on his chest and stomach where the random slashings had made contact.
"My God, what have you done?" he looked up and asked me.
As he said this, the out of body experience ended. Like a vacuum sucking a large amount of dust from the air, I felt my soul reenter my body, and I gasped,
"My God, what have I done?"
I looked at my hand that held the knife. The blade is broken off. Now all the events appear to be in slow motion. Bob looked up at me, and said,
"Man, somebody's gotta call 911."
"No shit someone better call 911," I yelled at the top of my lungs. The sound of my voice echoed down the empty street like I was in a cave. One of the calls to 911 that came in shortly after that was from 3 blocks away!
I stepped back, now getting my feet back under me. The 'return' of my soul into my body was complete, which is the only way I can describe it, and now reality was setting in.
I looked at my hand with the knife, and thought to myself, "The blade is gone. Where the hell's the blade? And the blade is half closed. Why is it half closed? Oh, because it stopped on my pinky finger. Christ, I'm cut!"
The blade had closed on my finger, cutting to the bone. In fact, the bone was broken from the force that was exerted by the slashing blows upon my assailant's back. The wound would require 17 stitches to close. The fracture of the metacarpal bone of the 5th digit went unnoticed until sometime later.
Upon noticing that my finger was cut, I went into my house to call 911. I left him lying on the sidewalk, tending to his wounds. After calling 911, I went back out to check on the jerk, starting to realize now that he may die. As I entered the doorway to exit my house, the car that he had arrived in drove off.
"The man just got stabbed once, and he's driving down the road somewhere. How amped up is this guy?" I thought as I watched the taillights disappear around the corner.
When the police arrived, I was up front about everything that had happened. Over the police radio, it was heard that he had shown up at the hospital; the same one that I worked at. I was never read my rights because I volunteered all the information I gave. The officers never asked me if my assailant had a knife.
I don't recall ever seeing a knife anyway. I saw a flash of light, but was that a knife? Or was it a wristwatch band? Or a ring? It could have been anything. I looked at myself. "No wounds except the one inflicted by my own knife," I thought to myself. Was it possible that I had escaped any injury from his knife, if in fact he did have a knife in his hand?
When the officers arrived at the hospital, no knife was found in his car, but a baseball bat was in the back seat. Bob's condition was critical. Although only one wound was serious, that wound included a knife blade very close the heart. The X-ray department where I worked took the X-ray that showed the blade perched next the pericardium, the tissue that surrounds the heart.
After learning that no knife was found in his car, I was arrested. As I was being placed in the back of the squad car to head off to a different area hospital to have my finger stitched up, Mindy drove back up.
Terrified, she ran from her car to the window where I sat, handcuffed behind my back in the patrol car.
"Don't make it any worse than it is, Mindy," I yelled to her. "He came at me, and I had to kick his ass."
Mindy broke down. This could not be happening. The guy she was just getting to know and really like was going off to jail because her punk ass estranged husband wouldn't leave him alone. Now I'd fought back like anyone would in the same situation. She pleaded for the police to arrest Bob, regardless of the seriousness of his injuries. He came here to my house, she stated. It was 2 in the morning when he arrived. I had tried everything to get Bob off my case. And now it had come to this.
Due to the seriousness of the attack, I was put on temporary leave without pay from my job at the hospital. I'd been working there for 4 ½ years, and now overnight, because I was faced with living or dying and decided I wasn't ready to lay down and die, I had nothing. No way to support myself. No way to feed myself. No way to live.
When Mindy offered me to come and live with her, I accepted.
When I arrived at Mindy's house for the first time, I thought I'd taken a wrong turn and arrived at a dump. 2 broken down cars littered the driveway. A large pile of broken cement pieces lay on the front lawn near the front door. The yards were overgrown with weeds and tall grass. In the back yard, washers and dryers and refrigerators sat rusting and taking up space. Most of the windows in the house were broken, including the sliding glass door. Inside it was generally clean, but in dire need of paint.
I had the cars hauled away cheaply, made a couple of trips to the dump which included all of the broken cement pieces, painted the rooms inside the house, cut the grass and trimmed the hedge and the palm trees in the front yard. And I found a used glass dealer that came in and replaced all the windows that were broken for under $300. The children were 14, 11, and 8, respectively.
Debra, the oldest and only girl, was just at the age of that a young lady starts the search for her identity, with peer pressure being the most important issue in her life.
Sam was the youngest, a very talented young artist who could pencil draw figures such as the Teen Age Mutant Ninja Turtles to a tee! Sam would like nothing better than for his mom and dad to be back together, but he seemed to be okay with me living in the house and being his mom's boyfriend.
Kyle was the middle child. He was the only child that didn't understand the incident, and blamed me for all of it. We stayed away from each other, and my time living at the house went by without incident between the two of us.
Chapter Two
The Trial
The trial came in December 1990. I had no past incidents to prepare me for what was to come. In my eyes, I had done nothing wrong except protect myself, so I refused to pay money to an attorney. "Our justice system will prove I was in the right," I thought to myself. I obtained a public defender as a lawyer. That was the second biggest mistake in my life.
The 'dumptruck', so named by repeat offenders because she looses many easy cases, was a pathetic piece of work, interested more in how much cleavage she could show in the courtroom than in how well she could defend the charges against one of her clients. My biggest mistake was believing that the justice system would protect me from wrongful imprisonment.
Before the trial started, the D.A. offered me a deal of 7 years in prison. I had many things I wanted to tell this jackass, but I simply said "No."
During the trial, the public defender decided to stipulate with the District Attorney that the victim in this case, Bob, was in fact on methamphetamines, also known as crank, as noted by the drug test taken at the hospital when he arrived after the incident. My blood test came back negative for any drugs, of course. I was in a 4 year university, studying to be a nurse.
By 'stipulating' that Bob was on drugs, no doctor took the stand to explain how violent and radical being high on methamphetamines makes a person; the first evidence of a lousy attorney. And it all happened so fast, without the public defender even asking me if I was okay with the motion, that it was done and forgotten before I could utter a word. My attorney assured me that this would not make any difference in court.
The lady who lived next door to me was the only witness. She was waiting up for her daughter to arrive home. When she heard the commotion out front, she looked out her window that overlooked the street. She then went to her bedroom in the back of her house to call 911.
While dialing, she testified, she heard someone yell, "Some one better call 911," but the voice was not that of her neighbor, the defendant, but of the victim, Bob. My attorney was so lame that she didn't even bring up the fact that a man who has a punctured lung from a stab wound can't catch his breath enough to yell, let alone yell loud enough to wake someone three blocks away!
It came out in the trial that Bob was a Vietnam Veteran. There he worked in the Medical Corp, working behind the lines with injured soldiers. As I heard these words coming out of the lips of Bob, I suddenly realized that this tiny piece of shit wasn't anything to be afraid of.
But now it was too late. Without an attorney who was good, the evidence was against me. But I didn't know that at the time. I was naïve, to say the least. I was a fool, to be more precise. I'd been brought up to believe that the law never punishes anyone who is not guilty of the crime for which they stand accused.
The rest of the evidence was clear. I admitted stabbing Bob in self-defense. The question was—did I have justification for acting the way I did? That was the question before the jury.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Screwed Without Intercourse by Gordan Stevens Copyright © 2012 by Gordan Stevens. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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