Walk a Mile in The Shoes I Wear

By Jay F. King

Though not ever destitute, Jay F. King has lived most of his life with an income that would be considered below the poverty level by government standards, even being homeless for a bit. He grew up with a passion for motor sports and music, racing for a short time with the NASCAR Association and running an internet music room. Although many have

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westwood Books Publishing
• Release date: Jul 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798888875940

Jay F. King

Though not ever destitute, Jay F. King has lived most of his life with an income that would be considered below the poverty level by government standards, even being homeless for a bit. He grew up with a passion for motor sports and music, racing for a short time with the NASCAR Association and running an internet music room. Although many have called him an inspiration, he will be the first to tell you he is nobody special. In his own words, "I'm just a t-shirt and jeans kind of guy."

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Copyright © 2023 by Jay F. King.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Contents

Dedications

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Epilogue

DEDICATIONS

I would like to thank the many friends and family that I have online for keeping me in their thoughts and prayers throughout this whole ordeal. There are too many names to list, it would look like a telephone directory. And I would like to thank all the ones that answered my requests for information while writing this book and those that read various episodes and kept offering me encouragement. A very special thank you goes to Rodney Henson of Henson Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprises and his son Curtis (http://curtishenson.com) for the photography production of the picture for the front cover.

To those that didn’t answer my polite requests, if you are in the book and the information isn’t accurate, well, tough noogies.

STOP!! Before you read this book, you should know that I am not a churchgoer. I subscribe to the belief that being in a building they call a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. If this offends you, then don’t read this book. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against people who do go to church, and fellowship is a good thing. I just don’t feel the need to go someplace once or twice a week to have someone explain to me the difference between right and wrong and what it is I should endeavor to do. The church is more of an attitude of the heart than a building. You may find some parts of the book boring, but I felt they were necessary to give you an opinion of my character. You have character? That’s enough of you! Well, it is a certainty that folks do call you a character. Shut up! That being said, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, or maybe you won’t. Some of the names of the people and places have been changed to protect me from being sued by the guilty. Anyway, on with my story.

CHAPTER 1

Here We Go

It was the best of times. It was the worst of. . . (One of the voices in my head interrupts.) What? It’s been used? Yes, it has. Oh alright. Well, then let me see, call me Ishmael. . .That’s been used too, and it’s not even your name. Geez, ok, how about Hello reader, I’m nobody special, just your average Joe, er uh. . .Jay, Jay F. King, and this is my story. Ok, I can live with that. Yeah, thanks. Now let me be so I can try and write something that will possibly be of some entertainment and maybe inspirational value to the people who may want to know how I came to be who I am and why I go on living day after day. Ok, but I’ll be watching. Uh huh, lucky me.

My life story. I was born, I’ve lived up until now, and a lot of stuff happened in between. The End. Uh, I think folks are going to want to read a little more than that. Geez, ya think? Ok, I was born more than a half century ago, on March 23, 1952, in San Francisco. Wow, you’re getting old. I’m not old. I’m comfortably broken in. I spent the first thirteen years of my life growing up there. Although I don’t remember the event, somehow, I have the feeling that when I was born and the first thing that happened to me was a spanking, I’m pretty sure I got the clue that life wasn’t going to be easy.

I remember a lot of hard times. This was mainly due to a dysfunctional family–to be more specific, having an alcoholic father. But I don’t hate the man. I do strongly dislike the husband he was to my mother, and he was abusive to my brothers and me, but I respect him for instilling a good knowledge of right and wrong in us.

There were times I remember when Dad did try to have fun with us. He would take us fishing at Muni (municipal) Pier in San Francisco. He took us to Playland at The Beach, which has long since been torn down to make way for condominiums. And when he took us along to go pick up Mom from work, she was a cashier in the employee cafeteria at San Francisco International Airport. We would get there early and go to the observation deck so we could watch the planes take off and land. Back in the 1950’s, terrorism by Muslim radicals was unheard of, so we pretty much got to roam the airport at free will.

But Dad’s demon, alcohol, was stronger than he was. He would find a job, work long enough to catch up on the bills that had backed up, get a little bit of drinking money ahead, then quit or get fired so he could basically loaf around and drink all day. This got to be a never-ending pattern, stopping only when his life here was throug. For the sake of us kids, Mom just went ahead and put up with it all. She was a saint, being the main source of support for the family for more than twenty years. My dad passed away at the early age of 49, mainly due to a brain aneurism caused by a fall during one of his drunken spells, but complications set in by a failing liver helped his demise. I forgive him for the beatings, and I hope my brothers can do the same.

CHAPTER 2

Living in Beaver Cleaver America

During those years growing up in San Francisco, we lived in a predominantly black neighborhood. I remember all the neighbors around us being really nice people. Dad had taught us that color did not matter. He was no racist by a long shot. He taught us that our ancestors were the ones who fought on the side to free the slaves, not on the side to keep slavery. Some of the nicest people I can ever remember knowing were the neighbors who lived across the street, Clyde, and Maxine Holly. One Christmas, during one of my dad’s bad spells, the Hollys went around the neighborhood and took up a collection, then bought us food so we could have a Christmas dinner, and clothes and toys for us kids. Clyde and Maxine also had a son, Zelworth, whom we all called Zee. Zee was a few years older than us boys and looked after us like a big brother. It was an exciting event in the neighborhood when his parents bought him one of the first Ford Mustangs, a 1964 ½, ever made. Zee made sure that we all got a ride in his new car. I will never forget the kindness and generosity of the Hollys, people with true Christian hearts.

My earliest memory takes place when I was just a little more than three years old. My younger brother Lloyd and I–there were eventually four of us–were sleeping in the same bed. I was three, and he was two years old. We awoke before our parents, and dressed in only underpants, he headed for the front door. I asked what he thought he was doing; he just opened the front door and kept going. Now I’m only wearing underpants, but I follow him down the front steps, trying to get him to stop. He just continued and said, Come on, we’re going to get cookies.

What? I asked. This lady right down at this house gave me cookies. He was headed a couple doors down. The day before, some chance encounter that I had no knowledge of took place between Lloyd and the lady who lived a couple houses away, and she gave him a cookie. When we got to her door, I stood back a little way, and he knocked on the door until what looked to me like someone’s grandmother opened the door. She was black; back then we referred to them as colored people, and she looked a little stunned to see us standing there at first. Then Lloyd popped the question, Do you have any more cookies? She cracked a big smile and said, Child, what are you doing out here with no clothes on? Then she looked at me and asked, Do you know where you live?

Yes, I said. She said to me, Go home and get your mother, and tell her to bring a coat for your brother. I trotted back home, woke up Mom, and told her what was going on. She put a coat on me, grabbed one for Lloyd, and said, Show me where Lloyd is. We went and retrieved him, and I noticed that as Mom carried him home, in his hand was a cookie! When we got back home, I got a swat on my hind quarters for not waking up Mom and telling her right away. Here I was, trying to keep Lloyd out of trouble, and what happened? He gets a cookie, and I get swatted! Life is so unfair. When I told Lloyd about that memory, he laughed. I have to admit it made me chuckle when he did.

The next event, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time and it is going to seem unbelievable, was a miracle that, in retrospect, has me convinced that angels are mischievous in good ways. Again, this happened when I was about three and a half, my brother was two and a half, and we had seen the movie Peter Pan the night before. Out in the center of the back yard stood an old, very large tree stump that the family used as a table for backyard picnics, BBQs, etc. My brother Lloyd and I were playing Peter Pan, taking turns climbing up onto the stump and jumping off, flying. On one of the jumps, instead of going down, I soared upward slowly for about ten seconds before coming back down, high enough so that I could see into the neighbor’s yard behind us. Lloyd and I excitedly ran inside and told our mother about how I flew. She just smiled at us and told us to go back out and play. When Dad got home and we told him, he asked what it was I had seen in the yard behind us. I described to him seeing lawn furniture and a small black curly-haired dog. He got a ladder, put it up against, the fence and saw exactly what I told him was there. They couldn’t explain how I knew because the fence was six feet tall with the framing on the other side, so there was no way I could have climbed up and looked over. But I know what it was. One of my guardian angels took hold of me in mid-jump and gave me a ride. Angels like to have fun too. I’m sure that angel had to put its wings into overdrive to be able to lift you. Shut up!

I remember observing an event close to this time that science will explain away, but to me, it was another of God’s creations. Rainbows are a pretty aspect of nature. Double rainbows are rare, and a triple rainbow is almost unheard of. I had walked out back on what can only be described as a perfect spring day. The temperature was in the low seventies, and it was a clear blue sky with not a cloud in sight. And there in the sky was the most perfect triple rainbow. The colors were sharp and vibrant, just as if they were painted on with a brush. With the absence of clouds and low humidity, it could have only been the work of God. He does paint the most beautiful pictures.

The next unexplainable feat happened a couple years later. I grew up being overweight–what would even be considered obese–so I was always called tubby, fatso, or just the neighborhood fat kid. Don’t forget Roley Poley. Yeah, yeah, they get the idea. Anyway, it was difficult at best and, in some cases, impossible to scale a fence. In the mid-1950s in San Francisco, there were still quite a few vacant lots in our neighborhood. And because it was a hilly area of town, the lots were stepped. From some lots, you could look down into the backyard of the next property because the ground was almost even with the top of the fence. Me and a few of the neighborhood kids were playing in one of these lots when we noticed an apple tree in the yard next door. Not thinking about how I would get back up, I jumped down into the yard to grab a couple of apples. From out of nowhere, a large Doberman Pinscher started running at me from across the yard, snarling. I was invading his territory, and he meant business. I should have been mauled, but somehow superhuman strength came from nowhere, and I sprinted towards that fence and cleared it in one bound. The other kids looked on in disbelief that I had made the jump. Once again, I’m sure I had divine help, because it was pretty much an impossible feat for a kid in my physical condition to perform.

I can also remember seeing an incredible sight back then. I went outside just after lunch one day, and there coming up the hill was a house! And not one of those prefabricated jobs you see being hauled down the freeway, but an entire Mediterranean-style house that took up the whole street, slowly being pulled up the hill at a snail’s pace. There was a man on the roof with a two-by four making sure none of the electric lines on the street got snagged. A man we called Mr. Wallace, who built houses for a living, was moving his own house from across town into one of the vacant lots on our street. Mr. Wallace turned out to be a very nice man; he always had a smile and a wave for us kids. And he didn’t mind when we used his yard to play hide and seek in.

We were pretty much what would be considered normal kids back then. Calling you normal is highly debatable. I’m every bit as normal as you are. Ok, point taken. There were no gangs fighting over turf. The biggest mischief we ever got into was jumping fences and cutting through the neighbor’s yards when we played hide and seek, and once we got in trouble for breaking a window with a rock. There has never been an instance where we intentionally hurt someone.

We grew up living just down the street from my grandmother on my mother’s side, and I remember a lot of times spent there being babysat after school by Grandma and my cousins. My Mom’s sister, Aunt Bert, also lived with my grandmother; it was a close-knit family. It was a small sharecropper’s house, but the family always gathered there for the holidays, and they were the traditional Thanksgivings and Christmases you would expect to see in a Norman Rockwell painting. The men sitting around watching football, the women working in the kitchen, creating those wonderful holiday feasts, filling the house with the scrumptious aroma of roasting turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin and mincemeat pies, and the children running around, playing, and being mischievous. It was all grand, chaotic fun. Tell them about Santa. Ok. It was a different uncle who played Santa Claus every year. One year, I recognized Dad as the man in the Santa suit. I knew then that there was no real Santa, but I kept my mouth shut so as not to ruin it for the other kids. Everyone gets their Santa bubble popped in a different way. Mine got popped when I was old enough to recognize Dad behind the beard.

Another episode of being kept out of major trouble came when I had my first traffic accident. I was about eight years old; Lloyd was seven; and my brother Lee was five. I was riding Lloyd’s bicycle with Lee on the handlebars when Lloyd wanted his bike back. We laughed at him and started riding away, and he chased after us on foot. As we approached an intersection, I turned to look back at Lloyd instead of watching for cross traffic. There was a sound of screeching tires, and I turned back around just in time to see a car traveling to the left. I tried to stop, but it was not fast enough. The impact jerked the front wheel of the bike to the left, slammed my hand into the car, and knocked us off the bike. Lee was stunned and immediately went and sat down on the curb. My hand swelled up later, but at that moment I didn’t feel any real pain. Though Lee was stunned, he didn’t suffer any physical injuries. After getting out and making sure we were okay, the driver took a quick look at his car. It was an early 1950s American-made car, very well built, so the damage was limited to a small rubber mark left on the driver’s door by the bicycle’s front tire. The man said it would wash off, so there was no real damage to be concerned with. I had no trouble admitting that I was at fault. The man gave us a piece of paper with his name and phone number on it and asked us to have our parents call him so he could make sure we were alright. No police or lawyers became involved. My dad offered to wash and wax the man’s car for him, but he insisted that it wasn’t necessary, he just wanted to know that we were going to be okay. Nowadays, there are lawsuits and lots of time spent in court. Life was a whole lot less complicated back then.

Those were not the only instances when I had help from the angels that are always around me. I remember two other instances when I was approximately twelve years old. One of them was when I was walking home after school and this younger kid came riding towards me on a bike that was two sizes too big for him. It didn’t take any effort to stop him and take away the bike. He started walking away, valiantly doing all he could not to cry. Something twinged with my conscience, so I called him back and gave him his bike back. I told him not to give up so easily and to scream, kick, and cry for help if he needed to. That God would come to his rescue. He didn’t say a word; he just nodded and rode away, and I am sure that it was one of my angels whispering in my ear, guiding my actions, and telling me what to say, helping me defeat the nature of the devil. And for all I know, the kid could have been praying at that moment as well.

The other instance that took place around that time is also going to seem unbelievable, but I swear this is true. God also makes invisible walls. This was in the mid-1960s when there was a lot of racial tension in San Francisco. I was attending James Denman Junior High, a school that was 65% black. One afternoon at lunch period, the blacks just started going around the schoolyard, violently beating on every white person they saw for no apparent reason other than that they were white. At that time, I had no idea it was a race thing; I thought they were just being bullies. Dad never taught us that color made a difference; we were all the same inside, and our ancestors were on the side that fought to free the slaves, not to keep slavery in existence. I stood at the corner of a building watching when, all of a sudden, it appeared it was to be my turn. A huge crowd of mob-crazed blacks started running towards me. Just as they were about to converge on me, they all slowed and started wandering aimlessly about, looking confused and bewildered. I stood there, frozen, not knowing what to do. A few passed by so close that I could feel their breath upon me. I heard one remark to another, Where’d he go? All of a sudden, a number of adults appeared and dispersed the crowd; the bell rang for the end of lunch period, and everyone returned to classes with relative calm restored. In retrospect, I believe the reason that the mob all of a sudden became confused was because God had performed a small miracle and rendered me invisible to them. I swear this is a true story.

CHAPTER 3

The Times, They Are A-changin’

Isn’t that a song? Yes, I borrowed it from Bob Dylan. When my grandmother died, Aunt Bert moved away, and since we kids were getting beaten up almost daily, she convinced my mom we should do the same. Dad was away on one of his benders, and we hadn’t seen him for days, so we packed up and, with the help of an uncle or two, moved away to Redwood City, a slower, more easy-going town thirty miles away on the San Francisco Peninsula.

America was just ending its Beaver Cleaver stage and moving into the Timothy Leary Free Love, Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out era. I had become old enough to acquire a driver’s license, and with it came a whole new set of freedoms and a change of lifestyle. I can remember hanging with kids and doing things that, had we been caught, would have landed us in jail. Jail would have been the least of your worries. Hey, at least we never hurt anyone or caused property damage. Well, this is true, there are worse things you could have done. Thanks. Now can I get back to writing? Oh, I suppose so, go ahead.

Jimi Hendrix introduced us to a new sound called psychedelic rock and produced the album, Are You Experienced? Boy, was I ever. I probably used more chemicals than Dow Jones even knows exist. I dropped acid more times than I can count. I was able to recognize hallucinations from reality fairly easily, so I always elected to drive.

One of the things I remember doing was getting high with friends and going to the free concerts on Saturday nights in the late sixties at Litton Plaza in downtown Palo Alto, California. Local bands would set up in the plaza and perform free concerts, trying to make a name for themselves. After the concerts, we would go to the golf course at Stanford University and get stoned some more. It was trespassing since we were there long after hours, but we were causing no harm, and it was a more comfortable setting than being in the midst of populated areas. Those were younger, wilder days. And stupider. Yes, I know that now. Be quiet! I am positive that GOD frowned upon a great many of my actions, nevertheless, He continued to look after me.

I went to high school at Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton, California. This is the same school that Stevie Nicks, the famous singer from the rock group Fleetwood Mac, attended. But I was a freshman while she was a senior, so if I ever saw her, I have no recollection of it.

I was one of the kids from the wrong side of the tracks. I didn’t like school, and that first year I only had four classes. I went in an hour later than everyone else and had only one class after lunch. I always got A’s and B’s on all the tests I was ever given, but because I never took notes or did homework, my final grade for classes was always a