Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 60        First years in Texas and arthritis hammers my body

My wife and I got married in her hometown Cincinnati; and afterwards I packed a U-Haul with my tools and some starter furniture, and drove to Houston, dragging along my dirty Chevette on a pull-behind dolly.

I was still driving that Chevette I bought in Chicago in 1978. I never once washed that thing, and by 1984 the floor under the driver’s feet was completely rusted away. I’m not kidding … this was a Fred Flintstone car … you could put both feet on the pavement while sitting in the driver’s seat. I wedged a 2x4 under the seat so it wouldn’t fall to the pavement while I was driving around … and when it rained, I got wet.

In 1985 when I traded that car in, the salesman couldn’t keep a straight face. They gave me a $100 trade-in, and when I protested, the guy said, ‘that car is used up.’

The car had boards and tools and little pipe fittings and all kinds of crud under the hatchback. I had money in the bank … enough to pay cash outright for a new vehicle … but there was no need because the Chevette worked fine … I must have been the tightest guy around for a hundred miles.

You see, I had a dirty old car and a dirty old suit, and cut my own hair, and that’s why I didn’t get those sales jobs in California … it’s because people measure others by their exterior gloss … and my patina has always been ruddy and cruddy … and I never knew any of this shit about myself before writing this book.
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

A lot happened in the following three years.

I found a suit-and-tie job selling postal equipment, but kept thinking; I could hardly wait to retire and build stuff in a shop … so after six months I went back into the repair and remodeling business. The big energy-recession had its grip on Houston in 1984-6 and business was dead everywhere, but my business took off and never skipped a beat; 7 days a week, year-round except major holidays.

The bicycle path along Braes Bayou beckoned and I loved the serenity and safety of that route, riding nearly 10 miles every night, and sometimes further. I started riding the long miles into downtown Houston, but it exhausted me so I cut back.
 
Then in late 1985, at age 35, Rheumatoid-Arthritis hammered my body.

My left eye turned red and hurt. My wrists hurt like broken bones and I actually thought they were somehow cracked from bicycling.

The eye doctor smartly directed me to a rheumatologist, who ran the tests and stabbed me through the heart with his diagnosis. I had a disease that rarely lets go; and it comes back each day and takes a nibble, and finally crumples you into a worthless shape in a wheelchair unable to wipe your own ass.

It was a slow-motion bike crash under the wheels of a car.

He said, ‘twenty percent of people get better and twenty percent get worse’ … but I knew, soon as he said it … I was in the twenty percent that got worse. I told my wife and cried because I wanted more for her. It was her dream too, that we’d work together and buy a house.

A few months later the capsula in my right knee ruptured at work and filled my lower calf with blood and joint fluid. The doctor put me in the hospital, and I laid out ten days then went back to work. But the knee ruptured again and my whole body shook.

I raced home and called the doctor. He calmed me down … but I didn’t know what to do. For once in my life, I had goals, but everything was being stolen by disease.

Rapidly my condition worsened, and no medicine touched it, so my doctor said we would try the strongest drug: Gold. He didn’t come out and say it, but I knew if it didn’t work, my chances were slim.

The most important person in my life rallied around me. My wife never hesitated. She pulled off my socks at night and pulled them on in the morning. She wrapped me with heating pads and pulled up the covers to help me sleep. I sweat out a powerful ugly odor every night, and was soaking wet by morning.

I hired two guys to work in my business and wandered along every day to help out and usually by three in the afternoon, I could do a little bit of work.

One evening in the summer of 1986, I went out for a slow 8-mile bike ride on the Braeswood path … and ran square into my doctor who was walking near his house. He described the event as incredulous. How the hell could someone be hospital-sick with RA and riding a bike, but I was a street fighter and you know that’s true.

The Gold would take six months before we knew whether it would help, and time had dribbled away. Five and a half months were gone, and then one night we were painting an office at the mall, and I could barely walk out to the van, but suddenly felt the medicine working. Something lifted off of me and I can’t tell you what it was.

Here I was, barely able to walk and totally unable to hammer a nail, and my body said, you got lucky and I told my wife that night, and slowly over the next three months my strength returned … but never like it was before, and my right knee never did repair.

Avidly I ignored the daily pain that arthritis brings, and threw myself back into work, then asked the doctor, ‘how long do I have?’

He threw the optimistic face and said, ‘some people take Gold for twenty years.’ But I needed the truth. So he looked me square in the eye, and said, ‘5 years … and after that, the medicine will stop.’

There was a lot to do.

Index of chapters