The Muse

Let me pat myself on the back for consistency. I have yet to meet a New Year’s Resolution I couldn’t defeat, and I‘ve trampled on this one.

It’s been over two months since I’ve posted. I could have forced a story out, but after I missed a week, the next week seemed easier to skip, and it snowballed from there, as bad habits and laziness always tend to trend.

It’s been a slow period for sure in my newly found world of sales, but I found my muse.

She was hidden deep in the heart of central Texas. She just happened to be a shaved-head, ex-con we’ll call Brad, living in the middle of nowhere with an 8ft privacy fence lining his entire 1.75 acre property.

He was bright-eyed and covered in strange tattoos. I say “strange,” but the proper term is probably “prison” tattoos.

These tats made absolutely no sense to your average, boring, never-been-locked-up, kind of guy. Sure, I could research them or watch some reality show about the intricacies of prison tats, but what’s the point? I’m fully okay with letting convicts have their own secret, poorly drawn, stick figure-ish, artistic language.

The only thing clear about Brad’s tattoos was they no longer jived with his current born-again-christian life style and religious signs littered along the inside of his house.

They did, however, match the no trespassing, shoot-first ask-questions-later signs on the outside of the compound.

Clearly, Brad was a complex man who struggles with emotional consistency.

When I arrived, the 20ft wide, 8ft tall, wooden castle gate slid to the left to let me in. I left my hatchback outside the gates.

I was confident I could scale the wall easier than my tiny, 4-cylinder, fiberglass, silver bullet, go-cart could break through the fortress gate. She’s built for gas mileage, not toughness.

After about an hour of talking and walking the compound with Brad, my reformed citizen of a muse openly admitted the irony of his desire to get out of prison just to box himself into a prison of his own making.

He was not kidding. This would probably be a psychology student’s dream come true, examining Brad’s prison experience and current life choices.

I was acutely aware of my exit strategy.

The compound was a mix between an industrial park and a plantation. At the forefront of the property was a massive aluminium building with an RV-sized garage door. The entire front portion of the compound from the road outside the gate to the front buildings was paved with asphalt. Not a blade of grass in sight until, of course, you exited out of the back of the building into the “yard.”

I imagine Brad treated himself to at least one hour a day in the yard.

The home, which started as a mobile home, had grown steadily over the years. All the rooms were horizontally structured and were two feet lower than the previous room. It was a strange set-up to say the least, but Brad explained.

“I just keep building decks off the back of the house, then closing them in to make the house bigger and building another deck after that. I just finished another deck. I think it’s going to be the last one.”

Good call Brad.

Once we finally made it through the container-room style of Brad’s deck-rooms, we emerged onto the latest deck and into the yard.

The yard housed three more buildings. One was a shed, the other two were slightly larger than sheds, and to my surprise, were actually apartments.

This place was absolutely crazy. It’s like Brad was a little boy obsessed with forts. He just kept building and building more and more forts. Then, he managed to find tenants to live in these forts.

There were buildings everywhere, covering almost all the land he owned. Where there weren’t buildings, there was a maze of chain link fence sectioning off different parts of the property in no particularly obvious pattern.

I imagined Brad wandering his property with a post hole digger, cement, and a bunch of posts, planting them wherever he felt necessary. Once he ran out of posts, he started unreeling the chain link fence in a haphazard, connect the dots fashion until he either got tired or ran out of fencing, sprinkling gates throughout wherever and whenever the mood struck.

Just invision this square lot, with a humongous RV-sized garage, a normal size shed, two large shed/apartments, and the main house, which is a double-wide with three deck-room additions and a deck. Between the main house and the three sheds, there is a labyrinth of chain link fence just waiting to confuse the five dogs living there.

Big Bad Brad was polite, happy, full of energy and chatter, but, unfortunately, not full of money. I got my muse alright, and made it out alive, but no sale in sight.