Jeff Spiteri
Bio
Jeff Spiteri is a writer and creative. With a working back ground in Mental Health and Substance Abuse. His writings reflect on his personal experiences with early childhood, adolescent and adult traumas.
Stories (11/0)
The Bridge Within VIII
Maneuvering out of the seatbelt that was twisted around my body, I climbed out of the car with Josh and Nick. The night before we had made a brief stop in a desert rest area off the highway. It was a different world out in the southwest. Signs warning of rattlesnakes in the desert brush surrounding the rest area and on the path to the bathrooms greeted us at the edge of the parking lot. Getting back on the highway, hours later in the quiet dawn we found Gilbert just waking from its desert slumber. Nick had moved to Gilbert mid highschool after leaving Detroit with his mom and sister. His uncle had taken him in after some hardships with his mom. After finishing highschool in Gilbert Nick found a job at the local animal shelter and became a live-in caretaker. His apartment was directly connected to the building and walked right into the main lobby. We scooted through the doors to his place. The shelter was not open yet. Inside his apartment we took our respective places on the living room furniture. I found myself cozy in the air conditioned apartment spreading out on a recliner and dozing back to sleep. Midday came and after a while the noise from the shelter had slowly woken us from our rest. Nick had some hash brown cakes in his freezer and taking him up on it I cooked several. Moving slow and lethargically I left some on the stove for anyone else who was hungry before meandering back to my recliner spot and dozing faintly off for a few more minutes. It was a difficult place, in between too much sleep and the emotional psychological and physical exhaustion of the whole trip since Chicago. Still, everything was brand new, interesting and exciting and whether I knew it or not I was oscillating between wonder and discovery as my world and possibilities were rapidly expanding and survival mode as the down time finally allowed space for my fatigue and the difficult events we had been through to catch up with the rest of my body. This didn't stop me however, I was still in go mode and the momentum of the trip and my new life's possibilities spread as far as the desert out before me. An hour or so after the hashbrowns Nick and Josh began to creek awake from hibernation. Nick wandered out into the lobby of the shelter to talk to his boss. Josh and I both got up, it was nearly 3 pm by now. Deciding to get some more cigs and junk food, we piled into Nick’s car to drive to the Circle K down the street. After nabbing a few snacks and convenient store produce we made off with our items to our next destination. The Gilbert Goodwill had an interesting array of items one would only find in the southwest. One of which I was captivated by, a turquoise bandana. It was a wedding bandana, something I had never seen before. Cowboy themed, it had a picture of a cowgirl and cowboy, inscribed on the border with the wedding date it read, “Celebration of love.” I totally dug it. Odd, quirky and western I was feeling the vibe. With my new bandana we headed over to Trader Joe’s. The store was running a hard bargain on its exit vulnerabilities for shoplifting and so not wanting to push my luck we walked out empty handed, instead opting for the dumpster around back. Nick had found some pretty good stuff before but that was not in the cards this afternoon. After sticking half our torsos over the side of the human size trash can we were approached by staff, told we were trespassing and asked to leave. No matter, we resolved to come back in the nighttime after it closed to see what goodies we could find. Heading back to Nick’s place we killed time skateboarding under the carport of the animal shelter before retreating back to his apartment for several hours from the sweltering heat. When the night fell we got back in the car and headed out for a dumpster run, stopping by several other shopping centers. We scored bagels and baked goods at the Panera Bread in town before stopping back behind Trader Joe’s. Finding the dumpster in the dark, not a soul was around. Discovering a handful of freshly tossed freezer and refrigerated goods we also managed to score a few pieces of fresh fruit. At the end of our digging Josh pulled out the final score, a quarter bottle of Bacardi. Skeptical of a half drunk bottle of liquor out of a dumpster it didn't belong in, I passed, but Josh had at it. After getting back to Nick’s place and taking photos with our dumpster score we promptly ate. The next day saw us waking earlier in the dimly lit apartment. Nick had to work so we putzed around the place till he was off around 3 pm. He had gotten off for the next few days luckily, with just some light helping out at the shelter here and there. That night we watched the movie ‘Kids’ by Harmony Korine which I had never seen. It was a hard movie to get through, portraying a group of teens in New York City, one of which was living with AIDS and sleeping with as many girls as he could without telling them. However horrible it was, I was attracted to movies like this. With grit and disturbing themes, at least they were honest and while hard to swallow they spoke to my own pain. The pain I could not put my finger on, the pain I was made to believe was not there by my middle class white washed suburban upbringing. The false sense of happiness had long expired. Movies like this and the music I listened to were the only real form of expression that could hold a candle to how I felt inside.
By Jeff Spiteri3 years ago in Wander
The Bridge Within VII
The next morning I woke to Ann stirring with her boyfriend in the apartment. Nudging me gently she told me it was time to go. Joe and Josh had both been doing laundry intermittently throughout the night. Exhausted, I pulled myself from the safety and warmth of my aunt’s floor. Waking Josh and Joe up, they pulled the last of their clothes out of the laundry. Gathering our stuff, Ann was waiting for us with her then boyfriend at the door. In his hands he had brought a flat of Otis Spunkmeyer muffins from Sam’s Club. Handing it to me, it was our breakfast and going away present. The visit was brief, pulling into a Shell gas station right next to the bus stop Ann pumped her gas as I gave her a goodbye hug. Squeezing me she said, “You be careful out there kid, I love you,” in my ear. After finishing pumping her gas she drove off. Catching the bus we headed into downtown Kansas City Missouri. The city was empty, we felt slightly sketched out, 3 white boys with packs in a quiet vacant shell of a downtown. It was near noon when we ran into this guy. Tall and lanky in a white t-shirt and jeans, he was an older dude. Eyeing us he asked if we were hungry. Asking him where we could find some food he ushered us to a church telling us to hurry. Inside the stone building in the downstairs church hall was a soup kitchen. Rows of tables filled with homeless folks filled the hall. Stepping up to a line of folding tables with church volunteers serving an array of hot canned foods, they filled our styrofoam bowls with minestrone soup and gave us each a white roll. As we ate, the hall slowly began to empty out. We had just barely caught the tail end of the lunch rush. A few older dudes sat around trying to make conversation with us, but guarded, we kept quiet. Getting directions to the library from one of them we finished our soup and headed out to the street. There at the library we found ourselves in even less hospitable waters. After signing up for library cards and sitting down at the computers, a security officer walked by our desks and informed us we could not have our packs in the library. Looking around there were numerous homeless folks using the computers with their own bags stuffed under the desks. Being escorted out, Joe wasn’t going without a fight. Indignantly he pointed out the other folks in the computer area’s belongings they had stashed away and a lone homeless man sprawled out asleep on a couch. The security guards could care less. Walking behind us we walked across the street and down the block to a street corner before perching up on the cornerstone of a building to figure out what to do next. The security guards in their paranoia circled the block around the library making sure we were gone. Walking down the avenue away from the library we crossed several streets before stopping to linger on the sidewalk. Pulling out his Crew Change Josh and I began to deliberate which yard and route we wanted to take out of Kansas City and when we could catch our bus to the freight yard. It was near 3 o’clock by now.
By Jeff Spiteri3 years ago in Wander
The Bridge Within VI
The summer carried on with intermittent adventures and bike rides down to Ferndale to the little yellow house. June was approaching fast and my anticipation was growing evermore steadily as I began to prepare for my exit. It was a natural sequence of events. I simply set a date, I knew what I had to do, and used my graduation as a hard marker for leaving. The time in between was filled with train and travel research and the cherished hangouts with Ted, Nick, Amy and the rest of our crew. I was so grateful to have found a friend group like them.
By Jeff Spiteri3 years ago in Wander
The Bridge Within V
The school year began, my last senior year. Determined, excited, motivated; I hadn’t felt that alive in a long time. The three months of my last 1st quarter flew by. At the beginning of August I had landed a job as a line cook at an archetypal Detroit style fine dining restaurant, The 4th Street Grille in downtown Rochester. It was a flash between French and Italian cuisine with a generic American twist. In the end it was nothing special, but the ambiance and prestige of location coupled with the “e” on the end of Grille gave it a sense of status. It was the first real cook job I had landed, and so, I was put to work on pantry and salad station, preparing desserts, prepping salads and frying calamari and french fries for dinner service. Occasionally I was given the honor and opportunity of learning saute, working the flat top and expo station, preparing entrees for the heat window while orders waited to be picked up, and cooking easier saute dishes like escargot. In spite of being vegan I loved it. Learning to make Bearnaise for Filet Mignon’s and Lobster Rockefeller and discovering Chicken Piccata opened my world to greater cooking techniques and ways to play with ingredients. On condition of me moving back in with my parents I had agreed that if I was to graduate high school it would be on my own accord. In light of the unfolding of the past summer my parents had expressed an absolute dis-involvement in the stake of my schooling and future. This move from them seemed like a culmination of frustration and form of punishment as my mom had resigned to quit giving me rides the 5 miles to school. However it was intended, it felt more like a relinquishment of involvement altogether than punitive action. That summer, after finding a Univega hybrid bicycle in the trash heap at a local apartment complex, having fixed it up, I now had an adequate and reliable form of my own transportation. Every week day I would wake myself up at 6 a.m., jump out of bed, eat a bowl of oatmeal, and, with a thermos of Yogi herbal tea, I’d ride the 5 miles from my parents house to school. It felt freeing, self reliant and liberating; everything I was wanting more of. It couldn't come fast enough. That summer after coming home from Chicago, I had found myself yearning for that freedom again, the freedom of the open road. And, those first few nights after arriving back in Detroit, I had found myself with the bright orange sleeping bag, rolled out in the back yard sleeping under the stars. This dis-involvement then, felt only like more of an extension of that, and I was grateful. I looked forward to my morning rides, and after school I would ride back towards my parents house, only this time with two extra miles tacked on I’d arrive at work. While the learning experience cooking at 4th street provided was great, and I had a blast discovering the ins and outs of kitchen life; like how to drink terrible espresso with a stick of rock candy and learning the Spanish word for homie, ”ese,” Which, with a sort of warped affection, everyone tauntingly called the elderly Guatemalan dishwasher who couldn't speak English wit.
By Jeff Spiteri3 years ago in Humans
The Bridge Within IV
In the morning I woke up and after putzing around I went down the stairs to the kitchen. Daniel had gone to work and would be back at 5 pm. His mom offered me cereal and I gladly accepted pouring myself a bowl. After chatting she left for work and I decided to head out the door and down the street. It was a Friday and Daniel had invited me to a party with a bunch of his friends, I offered to steal alcohol for them in return for his hospitality. Stealing was one skill I had developed that offered me great leverage whether as direct assurance in getting my needs met or as a way to make money and exchange services.
By Jeff Spiteri3 years ago in Humans
The Bridge Within II
Throughout my high school years my academic performance devolved. I had enrolled in my high school's trade program for the culinary arts my junior year. Cooking was a huge passion of mine another way I had learned to express myself, explore the world’s cultures and champion a cause. Through my punk rock informed politics I had discovered veganism and now, not only had I become a militant animal rights activist, but I had also been pushed into new and uncharted corners of the food world. My parents had urged me to seek out the trade program in hopes that it would be a road to better align me with a more compatible learning path, however, my depression and overall feelings of hopelessness around the rest of my academic life were still slowly sinking. By the middle of my junior year I was flunking out of all of my academic classes and had no choice but to withdraw from culinary school. I dropped out of traditional high school altogether and signed up for computer based adult learning classes aimed at bridging me into an alternative high school program.
By Jeff Spiteri3 years ago in Psyche
The Bridge Within III
The summer couldn’t come soon enough, and the day came when it was time to leave. Samantha picked me up early in the morning and we headed northwest out of town towards Lansing. I had only $15 in my pocket, a gallon of water and a gallon size bag of granola with a can of food and some shelf stable tofu. All of this tucked inside an REI hiking pack I had bought with money from Christmas the winter before. By lunchtime we were outside of Lansing, we decided to stop at an Applebees on the side of the highway. As we pulled up to turn into the row of chain restaurants lining the street I instructed Sam to park in the adjacent parking lot. She did, we got out of the car and walked across the street to the Applebees. I was vegan at the time and to this day can remember ordering a portobello burger. We ate quickly. When it came time for the bill the waitress laid our check on the table. Aside from culinary vocational high school the majority of my high school career had been spent working in restaurants. Neither of us had any intention of paying but to mitigate our guilt we decided to leave the server a fat tip. Whether it truly served its purpose as a tip or not was beyond our care and we hastily made our exit across the street to the adjacent restaurants parking lot speeding off down the highway towards East Lansing and the Michigan State Campus. After a short afternoon of record store perusing Sam had to leave. We drove south from the Grandriver strip littered with head shops, restaurants and the random assortment of collegiate supplies and memorabilia stores. There near the highway and across the railroad tracks she dropped me off at the tiny outpost of a building that was the Greyhound Station. With a Styrofoam to go container and a goodbye hug she left me and so I waited. It must have been at least 2 hours by the time the bus came. Evening was nearing as the growing number of passengers that had gathered outside the station shuffled aboard the old bus.I was quiet and giddy with excitement, poised and paying attention I watched as we pulled out of the stations parking lot and onto the highway. Several folks chirped back and forth about their plans and where they were headed, I sat quietly listening but never said much. A middle aged gentleman slightly younger than my father asked me where I was headed. I told him Chicago. He immediately assumed I was planning to catch the Amtrak and began to tell me that the bus was running late and that we might miss the train. I smiled to myself and didn't say anything playing along. When we departed from the bus the man was behind me, many of the bus passengers hurried towards the Amtrak platform on the other side of the greyhound station. As I made my way off the bus I walked in the opposite direction. The man called out after me as I walked across the parking lot towards the overpass running over the tracks just west of the Greyhound and Amtrak Terminal. "The Amtraks this way!"motioning in the opposite direction I was headed. I gave a incoherent hand gesture waving him on in acknowledgement and kept walking. There at the edge of the lot I waded into the brush to urinate and after the Amtrak left I walked up to the empty tracks and began to meander west following the vacant lines disappearing into the horizon. Under the bridge, I discovered, was a small amateur built skate park. I ogled it briefly before continuing on down the tracks. As I walked, several trains headed west passed by. A few hundred yards past the bridge the tracks split branching north to Kalamazoo and South to Chicago. Most of the trains that passed contained auto carrier cars all of which took the south split to Chicago. Like the inexperienced rider I was, I had no clue just how fast these trains were going nor how dangerous my futile attempts at trying to catch them really was. Eventually however, I clued in and after dozens of attempts to keep pace alongside these barreling freakishly large pieces of steel I decided It would be a lot smarter to head back towards the bridge look at my maps and devise another plan. The sun was beginning to fall. It had been overcast earlier in Lansing and I had been worried about rain but as we arrived in Battle Creek the sky had cleared and the bright sun was slowly lowering its self on the horizon. It must’ve been 5 or 6 pm when I headed back towards the bridge. Looking around I noticed a small group of people in a veterinary clinic opposite the road running alongside the tracks from where I was. The map I had printed out showed the tracks headed west but my mind, in its haste to catch my first train, didn’t stop to reason that the yard could be further east of where the Amtrak station was. I had gotten ahead of myself and now I was backtracking. I made my way across the tracks down an embankment and across the deserted street towards the group of people. They circled around each other at the back end of a green pickup’s bed with the tail gate down talking. I approached and asked the man nearest me if he new which way was west? I was just trying to orient myself to my map to make sure I was reading it correctly. The man in blue jeans and a cowboy hat stepped towards me and pointed in the direction of the sun, the same direction the tracks ran off in, across the road, before they made their split. “Sun sets in the west.” he said matter of factly. I nodded and felt silly, “first lesson in train riding,” I thought to myself, “sun sets in the west.” I thanked the man and headed back across the street up towards the train tracks and made my way back to the bridge. Several more trains passed, again I tried to run alongside them and see if I could keep the pace but quickly became discouraged. I retired back under the overpass and pulled out my camp stove and cooking pot. Lighting the stove I opened the package of shelf sustainable tofu and a Pad Thai seasoning packet and dumped them in my pot. It slowly began to heat, crackling and popping. Impatiently I took the half heated mush off the stove, it was tasteless and I really wasn't all to hungry. I threw the tofu into the drainage ditch I had crouched next to, to set my stove up and eat. Putting the stove away I wiped out my pot and stuffed it into the brain of my pack. Wandering over to one of the structural pillars that held up the overpass I tossed my pack on top of the piling that formed a 10 foot high wall. Taking several steps back I ran kicking off the face of the wall and grabbing its top lip, I hoisted myself up. The wall was laden with a large graffiti piece. End to end it must've been 30 to 50 feet. A group of kids my age and slightly older came from the skateboard park area walking up to the wall talking amongst themselves. They were graffiti writers and they were planning a new piece on the wall. I sat at its edge listening to them, after having acknowledged each other when they first walked up. They asked me what I was doing. I told them, “I’m gonna catch a train to Chicago.” One of the older kids said with a sort of challenge and curiosity, “I wanna see this.” I jumped down from the wall feeling inspired and determined again. Another train was coming and It looked like yet another string of auto carriers. I was at a loss but felt like I had something to prove. This had to work out, I had to catch a train, but how? After running up alongside yet another train going dangerously way to fast I walked back confounded and discouraged. The group of graffiti writers were still at the wall. One of them, the one making all the plans, looked at me and said, “you might want to go to the yard, theirs trains gassed up and ready to go all the time there,” It was a stroke of luck. I quickly asked how to get there and was given a long string of bus directions that left me confused. The kid could tell I was not going to retain all the details and so he simply said, pointing the other direction, back towards the Amtrak station, down the tracks, “just follow the tracks that way a couple miles and you’ll run right into it.”
By Jeff Spiteri3 years ago in Wander
The Bridge Within
The past 11 years of my life have been dedicated to resolving a mountain of childhood experiences that have had a stranglehold on the way I've experienced and shown up in the world. As a kid in my late teens I left home after high school and set out on what I thought was an adventure and a quest for fulfillment and purpose, little did I know just how it would really unfold. While all my friends were getting accepted into colleges and some going the other route, selling drugs and finding themselves in there own existential dilemmas with the law I chose to leave. Now many might wonder how a 19 year old kid who graduated a year late from an alternative high school with no drivers license or vehicle was gonna take off on his own and materialize some kind of life for himself. Especially a life that did not look like renting an apartment in a low income area a few miles down the road from his parents house and working some menial job while he decides whether he wants to go to community college or not. As an avid subscriber to all things alternative and far left of center my solution was found in a tiny niche of the punk culture I belonged to at the time, I would ride freight trains. In fact I had spent the past two years of my life researching how to ride freight trains, I would spend hours excitedly sneaking into the freight yard down the street from where I had grown up, in Sterling Heights MI, scaling auto carrier trains, ogling graffiti plastered gondola cars and learning how to walk around a yard, figure out the layout and safely navigate the strings of cars without getting maimed. This was my ticket to a new life and away from a childhood and situation I had painfully floundered in, wrought with emotional and behavioral issues, and feeling blamed for falling short of measuring up to an ideal kid, student, peer, male etc. All of which felt entirely out of my grasp to control. This is my journey, my story of transition, change, struggle, pain, healing and redemption. Join me as I share with you the bricks I’ve laid to bridge the forgotten and lost parts of myself into a more whole and healthy me.
By Jeff Spiteri3 years ago in Psyche
Unwritten
The black book was dark as the night. It was a void of sorts. End to end capped with a color so solid you could stare through it to the other side. It was filled with empty white pages. These contrasted the darkness that encapsulated them; however, they too were a part of the void creating the space and time from beginning to end. One look at this book and one might ask himself, “how could such contrasting colors be one and the same? How could they be a part of and create the same entity?” This book, in all of its contrast and completeness, was after all, still unwritten. Capped from end to end with the unknown and filled with blank pages. It sat alone in a dusty old bookshop waiting to be discovered.
By Jeff Spiteri3 years ago in Humans