My parents had recently divorced, and my mom moved myself and my three siblings from Corona, California, to a small town on the east coast of Florida called Port Saint Lucie. It's not such a small town now. I was 13, Wendy was 12, Michael was 11, and I think Dennis was 8 or 9 years old.

 The year was 1980, and my mom was in the habit of leaving us at home alone on Friday and Saturday nights while she went out to the local honky tonk and the bowling alley bar. She was looking for a man to replace my dad and help pay the bills. It was either that or she was just a ***. Popular movies at the time like The Urban Cowboy and Every Which Way But Loose made her habit seem acceptable to us kids.

She once brought home a guy named Jack. We didn't see Jack or even know that he was in the house until after dinner. At dinner, she told us that she had a friend who was going to be staying with us. What had happened the night before at the bowling alley bar was that someone came running in and told Jack, who was drinking with my mom at the bar, that his pickup had been set on fire. And it had been. Jack ran out the door and was beaten with a baseball bat. She brought him home to nurse back to health because he was from the same area in California that we had just come from.

We liked Jack. He was a good carpenter and made me a wooden go-kart, painted it orange, and named it The Orange Blossom Special. After about three months of Jack being there, a police task force came and hauled him off to jail. He was wanted for selling speed back in California. They call it meth now.

One Saturday morning, us kids were awake before my mom was. We were at the kitchen table feeding ourselves breakfast when her bedroom door opened, and I could tell by the sound of the hard shoes stepping across the floor that it wasn't my mom walking towards the kitchen. Around the corner from the living room and into the kitchen stepped a driller.

My mom hurried out of her room, chasing him in her fuzzy blue robe and slippers. Before my mom could say a word, he spoke, “Hey kids, whatcha eating?” After a short period of silence, my sister answered first. She said, “Kaboom.” He said, “What in the world is Kaboom?” It was a generic version of Lucky Charms that came in a giant bag. Twice as much cereal for half the price. I answered, “It's cereal.” My mom said, “Kids, this is my friend Mike.” My brother Michael spoke up and said, “Our dad’s name is Mike too.” Mike the driller answered, “I know, your mom told me. Can I have some of that Kaboom?”

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My mom brought him a bowl and a spoon, and I guess she felt comfortable enough to leave him alone with us while she went into her room to get dressed. He ate with us. He asked us what our names were and what we wanted to be when we grew up. Wendy answered, “A lawyer.” She became a court reporter. Michael said he wanted to be a cop. He’s 55 years old now and he’s been a cop all his life. Dennis didn't know what he wanted to be then, but he followed in Michael’s footsteps and became, and is, a cop. I answered, “I want to be a writer.”

I'm 57 years old now, and I've been a driller since I dropped out of high school at the age of 16. If you are reading this, I finally became a writer. Part-time, that is. I'm still drilling and will be until I no longer can.

By the time we were finished eating, my mom was back in the kitchen. She didn’t eat breakfast—she rarely did. Probably because she served it five days a week. She was a waitress at a diner in town called Ann and Fran’s.

We put the bowls and spoons in the sink, washed, dried, and put them away like we were trained to do by my mom. The driller stood up, said, “Nice to meet you kids, and I hope to see y’all again soon,” and my mom walked him out. She came back glowing with a smile as big as Texas. She asked us if we wanted to go to Pizza Hut for dinner with the driller because he had invited us all.

Of course, we all said yes—we liked him so far, and we loved Pizza Hut. Then she told us to go outside and don't come back in until lunchtime.

We played outside all day, came in for lunch, and went outside to play some more. We were yelled back in around 3 p.m. to get cleaned up and ready for dinner out with the driller. After we washed the black off the bottoms of our feet, changed our clothes, and found and put on our shoes, the driller pulled into the driveway.

I was in the shade of the garage with the door open, waiting for the others to finish getting ready. He drove a single-cab Chevy flatbed truck, and on the door it said “Ground Water Systems.” I remember thinking, as he got out of the truck, how much different the way he dressed was from the way my dad Mike in California dressed.

Driller Mike wore a denim shirt with pearl snaps, tucked into his jeans and secured by a belt with a buckle that had a bulldog’s head on it and the word “Mack.” He wore boots like I’d never seen before. They weren't pointed in the toes—they were big and round. The tops of the boots were covered by his jeans, but when I saw him earlier that morning, his jeans were tucked into the boots. I thought that was strange then, and I still do today. I tried that style a few times after I got my first pair of work boots and didn't like it. Mostly because things tended to fall into them, and when I learned to weld and got my first really big piece of hot slag in my boot, I gave that style up forever. It's just not functional. “Boots on the inside” is what I say.

If California Mike wasn't working, he wore an untucked T-shirt, corduroy pants or shorts, and tennis shoes or flip-flops. When he was working, it was a white dress shirt, tie, and black dress pants. I held a lot of resentments toward California Mike for what I saw him put my mom through, and the stark differences I saw in Driller Mike made me feel good.

I walked him into the house through the garage entrance and yelled to the house that he was here. The others were ready, and we all loaded up into my mom’s 1977 Cougar XLT and headed for Pizza Hut. It was a great time. We ate, played pinball and Pac-Man while we waited for the waitress to bring the pizza.

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We drove back home, he came in with us, and we watched BJ and the Bear, The Dukes of Hazzard, and wrestling—all on over-the-antenna television. Us kids went to bed after wrestling was over, leaving my mom with the driller on the sofa. When I woke up the next morning, he was in the kitchen cooking bacon and eggs.

I found out soon after that the driller had been a regular customer at the diner where my mom worked before us kids met him, and that he always sat in her section when she was working. I overheard my mom telling a story once about how, before they started seeing each other, sometimes he would leave her a $100 tip. Once, she tried to give it back to him, and he told her, “I just got paid for a well, and I know it will help you and the kids.”

He eventually moved in with us. He would take me to work with him if it was a weekend that he had to work or a school holiday. I would work summer vacations on the rig, and if I was in school and one of the hands didn't show up for work, he would come to the school and tell the principal that I had a dentist appointment. That was usually only if it was a casing day.

His drilling business did well. He bought me my first truck—a 1972 Ford single cab with a wooden flatbed. I've mentioned single cab trucks twice already; I don't think a pickup with a backseat was invented yet back then. He bought my sister a white Firebird with a 4-cylinder engine—ha ha—and bought my mom a 1979 Buick Riviera. He took good care of our family.

When I was 17 years old, California Mike found God and wanted his family back. The driller stepped out of the way. He bought a house, and I went with him. He only lived in the house for about a month, and then moved in with another waitress. I guess he has a thing for waitresses. Other guys who worked for him would move in with me from time to time. Sometimes an old friend of his would come stay for a while.

I eventually moved out of the house because I got married. I got my Florida water well contractor’s license and started a residential drilling business. California Mike couldn't find a good job in Florida, so I let him start a drilling business using my license. Driller Mike found an old cable tool rig and he helped California Mike get it going. California Mike hired a driller, worked as the helper and salesman. He did good—until his thumb fell off his hand and down a well. At that point, he sold the rig to his driller, took an online course to become a pastor, and started working for Jesus.

I got a divorce, sold my rig, and went back to work as a driller for Mike. We continued to work together on his rig and as a subcontract crew for many different municipal well drilling companies until I went to prison in the late ’90s and he left the country—but those are stories for other episodes.

Hopefully this is the first story of many that will tell of my adventures, successes, failures, comebacks, and the other drillers that I have encountered in my 41 years of drilling.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoyed it. Until next time, drill 'em straight.

 Jim Beath