Until You Get It Right: The Sixty-Year Odyssey of a Square Peg

by Eugene Lee Wyatt

I was a delinquent child reared in a broken home. As a teenager, I worked two seasons on a traveling carnival. I was sometimes homeless and often drunk. Petty crime sprees resulted in several incarcerations in reform school and state prisons. In my memoir, I describe many of my crimes, all of my incarcerations, one of which included me being an eyewitness to an unsolved murder, and several explicit sexual adventures because they were formative events in my youth and early adulthood, as were the experiences I relate riding the rails in both the United States and Mexico. With more maturity, I worked in several blue-collar professions, including logger, carpenter, and machinist, and then for twenty-six years as a regional and long haul truck driver. I experienced personally the worst hurricane to ever hit the West Coast, The Watts Riot, the Rodney King-South Central Riot, and California's Northridge (6.7 magnitude) Earthquake. In my youth, I was a starter on a championship fast-pitch softball team, a starter on a championship basketball team, and an undefeated amateur boxer. I have been happily married thirty-nine years, and have reared three beautiful daughters, all of whom are college graduates. My twenty-six year trucking career was terminated by a disabling accident, after which I enrolled in college. I graduated in December, 2006. I made the Dean's list my final (full) semester, and was voted the outstanding graduating student in the History Department. I am now a graduate student. Everything in my story is true with the possible exception of the dialogue, but even that is mostly true (after fifty, forty, thirty years I'm not sure). To be sure, the dialogue is true to the spirit of the moment and situation in which it was spoken.

374 pages, Hardcover

Published August 17, 2009