The Fortners: A Southern Gothic Triptych

I.

The night the lights went out in Barb: An Introduction to Violence

“HELP!”. “Mother, help me,” came the screams from deep in the house; so loud and primal that I woke up in a flight or fight state. My bedroom, once the bedroom of four boys, was in the back corner of the ‘L’ shaped ranch-style house. As my feet hit the floor, I heard the nightly whistle of the late-night coal trains taking the stones from the mines a few miles up the road to the processing plants in another county. As I was registering the time being late night/early morning, I heard that feral screaming and the brutal thump of something hitting the walls.

Slowly, I turned the door knob, trying to keep it from making any sounds, and even more slowly, I opened the door, just a peak at first. The living room was dark with just a glow of warm light coming from the back of the house.

As I walked around the corner, the screams grew louder, more primal if that was possible. Blood curdling is how my grandmother called them. I went into the dining room, which had been made into a temporary bedroom for my Aunt Barb. I saw her standing on top of her bed, scratching at the walls, trying to climb away from my grandfather. He would pull her ankles back towards him, causing Barb to fall hard onto the bed as her head hit the walls with that thud I’d heard, and my grandfather proceeded to punch her whole body with his bare fists; no part of her body was off-limits to his reign of punishment.

Years later, I would be watching an Instagram reel of a street drag race gone horribly wrong, and I watched as a bystander was caught under the wheels of one of the cars for a few seconds that seemed to last minutes. In those brief seconds, the bystander—whose legs were now missing—crawled away from the cars. I noticed the street lights shimmering in the pools of blood pouring out of his torso as he moved like an animal in the most primitive fashion. And it reminded me of Barb’s animalistic climbing up the wall away from brutality and violence, but going nowhere except perhaps to the River Styx like the bystander.

My grandmother told my Aunt Sissy to get me out of the room, but the damage was done. The man I looked up to as my father was now a monster I was terrified to cross.

The next morning, Barb wasn’t in the house, but there was my grandmother cooking up biscuits  and gravy, bacon and sausage, fried eggs, and syrup (a sugar water and butter-based syrup that is poured over biscuits like gravy). She did this each and every morning, and this morning was no different.

There he sat— my grandfather, the Reverend man with his own church, a man of God. He sat there with a wide smile and said, “Come and get you some breakfast, Jimmy”. I sat down at the table, and my grandmother began to pile food onto my plate. “Eat up, boy, you need to get out there and help your pawpaw this morning,” she said.

I didn’t dare bring up last night for so many reasons, but mainly because that’s how we did things in our family. Suck it up  and swallow it. Then shut the fuck up and move on. We were and still are an upwardly progressing family; most of my cousins are professionals, and they’ll never know the pain it took my family to go from the type of poverty highlighted by Eleanor Roosevelt’s pilgrimage through West Virginia and Appalachia into the family they are today.

A few years later, my pawpaw would get bored, and he and I started to build an additional house on his property. The next summer, we would take it apart, nail by nail, brick by brick, and rebuild it somewhere else on the property. ‘OMG’, I used to wail in privileged agony, “just buy more nails, why do I have to straighten them all!” The skills I learned with him in those summers have proven to be some of the most valuable skills I have, and maybe it’s the reason I’ve owned and rehabilitated so many homes of my own.

But that’s not the only lasting memory I have of him.  During one of those summers, I “talked back” to him, and as I turned to walk away, with the full force and strength of more like a brown bear than a mere mortal, he took a 2x4x6 board and hit me across my spine, I was 15. Later in life, I have problems similar to Multiple Sclerosis because of that hit.

However, that’s not the only scarring I carry forward. And perhaps the thing about his violence that scared me the most was on one Sunday morning we were coming home from Sunday School at his church, where he had preached about how difficult it would be to get into heaven, something about a camel and the eye of a needle.

As the car came to a stop by the back patio, we saw that my grandmother’s dog had given birth to pups. My grandfather flew into a rage, slamming the car door shut so hard the vibration felt like someone had dropped a cinderblock on the car.  He started screaming at my grandmother as she began to cry. He went into the kitchen and came out with one of those large black trash bags. As my grandmother begged him not to do it, he took the litter of about a dozen puppies and callously put them into the trash bag. He tied a knot in the top and walked across the backyard to the bluff’s edge over the Guyandotte and threw them into the river. That memory has never left me and still causes a flash of pain when recollected. It was life changing. I learned that day that people can be more evil than any demon in the bible.

Many years later, my cousin Katrina would tell me that his funeral procession was “3 miles long”. I didn’t say anything to her, let her have her sweet memories of him, but I thought to myself, would it really be that long if they knew the man I knew; a complete and disgusting contradiction between a man of God and a man of the Devil.

It wasn’t until I was myself in my 50s that I began to understand him better, which has allowed me to bestow grace upon him in my memories. He was a man, a person. And I’ve learned that people are complete and disgusting contradictions, including myself. I judged him through the lens he preached, and for nearly all my life, I’ve resented him for being flawed. And it wasn’t until I was in my 50s that I began to see the correlation between my own acts of violence, always in the name of preserving and taking care of my family. Even when it was my husband that I was violent towards.

Luckily, today, a flawed man that created his own share of pain in the world has grown into a man that most closely resembles my actual father -  a man of peace and quite strength who has turned rage into love and hate into acceptance; sowing smiles each day along the way.

II.

Kissing Cousins: An introduction to Sex

Many years later and after more than a few tries at finding Mr. Right, Barb ended up marrying the most successful man into the family. I call Carl the most successful not just because he was the most achieved or financially superior of my uncles, but more importantly his heart is bigger than Texas and he is a true American Hero; raising to the rank of a Major in the Army’s 82nd Airborne. Yes I respect him immensely but for good reason. So you can imagine my absolute horror when I was summoned into my Company’s Captains office during my brief tenure in the US Army at Fort Bragg and there Uncle Carl sat with Barb who was stabbing my heart out with her eyes.

After my first year of college at West Virginia University I signed up for the Army, just like a lot of other rudderless southern boys; black, brown, and white — the common denominator isn’t the color of our skin, it was the size of our family’s bank account.

But whoa Nelly, I was not suited for organized life where I’m told what to do, when to do, and how to do. I’m too independent minded. I was a lot of things that didn’t fly in the military. At WVU I started to drink too much but no drugs. In the Army I somehow got involved with a group of soldiers who did a lot of Acid and psychedelic mushrooms often as well as cocaine and PCP on breaks. ‘Somehow’ — that’s funny. His name was Jeff and he drove a candy apple red Jeep Wangler. For me it was a romance, for him it was just bros.

Not too far off the base there were buildings dotting the landscape. They all looked similar, old chipped paint on the exterior and oil stained parking lots being overtaken with grass growing in the cracks. One of those buildings remained starkly dark yet cars could be seen driving around to the back at a time of the night good church going folks where dreaming of heaven. It was the worst kept secret in Fayetteville.

The no sign bar was all lit up inside with it’s name in glowing neon lights “Tracxs” was a gay speakeasy with an enclosed entry to keep the cops back for a few minutes while the patrons fled out the back — remember, this is Cumberland County, North Carolina in the 1980’s home to Rev. Billy Graham and Senator Jesse Helms. Tracxs also had a fake wall behind the bars where soldiers would hide when the MP’s would pull onto the parking lot coming from all directions. One time I was in the bathroom getting a blowjob from another solider, a Captain with some Wisconsin sounding surname when the MP’s walked in on us. He was transferred to a different base in Minot North Dakota and I was forced into becoming a CI, a criminal informant for the US Army CID.

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) knew Jeff and “his crew” and they wanted me to put them into close proximity and to facilitate a deal with an undercover solider. By this time, it was obvious to me and my chain of command that I wasn’t cut out for the military. It wasn’t my dedication or ability, it wasn’t just because I was gay but that was the biggest part of it. Perhaps not in the way one might think. I wasn’t attracted to the men in my company, I wasn’t googling in the showers. Still, it made me seperate from them in mind and how I communicated with them about my personal life. If I’d only thought before signing up.

Once I was out of boot camp and infantry training at Fort Jackson I was sent to Fort Bragg home of the 82nd Airborne and it was my new permanent home. A few months after getting there I decide that I need cock and liquor. After evening chow was over, I drove from Fayetteville, North Carolina up to Morgantown, West Virginia (just southeast of Pittsburgh) and to my the life I knew at West Virginia University. I headed straight up High Street, past the Mountainlair, the Delt’s House, and the Sig Ep’s until I reached the Phi Delta Theta House, my old home after home.. On these illegal weekend trips north, I’d go to the football game with them on Saturday, go out the gay club on Saturday night, and drove back to North Carolina early Sunday morning. God what it was like to be young, so much energy and no need for sleep.

I was starting to enjoy the Army life. I had Jeff and his friends and when I needed some of my old life, I would skip out for the weekend and everything in my life was starting to go well — until it didn’t.

After one of my football and fraternity trips I was driving back down Interstate 77 across West Virginia’s spine and through the tunnel — that according to my maw-maw, John Henry had built. On the other side is Virginia and her breathtaking vistas of the towering Appalachian Mountains and her famous morning mist with hues of blue lifting out of the valleys in a day long procession; never really reaching the mountain tops before beginning it’s decent back into the valley. North Carolina’s border wasn’t far now, I’d be back in the barracks by 9.

After driving all night following a sexually tense after party with one of my Phi Delta Theta brothers I decided to pull off of Interstate 77 at the exit for Nations Ford Road and into Charlotte, hoping to find a 24 hours book store with glory holes. I needed to unload before heading back into the barracks. This was before the internet and before I was aware of ‘Dameon’s Guide’. Back in the day, one would look for the seediest, dirtiest part of any large town or city and find a bookstore with glory holes masking the agape mouths of local husbands, fathers, preachers, and perverts; I was a willing piece of meat at everyone I could find.

The sun had been up for nearly an hour but Charlotte is a southern city and that meant Sunday morning church so the city was still very much asleep and what seemed like a promising stop was turning out be wasted time and more blue balls. I drove a bit further turned on to Arrowood Road with it’s 24 hour gas stations, big rig trucks everywhere as the smell of diesel hung in the air and the thump-thump sound of cars racing overhead on I-77 filled your ears. It was over stimulating in the most Bret Easton Ellis way, which is why all of the junkies and their dealers hung out here as well one could imagine.

Ahead in the distance under a neon motel sign flashing Vacancy I saw a transvestite out working hoping to ‘entertain’ the early shift of factory workers, truck drivers about to head out onto America’s freeways and the three-piece suited men on their way to office towers downtown. I pulled over in front of the Economy Inn where the lady of the night was working.

“What the fuck, man—”

“I can show you where you’re trying to go,” he said, looking me over. “Oooh child… I got myself a Marine.”

“I’m Army, get out of the car.”

He smiled, soft hand against my face.

“Honey, if I can suck the cum out of my seventy-five-year-old sugar daddy, I can handle you. Twenty bucks.”

By the time he was finished with me I didn’t get back in the barracks until after noon when our company commander always did a Sunday formation. AWOL. Then on top of that I had written bad checks to a few places around Fayetteville and had been arrested. So by the time the captain was caught sucking my cock my time in the military was coming to a close if I didn’t end up in the brig.

I had been dating a married man that I had met at the no name speakeasy bar just off base and I was going to be Honorable Discharged thanks to the JAG and I was dreaming of moving in with Rick and raising his two kids. I was 19, he was 30 and his kids were teenagers. His wife? In my imagination she would just disappear, poof! But that’s not how it happened.

Rick and I had few places we could meet up to spend time together without someone finding out. One weekend when there was a large family wedding back in West Virginia that I wasn’t allowed to go out of town to attend, Rick and I broke into my Aunt Barb’s house just outside of Fayetteville to live together for the weekend. We frolicked naked through the woods and skinny-dipped by moonlight in their lake. We grilled steaks and ordered pizza. I felt like I was living in a fantasy. Come Sunday morning, we cleaned up the house, removed all traces, and kissed goodbye.

A few days later I was summoned into my Company’s Captain’s office.

“Sorry, Sergeant… I don’t understand. I did what CID asked. I’ve stayed out of trouble. What the hell did I do now?”

The sergeant didn’t answer. He walked me into Admin and told me to sit.

The seat was one of those old wooden ones — hard, unbending, and unnerving. Sweat ran down my back and pooled at my brow.

“Come in, Private,” said the Captain.

“Yes, sir.”

“Your uncle is telling me a troubling story, soldier. Care to explain?”

Before I could answer—

“Explain your sex games with my boy, you faggot!”

Barb’s voice cut through the room.

“You didn’t think I knew, did you? We caught him doing the same perverted shit with Sammy!”

Carl placed a hand on her leg.

The Captain didn’t look at her.

“Soldier, your uncle says you broke into his home this weekend. Stole guns. A coin collection.”

“And you had sex on my bed,” Barb snapped. “You filthy faggot. I ought to kill you.”

The words hung in the air.

“Wait outside,” the Captain said.

After more than an hour, I was called back in.

“Son, I don’t know what your aunt’s talking about — and I don’t want to. You’re lucky your uncle isn’t pressing charges. One more thing, your boyfriend’s wife followed him. Saw everything according to your Aunt.”

A pause.

“The boyfriend’s wife went back out to the house to kill you it seems. She met your Aunt instead. Listen, your Uncle just wants to know where his guns are.”

“I don’t know anything about any guns, sir,” I said, adding “and I don’t think Rick would have taken them either.”

Another pause.

“He knows you took the coin collection. He’s got you on camera. That’s a felony.”

“If you were mine, I’d have you in jail. Now get out.”

I turned to leave.

“You’re one lucky motherfucker, soldier. If it were up to me, you’d be dishonorably discharged. But you’ve got CID and JAG keeping you alive.”

A beat.

“Now get the fuck out.”

I sat in my car numb at first followed by the onset of undeniable decent into mortification. I needed whiskey. I pulled into the parking lot of the first bar I saw. After my third or fourth shot I raised my head up and looked around. I hadn’t noticed how dimly lit it was when I walked in earlier, you could see the cigarette smoke waffling above under the low hanging lights above the pool table. ‘Oh boy, this is perfect’ I said to myself. I asked the bartender for another shot of well whiskey; it didn’t burn, that would be too kind, it cut deep and sliced as it went down my throat leaving an after burn that surely felt like salt rubbed into an open would. I’ve had My Uncle’s potato moonshine - even it tasted better than this jet fuel — both of which should have come with a warning: May cause blindness.

“Whoa Nelly” I exclaimed as the world began to soften around the edges in this dungeon of souls I found myself in and all I could remember was that Rodney Adkins songs, If you’re goin’ through hell keep on moving … you might get out before the devil even knows you're there” So I sauntered over to the jukebox and ended up playing Folsom Prison Blues by good ole’ Johnny Cash.

I sat back down at the bar and order another shot. As the whiskey stripped my throat of any remaining feelings I began to think about how it all happened, how it all began. After downing another shot of the gut punch the room was getting a bit dizzy, or was I? I turned to my right, to the person sitting next to me and said, “did you hear West Virginia changed it’s state motto”?

I wan’t even really seeing the face, I wasn’t even looking at the person, I was looking through them into my past. “What was that fella,” said the man next to me. As I began to focus in on where the voice his features began to take shape and I quickly noticed the eagles on the collar of his leather bomber jacket with the familiar blue and gold patch on his shoulder. I suddenly felt more sober. “Sorry Sir, I was going to tell an off-color joke, Sir” I said as I shot to attention.

“You okay kid” he asked. “Sir, Yes Sir,” I shot back. “Relax boy, I retired from the military before you were probably born,” he said as he stuck out his hand to shake mine saying “Colonel Clayton Richards, nice to meet you.”

We exchanged banter like two men drinking near one another in a bar but I could see there was something more to this fellow, my gaydar was clocking this war hero. “Married” I asked. “Yep” he answered, “I’m married to the United States Army boy” he added. After a few more drinks we were both getting a little loose. “Care to tell me what’s swinging your cat by the tail” the full bird said to me. I figured what the hell, I don’t have anything to lose now.

I started to telling of the problems I was having in the military and how I had been going AWOL on the weekends or getting high on acid if I stayed on base when he interrupted me, “Boy that’s not what’s got you riled up, spill the beans boy, no judgement here”. I started to think about how I ended up in this bar, in this situation.

We were kids my two older cousins were brother and sister, he was maybe two years older than Jessie, the baby of the family - until their mother died and their father moved them to West Virginia to be near his new child bride, my aunt Mid with whom he had a new child thus regulating Jessie — a father and mother’s baby child — into the middle child, the middle girl. A mothers love she never really new.

Maybe that’s why she and her brother started having sex with me, even before I could produce semen. Jessie didn’t talk about Johnny and Johnny didn’t talk about Jessie. I never broke their code of silence. It was so much fun, I tried to get my cousin Katrina to play doctor with us but Jessie freaked out saying “She’ll tell her mother and I’ll get beat Jimmy.” Johnny was a different story. We would hang out on the weekends and in the summer his father would drop us off on an island in the middle of Smith Mountain Lake where Johnny and I would make tents out of tree branches and black garbage bags. We explored the islands at night and played lots of role playing games. He liked to call me, Sue, Missy or some other women’s name when he was putting his cock into my holes.

I must have been around 9 or 10 years old and a couple of years later while I was still playing doctor with Jessie and being Johnny’s bitch — I had sex with my younger cousin a couple of times, he was a few years younger than me and he was Barb’s son. It only happened twice with him when I a child myself and those memories came rushing back and started to merge with the meeting in the Captain’s office. Surely Barb knew I hadn’t seen her son since I left for college, when did she catch him I was thinking, then I began to think if she knew about Jessie and Johnny

Many years later I would go back to Gilbert to visit my family and of course Katrina offered to drive me around -so she could pepper me with questions. I wasn’t one of them if I ever had been and it was painfully obvious. I turned the table around on her and asked about her siblings.

Katrina gave me Jessie’s number like it was nothing.

“Did ya hear she won the lottery?” she said. “Blew through it already. Lives in a trailer over in Delbarton with some fella.”

I took the paper. Some things don’t change.

“Hello,” came a cigarette stained raspy voice and something heavier.

“Jessie, it’s Jim.”

A pause.

“Oh… hello,” she said — flat, like whatever used to live there had already left. No excitement to speak after nearly a decade.

We talked around everything that mattered. The lottery. Life. Nothing.

The one thing she wanted to talk about was Mid - my Aunt.

“Katrina could do no wrong,” she said. “Always telling lies to get us punished. That girl is evil.”

As she talked, my face burned. Not from surprise — from recognition.

What was done to them. What we did to each other. What none of us ever named. Joan Crawford would’ve taken notes on how to break a child.

I could hear it in her voice — not anger, not even sadness. Just absence. Like something had been hollowed out and left standing. It wasn’t just her. It was all of us.

I was discharged from the United States Army with an Honorable Discharge. It would be a long time before I lived honorably.

III.

Tent Revivals, Talking in tongues, and the Rapture: An introduction to God

The first time I saw one of my grandfather’s parishioners jump up out of her seat, throw her arms in the air, start dancing in place, and speaking in gibberish, I thought she must have been possessed — like that girl in the movie.

As I got older, I learned my grandfather’s church had a name for it. They called it “shouting.” It was what other churches might call witnessing.

I remember the first time I saw it happen in my own family. Mid jumped up out of her seat just like that woman before.

Arms in the air. Body shaking the same way and speaking a language no one else ever spoke — fast, loud, and nowhere — like a puppet whose strings were being pulled by a manic puppet master. Then another woman jumped up and started shouting.

“The Lord’s spirit is with us tonight,” my grandfather said, huffing and puffing, blowing his chest up like a gorilla about to fight for what’s his.

“Thank you Jesus,” he said — half spoken, half singing — like a nursery rhythm as he ran back and forth across the altar. It looked more like a stage to me.

Then the woman next to me jumped up, then a bunch of ladies all stood up throughout the church. Some raising their hands to the heavens, others flailing their hands and whole bodies where they stood; their bodies might be lifted up from the Lord’s spirit, but their feet had gravity boots on them. Imagine all that control not to step on your neighbors’ feet while still letting the Lord take you away. I wanted to be taken away right about then too. Anyone to anywhere real.

There was my grandfather up front on stage, moving his hands and body about like he was the conductor, and his parishioners were his symphony, and tonight he was playing Stravinsky’s – The Rite of Spring.

Spring time was my grandfather’s favorite time of the year. He looked forward to Holy Week, where he preached seemingly non-stop from Palm Sunday through Good Friday and a marathon session of preaching the Lord’s way, starting Saturday afternoon and continuing through the altar’s curtains being closed while the men washed each other’s feet, through the sharing of the Lord’s blood, through the sunrise service, and all the way into Sunday afternoon.

But his real love of spring time came with the Southern Baptist Tent Revivals, where his talent for preaching fire and brimstone brought him to life. Add in about a dozen congregations from across the region, put them all under a circus-sized tent for hours on end, and the natural body odors started turning rancid as the heat under the tents intensified. Women would be using hand fans to keep the sweat off their faces, not understanding, or not wanting to understand, they were making themselves hotter.

“I seen those jezebels fawning all over you,” my grandmother said. “Ah Ethel, you’re my only girl,” my grandfather said to my 50-something grandmother, who was now blushing. Come Mother’s Day, my aunts would descend on the house like a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills glam team, fluffing up her hair like she was wearing a Texas-sized bouffant and formal clothing that made her feel and look out of place. “This thing is scratching the tar feathers out of my neck,” she said once of a grey ensemble, adding, “it looks like what you want to bury me in.”

“Ah mother, you look beautiful,” my Aunt Mila said. My Aunt Sissy was finishing up making her hair closer to God when she said, “Mother, this is the best you’ve ever looked.”

“The best I’ve ever looked,” my grandmother said aloud to herself. My grandmother didn’t attend church often, rarely, in fact. “I don’t need to go up the road to be with God,” she would say.

“But don’t ya wanna get out and be with friends,” my grandfather would ask. And my grandmother’s reply was always the same in some variation, “I don’t want to go up there with all those heifers and listen to them squawk like chickens.”

Religion and God were woven into the mountains and into us — over time like the Guyandotte River slowly etched its way out of the heart of Appalachia and into the Ohio River.

It didn’t matter the season or day, God was part of every breath we took. And didn’t take.

When I was about ten, my mother was financially forced to raise me herself. I didn’t know her, but I was excited to and even more excited to get a respite from God’s hate in the big city of Huntington, West Virginia.

Instead I was enrolled at St. Joseph’s Catholic School. My accent was thick, my religion thicker, and I made sure the nuns knew they were wrong according to my pawpaw. That’s where I learned about being bullied.

On the weekends I was driven back down to my grandparents - my mother didn’t turn out to be like my maw maw; she didn’t cook like her and she didn’t love like her.

I didn’t get the respite from God’s judgmental eye when I was in Huntington either. Growing older also meant learning about myself and that I was different, but it was my grandfather and his Bible that named it. I was a homosexual.

“What does it mean when it says for man not to lie with another man, pawpaw?” I asked. “Never you mind that boy, just know it’s blasphemy to God,” he would say back.

“Why did you say the Jews would be stuck in a mountain when Jesus comes back again?” I’d ask.

Blasphemy.

“Pawpaw, what about the people in Africa who don’t know Jesus? Will they go to hell too?” I asked.

Blasphemy.

During the summers I went back to my grandparents and picked up where we left off. If we weren’t building that infernal house nail by nail, brick by brick, each summer it was something wildly ambitious, like extending the property’s bluff over the river to its very edge, nudging the Guyandotte a bit himself.The mountain of man I called my pawpaw.

A quarter century later in 2013, I saw someone outside of my grandfather’s church get up and throw their arms up in the air, while they danced in place and spoke nonsense.

And IT WAS IN AN LGBTQIA+ CHURCH!!! The MCC of Tampa Bay in St. Petersburg. I stared at the person doing the devil’s dance. For me it was PTSD, it was reliving trauma and my fight or flight response kicked in high gear. I stood up and ran out that church faster than a frog jumping out of the frying pan.

I’m not proud of that behavior and I presented the worst part of me for the world to see. A little boy afraid of someone feeling the holy spirit. Who was I to judge. I get it.

What helped me reconcile that person and all the people in my grandfathers church was my own out-of-body experience twice; both during my early months of recovery from addiction. After spending nine months in the recovery home for gay men called Shangri-La and it was.

It allowed me to connect with a new God, still unnamed, undefined but a God that I nevertheless turned my life over to and living in their will for me.

I was no longer trying to distance myself from their God, I was no longer trying to define God, I just accepted their existence. That opened the floodgates to my true recovery, not merely from mind-altering substances but also from soul-altering dogma in every breath I took.

I found the God that wasn’t a harsh judge full of anger and retribution; instead, I found a God of co-existence with everything living from the towering Giant Redwoods to the worms in the ground. I suppose some people rightly or wrongly refer to it as a sort of string theory, but my peace is that I don’t need to define it, justify it, or explain it and isn’t that faith?

All I know is that I no longer was annoyed or angry with the crying baby in the bench behind me on my way to work on a city bus. Other peoples opinions faded in the light I was walking in. It honestly felt like I was walking on a cloud. And the less I took that feeling for granted the more I was blessed with it.

After nine months in the recovery home, I moved out on my own and for the first time ever- I lived alone. I started painting. The angst, the pent-up rage, and the nightmares more than dreams of the depraved sex I had on drugs needed an outlet.

My guilt, shame, loss it was the perfect soup for artistic expression and I created some great art that sometimes, like my writing, was too direct and too literal for some folks. But for those who got it.., I felt seen maybe for the first time in a long time.

One of those paintings was hues of yellow on a black canvas.

Abstract.

During the painting, I saw God’s face on my canvas and I literally cum in my pants. I say that not to be dramatic or to take liberty, it really happened. That’s how I found a way forward in accepting people being moved by something greater than what’s known.