Chainsaw Magazine

“Orange Turns To Crimson”

Nowadays my hair is like a Bama Crimson color, but it was Clemson orange when I was
a little kid.
That made it rough growing up in Chrichton. I was one of about eight or ten white kids in
my elementary school, and the only one with bright orange hair and freckles. Chrichton
is the neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama where that viral video about the leprechaun in
the tree comes from. All my old neighbors and classmates talking about they saw a
leprechaun up in a tree. “I want the gold. Give me the gold.” That’s what we became
known for. If you tell anybody from Mobile you grew up in Chrichton, that’s what they
say. In my case, after they look at me shocked, like, “your white, freckled ass is from
Chrichton?” Then, “Give me the gold. I want the gold.”
We moved there when I was in second grade. Those first days were really the worst
days. Being new and looking the way I did made a big difference as an elementary kid.
But by the time middle school hit everybody knew I was harmless. I learned to take the
shit talk and give a little sass back. My daddy had the worst advice of anybody. He
would tell me to go up and hit the biggest kid who talked trash on me. He would not hold
back on the racist shit, either. If I had done that, I’d be dead or at least permanently
disfigured. If I had called Devontre Martin the stuff my daddy told me to call him? Shit.
But by middle school everybody had tired of being mean to me. They just thought it was
funny as hell when I would sass them. They had figured out I was a sissy by then, so all
the girls kind of took me under their wing.
My daddy got us stuck in Chrichton when he took a job at the Verbatim plant about the
time my baby brother was born. We could have stayed in Clyde, North Carolina, which
is a real pretty town up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My grandpa was a preacher up
there and him and Grandma have a real pretty place overlooking the valley. But my
daddy drank and he was always mad at my grandpa. He said all those holy rollers think
they’re better than us. He always said us like Mama, Curtis, and I had anything to do
with him and Grandpa not getting along.
Chrichton was perfect for Daddy. It was cheap enough to get by on his plant wages, and
it’s in Mobile where all anybody cares about is drinking and fishing, which is all Daddy
ever cared about. You can fish in the mountains of western North Carolina, but it’s
mostly river fishing for trout and stuff, so I think Daddy liked Mobile better because he
could sit on his ass on a pier or by an inlet while he fished and focus more on drinking.
My mama was mostly a stay-at-home mom. She worked sometimes, when things were
tough, I guess. Daddy was on suspension at the plant one time for being drunk on the
job and she took a part-time job at CVS stocking shelves at night. That was sixth or fifth
grade. It sucked being at home with just Daddy. He didn’t ever want us bothering him.
He’d sit in the living room in his underwear, drunk, chain smoking and watching the

Weather Channel and if we made too much noise he’d holler, “ya’ll shut the hell up.” We
learned to listen, too. He got up and smacked the taste out my mouth one time. We
were running back and forth. There was a bathroom in between our two bedrooms. I
was jumping on my bed daring Curtis to come find me and Daddy came in and slapped
me upside my head right off of my bed and down to the floor. Then he grabbed me by
my throat and told me I better listen when he told me something. That smell that was
coming off him as I stared choking into his crazy red face still gives me a feeling. The
mixed scents of sweat, alcohol sterility, and dry cigarette tongue turn something on in
me that makes me want to hurt myself in a weird, sexy way; to feel some deep pleasure
from sacrificing my body for love.
Mama was a buffer when she wasn’t out working. I hate to say it, but she took the licks
me and Curtis would’ve got if she hadn’t been around. I used to hear them at night,
sometimes even at four or five in the morning before Daddy went to work. I know he got
up early and drank his vodka before work because I peeked out and saw him more than
once. Sometimes he’d want something from Mama at those early morning times. When
I was little, I just thought he probably wanted her to fix him something to eat or he was
upset about not being able to find one of his rods or something, the kind of things he
would gripe about all the time. He would be grumbling and talking all stern, then go
softer with a coarse, raspy whisper. Mama would fix breakfast for me and Curtis on
those mornings without saying a word.
I never stood up to him, but Curtis tried several times. Curtis was fearless. I always
cowered, probably because I’m a sissy. Daddy could see that I was a sissy early on and
that made him really hate me. He had a little respect for Curtis for being tough and
fearless. But Curtis took some licks for that, too. So, I guess we both got it bad from
Daddy, but for different reasons.
I know Curtis is ashamed of me now. I don’t really blame him. He’s got his life pretty
together. He runs the landscaping for all the city government buildings downtown. He’s
responsible for that whole plaza on Government Street, got about twenty people
working for him. His two boys are pretty much grown now. Will is going to college at
Bishop State, and Jeremy works for his daddy as a groundskeeper. They aren’t fuckups
like me and Curtis were at their age. I guess they don’t see their mama too much.
Curtis comes over here to see Mama about once every week or two. He carries her to
church every now and again. He’s got this girlfriend; she’s got a son about Jeremy’s
age. We think Curtis will probably marry her. She’s got him going to church, which is
something we never did growing up. When he comes to see Mama, I try to be outside
working in my garden. I used to sit in the living room with the two of them, but Curtis
always seemed like he was about to blow up at me. He would act real put out if I spoke.

I could tell that he was ashamed of me and that he just wanted Mama to himself. So
now I just stay out of his way.
Daddy could tell I was a sissy, I think, before I even had any idea. In fourth grade they
gave us all those standardized tests, and I came out looking good. I guess I scored in
the very top percentile for all the categories. I was recommended to all these gifted
programs. They took me out of my normal classes and had our family go up to
Tuscaloosa and Montgomery so I could be involved in all these writing camps, space
camps, and nerdy little creativity exercises. I did that for like three summers, I think.
It felt off to me, though. I really didn’t need one more thing making me different from all
the other kids. Mama was so proud about it, telling all her sisters and cousins, bragging
on me every chance she got. “Oh, my sweet little Cameron is a genius.” That
embarrassed me, too. Daddy acted like he was proud in front of other people, but in
private he looked at me with even more apprehension and derision than before. And he
let it be known in no uncertain terms that he did not appreciate the fact that these trips
to Tuscaloosa and Montgomery cut into his fishing and drinking time. This in private, as
well. He always just smiled and kept quiet when the subject of my gifted mind was
discussed with anyone outside the immediate family. But among the four of us, he left
no doubt that it was nothing but a pain in his ass. Besides the inconvenience of it, I think
it just confirmed to him that I was something strange and soft that he didn’t understand
or like. I was the biggest impediment to the little bit of pleasure he could get out of his
hardworking, redneck life. Which, as far as I could ever tell, he only got by sitting next to
some water in silence with crickets chirping all around while getting blind drunk.
There was a little stocked pond full of catfish and bass at the foot of the mountain where
my grandparents lived in Clyde. They had a doublewide set up on a flat spot on the side
of a mountain with a little gravel driveway leading to it. Grandpa’s church was just down
the valley, about a half a mile past that pond. Their house wasn’t anything fancy, but it
always felt so nice to me. Grandma kept it so clean. She always had flowers in vases.
She and Mama loved going together to all the antique stores that are everywhere up in
the mountains. Grandma had a big old metal milk jug next to the front door and a rusty
old draw knife hanging on the wall in her living room, I remember.
Grandma and Grandpa loved Mama like she was their own daughter, and whenever we
went and stayed with them Mama, Curtis, and I would hang around their house making
meals and watching tv on the couch with Grandpa. He would pay me and Curtis a
quarter an hour to rub his feet while we sat there watching Judge Wapner or Andy
Griffith. A few times during the summer Grandma sent us kids out with buckets to pick
blackberries from the briar patches that grew along the barbed wire enclosing the
pasture. We’d bring back the berries, and she’d bake a great big blackberry cobbler for

us. If we stayed overnight, Daddy would end up down there at that stocked pond by the
second day.
I stayed straight and narrow through middle school. I started hanging around with all
girls at school, though, and acting fruitier. Middle school was when I really let that part of
my personality out of the closet. Acting that way and getting a bunch of girlfriends who I
could have fun and be a sissy with protected me. The guys just accepted me as
somebody they didn’t have to prove anything to or take too seriously. At home, I
learned to avoid Daddy. He was always drunk as hell, and his movements were
predictable, so it wasn’t that hard. So, in middle school I kept getting good grades and
making everybody believe I was a genius, but I let my gay out too.
It was freshman year in high school when the darkness began to emerge. I started
taking long walks, just to get out of the house. On the weekend or anytime school was
out, especially. I was clinched tight in that house. I just hated the way I felt when I was
there, so I started to walk. I explored all of Chrichton, then I started getting familiar with
the rest of Mobile. I started slipping a cigarette or two out of Mama or Daddy’s pack to
take with me on my rambles. Then I figured out how to get my own. I started noticing
older men paying attention to me if I hung around in front of certain convenience stores.
That’s how I ended up drinking and doing drugs. These older men would see me
hanging out alone and they started talking to me. At first, I just wanted cigarettes. I had
this one man, Jarvis, get me cigarettes once or twice. He would chat with me a little, tell
me to be careful out here, tell me I was a sweet boy, sweet little thang, stuff like that.
I liked the way Jarvis talked to me. We met at a Sunoco station around the Loop. He
was in town for work, staying at a Days Inn. At first, he was just friendly and I thought he
needed somebody to talk to. I couldn’t understand why this grown man wanted to be my
friend, but I was lonely and angry and looking for somebody, somewhere out in the
world. So, he bought me cigarettes a few times and we would just stand around outside
the Sunoco for a couple hours talking and smoking cigarettes. Then he asked me if I
liked liquor. He said he had some back in his hotel room. I had always sworn to myself
that I would not be a drunk, because Daddy was a drunk. But I really had a thing for
Jarvis because of how nice he was to me, so I went to his hotel room with him.
He was staying in one of those suites with a kitchenet and a living room. I plopped down
on the couch and Jarvis got out a bottle of Evan Williams and a bottle of Coca Cola and
made me a drink. It was my first taste of liquor. I was fifteen. I thought it was wonderful. I
drank that first one and Jarvis suggested I take off my shirt. I thought that was just a
wonderful idea. I took it off and asked him to make me another drink while I kind of
sashayed around the room. I was so happy. I felt so good and welcomed there in his
hotel room, like I’d finally found a place where I belonged. Jarvis asked me what kind of
music I liked, then I remember clearly that song by Xscape playing, “Kick off your shows

and relax your feet, Party on down to the Xscape beat, just kickin’.” I got very drunk. At
some point, it occurred to me that I needed to get home or I would face a beating from
Daddy. That’s the thought that brought me out of the fog of drunkenness. Next thing I
knew I was throwing up. Jarvis managed to get me into the bathtub before I puked all
over his room. As I stood over the sink washing the puke out of my mouth, I realized I
was stripped down to my briefs and Jarvis was sitting on the couch with his head in his
hands, crying and saying, “I can’t do this. I’m sorry. Don’t tell anybody I brought you up
here. Please. I can’t do this. I’m so sorry.” He called me a cab, and I prepared to go
home by using some mouth wash and smoking some cigarettes, trying to cover up the
smell of whiskey. I couldn’t figure out why Jarvis was so remorseful. I had had a
wonderful time.
That experience showed me that I had a power to get the attention and the freedom I
hadn’t even known I was craving. I learned that I could use my sweet little lost sissy boy
act and these lonely older men would pick me up and want to party with me. I started
doing a lot of that.
Most of the guys who picked me up were more experienced and sleazier than Jarvis. I
had a few very scary and traumatic nights. But I kept taking my chances and soon I
found myself in the gay party scene. I learned to use alcohol and drugs to heighten the
excitement and deaden the fear. Besides, the abuse wasn’t anything I wasn’t already
kind of accustomed to.
By the time I was getting close to finishing high school my parents had given up on any
effort to control what I was doing. I stopped going to school towards the end of eleventh
grade. Going out partying with men had been a weekend thing for a while, or I would
sneak out at night. Sometimes I would stay out all night and not get back home until
after school the next day. Momma stopped even mentioning it. After three or four times
of that happening, she stopped asking where I had been in the morning. I would come
home like I’d been at school all day and she would just pretend like everything was
normal.
I think she decided to handle me this way because of one time when I got caught red
handed coming in the house at five in the morning. Daddy was up drinking vodka and
watching the Weather Channel and he heard me come in. I was done up in a crop top
and some little shorts. I had been out at a club with a little old rich queen I knew. Daddy
beat the shit out of me that morning and called me every hateful word for faggot in the
book while he was doing it. He really beat me. I probably should have gone to the
hospital. So, after that, I think Mama decided I was safer out there than at home with
Daddy.
Eventually I stopped coming home all together. I just hustled and lived off the largesse
of older men. It was an unstable life, of course, but I was so messed up on booze and

drugs all the time that that didn’t bother me. All I was really thinking about then was how
to keep my buzz up. I was taking pills, drinking, or smoking meth every day after I
stopped living with Mama and Daddy. My party didn’t stop. I got involved with a man in
his forties who was a nurse with a pill hustle. He could get large quantities of Percs,
Oxys, Roxis, Xanax, Dilaudid, Fentanyl, everything. He would sell a lot of it in the gay
clubs and at raves. I became his little plaything, and I sank deep into an opioid fog. I
was eighteen when I met him. I got locked up for possession for six months when I was
twenty. I barely remember anything from those two years.
I was in Panama City when I got arrested. I came to behind the wheel of a purple Jeep,
the kind with no doors or a roof on it, just a roll cage open to the air. I had wedged it up
against the side of a building in a parking lot right on Front Beach Road. The Jeep
belonged to Randy, the nurse who was my pill supplier/ sugar daddy. I vaguely
remember leaving a bar in Mobile and running off to PCB with a couple friends who said
they had keys to a condo down there. When the cops pulled me out of the Jeep, I
apparently had a glass pipe with meth residue in it and twelve Percocet’s in my
possession. And I was drunk as hell.
I detoxed in jail. That was the worst part of it, the sickness. The only nice thing my
boyfriend did was to not press charges for the Jeep. Other than that, he cut me loose.
Everybody did. I did my six months in Bay County Correctional detoxing and crazy as
hell. I was so mad in there. The Lord must have had his hand on me for me to not get
into any fights, because, once my mind cleared a little bit from all the drugs I had been
taking, I was sick and furious. All I could think about every waking moment was how
everybody I had ever known had done me wrong. If they hadn’t beaten, raped, and
abused me, they had abandoned me and left me for dead. I became extremely bitter
and hateful during those six months.
I was remanded to a halfway house in Cedar Grove when I got out. I was the only gay
man there. All the other men hated me. My roommates banned me from speaking in the
room. They said the way I talked made them sick and they couldn’t stand to be around it
in the room where they slept and undressed. But there was a very nice man named Otis
there who tried to read the Alcoholics Anonymous book with me. He drove the van that
took us to meetings. We had to go to at least three meetings a week. I went, but I never
got involved. We would go to this clubhouse sort of place with all these tables set up in
a big room. I would pick a table by myself. What was I going to do, sit with my
roommates who hated me and threatened me every day of my life?
The halfway house got us jobs. I ended up in a seafood packing place with my hands in
ice up to my elbows all day. But the money was all right and I managed to get out of the
halfway house, get a place, and a moped to get back and forth to work on. I was living
alone, working alone, and still burning with hatred for everything that had happened to

me, everybody who had abused and abandoned me. I was on probation and getting
drug tested a couple times a month. I didn’t want to go back to jail, so I stayed clean. I
would sit in my little apartment and watch people coming and going from the Bingo
Palace and the Circle K and imagine what life must be like for them. I would look out the
window, eaten up with hatred and loneliness, smoking cigarettes and listening to the tv.
Curtis came and found me. He had a warrant out for him in Alabama. He was slinging
meth and he’d heard from some of my old crowd that I’d ended up in PCB. I had called
Mama one time to tell her that I was alive and working in a seafood packing warehouse.
I had not given her a phone number or any other contact information. That was enough
for Curtis, though. He was waiting in a royal blue Hyundai Sonata, sitting in the parking
lot outside the seafood warehouse at shift change.
“Hey, Cam. Daddy got knocked off a ladder by a forklift at the plant. He was in the
hospital for a couple months. They just let him out, but he’s ‘bout crippled and it don’t
seem like his mind is right. I ain’t been back home for a minute, though. The law is after
me in Mobile. I hoped I could stay with you, just for a few days.”
He spewed it all out just like that right off the bat.
Curtis was selling and using meth, shooting it at that. All that badass fearlessness he
had used to stand up to Daddy was turned against the world. He was going a million
miles an hour. He played it cool long enough to get into my place, but then he was
running and gunning. He dropped a suitcase with some clothes in it at my apartment, I
cooked us a frozen lasagna, then he was out the door. From then on he would turn up
at random times. He came in once as I was headed out for second shift and showed me
a fat roll of bills, said it was thirty-thousand dollars. He was giddy and he had that lean,
twitchy meth look. Then a couple weeks after that he showed up all beaten and bloody
and said he had to lay low for a while.
“These motherfuckers out here think they got me shut down, but they don’t know my
ass.”
He threw an ounce of meth down on the little coffee table I’d picked up at the Goodwill. I
swear I didn’t buy a glass top table for that reason.
I started using with Curtis. I just smoked or snorted it, but Curtis was wide open,
shooting up and acting wild. I was scared of him. He would get high and start talking
crazy. At first, he started talking about killing our daddy, how he was glad that Daddy
was suffering, it gave him pleasure. He went on and on about that for days as we
stayed in my little apartment with the shades drawn. I would go out to work after not
sleeping for two days and when I’d come home, he’d start right back up talking to me
about how much he hated Daddy. Then he switched to Mama, how he hated her for
allowing Daddy to treat us the way he did. He reminded me of story after story from our

childhood, and some I think he made up in his tweaker imagination. This went on for
several days, I don’t really know how long. Then that ounce started running low and he
decided he had to go out into the streets again.
“I can leave you a gram or two,” he offered. I said no that time.
I went back to my quiet, boring life of looking out the window and feeling sorry for
myself. I drank a ton of water and got some golden seal and passed my drug test. I
hoped Curtis wouldn’t turn up anymore so I could stay clean and try to find a calm way
to live. I dreamed that somebody would give me a little room on the back of one of the
beach mansions in Destin, let me stay there and be their maid. I had this fantasy that it
was some sweet little old rich lady who looked like my grandma in Clyde. She would sit
and drink coffee with me and I could clean up after her and listen to her tell me all about
her life and her tv shows. I started living in this fantasy all the time while I was at work.
Then I’d lay down on my couch as soon as I got back to the apartment and dream about
how it would feel to live like that until I fell asleep. I had been on a meth binge with
Curtis for a week or two, so I didn’t do anything but work and sleep for a month after he
left.
But after a few months, Curtis came back. First thing he did was sleep for about a week.
He still had that blue Sonata, except it was dinged up all over now. He came in one day
when I was off work, didn’t say much, just “I need to rest.” I was just watching tv and
doing nothing. He sat down on the couch and laid his head all the way back and sighed
real deep. I told him he could sleep in my bed for a while if he wanted. He said nothing,
just got up and started walking that way. Then, “I showed those motherfuckers who the
fuck I am,” without looking back at me. He didn’t come out of that bedroom, at least not
while I was home, for several days.
When I came home from work about a week later, the Sonata was gone and there was
a silver Grand Cherokee with car lot tags in its place. Curtis was in the apartment with a
woman. They had a bottle of Patron they were pouring shots out of. She was wearing a
bikini top and some daisy dukes, and real fluffy bedroom slippers. Curtis just stared
hard at her body, rubbed on her, and sucked his teeth. He didn’t introduce us except to
say, when she kind of slithered across the room towards me, “Naw, baby. He ain’t into
you,” and he laughed. They passed me a shot and I drank it. Then they said they were
going out and left. That shot whet my whistle, so I went out and got a six pack and
drank it while I watched the world go by on N. East Avenue all night.
Things turned after that. Curtis started drinking all the time, bringing strange people
around, and flashing money. He would just turn up at the apartment from time to time.
He’d give me some meth and a couple hundred-dollar bills, I guess as payment on the
rent. I didn’t see him using meth anymore, though his drinking was intense.

I got into the meth then. I would start up smoking and immediately feel like I was locked
in. The compulsion would take over, and two or three days would slip away. After a
couple months my job was gone, and I had to ask Curtis for all the rent money. When I
first asked him, he acted real pissed off. He was in the living room drinking and
watching tv with one of his skeezy girls, and I just dropped the subject and went into my
bedroom to take another hit off the pipe. But I guess he thought it over, because he
came in a little bit later.
“I can start giving you the money to pay the rent, but I got to use this place to make
some money if I do that. You keep your name on the lease, and you can live here and
stay high. But you drop off the check every month and we keep it like it’s your place.
Sound cool?”
He had me. It sounded like a deal at the time. I wish I hadn’t been high for that
conversation.
After that there were skeezy chicks coming and going all the time. My apartment turned
into a meth trap whore house. Sometimes I would be in my room, and Curtis would
come in and say, “get the fuck out.” I would have to go walk the streets tweaking out like
a psycho. It was a nightmare. I heard a woman cry for hours in the living room one day
as I stayed holed up in the bedroom. I didn’t know who she was or what had happened
to her. I would turn up the tv and sit right next to it to try and drown out the sound of
strangers fucking.
Curtis wasn’t always around. Sometimes other men would bring in the whores and
drugs. There were a couple guys that I became familiar with. A big fat guy with corn
rows and jail tattoos became a regular fixture. He introduced himself as Tim-Bo.
“That’s what errbody be calling me.” He was one of these white boys who are convinced
they are black.
Tim-Bo started treating me sweetly. He reminded me of when I was a teenager and I
would get a sugar daddy. I knew what that treatment was all about, but Tim-Bo was the
one bringing the meth into the apartment, so I made peace with my fear. We would flirt
every time he was there. He’d come in and say something like, “Come get your candy,
you lil’ prissy ass bitch,” in a playful way like I was a dog or something. I’d play my part
and sashay out of my room for him to fill up my pipe. It was a power thing that I could
see him getting off on.
Tim-Bo’s flirting became heavier, more insistent. I went along with it because I needed
continued access to his drugs. That was the price I had to pay. He knew the score and
relished it. Soon I was sucking his dick. I don’t think Curtis knew what was going on.

Tim-Bo would tell the whores or junkies he brought in things about me. He would laugh
and tell them I was, “another one of his bitches,” or tell them the things he did with me,
that I loved his dick.
We were there alone one night, and Tim-Bo was drinking vodka and snorting lines of
meth. He insisted I give him head. He was rough, aggressive. He wielded his powerful
bulk against me. I tried to assuage him with pleasure, but he was intent on domination
and debasement. I had been in this situation before, but Tim-Bo was big and strong,
very high and drunk, like a mad dog. It got out of control. He injured me very badly; my
rectum, one of my cheeks caved in, my spleen ruptured, one lung collapsed. I was
knocked out. He must have realized he had gone too far because he ran away into the
night. I came to in the hospital.
Mama came to get me once I’d been released from the ICU. I couldn’t believe how old
and small she looked. Her hair was long and stringy, blond and gray. He little arms and
shoulders were like those of a dwarf, her belly was round, and her back humped over.
She took me back to our house in Chrichton to nurse me back to health, but I’ve never
really been healthy since Tim-Bo did what he did to me.
Daddy was there at the house too, being nursed by Mama. He was worse off than me.
He’d broken both of his femurs and his back when he fell. He’d suffered a head injury
too, and his mind was gone. He was like a helpless baby. He just sat in a recliner
looking at the tv, all drugged up on pain pills. Mama had to change his diapers.
I got to where I could get up and move around the house within a couple months, so I
started to help Mama wherever I could. Mama worked out everything, so Daddy and I
were both getting disability. Verbatim took pretty good care of Daddy with a settlement
and full medical treatment. We didn’t have to worry about money or a job. But Mama
had her hands full.
Mama got a call from Florida. It was Curtis calling from prison. He asked if I was there at
the house. He didn’t even know if I had survived the attack. He had gone looking for
Tim-Bo when he put together what had happened. They got into a fight at a trailer park
in Crystal Lake and Curtis had shot and killed Tim-Bo. He’d been convicted of
aggravated manslaughter and possession of an unregistered firearm and sentenced to
twenty-five years. He was twenty years old.
I tried to help Mama take care of Daddy. Between him and me, the house was full of
pain medication. We did our best to keep him numb, because when he wasn’t heavily
doped up, he was in agony. He would just sit in his recliner and moan. His many
wounds would not heal. But he was docile as a baby. No more of his threatening or
intimidation.

About a year after I go back on my feet, Daddy went septic and had to go into the
hospital. The doctors didn’t hold out much hope right from the start. Mama went down to
Florida to visit Curtis in prison and break the news to him. I stayed in Mobile and had
myself a pain killer buffet.
When Daddy died the warden was ready to grant Mama’s request to let Curtis out for a
day to attend the funeral. But Curtis declined. He chose to stay in prison rather than go
to Daddy’s funeral.
It has just been Mama and me ever since then. I have been given several diagnoses
over the years for mental and physical illnesses. I survived bladder cancer about ten
years ago, but it wrecked my body even further. I’m on an oxygen tank and I take about
thirty pills every day. They tell me I’m bipolar, PTSD, and OCD. But I have found a way
to get by all right, with Mama’s help and companionship.
Curtis was a mad dog that first year in prison. Mama would try calling and visiting
regularly, but half the time Curtis was in the hole for fighting and raising hell. But after
Daddy died, he became a model inmate. He became active in drug addiction recovery
and church groups inside the prison, and he took classes to get his high school diploma,
then an associate’s degree in business administration. He carried on a relationship with
one of his old meth whores by writing letters back and forth. She had cleaned up and
was looking to make things right. He was released on good behavior after fourteen
years. The two of them took up together immediately and had Curtis’s two sons. They
stayed married down in Florida for five or six years, but the relationship petered out, I
guess. She ran off with a woman and Curtis moved back up to Mobile with the boys. I
have never heard Curtis say a word about her since he’s been back home.
I take care of Mama, and she takes care of me. I took up gardening. That’s been a long
time ago, now. Everybody in our neighborhood looks forward to my Pink Mules Ears
and my Amelia tomatoes every year. I always like to do melons in the summer, too.
Cantaloupe and watermelon. That’s what I like to spend my time doing, growing things.
Mama goes and does things with a lady’s church group sometimes, but not much. They
all wear big purple hats, and they go out for brunch in the Loop some Sundays. Those
ladies are kind to her, but Mama prefers to keep to herself most of the time. I know it’s
partly because of some of the fits I’ve had. Sometimes I lose control of my emotions and
I make a scene. People don’t have a lot of understanding for that. So, Mama and I keep
to ourselves. She cooks and cleans and goes to the bank, the social security office, and
to pick up my disability checks. But she’s slowing down now.
Mama has a picture of Curtis and me sitting on the front porch of Grandma and
Grandpa’s house in Clyde with that beautiful valley spread out behind us. We’re just a
couple of little shits. I have my arm around Curtis and I’m looking right at the camera.
Curtis is looking up at the side of my face, sort of biting his lower lip and smiling, like

he’s waiting for the next funny and wonderful thing I’m going to say. Every time I look at
that picture, I can’t believe how bright orange my hair used to be.

Alter Call

Richie’s mother had a brother fifteen years her senior named Cecil Hamrick. Cecil was legendary in the family. He was tall, broad shouldered, his head like a bust of a Roman senator, bald on top with close-cropped gray otherwise. Richie had always known him in a three-piece suit, false and prominent pearly whites gleaming in his face. But his legend derived from his hellraising days and subsequent redemption. He had been in and knew about the world. He had served prison time in Maryland for a desperate robbery. There was another family somewhere, sired before the one he so stolidly supported with Richie’s aunt Cora Mae. He had a guitar that he used to praise the Lord, but there was a honky-tonk past that brought him as close to fame as anyone in the family had ever come. 

Cecil had ended up down and out in Atlanta, drinking and doping himself to death in the bushes of Piedmont Park when a preacher made a project out of him. The story was famous in north Florida Churches of God. Cecil was among the most debased and defiant of Satan’s captives. He had run Pastor Clyde Ward off time and time again, sometimes at knife point. But Pastor Ward had not given up on him. One day, dope sick and hungover, Cecil allowed Pastor Ward to join him on his park bench and minister to him. As the Pastor spoke of how the crucifixion and resurrection had freed all God’s children from the bondage of sin and death, Cecil felt the sweet breezes of eternity sweep through his soul, clearing out the dust of sin and shame. He broke down in surrender to the healing, sanctifying Blood of Christ. From that day on Cecil was a changed man. He put down the booze and the dope and dedicated his life to serving God and loving his fellow sinners. He went to Bible college and graduated top of his class. He returned to north Florida with Cora Mae, the new wife he had met at Pastor Ward’s church and started a bus ministry at the Nazarene Church of God bringing addicts and alcoholics from Duval County’s many detox and rehab facilities to church on Sunday. He worked the same job for the next few decades as he and Cora Mae built a family of their own. He was as fine a specimen of manhood as one could wish to meet. 

When Richie was twelve Uncle Cecil and Aunt Cora Mae asked his mother if they could take him on an excursion to Atlanta in their RV to see old Pastor Ward and have a little fun. Richie’s parents had only recently divorced, and Cecil and Cora Mae wanted to shower him with love and goodness.                     

They dragged the RV north in Cecil’s Silverado and ensconced in a park near Hapeville. They went to the theme parks and attractions, caught a Braves game, took a photo of Richie with a statue of Hank Aaron, and ate hot dogs and frosted oranges. 

Richie came to know the affection that was part of the piety of his family on this trip. His aunt rose early in the RV park and made bacon and eggs for him. His uncle would already be out of doors, sitting at a picnic table with his Bible with its dozens of page markers. It was spring then and the azaleas of Georgia remained indelible in his memory thereafter. The creek rush of the RV park overlaid the Atlanta traffic hum, much as Richie’s ambient lust occasionally fought its way above the rim of his fascination and reverence for his pious uncle. Rage and lust, those sweet mornings when the song of the brown thrasher gave way to sweaty afternoons of downtown connector traffic, Richie in pubertal glow of rage and lust in the backseat of the Silverado, confusion and craving in the line for the Coca-Cola museum. What of his mother’s dire earnestness, was he supposed to be saved from his father? What did Cecil want for him? He would lie in the RV at night, daring the low, sustained moan of elders asleep with his rosaceous fantasizing, his daring wantonness, his vengeful slobbering. The love he knew Cecil, Cora Mae, his mother, even his father, had for him was near, palpable. He was grateful for their love to the depths of his being. He held no animosity for any of them. But he could not understand how they could offer this to him. What did they expect him to do with this that they offered? Why had they all failed to do anything with it? He remembered sitting on Cecil’s knee, the man’s great, coarse hands on his meager shoulders. A flush and blossom of goodness welled up within at the memory. Then why had the man brought him to this crater of commerce, this sweltering massacre of teeming scandal and fraud? Everywhere he looked there were demanding, cajoling, insinuating, alluring, inviting deceptions. But his mother, father, aunt, uncle, et al. seemed not to notice.    

They checked out of the RV park early on Sunday morning and went directly to the Briarcliff Baptist Church to hear Pastor Clyde Ward preach. The sanctuary was off a tree-lined major thoroughfare in Atlanta’s prosperous Morningside section. The ponderous organ chords and mildew spilled forth into the parking lot. Elderly white folks tottered into the vestibule, gripping wrought iron where it was available. 

 When Pastor Ward met his uncle both men’s dentures shone and their eyes went misty. They gripped one another by the elbows and looked for a long time into each other’s eyes. Finally, Pastor Ward acknowledged Cora Mae.

“Pastor, this is our nephew, Richard Norman,” his aunt offered.    

The Pastor shook his hand and then hugged his aunt. Then they took pews to observe the service. Pastor Ward gave an impassioned convocation on the wages of sin. Richie tearfully accepted the alter call and gave his heart to the Lord.