I’m an old man now and it’s my understanding that I have to give a trigger warning here before we start. What I’m about to share deals with bigotry and hatred and violence. Things that I feel will be dealt with in a righteous way after the mortal coil is shed, but sometimes, those things are punished here in this life.
It’s one of the great mysteries of life; a man’s purpose. Most men fumble through everyday of their lives in an aimless way, beset with confusion, anger, grief, and a dull ache that never truly goes away. Most men never find their purpose. I had always assumed my purpose was prose and the gift of an imaginative tale told well, but I was wrong. I found my true purpose on a sticky August night in 1964 at the end of a rope.
Just a month before that night, I had followed an elusive muse in my car while I was listening to some music. She was a beautiful thing, that muse, but I had only caught a few glimpses of her, and I was convinced that if I stayed true on my aimless course, she would come to me and I’d be able to share her beauty on the page. How many backroads I cruised down, I cannot say, but I ended up somewhere that I truly had no business being.
I came to an epiphany, a creative revelation, and I felt the need to pull over on a dark country road and celebrate with a cigarette. A man is at his worst of wits when passion eclipses all reason and he fails to notice his surroundings. Something unholy had been waiting for me out there in the dark on that wooded country road, and in the middle of all the bloody mayhem, I was overcome with a fear and a terror that I had never experienced up to that point of my young life.The good Lord in all his wonderful mercy carried me through the horrific attack that had almost taken my life At the time, I had been amazed that I had survived such a vile and evil thing that no man should have to endure, let alone live to tell about it.
In a thick haze, I somehow escaped my attacker, and fled back into my car. I can’t say that I had anything to do with the drive back to the city and to the hospital because I’ve no memory of the affair whatsoever.
Once I was carried through safely on the other side of the bloody ordeal, I swore that I would live the rest of my life following the good Lord and His direction. Of course, I had no idea what direction that was going to be.
For two weeks I sat in the hospital in a feverish state, burning with a fire that was as close to hell as I ever hoped to be. I don’t recall very much during that time other than pain and agony. In my few fleeting moments where the fever would briefly subside, I would curse my attacker, hoping someday that I would be allowed the pleasure of vengeance.
Once the fever had finally broken, it was a good week that I had restless nights and horrid dreams; dreams of things that no God fearing man should even have lurking in the dark primitive corners of his mind. I was in a bad way.
After a while, both the pains and aches had gone away, and much to my delight, they must have dragged the nightmares away with them. I was finally on the mend, and for a few days, everything was fine and dandy. Everything looked brighter, everything smelled better, and I heard things coming out of the radio that I’d heard a thousand times before, but they seemed somehow more alive, like the band was right there next to me. I was able to write as if the most beautiful ideas were swarming around me and all I had to do was pluck them from the air and put them on a page. I had just assumed that the feelings and inspirations were simply that whole second-lease-on-life euphoria that someone gets after surviving a nightmare that manifested itself in reality. Looking back now, I guess that wasn’t too far from the truth.
As luck would have it, if you want to look at it that way, I woke up one morning and took a good look in the mirror of the man God had spared. With my eyes I traced every detail of what would eventually heal to be a spectacular patchwork of scars on a once ordinary face.
I, like most people I suppose, get feelings from time to time that I can’t explain. I like to think that I’m a man who trusts in my own feelings, and when something inside my head goes off, I listen to it. As I stood there looking at myself, I got one of those feelings.
It had begun to tax my mind for most of the day that I needed to leave the city behind me and try to find a place where I could truly be alone. Away from anyone who might encounter an ugly and unknown side of me. I had wakeful dreams of rage and hate that made me fear that I was losing a tenuous grasp of sanity. Horrible supernatural stories from my youth had whispered their way into my thoughts, and as I had noticed that everything about me which had seemed so vibrant since the fever, so too did I notice how very real spirits of despair and dread and terror had suddenly wrested away any feeling of peace that I had.
I left my home and drove out of the city as fast as I could, up the 74 and out into the backcountry once again. The sun started to fall and I had the windows down to feel the wind and to try and give myself a respite in all that oppressive heat, but even so, sweat was sliding down my back and the sides of my broken face. My body began to tremble. I stepped on the gas and was mindful around the corners of the dirt road I had pulled onto, leaving the highway behind.
The sun was almost gone, and I took several turns trying to get lost on purpose based off of feeling more than reason, driving farther and farther into the middle of the backcountry where a man who looked like me shouldn’t go. Those thoughts never even entered my mind, although something in my mind gave me a vision of a truck following just out of sight behind me.
I finally stopped my car on a lonely road where the dogwoods and live oaks tussled for dominance, and the creek they were waging war over was busy talking to itself as it weaved its way between their ranks. The crickets were in the midst of a mad and euphoric symphony that I had hoped would soothe my nerves. I kept the engine on and walked out onto the dirt road. It was almost dark now, and as I looked to the sky I realized that the clouds had come rolling in just as the light from the sun had faded from view.
I fumbled for a cigarette in my pocket and I struggled to light it with shaking hands. I laughed at the irony that after having been attacked just a month prior, I had found myself on a similar road in the middle of nowhere, but I took a strange comfort in the desolation. It was a place where I could quietly lose my mind and no one would be the wiser. I tried to slow my breaths, deeply inhaling that sweet smoke and letting it all out slowly. My heart began to pound up my neck. Once again, I felt a deep confusion and fear over what was happening. I cried out loud to God to quiet a monstrous voice that was growing in my mind.
I was answered by the sound of a snapping twig coming from somewhere to my left, and I could swear that I smelled whiskey coming from somewhere on my right. If I had at that moment the control of my better judgment, I would have quickly made a run for my car, but I was suddenly taken over by a pain in the pit of my stomach that sent me screaming to my knees. That pain was followed by a gunshot and a new pain as a bullet ripped through the right side of my chest.
There was a voice to my left and a sharp shrill whistle from my right. The glare of headlights came round the corner of the road behind me and although I tried to get to my feet, the pain in my stomach began to radiate throughout my body, completely obscuring any pain I had felt from being shot. I listened to ignorant uneducated voices coming toward me.
“You were just supposed to wing him!”
“Damn fool dropped to his knees as I pulled the trigger.”
I could smell my own blood, and I could feel it soaking the front of my shirt. The headlights stopped right next to me, and two more men ran to my side to join the two who had been hiding in the forest. The pain in my stomach grew, and as the four men dragged me to the closest oak, I looked down at my chest and the small river of blood that was pouring from the middle of it. In spite of all the pain, a feeling of curiosity overtook me and I was able to touch the gunshot wound, but it felt as though it wasn’t even there. All I could feel was the gnawing pain deep in my stomach, as if something was doing its best to claw its way out of me. I began to scream at the pain.
I could hear their laughter at my agony, those so-called men. I could hear them saying the words and casting the curses that I had heard a thousand times before and a thousand times since. I felt the rope go around my neck, and it took three of them to hoist me from the branch of a large oak. The rope cinched down on my flesh as I rose into the air, but the only pain was deep in my stomach. There was nothing else. I looked to the sky and once again called on my God with a cracked and pitiful voice to end my pain, if He would do nothing else.
Almost as if He had been waiting to hear my voice, the pain took on an altogether different meaning in my mind. On a primal level, I suddenly understood why it was there, and I began to feel that I might also know how it was to be treated. To be sated.
The clouds parted above me, and the full moon shone down on that lonely dirt road, illuminating the faces of my would-be-executioners. They cheered as they looked upon me one last time before they turned to walk to my ‘57 Fairlane, obviously the prize they would take as a reward for their wicked work. I began to laugh as I heard The Contours asking if someone loved them out of the speakers of my car.
There was a new scent in the air. A wonderful vibrant smell that began to drive me into a frenzy. I could still smell my own blood and the whiskey on their breath, but it was the scent of the blood running in their veins that was above all, and I was craving it.
My bones began to move, dislocating and relocating, and I began to howl in a new agony; a ravenous hunger that was beyond the words of men to describe it. The hateful villains ran back beneath me, and in terror of what they saw coming to life hanging from the end of their frayed old rope, they began to shoot their rifles and pistols, striking home into flesh that was no longer bothered nor threatened by the pain they brought.
I remember nothing of reason after their guns snapped dry, only dreams. Dreams a God fearing man should never want to have. Dreams of an unholy thing struggling to be born into this world under the branch of an oak in the wilderness. Dreams of the beast ripping itself from the rope and chasing after the men desperately trying to flee in a speeding truck. Visions of a truck sitting in a smoking ruin off of the road, while the beast toyed with the terrified dying men on the dusty road before they took their last ragged breaths in this world.
I came to the next morning surrounded by what had been wrought the night before, and though I would like to say that I felt sorry for those men, I still to this day cannot. Although I take no joy or particular pride in what I had done, or rather, what the thing inside of me had done, I felt no guilt. I left the pieces of those men where they lay, and I drove back to my home wearing a pair of overalls that I had found in their truck.
I knew that it would happen again, and the only way to put a stop to it would be to commit a mortal sin; something that I was not willing to give a ponder. I made a compromise with myself first before I brought it to my God..
Almost a month before, I had survived an attack by some kind of animal that I never had the benefit of seeing, but after a night at the end of a frayed old rope, it all became clear what that animal was, and the dark gift I had been given. Those awful so-called men were not as fortunate as I had been, of course I still believe that I had someone watching over me. Someone who did not see fit to extend those men the same mercy as was given to me. There had to have been a reason for all of this to have passed, and after a considerable amount of thought and prayer, I finally realized what that reason was.
As I said in the beginning, most men go through life with not a shred of a sense of purpose. Some men, such as myself, are fortunate enough to find out what that purpose is, even if it’s to be found in the most awful way.
It had been a full three months since that hot august night when I was first attacked, that I found myself yet again standing next to my Fairlane off of an old dirt road in the backcountry. More than two dozen so-called men were standing in a field little more than a hundred yards away from where I was standing. Chubby Checker was quietly coming out of the radio singing about a slow twistin’, and although I had planned to do some twistin’ myself, I couldn’t promise that it was going to be slow.
They were burning a symbol very dear to me in the middle of that field the same way they had burned a church just a few days before. They whooped and hollered as they shot their guns in the air. I remember hoping that some of those boys would save some bullets. I wanted a few of them to have some false hope before they died. They concealed themselves in sheets and pointed hoods to hide what was inside. But I knew what was inside, because I was starting to smell it, and I was getting hungry.
I turned the radio up and they all turned in my direction when I turned on my headlights and shined a light on their wickedness. They seemed confused at first when they saw me, a man calmly removing his clothes and showing off all that color they hated out of ignorance and stupidity. I smelled their blood pumping and I heard their hearts pounding as they all ran toward me in a murderous rage. I looked up and smiled.
The full moon that September in 1964 was a beauty.