Love: A Cup of Cold Water

[Note: The introductory portion from the original mailing has been removed for the sake of relevancy.]

Well then! Where were we? Oh yes. We were going to talk about love. Hang on to your hats; let’s switch gears and take a brisk joyride through my “pagan” past, beginning some seven odd years ago and careening our way forward from there, first on one wheel, then on the other, until finally we land with all four on the floor. Yes, in warming up to this topic of love, I thought I would share a few more morsels of my life that someday, hopefully, (if I can work up the necessary motivation and when I’m not writing all these newsletters) will find their way into the completed autobiography. Shall we see if together we can see the beauty in the bittersweet?

In 1995, I was still a married man and an active musician. After the folding of Hypnosis, the rock band I played in during high school, “Joe,” the rhythm guitar player (who was living with my then-wife’s sister) and I decided we were going to put together a studio project. Consider that:

Incidentally, I still own my studio equipment to this very day; for the most part, it makes an excellent display surface for my ever-growing dust collection. Perhaps one of these days if I live long enough, I will again return to music, a passion I share in part with writing. Be that as it may, the studio environment soon grows somewhat stale and stuffy and we began to crave the frenetic environment of a live band: the energy, the fun, the frenzy, the spontaneity, the sweaty armpits, the battle of the egos, and, above all, the sheer pleasure of “belting out bedlam with abandon” at multi-decibel volumes. (See Hard Rockin’ Hooligans and a Man Named Dave for context.)

In the autobiography, I say little else of Russ, but I would like to tell you a bit of the crossing of our paths and its eventual result. As is noted in the account above, Russ had long hair. As long as mine or longer. Unlike mine, which is nearly straight, light-brown, and beginning to thin a bit, his was wavy, dark, and very thick and full. His goatee was always kept impeccably trimmed, “groomed to the teeth,” and he had a gentle manner about him that seemed to win the respect of the ladies. He wasn’t particularly handsome: a few pounds overweight—not by much, but a little—and a slightly more prominent nose than some: all in all he looked the part of the musician. His dark eyes saw perhaps far more than I gave them credit for then, though he had a humility about him that often caused him to lower them to the ground, rendering the messages written therein impossible to discern, even by those far livelier witted than myself.

Amanda and I were on our way out by then; we were officially divorced the following year. I was clean off pot and determined to stay that way and I was doing everything I could to salvage our marriage, desperately seeking to pay penance for my many transgressions. I learned during that time as never before the way a man ought to treat the woman he loves, but alas, the damage was already done, the decision had already been made and settled on with finality, the woman I loved too late had slipped from my grasp. We moved weeks before she was to go into basic training at Lackland Air Force Base and I was faced with the arduous task of finding yet another baby-sitter. I had no idea how I would manage, and then Russ stepped forward: “I’ll baby-sit Jeremy.”

Not only was Russ unemployed, but he was happy to remain that way. He told Joe and I that it was not God’s will for him to find a job—that God didn’t expect it, instead wanting him to focus solely on his music—a view on which both of us disagreed with him. In time, to his credit and character, he came to see things from our point of view, though arriving at the conclusion from a far different method: from reading a book neither of us had so much as touched in years. Indeed, he carried this book with him frequently, quietly doing his devotions while we were gearing up to jam. The strange thing is, it never seemed odd to us to see him reading his bible in this manner.

No, Russ was content to baby-sit with the fringe benefit that I offered him unlimited access to my studio, a ride to and from his house after work, and informal “lessons” in high-tech musical gear. I would come home after a long day’s work, and he would be sitting in the chair, a guitar strung across his lap, holding his cigarette just out of Jeremy’s reach. He always felt guilty about smoking—he said he knew it hurt his “Christian witness” (his words)—but he had nonetheless taught Jeremy to say “hot hot.” It was actually kind of cute, a sort of half whisper. In fact, I still have it saved as a digital sample, playable on my Ensoniq® ASR-10^TM sequencer/sampler (pro keyboard). Every once in a while I’ll pop the computer disk in and “play” his tiny voice, a wave of ambivalent emotions washing over me.

I would always ask how Jeremy had been and Russ would usually tell me he had been very good. Russ was really the only love the poor child got of which to speak, for I might as well have not even been his dad for as much attention as I paid him. There are times as I look back, I have deep regrets. I long to be able to pick that little boy up and shower him with the love a real daddy should, but then again, I am not the same man today as that twenty-two-year-old megalomaniac was then. I feel like crying when I hear the “hot hot” whispered from the keys of my electronic keyboard; the sound is torturous to my ears, the sound of innocence and the yearning for love trampled in the dust: trampled in the dust, that is, by my own selfish indifference. I am the one who has to live with the memories—and the regrets.

Russ would compliment me on how well behaved Jeremy was and indeed it was true. Jeremy would sit mesmerized at his feet, a musician just like his daddy making magic with the strings on a fretted fingerboard. I can see the picture even now, burned into my mind, and indelible image that haunts me still. In time, I would pack Jeremy in his car seat in the back; by the time we drove across town into the countryside fringe where Russ lived he would be sound asleep.

While Jeremy slumbered peacefully, Russ would often sit out in the car and talk with me before unpacking his equipment and calling it a day. I would teach him how electronic gear worked, what kind of equipment he might need to purchase, what brands to trust and which to stay away from, how to use my recording equipment and what samples I had used in my latest sequences. He was an eager pupil, hungry to learn more about the recording industry and music technology. But I didn’t always do the talking.

Russ would tell of the musicians he admired—Jewel had particularly caught his fancy at the time—and he would speak of other things as well. He told me he thought God had told him he shouldn’t have moved in with his grandparents (apparently there was some conflict there). I pointed out to him that I too had once gone to church and that he could believe in God if he wished, but that these promptings from “God” were merely instincts, intuition. I was always rational, persuasive, never insulting of his beliefs, but gently arguing that God was his own wishful thinking, “God” was what he attributed to purely natural phenomena. There were more than a few times I could see the glimmer of doubt flicker in his eyes as the plausibility of my statements began to make far too much sense for his comfort. Yet, he clung to his notion of God, continuing to read and believe his bible, and I respected him all the more for it. Though I pitied his naiveté, I had to admit that his beliefs made him a better person and he certainly wasn’t hurting me any by clinging to such faulty notions.

In time, I was re-introduced to smoking pot. Not that this was any great surprise, but Russ could see the downhill slide and I know that it saddened him. I knew very little of his past, except that he had come out of a lifestyle of heavy drugs. I couldn’t really picture that, but I didn’t disbelieve it; Russ never knowingly lied and further I had no reason not to believe him anyway. He was known to pop a beer with us on occasion—only one, mind you, but a beer nonetheless—which I thought was cool for a Christian, even though I personally had little use for beer, preferring harder forms of alcohol when I caught the whim to drink.

It wasn’t long after I got back into smoking pot that Russ felt that he needed to step down from baby-sitting. I was seeing less and less out of him and was soon to discover methamphetamine, a drug extremely prevalent here in Springfield. The last time I saw Russ, some friends and I went to an all-night tweaking party and he agreed to watch Jeremy overnight for us. I arrived the next morning strung out, but had saved him a beer, offering it to him, adamently denying I had been doing anything other than smoking pot, but he’d been there and knew the ropes: he knew I was lying and he looked away uncomfortably, unwilling to confront me. It wouldn’t have mattered if he did; I would have vehemently denied all charges anyway and I think he knew it. I don’t think it was any secret to him that I was merely using him at this point anyway; for that matter, I had been using him all along to my own advantage. He drained his beer and I gathered Jeremy up and went home with my friends to a few more lines drawn on the mirror.

I forgot him except when I would drive by and see the house he had moved into, since bulldozed to the ground. My life became increasingly consumed by drugs and I began using people more and more, tolerating Jeremy, going through the bare minimal requirements of the man who in a moment of sexual pleasure had donated the sperm that knit together his frame. As the methamphetamine began to take possession of me, I would leave Jeremy in his crib for hours, sadly neglected him, his diaper left unchanged and soaked with urine. When he would cry, I would often scream at him, sometimes roughly shaking him to try to get him to shut up and leave my tweaked out head in peace. Then I would feel incredible guilt and shame added to the pain of my divorce which was always near, waiting for the opportune time to swallow me, anxiety attacks leaving me unable to move, a difficult feat while climbing the walls! I was in hell, insane, ever-loving mad as high ho the dairy—oh! the cow jumped over the moon with the silver spoon. To cope, I would do more drugs which led to more shame and guilt and more neglect and abuse. I am ashamed to write these words, but they are the truth. I wasn’t fit to be a father; I deserved incarceration; I was living in the hell of my own creation.

Jeremy eventually went to live with his mother, a decision I had no problems making for I knew I was not fit to be a father. I moved in with my roommates Jimmy and Leann and began dealing drugs out of their basement, right under the noses of Leann’s three children. She wasn’t happy about this, but I had something she didn’t, something she needed to raise her kids: money, and lots of it. Money was something she liked to spend; Jimmy and Leann were never frugal with their finances.

The drugs began to become more and more frequent and more and more varied. I tried acid for the first time and soon began using regularly. I tried cocaine and loved it. Being the dealer man, I always got the best of everything, be that nose candy or a bit of sugar on the tongue. For recreation, my runners would load a glass stemmed bong with a layer of cocaine, a layer of marijuana, another layer of “white gold,” a layer of weed, and so on. My oh my! Paradise was yours for the taking, or as the Ozark Mountain Daredevils sing, “If you wanna get to heaven, you gotta raise a little hell.”

I do not have the time nor that space to entail the events that followed, except to tell you the story through the eyes of Jimmy and Leann. I was becoming increasingly difficult to live with, my moods erratic and unpredictable, my anger flaring up against them without apparent reason or cause. I think both were on the verge of breakdown and Jimmy would lapse into long pensive silences, often stealing out of the house to go get drunk and get away from the problems. This left Leann anxiety-ridden, the two men in her life addicts—the one living downstairs in the “dungeon”—a definitive cause to throw her hands up in despair.

One thing that helped Leann, however, was a Christian neighbor who was going through a painful divorce. The two would sit on the steps with their cigarettes, sometimes tearfully, at times talking long into the night. Jimmy and I weren’t particularly keen on this “religious” neighbor, Jimmy because she kept filling Leann’s head full of these cursed ideas about God, and me, because, well . . . just because. She kept trying to get us to come to church with her, often coming over Sunday morning to ring the doorbell while we all pretended to be asleep. Jimmy and Leann weren’t exactly early risers and I didn’t believe in getting up any earlier than noon. In fact, many days my “alarm clock” consisted of my runners stopping by to pick up the goods for their daily rounds. They would get impatient waiting on me and would beg, con, or connive a ride over, enticing me out of bed with the aroma of a joint freshly burning. (This was always certain to make me less grumpy for having been woken in such fashion, though it was more a convenience than anything: the dope they offered they’d gotten from me in the first place!)

Then I really bottomed out. I was later to learn that Jimmy and Leann had seriously considered institutionalizing me on more than one occasion, though by the grace of God they never did. However, I well remember one incident as long as I live. One day Jimmy came down the stairs while I was lying on my bed during the middle of the day. He tried talking to me, but I just rolled over, shutting him out mentally as well as physically. I’ll never forget what he did next. Climbing up into bed with me, tears in his eyes, absolutely at his wits end of what to do with me, he wrapped his arms around me and said, “Brother, I’m not gay. But I love you, man. I’m worried sick about you, Bro. I don’t know what to do for you.”

Now what are you supposed to do when someone does that? When someone risks his reputation, risks his masculinity, risks his very all to demonstrate such selfless concern? I relaxed in his arms. It seemed so strange to me. I certainly wasn’t gay either, but this was different. This was love; raw, unadulterated love, love I could never return, love that seeped into my blackened heart by its shamelessness. He held me for a moment before releasing me, but the memory still moves me deeply when I think of it. Actions do indeed speak louder than words; actions speak even when words fall on deaf ears. Drunken Jimmy was my Jesus that day. Indeed, Jimmy did what Jesus would have done; Jimmy the hardened “sinner” did what I, in my supposed spirituality, have never done to this day. But you see, Jimmy had walked the streets alone, sleeping on park benches. He knew what it was to be used and abused. But he also knew what it was to love, to open your bleeding heart and pour it into another. Yes, he knew this literally, in California he cradled more than one dying buddy in his arms as the bullet worked its awful magic, extinguishing the wick of life, soaking them both in gallons of hot, sticky blood until at last the eyes grew dull and lifeless and the body hung limp in his arms, another victim claimed on the streets of San Diego. Jimmy had traveled roads I have never faced even to this day, roads even more graphic than this, roads down which we shall not even venture so much as a peek.

I had been hearing voices for some time now. Invariably, the question the skeptic and believer alike always ask me when I tell them my story is, “But don’t you think that was the drugs?” I tell them, “Yes, I do. But not like you think.”

Allow me to explain. Pretend with me for a moment, those of you who don’t believe, that we really do have a soul, an immortal part of us that never sleeps and never dies. If this spiritual side of us does exist, as we are agreeing to pretend, would it be affected by anything I did? If I jumped off a cliff to my death, could I kill such a thing? If it never sleeps and never dies, what then could I do to it? What if I did heavy drugs every day for months on end which severely taxed my body and mind, could I do anything to destroy this soul within? Even if I was only loosely clinging to life and sanity, would I in any way dull its vivacity?

You see, I am convinced that by doing the drugs I had fatigued my body and mind to the point of near breakdown. However, this merely rendered my soul that much “closer to the surface,” if you will. Like those who have had near-death experiences, I was afforded the ability to “hear” the same normally unseeable reality such people claim to be able to “see.” However, being the spiritual realm, we do not hear with our physical ears, see with our physical eyes; our awareness comes from the higher realm of the spirit or mind. (You might be interested in reading another explanation of the “inner eye” and “inner ear” from the quill of St. Augustine in St. Augustine: Between Two Worlds.) This is quite Biblical by the way: Scriptures say no one has seen the face of God and lived and yet God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. Or what of the story of Elisha in 2 Kings 6:8–22?

You see, the servant saw the same hills he had seen before. Only now he saw a dimension deeper: he saw the previously hidden realm which had been surrounding him all along, a dimension “stacked on top” of the one with which he was already intimately familiar. I maintain that there is more than one gateway to this deeper reality, though the angels you see may not always be the sons of God.

Be these things what they may, it was the voices—spirit guides, if you prefer, though I dislike that term—that ultimately led me to God, the voices that convinced me that the things I scoffed at were true. Call it drug-induced paranoid schizophrenia if you must, but know that upon tasting the living water of the risen Savior to which it led me, my life has ne’er been the same.

As providence would have it, one of Jimmy’s friends, also a tweaker, was the son of a minister. His father had passed on but his mother was an active prayer warrior, faithfully petitioning God on behalf of her wayward sons. When I would tell my drug friends what was going on within my new level of perception, Jimmy’s friend had no qualms accepting what I said at face value (nor for that matter did most of my peers, although most rejected its ultimate implications). He firmly believed the bible and he knew he should straighten his life out, but the meth had sunk its diabolical claws into him as well. He did tell me an interesting story of his brother, however. On his way to run a deal, a guy unloaded a shotgun into the back of his head. As he lay dying, his brother made things right with the Lord “in the eleventh hour,” as the expression goes. It would seem that shortly after this, Jimmy’s friend had a dream where his brother appeared to him, glowing, a veritable Christ-like figure. And what do you suppose his brother said to him moments before disappearing, joy and peace radiating from his face, his arms outstretched? “Look, Bro. No tattoos.”

I finally did give my life to Christ, as most of you well know, having read many of these newsletters by now. I had been convicted of my smoking, which I soon quit with the help of a “Guide to Quitting” library book I’d checked out from the bookmobile, written by a successfully recovered ex-smoker, though it was every bit the living hell she promised. I gave up all the drugs without too many problems, but cigarettes! My oh my! Experts tell us that nicotine is even more addictive than heroin; they claim it is the hardest addiction to give up, a fact I would most assuredly vouchsafe. I was determined to quit, and despite feeling like I was being torn in two, despite being extremely cranky and hard to live with for a week or so, despite my knuckles turning white, I finally beat the habit and have remained smoke free these last five years. I don’t even have any desire for a cigarette anymore, though I still often smoke them in my dreams. :)

I had a slight problem however. I didn’t know how a Christian was supposed to act. What was a Christian supposed to do? I mean, a month ago, I didn’t even believe in God. My definition of bible reading was self-help books checked out from the library. My mom and dad seemed light years removed from my life, though they had (and have) never ceased being faithful in their Christian lives. Then an impression formed in the depth of my mind. Have you considered my servant Russ?

What would Russ do? Russ the long-haired guitar player. The Christian who smoked and drank an occasional beer, but only one. The Christian who didn’t attend church but faithfully prayed and read his bible. The one who never swore, who was always humble and gracious. The Christian who probably felt like he was a total failure in my life. The Christian who to my knowledge still knows nothing of my conversion to this day. The one who would stand before the throne room of God wondering when he had offered any cup of cold water and when he had visited the sick and when he had clothed the naked. But Russ, faults and all, was a true Christian and even if his candle wasn’t the brightest, it still shone clearly out in the darkness: shone more brightly perhaps than many well-trimmed lamps too dazzling to beckon without sending me scampering.

Months before, when I took Jeremy back to stay with his mom, I had totaled my car, though it was still drivable, albeit missing a back window and with a badly dented door complete with broken glass. (Jimmy and I would run out when it rained and strap down the two tarps stored in the trunk; we’d became masters at this task, rendering our tightly choreographed teamwork in skillful seconds flat.) Jimmy and I put in the back glass and worked and worked to bend the frame out enough to fit the mismatched door I’d bought at a salvage yard.

Jeff and Vicky, the neighbors two doors down, were a very “religious” family who went to church at least three times a week and whose names were easy to remember because his first name was that of my brother’s, her first name that of my sister’s. Jeff held some position in his church (pastor? teacher? youth leader?) and seemed a bit remote and aloof. Yet despite such perceptions, who do you suppose it was who ultimately helped Jimmy and I dent my door back out far enough so that we could hang it on the hinges, who figured the most efficient way to go about it? Whose ingenuity do you suppose it was that made sure the hinges were spaced with enough washers that it formed an optical illusion, hanging straight despite the frame’s remaining curvature? My car isn’t pretty—I still drive the same white, blue-doored one to this day—but I owe Jeff a debt of gratitude for the nearly waterproof ride with which I travel back and forth to work and school.

I said I would speak of love. I have. Its name was Russ, its name was Jimmy, its name was an unknown neighbor sitting on the doorstep sharing God with Leann, its name was a widowed pastor’s wife, prayer warrior, and mother of a drug addict, its name was Jeff. How about you, Christian friend? What name does love go by in your world? And what is love again, you ask? Simply a cup of cold water to a dry, thirsty soul.

“For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” (Matthew 25:35–36)

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