What Difference Do It Make? (10 page)

There in the Villa of Angels, I finally began writing. Scribbling in blue ink on a yellow legal pad, I poured out scenes of hope and trepidation: the first day Deborah and I went to the mission. Hope and fear: the first day we met Denver. Hope and victory: the formation of deep friendships with Denver and other homeless. Hope and terror: Deborah's cancer diagnosis and her nineteen-month battle to live. Then hope extinguished, replaced by desolation: where I had lived since she died.

As I wrote, I paused for long moments and gazed across the misty Tuscan hills at the Duomo, Florence's central cathedral, consecrated in 1436. No one could deny that I had landed in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, a backdrop of living inspiration for great artists and writers from Dante to da Vinci to Michelangelo. But for me the city that so inspired them was cloaked in the colors of mourning—smoggy grays and charcoal black, shroud colors unsuitable for the joyful journey that was Deborah's life.

I reread what I had written so far and thought of the first important exhibition of modern art in America, the New York Armory Show of 1913, where critics lacerated the works on display, declaring they weren't even worthy to be tossed in an ash can.

Those works of art didn't merit that criticism, but my first written words did. Before returning to Texas, I tossed them in the trash.

I don't know if it happened on the train ride to Rome or while clearing customs at the airport. But somewhere inside me, a switch flipped. And on the eleven-hour flight home, the words began to flow in earnest, faster than my hand could drive my Hotel Columbus ballpoint pen.

Although I know they were there, the people sharing my row of airline seats vanished. I don't recall eating the cardboard-flavored in-flight chicken that I'm certain I was offered. I only remember being shocked, as the first officer announced our final approach to Dallas, to find I'd written ninety longhand pages—a manuscript longer than any term paper I had ever written at Texas Christian University and all without Cliff's Notes.

Bleary-eyed, I trudged through US customs, clutching my newborn manuscript. At the baggage claim, I looked up to find three grinning ladies clustered around me.

“Excuse me. We don't mean to bother you,” said the one sporting a Gucci bag and a lilting Texas accent. “We couldn't help but notice that you wrote and wrote all the way from Rome, and you look real familiar. Are you by chance a famous writer?”

I smiled, exhausted. “No, I'm not famous, and I'm not a writer. But I am working on a book.”

“What kind of book?” the lady asked, glancing excitedly at her companions.

I thought for a second. How could I summarize the maelstrom of compassion, pain, friendship, redemption, and grief that had been my life for the past four years?

Finally, an answer hit me.

“A love story,” I said.

14

Denver

“I want you to know that I forgive you,” Deborah said [to the woman I had had an affair with]. “I hope you find someone who will not only truly love you but honor you.”

Her grace stunned me. But not nearly so much as what she said next: “I intend to work on being the best wife Ron could ever want, and if I do my job right, you will not be hearing from my husband again.”

Deborah quietly placed the phone in its cradle, sighed with relief, and locked her eyes on mine. “You and I are now going to rewrite the future history of our marriage.”

She wanted to spend a couple of months in counseling, she said, so we could figure out what was broken, how it got that way, and how to fix it. “If you'll do that,” she said, “I'll forgive you. And I promise I will never bring this up, ever again.”

F
or the next three and a half years, mostly at Lupe Murchison's breakfast table, me and Mr. Ron wrote us a book. Of course, I couldn't write or read at the time, but I told Mr. Ron everthing I could remember, and he wrote it all down.

But we hadn't been workin on it for long when, one morning at Rocky Top, I just all of a sudden decided to shut my mouth. We was sittin at that big ol' table Miss Debbie picked out for the ranch kitchen, and I just went quiet and commenced to sippin my coffee. Mr. Ron was sittin across from me, writin everthing longhand with a pen on yellow paper.

“What is it?” he said. “You haven't shut up all morning. What's got your tongue all of a sudden?”

I didn't look at him. “I been thinkin 'bout forgiveness,” I said.

“And?”

“Well, there's been a lotta forgiveness in these past coupla years,” I said, finally lookin up at Mr. Ron. “Miss Debbie forgave you for steppin out on her that time. And I done forgave the Man for makin me work all them years without no pay. And God forgave me of all my sins . . . ”

I could see Mr. Ron noddin along, encouraging me to keep goin.

“Mr. Ron, we speaks a lot about forgiveness,” I went on, “about how God forgives us and we is supposed to forgive others. But there's a whole 'nother kind of forgiveness you don't know nothin about!”

“What's that?”

“Well, you know . . . it's that statue y'all call Lamentations.

“You mean the book of Lamentations in the Bible?”

“No sir.”

Mr. Ron looked at me real hard, like he was tryin his best to figure out what I was sayin. “A statue . . . ?”

“Yessiree, a statue of Lamentations.”

“Oh . . . you must mean the Tower of Babel! That's kind of a statue, and it's in the Bible.”

“No sir,” I said. “This ain't got nothin to do with the Bible. It got to do with the Man. You know what I'm talkin 'bout. This is the Man's law that says after a lotta time has done gone by, you don't got to go back to the pokey no more for somethin you done way back in the past.”

Mr. Ron started laughin then. “Oh, you mean the
statute
of
limitations
!”

“That's it!” I said. “If we gon' write this book together, I got to know
all
about that statue before I tells it all!”

It was May 1968. Now in case you ain't heard nothing 'bout Angola [Prison], it was hell, surrounded on three sides by a river. I didn't know this then, but in those days, it was the darkest, most vicious prison in America.

A few days after I got there, a prisoner I had met back at the Shreveport jail saw me and reached out like he was gon' shake my hand. Instead, he gave me a knife. “Put this under your pilla,” he said. “You gon' need it.”

The reason I needed to know about that statue of Lamentations was 'cause a' somethin that happened to me after I left the plantation. One time when I was a bad man, I held up a bus. Now, you might already know I had to go to the pokey for that. Ten years they gave me, and that was a long stretch. So I wadn't gon' be tellin too much more about the pokey if I was gon' have to go back to the pokey for tellin it!

It might sound strange to say this, but Angola Prison was a dynamic and precious thing. Down there in the bayou, they specialized in makin men outta boys. Funny thing about it was that even though all I did was hold up a bus, the Man decided to send me to prison in style. They packed me onto one a' them little ol' aeroplanes and flew me down. Plane landed right on the property.

Once I wound up there, the Man sent me to the worstest camp they had. They called it the “Bucket a' Blood,” and I'd only been there one day 'fore I figured out why. Somebody got killed there ever night.

My first night in Angola, a great big brother came up to me and looked me up and down. “What you need from the store, man? I'm goin over there right now.”

I thought maybe he'd heard about me from the fella that give me the knife in Shreveport—like maybe he was lookin out for me. So I said, “Bring me some cigarettes and two or three candy bars.”

He brought 'em to me at my bunk, which was in a big ol' buildin shaped kinda like a barn. Purty soon, I found out them things wadn't free.

That night I was layin in my bunk on my back, starin up at the ceiling. I could hear rats in the walls, and somewhere way off, a man screamed. Wadn't no lights on where I was at, and the cell was blacker than the bayou on a new moon.

“You ready?”

That big brother was standin right by my side. He'd slipped in real quiet and sneaked up to me in the dark without me even knowin he was there.

“You ready?” he said again, his voice a little lower. A little deeper. Right then, I knew what he was after.

“Yeah, I'm ready,” I said. “But I got to go to the toilet first.”

I swung my feet down onto the floor, and brother-man stepped back to let me get out of bed.

“You go on and lay down,” I said. “Put the sheet over you. I'll be right back.”

I walked away from the bed into the pitch dark. I heard a whispering sound as his pants crumpled to the floor, then a
creak-creak
as he laid down on my bunk. The toilet was on the other side of the room. I walked over there and unzipped my britches, let him hear that I was doin what I said I was gon' do.

“You want a cigarette?” I said. “For after?”

“Sure do,” he said, kinda cocky. I could hear him chucklin in the dark. So on my way back across the room, I stopped at the little shelf where I had stashed my cigarettes that he'd done bought me. It was also where I'd stashed my knife.

Brother-man screamed when I stabbed him. Screamed like a woman 'cause I 'xpect I turned him into one, right through the sheet.

I bent down close to his ear and growled real low. “You or any a' your friends come 'round here again, I'm gon' finish the job.”

While he was howlin and cryin and, I 'xpect, holdin what was left of his manhood, I saw lights go on outside. Then I heard boots poundin and guards drawin down. But they stopped outside the door to size up the situation.

“Moore! Who you got in there?”

“This fella's done gone crazy!” brother-man screamed. 'Cept he didn't call me “fella.” “Get in here and kill him 'fore he kills
me
!”

They sent me to the hole for that. But didn't nobody try to make me his woman no more.

That's why, though, when I think about Miss Debbie reachin out to me, my chest gets tight. I had told her straight up that I was a mean man, but she didn't have no way a' knowin how mean. I thank God today she found the courage in her heart to love me enough so that someday I could tell you that even a black ex-con from Angola that stabbed a man could maybe someday do some good in the world if he gets a chance.

DON

The Art of Homelessness

Most of the thirty or so men sitting in a circle at the Union Gospel Mission in Saint Paul, Minnesota, didn't look like they'd been acquainted with a comb for a while. Their clothes were clean, Don Thomas told us, but they didn't quite fit. Some of the men were addicts and ex-cons. Some were just down on their luck. Don wasn't sure such a rough-looking batch of guys would be interested in what he had come to say.

“I'm here to see if any of you would be interested in learning a little about art,” said Don, a designer for an architectural firm in Saint Paul. “Drawing, painting, that kind of thing.”

Some of the men threw each other skeptical sideways glances. Others kept their eyes trained on the floor. But one man with a ruddy, wrinkled face and approximately four good teeth spoke right up. “We ain't gonna weave any of them [expletive] baskets like we did in prison, are we?”

“Oh, no,” Don replied with a smile. ‘We're going to draw naked women.”

The whole circle burst out laughing, and a show of hands revealed that every man present was suddenly, miraculously, interested in what Don had to teach about art.

I believe art can make a big difference in anyone's life. After Deborah died and Denver moved in with me, I suggested he try his hand at painting. He thought that was a good idea, judging that he couldn't do any worse than some of the multimillion-dollar pieces he'd seen by Jackson Pollack and Pablo Picasso when I took him to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. And once he started, Denver took to painting like a bull rider to a rodeo. Since
Same Kind of Different as Me
came out, he has sold more than three hundred paintings.

Art had made a difference for Don Thomas too. In fact, it had been his salvation.

After his mom died when he was a teenager, his dad raised him. A proud Marine, his dad numbed the pain of his loss with alcohol, and Don was left alone a lot. “By junior high, I was making bad decisions, drinking, being cavalier about relationships with girls,” Don says. “It's amazing I didn't get myself in trouble for fathering a child too young.”

Fortunately, a high school art teacher reached out to the young man and helped him find a different path. “To be able to draw what I was feeling and seeing, to express some of my anger—I believe it changed my life.”