Gone to jail for my father where I encountered an angel that offered to let me out, but said that I would grow spiritually more if I stayed... So I said "then I will stay"; soon after the guards came to let me out, only for another identity misunderstanding to send me right back into the county lockup.
I am a fat man and the 1800 calories they give you in jail felt like fasting to me. That weekend I praised God for every bight of food and it made everything taste good, even the crunchy eggs; so much so that other guys came and gave me there food!
====
The other thing I've written a short story about:
In my eighteenth year of life, we had moved from cinder block government subsidized housing to our new home. It was a good estate, dark red bricks interspersed with brown, laid out west to east there was the kitchen, family room, living room, bathroom, two bedrooms and then the master bedroom. My dad was diagnosed as terminally ill and the social security disability office had come through with back-payments after years of lawsuits. They paid a lump-sum of $80,000. With part of it my dad fulfilled the marital promise of buying a home that he had made about the time I was conceived some 18 years earlier.
Since moving to our new home things had not gone as well as I might have hoped. Burdened with a great deal of money my parents went from partying once every few months to partying every day. Partying, as I learned when I was 12, is what coke addicts call it when they do their drugs. From that time forward I had known my job was to take care of my younger brothers.
My 12 year old brother was failing scholastically, picked on because he stunk and never had clean clothing. My autistic 8 year old brother seemed not to mind the cleanliness of the house, until a pipe that started leaking behind a wall in the kitchen was never attended to. Eventually it soaked the family room floor and kept him from playing Nintendo. My 5 year old brother took to this all in stride, to a 5 year old, almost everything is normal. ‘This all’ ignores the time he started crying uncontrollably, in a way I would consider more an adult nervous breakdown than a tantrum, when he picked up a cup he thought had Kool-aid, took a drink, only to find it full of roaches.
The maggots that grew in the water stagnating in the kitchen had driven my parents to cook in their bedroom using an electric griddle. I don't remember when the roaches went from night-creatures to festering in the corners of our walls. But I do remember thinking that, after a time, you get used to smashing the little brown bugs with your hands. It was comical, too, to watch the cute brown creatures paratroop from my parents ceiling onto the hot plate.
As the roaches festered I understood that my dad had a drug problem; I begged him to stop. I knew that what little money I made was to be given to 'help the family'. A drug-addict will spend bill money on drugs so he can plead poverty when the bills role around. I knew that my youngest brother had come from a drug-induced orgy from years past, which was of course why he had brown skin, eyes, and hair, unlike the rest of us. But these disparate bits of information, even the squalor that I lived in, did not ring in my mind as something that demanded intervention. That is, not until my dad showed me the flesh of his thigh, where much had been eaten away by cockroaches, leaving brown scabbed over sores.
In the moment I processed my dad's moist red and crisp browned flesh I knew that no child should live like this. I thought to myself, "There are state agencies that can fix this problem". I was impelled by both my conscience and Christ himself dwelling in me to do something. But that was inconvenient and despite my faithful lip service, I was much less subordinate to Christ than I was to my fear. Later that day, angry with myself, I started an argument with my dad. I told him that if he did not fix the living conditions in the house I was going to call the police. “Bullshit” he knew me.
Still angry I told him I needed to go to the store so as to feed the kids. The red key ring was buried under the rubble of slovenliness on his brown bedside table. While I was bending over to grab it the crazy old man doused me with the contents of a tacky liquid and cigarette butt filled crystal ashtray. The brown and black grunge had an effervescent quality that was more sharp than the general scent the mold, maggot and roach infested house was emanating. I felt rage for myriad reasons and I knew I was big and strong now; I moved to kill the druggy son of a bitch, he noticed this and stood on his bed. I lunged for his feet. He on hit me on the back of the head with the weighty ashtray. I lost consciousness. I ultimately realized I could do nothing to help protect my family unless I became a drug free refuge for them. So I moved out.