When Thomas Diggs walks inside the doublewide trailer that produces the Mama’n’Dem podcast to promote his latest album, No Good Place on Earth, the sun blazes in silver streaks through a golden halo and illuminates his body.

The windows are open and a crow glides through a torn screen and lands on his head and coos and flaps its wings while he comes into form, then flies away.

The ceiling fan is pattering and he sits down, wearing a Yokel Pilgrims t-shirt. He asks if he can light a cigarette and the podcaster says Okay and asks if he wants a beer and Thomas says Alright and Thank you. He hands him a beer and Thomas cracks it open and pulls out a cigarette and lights it, ashes into a Coca-Cola bottle, exhaling, and starts in with a story.

“This ole friend of mine,” he says almost spilling his beer. “Well we weren’t drinking buddies or nothing, though I’ve since shared a beer with him since we’d met—we'd met in Leotie Psychiatric Hospital, it’s built just after the Civil War. Dude has this story, it’s his uncle’s story. It’s a true story, he swears by God it’s true. He tells about his uncle, saying dude was an all-out family man. Took care of his wife and raised three beautiful children all ended up married themselves with jobs they loved and never divorced. Nobody calls him a great husband or great father. He was in Vietnam too. Done three tours. He killed seven of the enemy, and that's only the ones confirmed. He saved twice that many Americans over there. Come back and got so many medals boy you can’t count ’em. Ain’t nobody to call him a war hero. He started this farm, where he gave convicted criminals coming from prison a chance for a job when the damn burger king wouldn’t hire them, gave them a second chance in this world. Chance for redemption. Chance for life again. Nobody says he’s a Good Samaritan or even a good farmer, which he was. He was a great farmer. He played chess with the homeless and even gave them his time and money, if they asked, and if they wanted it, gave them work. Nobody called him a man of great compassion. Nobody called him a man of integrity, or a man of charity. Nobody evaluated the size of his heart, saying that it was big and full. Now. There was one night when he was a teenager. His buddy had caught him in the pasture fucking one of his daddy’s cows. Well, what do you think it is everybody calls him?”

***

Throughout the interview Thomas is asked about his life and he speaks some about it.

He says that he was born inside a liquor store that his parents were trying to rob. There was a blind reverend looking for a deal on wine, and he had a guide dog that apparently heeled over and died as soon as it laid its eyes upon and reckoned the newborn into this world. The reverend dropped his bottle and it spilled all over the child and he pointed and cursed it unto damnation, who was covered in wine and blood from the bottle shards.

“So I ain’t never really had a chance in this world,” he says on the podcast. “From the very beginning.”

When he was six years old, the local sheriff’s department raided his home, finding the manufacturing of crystal-meth with intent to sell, and his parents screamed and cried and attacked the authorities with shattered bottles and threw iced dust of paint thinner in their eyes, and his father pulled out a gun and was shot and his mother charged them with two bread knives and stabbed one of the officers in the chest before she was shot and killed too.

The score to this scene was in front of the television, where the six-year old was wearing Starman super-hero pajamas, a white Stetson cowboy hat that rolled around top of his head, and playing a dust-tinged National Duolian guitar singing out his heart like a sharecropping bluesman from the Depression era—his face framed perfectly within the static television that spritzed fuzz in a low volume while his lungs rose and his breath shrined his face a gray smoke and godly cloud.

He was singing, “No matter how I struggle and strive, I’ll never get of this world alive.”

The sheriff took one look at him, as though he were an American portrait of the son of God, and said, “My God, he’s bee-utey-ful,” and adopted him and had the boy baptized and had him join the church choir.

The boy quit school and nobody noticed. He spent his days stealing tobacco from the liquor store and selling it to older kids and spent his nights listening to Mister Fallen Angel’s Midnight Blues Hour on a radio he found in a dumpster.

At fourteen, he was asked to perform a Protestant Hymn in front of the entire church, and he had already stolen his first cassette-tape and listened to it religiously, practicing the guitar at night in the cemetery beside the tombstones of his birth parents, singing the Gospel according to Blind Willie McTell and Blind Connie Williams and Blind Willie Johnson, asking who’s that writing. Playing the harmonica until his lips dripped with blood and he’d have to spit as it were tobacco juice and playing the guitar parts so the strings would strike a spark that would catch fire and smoke swayed there before him where he made music with blood raining from his fingers.

People who drove by the graveyard in the cold fog could hear him and thought it to be haunted by ghosts. The squirrels and white-tailed deer and hawks, red foxes and beavers from the riverbank came to hear him and the mockingbirds and robins sang back-up vocals, digging up the graves of his parents and their bodies rose and their spirits sang with him too.

The day he was to perform the Hymn in front of the church he stood in the left vestry sneaking pulls from a bottle of wine he stole and had hidden under his robe, and the sheriff put his hands on his shoulders and bent his knees to look him in the eyes.

“Boy, the whole town comes to this here church and is here today to hear you sing the Word. Do not let me down.”

He said Okay.

When he walked to the pulpit they started in with the organ. He began to mumble the words which he never learned and heat bolted from inside his face. He vomited some and wiped it on his sleeve.

They booed him off stage and screamed at him with disgrace and cursed his name.

The next Sunday the sheriff had arranged a chance to have his name redeemed with a second performance to make up for the previous.

The boy was nearly in tears when he said Okay. The congregation was whispering and chuckling and he bowed his head and was drinking whiskey this time and put back a whole pint and looked up, peering down the pews and the organ repeated the opening verses three times. He took off his white-cloak robe and was wearing a blue-jean shirt with Indigo pebbles and the emblem of a buffalo skull on his bolo tie and slid out of his shoes so that he was bare-footed and he held a harmonica to his lips and sang for them some Sonny Terry—Old Lost John, wailing sexually and crying with fervor lungs a moan that had been scorned and beaten by the world’s belt. He slid to his knees and rolled on his back and for the first time was totally taken by the spell of song.

Some folks screamed in horror and others fainted, and some went down into the spell with him, shaking their hips, and it is said that one poor old man up-and-died there on the spot, and almost all ran out of there acting as they’d just been seeded by Satan.

He was kicked out of the sheriff’s house that day. “What the hell is wrong with you,” the sheriff said.

“I just done what I know. I only did what I wanted to.”

“You disgraced your Lord and Savior. You embarrassed me in front of the entire town son. You put shame to your family name.”

“My name ain’t the same as yours.”

“You’re gawddamn right it ain’t. Now take your devil music boy and gee-it. Jesus Christ can’t even do nothing for your awful soul.”

The boy whispered, tailing off at the end of his sentence while he gathered his tapes and was interrupted. “You don’t know nothing…”

“—What’d you say to me? Huh? You fucking loser.”

Before the boy could speak the sheriff was already beating him with a bullwhip across his shoulder blades until blood was smeared across his back as it were a canvas for blood and only blood.

When the sheriff finished he had worked himself to near death and had his hands on his knees and was panting and the boy stood above and his blood stained into the carpet an outline of red wings and he said, “I said—you don’t know nothin’ about Jesus Christ.”

He stole his step-sister’s blue bicycle, which had a green basket—with flowers still inside that by he’d watch die in the coming weeks—he’d use to carry his whiskey and his tapes and harmonica, and a silver trumpet bell and he was gone. He would add the bell as an accessory to his guitar delivering a steel-horn affect giving his music a strange church-chime sound.

He lived in dumpsters, and slept in public camping grounds, met friendly people at dive-bars and would stay on their couch or with them in their bed for a week-or-so before being kicked out or moving on, and took work as a mail-man, garbage-man, dishwasher and janitor, begged for money with a sign and guitar and it rained on him during one stint for seven days straight. Made enough money for cigarettes and beer and a little whiskey but not much else. Each night he found a spot with a microphone where he would be booed off stage and sometimes particular audience members hated his sound so much they took it upon themselves to beat him until he rolled around the floor bleeding and then kick him until he bruised and bled the more and lost teeth from his mouth, three of which he’d never replace.

Many nights he’d pass out drunk naked in truck beds with his face behind a spider-web of saliva, howling the verses of songs he’d not remember come morning while the stars seemed to arrange a silent sweeping score. Many days under an ocean firmament lit with fire-red waves and heat-lightning bursting in chains like circuited seizures would he drop to his knees and stretch out his arms, the scars behind his shoulders cracking, looking up and waiting for the sky to flood, and curse the name of whoever would imagine such a world and then make it manifest.

He lived this way for four years, until he was old enough to go to prison and he was sentenced for the first time for acts of animal cruelty.

He had been betting on dog fights for almost three months, the event being held in a ring in the woods three miles deep behind Johnny Maver’s place, when it was raided by the same sheriff who raised him.

“If it ain’t the prodigal son,” the sheriff said and shook his head, cuffing his wrists. “God you disgust me so.”

He sang Otis Redding in his cell, “I want another day, you can let me have just one more day,” and introduced the song with, “We gonna sing a soulful song ladies and gentlemen, for everybody who is unhappy. This song is something that everybody wants, everybody needs, and I been trying to get it,” and was told many times to shut the fuck up. He mopped the floors in the evening singing, and cooked cornbread in the afternoon singing and walked outside every day singing, and it was when in prison when he first discovered his name.

“See here’s the story on how I wrote my name for the first time,” he’s saying to the podcaster, “There was this dude fixing to go to the electric chair. I had gotten to know him pretty well. For his last meal he said he wanted a little whiskey and a piece of ass. Then they come into his cell and grabbed him and took him down the hall and I guess they zapped him too. Before he was gone he gave me his copy of the Book of Thomas and I read it in one sitting. It was banned from the Bible. They buried it way down there and centuries later they dug it up. I spent a while considering that. Then the letters of my own name gutted me, all in a crazed blur, like bad mushrooms or a olden-days kinda vision and that was it, I could see it written down in the black of my mind when I closed my eyes. It was raining matchsticks and there was my name before me. Was like candles had been lit for this moment in eternity and was burning and the gnats screaming. I was hollering and everybody thought I’d finally lost my mind. But I knew I had just found it for the first time. In Leotie County Prison. So that’s the story how I got my name. I sketched it too, on the walls in cell number G-77.  Wonder sometimes if it’s still wrote down there.”

After he first wrote his name he began writing songs too, and met the fiddler Ray Jim Lyall while in prison and they played together in spare time and when he was released he joined Ray Jim’s bluegrass band, The Yokel Pilgrims.

They toured Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama again, playing fiddle and harmonica and banjo and stand-up bass, snare drum and steel guitar before a hundred and even a hundred fifty somewhat enthusiastic fans a show.

The song that gave them a small following in certain circles was their bluegrass cover of “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain.” They each sang verses, but Thomas Diggs stole each show from his amphetamine laced kicks sliding across the stage and hyper paced guitar licks and wild-rage performances, letting those angels-banned-from-Heaven imprisoned inside him race all through his bones, looking like a man succumbed by exorcism.

Ray Jim would let the shouting of fans die down some from the previous song, and in hoarse voice wallow out, “Alright now, whoow, alrighty.” And he would eye down Thomas from behind their microphones, while they tuned their instruments and say, “Tommy, I believe you had a question for me.”

“Well yeah,” Thomas would say, checking a note or two on his guitar. “I think we all want to know. Where’s she been and when is she coming?”

And the audience would roar while the band went straight into chorus singing acapella in low-toned lungs styled after a funeral procession, which was followed with savage screaming from the band members, and duck calls and cowbells from the audience, and blank rounds fired into the air and ceaseless, un-abandoned shouting.

The drums banged recklessly like an announcement of birth, and then for the twelve minutes that proceeded the band would search their instruments with their fingers as it were sparked from their soul, with lightning drawn out from the strings and from the piano keys, and bellow out with the audience, “When she comes!”

They sang about her laying down with the scum of this world, skin cloaked by the heat of the sun, spending her time with the mortals upon earth, one day she would slay the dragon that she had once brought strings and sealing wax, but it would ferment again from the dust and dirt, flying woodenly over her while she was giving birth, her moaning in horrid pain with the pitiful seed in the clouds of Heaven, and her fleeing and hiding in the wild horse-chestnut trees, running by night and her feet would sparkle as they were dressed by the moon, she’s been farming twelve oxen and milking twelve fine cows, her heart breaks still for her children cursed by fate since dawn, struggling to fight the god of time and god of the tides, She’ll be deep in a flood from the dragon’s breath, the bubbles on the surface are the stars that crown her head, and she was swallowed up by a whale been hunted since man became flesh, she’s been weaving seven years through Hell on a crimson shell, she’s been singing seven long years with a golden tongue, been singing about change coming, ain’t looking good but still singing she’s borne by angels, in Hell she sings down a long dark road, the fire down there flashed within in her eyes, she’ll keep on until she finds the wicket gate, and she’s the mother of saints and she’s slaying the dragon she once bore and she once raised, when we ask and ask where has she been, and ask to see her distant light, and vomit all day and shake and cry all night, oh mama! She’ll be risen by the seed where the flowers come from, and she’ll be coming around the mountain.

The Yokel Pilgrims held practice at the Leotie Azalea Trailer Park where most of the band lived, jamming outside for all members of the community to come watch, sitting on televisions, and lawn chairs, and the seats of sixties Chevy pick-up trucks that had been torn apart from the vehicle with a price tag on the leather for twenty-five dollars. They brought their duck calls and their cowbells and sang with them.

The band was trying to record their first album when they finally kicked out Thomas from the group because of his recklessness and abusive nature. After he was introduced to heroin he started slouching during rehearsals and slouching out of the tour van, and slouching out of motel rooms shading the sun from his body.

On many occasions, wherever their gig was, he crawled across the parking lot. He would flat collapse on stage and start fights with other members of the band, or be missing with some woman, or locked in the bathroom suicidal. He slept with Jim Ray’s wife when she was in a bad way on heroin too, and Jim Ray’s sister, and he missed practice and when they rehearsed before shows he was likely playing his guitar with broken strings and singing incoherently or passed out drunk, unconscious and lifeless on heroin or some awful combination of tranquilizers which involves putting horses to sleep.

He spent all his money and time in bars with the locals, then talking to himself when nobody else was there, waking up in the bathroom noontime the next day.

“Playing with them,” he says on the podcast, “when we was just twenty was probably the greatest day of my life. We had wings back then. Believe that to this day. But I couldn’t get straight. Truthly, only time I ever seen God is when I was high on heroin. I wasn’t about to kick those visions.”

When the band got tour dates to play in Europe, they never told him and he was replaced.

It was a short time after that when he had spent all the money he ever earned and was homeless again.

Wherever he went he was laughed at and spat on, denied food, and only drinking water and bathing occasionally out of the faucets of convenient-store bathrooms, singing each day on the streets like an exiled prophet.

“I was bellowing out a sound so pathetic,” he says on the podcast, “it coulda been heard across the country as a dying dog. I believe it was worse when I slept, and it’s the only explanation I have for them finding me, and them saving me.”

“When who saved you?” The podcaster asks.

*** ***

He’s referring to the Sin Gustine Side-Show Circus, which he joined after falling asleep one night—and dreamed of these figures standing above him with fire-breath and oceans in their eyes, and humans with the heads of donkeys and fishes and they peered down into his sleeping soul and said amongst themselves that this man does not belong to this world, not by a million miles.

When he awoke, he was riding in their caravan where his job was to arrange the score of the entertainers departing from their car, emerging unto the circus ring as it were a music video.

There was a ventriloquist whose puppet was in fact a living and breathing dwarf so small he could dance upon the ventriloquist’s palm and together in a spooking speech they foretold the future, saying the words were given to them from ghosts of the dead that screamed into their skin.

“It is not God but His mistress called Fate and Chance to which you shall bow down.” And, “He who waits for to set his wings upon the stars shall drown forever into the ocean depths with feathers damp and anchored.”

Their fortunes were made manifest by the performance of the ‘Wind-Man’ with the words, Do You Dare Disturb The Universe tattooed above and below his eyes, and There is Risk and Truth to Yourselves and The World Before You arced and outlined by a rainbow across his chest, and was so skinny he appeared as a skeleton beneath a ghost-flesh.

He could slip behind thin air while another performer known as the ‘Human Firecracker’ exploded upon the stage, and the Wind-Man would reappear as a man hanged behind the spurted flames, and then as the swinging corpse’s Spirit and then its resurrection, or as the image of death itself, steadfast and slipped away from the stage, creeping between the seats, having audience members screaming.

There was the lion-tamer in a top hat and red necktie, a bullwhip and twelve lions sitting on stools in a semi-circle before him while he tempted and taunted them, and whipped them until one-at-a-time they chased and danced with him.

The audience roaring in astonishment while, like a man with the power of trance, the tamer halts the lions chasing him, and while he bowed before the flowers thrown at his feet, one of the lions, the mother, became awakened and ran up behind him and threw him against the cage and began devouring his flesh, dying and buried somewhere in the swamps of Yazoo Mississippi Delta and the show was finally cancelled.

It was in this experience with the traveling circus that Thomas wrote what would become his first album and discovered and developed what would become his style —punk-rock and psychedelic hillbilly and country blues, like the Gospel soundtrack of a congregation where men of God test the blood of rattlesnakes—all becoming the record Circus Freak, which would take two years of touring before being produced.

In these years his hair grew long with tangled knots and his beard went ungroomed and greasy and he appeared in the image of an inbred Jesus.

He sang in these years, among other written works, “Crow at My Window” and “Ole Frank and Lefty Jed and Jesus” and “Miss Bethlehem, Georgia: Reincarnation of June Star” in dives across the West: crossing into each new state with a wild and live vehemence that grew from within him like his spirit was fixing to burst through the stratosphere—starting out on Georgia Street in North Texas, where drinks were served in plastic cups and fried foods served on paper plates, to the Matador and Paramount Liquor and Lounge in Gallup, New Mexico, buying a case of beer and a fifth of whiskey in the store and walking through the Picasso’s Guitar Player door beads and into the bar where he would drink all day and perform all night in front of a half dozen drunks playing pool and trying get lucky with strangers, Club Rio and World Famous Woody’s Tavern on the stage with dancing drunk tourists from New York, Virginia and Florida who would offer him five dollars to play covers and so he did, and people on work visas from the Philippines and South Africa, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica who heard his sound and shared cigarettes with him on the upstairs patio and bought him shots and invited him to their homes, and the Dirty Dogg Saloon where the sound of motorcycles rumbled all hours of every day and women danced on the stage with him in hula hoops and crack pipes and meth-laced joints and tattoos of angels cloaked in light and angels cloaked in darkness riding bikes on their backs.

He hitchhiked up Highway 1 and played songs in the cars, and bussed tables during the day at the Rocky Point Restaurant and played folk music at night in awful drunkenness and cursed the couples there dressed fantastically civilized eating fifty dollar fillets and drinking hundred dollar bottles of wine who conversed delicately and who did not listen to his songs and he spent time living in the Redwoods, hiding from the authorities and when he was spotted he appeared as some American mythology written out of the wilderness many centuries ago, and lived on the rock beach where he was arrested three times for drunken behavior and misconduct.

When his hands were cuffed by the metal which caved down the blood in his wrists and he was asked what in the hell was wrong with him he would jab his head toward the ocean where the silent surface formed foam of violent waves under the sun and crashed in whispers and sang into the shells collected at the ocean’s bottom and he would say, “There’s my mind, out there drowning.”

He took a job on the Pioneer River Cruise, where he drank umbrella drinks all day in the sun and appeared to be dead in the pool and his skin became leather, and finally talent manager Jack Kettle heard him perform one night, with his family who were taking three months away from Hollywood, for nearly two hours and found himself in tears and his heart felt like liquid matter and he asked Thomas how he wrote one particular song which he swore was a ballad of his own father.

“Maybe I met him. He ever sell heroin? I might have jerked him off for some heroin.”

They picked out a band by traveling the state of Texas and set up a recording studio in the cart of an abandoned coal train, labeled in old bronze lettering Mr. Peabody, and the acoustics reverberated a hollow echo chiming of ghosts and dust.

The cover of the album is a photograph of Thomas and the seven band members getting out of a 1974 sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle Bug in the middle of a rodeo tent filled with fire-rings.

Thomas is wearing a straight brimmed black matador hat with a red band and red trim, a face painted in white and a red handprint on his left jaw, a wide silver bull ring hanging in his nose, seashell earrings tied by string and humming the ocean just over his shoulder, and a rhinestone sky-blue suit with silver sparkling and shrining the outline of his body like the sun against river.

Tied to his neck by a rope are three crows with green eyes. He holds his palm under the mouth of a bull while the band members—dressed as a bear riding a unicycle, or as rodeo clowns and circus clowns chasing geese and rounding up chickens, or as magicians or biblical shepherds in the image of John the Baptist holding his own decapitated head in his arms–flee from three other bulls chasing them ridden by monkeys wearing red pinstripe pants and playing snare drums and smashing crash cymbals together.

After the record was finished and released it was met with mixed reviews. Critic Alfred Welch wrote it was perhaps the most foul and vile thing his ears had ever endured and suffered, and Jean Valdie said it was just good enough in place to make even Milton’s Satan weep.

Upon the album’s completion they celebrated at Venus in Lion Furs which smelled like Yves Saint Laurent and Avon Odyssey Perfume and flower-scented skin and cigarette smoke, and stale eggs and ass sweat.

He met a stripper named Penny-Dice Gaia, who was ten years his senior with long forest shaded hair and hazelnut eyes that trailed somewhere into her soul a mystical mountain and waterfall.

For twenty-five dollars she led him to a back-room.

He told her he was fixing to be a star of this world.

They unbuttoned her cut-off blue-jeans that hugged her thighs which revealed a tattoo of the Virgin Mary between her legs, golden halo and gold chiming out from her rose-tinted heart, incensed with Heaven’s willows, and she grabbed his hair and steered his face.

They drank and laughed and touched each other all night a song written forever against time, and were married early in the morning at Shamrock City Hall while it was still dark out, and by the time the sun struck light she was carrying his seed and was glowing with warm waves from beneath her skin.

The session violinist was named Billy Dale, or B.D. or Beady and when he was told the news after their honeymoon in Paradise, California, he said in disbelief, “No you didn’t. Gawddamn boy. You know where all that thing is been.”

Thomas poured Caldera brand hot sauce into his whiskey and sipped it all the way down and refilled the drink, and was smiling.

“Goddamn boy,” Beady kept saying, “You did not.”

“I sure did.”

Thomas and Penny-Dice bought a trailer in Leotie, Georgia and he inherited four of her sons each with a different father, as well as the one in her belly and he bought three hound dogs who had been trained to track anything with wings. Where they lived, at night at least three times a week the sirens screamed, and the dogs howled for the salvation of the criminal while he sat on his lawn chair with a cooler of beer on the duct-tape porch singing and playing the guitar.

He never took them hunting and kept their kennels as abandoned prison cells and used for outside sitting, and taught them how to sing, and had them sing on the title track of his next record, Angels Are a Country Song, and were on the cover too, a series of three water paintings by Virgil Day, one where a dog is chasing a flock of white ducks with their wings flapping across a creek on a winter day where another dog tracks down drops of blood left behind from the imprint of a snow angel, and the third one in Thomas’s lap with them smiling and staring at each other as though their souls were married many centuries ago and had traveled many miles to meet again.

The most successful track on the record was the steel pedaled and punk driven “November Hunt” with the chorus, “You shovel through my soul like I knew you would/And Jesus wants your heart ’cause it tastes so good.”

“When I wrote and recorded that,” he says during the podcast, “it took all of thirty-three minutes. Looking back, I think, my whole life, every single moment of it came down to those thirty-three minutes, and that was it. When I wrote it down and they turned on the mikes and I was singing, I saw my Spirit come from inside of me to outside of me. I saw my mama too. She was wearing smeared and old make-up. Her hair was very beautiful, always. There’s a lotta people claimed her to be a witch, some devil whore, living in the woods with different men. But she weren’t no witch. She was a angel. She had something from God that rang through her eyes. Wearing a white nightgown, and what my Spirit saw in those thirty-three minutes was my mama giving birth.”

His prolific years were captured by his first two albums and most say he never caught it again.

The next few years he lived comfortably for the first time in his entire life, and in his comfort did nothing too much save for score heroin and sit outside on a lawn chair, watching nature, staying high, with cuts on the veins of his arms and wrists, and neck and thighs and ankles.

Penny-Dice came to him one morning when he was singing on the floor drunk and strung-out wearing only his underwear. NASCAR was on the television.

“You ever gonna get straight Tommy?”

He rubbed his eyes and tried to stand and fell down on his back.

“In this life,” he said. “No, I kindly doubt it.”

“I thought you was going to be a star. You ain’t nothin’ but dust’n’trash are you.”

He made fast engine sounds with his tongue and saliva stained his cheek.

“I’m taking the kids to my mama’s place in Greenville.”

***

After his family left him, a suicide attempt had him hospitalized at the Leotie Psychiatric Hospital.

He signed autographs for the staff, whoever wanted one and most did not care either way. They hung it up on the wall with the childish drawings the patients would color.

He taught a music class and he recorded Psychotic Blues in their music room with other patients that he showed how to play instruments contributing to each track, playing a theremin or harpsichord, or the bongos or a lute, pushing brooms against the floorboards and clacking washboards, playing the jaw harp and playing tubular bells or the xylophone, each of them taking a turn at the horns with the final production being dubbed so it sounds like a band of a hundred bronze trumpets. With verses he wrote of those he met there, “Done killed my brother in the morning in the fog/It was the voices in my head that said to/Say they was the Word of God/There ain’t nobody learned me God is a devil too.”

The record was the last to get any positive reviews and was considered almost unanimously, until his final album, to be his last decent effort as a singer-songwriter.

Penny-Dice would visit him, with other patients in the visitor’s room, and he asked to see his son and step-kids and she tried not to cry and he tried not to cry when she said the truth, that they preferred, at least for the time being, to not know him as their father.

“How’s your mama?”

“She’s good.”

“How’s your car?”

“It’s fine.”

“You need a new one?”

She was shaking her head and her eyes were consumed in darkness behind gray cloud sunglasses and she turned away when she spoke.

“Tommy.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

When he got out he still had the shakes and still down in his heart didn’t want to live in this world and he joined the Zou Buddhist Temple just outside Bethlehem, Georgia, praying with his feet crossed and his head shaved, learning a philosophy that says when one desires then one lives in pain and one accepts pain then one has no desires and then lives in contempt and satisfaction, trying to embrace this way of being, smiling every moment of each hour, whether it was true or not a true smile, and finally left after three months saying, “There just ain’t no blood here.”

While staying halfway sober he recorded a few albums that drifted into the abyss of obscurity, two different country disco records, a soundtrack for the film, The Resurrection and a Buddhist Christian album that were all considered pretty awful.

He played country fairs and country weddings, water parks and theme parks and trailer-park barbeques, college softball National Anthems and southern small-school fraternity Tuesday night socials, back to low-key dive-bars and house parties for twenty-five dollars a night and all he could drink Ole Chattanooga beer from a keg, low-country bluegrass festivals in a Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama Tri-County area.

Many of the dark shaded bars he performed in he was recognized by the old timers and regulars across the south and southwest and they offered him free drinks and he mostly said No thank you, but sometimes he’d say to himself, ‘Well one little drinky-dew never killed nobody,’ and they’d share brown liquor and drink more and more of those drinks until the dark bar lit gold and silver and became a blurred and electric disco ball barroom like an LSD trip in Heaven, taking shots out of the belly buttons of women wearing cut-off blue jeans and tight shirts, dancing in her arms and believing the dance to be a dance with angels, and speaking like they had been in love forever and only woke up that night to understand this, over outside cigarettes, and stealing bottles from behind the bar and laughing beside windows where the moon was the only light, snorting cocaine off her fingers in a booth, being tased by the bouncer for dancing on the table and falling into her arms and carrying each other outside the doors, snorting coke off each other in the car in the parking lot, whispering into her ear the poetic verse he would never remember with her biting his neck and panting and moaning and them breathing the breath of animals, waking up in the morning fallen off her bed frame rubbing his eyes with the damnation of eternal headache and her kids yanking at her ankles hollering for pancakes.

On certain Country radio programs his song, “My Daddy’s Blood” was heard and he did a music video for it.

The song is from the perspective of different sons who give more-or-less a eulogy of their fathers, one was born in the Great Depression, one was a WWII medal recipient, one was in the Olympics, one cured cancer and one made the world in six days.

The video’s story spans over eighteen years and begins with a father driving a pickup truck from his home and his son inside the house peeking through the blinds.

Then the father stands at the counter of a gas station with an Indian clerk and points to a pack of cigarettes, and when he gets them he shakes his head and points to another pack. Each pack he points toward is the pack he receives and he points to a different pack three times.

He sits down in a bar, and his son grows up. Body turned upside down in a bathroom and head dumped into a toilet, beaten up after class by bullies, the same kid fifteen years later at the altar, and the same bullies interrupt the ceremony to beat him, and his own mother and wife yell, synchronized with the lyrics as sung, “Kick him in the head,” and “Tear out his eyes.”

This experience happens throughout the song, at a job interview, sitting in his den watching football, at the hospital while his wife gives birth, in the grocery store reading from a list and grabbing a box of cereal. And at church while he’s holding a hand in the air singing Hallelujah.

The scenes are intertwined with Thomas playing and singing the song, on a ship from Ireland in the seventeenth century bound for America, playing in the Georgia fields full of cotton, playing on a stage before the Founding Fathers, playing on a stage before Civil War soldiers, and WWII soldiers, and Vietnam protest rallies, and Alabama and Mississippi sixties massacres, singing, “My daddy’s dreams came up roaring and screeching/And all that remains from them are burnt tire marks,” and singing on the moon with the American Flag, floating finally, through outer space, beyond Jupiter and Neptune and passed by an alien aircraft whose passengers marvel through the windows at this lost American singing through space.

At the end of the song the son blows out a number 30 candle on a cupcake and walks into a bar and the old man is sitting there half asleep and he sits down beside him and orders a drink, and the old man asks him for a drink and gets one and then bums a cigarette and his son lights it for him too, and the two don’t recognize each other and they shake hands and smile and are conversing. The old man laughs and puts his arm on his shoulder and ashes his cigarette.

Then the bullies come in—still aged around ten years—and throw him from his chair and throw him through the window and his father helps him up and looks at the twinkle in his eye and seems to recognize him and appears that he’s going to hug him, then punches him in the face, and they all have a good time beating him.