Ballad of Thomas Diggs (Part Three)
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.”