Ballad of Thomas Diggs (Part Five)

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.