Chapter one

                I sit in my bathtub naked and beaten down.  I am so thoroughly exhausted from fighting with my wife, Rachel, that I can barely bring the bottle of Sailor Jerry to my mouth.  I drink Sailor Jerry because it is higher proof, and because I am a sailor myself.   I don’t really want to be one; however I did get the idea from Rachel.  And I am not really a sailor, but rather a corpsman.  Maybe that is the problem, that I have no idea who I am.  Anyhow, a corpsman is a sailor who provides medical assistance to Marines.  We are kind of a hybrid like that.  But like I said, I never really wanted this position.  And my troubles aren’t even war related, since I haven’t even seen combat.  At least not the kind of combat you would ordinarily associate with the military.

                I sink my head down into the tub water.  It will all be over soon enough.  I try to hold my breath for as long as I can, to see if I can pass out.  A minute or so passes and my lungs are screaming at my brain, begging it to make the executive call to surface for air.  I don’t listen to it.  I have always been a glutton for pain.  Another minute passes and I slowly feel the pain turning into a tingling sensation all about my body.  If I continue much longer I will probably pass out and inhale water.

                Just as I am about to fade into oblivion, I jerk my body up and gasp for air.  I didn’t figure it would work, and I laugh out loud because it is a little funny when I think about everything that has happened in my life leading up to this point.  After all, they say that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. 

                 The blade came from one of my shavers.  It wasn’t really hard to break open, and my fingers are pretty strong anyhow, so I don’t think it is any indication of just how cheap these products are being made these days.  I slide my finger across the blade and draw several beads of blood.  At least they make sharp razors, even if the rest of the shaver is a plastic piece of crap.

                My psychologist gave me Klonopin for my anxiety.  I lied to her and told her I was not an alcoholic.  Anyhow, do not mix the two.  Or you will end up like this. 

                I decided a long time ago it was going to be me or her.  I cannot live with this woman that I married.  I do not want to face the fact that I made the wrong choice and that I am quite possibly the stupidest motherfucker on the planet.  And I am not a murderer, although I have thought very long and hard about how I could kill her without getting in trouble.  After all, she would be better off dead.  She told me herself.  All I ever wanted to do was help her.  Why does she have to be such a bitch to me?  When I am the one that is actually on her side?

                I am married to depression.   So I inherited this mess fair enough, and I do not blame anyone but myself.   My life is a series of bad decisions.  And here I go again, making the ultimate bad decision.  Physical pain is something that I have never been bothered by too much, so it doesn’t hurt as I rake this blade over my wrist several times, trying to hit pay dirt.  Psychological pain is much worse.  It is actually a relief in a lot of ways, slicing my wrists like this.  Blood pours out of my arm as the bathwater starts to turn pink.  I dig the razor into my other wrist.  Let’s get this right.

                I think about Rachel as the booze and the drugs and the bleeding all come together in perfect synchronicity.  I see her little brother and sister, who I love more than words.  They are the ONLY reason why I have stayed so long.  And she has used them against me just like her mother uses them against their father.  Such a mind game they play the Stafford family.  I thought I was a gamer, able to psychologically fix this person.  I went to school for psychology.  And I had lived a happy life.  I thought that it would rub off on her.  Little did I know that she would rub off on me?

                Slowly I fade into oblivion and with golden rods and cut scenes I am hurled into a vortex of conscious unconsciousness.

                The strange thing is that ten years ago I was Graysville’s golden child.

                Oh, how the tides they turn.  No one saw me going into left field, but a whole lot of people noticed when I came back and wasn’t the same.  And they pretty much turned their backs, which suited me just fine, I don’t harbor any animosity towards them. 

                Not any longer, that is because I did.  I had a lot of anger, but all of that is gone now.

                This is the truth.  That is what you will be getting here, the truth.  After all, we are all searching for truth in some form or fashion.

                My name is Conrad Saint Louis.  Everyone would eventually come to know me as St. Louis.  This is a name I much prefer to any of the other ones that have been applied to me over the years.

                As a school boy I did exactly what I was told by my parents, and it worked. 

                Study hard. Check

                Get good grades. Check.

Run your ass off, because you suck at swimming, your shot is iffy, and you can’t throw.  You are good at something, and that something is going hard on the track. 

                I inherited running honestly, because running was just what my father was good at, and so I had a role model.  I had a coach.

                He always encouraged me to run with him when I was younger and so I did.  I would go run for a mile.   And then I would go run for two miles.  And by the time I was six I was able to run 4-5 miles at once, no problem at all.

                I entered every single race that came through the area and usually finished among the top in my age group.  I wasn’t exceptionally talented, but I wasn’t slow.  I did have a motor though, which caused me to run 70 mile weeks in high school, and eventually grow into a State caliber runner.

                And I was drilled on spelling words.  And I had no video games so I read encyclopedias for fun.   I got good grades.  I wasn’t exceptionally smart.  I was just smart enough, and had some gusto.  Just so happens that this is enough to include you in the 95th percentile in your class in Graysville.

                So heads did turn.  I didn’t ever think I was better than anyone.  I felt lucky to be honest, that my family was stable enough to give me such a foundation to grow and flourish.

                Running took me to Cumberland College.  This is in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains.  I chose to go here because the running program was strong for a small college, and there were plenty of rolling hills with a plethora of paths zigzagging through the Cumberland Gap.  And they were paying my tuition, which is the single biggest reason for going there.

                Jesus saves was the writing on the wall. Literally.  It was spray painted on a bridge you could see from the interstate heading south from Ohio.

                It was everywhere.  This liberal arts college also happened to be affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.  The money trail was obvious; the SBC funded this cadre of educators.   And they programmed every Southern Baptist kid in a 200 mile radius with their bullshit.

                I once saw our school’s president, Dr.  Taylor, carry several boxes of whiskey into the college’s hotel.  I worked there, and it was the same night as a big party he and his wife were throwing.

                Did I mention that Cumberland College is in the driest region of southern Appalachia?  That means alcohol is a no-no.  Not only was our community dry, but also it was outlined in our student handbook over and over that any student attending Cumberland was not to drink alcohol, regardless of age.

                Needless to say, I was given very mixed messages.   Desperately wanting not to conform with these idiots, I decided to become Atheist. 

                I remember the exact place where it happened.  It was on the football field, that was inside the track that I would run around a million and a half times for the next 6 years.  It wasn’t a rash decision made right there on the spot.  My rational thinking mind had been bugging me for years about inconsistencies in the church, but this was the tipping point.

                We were playing ultimate Frisbee.  All it took was one like minded individual in this sea of southern righteousness.  His name was Joey, and he was also a member of my cross country team.  He said he didn’t buy into the baloney the school was feeding him.  I was engrossed from the very beginning.  I do not believe in God.

                What was developing right in front of me was a beast of a situation that would send my life in directions once unimagineable.

                Because I was “exceptional” in high school, in a manner of speaking, it was all the more difficult to watch myself slide into nothingness.  I got to live this debacle, so I can only imagine what it looked like from the outside looking in.