Free Angelhead by Greg Bottoms Page B

skinny as a concentration camp prisoner from a scratchy Nazi-era documentary, he looked like someone else entirely. I couldn’t believe it was him. We all stood around in the living room as if we'd just seen a spaceship land, as if we were characters in a cruel art film and we didn’t know our lines.
    I couldn’t not look at him, though I tried. He smelled like trash, stared straight ahead, his head leaning back on a cushion, staining it with grease. His hair was long; he had a thick beard. His eyes were glassy and distant. The fly on his tattered, dirt-stained jeans was open, his shoes were untied and almost black with filth. He was helpless. It was the saddest thing I have ever witnessed. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. I lost something of myself that day, and I’ve never gotten it back. Standing in the room with him, needing to scream, to shout, to break something, but unable to, I said to myself, I'm going to go crazy; I'm going to be like him; I feel it coming.
    My father broke down completely, sobbing, hugging Michael, and then sitting down and laying his head on the kitchen table—my stoic father, my tough, no-bullshit father destroyed by a guilt you could almost see around him like a luminous aura.
    Michael didn’t move, didn’t even eat, until my parents took him to the emergency room, simply not knowing what else to do. The nurses gave him fluids and a meal. They checked his blood for drugs and alcohol, but there was no trace of either.

    Years later, when my brother was in prison, I heard the stories about Florida from my younger brother, whom Michael had confided in one day.
    Michael was kicked out of a youth hostel the first day he arrived, then had lived in a small Assembly of God church for the first few weeks. The pastor let him sleep there on a cot, but wouldn’t let him attend church. Michael was too disturbed, too likely to have outbursts of religious zeal that scared people, even charismatics and evangelicals, who were having outbursts of their own for the Lord. At the best of times, while Michael was living at home, his appearance was frightening; away from the constant care of my mother, the sight of him was enough to make people cross the street. He looked, at his worst, unmedicated—unshaven, yellow teeth, hair everywhere—something like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
. His looks, and his vastly unstable behavior, were exactly what got people burned at the stake in medieval times, or had their skulls drilled open so the spirits could escape, or had leeches placed on their eyelids to drain the evil energy from inside their heads. Florida wasn’t so much better than this.
    Other details of his journey are murky, not grounded by any specific narrative, time, place.
    He was gang-raped while living among the homeless.
    He paid for hookers, both male and female, with money he stole from other homeless kids; he once beat a hooker (a woman, I think) nearly to death in an abandoned house because she tried to steal his Bible, then went to a convenience store and called an ambulance.
    A trucker gave him money and food, in exchange for blow jobs until Michael finally tired of him and moved to a different part of town, found a different group of kids, a different corner to hang out on.
    He was robbed.
    He participated in, or at the very least was present during, both rapes and robberies.
    He prostituted himself for money or coffee or food or drugs.
    He prayed several times a day.
    A demon lived in his shoes, so he threw them away and stole a pair off a sleeping drunk.
    He became seriously ill after snorting crank and was taken to an emergency room, where he was treated for extreme dehydration and cramps. He had no identification, no money. His wallet had been stolen and the only thing he had was his tattered Bible that had his name written in the front.
    When the hospital called my mother, having somehow tracked her down about the bill, Michael had already vanished. My