Books grow from many things—life experiences, family, friends, things heard on the radio or read in a newspaper. Even an especially moving piece of music can seed a story within a writer’s mind. In my life, five major incidents occurred that have seeded many stories and grown many characters over the years.
- My grandfather’s death
At nine years old you don’t give much thought to death. Not until a garage door swings open and Death sprawls at your feet in the form of the battered body of a young woman. Inside the garage, my grandfather sat upright behind the wheel of his old, green Chevy. The police claimed it was a murder-suicide and laid the case to rest on the unoccupied passenger’s seat of my dead grandfather’s car, the car with a half a tank of gas and the engine shut off inside a concrete block garage with no entry save the big double doors that the police had to cut the heavy duty padlock off in order to open.
How easily they wrote my grandfather’s life off. Being poor and living in our part of town didn’t rate much of an investigation when you died, however violently and under whatever suspicious circumstances. - Alley rapist
Fast forward: late teens, Columbus, Ohio. Taking a shortcut through a dimly lit alley. From a ramshackle garage without its door, a man rushed out, grabbed my arm and jerked me close. “Hey, baby, ya want some, don’cha?” He grabbed his crotch and let go of my arm. I stumbled. While off balance, his fist smashed into my face. I hit the ground and scrambled back up, lip bleeding; nose bleeding. The yellow light of the streetlamp reflected off a glimpse of metal. Instinctively, I threw my arm up in front of my face. Hot pain sliced through my hand. Blood poured from the gash. A fat man on a second floor balcony yelled out, “Wha’ da fuck goin’ on down there?”
My assailant backed a few steps away, then casually swung around and walked off. I staggered to the nearest house with a light on in the downstairs window. The elderly woman let me in, doctored the gash on my hand, and phoned the police. Taken down to the nearest police station, where I was treated to several hours of aggressive questioning about why I was in that alley at that time of night. - My Mother’s Abrupt Leaving
In January, 1973, a few months before my twentieth birthday, my mother complained of an oncoming migraine headache and left work early. After a fried pork chop dinner that evening, she sipped her coffee then with the headache ramping up, went off to bed. Within an hour, the migraine engulfed her in agony and she was rushed to the emergency room. By the time she arrived, she had slipped into a coma.
Four days later, my mother, having never regained consciousness, died. - The Fun Times of Being a Lesbian—not so much.
–I returned to Seattle in 1989 and landed a job with a medical facility. A number of months into the job, when I insisted that my life partner needed the coverage afforded to married couples as I was working in a section of the facility with a high risk to carry home a contagion, I was told homosexual couples did not rate the coverage. Unable to afford the medical costs if I did drag a contagion home, I refused to work in that part of the facility. I was fired.
–Capitol Hill in Seattle felt like a haven to me after having been in the Deep South–a place where my life partner and I could walk together without fear. Until the night that a woman was waylaid outside of a lesbian bar and three men began beating her with clubs. If the women inside the bar had not heard the commotion and rushed into the fight, the woman would have been beaten to death.
–Being an out lesbian among one’s colleagues isn’t always easy or acceptable; not even when we were all supposed to be counselors for the addicted. When I told a male colleague that his inappropriate lunchroom “joke” was offensive, he brushed aside my concern with “Hey, lighten up. It’s just a joke.”
When I insisted ‘just a joke’ or not, it wasn’t funny and it wasn’t appropriate, silence fell among my lunchroom colleagues so hard it nearly gave me a concussion.
After that my colleagues avoided both of us, saying they “didn’t want to take sides”. My direct supervisor called me in and told me I was “Half the problem”.
Eventually, the man was fired, but not for his homophobic and inappropriate behavior.
Scenarios, such as these, continue to occur with frightening regularity. Poor people are murdered with little or no investigation launched into their deaths; rapists freely walk streets while women have to be ever-vigilant; loved ones die without warning; a person can suddenly wind up on the wrong side of violence; and civil rights for LGBTQ people sometimes seems like a far off dream to me.
Words have power, incredible power. With words we can destroy people or build them up; we can paint injustice with a whitewash brush, or we can shine a stark light upon it. It is my hope that my words, my novels, will shine a stark light into very dark corners.
Old Woman Gone, A Special Crimes Team novel: Who would kidnap an 85-year-old witch?