In Memory of K. A Child of God.

Every so often I think of Tim Anderson and wonder how he is.  He's an author of some very good short stories,  or, rather, accounts of his life as a gay truck driver which are not what most people would think on first reading that description.   He is a very sympathetic and close witness to lives that would generally not be mentioned.  For me, they are some of the more deeply religious things I've read.  Some are profoundly sad, documenting the least among us and people who could become the least through the most casual of circumstances.  I think this one.  Beautiful Loser may have been the first one I read,  I think I was looking for a quote from the Leonard Cohen novel of almost that name when I came across it, many years back.  It is about what happened the night a young, truck stop prostitute asked him if she could use his radio to find customers.  Tim Anderson's account is one of the sadder and more insightful things I've read like that.  For reasons I won't go into, it hits far closer to home today than I'd ever have expected then and which I can't bring myself to go into.

Re-reading it reminds me of this article that was in The Guardian last year, in which an atheist,  Chris Arnarde talked about how surprised he was to find religious faith in the drug addicts and prostitutes he was photographing after he left his job on Wall Street.

I eventually left my Wall Street job and started working with and photographing homeless addicts in the South Bronx. When I first walked into the Bronx I assumed I would find the same cynicism I had towards faith. If anyone seemed the perfect candidate for atheism it was the addicts who see daily how unfair, unjust, and evil the world can be.

None of them are. Rather they are some of the strongest believers I have met, steeped in a combination of Bible, superstition, and folklore.

The first addict I met was Takeesha. She was standing near the high wall of the Corpus Christi Monastery. We talked for close to an hour before I took her picture. When we finished, I asked her how she wanted to be described. She said without any pause, "As who I am. A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God."

Takeesha was raped by a relative when she was 11. Her mother, herself a prostitute, put Takeesha out on the streets at 13, where she has been for the last 30 years,

It's sad when it's your mother, who you trust, and she was out there with me, but you know what kept me through all that? God. Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.

Sonya and Eric, heroin addicts who are homeless, have a picture of the Last Supper that moves with them. It has hung in an abandoned building, it has hung in a sewage-filled basement, and now it leans against the pole in the small space under the interstate where they live.

I don't know if Tim Anderson is still writing but I hope he is.  He was writing a blog, and as bloggers do, he went to another one.  And it looks like if I'm going to find him again, I'll have to break my resolution and do Facebook.  I hope he's doing well, now retired from being a trucker.   His Christmas Village stories and others also show he can be rather funny as well.   We've had very different lives and come from different generations but he's shown me parts of life and life as a gay man I'd never see from a gay perspective, including the lives of straight people.  His story prepared me for some really bad news I got today and I thank him for that.