Chapter 6 
Chapter 6 There is a way that seems right to a man,
But its end is the way of death.
—PROVERBS 14:12
AL: Given the way I was living, New Orleans seemed like an ideal place for me to find myself after I left home. My dad’s sister Aunt Judy and her family lived in a bedroom community just outside New Orleans, and she agreed to let me stay with them for a while. She was the director of nursing at one of the hospitals in New Orleans and offered to find me a job. The whole arrangement seemed good to me, and I was eager to leave my West Monroe past behind for a new start in New Orleans. I’m sure my leaving broke my parents’ hearts, but they were committed to tough love and to letting me make my own mistakes.
The most tragic part of my lie was that Lisa trusted me, so she believed what I told her.
My parents were not the only ones whose hearts were broken when I decided to move away. Lisa was devastated. I was seventeen by this time and eager to prove myself in a big, happening city. Lisa, however, was only fifteen; she had just started dating the man of her dreams (me), and she was in love. She was convinced our relationship could stand the long-distance test; frankly, I didn’t care whether it did or not. At that time, I was dating Lisa because I thought she was pretty, I knew she was a nice girl, and she was sleeping with me. I did not reciprocate the deep feelings she had toward me, nor did I share her commitment to our relationship. I told her that, yes, we were so in love we could definitely make a long-distance romance work. That was a lie and I knew it; I fully intended to be in hot pursuit of all the good-looking women I could find once I moved away. The most tragic part of my lie was that Lisa trusted me, so she believed what I told her.
Aunt Judy did get me a job in the same hospital where she worked, as a courier for the nurses. My responsibilities consisted of carrying documents, charts, lab reports, medications, supplies, and other things back and forth among the nurses and hospital employees. I thought I was the best-looking, most charismatic man in the universe. At seventeen, I was exceedingly flirtatious, I was arrogant, and I thought I was God’s gift to women.
Most of the nurses were in their early to midtwenties. I told them I was twenty-one and spent my entire eight-hour shift complimenting and teasing them. I worked the night shift, eleven P.M. to seven A.M., which meant less supervision and more freedom than I would have had working days. I could not imagine a better job.
Back in West Monroe, my family missed me and Lisa was miserable without me. One weekend, my mom, brothers, and grandparents came to New Orleans, saying they wanted to visit Aunt Judy and Uncle Jim. They brought Lisa with them. I’ll let her tell this part of the story from her perspective in the next chapter, but suffice it to say here that I did not treat her or my family well.
When they arrived, I was not even home. I was out on a date! In fact, the whole time they were in New Orleans, for several days, I showed up to see them only once. Lisa was shocked and heartbroken.
I did not realize for quite some time how much I had hurt her in so many ways—not picking her up when we went out but asking her to meet me, never having any money to even buy her a hamburger, introducing her to alcohol, allowing her to be around people who were smoking pot (including me), not respecting her feelings for me, pressing her to go faster and farther physically than we should have, robbing her of her virginity, and just generally taking advantage of her before flippantly saying, “I’m leaving,” and basically abandoning her. I did talk to her by phone a few times from New Orleans, but once I left West Monroe, I was ready to dump my fifteen-year-old girlfriend for some “real women.”
At the time, I could not have accurately described the way I treated her or put truthful labels on my bad actions. Lisa could not articulate everything I did to her either; she just knew she was devastated, and she cried all the way back to West Monroe and for a week afterward.
Before long, my life almost became one wild party after another in between my shifts at the hospital. I acted like I enjoyed the drinking and carousing because I thought it made me seem cool, but I really found it uncomfortable. I also went through two or three one-night stands but found them unsatisfying. Even then, something in me understood that sex is about intimacy and a relationship. I’m not sure how I knew that, but I believed a physical relationship needed to take place in the context of some level of exclusivity. Maybe that was because I saw such a powerful example of ironclad commitment in my mom during difficult times in her life. Maybe it was just part of my emotional makeup, or maybe I was a bit old-fashioned. Whatever the reason, I have always had a “commitment chip” in my relational wiring, so I quickly lost interest in sex for the sake of sex and focused on developing a steady relationship.
I could not have made a worse choice for this “steady relationship”—a twenty-six-year-old neonatal nurse who told me she was married but separated. She confided in me about all the struggles she faced in her marriage and about how unhappy she was and what terrible problems she had with her husband. Before long, she and I were sleeping together.
Something deep inside me kept whispering to me that what I was doing was not right. I was not ever completely comfortable with that relationship, and I never understood why she wanted to be so secretive and sly about it, but I stayed in it.
Once again, I was living a double life. I had become a master of disguise. Everyone around me seemed to love me because I had a great personality, but in reality I was not lovable at all. I was a self-serving, arrogant young man trying to act much older than my age. I was sleeping with a woman who was not my wife, and I was drinking more than ever and taking speed in order to be able to work at night without having to sleep away all my daylight hours. Where drugs were concerned, I feared getting caught with them and going to jail, so I definitely was not a “pothead” or anything like that, and I viewed speed as something I needed to keep me awake during the graveyard shift. I never had marijuana in my possession (even when I smoked it in my younger days) but rarely turned down a joint when someone offered me one. All the while, I kept my job, did the laundry at Aunt Judy’s, cooked for the family, and cleaned their house. I never lost my sense of responsibility toward family, but I took no responsibility at all for my personal life, and I made one bad decision after another with my nurse girlfriend. That almost cost me my life.
One Sunday morning, after I had been in New Orleans a little more than a year, I went to the nurse’s apartment to tell her I could not see her anymore. For some reason I had begun to sense danger around us, and I realized she might have more of a story than I realized. Something about the relationship just did not feel safe, so I wanted to end it. As it turned out, I never got the courage to break up with her that day and ended up leaving her apartment without saying what I went there to say.
I had not driven my white 1976 Monte Carlo very far before two tires went flat. A man pulled over close to me, got out of his car, and asked about the tires. I could tell he was not interested in helping. Suddenly, he picked up my crowbar and began beating me with it, shouting profanities. I tried to wrestle it out of his hands and then took off running as fast as I could, barely escaping the crowbar when he hurled it at me. He was my girlfriend’s husband.
I skidded into a convenience store, breathless and terrified, and told the clerk to call the police. I don’t know how much time passed before they arrived, but it seemed like forever.
I got into the car with one of the police officers, who said he would take me back to my car. He asked, “Where’s the gun?”
I did not know what he meant. Later, I guessed that he was testing me to see what I would say—he wanted to know who the gun belonged to.
As it turned out, after the assailant threw the crowbar, he ransacked my unlocked car and found a loaded gun. My uncle had given me the gun to carry for protection, and I had hidden it under the seat and forgotten about it. In his rage, my girlfriend’s husband had used the gun to smash the glass on my car before he headed down the street after me. I’m sure he was intent on shooting me if he found me.
Suddenly, the guy picked up my crowbar and began beating me with it, shouting profanities.
When the first police car arrived on the scene, my girlfriend’s husband ran back to the car and threw the gun into it, through one of the broken windows. The police later removed the gun and placed it on the hood of my car with the chamber open for me to identify. Had I not run so fast, I feel certain I could have been shot to death. The guy was that angry.
When we got back to my car, a small crowd had gathered, including my girlfriend and several of her neighbors. Some of the neighbors had called the police before I did, and that’s probably what kept my girlfriend’s husband from following me to the convenience store and killing me in the candy aisle. Needless to say, my girlfriend was upset, more about the fact that I had lied to her about my age than anything else. The relationship ended up being over that day after all. I had to admit that my time in the Big Easy was not nearly as easy as I imagined it would be.
After the chaos subsided and almost everyone had left the crime scene, I sat down on the curb, exhausted, dazed, and relieved to be alive. I realized the man who attacked me would not face any consequences for his behavior because he had a good relationship with the police as a drug informant. The police basically told me nothing was going to happen to him and that I should not have been running around with a married man’s wife to begin with. I couldn’t argue with that!
Eventually, the only person left besides me was the crime scene photographer. When he finished taking pictures, he walked over and sat down beside me. I don’t remember word for word what he said, but he started asking me what I was doing and where I was from. He started talking about my family “back home,” and I began to cry. He could tell I was a lost soul in a bad place, and he knew exactly the right things to say to me in that moment. The photographer ended the conversation by encouraging me to go home. When I look back on that moment, I realize that this man provided me with the way out of my mess. “Go to the hospital and turn in your resignation. Then go home. Get back to your family. You don’t need to be here. If you keep living like this, something really bad is going to happen.”
When I speak publicly, people often ask me if this man was an angel. I don’t know. All I know is that from a biblical perspective, angels do function as God’s messengers—and this man definitely had a message from God for me. I don’t get caught up in who he was; I’m just thankful he talked to me that day.
Dad was indeed standing in the driveway, but instead of yelling at me, he simply said, “We’ve been waiting for you.”
After everything that had happened in New Orleans, I finally did want to go home. I did not want to run anymore, but I had no idea how my family would respond to my return. I started by going back to Aunt Judy’s, bruised and beaten, and telling her and my uncle everything that had happened. They were shocked. After all, I’d been a model houseguest, even cooking and cleaning, and a reliable employee at the hospital. They had no idea what I had been doing on my off hours. “I am a mess,” I told them. “I just need to go home.”
They agreed wholeheartedly and helped me get ready to leave.
After being in New Orleans for about a year and a half, I called my mother and told her I was coming. All she said was, “Okay.” I was nervous all the way back to West Monroe, hoping my dad would not be standing in the driveway ready to bawl me out when I got there and read me a list of rules I would have to obey in order to stay.
Dad was indeed standing in the driveway, but instead of yelling at me, he simply said, “We’ve been waiting for you.” Then he invited me to go build some duck calls with him. Over the next few weeks, I started college, worked for Dad, and listened to him as he taught me the Bible. A couple of months after my return from New Orleans, I committed my life to Christ again, for all the right reasons, and Dad baptized me in the river by our house.