Читать книгу Faces of Evil - Lois Gibson - Страница 14

Chapter Three:

“If I Can Just Get off That L.A. Freeway without Getting Killed or Caught”

I owe my career path as an artist to an obscure seventeenth-century Dutch master painter by the name of Johannes Vermeer.

I say “obscure,” because the name “Vermeer” is not usually the one mentioned by most people as the Dutch artist with whom they are most familiar. They’re more likely to say “Rembrandt,” for instance. Art lovers, of course, are well aware of the artist who brought to light everyday life in the city of Delft in the Netherlands in the 1600s. Thirty-six masterpieces of his work survive today.

After the rape I was still living in Los Angeles but growing increasingly disgruntled with it. I had begun dating Mark, an attorney who loved Vermeer and had a book of his paintings.

One day he proclaimed, “Vermeer is the best artist ever!”

I shrugged. “I don’t know about that. Van Eck is probably better technically,” I said, “and anyway, I prefer Rembrandt.”

Surprised at my argument, he attempted to convince me of the error of my ways. Suddenly I said, “Shoot, I could paint as good as Vermeer.”

“Oh don’t be ridiculous!” he scorned. “There’s no way in the world you could paint that well. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You wouldn’t even know where to start.” Calmly, I persisted in my assertion that I could paint every bit as well as Vermeer and he grew so incredulous and insulting that he threw a dare at me that was intended to shut me up for good (and prove his superior knowledge).

“You think you can paint as well?” he demanded. “Okay, fine. I’ll take you to an art supply store, buy you whatever you need and you do a reproduction of one of the paintings in this book.”

So I did.

I spent hours in my apartment, painting a copy of “Girl With Pearl Eardrops and Turban.” While I painted, I listened to my tapes of George Harrison’s Everything Must Pass, Sly and the Family Stone and Cheap Thrills by Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

And I loved it. Loved every minute of it. And I realized that listening to music and painting was as close to bliss as I was ever likely to get in this life, that I loved doing it so much more than I had enjoyed going to discos, L.A. parties and all the rest of the Hollywood scene.

This is what I want to do, I decided. For the rest of my life.

The rape was never very far from my mind and I remembered well those terror-driven moments and my thoughts, when I’d despaired that I was going to die before I finished college. I made up my mind right then that I would find a way to go to college and major in art.

Eventually, I finished the painting and called up Mark to come and pass judgment.

He was astounded, incredulous.

Of course, he couldn’t just compliment my work and let it go. This was the 1970s and like many men he believed that most women should be at home keeping house and making babies. He kept saying things like, “Did you really paint that?”

As my cheeks began a slow burn, I said, “What do you think? That I had some guy come in here and paint it for me?”

And he said, “Maybe.”

I was furious, but it was only the beginning. He insisted that I paint in front of him so that he could be reassured that I had indeed done the work.

So he watched me and I painted, thinking, I will never see this ego-maniac jerk again EVER.

When he was satisfied that I had indeed done the work, he then demanded that I give him the painting.

“Are you kidding?” Now I was incredulous. “There’s no way I’m giving you this painting.”

“But I bought the art supplies,” he replied, as if that was all there was to it.

I didn’t know if he was ignorant that good replicas of Vermeer paintings could go for $6,000 to $8,000 on the open market or if he was that big of a jerk—that sixty-five dollars’ worth of art supplies was somehow an even trade for my talent and my labor.

I crossed my arms over my chest and stood in front of my picture. “I’m not giving you this painting,” I said.

Sputtering, near apoplectic, he left, slamming the door so hard that it rattled things on the walls.

As soon as he got home, he called and screamed at me for more than twenty minutes, because I wouldn’t give him that painting.

I set the receiver down on the bed and sat there, listening from a distance while he ranted and raved and screamed.

And I thought, I want a man like my daddy. A man who’s not afraid to work hard, get his hands dirty, stay the course and take care of his family.

While this jerk kept screaming, I contemplated the men I’d known in the Midwest. A real man, I thought, or at least the kinds of men I grew up with, would call you up and let you know that he was angry in deep, calm tones.

And so I hung up and started making plans.

My decision to leave Los Angeles didn’t happen right away. I talked to some people, although not about the attack, which I still kept locked inside, and while I thought more about things, I continued to date men who neither were sensitive nor had deep values. I certainly do not mean to imply that all California men have something wrong with them, but, still slowly recovering from my rape and growing more homesick all the time, I began feeling that the lifestyle I was seeing was patently phony. Ambitious men on the fast track to make it in Hollywood cared deeply for superficial things that I didn’t care about at all and seemed to think that projecting an image was more important than being real.

Even so, I wasn’t ready to go back home to Kansas. I would have felt too defeated, too much like I had failed at something and I wasn’t even sure what. So one day I sat down and drew myself a map of the states of Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas.

Then I stood up, closed my eyes, twirled around and put my finger on the map. I opened my eyes and saw it landed on Texas.

I did the exercise again. And again. In all, I twirled around blindly seven times. Five out of those seven times my finger landed on Texas.

It seemed to me a sign. Everyone I had spoken to who came from Texas loved it. I’d heard stories about riding down rivers on inner tubes, taking trail rides, exploring mountains and caves, deserts and forests and the Gulf of Mexico.

One way or the other, I was being guided to Texas.

Later I looked at a real map. Dallas appeared to be a sprawling metroplex where I figured jobs would be plentiful and I knew the University of Texas had a branch campus in the Dallas suburb of Arlington. I called the Dallas Chamber of Commerce for information and the woman who answered the phone was warm, friendly and sweet; she even offered to send me brochures on all the college campuses in the area. The brochures arrived, as promised, within two days and I was sold.

It didn’t take me long to pack my modest belongings into my little car and hit the road.

And as I was driving out, over the radio came the hit Jerry Jeff Walker song, “If I Can Just Get off That L.A. Freeway without Getting Killed or Caught.”

Turning up the volume, I sang along and headed for Texas.

Sometimes things happen from time to time in my life which seem to be signposts. They let me know that Someone greater and smarter than me is guiding my path. I call them mini-miracles, because I don’t know how else to explain it.

If I tried to write the story of my life as a novel, most editors would probably reject the story, claiming it was just too unbelievable. But it’s my life; it happens and, in truth, it can be pretty remarkable sometimes.

Once I had moved to Arlington, I found a nice duplex home not far from the University of Texas at Arlington campus, got a job and enrolled in classes. A couple of months into the spring semester of 1973, I was sitting in class, waiting for the professor to show up. Suddenly I commented aloud, to no one in particular, “I wish I knew if they had a place at Six Flags Over Texas,” (located in Arlington) “where they let you work doing live portraits like in Disneyland. Because I draw faces really well and it would just seem like the most fun way to make money.”

The young woman sitting right next to me almost fell out of her seat. “Are you kidding?” she cried. “I’m the business manager of the portrait artists’ concession there and they do! They’ve started training already, but if you’re really talented and you really want to do it, they’ll take you anyway.”

Like I say. A mini-miracle.

I started out as a watercolor portrait artist, making from $10-$12 an hour, which was really good money at the time. Learning to do quick portraits in watercolor on live subjects—many of whom are wiggling children—is a real trial by fire. You can’t make mistakes, you can’t cover up and the paint dries in about sixty seconds. You can’t even use white paint for details like the gleam in someone’s eye. What you have to do is paint around that little point and leave the white paper to stand in for white paint—and pray that none of your other colors “bleed” into it.

You have to have just the right touch of wetness, not just of the paints, but of the wash for the illustration board—too wet and all your colors run together; too dry and the watercolors don’t work. And you have to do all this with squirming subjects or kids who just can’t sit still but who are so cute you want to hug them, with dozens of people standing around, staring at your work over your shoulder.

Most artists aren’t daredevil enough for such torture, but I loved it. The more portraits I did, the more I could feel myself getting faster, smoother, better. I painted tourist portraits all summer long and it was superb introductory training for my life’s work.

However, after one semester at UTA I realized that I needed to find a school that had a more extensive art program. Though I had little money I was determined to get the best education I could for my future art career, whatever that would be. Looking at other nearby schools I liked the one at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas’s capital, and transferred there. Austin is a beautiful capital city filled with cold spring-fed creeks, walking and biking paths, trees and rock formations and more bookstores, per capita, than any other city in the country. It’s a music center famous for launching talent and Sixth Street near the university is crammed chock-a-block with music clubs and quirky shops.

However, I didn’t get many opportunities to enjoy very much song and dance during the three years I lived there while finishing my degree. My life was a blur of day-long art classes and laboratories, followed by waiting tables well into the night, falling into bed for a few brief hours of sleep, then getting up and riding my bike to the shuttle bus to start classes all over again. Somehow I managed to survive on less than $5,000 a year, furnishing my place from garage sales, buying marked-down, on-sale clothes and subsisting on beans, soy, cheese, water and whatever else was cheap.

In my last semester of art school, just before getting my degree, I learned a painful lesson on how to watch for those “signposts” from God.

Call it a “still, small voice” or a gentle nudging, or whatever, but I believe that God sends us guidance in clear ways if we pay attention. I was dating a guy whom I thought I loved. He lived in San Antonio. On weekends I went there to see him. On the way home one Sunday night, I was planning to drop in on a girlfriend for a chat before returning to my place. Suddenly I got this powerful urge to keep on going straight home.

But I didn’t want to go straight home.

The urge grew stronger, more persistent. It was so strong that I actually argued with myself out loud, saying, “No, I’m not going straight home! I want to visit Donna and I’m going to.”

So I did.

Later that night, when I drove down the street leading to my house, I saw a fire truck in my driveway and smoke pouring from my living room!

Later I found out a careless roommate had thrown a rug my sister had hand-made for me over a heating grate and gone out. The rug had caught on fire and burned up my easy chair and hassock (which I sank into every night after exhausting hours waiting tables) and a painting I had just finished as a final major project for my last art class.

My kitty Blackie’s paws were also scorched.

The only reason the whole house didn’t burn down was that the fire station was right across the street and firefighters lounging on their front lawn had quickly spotted the flames.

I had loved that painting, a surreal, romantic work that depicted a lush jungle landscape suspended in mid-air in a blue sky with a waterfall cascading down into a cloud. Now it was almost unrecognizable.

I also loved my cat, whom I spent the night nursing. Heartsick, the next day I dragged my charred canvas to class for my final grade.

Though I explained to my oh-so-sympathetic classmates what had happened, they critiqued the painting anyway, saying things like, “The black velvety structure is so intense!” And, “The blackening actually becomes part of the art...”

I got a “B” on my burnt-up painting.

It was a good lesson, though. I learned never to ignore my inner promptings again. And I never have.

After graduation I moved to San Antonio to be closer to my boyfriend, who was a dental student. San Antonio is a city rich in cultural and historical significance to Texans. It boasts the start of the Texas Revolution, in which a small band of “Texians” held out for thirteen days in the tiny Mission San Antonio de Valero—known throughout the world as “The Alamo”—against overwhelming Mexican forces led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. The famous defeat inspired other Texians to “Remember the Alamo” and eventually win their independence from Mexico.

The influence of the Mexican culture can still be seen all over the city and through the years, San Antonio has become a mecca for tourists, offering such attractions as Sea World, Fiesta Texas, historical restored theatres, cultural centers and the River Walk.

Strange as it may seem, I actually enrolled at the University of Texas Health Science Center at the San Antonio Dental School.

I wasn’t studying to be a dentist, but rather a maxillo-facial prosthesis technician who makes artificial eyes, noses, ears and other facial parts for patients who’ve lost them due to trauma or surgery. (I didn’t realize it then, but that training would later enable me to draw even the most complicated jaw and teeth structures when doing forensic sketches. If someone tries to describe, say, an unusual overbite, I understand immediately what they are talking about and can draw it with little trouble.)

The first time I saw San Antonio’s beautiful River Walk, my emotional reaction to it was so powerful, so visceral, that my eyes filled with tears and I became almost physically ill.

The San Antonio River ribbons gently in and out of the downtown area and throughout the city. Located one flight below the downtown streets, the River Walk is like entering another world. Lined by softly swaying cypress trees, the banks of the river are dotted with sidewalk cafes, hideaway clubs, live music and shops of every kind. River taxis cruise slowly past and the sights, sounds and colors are, to an artist, like walking into a kaleidoscope.

But it wasn’t the beauty of the place that overwhelmed me. It was one of those nudges from God again, only this time, it was more like a sledgehammer to the side of the head.

I’ve got to do portraits here! I thought and the impulse was so strong that, for a moment, I wondered if I’d said it out loud.

I had to. That’s all. Period.

Girls growing up in the fifties were taught to be pleasers, “nice girls,” to hide our intelligence from men so that they could always feel smarter, to be ladies, to have, as the Bible says, “a sweet and gentle spirit.”

That’s pretty strong conditioning to overcome and I sometimes wonder what drove me to be so stubbornly independent. Somehow I mustered the courage to approach various businesses located on the River Walk and requested permission to set up my easel and two chairs and sketch tourists for money. I always offered the manager a percentage of my income. But even though I worked at four separate businesses, not a single one took any money from me.

For I always attracted business for them and me.

The first couple of years, I worked mostly weekends, but it became clear to me that I was making so much money that I didn’t need to do anything else. In fact, I didn’t want to. Eventually, I dropped out of dental school and spent most of my time along the River Walk doing portraits and I loved every minute of it.

In all, I did more than three thousand portraits in that milieu.

But then something stopped me in my tracks and sent me to Houston, something more than the doomed romance that was petering out, something more than my restless heart’s desire for a fresh start.

My body.

Nowadays, “repetitive motion injuries” such as carpal tunnel syndrome are widely understood, but at that time, I never gave a thought to the thousands and thousands of times I turned my head back and forth like someone watching a ping pong match—subject to canvas, canvas to subject. I developed an inflammation of the muscle connections that run from the sternum—or breastbone—all the way up my neck to the mastoid process, which is the bony protuberance on the skull behind the ear. So severe was the inflammation that the skin over my breastbone turned purple.

I could barely move. Simple motions such as tying my shoes, rolling over in bed or reaching my arms out in front of me were so intensely painful that I screamed. When my hard head finally gave in enough so that I was forced to go to the doctor, l learned that my condition had a name: costra condritis.

The doctor told me to quit doing portraits.

Instead, I ate aspirin like candy, used heating pads until my skin blistered, swathed my neck in scarves and turtlenecks. It got so bad that I couldn’t turn my head to check the entrance of the freeway—I’d just jam down the accelerator and pray.

Finally, because of my physical condition, I couldn’t do portraits anymore. I had to quit.

Defeated, scrunched up in pain, dispirited, depressed and alone again, I packed up my paints and moved to Houston.

What I didn’t realize when I left San Antonio was that the only way I was ever going to have a future was for me to face, once and for all, my past.

Little did I know that it would be in Houston that all my carefully pent-up demons would come swarming out of their hiding places and all my running from myself would come to a soul-crunching halt.

Recently, medical science has begun to take a second look at what eastern and Native American traditions have long known to be true: that our bodies, minds and spirits are intimately connected, a delicate, intricate web. Touch one strand and the entire web shivers.

I’ve spent some time looking into this matter and now I find it not so surprising that it was the “shield” covering my battered heart that eventually began to show the bruises on the outside that I felt so acutely on the inside.

The fact that my neck stiffened up and was intensely painful was partially because I did put considerable strain on it in my work doing riverside portraits; there’s no question about that—but it’s also true that I had nearly lost my life when someone evil put his hands around my throat and that I kept this attack a secret from everyone around me.

It causes tremendous stress to the physical body when it’s being held in an emotional straitjacket by the mind. It requires great energy to pretend on the outside that everything is well on the inside when it’s not. Since my attack, I’d tried to run from what had happened to me by working myself almost to death, burning up every single waking moment of every single day and never letting anyone know the turmoil that I was trying to hide even from me.

However, busy-ness may keep us from thinking very deeply, but it can’t fool the subconscious.

I was a performer on stage, covering my true self with a mask while singing and dancing so furiously that my body was beginning to break down. But I have an almost unimaginably strong willpower and when I first moved to Houston, I was still not yet ready to confront those demons. I did all I could to keep them caged up.

However, it was getting harder and harder all the time.

If you were to consider Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston as siblings in one big Texan family, you’d have to think of Dallas as the society doyenne, a bit snooty, dismayed that her bawdy cowboy brother, Fort Worth, lives so close by. Austin would be the spoiled little rich girl, the wild child who gets away with a lot but whom everyone loves anyway. San Antonio would be the historian, the keeper of the family scrapbooks, always wanting to be taken seriously.

Houston? Houston would be the nouveau riche step-brother, too busy buying and trading, back-slapping and cigar-smoking, to care much what anyone else in the family thinks. Compared to the others, Houston is shiny and new and proud of it and thinks there’s no such thing as “wretched excess.”

When I moved there in 1979, Houston was booming and jobs were plentiful. It was a good place to get lost in, like a film extra in a cast of thousands.

In a grand gesture of supreme...what’s the word? Ignoringness? I chose to ignore what my body was trying so hard to tell me and before long, I started doing portraits again, this time at Houston’s Northwest mall.

One sunny day in May of 1980, I was in the process of setting up my easel and preparing to begin my Saturday afternoon work, when suddenly, my vision focused upon, quite simply, the most beautiful man I had ever seen.

His blond hair shone as if backlit and he walked with a dancer’s grace, carrying his tanned and muscled body with ease, like a tool he well knew how to use. It seemed to say, I could pick up a car if I wanted to. Thing is, I just don’t want to right now.

I’m nothing if not a fast thinker and before he could get away, I hailed him and asked if he would sit for me to help me “warm up.” I offered him a huge discount (though Lord knows I would have painted him for free). Actually, this is a common practice when doing candid portraits. If an artist just sits there with a blank easel, people will hurry past as if they’re afraid you’re going to ask for a donation. But if you are doing a portrait, natural curiosity will draw them ‘round and once they see how good the painting can be it isn’t long before you can attract quite a bit of business.

It wasn’t business I was looking for that day, though.

My intention was to make casual conversation, get to know the man, toss in some flirting and see if I could snag a date.

But I had no idea just how shy Sid Gibson really was.

The minute he noticed people hanging around gawking, he turned crimson, hung his head, dropped his shoulders and mumbled answers to all my friendly questions. To this day, I couldn’t understand what he said, but the truth is that I was so smitten I probably wouldn’t have heard anyway.

In fact, he was making such an effort to disappear into the floor that I thought he was short. It wasn’t until we actually did have a date that I realized he was built like a body builder.

The day God brought Sid to the Northwest mall and into my life was the day I truly began to live again....though it didn’t exactly seem that way at first.

After he stumbled and mumbled off from the portrait session, he suddenly re-emerged from the crowd, grinning at me like a little kid. He handed me a small, torn-off piece of white paper.

It turned out to be the corner of a deposit slip, containing his name, address and phone number. In spite of the fact that I found him enormously sexy and attractive, I wadded up the piece of paper into a little pea-sized ball and tossed it into my coin purse. After all, I’d been hurt plenty by men in recent years. I didn’t know how to trust anymore.

A couple of weeks passed and then a girlfriend who worked nearby started complaining that this “gorgeous, muscle-bound guy” kept coming by and asking about me and was I going to do anything about it or not?

That was the first clue I had that Sid Gibson had apparently been as attracted to me as I was him, so I called him and arranged to meet him at a local restaurant.

Disaster.

Getting him to talk was about as easy as getting children at an amusement park to sit still for a watercolor portrait.

“So, do you have any brothers and sisters?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh? How many sisters do you have?” (I’d found that my relationships with men tended to work better the more sisters they had.)

“Not too many.”

“How many?”

“Just four...” (lengthy pause) “...and there were two cousins who lived with us who were like sisters to me.”

It’s a wonder we ever got together at all. It took two such miserable dates for me to learn that the man hated restaurants, which, of course, he had neglected to mention to me. That’s when I asked him to come jog with me and that’s when the magic started to happen.

It was during that afternoon that I told him my dream of being able to paint for a living and to my astonishment, he said, “Why don’t you let me pay your rent and buy food and that way you could just paint full-time? You could still live by yourself.”

Of course I was way too proud and independent to take him up on that offer, but I knew from that point on that this was a man who knew how to love—unconditionally.

The youngest of seven children, Sid grew up with four older sisters and it gave him a perspective on life that was unique among men I’d encountered. He knew how to talk to a woman, how to treat her, how to care for her. Though a man’s man in every way, Sid was a nurturer.

I’d been working so hard, being so independent and brave, that I didn’t realize how much I needed nurturing. In relationships, I tend to be the giver and so many men I’d known had been only too happy to be takers. Sid knew how to take love but he also knew how to give it.

Almost as impressive to me as his ability to love unconditionally was that he had worked hard to build a career in construction plumbing, he was proud of what he did and not the least bit pretentious. (The muscles came from hard work, not from some elite fitness club.) I was so used to dating guys who lied about their incomes and tried other tactics to impress me that I fell in love with Sid’s honesty and genuineness as much as anything.

When we first started dating, Sid was living with a lovely young couple named James and Diane Denton. Diane was a stay-home mom, taking care of their first baby and Sid helped out with the rent and household expenses. Sid has always loved kids and he was terrific with their daughter, Amy—an energetic one-year-old—and it made me joyful, watching him with her. The four of us got along wonderfully well and when I was over at their house, I felt at home.

Let down my guard a bit more.

It was nice, not feeling so alone for a change. Feeling like part of a family. Being in love with a gorgeous guy. Within three weeks we knew we would be married. In fact, there wasn’t even a romantic proposal. It was just a fact that we accepted almost from the beginning.

I had found the love of my life and I was looking forward to happiness with him...but it was complicated. There were still all those demons to contend with.

With Sid, I lowered my shield a little and let myself be vulnerable. That’s when the demons get you.

Everything was just fine until the day Diane turned on the evening news.

I never watched the evening news. Never. Of course, I know now that this is one way in which some victims of violent crime deal with their attacks—they avoid news of anyone else’s violent attacks. And that’s all the local evening news is—murders, rapes, fires, violence.

I had found that watching the evening news and hearing about those violent crimes triggered all sorts of uncomfortable feelings I did not want to deal with, so I just avoided the subject altogether...until the day Diane turned on the television and I was trapped into watching with her.

That’s when I heard that a dance instructor had been raped at gunpoint in front of her students—little girls, eleven and twelve years old.

Suddenly, as if some underground cave deep inside me yawned open, out swarmed clouds of bat-like demons, driving me to an almost unrecognizable rage. All my carefully-controlled emotions burst loose in a torrent of outrage and pain and I didn’t know what to do except scream at the television.

I wanted to chase that animal down and run him over with my car. I wanted to parade him in front of that poor woman and those traumatized little girls and say, “See this? They’re gonna put him in jail, in a cage like the animal he is!”

Diane kept her composure, but she must have wondered what in the world was going on. I hadn’t been dating Sid all that long at that point, but long enough for her to know that this was just not like me.

I didn’t know, of course, that everything I was feeling was completely normal, that in fact, it was long overdue. This kind of white-hot anger is necessary for the healing process, or else it will fester inside a victim like pus in an infected sore and, like an untreated infection, can poison over time. I wasn’t just filled with rage for this poor dance instructor, I was filled with rage for me, for anyone who was forced to suffer unjustly because of another.

The announcer was droning on with a generic description of the attacker: “male, 5'10", brown hair, brown eyes.”

At that, I found myself giggling, but it was mirthless, cynical laughter. “That’s just laughable!” I cried, almost hysterical. “They’re describing half the men in Houston—you’re talking a million guys.”

They’ll never find justice for her, I anguished. She’ll be alone and afraid and lost just like...

Just like me.

I felt something building inside my chest, a physical burning, a sickness just like what I had felt that day years before after I had been raped.

Remember that Bible story about how the blind apostle Paul was walking along on the road to Damascus, when suddenly, “the scales fell away from his eyes” and he could see—not just literally, but also figuratively?

That’s what happened to me, in a manner of speaking.

I knew, just like that.

It was as if all that tumultuous, chaotic energy that was colliding within my heart and mind had suddenly focused itself with all the concentrated power of a laser beam.

All the scattergun restlessness that had driven me from city to city and job to job and man to man since the rape, the force that had pushed me almost over the brink of sanity, that had pressured me until my chest turned purple from the pain...all that energy suddenly compressed itself into one powerful lightning bolt: a knowing.

Whirling toward Diane, I said, “I could sketch that guy.”

Although I had never done a sketch of anyone based on descriptions alone, I had done thousands of portraits and I knew—almost without hesitation—I knew I could do it.

If Diane was having trouble keeping up with the thunderstorm of emotions she was observing passing over me, she kept it to herself. I still had not told her about the rape, nor was I ready to discuss the attack I had suffered at this point. But Diane seemed to accept what I was saying at face value and said, “Okay, call the police. Tell them you can do a sketch of the guy.”

In my mind flashed an image of what the police would have to say about some artist approaching them out of the blue with such a suggestion and I shook my head. “No. I’m not ready. I have to practice first.”

She nodded. “All right, then. Let me describe my mother to you and you can draw her.”

“No.” Pacing the floor, I said, “You know her face too intimately. I need to do a sketch of someone who’s a stranger to you.”

At this point, the energy was burning a hole right through my chest, or at least it felt like it. I knew that I would do anything to make this work. Instinctively I knew that if I could use my gifts and talents to help other people get justice, it would also soothe my own pain.

“Go pick out someone, anyone,” I instructed a bemused Diane. “A gas station attendant. Anyone. I’ll stay here with the baby. You come back and tell me what the guy looks like and I’ll see if I can do a sketch.”

Though she did comment that the idea was “weird,” Diane was nothing if not game. She gathered up her purse, car keys and left.

Almost immediately, I burst into tears.

I’d never seen anyone do anything like what I was proposing before. I had no idea how it was done or even where to begin.

Why did I let myself get into this? I agonized for a few moments. Why did I let these demons loose?

However, though I couldn’t articulate it at the time—not even to myself—somehow I knew that if I was able to do the sketch, it would heal me.

But if I didn’t...it would destroy me.

If I can’t do it, I found myself thinking, I really don’t want to live anymore. All of a sudden, no other job in the world seemed as worthwhile to me. I began to grieve in advance, knowing that a failure at this point would make me feel worthless.

At that point, as I continued to agonize, Diane’s baby started to get fussy. I struggled to pull myself together before Diane returned. That little ten-minute trip of hers felt as if it took an hour. When she got back, I went to fetch my drawing materials, which I always kept in the trunk of my car, and returned, sitting down at the kitchen table.

“Okay,” said Diane, clearly into what was for her a cool game. “I saw a black guy. He had a round face.”

I stared at the blank sketchpad I’d laid flat on the table—which I soon figured out was a mistake—and I couldn’t visualize what she was saying.

How do you start? Where?

Eyes blurred with tears, I shoved back from the table. “I can’t do it,” I said. “This is too hard. It’s impossible.”

But Diane knew how to get things done. She was relentless. She simply would not let me quit. She bossed, pushed and would not take no for an answer. “You can do it,” she insisted. “Keep working. It’ll come to you.”

I’ll always be grateful to her for that.

She described the guy’s hair and eyes, nose and ears, constantly making me rework and make changes. By the time I’d worked my way down to the mouth, I was completely drained.

“He’s the kind of guy who never stops grinning,” she said.

“Mouth open or closed?”

“Open.”

“Does he show his upper teeth and his lower teeth?”

Surprised, she said, “Yeah!”

For the first time, I felt a smile creep across my face. The eighteen months I’d spent in dental school were going to come in useful after all. One of the things we’d had to do was memorize the placement of teeth.

I drew the grinning mouth, even showing a touch of tongue behind the teeth.

Diane threw up her hands and said, “That looks like him! That’s him!”

My heart was beginning a slow thud in my chest. “Don’t say it looks like him if it doesn’t,” I said solemnly. “I mean, don’t flatter me. This is too important.” She had no idea the emotional investment I had in this one drawing.

“No! I’m not just saying it. It really looks like the man at the gas station.” She grabbed up her car keys and the baby. “C’mon, let’s go down to the gas station and I’ll show you.”

It was three blocks from Diane’s house to the station and I turned my face to the passenger-side window, eyes squeezed shut, willing myself not to cry. The short trip was almost unbearable.

We drove up and got out of the car. I pulled out the 18” by 24” piece of drawing paper on which I’d drawn the portrait. The attendant walked out of the little office.

A total match.

It looked as if he had posed for the portrait.

Handing the picture to Diane, I placed my hands on the top of the gas pump, hung my head between my shoulder blades and sobbed, wailed, in joyous relief.

While my tears poured out and Diane stood, dumbstruck, I stared at the oily concrete of the gas station tarmac and saw my whole future laid out for me.

I will catch them, I realized. All the killers and rapists and thieves and haters like the one who attacked me and the one who assaulted that dance teacher. I will give crime victims back their lives and, in so doing, they will give me back mine.

At this realization, I laughed a little and looked up to see the gas station attendant, staring at the drawing. He recognized Diane from her earlier visit and asked, “Did you do that?”

Grinning, Diane shook her head and pointed at me. “She did it.”

He glanced from me to the drawing. At first, his expression was one of disbelief and then, amazement, followed by genuine anxiety. He said, “But you weren’t here!”

I could see that he was spooked. In fact, he began to inch backwards away from me, holding up his hands as if to fend off a curse. Narrowing his eyes, he said, “Why would you want to do that?”

I couldn’t begin to imagine how weird this whole thing must have seemed to this man, if for no other reason than because of my own behavior, which must have seemed bizarre to him. But I could also understand how it would worry him that someone he’d never seen before could appear out of nowhere with a dead-on drawing of his face.

I didn’t know how to answer him without going into the criminal angle of the whole thing, so I just said, “C’mon Diane; let’s go.”

It was a profound, powerful, energizing moment in my life. All I had to do now was contact the police.

When I realized that I could draw people’s faces without looking at them, from descriptions alone, I guess I thought the hard part was over.

Little did I know that it was only just beginning.