Faces of Evil Read online

  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 swa
ying 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 fulltime? You could still live by yourself.”