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The Light of Embers, Lambent in a Cool Hearth
There’s a word in Greek that means deliverance, preservation, and safety. It translates into English as salvation, and is associated with the concept of three promises for those who follow God: past, present, and future; you have been saved, you are being saved, and you will be saved from sin. Soteira. Allen speaks of it with precision, calls it beautiful. In turn, I feel its weight.
Allen has always appeared kindly and unassuming. He speaks with integrity and carries with him an intellectual air. His wise eyes remind me of some sort of Greek philosopher. Coupled with the fact that I’ve seen his bookshelves, which are lined with all the classics and capital “G” greats from academia, he fits the description. Seated before me at our secluded café table, Allen seems tired in an ancient way, like someone who’s already faced his past and knows that you cannot fight against things long since happened because it will only end in a stalemate. In the small moments he uses to prepare, the air hums as if it’s also settling in for the next few hours. When he’s ready he looks at his hands and begins.
“Growing up, I had this one friend who was pretty wealthy, and I always felt lesser than him because my family never had anything. Very small house. Barely any clothes. It ended up contributing to a lot of uncertainties. Personal struggles. People didn’t like me. I was small, got made fun of, people tried to chase me and beat me up.”
He goes on to say that his family, with no theistic background, went searching for something; they were trying out churches and shooting blind until they finally heard the Gospel preached and gave their lives to Christ. Allen was eleven years old at the time. A new Christ follower he says with big air quotes, because having true direction that young is almost impossible. A child can only have an idea of an unfathomable God. To a child, loneliness feels as heavy as the sky, eagerness may turn sour unless every card is played just right.
“It started when I met this one kid at church. He was the one who got me involved with drugs. Me and this guy, we’d go off in his Chevy Blazer—man, that thing was old-old—and we’d get high, sell the weed.” He leans back in his chair. “High school came around. People wanted to be popular, have big friend groups, all of that. I wanted it too, so I cut up a lot, was pretty funny, tried making people like me. I was always doing random jobs, whatever I could to keep up everyone else. Always a hard worker.”
He says those words, hard worker, like they’re a song with history. There’s a pause where he seems to take in the bustling of the café around him before he continues.
“High school was sex, drugs, and money. Those were the things that made me happy. Back then, everything was so messed up. Parties would just be orgies, people in all these rooms, you know. Weed and drinking turned into cocaine, acid, mushrooms, speed. Never did anything with a needle, though.” By the end of high school, he was selling all the drugs just so he could participate in recreational activities.
His hand rests around the to-go cup housing cooling coffee, black, while he stares at the table as if the wood leers back at him. The one stable part of his life was his parents, he says, and they split up for some time. It was a fracture severing into a brittle frame. With a rueful smile, he tells me about the box speakers he had in his childhood bedroom that were tall enough to tip them together with room to lie beneath them. He’d drown the world out with a healthy dose of Iron Maiden, Pink Floyd, and ignoring his thoughts. Under a pyramid of sound, he attempted to stick together his lost soul.
As I know him, Allen is a perfectionist determined to hold himself together enough until he physically cannot stay grounded any longer. This trait bled all over his college life until it looked like a crime scene. Back then he had a Yamaha 550 Vision, a metallic, candy-apple red motorcycle with a sleek fairing; it was the only way he got around. Classes, home, classes, work all night, repeat. If he had to deal drugs, he’d do it. Paying his way through an education impelled him to do what it took, scholarships aside. Always a hard worker, he says again. Something about the way he forms the words sounds like acceptance. Hard work only goes so far built upon no foundation. Eventually, there’s a fall from a great height.
Impact came on a clear night. Fall at that time in Florida wasn’t quite brisk, but alive. Allen couldn’t afford a leather jacket, so he donned his stained and decidedly uncool coat—a gray, sort of denim fabric with pale blue and pink plaid lining—to combat the chill. That night, he was going out. Being involved in the business he was, he ended up in shady places.
The apartment was soaked in a filthy haze, machine guns lying in plain, purposeful sight. Cocaine covers various surfaces, stark and opaque. One guy there, another no-name, had a bike too. His had a bigger engine than Allen’s, a 750. They did lines before heading to the sketchier part of town. “People would get killed there,” he says dismissively, going on to note that the only thing he remembers about being out then was flashing lights, a dull reality of being high. “We were there. We left.” A blur. They did more lines when they got back and even more lines deep into the morning, just before they took their bikes out for a ride without a destination.
It was a two-lane road, nothing else around but palmetto frons, pine trees, and a power station somewhere off in the velvet night. They were flying over the unlit pavement, past the broken-down fences lining the road that disappeared in their peripherals. Neither one of them was near a state of mind clear enough to consider what could have been out there with them under the vast sky. Fences are meant to keep things out as well as in.
The road ended. No-Name reached it first and was already racing back the way they came when Allen turned around. There was only the press of the wind and blanket of his helmet. One long moment, everything was nearly black. Next, the frosted outline of a massive black angus just barely lit by the moon.
“I can still remember the look of horror on the bull.” Allen shakes his head. “The biggest oh, crap, look I’ve ever seen, and it was on that animal’s face. I hit him perfectly, right in the head. The bike went down. I went up. They told me after it was probably a blackout, psychological protection that kept me from remembering launching through the air. I impacted and rolled 114ft. The visor of my helmet smashed off. My arm snapped in half, bones exposed and sticking out. I have no idea how, but I stayed awake.”
No-Name circled back for Allen, saw him trying to stand up with his destroyed arm, watched him buckle and faceplant three times. The power station workers heard the collision with the bull, like metal hitting concrete. They were the ones who called the ambulance.
You would expect the short third act, that what happened was Allen’s metaphorical and physical breaking point. Real life churns out something different than a dramatic fade-to-black, fade-in, and everyone hugs. For Allen, the night was long.
“I sat there in the darkness trying to wipe the coke off my face before the cops showed up. Threw my vial of it off into the woods. Didn’t know if I’d get caught and thrown in jail.” Describing his state of mind then is a lost cause. Everything was a question, his biggest being whether or not he’d survive if he needed surgery (spoiler: he had surgery later that morning). Eventually, Allen arrived at the hospital. Besides his arm, the rest of his body was untouched, not a bruise or a scratch. He called his parents to tell them he’d been in an accident, but they never showed up to see him. Turns out the hospital staff mixed up his middle and last name, and they couldn’t find him. Allen spent the night alone with his thoughts.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about everything I’d done. All this stuff, my whole life, I’d screwed it all up, and none of it fulfilled me. All the time I couldn’t shake the sense of why? That’s the question I asked myself all growing up: why? I didn’t want to be lacking, I didn’t want to be poor.
"After, once I got home, apparently parents had a lot of arguments of what to do about me. Mom wanted to tell me, 'We’re done and you’re on your own.'” He gestures a shrug entirely through one rough hand. “Dad didn’t want to… I don’t know how it ended up happening, if someone planted them or what, but Mom found more drugs in my things. That was it. Said she’d be leaving us, leaving my dad.” He nods to himself. “That’s when I broke. I was so, so selfish. What was the point in living life how I wanted to? What did it bring me?”
Emptiness, the destruction of his family. His mother walking out the front door with no intention of looking back. His last pieces falling. There and then, he decided he wouldn’t break up his mother and father, his brother and sister.
“I physically had to stop her from leaving. I cried and I begged.”
Allen’s silence lingers, riddled with old things tucked into corners. It holds more than regret; it carries the enormity of years gone, learned from but not wasted.
“That was the turn-around. The beginning. I had this event at 11 that I just regressed from for seven years, a quick fire that was almost snuffed out, but a few embers survived. God completely changed my life. All of a sudden, I was a sponge. Gradually, through the winter, anything I could learn about God, everything I had avoided growing up, I absorbed.” Allen leans forward. The crow’s feet at his eyes deepen when he smiles. “I spent time with Him, read the Bible. Communicated in ways too difficult to explain, more complex than you and I talking. I read entire books on theology and started asking myself, ‘How do I know this is real?’ because I knew I’d found the real meaning of life, but I wanted good reasons.”
He fought for the scholarships he lost back from the school board and started classes again. “That’s about it,” he says. “I never looked back.”
It’s jarring, the way he slams the storybook shut and packs it away. There must be more to tell, some of it I know from having him in my life: getting involved in ministry, meeting his wife, graduating and climbing his way through the ranks to become one of the most well respected people of his industry. He has a family, a doctorate nearly under his belt. I think to the entire time I’ve known him, the way I’ve played apprentice and taken mental notes when he’d spoken about jobs and life. Now, he takes a sip of his definitely cold coffee and grimaces. I want to urge him to keep going, to ask him, how did you get from there to here?
I don’t though, because the answer is clear and simple. He’d probably sum it up for me by saying he’s a hard worker.