Brown Recluse

Being homeless was not that bad.

Take those three men in Macon.

They made their wounded way to Atlanta too.

But they found the other side of Atlanta.

 They found Donald Lee Hollowell which used to be Bankhead.

 They found Joseph Lowry running alongside the Atlanta University Center.

 And they found the Georgia dome and the Russell federal buidling.

 There were half way houses run by drivers of cadillac trucks with bedrooms devoted to confection on twin streets named Simmons.

 There was three dollar beer on Sundays because Georgia law forbade the sale of alcohol between Saturday night and Sunday night.

 For those who could make the trek to Charleston in South Carolina there was work on the docks unloading big ships, everything from frozen chickens to BMW’s.

 Alcoholic truck drivers with commercial driver’s licenses waited for trailers to be dropped on their rigs occasionally being suspended for their blood alcohol levels and sometimes given medical attention for mishaps when cranes dropped trailers but missed their bull’s eye shaking up the whole rig and temporarily hospitalizing the drivers.

 There was work in Charleston when there weren’t enough hands to unload those ships.

 That’s when the homeless got seventeen dollars an hour.

Then there was FEMA.

 Federal Emergency Management had flexible payrolls for transient employees, people who could drop their obligations in a moment’s notice to race to the nearest storm.

 And FEMA paid well to people who lived out of their cars and did not have apartments when it was not their turn to work.

 The hitchhike from Macon to Atlanta was life changing and thought provoking for the men who lost their foreskins or lost their wives or lost their manhood or had their manhood restored or were castrated altogether, because Atlanta was not the destination for Recluse victims just the gateway to life after Brown.

 The first three became holy.

At first they received blankets for cold weather and stood in line for food at soup kitchens, then they started doing missions by passing out tracts.

They learned the script asking people on Peachtree street and streets leading to Peachtree if they believed Jesus was Lord and that God had raised Him from the dead.

 Many people got saved because the three asked their questions many times.

 Some answered with affirmation which led to the occasional sprinkling by the fountains near Centennial Park during the summer months.

 Hearers of the Word got saved and the three became holy.

 There were financial rewards for learning the ways of Atlanta and there were spiritual rewards for getting involved in the lives of the people of the capitol of Georgia.

 And they too watched the renaissance taking place at 384 Medical Arts building.

 They heard the rumors of prostitution and realized this was not the traditional pimp and prostitute.

 The scale of the refurbishment was too grand.

 The philistine with the huge endowment was a surveyor by trade.

 The financial specialist who used to be married saw quite a bit of underwriting for premiums which made their way to the revitalization of commercial real estate.

 The effeminate young man who was raped was an architect.

They knew to restore that eye sore near the corner of Ralph McGill and Peachtree street was going to take tens maybe a hundred million dollars.

 But they were not going to participate in the goings on inside.

 They had all been Johns before.

They all their scars.

Their identities had been stolen along with their manhood and their former ways of life.

 For them 384 Medical Arts represented what they left in Macon.

 They continued to hand out tracts.