Tommy Pierce's Story

I wrote a story for the Chattanooga Pulse a long time ago. This story has been my proudest achievement for the Pulse yet. It stirred up a bit of trouble, but good ones usually do.

The story was about the Chattanooga Homeless. The idea was to hand out some notebooks to area homeless and let them tell their own stories. It worked perfectly. A caseworker at the Community Kitchen named Ladonna Guffey is responsible for it happening. Without her it would have remained just an idea.

Below is an excerpt from that story. I don't know who this guy is or what's become of him. I never met him. I hope he's still writing, though. Ladonna and I talked about making the journals we collected into a larger project. I'm planning on doing that someday.

Here's what Tommy wrote:


When Ladonna told us she wanted everyone to keep a day to day journal I thought, “Cool. I love writing about my life.”

Then she said it would possibly be published in the Pulse. I thought, “Why would anyone want to read about the lives of the community’s riff-raff?” I twisted it around in my head for a few weeks and just wasn’t feeling it.

Then I was walking down the street last week with some dirty, weak, rancid drunk in front of me. A couple blocks on I tried to pass him by but he stumbled and I let him grab my arm. He was haggard and his face showed a long life of hardship and pain but it was his eyes themselves that took me off guard. They were just as clear and joyful and blue as my five-year-old son’s. That’s when LaDonna’s Journal thing hit my heart instead of my mind.

I started thinking about how a human being, the most evolved creature on God’s Green Earth, could de-evolve so far. What could break a man or woman’s soul into so many pieces?

I started walking and talking with him and asked if he wanted to drink a beer with me. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a few crumpled bills and said, “Sure! What you drinkin’?”

Behind a dumpster, sipping a PBR, I tried to get his story, but the only thing he said was, “Son, my life ain’t over yet, and just who the hell would want to read a story with no ending? They’d go damn blind.”

So behind that dumpster ol’ Stu taught me the meaning of life. No matter how broken you become and no matter how beaten you are, it’s not the end. You still have your Will.

There was a car accident down the street the other night. After the cops were all gone and the wrecked cars moved away a man came back and was sweeping the glass up off the road. He said he’d take it to be recycled.

Isn’t that something? Even the broken, beaten windshield’s story isn’t over. It’ll be reshaped into your reading glasses or a new car mirror.

If something as physical and solid as glass can be shattered and then repaired, why not our souls? When you’re laying on the ground looking up at the entire world with both fists in the air, just know it’s not over.

I’m not sure if this’ll get published. But I hope to God someone gets a little inspiration to put their Human Will to work and mend the pieces. After all that Will is what evolved us in the first place.

Written by Tommy Pierce in a crummy hotel room, but one day it’s feather beds and goose down pillows, Delmer.