"You’re never goin’ home, big shot!" the huge guard laughed as he unshackled the chains from my waist and arms, "so enjoy your stay!"

But before we walked down the ramp into the gloom of the stone tunnel, I stretched from the cramped fatigue of the long ride in chains and looked up once more at the sky. One last look at the world. But it was cold and grey and foreboding, and everything was winter dead. The grass and trees and the world.

And me.

And as the four of us moved on down into the ground, I could feel the dampness and cold in my bare feet, and smell the rancid slime on the tunnel walls. A putrid smell which was to be my ceaseless companion for a long time. And I shuddered as the massive steel doors boomed together behind us. But we kept walking on and on into the depths, to the cadence of the steel-tipped boots of the big men at my side.

Then I heard a man scream.

And then more steel slamming against steel. And men sobbing and groaning and crying. Agonizing sounds which never stilled. But the others with me didn’t even notice.

"You can’t have a toothbrush or soap or razor," one of them warned, "’cause you can kill yourself or one of us with any of them things. And no mail for now, and you can’t see the chaplain or doctor, or leave your cell for nothin’ . Once a week we’ll come down and get you and put you in a shower where you can wash off with sand soap. And when we put your food on the floor outside your door, you stand way back in your cell while we open the door. Then get down on the floor and reach out real slow with one hand and drag the tray into your cell. But don’t let any part of you but your hand come out the door or we’ll stomp you. And there’ll always be at least three of us there to do the job!"

"Yeah, but you’re gonna be in real good company, Mr. Big-Shot Prosecutor!" one of the others laughed, "’cause the cannibal’s gonna be right across from you. He’s the one they caught when the cop saw him walkin’ down the street with a man’s hand hangin’ out of his pocket! He’d just killed an old wino and eaten his heart while it was still beatin’. Just for kicks. And he was jus’ takin’ a little snack home for dinner! Ha!"

"And the guy on the other side of you’s been in for sixty-four years," the third guard bragged. "’Old Chief’" we call him. An Indian. Robbed a stage coach and killed the driver back in Oklahoma Territory. And is he ever doin’ bad time! Hates every miserable minute of it."

But we just kept walking on, perhaps a quarter of a mile, until we reached a small steel door with a slit in the front. One of them unlocked it with a massive bronze key, threw my greasy old blanket and pillow in onto the caked floor and shoved me into the suffocating darkness inside.

"Get in, big shot!" he snarled, "We’ll be back for you in fifty years!"

And he wasn’t smiling.

I had been sentenced by Judge C. Clyde Atkins, a Federal District Court Judge in Miami, Florida, to serve fifty years, and I still had a dozen federal indictments pending which carried another possible one hundred and twenty years. And here I was, in the "hole". Solitary confinement. In one of the most maximum security federal prisons in the nation in Springfield, Missouri. Where they kept cannibals and stagecoach robbers and where the "bird-man of Alcatraz" died all alone. An empty old man.

"Fifty years!" My heart pounded as I glanced numbly around at my new home. "So this is it! So this is my home for the rest of my life. So this is where I’m going to die some day. I wonder how long it will take."

And it was horrible and hideous and indescribable. There was no air and the stench was loathsome and the sweat dripped off me onto the stone floor as I reached out with my arms to measure the distance between the stone walls.

"I can touch from wall to wall this way, and almost from wall to wall that way," I noticed. My God why does it have to be so small! Must be about six by nine. And just a steel slab with a slimy little two-inch rubber pad for a mattress. And a foul smelling little brown toilet. And a filthy little sink. And stains and matter of all kinds dripping from the walls and ceiling!"

"Can I possibly sleep over here," I remember hoping, "near the outside edge of the bunk so I don’t rub against that human stuff smeared on the wall? But then the bunk is just as bad. So I guess it won’t matter. And I might as well get used to it!"

And the heat was overpowering and unbearable as it came boiling out of a steel register over the toilet. I tried pressing my face against the filthy steel door for coolness, but even it was warm and repelling. And as I gasped to breathe I tore my dripping clothes off and stood there naked and sweating and my heart pounding.

And then I saw the writing on the walls. Incredible words of perverted old men whose very souls were already in the flaming pit of eternal hell. Not the flippant or dirty or erotic scatological and sexual graffiti of bus station toilets, but the depraved and morose ramblings and scribblings of deranged and morbid and screaming animals.

And oh so pitiable!

Particularly the dates. And months. And years. Little areas on the walls where broken old men had started checking off each day of their unbearable lives as endless time there in that horrible tomb stood still for them. Broken old men like me. There would be the date they first came into the cell. And then the date of the next day and the next and the next. And then you could see where they had lost count of the date and had to just start making marks to keep track. Mark after mark after mark. On and on and on through years and years and years of endless agony and horror and sobbing and despair. Always alone. Broken and lonely and dying. Screaming lonely! And then the marks would just get weaker and weaker. And then finally just trail off.

Trail off into an unmarked prison grave.

Or an insane asylum.

Alone. All alone.

And there was a tiny ray of sunshine which beamed in hauntingly against the wall over my bunk from a high, tiny barred opening which led out into a barren and enclosed courtyard beyond. And the little spot of light traced a tiny arc across my wall for only a few moments each day as the sun headed down toward the night. And then it was gone. A fleeting little will-o’-the-wisp. Now here. Now gone.

But as the mighty sun of our majestic solar system crept its way over so slowly and imperceptibly southward toward the winter solstice, some poor and now long-dead soul had noticed after many months how the tiny arc of light had crept gradually higher up the slimy wall. And with his wretched and trembling old hand he had begun tracing the arc each month as it moved upward and upward. Month after month until December of that year.

Many years ago.

And then he had traced the tiny little arc downward with forlorn and depraved regularity as the sun crawled ever so slowly back up toward the summer solstice that year. Until June.

And then back up another year. And then back down.

And then back up another year. And then back down.

Month after endless month. Year after desolate year. On and on into death’s oblivion.

"Oh my God such horror!" I exclaimed out loud! "A second is a lifetime. An hour is indescribable. A day is unbearable and unthinkable here in this sweltering and vile madness!"

"And fifty years the judge said! Fifty years in this loathsome, horrible little solitary cell. Alone. And naked and sweating. Waiting for an endless lifetime to drag slowly by in tears. Waiting for death to comfort me!"

And as the staggering and ghastly and hideous reality of that endless living death crushed down on me like a mountain crushing down on a coal miner deep within the black bowels of the earth, I threw myself to the slimy floor and sobbed and sobbed. And as I writhed naked there in that desolate horror, my entire life passed in array before me. A bizarre and fantastic tableau. And incredible lifetime of frantic yet fruitless search for reality.

Chapter Two

And the first thing I thought about was my old great granddad.

We don’t know a whole lot about old great granddad James Gilfillen except that he loved the Lord Jesus! Because shortly after he come over at age sixteen from the highlands of parish Cumberwarthen, Scotland, in 1828, he started preaching. Tramping up and down all over the mountains of Pennsylvania and Ohio preaching in the Erie Conference of the Methodist Church. But you can also read of his love for the Lord in the mute witness of the 122 year old marginal notes in the big old pulpit Bible he lugged all over those rugged slopes.

A man of God.

But as his children and grandchildren began to prosper there in Pennsylvania and West Virginia they seemed to drift further and further from the foot of the Cross. Funny how prosperity does that sometimes.

And I suppose my poor old father was about as far from the Lord as anyone can get. Yet he was right slap-dab in the middle of religion. A very outspoken and very proudly self-made dentist of considerable wealth, he never missed a Methodist service. He sang in the choir and taught Sunday School and never loved anybody. Least of all himself. He was always extraordinarily aggressive, intolerant, bigoted and brilliant. Miserly and miserable.

And when I was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, in 1931, we had a huge house in the best section of town and a big summer camp out in the mountains by the Tygart’s Valley River and a big Lincoln automobile and all kinds of worldly things.

But there was never much joy around our house. And not much love.

Oh, as a little lad I used to love to explore the woods out there around the camp or pad barefooted through the summer shade down the cool clay road by the river. Mother would give me a nickel and I would run all the way down that old road and across the bridge a couple of miles to the little general store in Colfax where I would buy a big piece of candy or a soda. And it was as much fun as a circus!

And when we used to go out in the country to old granddad Eldora Moran’s farm in Catawba for the weekend, it was just the greatest thing in the whole wide world! Because there were cows and horses and chickens and dogs to play with. And haymows and barns. And the outhouse and the bats in the attic and grandma’s applesauce pies. And the old pump organ. He was my mother’s father, and old granddad Eldora Moran had more love than any man who ever lived. And I could feel it. Everybody could.

And then there were the yearly Morgan reunions up on the hill from his farm in the shade of the ageless Sycamores by the little old frame Mount Zion Church. Mount Zion Church – topped off by the big old oak weathervane granddad Moran had hand-carved in the shape of a fist with the index finger pointing triumphantly and eternally heavenward! A "One Way" sign even way back in those mountains a hundred years ago. And boy, there was all day eatin’ and all day preachin’ and all day singin’ at those get-togethers! And they were even better than a circus!

And of course in the winter time there was snow sledding and Christmas days and new tricycles and all those things that will keep a little boy smiling.

But I don’t remember anybody ever talking about a real living Jesus. Oh I remember them telling me at Christmas and Easter time about some man who lived a couple of thousand years ago who was a real good man. But nobody ever said anything about a real living Jesus.

And when I was seven my mother, father, brother and I moved from West Virginia down to wealthy Coral Gables, Florida. The fancy suburb of Miami. And our big new marble-floored mansion was right across the street from the huge rich Coral Gables First Methodist Church.

And I can still remember my first Sunday School lessons:

"You cannot really believe the Bible you know," the little lady teacher with the big diamond ring used to warn us, "because it does not really mean what it says. It is just a nice storybook to tell you that if you live good lives and obey your mommies and daddies you will all go to heaven one day. Now won’t that be nice?"

"Yes Miz Banky," we all dutifully intoned.

"And as for that story about Noah and the flood," she continued, "it of course did not happen that way either. The world could not have been covered with water. That is just another story to show you that if you are bad God is going to punish you. And of course Peter did not really walk on the water because that is not possible either. We all know that. That is just another little story, too."

"Yes Miz Banky."

"Boy, what a silly waste of time this old place is!" my busy little mind rebelled. "I could be ridin’ my bike or climin’ trees or anything!"

And I was right. I might as well have been. Yet I kept on going there dutifully every Sunday, year in and year out. First because my folks made me. Then just because it seemed like the thing to do.

After all, everybody else was doing it.

And what a church it was! The biggest and richest and fanciest church in all Miami. Worth millions of dollars. And as a tiny lad listening to grown-up talk I can remember all the scandals and gossips and back-biting. And I remember all the Cadillacs and cigarettes and furs and diamonds and drinking and how the preachers were always getting fired if they said the wrong things. And how everybody was always talking about money and salaries and contributions and tax deductions.

But nobody ever talked about Jesus.

And I remember my dad and all the other folks in the church were sick all the time and filled with worries and anxieties and troubles. Always. But nobody ever said anything about a God who could do something about all that. But then, come to think of it, I don’t remember anybody ever saying anything about praying for that matter.

And I know nobody ever mentioned Jesus.

Oh there were always lots of things going on in the church. There were committees and finance campaigns and circles and expansion programs and drives and choirs and meetings. And there were all kinds of parties and picnics and covered-dish suppers and on and on.

But nobody ever talked about Jesus.

There were huge stained glass windows and velvet draperies everywhere, and massive mahogany altars and pulpits and railings and pews and mammoth hand-carved doors. And real gold candlesticks and crosses and collection plates. If you donated enough money you could have a gold plaque put up with your name on it so everybody could see it. There were lots of satin robes and gowns. Even the old janitor used to wear a satin robe on Sundays.

But nobody ever talked about Jesus.

And it bothered me. In fact life in general bothered me. And I seemed to always be looking for something more in life than what I could see with my eyes. Something always seemed to be missing! Something invisible and illusive and just right around the next corner. Or just over the next hill. Or in the next country.

Yet I felt like I was the only person in the whole world who even noticed it was missing. And it was something you just could not live without! And yet nobody else seemed to understand at all. Nobody else even seemed to notice it was missing. Or care.

And I could not understand why they couldn’t see it was missing! Why couldn’t they see there was something missing in life!

And I used to cry a lot. All alone.

And my wonderful and love-filled mother would come in and try to soothe me as I lay there on my bed sobbing.

"Gene, what’s wrong dear?" her voice would tremble.

"I don’t know Mamma. I don’t know! I’m just unhappy. And that’s all I know. I just don’t know!" And that was all I knew to say.

But I remember my brother Jim never cried. He never even noticed that something was missing. Always self-sufficient and well organized. And satisfied.

And later in life as I was to search more and more desperately, he was to tell me over and over again that I was just running away from myself. And that I would have to settle down and stop all this nonsense.

He never understood either.

So one Sunday when I was a junior in high school I urged my pal George Champion, "Hey, let’s skip church this Sunday and spend the day out in the glades snake huntin’."

"Good idea" he agreed, and off we went in my Model "A". We had been snake and orchid hunting off and on for a year or so together, and used to sell the live water moccasins and rattlers to the snake farms, more for fun than for the money. In fact I frequently had a dozen or so big poisonous water moccasins and rattlesnakes in a big open-top cardboard boxes out in our garage where our sweet old black maid Idella had to do the ironing.

"Lawd! Have mussy!" she used to plead with me, smiling just a tiny bit, "When you gonna’ git dem tings out o’ dis place!"

And we got pretty good at the lore of the Everglades as we journeyed deeper and deeper into the trackless and ageless swamps.

Glades buggies were unheard of in those days, and only a few of the Seminole Indians along the Tamiami Trail had old wooden air boats with Ford V-8 60’s in them. And they only used them for frogging right there along the highway.

But we plunged on into the unknown. Deeper and deeper into the cool dark cypress cathedrals where the primeval silence was only broken by deer and otter and wild turkeys. Where incredibly hewed and delicately formed orchids gracefully waived from every mossy bough. Where the stillness was majestic and powerful and eternal. And where the sweet smells of wild flowers and bubbling streams and moss mingled and lured us tantalizingly deeper and deeper beyond.

And something there touched me.

Or Someone.

For I began to feel for the first time in my life that there was meaning and warmth and beauty and an eternal quality to life which lay somehow right there where I was standing. Or maybe just beyond the next hammock. It was right there and I could almost touch and feel it! Almost. Not quite. And George felt it too and was moved by it and so we came back every weekend, again and again for a year. Going deeper each time.

"Listen George!" I used to say was we would stand in awe as the soft summer wind whispered his secrets to the saw grass and to the tall slash pines. And we would sit for hours in the ageless oak forest chapels watching the tiny otters gleefully sliding down the upturned roots of an old hurricane-felled cypress. And the squirrels would romp and play and the majestic white ibis would feed nearby as a big noble buck nibbled at the new green leaflets across the crystal pond.

I was a little boy playing under the very Throne of Almighty God, and never knew it. I could sense His footprints there all around me. But I didn’t know to look up. Nobody had ever told me to. Nobody ever told me there would be anyone there even if I did look up.

And a great yearning and longing began to gnaw a hole into my heart. A big God-shaped hole which was going to get bigger and bigger as the years drew on and on. A big God-shaped hole which I was destined to travel to the very ends of this planet to try to fill. Which I was destined to sink to the lowest depths of depravity and degeneracy to try to fill. A big God-shaped hole which will destroy a man if it is not filled in time.

And there’s so little time.

But then after high school when my ambitious father insisted that I become a rich dentist like he, I was shipped off to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, to pursue that grand profession. And the infinite peace and stillness and ageless strength of my cypress cathedrals were all gone now. I had wanted to be a forest ranger so I could stay there forever, but Dad said that was juvenile and beneath my intelligence.

So there I was in big old dirty Atlanta. With fraternities and sororities and beer and cigarettes and girls and all those other things you think you’ve got to do if you want to belong. All those things with which everybody else is secretly trying so desperately to fill his own God-shaped hole. And with which I was to try so frantically to fill mine.

"All the really big men on campus are Sigma Chis," the sophisticated senior in the neat cashmere sweater and new white bucks confided at the rush party, "and if you’re really going to be on the inside here at Emory this is the fraternity for you. And we have some really out-of-sight parties and all the little chicks from Agnes Scott come over and really groove on us and we really live it up. And we’re the biggest and the oldest and the best."

And as he went on and on my young mind flashed back longingly from all that dazzle into the peaceful shade and serene silence of my ageless oak and moss cathedrals. And to that loving fullness and incredible peace I had known there in my secret hiding place. That fullness which was never to be recaptured for a million miles and million years.

But then there was that terrible gnawing hole again, and I knew I had to fill it with something!

"O.K. Fine! Where do I sign up?" I gave in as he lit my cigarette and handed me my first cold Champale. And "Shazam!" Little Captain Marvel was now suddenly the big man on campus! A.B.M.O.C. with all the groovy clothes and just the right kind of mixed drink and all the right kind of imported beers and the English Oval Cigarettes and the hopped-up car and the little black book full of willing phone numbers. Empty little phone numbers who secretly were searching just as desperately and just as fruitlessly as the big man on campus.

And one of them was a rich little high school senior named Beverly. Beautiful, poised, stagy and empty. A blind date to an exclusive little cocktail dance. And after that and a few more whirlwind courtings the big hollow man swept the hollow little girl off her feet by pinning her with his flashy jeweled Sigma Chi pin – a mating that was to end in terrible tragedy eleven years later.

But as the little blond and her sophisticated big college man raced around Atlanta for a year of petting and partying, his grades fell from bad to worse until one day the dean frowned, "Gene, I’m not expelling you but there’s something missing in your life. And until you find it and get hold of yourself you’re just not going to be able to make it here. Or anywhere. So don’t come back next quarter. Go find yourself! And settle down!"

"Oh my God!" I thought. "Doesn’t he know how terribly desperately I want to find myself! Doesn’t he know how tragically I am searching for something real in life to cling to! Oh how I wish I could cry out to him! Or to someone! Or to die!"

And my heart lunged out for my secret cathedrals back in the prehistoric everglade jungles. But they were gone. Forever.

But since my father had never known failure, he never understood my despair. And since he had never cried, he never understood my tears. He used to boast, when he saw me crying, that he had never cried in his life. And so when I transferred to the University of Miami in the summer of 1950 he only made my emptiness greater by his relentless reproach and derision.

But he never said anything about Jesus.

Yet within the pool of my mother’s beautiful brown eyes I could always sense an eternal quality of pace and love which reminded me of what I saw in that bottomless pool in the timeless cathedral with the orchids and otters and moss.

And I did fairly well scholastically for the first quarter, but then Beverly came down from Atlanta and matriculated in the fall and we began roaring around in fraternity life all over again. And I bought a real slick ’39 Ford coupe with sixteen coats of black lacquer and a big engine and a set of pipes that just wouldn’t quit. And all of a sudden I was the big man on campus again. Trying to fill that hole. But only making it bigger every day.

And I used to cry myself to sleep at nights not even knowing why I was crying. Just like when I was a lad. Crying for something that was missing. And one night parked in my sleek coupe out in font of the women’s dorms with Beverly – who was now wearing my engagement ring – I just wept and wept as I told her, "Beverly, there’s just something wrong with my life. And I don’t know what it is. But there’s something missing inside. Life just can’t be this empty! And so I’m just going to quit school and go find whatever it is that’s missing. Somewhere. Somehow. Or I’m going to die trying!"

And I almost did. Many times. Even at my own hands.

But I was pretty good at building racing engines by this time and I had raced my coupe at the drags just often enough and successfully enough that I was getting bitten real hard by the racing bug. And boy was it exciting! The deafening scream of thirty big full-house mills turning six grand on a 90% nitro down on the straight-away of a one-third mile asphalt track, and the wild acrid smell of fuel and rubber and asphalt, and the screaming grandstands on their feet – will fill the biggest hole in the world.

At least for a moment.

And so I went to work in the service department of Huskamp Ford Company in Coral Gables, just so I could get into that frenetic racing fraternity. Just so I could scream down those straight-aways and shudder around the 5G turns and see the roaring crowd behind the man with the checkered flag. And it didn’t take me long.

Oh it was a little humiliating at first: Me, the big man on campus, the son of the richest dentist in town, now nothing much more than a grease monkey in a Ford garage.

"But that’s all right," I promised myself. "I’ll show them. Wait till I get to be a big time driver. Wait till I’m another Juan Fangio or Tazio Nuvolari. And I’m going to make it. They’ll see!"

And I threw myself into my work and into building racing engines and cars with an absolute frenzy. I was always the first one at work and the last to leave. I was sharp and fast never slowed down. And I was out at the track every race night, in the pits, showing everybody how smart I was and what a big time driver and mechanic I was. And then one night my big chance came.

"Hey Neill, how about driving for me tonight?" Gregory urged me. "Norman’s just not winnin’ enough races and I’m sick and tired of losin’! And if we don’t start winnin’ real fast we’re gonna lose our sponsor and be outa the game. But you gotta win and win big. And tonight!"

I had lied to Greg and told him I had been racing all over the country, and so he thought he was getting a real seasoned pro wheel man. But I had never even been inside a big car before. But I was not about to let him know that. And I was not about to lose. No matter what the cost! And as I crawled into the throbbing number 280 as her throaty big engine idled in a pulsating roar there in the pits of the Medley Speedway in Miami, I was a big man again. Number 280 was the fastest car on the track, and the sponsor, Seminole Tile and Marble Company, was willing to pay a big bonus for every event with a first place whether it was qualifying, elimination, or main.

Yet I only had six practice laps in which to learn that bomb before entering the first qualifying event, and so as I roared out of the pits and into the number four turn I guess my blood must have been fifty percent adrenaline! And I stayed high up on the outside for the first couple of warm-up laps.

But then I stuck my foot in that big carburetor and never took it out until after the six were over! I threw that car through those turns with the engine wide open, only braking with my left foot, like no car had ever been driven there before.

Because I didn’t care one bit whether I lived or died.

As long as I won.

I was either going to be the fastest driver in the world or they would have to scrape me off the wall trying.

"Damn it, Neill, slow down! Are you crazy!" Greg screamed at me over the din as I loped into the pits after the warm-up. "You’re gonna kill yourself and everybody else out there at that speed! And don’t push those cars on the straightaways and dump ‘em out of the turns. I saw you! Now damn it, take it easy!"

"Yeah, sure." I laughed to myself. "But he hasn’t seen anything yet!" And he hadn’t. Because when you’re as hollow inside as I was and when you’re as desperate and frantic and crying out and screaming inside as I was – you’ll do anything to fill the emptiness. Absolutely anything.

"And the thing I’m goin to do," I vowed to myself, "is win! I am going to win!"

And I did.

When I got out there moments later in that first qualifying event I stood that crowd on its ears! Nobody sat down during the whole race. I lapped the field and was so far ahead of the next car behind me I lost count. And I just held it wide open, full bore, blasting my way through the traffic the whole way! I went outside the other cars and under them and between them just like they weren’t even there. I guess I must have spun out ten other cars coming around the turns in that first race and I broke every unwritten rule on the track.

I was desperate and hated. But victorious.

And after that first race a dozen other drivers and owners were only kept from jumping me there in the pits by the police officer who rushed up to my aid as I climbed out of the car. And they made all kinds of vows about getting me and about killing me out on the track. But they could never touch me, and I went on that night to take every event.

And I kept on winning and winning, and in a few months I became top money winner there. And all the stag chicks who hang around race tracks were always coming back in the pits after the races wanting my autograph and wanting me to give them a lift home. And my name was always in the paper in the racing magazines.

I forgot all about lovely little wild orchids and love and joy and peace. Because I had thrills instead. And a big bright shining future roaring around the world with fast cars and fast women.

But then in August 1952 I got a telegram one day which started off, "Greetings from the War Department." And it said something about being chosen to serve my country. But I knew what it was, and I guess I never even read the rest of it. I was being drafted into the Korean War! Just as I was getting close to the top of a great career as a race car driver the rug got pulled out from under me.