What I saw, in many of the crew, were men with broken spirits, hollow men who had sold their souls to the Great Gray Mother for a mere pittance. Having been granted the intoxicating drink they sought to ease their pain, and the favors of her prostitutes to satisfy their compulsion for soul as the Great Gray Bitch sucked the very marrow of life from them through the wanton dissipation of themselves in booze ’n’ sex, they quickly faded away into the shadows of the very men whom, in the past, they had only reflected in the dirt but had never dared to embody before now.
I saw too, how both my fathers’ spirits had been broken before me. When my real father unwittingly traded his soul to the Great Gray Bitch, she broke him in two, stole his mind, and carried it off to the metaphysical realm where he roams in madness, to this very day, unconsciously trying to find his way out. In the case of my stepfather, who had offered his body to her as cannon fodder in an earnest attempt to die to himself, she snatched up his soul and imprisoned it in a bottle with the spirits of alcohol, who eventually granted him his wish. And though they both found soul in my mother, such solace came as too little, too late, to stave off the fate they had inadvertently bought from the Great Gray Mother with their souls.
So had I inherited from them this tendency to cash in on the same terrible fate. Having given the Great Gray Bitch my body but not my soul, I still had a chance to change my fate before it was signed, sealed and delivered to me in an even more despicable form. For I was not about to live ’n’ die as half a man, or some soulless beast, as had my fathers before me.
