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"The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death."

 I've always recalled as a child, reciting the pledge of allegiance, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, to the republic for which it stands, one nation, UNDER GOD, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." and I recall we were always encouraged to emphasize "under God", to spit in the face of the godless liberals and proudly proclaim our faith. My name is Constantine, named after the conqueror of Rome from the barbarians under the banner of Christ, but I normally go by "Stan". At age 6, I was already a devote Christian. Jesus was my superhero. Whenever something went wrong in my life, I would always talk to Jesus about it. He didn't really say much back I suppose, but I always imagined he was listening and taking down a list, and making sure to remedy all my problems. I remember when I was around that age, my mom slipped on a patch of ice and tore her hamstring in her left leg. Actually, it could've been the right leg. I don't remember, now that I think about it. But boy, I prayed my ass off for that leg to heal and I'm sure if Jesus were there, I would've talked until his ears were bleeding. And guess what? My mom's leg healed, and I said so many thank-yous to Jesus after that, but of course, later on, I realized that her leg probably just healed on it's own.

That's what you did in rural Wyoming, you went to church on Sunday, you cheered for your high school's football team, and then you went to Bible college and moved away to go on mission trips to Africa. So many people from my church ended up going to Africa, I began to wonder when all the Africans would get saved and how close we were to winning all the hearts in Africa for Jesus. The missionaries would come back and talk in front of the church about spiritual warfare in Africa, and how Christ needed soldiers to fight in that battle. I was sure that when I got older, I'd get over there to Africa and fight in that war for Jesus.

When I turned 15, my mother got cancer in her stomach and died. She suffered in that hospital for months and everyone in my church prayed for her every Sunday and Wednesday. I got my whole youth group to put hands on her stomach and we all prayed for Jesus to heal that tumor in her stomach. The pastor said he saw angels around her and following her that day. I never saw the angels, but I was sure they were there to fight off the demons of cancer. Obviously, they didn't do a very good job, and needed to be fired from being angels because my mom died. She started fading away one day and she said to me these words: "I think I'm going to meet Jesus soon." she whispered quietly as tears fell down my cheeks. "Don't worry, you'll get to meet him soon as well." She said quietly before falling asleep. I put my hand around hers and held that hand until it went cold. As a child, I just cried until there were no more tears left. Why would God ignore all of our prayers? Why wasn't our faith enough to save her?

At first, I thought to myself "The angels were following her to take her to Heaven." and was comforted, thinking about her with Jesus in Heaven. I imagined him hugging her and telling her that he loved her, then taking her by the hand to a beautiful place, where she sat under a huge tree and the birds sang to her. But I missed her so badly that I began to have dreams where she would be alive, and everything would be all right, but then awaken to realize that it was just a dream, and she was dead. What a cruel joke. I began to hate God. I became everything I never wanted to be - drug-user, alcoholic, and violent. I kept getting into fights at parties and had many girlfriends who used me to get drugs and money. Unfortunately, many of these girlfriends also already had boyfriends, and the boyfriends would be out for blood knowing that I had sex with their girlfriends. I wasn't afraid of them, though. I didn't care if I lived or died. One of them pulled a knife and cut me across the back, which was a terrible idea. He should've stabbed me in the back of the neck or something to kill me, because I'm a fairly big guy, being 6'5" and weighing 280 lbs, so it was a very bad idea to just provoke me, and I turned around, picked him up by the throat and then slammed his body into the ground like he was a rag-doll. Then I limped out to my car and drove myself to the hospital and almost died from blood-loss at age 18.

My father sent me down to Florida to live with my grandparents, fearing that I would be killed and seeing that I needed a change in environment. Clearly, I did, but I didn't know it. My doctor entered my room in the hospital and she said, "Mr. Claremont, you're quite lucky. Do you believe in God?" and I sneered and said "Yeah, I do. And fuck him." She hesitated and then said "Well, you almost died in your sleep last night, so I would be thanking him right now."

"No thank you." I replied.

When I moved to Florida, I got into gangs, not college. At age 24, I was arrested for selling cocaine, and spent very little time in prison because my father was wealthy, and was able to somehow get me out. I repaid him the favor by selling heroin and getting arrested again a year later, and this time, for 5 five years.

I had a lot of time to think while I was locked up. This time, my father didn't bail me out, and didn't write to me or call me like he did the first time. I figured, fuck him, if he didn't want to be a part of my life anymore, then I didn't want to be a part of his. But I didn't make this decision without major ramifications to myself emotionally. I was very depressed, and tried to cut myself up with a piece of metal, but the guards stopped me and put me in isolation. I spent most of my sentence being in solitary confinement. While I was there, I couldn't believe what my life had become. While in my gang, I beat up more people than I could count, and some of them may have died, and I sold so many plastic bags with drugs, and those almost certainly killed some people, because we had some buyers who were regulars who never came back. I hope they turned their life around and got clean, but I knew better. Some of our buyers were mothers and fathers, and I realized that somewhere, there was probably a 15-year-old who had lost his mother because of what I had done.

My tattoos covered most of my body, which were mostly gang tattoos, but a few ones that I had custom-made to show what a badass I was, so that people would be afraid of me. On my right knuckles, it was written in ink "Fuck" and on my left "Life", one letter for each finger. I had a devil riding a dragon on my right arm, and he had a spear with a head at the end of it, and the dragon was climbing atop a mountain of headless bodies. On my left, there was the demon Azazel, depicted as a horned figure wearing a black cloak. The rest of my arms were used by my street gang, as was my chest and back. On my back, I had a pair of dragon wings that covered my whole back. On my stomach, there was a depiction of Carl Panzram staring angrily outwards at the world.

When I was released, I moved up north to Maine by myself, and got a job as a dock-worker. I slept in my car during the summer, and rented the most low-end apartments possible in the winter. I actually had a pretty good reason for moving to Maine. It was cold almost the whole year around, so I could wear long-sleeve shirts and fingerless gloves that would cover all the gang tattoos. Luckily, I was never stupid enough to get one on my face, or I'd have to run around wearing a mask. I made some friends who were mostly drinking buddies of mine that also worked at the dock. They were all right, I guess. They would just meet at the bar, get smashed and talk shit about their wives. It was a lot more amusing than it sounds. We spent a lot of time coming up with these absolutely ridiculous crude jokes to roast the wives of these guys, and we were liquored up the whole time, which didn't hurt at all in terms of our ability to find humor in terrible, terrible things. I was the only guy who didn't have a wife. I figured that wives were a waste of money, and I was saving money to buy a boat. That was my only goal in life, to buy a boat. I didn't know where I'd go with it or what I'd do, but I wanted it to be big enough so I could use it to make a living by catching fish and shrimp. Some of those captains just lived on their boats, did very little work, and still made 30 grand a year, after paying their crew.

So I bought that boat, and it felt like the only real achievement I'd ever made. I got my best friend Andy to be my first-mate, and got a couple of other guys to work on my boat. I had a hell of a time figuring out a name for my fishing boat, but finally dubbed her the Forrest Gump, which I cleverly named after the character from the movie of the same name, because he had a fishing boat.

Andy and I spent about 15 years (I think) on that boat, and we made enough money to buy a house, and both of us had a pick-up truck. Mine was red, his was white. Still, by this time, I was about in my mid-40s, wasn't married, had no money saved, had done almost nothing with my life, and spent all my time with my dumb friend Andy. Well, that is, until Andy started picking up girlfriends. He would bring them back to the house, have sex with them, kick them out, and repeat the process just about every other day. I couldn't understand why he was able to get some of these girls; I mean, these were gorgeous women, and Andy is... how do I put this? He's pretty ugly, pretty stupid, and pretty uncharismatic, and those are the only pretty things about him. I mean, I was his buddy, but he was like my sidekick, and the sidekick definitely shouldn't be pulling in more beautiful women than the superhero, I figured.

I was bored with my life.

Same shit every day: pull the anchor up, sit out in the water the whole day in the freezing cold, let the nets down, haul in a marginal number of fish, bring it back to port and haggle with the cheap-ass buyers. I hated those guys. I'm not even going to talk about them, because they're not worth my time.

By that time, everyone had a smart-phone, so I figured I'd buy one too to keep myself occupied while out on the water. It was one of the best investments I ever made. It turned out that I was like the only captain in the world who didn't have one, because pretty soon, I had 2,000+ friends to chat with who all had their own ships and we would play pranks on each other and try to get each other to get lost by giving wrong coordinates. I became pretty popular in my little social media kingdom, and some of the captains, including myself started working together to help each other find sea-food to catch, and we were making double the money we were making before.

This was all good and well, but one day, we got pranked into thinking there was a huge fleet of prawns swirling around somewhere, and a storm came out of nowhere and my ship capsized. I don't know how long I was underwater because I passed out and was rescued by one of my crew, who paddled us towards land until the Coast Guard came and picked us up. When I woke up, I found out that Andy didn't make it and drowned when the ship turned over. My smart-phone was at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere, and my ship was damaged and it would cost ten thousand dollars to repair. I didn't have ten thousand dollars to spare - if I sold the house, maybe I could do it, so I did just that. I couldn't just go without having my boat, otherwise I'd have no income, and then I'd lose everything. Andy's brother came over and took Andy's truck, which had my 200-dollar lantern in it, and that son-of-a-bitch never gave it back.