Faces of Evil. Lois Gibson
to the mastoid process, which is the bony protuberance on the skull behind the ear. So severe was the inflammation that the skin over my breastbone turned purple.
I could barely move. Simple motions such as tying my shoes, rolling over in bed or reaching my arms out in front of me were so intensely painful that I screamed. When my hard head finally gave in enough so that I was forced to go to the doctor, l learned that my condition had a name: costra condritis.
The doctor told me to quit doing portraits.
Instead, I ate aspirin like candy, used heating pads until my skin blistered, swathed my neck in scarves and turtlenecks. It got so bad that I couldn’t turn my head to check the entrance of the freeway—I’d just jam down the accelerator and pray.
Finally, because of my physical condition, I couldn’t do portraits anymore. I had to quit.
Defeated, scrunched up in pain, dispirited, depressed and alone again, I packed up my paints and moved to Houston.
What I didn’t realize when I left San Antonio was that the only way I was ever going to have a future was for me to face, once and for all, my past.
Little did I know that it would be in Houston that all my carefully pent-up demons would come swarming out of their hiding places and all my running from myself would come to a soul-crunching halt.
Recently, medical science has begun to take a second look at what eastern and Native American traditions have long known to be true: that our bodies, minds and spirits are intimately connected, a delicate, intricate web. Touch one strand and the entire web shivers.
I’ve spent some time looking into this matter and now I find it not so surprising that it was the “shield” covering my battered heart that eventually began to show the bruises on the outside that I felt so acutely on the inside.
The fact that my neck stiffened up and was intensely painful was partially because I did put considerable strain on it in my work doing riverside portraits; there’s no question about that—but it’s also true that I had nearly lost my life when someone evil put his hands around my throat and that I kept this attack a secret from everyone around me.
It causes tremendous stress to the physical body when it’s being held in an emotional straitjacket by the mind. It requires great energy to pretend on the outside that everything is well on the inside when it’s not. Since my attack, I’d tried to run from what had happened to me by working myself almost to death, burning up every single waking moment of every single day and never letting anyone know the turmoil that I was trying to hide even from me.
However, busy-ness may keep us from thinking very deeply, but it can’t fool the subconscious.
I was a performer on stage, covering my true self with a mask while singing and dancing so furiously that my body was beginning to break down. But I have an almost unimaginably strong willpower and when I first moved to Houston, I was still not yet ready to confront those demons. I did all I could to keep them caged up.
However, it was getting harder and harder all the time.
If you were to consider Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston as siblings in one big Texan family, you’d have to think of Dallas as the society doyenne, a bit snooty, dismayed that her bawdy cowboy brother, Fort Worth, lives so close by. Austin would be the spoiled little rich girl, the wild child who gets away with a lot but whom everyone loves anyway. San Antonio would be the historian, the keeper of the family scrapbooks, always wanting to be taken seriously.
Houston? Houston would be the nouveau riche step-brother, too busy buying and trading, back-slapping and cigar-smoking, to care much what anyone else in the family thinks. Compared to the others, Houston is shiny and new and proud of it and thinks there’s no such thing as “wretched excess.”
When I moved there in 1979, Houston was booming and jobs were plentiful. It was a good place to get lost in, like a film extra in a cast of thousands.
In a grand gesture of supreme...what’s the word? Ignoringness? I chose to ignore what my body was trying so hard to tell me and before long, I started doing portraits again, this time at Houston’s Northwest mall.
One sunny day in May of 1980, I was in the process of setting up my easel and preparing to begin my Saturday afternoon work, when suddenly, my vision focused upon, quite simply, the most beautiful man I had ever seen.
His blond hair shone as if backlit and he walked with a dancer’s grace, carrying his tanned and muscled body with ease, like a tool he well knew how to use. It seemed to say, I could pick up a car if I wanted to. Thing is, I just don’t want to right now.
I’m nothing if not a fast thinker and before he could get away, I hailed him and asked if he would sit for me to help me “warm up.” I offered him a huge discount (though Lord knows I would have painted him for free). Actually, this is a common practice when doing candid portraits. If an artist just sits there with a blank easel, people will hurry past as if they’re afraid you’re going to ask for a donation. But if you are doing a portrait, natural curiosity will draw them ‘round and once they see how good the painting can be it isn’t long before you can attract quite a bit of business.
It wasn’t business I was looking for that day, though.
My intention was to make casual conversation, get to know the man, toss in some flirting and see if I could snag a date.
But I had no idea just how shy Sid Gibson really was.
The minute he noticed people hanging around gawking, he turned crimson, hung his head, dropped his shoulders and mumbled answers to all my friendly questions. To this day, I couldn’t understand what he said, but the truth is that I was so smitten I probably wouldn’t have heard anyway.
In fact, he was making such an effort to disappear into the floor that I thought he was short. It wasn’t until we actually did have a date that I realized he was built like a body builder.
The day God brought Sid to the Northwest mall and into my life was the day I truly began to live again....though it didn’t exactly seem that way at first.
After he stumbled and mumbled off from the portrait session, he suddenly re-emerged from the crowd, grinning at me like a little kid. He handed me a small, torn-off piece of white paper.
It turned out to be the corner of a deposit slip, containing his name, address and phone number. In spite of the fact that I found him enormously sexy and attractive, I wadded up the piece of paper into a little pea-sized ball and tossed it into my coin purse. After all, I’d been hurt plenty by men in recent years. I didn’t know how to trust anymore.
A couple of weeks passed and then a girlfriend who worked nearby started complaining that this “gorgeous, muscle-bound guy” kept coming by and asking about me and was I going to do anything about it or not?
That was the first clue I had that Sid Gibson had apparently been as attracted to me as I was him, so I called him and arranged to meet him at a local restaurant.
Disaster.
Getting him to talk was about as easy as getting children at an amusement park to sit still for a watercolor portrait.
“So, do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh? How many sisters do you have?” (I’d found that my relationships with men tended to work better the more sisters they had.)
“Not too many.”
“How many?”
“Just four...” (lengthy pause) “...and there were two cousins who lived with us who were like sisters to me.”
It’s a wonder we ever got together at all. It took two such miserable dates for me to learn that the man hated restaurants, which, of course, he had neglected to mention to me. That’s when I asked him to come jog with me and that’s when the magic started to happen.
It was during that afternoon that I told him my dream