![\"The](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.everywritersresource.com\/selfpublished\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/grasss.jpg?resize=492%2C742\" "\\"The")
Author<\/h2>\nDoug Howery<\/p>\n
About the Author<\/p>\n
DOUG HOWERY has been writing both fiction and essays since 1990. His essays and familial stories have appeared in The Blue Ridge Lambda Press.<\/p>\n
In many of his stories, as in “The Grass Sweeper God,” Mr. Howery’s true lode, his font of inspiration is in the passion and suffering he has experienced.<\/p>\n
From the #1 Best Selling Amazon Author:<\/p>\n
I see my audience as your audience because, The Grass Sweeper God is as much about how we raise our children as it is about accepting our children for who and what they are. People who’ve felt marginalized–so long denied any history have a special need and claim on writing that accurately represents their familial-based human condition. It shows the reader where we’ve come from and perhaps where we’re going as a diverse, tolerant and intolerant society.<\/p>\n
Sixteen-year-old Smiley Hanlon is a young woman trapped in a young man’s body. In the 1950’s Appalachia coal fields of Solitude, Virginia, Smiley is placed in the “Mentally Retarded Class” because he is effeminate and wears a blouse and saddle shoes to school.<\/p>\n
Smiley is backed by his best friend, Lee Moore who protects Smiley from a father and many townspeople who hate him. Smiley has dreams of becoming an entertainer. Raised by his aunt in a juke joint, as a child Smiley sings and dances on the Formica bar top into the wee hours. Chosen as the female lead, Dorothy, in a new town production called Dorothy of Oz Coal Camp, his dream is being realized. The triumph of the play and his dream is sabotaged by his father and classmate bullies culminating in a tragic and horrific moment that changes both Smiley and Lee, forever.<\/p>\n
Smiley and Lee flee to NYC. They learn that prejudice is prejudice whether in the coal fields of Virginia or on the streets of NYC. Smiley suffers at the hands of his real mother who is a religious zealot. She tries to change who Smiley is because he is a boil on the body of Christ. Lee suffers at the hands of psychologists who practice Aversion Therapy-electric shock treatment to cure his homosexuality.<\/p>\n
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Both Smiley and Lee become forces of change as do countless others. In 1969, Smiley Hanlon and his friend, Lee emerge as leaders of a gay revolution, The Stonewall Riots. The riots are vicious but the real battle will be won or lost on another continent: Solitude, Virginia.<\/p>\n
The Grass Sweeper God is a force of nature that flows through all things…straightens out that which is bent…which is sick…<\/p>\n
Chapter One<\/p>\n
1950s<\/p>\n
This godforsaken place was the backwoods of Appalachia coal mining country. And being sixteen meant a cultured age of about ten or twelve, really. Especially if you were retarded and rode the short bus. This meant riding a school bus designated specifically as the retarded kids\u2019 bus, but it also meant boarding normal kids alongside retards at each bus stop. The only real specificity: If you were trapped inside the wrong body\u2014if you were a young man who wanted to be a young woman\u2014you were the bull\u2019s eye in the kids\u2019 cross-hairs because you were the biggest, retarded mongoloid excrement of \u2018em all, really. Excrement being too proper of a word: Specifically you got the \u2018cultured\u2019 and \u2018godforsaken\u2019 shit kicked outtaya every school day by retards and rednecks. Proper language left this place along with any civility once branded as a retarded freak, really. Indifference to proper language and civility ruled the day, and brutality beat the night.<\/p>\n
It was the first day of Smiley\u2019s tenth year in the \u201cMentally Retarded Sophomore Class.\u201d Smiley had prepared for his first-day-of-school-beating by donning Aunt Lettie\u2019s blouse and his shit-kicking saddle shoes. The school bus stopped and Smiley boarded. Under his breath, he summoned God\u2019s wrath upon those who would do him harm, those who could and would kill him, that he knew, he had known that since the first grade.<\/p>\n
He clutched his school books against his chest. Even the simple act of a boy holding his school books against his chest was considered sissy in this neck of the woods, really. Real boys\/men held their books down at their side, not clinging to their chests like a girl.<\/p>\n
The seats weren\u2019t full, some had only one person seated, but just as last year his classmates scooted to the end of the bench seats so Smiley couldn\u2019t sit. The school bus sputtered forward and jerked to stops. And with each stop and start, Smiley precariously balanced himself. Each time the school bus stopped, kids, sometimes one at a time and sometimes in groups, filed past Smiley. They pushed him aside in the narrow aisle and crushed his school books into his chest. The attacks from his classmates had become more brutal through the years than just the usual spitballs that he knew would pepper his head at any minute.<\/p>\n
The clapboard cottages that dotted Cavit\u2019s Creek appeared to pass by in slow motion. The school bus strained forward under the load of the children\u2019s weight. Smoke from chimneys mingled with the fog rising from the water. Smiley imagined faces in a foggy television picture box. Then he dreamed that smoke and sparks would fly out of narrow asses who had not allowed him to sit. A smile creased his lips; a smile that only Aunt Lettie could put there. Minutes before boarding the school bus, Aunt Lettie had told him the story about his grandfather Hanlon\u2019s death: His aunt would tell the story in her most southern and gracious dialect. \u201cYour grandfather Hanlon said, \u2018I hate this goddamn picture box. . .\u2019 He reached to turn it off. Just as your grandfather reached to flip off the television, for the life of me, I cannot remember what was playing. But God spoke with a thunderous roar followed by lightnin\u2019 that came in through the window over there,\u201d she pointed to the window. \u201cAnd then sparks flew out of your grandfa
\nther\u2019s ass. He dropped dead right over there on the throw-rug, right in front of that ol\u2019 bar and television.\u201d She paused like it was happening at that very moment. And she was watching the murderous lightning trail snake its way from the window to the smoky television screen before exiting Hanlon\u2019s ass. \u201cHow would you like it if sparks were to fly out of your ass? Now you stop thinking about yourself. So what if you\u2019re in the retarded class. Hell, we\u2019re all bat-shit crazy. You\u2019re just another long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Just look around you and you can find someone else crazier than you. I betcha\u2019 you\u2019ll see some sparks fly outta\u2019 their crazy asses before the year\u2019s end.\u201d She smacked his ass with a bar towel on his way out of the juke joint door of Hanlon\u2019s Place.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.dhowery-book.com<\/a><\/p>\nBest place to buy your book<\/h2>\n