Real Death Angels

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Larry Mitchell, the president of the Unchained Gang, a born-again motorcycle club, tells all. Now an ordained minister, Pastor Larry heard a calling over the roar of his Harley. Now he rides for the Lord. This is his story.

I was born in Bloomington in 1949 and I went to Ellettsville schools all twelve years. I graduated from Edgewood High School in ’67. Played football, was on the wrestling team… My mom always went to church. She grew up in church. It was a legalistic church. That means the preachers, they were clothesline preachers. They taught you how to dress. They taught you not to cut your hair. They taught you all those things, but they never really taught a hands-on—the Word, apply it to your heart, and to become overcomers in your everyday life. That’s what I really go after here. I want people to be able to grab a hold of the Word like it’s a screwdriver or a wrench or whatever and be able to know how to apply it to their life.

Since Dad wasn’t in church—Mom was—but there never was a lot of conversation about God in our home, even though my mom was faithful. We were there every time the lights was on. By the time we were teenagers we just decided we didn’t want to go anymore. And we didn’t.

We were in the Boy Scouts, growing up. That was a great time of my life. There was a lot of good things there. It was just within me, I guess. I don’t know where all this rejection that I was feeling was coming from.

My brother, man, I just thought the sun rose and set in him. It seemed like he could always do everything real good. And I just idolized my brother.

He’d fight a buzz saw. He’d wade through Hell to fight a buzz saw. He just had this boldness, this bravery about him. He wasn’t afraid of anything. “Why am I afraid?” It was like I had this spirit of fear on me all the time. I was afraid of things, afraid to try things. And I hated that about myself, so maybe it was coming from within more than from everybody else.

But all that really changed by the time I hit high school. I remember the first couple of fights I got into I about killed the guys. And that scared me, ‘cause I didn’t want to do that. And I hurt ’em so bad, and that really freaked me out. I was really determining then that I really didn’t want to hurt anybody. I guess I thought, “Well maybe if I punch a few people out, then people will just leave me alone.” And it didn’t work.

I saw guys in the school that were popular, that were rough. And it seemed like since they got drunk on the weekend and since they were tough, nobody bothered them, that made them popular, that made them accepted. So I thought, “Well if I do that, then maybe I can be accepted. Then maybe I can not feel the way that I feel all the time.” It seemed like I was wrestling with that.

That made all the rough guys want to see how bad I was. It was just fighting all the time then. Even though I had this sense of not wanting to fight, if there was a way that I could deter that, I’d always talk first. And I’d always make the other guy swing on me first, before I ripped his head off. ‘Cause then I felt like it justified me tearing him apart.

I had an experience whenever I was a teenager. This was before the jail experience. It didn’t last very long,  but I do remember the old church was having a revival and I just really felt God touch my life. And I went to the altar one night and I was baptized in the Holy Ghost and I remember I spoke in tongues for a half an hour, I bet. And the evangelist was interpreting everything that I was saying. I was prophesying in tongues is what I was doing. And I went on. I remember I’d speak a while and then they’d interpret what I was saying. I’d speak a while, and they’d interpret what I was saying. This went on a while.

When I got up—I was maybe fourteen—and I remember when I got up from the altar, I was just, WOW! I just felt like a zillion watt light bulb. I never forgot that. Never ever forgot that. And it seemed like no matter where I was at, there was this keeping power. I really did want peace. And even though here I ended up in a motorcycle gang. Gosh.

I got my first Harley when I was seventeen…  I had it for a year or two, and then all of sudden, there were some guys that came up from Texas. They rode with the Bandidos, which is one of the big clubs in America. They came up here, and they started a club up here called Cain’s Children. They already had a couple sets of patches made up. I was riding around town then with a guy on a ’49 Panhead. Me and him was riding around and just, you know, not really into anything a whole lot, except our bikes, just messing with them. So these guys, they pulled up along side of us, uptown, in Bloomington. This was in 1969.

They wanted to know if we was interested in riding with a motorcycle club. And, of course, we didn’t call them gangs back then. Of course, that’s what they are, but we didn’t call ’em that. We said, “Yeah, we’re interested.” We just laughed, you know. It was all a joke. So they really did have a meeting, and we went to it. There was ten of us. And we formed Cain’s Children, and I was the youngest of all of ’em, all ten of ‘em. I wasn’t even old enough to go in bars yet. But I did. I been going in bars since I was eighteen.

That’s when the motorcycle clubs started. So that’s when I was really introduced to drugs. When I was in high school, the heaviest thing you had was all the alcohol, which that was easy to get. And diet pills, back then. You could pop the capsules open, take the little yellow thing out of the middle of it, and get high on that if you take enough of ’em [laughs]. That was about the extent of it. There really wasn’t any weed or nothing back then. Until ’69, and that’s when I was really introduced to everything. It was just there in mass quantities.

‘Course, when we started from the ground up, that made all of us full members. They said they wanted to start their own thing. ‘Course there was everybody. That’s the reason you got ten thousand different motorcycles gangs. That’s the reason you got ten thousand different kinds of denominations of churches. Everybody wants to do their own thing. I think these guys just wanted to head up their own thing.

We got in as full members, and there was ten of us, and we drew up bylaws. But after that anybody coming in, you had to go through a prospect period and a probation period. Mainly, that meant you was a gopher. It was just like going to boot camp. When the motorcycle gangs started, all these guys like the Hell’s Angels and the Booze Fighters, these guys were out of the military. And so really they put you through boot camp—they knew it all—before you were able to fly full patch.

It got so bad, some of the guys—there were several of us who were in it for the camaraderie and the motorcycles and all that, but then there was a lot of people that was in it for the image. They just wanted the patch. They just wanted the glory of it. A lot of them was just alcoholics, wanting to join, and never did keep their bikes together. That was always real upsetting to me.

What was your attraction to it?

Get your own copy of "Riders for God," published by the mighty University of Illinois Press.

Just belonging to something. I liked the motorcycles and that part of it. I really got into working on bikes. And those was my early years of training, cause everybody was always letting me work on their bikes, which I really enjoyed. They’d give me a bag of weed or a case of beer, and I’d go rewire their bike or overhaul something on it. So I didn’t have to spend a lot of money on alcohol or drugs [laughs]. I’d just work on their bikes.

So, it was just a sense of belonging, really. Maybe, subconsciously, it was, too, if I belonged to something that looked bad, then here again, everybody would just leave me alone. That didn’t work. [Laughs] It still didn’t work!

We’d get into it with other clubs. It’d go beyond fists then. We were into automatic weapons and knives and chain belts and baseball bats.

There was a lot of bigger clubs that came into being. So Cain’s Children from Bloomington, we formed a three-way alliance with the Cloven Hooves from Terre Haute and the Grim Reapers from Indianapolis. We were all independent clubs and young clubs, so we formed an alliance so that some of the bigger clubs around here would leave us alone.

Actually, there wasn’t any really bigger clubs in southern Indiana until the Outlaws came into being sometime in the early seventies up in Indianapolis. And, of course, when they barnstormed into town, they put a lot of clubs out of business and told the other clubs: If you want to fly your patch, you will pay tribute to us. I don’t know how much a month, but they had to pay the Outlaws so much a month for the Outlaws to leave them alone, to let them fly their patch.

Actually, these clubs became farm clubs. They would come over and see the members that they really liked and they would draft them into the Outlaws. There’s still a lot of clubs that the big clubs use for that.

Was there anything at stake other than image and reputation? Were you controlling drug traffic?

Yeah, there was infringing on each other’s territory and things like that. Making money and the glory, too, saying this is our territory. So all that was going on. Plus fighting. We got into fights all the time around here with all the rednecks.

There was a lot of rednecks that hung together. It seemed like that was a never ending battle. ‘Cause we was going to their bars. We’d go to any bar we wanted to.

A biker’s kind of a cross between a hippie and a redneck. This is a drug-using redneck. Long-haired redneck, I guess. We just didn’t fit in. Didn’t fit in with the hippies and didn’t fit in with the rednecks. It was just a whole different thing, but it was stuck right in the middle there somewhere…

We’d get into a bar and, of course everybody, if you’re on whiskey or alcohol of some sort, you feel like you’re Superman. We either instigated something or somebody would instigate something with us and then first thing you know—

They could just look at you wrong, and then the beer bottles would start flying. We was literally in fights in bars where, I mean, there wasn’t nothing left. Literally, just nothing left.  Everything was smashed and we just tore the place apart.

I lived in an old farmhouse. My house was the party pad, so to speak. It was our clubhouse, so everybody knew where I lived. So I got a call about three o’clock in the morning one night and a friend of mine at one of the bars in town said that there was a club in town that was asking questions where I lived. Somebody told ’em.

And so I got up. I had a semi-automatic. I sat there and loaded it up, and I just sat there in front of my front door, and sure enough a van pulled up. I counted them. There was thirteen guys got out of the van, and they started walking around the house and started beating on the doors and windows. I remember thinking, “Well, my clip held fourteen shots. I could miss once.”

I didn’t even answer the door, ’cause I’s by myself. Me and my old lady back then, my wife. And they left. They didn’t do anything. I was really surprised when I got up the next day. They took duct tape, and this club was called the New Breed, and they wrote “New Breed” in the barbed wire fence at the bottom of my driveway.  And it was funny.

So we paid them a visit. We went to Indianapolis. They lived in Talbot Village. Even though they were nice and didn’t do anything to my place, we found their place and found their president. He was the only Harley rider of the bunch. All the rest of ’em was pretty much kids.

We found out where the president lived, and we kicked his front door open. We all went running in there and we just kinda, just told him the way it was if he ever should—we laid down the rules and said this is what’s going to happen if we ever see you again. We never saw ’em again after that.

It was just always retaliation. And that gets real old, year after year after year. You’re fighting these people. I couldn’t get to sleep till the bars closed. ‘Cause I knew some of the guys would be uptown, and there’d always be a fight, and I’d always get a phone call. “Come on up. We got a thing going.” And that got real old. And here, basically, I didn’t want to fight.

I was just tired of it, really sick and tired of it. Oh, there was a few times. I’m not going to say that I never enjoyed it. ‘Cause there was still this anger part within me. And if somebody’d really push me and I’d get mad. But it seemed like I had a long fuse, normally. I was president of the club for a long time, and I think maybe that’s why. I was always a mediator.

It’s kind of funny, because most of the presidents that I ever found of clubs, I liked ’em all. They were usually mediators. I think about that now as a Christian, looking back, and I’m thinking, basically, all these guys that were nuts, although there were some Geronimos every once in a while. They wanted to be a boss but they never was a leader.

I was so drugged up back then it was really hard for me to care about anything anymore. There was always this struggle going on within me. And it was probably that experience I had growing up. I grew up in church, then all of a sudden it was like, right before I really rebelled, God just zapped me, and I never could quite fit in to the whole scene that I was a part of.  The anger and the violence and all the lifestyle that went with being part of a motorcycle gang.

I remember I got in a fight one night, and this guy had ahold of my hair, and I was mad. I wanted him out of my hair. I had an opportunity. I stuck my fingers in his eye sockets and I told him I was gonna rip his eyeballs out if he didn’t get his hands out of my hair. And he still wouldn’t do it. This guy was so drunk. I knew he was wiped out. And I didn’t do it, ’cause I didn’t really want to do that. But I could’ve. I coulda just popped his eyeballs right out. And I didn’t do it.

So then I thought I’m gonna strangle this guy till he passes out. ‘Cause he was a redneck and he didn’t have no hair, so I couldn’t pull his hair back. I just, I beat this guy. He was just gone. He was out of it. The guy was nuts.

And I remember having ahold of his Adam’s apple until I could almost touch my forefinger and my thumb. I mean I was ripping his Adam’s apple out. But I remember thinking, “I don’t want to kill this guy. I just want him to get out of my hair. I just want him to leave me alone.” I kept thinking that.

So then I was faced with some situations, just like those guys showing up, where I coulda killed somebody. I remember thinking, “Man, this is getting out of hand.” My whole life was getting out of hand. It seemed like it was always just “grrr.” It was always with somebody, all the time.

My wife was real unhappy. She was sick and tired of it. She never really did fit in. She was a good girl and had a good family. We were high school sweethearts and all this. We ended up getting married. She proposed to me. I just married her ’cause there wasn’t nothing else to do. That’s what I told her. I don’t know. I wasn’t ready for marriage. I wasn’t ready for none of that. Most guys aren’t.

We never did have any kids in my first marriage. It was ironic that I ended up leaving her. I ended up with some other gal at a party, and so I just left. ‘Cause there was a lot of turmoil at our house, and I was sick and tired of that, sick and tired of her trying to tell me what to do.

Here again, I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t care. I couldn’t keep a job. Longest job I’d had was about a year and a half, and I thought I was making a career out of that. I could’ve got sent up a couple times, because of drugs and stolen stuff. I got involved in a lot of stolen stuff.

I was thrown in jail a few times but always out the next day, but the things they could have really nailed me on, it just seemed like I was always, just, I don’t know. Things would happen.

I finally got a job at the Harley shop, here in town. I worked up there for four years. I liked that job real well, but still, my drug habit. I missed at least one day a week, maybe two, because I was riding with the gang. We was partying all the time and going on runs all the time. If I took a notion I was going to stay at a bar all day and get drunk, that’s what I’d do instead of going to work…

Tell me about when you were saved.

It was in 1978. But leading up to that, I was really running. God had started really dealing with me in ’75. Had a son that was born in 1974. That was the beginning, because of this gal that I’d ended up leaving my wife for, I was shacking with. We were living at the club house most of the time. She got pregnant right of the bat. I welcomed that. I remember that feeling, you know, Hey! This is gonna be cool. I’m gonna have a kid.

We found out it was going to be a boy and I was just even more, you know, I was just really happy about it. ‘Course at the same time, I was riding with a club out of Chicago called Hell’s Henchmen. And this was a big city club. These boys was bad boys, real bad boys.

I was getting sick and tired of some of the stuff that was going on with this group. And to make a long story short, we wanted out. And some clubs you don’t get out. You go out feet first.

What sort of things did you have to do to get in?

Muff diving after two hundred guys had gang banged her, you know. Sticking your face in it. I did all that stuff. We’s prospects then. We wasn’t full members. We were prospective members, so anything they told you to do, you did it, if you wanted in.

Anyway, we was gonna get out. So they came from Chicago one night in a big old Lincoln Continental and they found me and some of the guys I was running with from another club down here then, the Cloven Hooves. So that night they was gonna blow my brains out.

And they could’ve. They could’ve blowed my brains out and nobody would have cared. They could have all gone back to Chicago and it would have all been forgotten about. They tried to talk me into staying. They wanted us to stay. They didn’t want us out. There was five of us that they wanted to stay in.

And here this woman was pregnant with my son. I just told ’em that. I said, “Hey, I’m real happy right where I’m at. I don’t want to go to Chicago. I don’t want to be a part of you anymore.” And they started teasing me real bad that night, but I didn’t care. It didn’t phase me at all. I remember this is something that I wanted.

There was a bunch of us in a trailer court, visiting at this guys’s house, and they come kicking the doors in and had us at gunpoint. Some of the other gals was there. So they was kicking everybody and stompin’ ’em. They took me and another guy and we went to my house, my place, where I had all of their patches and everything that belonged to them in a sack, which they took that and all of our money, and stole everything else we had that they could carry back.

I remember them saying that they didn’t want to do what they came to do, ’cause they came to kill us. Finally, they drug me outside the trailer, took me outside and they stuck a .45 to my head. They was all high on LSD. One guy was slobbering, frothing at the mouth. I remember him telling me, he said, “I’ve come to do this. I come to kill you. I can’t do it. I don’t know why, and this really makes me mad.”

I’m thinking, “I don’t care why you can’t do it. I’m just really thrilled you’re not going to do it!” But I never forgot that. I look back and I know that was God. Man, that was God that just kept that guy—’cause I knew, that’s just exactly what they were gonna do.

They left that night. They went over and took the keys out of my motorcycle and said they’d be back to get it. Of course, the next day, that motorcycle got a whole new paint job. It got a whole completely different face-lift. Didn’t even look like the same bike after that.

They never came back. Never did, really. I’d never seen them again until I became a Christian, riding with the Unchained Gang. I’ve seen a lot of those, but I’ve never seen any of the old faces. I’d look at ’em from a distance.

That was quite a religious experience for me. ‘Cause I remember really thinking about God. That was something that stayed with me two or three days. Now some people, that would have been a life-changing thing, but it wasn’t. I was just so far out. Couldn’t care. So I did think about it for two or three days, but shoot, I was right back doing the same thing again.

The drugs and the alcohol was really wearing me down. I was becoming more paranoid, becoming more confused. God was speaking to me. I wasn’t having fun anymore. I’s getting mad at the guys that I rode with. This kept going for like three years.

I went to bed one night, and that was one of the first times I could remember that I’d drank no alcohol. I didn’t smoke any weed. I took no drugs. In fact, the last beer that I drank was October of 1977, and it made me so sick. I was sick for three days. I thought I was going to die. And I never had another beer after that. And I got saved January of ’78, just a few months later.

But all these things was happening. It was just driving me nuts. I was OD-ing a lot. Even when I was smoking weed. I grew it, smoked it, sold it, ate it, drank it. Marijuana had really become my life. But I remember I couldn’t even smoke the bottom leaves of a plant. It seemed like I had this rubber band in my head that was being pulled and stretched.

It was a short time after that, a buddy of mine died of a stroke from using too much marijuana. They said it was from the marijuana use. I believe that’s probably what was about to happen to me. I don’t know, that was just speculation, but a lot of crazy things was happening. My health was really going bad. I was getting pneumonia all the time. Couldn’t fight off a cold in the middle of the summer. My immune system was so far out.

On the night of January 28th, I went to bed. It was two thirty in the morning. I couldn’t sleep, ’cause usually I’d have to get tanked up, doped up, drunked up or something to be able to sleep. I remember wallowing around there, all of a sudden—I was in there on my back—and I had a vision. God gave me this vision.

Now, I’ve hallucinated many times in my life, but I’m thinking, “This is not a hallucination.” I was completely conscious. I saw a giant set of scales, a huge set of scales. On the left side of the scale I saw God. I didn’t see God, but I knew it was God. I don’t know how I knew that, but I knew it.

He was putting in my drugs, the alcohol. I saw the motorcycle gang, the patch that I was riding with then. I saw him put my ’72 Harley in there. And I knew all these things that were going on the left side of the scale were things that had priority in my life, that my life was given to. These were gods that I had in my life.

These were things that I didn’t think I could turn loose of to serve God. I didn’t know that. At that time I knew that those were things that my life revolved around.

The scale dropped. And when the scale dropped, I heard God’s voice. I don’t know if it was audible or if it was just so impressionable. I don’t know if anybody else could have heard it if they’d been in the room. But God said, “Larry, you are choosing death.” He says, “Larry, if you’ll serve me I’ll give you life, but you are choosing death.”

And, wow! That had such an impact on me, because I knew that where I was at, I didn’t get there overnight. And it was all a series of choices that I had made, from the time that I started working out to get even with all these guys who ever beat me up. I was still rebelling. I was going to be my own boss. Wasn’t nobody going to tell me what to do anymore.

I was sick and tired, I want everybody to leave me alone. I want everybody to leave me alone, and yet, here I am a people person. I like being around people. I just hated all the violence, and I hated all the tempers. I hated all the garbage, but here I was. I was just right in the middle of all of it.

Then the Lord spoke that, and on the right side of the scale, I don’t even know how I saw what I saw, except in the spirit, but I saw him putting on the right side of the scale peace and real joy. Eternal life. “I’ll be with you when the clip runs out. I’ll be there.” All these promises.

The scale dropped, and when the scale dropped, it was like all of a sudden my whole thinking was different. It was like everything that had ahold of me for years of my life had to turn loose for a while. And I’m laying there, and I knew that I had to make a decision. I felt like everything that had been happening to me had been leading up to a crossroads in my life and what God was asking me was, “Do you want to live or do you want to die?”

And he was giving me an opportunity to make a choice again. I think about the mercies of God. He didn’t have to do that. I was so rebellious, he could have squashed me like a bug, took me right out. But he said, “Hey, do you want to live or do you want to die?”

‘Course I wanted to live, but I didn’t know how to live. I was trying to find life in all the wrong places. Boy, that was scary. That was real scary to me. It was like God was asking me to take a jump across Grand Canyon. That’s how mammoth it seemed like it was.

But I knew the weight. I kept thinking, God reminded me, “Hey, you said you’d try anything once.” ‘Course I did try him once at fourteen years old, and that weighed against me too. I thought, “Well, I didn’t make it then. I didn’t live for God. I had such a wonderful experience. Why didn’t I stick with it? If I couldn’t do it then, I couldn’t do it now.” Of course, that was the devil telling me that. But I had try to it again. And I said yes, and it was just like when I said yes that night, the vision was gone.

I had such a peace in my life. I slept like a baby. I mean slept like I never slept before. Woke up the next day, I had such a desire. I thought, Man I’ve got to have a Bible here somewhere. Whenever I was a kid, I won this Bible in a Sunday school contest, and I’d been dragging this thing around in a cardboard box from place to place where I was moving. And I looked and I looked and I found that old Bible that I’d had since I was a kid. And I started reading it.

I never read. I graduated from school and I could read. I couldn’t sit still long enough to read. I didn’t like to read. But that first year after I gave my life to the Lord, I read the entire Bible all the way through and fifteen other books besides that. All I’d ever read for years was Easyrider magazine, and that was it.

I was just so hungry. It was like I’d been in a desert for years. When I woke up the next morning, snow was piled up to the bottoms of my windows. I realized that a blizzard had hit that night. It was pretty wild.

I’ve never had a moment since then to ever turn back. I’ve had a lot of bad situations hit, some real doozies. It was like a few months later, I realized, God showed me, ’cause my health was so bad by then. I remember going to church and I was so nauseated. I just felt like I was gonna die.

I remember I came home one night, I remember feeling real bad. ‘Course the devil was always telling me “You’re gonna die. Too bad. God came too late,” and this and that. And I remember going to bed that night with the devil setting on my brain, telling me that stuff.

And I’d went to sleep, I don’t know for how long. I woke up. When I woke up—God’s allowed me to see a lot in the spirit—when I woke up, I saw these two death angels standing at the foot of my bed. How’d I know they was death angels? All I’d ever seen was a tattoo or a picture. These dudes was huge.

Death Angels is not a gang? These were death angels?

These was real death angels. Their heads was bumped up against the ceiling. They had hoods. I couldn’t see no faces. They were standing at the foot of my bed like they were talking to one another. I couldn’t hear ’em saying anything. I’m laying there like, Am I really seeing this? [Laughs] I mean I really remember thinking that.

I’m thinking, “Gosh, I’m awake.” It was like whenever I was awake, they knew I was awake. They both turned and was looking at me. I still couldn’t see their faces. And it was like I knew that they were death angels. All of a sudden I realized that they were there to get me. So I got to thinking, “Man, I must have been really close to death, through all of this, for these creeps to show up.”

When they turned to look at me, and all of a sudden the realization hit me that they were there to get me, whew! I mean I just felt God well up inside of me, the Holy Ghost is really what happened. And the Bible says that when Satan would come in like a flood, the Holy Ghost would raise up a standard against him.

And I just felt this confidence inside of me. And of course I didn’t have a great—my prayers, I didn’t have no fancy words. I still don’t. I just try to pray out of my heart. I just told these, I said, “Hey!” I was speaking out loud to them, and I said, “God didn’t save me just for you bums to think you can come here and haul me out of here, and I rebuke both of you’ns in the name of Jesus Christ!”

And the church I was going to didn’t even teach me that. That just came out of me. And I’m rebuking both of ’em in the name of Jesus and they’re just, they’re gone. They disappeared. And I’m laying there, I’m pinching myself. Did this really happen?

It was from that day forward that I started being healed, that my health was getting better. It got better and better and better after that. And that was pretty wild.

I went to the very last. I’s president of the club at that time. I’d got out of the Henchmen ’cause they left, and I rode with the Cloven Hooves for years after that. And a bunch of the guys that was in the Cloven Hooves were around in Cain’s Children. They were a part of that club. They were riding with the Hooves now. And I just thought these are people that I rode with and I’m gonna tell ’em. I just felt compelled to go to this last meeting to tell them what I decided, what had happened in my life. [Laughs] They thought I was nuts. They thought I’d completely flipped out. Sure, give Modo 1 a couple weeks. He’ll be back. And of course it didn’t happen. Give him a couple months, give him a couple years, and it just never did happen. And finally I sold my motorcycle and they knew that I meant it.

Since I gave my life to the Lord, nineteen guys have given their hearts to God. Out of this one club, not counting their wives and children. Nineteen men. And almost all of them, to this day, are still serving God.

I know now that God was always there, always dealing with me. Always. And he kept me.  I did a lot of terrible, terrible things. But I realize now that he kept me, he kept me from—I coulda killed somebody. I coulda done even worse things that he kept me from doing. He really did.

And he kept me, period. I mean I coulda got my brains blowed out several times. I walked away from motorcycle wrecks a lot of normal people died in. And I just walked away from it. Overdoses. I got overdoses so bad, I felt like a mummy. I’d get to the place, as long as I could move my finger, then I’d think I’m okay [laughs]. It was nuts. It was really crazy.

Rich Remsberg is a documentary photographer in Bloomington, Indiana. You can learn more about his work at his website.