When Angels Die

By James Sniechowski

Romance! Cultural barriers! Career challenges! And success!

All that in When Angels Die, third book in James Sniechowski's Leaving Home Trilogy. His lead character, Jim, finds himself going from a prestigious New York City acting school to early success in a regional theater in St Louis. With each

• Language: English
• Publisher: JayEss Publishing
• Release date: Oct 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780970799265

James Sniechowski

Husband-and-wife psychologists Judith Sherven, PhD, and Jim Sniechowski, PhD, are best known for their pioneering work in examining the positive role of differences in relationships. Judith, a clinical psychologist, has worked with hundreds of men and women in her twenty-two years of private practice. Jim holds a doctorate in Human Behavior and is the co-founder of The Men's Health Network in Washington, D.C. Over the last sixteen years they have worked with nearly 100,000 singles and couples in our relationship trainings, workshops, seminars, and lectures as well as corporate consultation nationally and internationally. They have appeared as guest experts on more than 800 television and talk-radio shows including Oprah, The O'Reilly Factor, The View, 48 Hours, and Canada AM. They have hosted their own radio shows for KYPA (Los Angeles), WRIP (Windham, NY), and the Wisdom Radio Network as well as being called often by Cosmopolitan and other women's magazines. They are columnists for Today's Black Woman magazine and they are the national spokes couple for the Society of American Florists. They live in New York. Their websites are www.themagicofdifferences.com and www.thenewintimacy.com.

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Angels Die Testimonials

When Angels Die is my favorite book in the Leaving Home Trilogy. The deeply moving story of the university years of a promising young actor’s life are as poignant as the roles he played on stage. Powerful.

—Joni M. Fisher, Author of the Compass Crimes Series

Sniechowski has such a sensitive nature in his style of writing and without sentimentality or flowery description. He has a talent for saying what we wants to say simply yet with a variety of compelling words (his vocabulary is lush) and yet I don’t need a dictionary! When Angels Die flows so beautifully. When this author teaches a virtual writing class, I’m signing up.

—Wendy Lucas, Virginia Beach, VA

I thought I was just getting a story of the author’s early life (which I couldn’t stop reading), but what I got was a tantalizing deep-search that made me realize how much the noise in my own thoughts was holding me back from living my best life. I got what Sniechowski meant by leaving home because my mother didn’t want me to have more than she had. I really grew and matured from reading this When Angels Die. My life is bigger now! Sniechowski’s description of loss is the best I’ve ever encountered. And learning the inside story of the main character, an actor, and embracing the characters he became, that was fascinating. Had no idea what I was up against in what turned out to be a personal ride until I got through it. This book is still with me.

—Scarlet Jones, Norfolk, VA

This is a remarkable book from a remarkable author who has bared his Soul, trusting his readers to get something of personal value. Boy did I ever. Page after page the boogey man got thrown out of my head. The point is when I finished and sat with my emotions I did not put this book away. Instead it made me think about who am I and what do I want going forward.

I want more so don’t stop Sniechowski!

—Violet Hawkins, Phoenix, Arizona

I was hooked by this story right frm the first page, and that’s story-telling at its best. I loved the characters and remained curious about them all the way through When Angels Die. That this book made me think and examine some old beliefs is an understatement, Wow! A great story and self-examination at the same time. The best.

—Howard Nelson, Duluth, MN

James Sniechowski’s fascinating LEAVING HOME TRILOGY comes full circle in his latest novel When Angels Die, as the main character, Jim, comes home to himself as he excavates his empowered essence from the oppressive conditioning and environment of his youth. His inspirational journey and rigorous self-discovery to break through the legacy of insanity and leave footprints on the other side of self-liberation serves as the ultimate achievement to fully claim his own life, unencumbered and free at last.

—Kelly Cline, PsyD, Consciousness Coach, San Diego, CA

A story of resilience and grit as one young man makes his way through a budding acting career, using all of himself, raw and uncensored, to fully develop his characters while he wrestles with his inner demons and religious programming to bring his roles to life with new dimension and depth not possible in an unexamined life.

—Sandy Chen, Actor, Los Angeles, CA

When Angels Die, the third book in Jim Sniechowski’s Leaving Home trilogy, is not your typical memoir-like novel. By no means. Instead it charts his fascinating end journey through coming to grips with an almost-overwhelming struggle to unburden himself of the fear and guilt which had been imposed upon him early on by his Old World strict religious indoctrination. Through a psychological tug-of war he achieves a confident sense of self and self-acceptance. His determining his new life is uplifting and it makes the trilogy complete. He is no longer leaving home but has finally left it. You must read this book! It’s stunning. But to get the full impact of this beautifully-written story, you absolutely must read the two preceding book first.

—Anne-Marie Staw, Sante Fe, NM

I have been sitting here reading every word because every word is worthy to be read.

He has a way of putting me right there no extra filler bridging the important interesting story. It all is necessary into itself.

His vocabulary is big enough not to be pretentious. I LOVE this book his story.

Jim is a true author and needs to write more. I will keep reading. Nothing can be improved upon. He had my interest from the start. No warming into the story. It all is the story. I am there with him each step.

I love him as the character, the person, and the hints of leaving home.

This keeps my desire to keep going. Keep turning pages. I see it in my minds eye as pictures and rolling as a movie.

I love how he brings in life’s examples.

This is a best seller. I think his best in the trilogy.

—Wendy Lucas

Praise for

award-winning author

James SNIECHOWSKI

When Angels Die, the third book in Jim Sniechowski’s Leaving Home Trilogy, is not your typical memoir-like novel. By no means. Instead, it charts his fascinating end journey through coming to grips with an almost-overwhelming struggle to unburden himself of the fear and guilt which had been imposed upon him early on by his Old World strict religious indoctrination. Through a psychological tug-of-war he achieves a confident sense of self and self-acceptance. Determining his new life is uplifting and it makes the trilogy complete. He is no longer leaving home but has finally left it. You must read this book! It’s stunning. But to get the full impact of this beautifully-written story, you absolutely must read the two preceding books first.

—Anne-Marie Staw, Santa Fe, NM

I could SO relate to this story! I was engrossed all the way through.

—LaVon Merced, New York City, NY

Brilliantly written, this book took me for a deep inner examination while at the same time kept the story moving forward and therefore entertaining! I can’t recommend it highly enough.

—Marcus M. Connolly, Bridgeport, CN

Sniechowski’s third novel is a deeply courageous adventure! Best read after the first two, but still a stand-alone epic adventure of heart and soul!

—Alfonso Romero, Los Angeles, CA

After having read the first two books, Worship of Hollow Gods and An Ambition to Belong in James Sniechowki’s Leaving Home Trilogy, I was eagerly awaiting the final installment to see what the climax of his ever-evolving journey would be. And it was worth the wait. Volume 1 took me into the delusions and distortions of his pre-adolescent struggle against the grip of his family’s primitive and punitive Old World Roman Catholic religion. Book 2 revealed his teenage years when he was painfully out of place as a member of an inner-city Detroit street gang called the Royal Lancers while at the same time splitting life between his inner-city home and his prestigious suburban Jesuit college-prep high school education. And finally book 3 When Angels Die. An awesome finale. No disappointment here!

—Michael E. Glass, Santa Monica, CA

James Sniechowski’s fascinating LEAVING HOME TRILOGY comes full circle in his latest novel When Angels Die. We are taken into his adult life as a professional stage actor as he excavates his empowered essence from the oppressive conditioning and environment of his youth. His inspirational journey and rigorous self-discovery to break through the legacy of insanity and leave footprints on the other side of self-liberation serves as the ultimate achievement to fully claim his own life, unencumbered and free at last.

—Kelly Cline, PsyD, Consciousness Coach, San Diego, CA

A story of resilience and grit as one young man makes his way through a budding acting career, using all of himself, raw and uncensored, to fully develop his characters while he wrestles with his inner demons and religious programming to bring his roles to life with new dimension and depth not possible in an unexamined life.

—Sandy Chen, Actor, Los Angeles, CA

The final book in his Leaving Home Trilogy, When Angels Die is written in James Sniechowski’s beautiful, elegant, and eloquent style that I’ve come to know. On the surface, this autobiographical fiction appears to be all about a part of Jim’s journey as a stage actor. But if you are left with that assumption alone, how very wrong you’d be. By intricately, and even artistically, weaving that surface story with what’s happening to Jim on a much deeper non-conscious level, you discover a very heavy cloud that burdens all too many people. That is the cloud of negative childhood and teenage conditioning from family and cultural surroundings, but mainly from the Catholic Church. The story behind When Angels Die is how Jim gains his freedom from these Angels once he recognizes that his life-long beliefs have been without foundation.

—Kashonia Carnegie Ph.D., Moral Philosopher and author of the Conscious Change Series of Books, Victoria, Australia.

When Angels Die

James Sniechowski

JayEss Publishing

Copyright © 2021 by James Sniechowski

All rights reserved. This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, locations, events and incidents (in either a contemporary and/or historical setting) are products of the author’s imagination and are being used in an imaginative manner as a part of this work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, settings, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN:

First Edition

eISBN:

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021917291

Cover Design: Alexander Von Ness

Cover Photo Credit: m930605/Flickr

JayEss Publishing

2310 Homestead Rd. Suite C-1 #434,

Los Altos, CA 94024

For my wife and partner,

Judith Sherven,

without whom this book would not be,

and to all those who were there during those

most far-reaching years of my life,

I am deeply appreciative.

Prologue

The words leaving home are central to my Leaving Home Trilogy. Leaving Home is most often understood as leaving a place of residence, more commonly known as your home. But in the Leaving Home Trilogy, it takes on a very different meaning. Every child grows up in the emotional home of their early years, and every child’s initial response to life is based on the emotional condition of that first home. An obvious example would be growing up in a home of violence, leaving the impression of a violent world the child has come to expect and needs to protect itself from. As the early expectations are experienced over and over, they become habit, and as habit they recede into and become a significant part of the unconscious mind where they dictate many of the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of a person’s ongoing life.

On the other hand, if the home is one of care, support, and respect for who the child is, the child grows up in a world within which it can trust and thrive. For any person to leave home, no matter their age and no matter their early conditions, it is precisely the world of the negative and harmful unconscious impressions and judgments that every person unavoidably takes with them into their later life that they must leave behind. My Leaving Home Trilogy is a three-book autobiographical fiction series about how the lead character, Jim, struggles to free himself from the grip of his own unconscious restraints and the discoveries he and the reader make along the way.

James Sniechowski

Arrival

It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. A 500-seat horseshoe-shaped theater at the center of which a thrust stage, a peninsula bounded on three sides by banks of empty seats waiting to be filled, was set into the incline of a raked floor, providing each audience member an unobstructed view. The stage extended out from the dark back wall like a shaft of energy thrusting into the field of future action where I imagined lovers would kiss, clowns would frolic, kings would battle, villains would deceive, and my future would come alive in its many forms. I felt as though I’d stepped through a portal into a vast future, a sense of unfolding that drew me. I’d imagined a moment like this. I felt swept up and pushed toward a breathtaking yet intimidating future.

I’d arrived Thursday late afternoon having driven from Cleveland in my used 1962 forest green and white Chevrolet Impala to the Loretto Hilton Repertory Theater in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. I had just completed my first professional job as an actor at the 1967 Cleveland Shakespeare Festival and was arrived in St. Louis for my next. The Loretto Hilton held great promise.

Two work lamps, one on either side of the stage, simple bare bulbs set atop thin black poles each with the buffed glaze of newness, cast a gauzy white light that spread out into thin air and hung like a cloud over the dark emptiness. Sheathed within the gossamer airiness, I felt the presence of something hallowed, something to be held as precious. The Catholicism I’d been raised in used clouds and diaphanous light in its art and iconography and my past leapt into the present bringing with it deeply felt familiarity.

I had been allowed to enter the empty theater and be witness to something sacred, and it was demanded of me that I acknowledge my privilege. I bowed my head and focused on the grace of that subtle sacramental moment. But, as with all that is holy, the moment and its vision were delicate, as though I could swish my hand through the light cloud, and it would disintegrate and crumble like dust to the floor. I stood very still.

In Cleveland, I’d been cast in various roles, with the most significant to me being Costard the Clown in Shakespeare’s comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Philip Minor, the director who’d been hired to direct just that one show of a five-show summer season, was provided with an already hired company of players, including me. He called each member of the cast into his office one by one and asked each of us, What role do you want to play?

Costard the Clown, I answered.

Not Don Adriano?

The character’s full name is Don Adriano de Armado, one of Shakespeare’s most fantastical comic creations, a puffed-up Spanish grandee who struts and preens and sees himself as the perfect romantic jewel at the center of the known world. Don Adriano is a character any actor would love to play and whom several of the other actors had already requested.

No.

Why not? Minor’s surprise and puzzlement opened his face into genuine curiosity.

This is only my first professional show. I assume a more experienced actor will play that part.

Oh. His face settled into what looked like respect.

Besides, I continued, I’ve never done Shakespeare, so I will need your help. I wasn’t guileful. It seemed like common sense. He was impressed.

Minor’s precision and care with Shakespeare’s language deepened my understanding of the text, which led to my better interpreting Shakespeare’s intent both for myself and for the other actors around me.

During rehearsals, when my character was not in the scene, I sat near Minor and watched how he staged actors to be sure the audience’s focus would be directed to just the exact right spot on the stage to best enhance their appreciation of the action.

Minor had been hired to direct later that fall at the Loretto Hilton Repertory Theater, and he arranged to bring me along.

In the Loretto’s stillness, I could hear the silence, the hush of 500 empty seats, everyone in potential, waiting to feel the weight of someone pressing down on its cushion and becoming comfortable. Not merely objects for sitting, I saw them as designed to embrace and hold a playgoer through sadness and tears, silliness and laughter, fear and trembling, the fullness of experience one attends the theater hoping for.

Along the drive from Cleveland, I’d flicked through the radio stations looking for my favorite music, either Doo Wop or Rhythm and Blues. Not at all easy. The opposite, actually. I was not unaware of racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism. I knew those from my own Detroit Polish immigrant working-class family who used words like nigger, hillbilly, and kike" effortlessly and without a second thought or any flicker of shame. I decided that the depth of prejudice in any area along my route could be measured by the difficulty I experienced finding what I wanted to hear. Prejudice and bigotry prevailed.

I took the liberty of stepping onto the Loretto stage. I imaged playing Hamlet, giving his transcendent To Be or Not to Be soliloquy as 500 sets of eyes and ears all trained on me, all drawn into the problem of decision and Hamlet’s struggle of what to do in a moment of consequence. Breathing rapidly from excitement, tears welled and hung on the edge of my eyelids, causing the light cloud surrounding me, which had just a moment before been defined and weightless, to blur, to become indistinct, heavy, and difficult to see. I’d had a number of numinous experiences in my life, so I knew the lifespan of something hallowed was very brief, and I didn’t want to miss any of it. Driven by my own urgency to cling to the delicate awe, I wiped the backs of my hands across my eyes to clear my vision. Once cleared, I could feel that the preciousness had, as expected, passed, though the beauty of the space lingered and my sense of privilege had not dissipated. But the awe I’d felt receded back into the ineffable from whence it had arisen.

I looked up to see the steel-pipe battens that made the lighting grid from which hung a variety of unplugged and shadowy Klieg lamps, and, like the seats, each one waiting to be energized.

On the southern border between Indiana and Illinois, just as I was about to give up my radio search, I ferreted out two twangy preachers who railed on with such blistering biblical denunciation I could see how believers would be terrorized into believing that what they were hearing came straight from God’s mouth through the radio to the ears and hearts of the listening audience. The two spiritual goons were certain—unequivocally, mercilessly, condemningly certain. Their topic? Black Music. My music. They called it Jungle Music, channeling their rage about how it was a product from the deepest pit in Satan’s hell leading children astray and away from the Lord.

Woe betide him, one of them roared.

It would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble, the first one thundered.

They paused, bringing silence into my car to give me time, I was sure, to consider what they believed was the depth of my depravity and my momentous need to change my ways, regardless of whether I was of the millstone type or not.

In a final fulminating crescendo, the second preacher, whose deep baritone voice made him the perfect clichéd spokesman for the Lord, topped all of it off with Luke 17:2, as though his reference to the New Testament and his thunderous citing of its placement in the Holy Book justified his righteousness, proved his faith, kept the unbelievers at bay, and assured believers of the value of their fear of the Lord as the seminal wisdom at the foundation of their belief and their lives.

He continued breathing heavily, segueing into another auspicious pause during which his partner, his mid-range nasally thin voice