This Isn't Going to End Well, page 1
This Isn’t Going to End Well
The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew
by
Daniel Wallace
illustrations by
William Nealy
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2023
In memory of Randall Garrett Kenan
Contents
Author’s Note
Part One
1 The Boy Who Couldn’t Fly
2 The Three of Us
3 The Secret Room
4 The Man with No Name
5 His Origin Story
6 A Kind of Love Story
7 Sally
8 On Not Becoming a Writer
9 Waiting for My Father to Land
10 A Day Not Spent Fishing Is a Day Lost Forever
11 A White Christmas
12 Renaissance Man in a Neoprene Suit
Part Two
13 Ashes
14 Discovery
15 Journals I
16 His Childhood
17 Journals II
18 Princess Caraboo
19. The Murder Book
19 Edgar Hitchcock and the Final Frontier
20 Coming Home
21 Hindsight
22 The Immortality Project
23 The Envelope
Part Three
24 Last Days
25 His Notes
Part Four
26 Polio Creek
Epilogue: Thanksgiving
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Author’s Note
This is a book about the life and death of William Nealy, my brother-in-law, a man I loved and admired and who left this world, by choice, when he was forty-eight years old. He was so young, and now that I have outlived him by a decade and a half, he seems even younger. This is fitting: William had the worldview of an adventurous teenager all his life, incorporating those passions into his adult self: drawing cartoons, climbing mountains, kayaking rivers, hunting for fossils on the banks of the Eno River, keeping snakes as pets, making books. I thought he’d been living the kind of life he wanted to. Then he killed himself. That day—July 19, 2001—marks the before and after of my family’s life.
Suicide is one of the most traumatic of deaths, no matter how it’s undertaken, and those left behind suffer through a complicated grief that may never subside. That grief in my life, enduring for the last twenty-two years, was the true impetus for this book. I didn’t begin it with the idea that writing it would be cathartic, or that I would “come to terms” with his suicide (I don’t even know what that would mean, in this case). But I did want to try to understand him and tell his story the best I could. I have tried to recreate events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them. To protect privacy, in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places. But none of the changes undermine the essence of William’s story in any way.
Though William’s reasons for dying by suicide were uniquely his own, the choice he made is all too common. There are resources to help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number is (800) 273-8255. There is also a three-digit dialing code—988—that will route callers directly to the Lifeline. You can also text 741741 to be connected with a trained counselor, twenty-four hours a day.
One of the major challenges in preventing suicide is that thoughts of it are often kept secret until it’s too late. It’s one of the most powerful and damaging secrets a person can have, too, and only becomes more insidious the longer it’s kept. So please, tell us your secrets. Show us who you are.
—Daniel Wallace
Part One
1 The Boy Who Couldn’t Fly
1971
The first time I saw him he was standing on the roof of our house, wearing frayed and faded cutoffs and nothing else, eyeing the swimming pool about twenty-five feet below. William. Last name unknown, unnecessary. Already—in my mind, at least—he had achieved the single-name status of a rock star, and I had yet to even meet him. I’d only heard about him from Holly, my sister, who was older than me by six years. My sister’s boyfriend was on the roof.
It was unclear why he was there at first, though he did have the look of someone about to take a leap. But that was impossible: the pool was on the ground, and he was on the roof of our house. Out of utmost concern for any potential accidents, my mother had had the diving board removed, and that had been just three feet above the water. He was eight times higher than that. He had thick, corn-yellow hair tied back into a ponytail, broad shoulders, was thin at the waist, and he stood spotlighted by the sun. I thought, Holy cow. He is about to jump.
I was twelve. Until that day I never thought of a roof as a thing an actual person might, on purpose, jump off of. To get there, he’d first had to stand on the back porch railing, and then balance on a window sash, lift himself up and over the gutter, and roll away from the edge. After that it was a simple walk at a sloping forty-degree angle, barefoot on hot shingles, to the other side of the house, where the roof flattened out. This was the roof over my mother and father’s bedroom, a 1960s addition to the 1930s house. He was standing at the edge of my parents’ bedroom, surveying his flight path into the water.
My father did not like William at all.
He was definitely about to jump.
I guessed it could be done. It looked like it could be done. With a little lift he would miss the concrete skirt and splash into the deep end. But there were a multitude of ways for the jump to go wrong. He must have been considering a few of them. He could slip and miss the pool and hit the concrete instead. That was possible. But even if he hit the water, he couldn’t know how fast and how deep his jump would carry him. He might hit bottom, break his legs, drown. He could crack his head. So many bad things could happen between the roof and the bottom of the pool.
Or maybe it wasn’t William who was considering these things. Maybe it was just me.
And now he took the three steps back away from the edge of the roof for the running start, the bold approach, the liftoff. In my memory this happened in slow motion. Maybe it actually was in slow motion; maybe he was that good. And then he was airborne. Freeze frame.
It was toward the end of May. Summer had come to Birmingham, Alabama, hot for sure, but it wasn’t the heat that knocked you back. It was the warm, wet blanket of humidity, the cottony air. But it was also beautifully green, and there were robins, cardinals, butterflies, and dragonflies everywhere, and the pool he was angling toward glittering and glinting like broken glass. A beautiful day to fly or, worse scenario, die. I was watching him through the backdoor screen. Velma, our housekeeper, was upstairs ironing. He couldn’t see me. I had just gotten home from school, seventh grade, my second year of private school. It was a boys’ school, a former military academy, and everyone had to wear a tie and whenever an adult entered the room we had to stand, as if at attention. I was still wearing my tie. I was as thin and white as watered-down milk, and quiet, and I made straight Bs. I was okay at just about everything, the best at being average. And now this, this is what I was looking at, this man who was flying off our roof, falling through the air.
He hit the water, of course, made a giant splash, and disappeared beneath the wake, not for too long, but long enough for me to wonder if he would ever come up. Then he surfaced, leaning back his head to let the water pull his hair away from his face. Then he got out of the pool, climbed the house, and did it again. And again.
It was pretty magnificent. I was spellbound. It wasn’t some unformed idea I had about masculinity or manliness in him that I was drawn to; I wasn’t into that, then or now. It was just the wildness, the derring-do, his willingness to take flight—literally—into the unknown, an openness to experience and chance that so far in my short life had not been previously modeled to me by anyone. Whatever I was, it wasn’t that, and I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to be the me I was. That’s what I would learn from him though, over the years, how to become the me I wanted. Not by being him, but by watching him.
Later though—much later—I wondered how the rest of our lives would have turned out had he died that day instead of the day he did, by his own hand, three decades later. Had he tried for the water but missed.
Holly would have lost her boyfriend of a year or so, and she would have carried that sorrow with her forever, how her first love had died trying to dive into the pool from the roof of her parents’ house. Every man she’d be with for the rest of her life would eventually be told this story, every friend, and to some degree it would define her. But it would have been just one of the moments that defined her. She’d have gone on to other joys, other sorrows, fallen in love again and again and maybe even have had a family, maybe even have become, I don’t know, a teacher. An artist. But as time passed, the day young William Nealy died trying to dive into our pool would dim. It would always be one of the most important days of her life, one of the worst, but in the end just another color in her quilt. And what would it have done to me? Who would I have become?
I didn’t want him to die—on that day, watching him, or on any of the other days or nights he risked his life: kayaking a river above flood stage, falling off a mountain or a motorcycle, slamming his bike into a tree, drinking and driving, playing with venomous snakes. But his life was to have such a profound effect on Holly and me, and not all of it good. Sometimes I still imagine what it would have been like if he hadn’t shared it with us after all.
But he did liv
For a couple of hours, the house was like this, a circus of youth. Then it was over. I watched as they climbed off the roof, got in their beaters and drove away, and the house was quiet again, still.
William was so alive, more alive than I was or would ever be. He flew, and I, who couldn’t, just watched. That someone so remarkable and dangerous could ever be reduced to ten cups of ashes in a small wooden box was unimaginable. That’s what became of him, though, and it was in that box he came to stay with my wife and me, forty years after the first time I saw him. See him as I saw him that day, and then on all the days after, me the little brother of the beautiful sister, watching him hanging out in the kitchen in his leather jacket, a plain white T-shirt beneath it that matched Holly’s, his assassin-style sunglasses, his hair the color of burnt butter, thick, shoulder-length, straight, parted in the middle and sometimes falling across his face like a curtain; slender in his beaten-down jeans, the thick brown leather belt with grommets that held his jeans precariously right at his waist, a chain hooked on one end to a belt loop, the other end to his wallet, steel-toed black boots, leaning against the faux-slate kitchen counter where he’d set his black motorcycle helmet and not saying a word. Quiet. He seemed to be assembled from equal parts biker and builder, student and stud, and he pulled it off. At least I thought so, and that’s all that mattered then, and it may be all that matters now. It was more than just a look, though: it was who he was beneath the disguise that made it work. It was who he was waiting to become. Sometimes you can tell.
He had been a cartoonist since he was a kid, an R. Crumb disciple; it wouldn’t be long before I started seeing his drawings scattered around the house, taped to Holly’s bedroom wall. “Cartoons became my second language,” he later wrote. “Sometimes my first.” His cartoons were funny, purposefully and playfully offensive, and popular with his friends. That he would go on to become a working artist and writer, a famous one at that, capturing the substance and style of a subculture and in the process becoming a subculture hero himself, surprised everybody, him most of all.
It was lucky for me to have met him when I did. He was the one who would give me the idea for the life I ended up living, even if what I ended up doing was nothing like him or what he did. He showed me how it was done: experience, imagine, then create. Every book I’ve written is dedicated to him in invisible ink. I doubt I would have written a one of them without him, or that I ever would have considered being an artist at all.
Who was he, though? In the mid-nineties a magazine editor asked him for his bio and William wrote this:
Nealy has been a boy scout, an underground cartoonist (late 60’s), high school dropout, war resister, civil rights activist, construction worker, college student (BA 1976), mountain rescue specialist, garbageman, professional rock musician (drummer), police analyst, sculptor, spelunker, motorcyclist, bowhunter, paramedic, canoeist, kayaker, river guide, fork-lift driver, parachutist, author (ten books translated into three languages), real estate photographer, yachtsman, sport angler, traditional archer, rollerblader, tree surgeon, environmental activist, and, occasionally, a drunk and drug addict. Plus a few other things we can’t mention ’til the statute of limitations runs out. Also a political cartoonist, illustrator, private detective (2 arrests, 1 conviction, 1 pending), lifeguard, etc., etc. I’ve done more crazy-assed stuff than any other cartoonist on the fucking planet, period! And I still have enough brain cells to write books about my exploits.
Most of it, remarkably, more or less true.
At night after I was already in bed, I would hear them. William, Holly, their friends, all on the other side of the wall from me. They were trying to keep it down, but it was impossible for them. They were like ghosts to me: the disembodied laughter, the opening and closing of doors, the careful footsteps in the hallway, the lights from their departing cars sweeping through my window and across the ceiling. Then dark. Then silence. But it wasn’t them who were the ghosts. I was the ghost, really, longing to be a part of their lives but unable to, and not because I was dead, but because my life had yet to begin. This is why I’m telling this story. This is when it starts.
2 The Three of Us
May 21, 1972
Although I was thirteen years old, I think of this as the day I was born again, my coming-out party with Holly and William and . . . Alice Cooper. My first rock concert. Alice Cooper! Named for its singer who, it was said, would bite off the head of a chicken onstage and drink its blood. Who wore a live boa constrictor around his neck while decapitating baby dolls, and who, for an encore, would hang himself from a gallows. One of the early heavy metal bands, Alice Cooper learned early on that stagecraft was as important as the music they played. Their big hits, “I’m Eighteen,” “Under My Wheels,” and “School’s Out,” were loud, angry songs, sung in blistering screams by Vince Furnier, a.k.a. Alice. Blue Oyster Cult would be the opening act.
The concert was on the same night as Holly’s senior prom (not William’s: he had left high school without graduating). But the prom was a concept both of them found ridiculous. They went to it anyway, long enough to make an impression, leaving in time to pick me up and get to the show. William dressed as a gentleman serial killer, in a tux and top hat, his face framed by twin waterfalls of his long blond hair. Holly was a wraith, or maybe a corpse, her face painted white, with deep circles beneath her eyes. They could have been onstage.
I went as the little brother. The three of us watched Alice Cooper with his dripping mascara and baked-on sneer wrap the boa constrictor around his neck and hang himself onstage and scream as if he were the angriest man on Earth and hated us all. I wasn’t really with William and Holly, though, not as much as I wanted to be; they were in the row behind me, smoking. The Birmingham Municipal Auditorium, already an old room when I was young, was so dark, with cracked concrete floors and sagging, weary gray chairs. I don’t think they wanted to be seen with me: I was just a kid, after all. Through the first few minutes of Blue Oyster Cult, I was alone. But eventually Holly climbed over the seats and sat with me, and then William followed, one on either side, and I forgave them everything. They made me feel untouchable—so cool, a cool beyond what most people could even imagine.
For decades they were the absolute coolest, and as long as I was with them I thought I was, too. But you can’t borrow cool. I was, at best, a sidekick. But over the course of the next few months, I sponged up all that I could. I started to wear torn T-shirts and frayed jeans. I let my hair grow to my shoulders, falling like a curtain over my eyes. I wore purple Converse tennis shoes and affected a mild disdain for just about everything. I didn’t want to be Alice Cooper—he was too obvious, and obnoxious. All Alice Cooper wanted was your attention. I wanted to be William: quiet, removed, brave, fearless, skilled at everything, a man who could turn his experience not into a screed but into a cartoon. I wasn’t William, though, and I never could be; I knew that, even then. And so, I did what I could with what I had. I picked the parts of him that suited me, the ones I could successfully acquire. I wanted to at least seem like him. I would never be the guy jumping off the roof, in other words, but I could do a good job acting like the guy who did.
3 The Secret Room
1972–1974
My father was a self-made man. He came from the small town of Cullman, Alabama, but left to make his fortune in what he called the “big pond” of Birmingham. He didn’t have a college degree or any obvious skills, other than a winning smile, a head for numbers, and limitless ambition. He and my mother married in 1950. He was twenty years old, and she was eighteen. In 1951 my sister Rangeley was born, and then over the next nine years my mother and father had three more children: Holly, me, and my little sister Barrie.
