This Isn't Going to End Well, page 14
“Stanley was a good suspect. But once you get in mind that he did it, everything you see is in the context of him having done it. You see it through those glasses. Wrapped up in Edgar, and focused on the hunt, absorbed by it—that created passion, and undermined the witnesses. William would pull together all these people comparing stories with one another. He may not have been responsible, because they might not have been able to convict Stanley anyway. But it made it much more difficult. All the talking undermined it.”
She was suggesting that it was possible that Stanley Byrd might have been convicted had William and Holly never returned to Birmingham at all. I didn’t know whether this was true or not, and neither did she.
“Did you ever tell anybody?” I asked her. “I mean, could William have known?”
“No,” she said. “There was no sense in telling him. What’s done is done.”
A good thing that she didn’t. I think he would have killed himself even sooner if she had.
But he tried so hard to live.
In July 1997, just after the charges were dropped and Stanley became a free man, William made another one of his lists, the ultimate Pro/Con list: should he live or die?
Pro: I have a woman I love, a beautiful home and land, sufficient income, tons of paraphernalia, a houseboat, a profession, pursuits I love: primitive tech, artifact collecting, archery, bicycling, shooting, woodsman-ship, geology, woodwork, flint nap, 10 books, limited fame, good writing ability, phys. healthy mother with good insurance and good estate.
Con: Alcoholism, drug dependence, chronic shyness, poor concentration, low self-esteem, insomnia (chronic), passive aggressive personality, unipolar depression, S.I., paranoia neurosis, D.D.D. x4, asthma, cig. addition, sick pets, fogged thermopane, termites.
The scales were weighted from the beginning. Still, he would live for another four years with the woman he loved in their beautiful home, fogged thermopane and termites notwithstanding.
22 The Immortality Project
The earliest entry I have in William’s journals is from July 1978. He was twenty-six years old. He was working in a trail shop at the time, and just starting to draw his maps. In this entry he writes about many things, but for me the most interesting section deals with the concept of an “immortality project.”
It began with an argument he had with Holly. Apparently, she had asked him if he’d been depressed lately, and he told her he’d been sad for a very long time. He told Holly that “my problem, at the root of it all, was that I lacked a CAUSA SUI project—an immortality project—a consuming task.”
He was reading The Denial of Death at the time, by Ernest Becker, and this is one of the big ideas in the book. “An Immortality Project is one in which we create or become part of something that we feel will outlast our time on earth. It’s how we hope to become heroic, and part of something eternal—the belief that our lives have meaning, purpose, and significance.” Becker also argues that “the basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.” This is why we distract ourselves with greater goals, like saving lives, solving crimes, or even writing a book.
Reading William’s journals, I came to realize that this idea was true for him, then and throughout the rest of his life. Maybe the truest thing. He needed to have a project—small projects like replacing a rotten piece of wood on the deck, and larger ones, like my sister. Holly was his first immortality project. He thought that through his sacrifice and devotion to her maybe he could save her. That she could be his consuming task. That was why he’d stayed with her, way back when. I knew that he’d loved her more deeply than anybody else in his life, but if she had never gotten sick I believe he might have left her, that he’d stayed not despite but because of her illness. It turned out that he couldn’t protect her against a ravaging autoimmune disease, which tore at and disassembled her and was, in his words, “like watching your lover being raped and mutilated every day for 20 years.” So, no heroism for him there, even though to my mind, staying with her in the first place, and making her life possible in the second, was the heroic act.
Then there was Edgar. When William learned that he was missing, his first hope was to find him, somehow, alive. It was unlikely, of course, but this is the sort of thing heroes do: it’s what distinguishes heroes from the rest of us. Look at his books: chapters are spent on rescue and self-rescue. Don’t give up! Swim towards the light! And once Edgar was found dead, there was always a backup plan: justice, which was a kind of revenge. That was a good project, and this one almost worked. William did his part, he found who he thought was the guilty party, but felt that the justice system failed him. And as much as some journal entries suggested he wanted to, he could not take matters into his own hands and deliver a different kind of justice. He couldn’t kill Stanley. It just wasn’t in him. All he could do is fantasize about it, creating more intricate and creative ways to kill him as the years went by.
It started to feel to me like Edgar was William’s last chance. Had he solved his murder, he might have saved himself. Edgar could have been his redemption, a redemption he didn’t really need—he had given so much of himself already—but only imagined he did. Avenging the death of his best friend (what Achilles had done for Patrocles) would have allowed him to bring a balance back into the world, into his world at least. It would be a story we’d be telling for a long, long time, a story about a hero who finally got his Elysian Field upgrade. He may have hoped for another opportunity, but over the next four years one did not present itself. Instead, he developed four herniated discs from a bike accident, and then he couldn’t paddle. He could barely sit long enough to draw. To himself, he was just the shell of the man he’d built for himself to live in, a would-be hero who never had a real chance to be heroic, a man who nobody really knew.
But there was something else that Ernest Becker wrote that I kept coming back to. I didn’t know if William ever read it, though; it was in another book, The Birth and Death of Meaning.
“By the time we grow up,” Becker writes, “we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away, of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—lo and behold we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art.”
We couldn’t save him for the same reason he couldn’t save himself: no one, not Holly, not me, maybe not even William, knew exactly who he was. Odysseus, Achilles, Princess Caraboo, Clint Eastwood. The Coolest Guy on the Planet. All, some, or none of the above.
23 The Envelope
It was in a folder where I kept documents that didn’t fit anywhere else. The journals had an entire shelf in my bookcase, but there was so much more: two miniature journals that were the size of index cards in which he wrote in letters almost too tiny to read. There was his driver’s license and passport and a picture of Elvis Presley on a plastic change tray, loose photos, random notes and loose-leaf papers, a few drawings—and the envelope. On the front Holly had written “H [Holly] read 9/02/01.” And a description of its contents: “William’s intense self-hatred.”
And on the back, of course, that tape across the seal and the hair beneath it.
Holly had dated it, fifteen days after William had killed himself. Two weeks. I’m assuming she had just found the envelope that day. She was drawn to it immediately, as I was, because this was different from the rest of the material, separate, specific. I couldn’t open it, but she did. She opened the envelope, read its contents, read it again, I imagine, and again if she could stand it. She sealed it, and then she removed five long brown hairs from her head and taped them to the seal.
Why did she tape her hair to the seal? Was it a safeguard, that if anyone were to open it, she would know? Or was it just to say that what was in this envelope was so precious, so dangerous, that she had to mark it with a part of her body? All I know is that the hair across the seal distinguished it mightily from anything else I’d ever held in my hands.
She did what she did. Then she put the envelope away, and for the next seventeen years it was never opened again. She didn’t date anything else; none of the journals, which she no doubt read as well, had her mark anywhere on them. She dated this because—I don’t know why. Maybe she just wanted to mark the day when she finally learned everything she needed to know about him.
Now it was mine. It wasn’t mine, really, just like the rest of all I had of his wasn’t mine. But in my need to understand and explain to myself what I was doing, I thought of it all as my inheritance: the last words he wanted her to hear, she wanted me to hear, too. And after everything I had already read in his journals, where he seemed so utterly free in sharing his hopes and shattered dreams, his suicidal ideation and his homicidal fantasies about Stanley Byrd, what more could possibly be divulged that I didn’t already know?
I couldn’t open it. I couldn’t break my sister’s hair. Instead, I cut the short edge of the envelope with a razor blade, removing just a tiny sliver of it, leaving the tape and Holly’s hair intact. Were Holly to come back to life and look at it she would hardly be able to tell I had opened it all.
William was the king of lists, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that the envelope contained another one. Three pages long, on yellowed-lined paper, in the handwriting I’d always admired: his List of Shame. There was almost no commentary, just the facts, one delivered after the other in austere self-flagellation, secrets that he would not, could not even commit to his journals.
I’m not going to list them all here: enough, finally, is enough. But there is this one note he made, a critical moment in his life he may never have told anyone about: “My hero A.J., a scoutmaster,” he wrote, sexually assaulted him “in the councilor’s tent.”
No interpretation or analysis from William; he doesn’t even say how old he was, but I would guess eleven or twelve. Presumably they were camping; William was probably going for another badge. This life-altering episode—William turned away from the impact of it himself. William Nealy, the boy with the bright red hair, the bowl cut, the freckles, the nerdy thick glasses, who was claiming his right to be a boy by joining the Scouts, and becoming, one day, a great one, could not face this moment down. What must it have done to him, then and for the rest of his life? How hard is it to hold on to a dream of the man you want to become when the best version you have of that man assaults you while you’re sleeping? The emotional energy it took to sustain a dream so corrupted had to have been exhausting, and confusing. He felt trapped, certainly: he could not go backward, because there was nothing there for him. But what lay ahead for him now? Maybe this was his very first real secret, one he kept for his entire life. Had he ever told Holly, I think she would have told me at some point in the last ten years of her life. Maybe this is when he split himself in two.
But there are no more details from William, no self-examination or reflection. He simply moves on from there: “I stole a pistol from my grandfather when I was 13 and gave it back to him when he was dying, 8 years later . . .”
And on and on: looking through medicine cabinets in friend’s bathrooms, “Gil and I dancing in dewy suburban lawns before dawn, naked, when we were 8,” making out with a friend’s girlfriend, wandering through the forest “scoping out the back trails, the hidey holes, prepping for future adventures, laying faked evidence for bragged-on but uncommitted crimes,” followed by pretty straight-forward titillations and teenage misadventures, unwise and provocative but ultimately forgivable.
He was never able to forgive himself, though. The good life he led didn’t erase or absolve him or seem to give him any respite from the guilt he felt for his transgressions; the good life he led was, to him, a cover, a ruse, a self to hide his other self beneath. He was quite aware of the image he had created—the Man with No Name who had made a name for himself mapping rivers, climbing mountains, racing down treacherous trails on his mountain bike, and writing books about all of it later. As he wrote more than once in the journals, no one would be able to handle who he really was. If he was the model of the toxic male, he was toxic only to himself, cool on the outside and burning with shame on the inside. These deepest and darkest secrets became the foundation for the creation of a new William, the one everyone knew, and loved, and some of us almost worshipped.
He ends it all like this: “I think this rant may continue until I’ve put it all out there . . . then I can read it and burn it and eat the ashes.” But he never did that. Here were his confessions—his rant, as he put it. He never burned it, though, and most crucially, he never put any of it “out there,” where it is now. No one ever knew what happened to him; no one knew why he was the way he was, or why he did what he did. His other self lived and died on the page, as gone as if that part of him had never existed at all—until I found it in a cardboard box in the back of a dark closet and gave it a second life.
Part Three
24 Last Days
No matter how many wonderful things you did, you will always be remembered for the last one you did wrong.
—William, from Boyz Life, an unfinished manuscript
He’d always heard voices, faraway siren songs of death, like music drifting through the woods from the home of a distant neighbor. But when he woke up that morning, out of a suicidal dream—Sunday, July 15, 2001—it was different: the voice was in his head now, and the voice was his. Like he was talking to himself. He wrote this down in his journal, what he heard, the message he had received: Imperative . . . do this, soon.
Then, as if it was already out of his hands, he wrote: So so sad.
This is what happened.
Since the week before, he wrote, he’d been absorbed with the prospect of following through on his lifelong desire to kill himself. After so many years orbiting his destination planet, he felt ready to enter that atmosphere—long-desired but still unknown to him—and touch down. He wished he could have had more practice. He learned a little from the first time he tried this, six years ago, but only what not to do. And he’d never done anything in his life without planning for it, without practice, practice, practice. When he was first learning to skate, at forty, he practiced in private for months, where no one could see him, until he got the moves down. Then he went out into the world—a full-fledged skater. If he could have practiced killing himself, he would have, but since that was impossible, he just had to plan and plot and hope for the best. He had guns and drugs and he knew how to use them both. He knew that suicide was not just about killing yourself; that’s the easy part, and when you do it right it’s over in a flash. But there’s a lot of prep that goes into it, a lot of paperwork. Let no one tell you different.
I never found his very last journal. I only saw the few pages of it that Holly copied and showed around—his last days. She made dozens of copies and gave them to friends and family. She wanted to show us how crazy what had happened was. How maybe he had been crazy himself toward the end. She wanted to know what we thought of the whole thing.
Or maybe she just didn’t want to be the only one who read it, who had to carry this dreadful story around in her head forever.
The last few years of his life William seemed to recede, in person and in his journals as well. It was a gradual thing that happened after the charges against Stanley were dropped. I rarely saw him. He was agoraphobic, I think. He didn’t even want to talk on the telephone. When I visited he’d be in the bedroom, reading, or upstairs in his office trying to draw. Holly, though she had been operated on shoulder to toe, was by far the livelier of the two.
The last two complete journals of his I have focus mostly on the day-to-day. The road his life was on felt smoother now—not happier, really, just less tortured. It reads like he’s accepted himself for who he is, and calibrated his desires based on that. He’s no longer railing against the world. There’s not a lot of noise in them, inside or out. The journals are friendly text-capsules of day-to-day events, with very little commentary, very little complaint. Even stressful moments feel calm. No fears of implosion. No threats to his life or the lives of others. The only truly apocalyptically paranoid entry in the last year of his life is on May 15, 2001, when he wrote about a report he heard on NPR. A national database was being established to detect abuse of oxycontin. “Possibly if Holly started conserving and ceased double-scripting everything would be okay . . . I’m thinking I may need a lot more ammo: 9mm, .30, .357, 12 gauge, 00, etc. We may be getting a visit from the DEA.”
But even this—making sure he had enough ammo to hold off the DEA—was written in a less frantic, almost easy-going voice. His asthma was getting worse, as was his back pain. Holly had already had one shoulder replacement and was going to get another soon. Basie, my younger sister Barrie’s son, his (our) nephew, was spending a lot of time with them, and many of William’s entries describe their visits—“rounding numbers,” playing with Legos, killing Nazis. Lots of writing for school.
There was a sense of peace. But I think the peace came from the decision he’d made, this deal he made with himself to die. He’d been on the road to suicide all of his life, but now, from where he was, he could see the end of it. Just a little farther to go.
I looked back at everything I’d read, beginning in 1978:
Last weekend I felt that I was truly headed for the edge. These periods of acute depression seem to manifest themselves daily—maybe it’s all depression interrupted by short daily flights of euphoria that give me the impression that I’m sporadically depressed instead of sporadically happy.
Followed by innumerable suicidal ideation dreams over the years, his own first botched attempt at dying, his casual one-off observations (“If it weren’t for Holly and the pigs, I’d kill myself”) to his futile attempts to convince himself that he might be able to avoid it.
She was suggesting that it was possible that Stanley Byrd might have been convicted had William and Holly never returned to Birmingham at all. I didn’t know whether this was true or not, and neither did she.
“Did you ever tell anybody?” I asked her. “I mean, could William have known?”
“No,” she said. “There was no sense in telling him. What’s done is done.”
A good thing that she didn’t. I think he would have killed himself even sooner if she had.
But he tried so hard to live.
In July 1997, just after the charges were dropped and Stanley became a free man, William made another one of his lists, the ultimate Pro/Con list: should he live or die?
Pro: I have a woman I love, a beautiful home and land, sufficient income, tons of paraphernalia, a houseboat, a profession, pursuits I love: primitive tech, artifact collecting, archery, bicycling, shooting, woodsman-ship, geology, woodwork, flint nap, 10 books, limited fame, good writing ability, phys. healthy mother with good insurance and good estate.
Con: Alcoholism, drug dependence, chronic shyness, poor concentration, low self-esteem, insomnia (chronic), passive aggressive personality, unipolar depression, S.I., paranoia neurosis, D.D.D. x4, asthma, cig. addition, sick pets, fogged thermopane, termites.
The scales were weighted from the beginning. Still, he would live for another four years with the woman he loved in their beautiful home, fogged thermopane and termites notwithstanding.
22 The Immortality Project
The earliest entry I have in William’s journals is from July 1978. He was twenty-six years old. He was working in a trail shop at the time, and just starting to draw his maps. In this entry he writes about many things, but for me the most interesting section deals with the concept of an “immortality project.”
It began with an argument he had with Holly. Apparently, she had asked him if he’d been depressed lately, and he told her he’d been sad for a very long time. He told Holly that “my problem, at the root of it all, was that I lacked a CAUSA SUI project—an immortality project—a consuming task.”
He was reading The Denial of Death at the time, by Ernest Becker, and this is one of the big ideas in the book. “An Immortality Project is one in which we create or become part of something that we feel will outlast our time on earth. It’s how we hope to become heroic, and part of something eternal—the belief that our lives have meaning, purpose, and significance.” Becker also argues that “the basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.” This is why we distract ourselves with greater goals, like saving lives, solving crimes, or even writing a book.
Reading William’s journals, I came to realize that this idea was true for him, then and throughout the rest of his life. Maybe the truest thing. He needed to have a project—small projects like replacing a rotten piece of wood on the deck, and larger ones, like my sister. Holly was his first immortality project. He thought that through his sacrifice and devotion to her maybe he could save her. That she could be his consuming task. That was why he’d stayed with her, way back when. I knew that he’d loved her more deeply than anybody else in his life, but if she had never gotten sick I believe he might have left her, that he’d stayed not despite but because of her illness. It turned out that he couldn’t protect her against a ravaging autoimmune disease, which tore at and disassembled her and was, in his words, “like watching your lover being raped and mutilated every day for 20 years.” So, no heroism for him there, even though to my mind, staying with her in the first place, and making her life possible in the second, was the heroic act.
Then there was Edgar. When William learned that he was missing, his first hope was to find him, somehow, alive. It was unlikely, of course, but this is the sort of thing heroes do: it’s what distinguishes heroes from the rest of us. Look at his books: chapters are spent on rescue and self-rescue. Don’t give up! Swim towards the light! And once Edgar was found dead, there was always a backup plan: justice, which was a kind of revenge. That was a good project, and this one almost worked. William did his part, he found who he thought was the guilty party, but felt that the justice system failed him. And as much as some journal entries suggested he wanted to, he could not take matters into his own hands and deliver a different kind of justice. He couldn’t kill Stanley. It just wasn’t in him. All he could do is fantasize about it, creating more intricate and creative ways to kill him as the years went by.
It started to feel to me like Edgar was William’s last chance. Had he solved his murder, he might have saved himself. Edgar could have been his redemption, a redemption he didn’t really need—he had given so much of himself already—but only imagined he did. Avenging the death of his best friend (what Achilles had done for Patrocles) would have allowed him to bring a balance back into the world, into his world at least. It would be a story we’d be telling for a long, long time, a story about a hero who finally got his Elysian Field upgrade. He may have hoped for another opportunity, but over the next four years one did not present itself. Instead, he developed four herniated discs from a bike accident, and then he couldn’t paddle. He could barely sit long enough to draw. To himself, he was just the shell of the man he’d built for himself to live in, a would-be hero who never had a real chance to be heroic, a man who nobody really knew.
But there was something else that Ernest Becker wrote that I kept coming back to. I didn’t know if William ever read it, though; it was in another book, The Birth and Death of Meaning.
“By the time we grow up,” Becker writes, “we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away, of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—lo and behold we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art.”
We couldn’t save him for the same reason he couldn’t save himself: no one, not Holly, not me, maybe not even William, knew exactly who he was. Odysseus, Achilles, Princess Caraboo, Clint Eastwood. The Coolest Guy on the Planet. All, some, or none of the above.
23 The Envelope
It was in a folder where I kept documents that didn’t fit anywhere else. The journals had an entire shelf in my bookcase, but there was so much more: two miniature journals that were the size of index cards in which he wrote in letters almost too tiny to read. There was his driver’s license and passport and a picture of Elvis Presley on a plastic change tray, loose photos, random notes and loose-leaf papers, a few drawings—and the envelope. On the front Holly had written “H [Holly] read 9/02/01.” And a description of its contents: “William’s intense self-hatred.”
And on the back, of course, that tape across the seal and the hair beneath it.
Holly had dated it, fifteen days after William had killed himself. Two weeks. I’m assuming she had just found the envelope that day. She was drawn to it immediately, as I was, because this was different from the rest of the material, separate, specific. I couldn’t open it, but she did. She opened the envelope, read its contents, read it again, I imagine, and again if she could stand it. She sealed it, and then she removed five long brown hairs from her head and taped them to the seal.
Why did she tape her hair to the seal? Was it a safeguard, that if anyone were to open it, she would know? Or was it just to say that what was in this envelope was so precious, so dangerous, that she had to mark it with a part of her body? All I know is that the hair across the seal distinguished it mightily from anything else I’d ever held in my hands.
She did what she did. Then she put the envelope away, and for the next seventeen years it was never opened again. She didn’t date anything else; none of the journals, which she no doubt read as well, had her mark anywhere on them. She dated this because—I don’t know why. Maybe she just wanted to mark the day when she finally learned everything she needed to know about him.
Now it was mine. It wasn’t mine, really, just like the rest of all I had of his wasn’t mine. But in my need to understand and explain to myself what I was doing, I thought of it all as my inheritance: the last words he wanted her to hear, she wanted me to hear, too. And after everything I had already read in his journals, where he seemed so utterly free in sharing his hopes and shattered dreams, his suicidal ideation and his homicidal fantasies about Stanley Byrd, what more could possibly be divulged that I didn’t already know?
I couldn’t open it. I couldn’t break my sister’s hair. Instead, I cut the short edge of the envelope with a razor blade, removing just a tiny sliver of it, leaving the tape and Holly’s hair intact. Were Holly to come back to life and look at it she would hardly be able to tell I had opened it all.
William was the king of lists, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that the envelope contained another one. Three pages long, on yellowed-lined paper, in the handwriting I’d always admired: his List of Shame. There was almost no commentary, just the facts, one delivered after the other in austere self-flagellation, secrets that he would not, could not even commit to his journals.
I’m not going to list them all here: enough, finally, is enough. But there is this one note he made, a critical moment in his life he may never have told anyone about: “My hero A.J., a scoutmaster,” he wrote, sexually assaulted him “in the councilor’s tent.”
No interpretation or analysis from William; he doesn’t even say how old he was, but I would guess eleven or twelve. Presumably they were camping; William was probably going for another badge. This life-altering episode—William turned away from the impact of it himself. William Nealy, the boy with the bright red hair, the bowl cut, the freckles, the nerdy thick glasses, who was claiming his right to be a boy by joining the Scouts, and becoming, one day, a great one, could not face this moment down. What must it have done to him, then and for the rest of his life? How hard is it to hold on to a dream of the man you want to become when the best version you have of that man assaults you while you’re sleeping? The emotional energy it took to sustain a dream so corrupted had to have been exhausting, and confusing. He felt trapped, certainly: he could not go backward, because there was nothing there for him. But what lay ahead for him now? Maybe this was his very first real secret, one he kept for his entire life. Had he ever told Holly, I think she would have told me at some point in the last ten years of her life. Maybe this is when he split himself in two.
But there are no more details from William, no self-examination or reflection. He simply moves on from there: “I stole a pistol from my grandfather when I was 13 and gave it back to him when he was dying, 8 years later . . .”
And on and on: looking through medicine cabinets in friend’s bathrooms, “Gil and I dancing in dewy suburban lawns before dawn, naked, when we were 8,” making out with a friend’s girlfriend, wandering through the forest “scoping out the back trails, the hidey holes, prepping for future adventures, laying faked evidence for bragged-on but uncommitted crimes,” followed by pretty straight-forward titillations and teenage misadventures, unwise and provocative but ultimately forgivable.
He was never able to forgive himself, though. The good life he led didn’t erase or absolve him or seem to give him any respite from the guilt he felt for his transgressions; the good life he led was, to him, a cover, a ruse, a self to hide his other self beneath. He was quite aware of the image he had created—the Man with No Name who had made a name for himself mapping rivers, climbing mountains, racing down treacherous trails on his mountain bike, and writing books about all of it later. As he wrote more than once in the journals, no one would be able to handle who he really was. If he was the model of the toxic male, he was toxic only to himself, cool on the outside and burning with shame on the inside. These deepest and darkest secrets became the foundation for the creation of a new William, the one everyone knew, and loved, and some of us almost worshipped.
He ends it all like this: “I think this rant may continue until I’ve put it all out there . . . then I can read it and burn it and eat the ashes.” But he never did that. Here were his confessions—his rant, as he put it. He never burned it, though, and most crucially, he never put any of it “out there,” where it is now. No one ever knew what happened to him; no one knew why he was the way he was, or why he did what he did. His other self lived and died on the page, as gone as if that part of him had never existed at all—until I found it in a cardboard box in the back of a dark closet and gave it a second life.
Part Three
24 Last Days
No matter how many wonderful things you did, you will always be remembered for the last one you did wrong.
—William, from Boyz Life, an unfinished manuscript
He’d always heard voices, faraway siren songs of death, like music drifting through the woods from the home of a distant neighbor. But when he woke up that morning, out of a suicidal dream—Sunday, July 15, 2001—it was different: the voice was in his head now, and the voice was his. Like he was talking to himself. He wrote this down in his journal, what he heard, the message he had received: Imperative . . . do this, soon.
Then, as if it was already out of his hands, he wrote: So so sad.
This is what happened.
Since the week before, he wrote, he’d been absorbed with the prospect of following through on his lifelong desire to kill himself. After so many years orbiting his destination planet, he felt ready to enter that atmosphere—long-desired but still unknown to him—and touch down. He wished he could have had more practice. He learned a little from the first time he tried this, six years ago, but only what not to do. And he’d never done anything in his life without planning for it, without practice, practice, practice. When he was first learning to skate, at forty, he practiced in private for months, where no one could see him, until he got the moves down. Then he went out into the world—a full-fledged skater. If he could have practiced killing himself, he would have, but since that was impossible, he just had to plan and plot and hope for the best. He had guns and drugs and he knew how to use them both. He knew that suicide was not just about killing yourself; that’s the easy part, and when you do it right it’s over in a flash. But there’s a lot of prep that goes into it, a lot of paperwork. Let no one tell you different.
I never found his very last journal. I only saw the few pages of it that Holly copied and showed around—his last days. She made dozens of copies and gave them to friends and family. She wanted to show us how crazy what had happened was. How maybe he had been crazy himself toward the end. She wanted to know what we thought of the whole thing.
Or maybe she just didn’t want to be the only one who read it, who had to carry this dreadful story around in her head forever.
The last few years of his life William seemed to recede, in person and in his journals as well. It was a gradual thing that happened after the charges against Stanley were dropped. I rarely saw him. He was agoraphobic, I think. He didn’t even want to talk on the telephone. When I visited he’d be in the bedroom, reading, or upstairs in his office trying to draw. Holly, though she had been operated on shoulder to toe, was by far the livelier of the two.
The last two complete journals of his I have focus mostly on the day-to-day. The road his life was on felt smoother now—not happier, really, just less tortured. It reads like he’s accepted himself for who he is, and calibrated his desires based on that. He’s no longer railing against the world. There’s not a lot of noise in them, inside or out. The journals are friendly text-capsules of day-to-day events, with very little commentary, very little complaint. Even stressful moments feel calm. No fears of implosion. No threats to his life or the lives of others. The only truly apocalyptically paranoid entry in the last year of his life is on May 15, 2001, when he wrote about a report he heard on NPR. A national database was being established to detect abuse of oxycontin. “Possibly if Holly started conserving and ceased double-scripting everything would be okay . . . I’m thinking I may need a lot more ammo: 9mm, .30, .357, 12 gauge, 00, etc. We may be getting a visit from the DEA.”
But even this—making sure he had enough ammo to hold off the DEA—was written in a less frantic, almost easy-going voice. His asthma was getting worse, as was his back pain. Holly had already had one shoulder replacement and was going to get another soon. Basie, my younger sister Barrie’s son, his (our) nephew, was spending a lot of time with them, and many of William’s entries describe their visits—“rounding numbers,” playing with Legos, killing Nazis. Lots of writing for school.
There was a sense of peace. But I think the peace came from the decision he’d made, this deal he made with himself to die. He’d been on the road to suicide all of his life, but now, from where he was, he could see the end of it. Just a little farther to go.
I looked back at everything I’d read, beginning in 1978:
Last weekend I felt that I was truly headed for the edge. These periods of acute depression seem to manifest themselves daily—maybe it’s all depression interrupted by short daily flights of euphoria that give me the impression that I’m sporadically depressed instead of sporadically happy.
Followed by innumerable suicidal ideation dreams over the years, his own first botched attempt at dying, his casual one-off observations (“If it weren’t for Holly and the pigs, I’d kill myself”) to his futile attempts to convince himself that he might be able to avoid it.
