This Isn't Going to End Well, page 7
William, whose first book of river maps had been collected and published in 1981, was the first person I ever knew who wrote a real book—a book that became a book, words and images on a page that were printed, bound, and sold. This was so important to me—knowing someone who had taken an idea, dressed it up, and sent it out into the world. The way we first see books is as beautiful parcels of words in cloth covers, unmarred, perfect, without a drop of sweat anywhere on them, not a single torn or crumpled page. No blood. There was no way the tangled and tortured process of actual writing, the days and nights of minor triumphs and major defeats, could ever add up to something as beautiful as a book. But to be able to watch someone do it—someone I actually knew—changed all that. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? When I’d visit Holly and William at their home, he would often be bent over his light table, tracing the penciled lines of his drawings in ink, every detail of every rock and rapid, pouring over his character’s expressions—the paddlers and their girlfriends—scene, character, conflict. Watching him gave me permission to begin writing in 1984, and also was the reason that the first writing desk I bought was a drafting table.
But there was even more I wanted him to teach me.
I wanted him to teach me how to fish.
He, of course, liked nothing more.
I was twenty-four and I’d never been fishing in my life. My father had never taken me fishing and that was fine with me. But now that I was a man and wanting to be a writer and needing to understand what happened when you killed things, I felt like I was missing something valuable, and so I turned to William to show me what it was.
William would have shown me how to do anything I asked him to. He would have made an amazing father himself. Nieces and nephews, the neighbor’s kids, they all loved him, and not just because he made a camp for them in his backyard—with a climbing wall and a tree house and a mesh tent to spider-walk over—but because he saw the world through their eyes. He saw the world as a place for homemade adventure.
Fishing was integral to the idea of being the writer I was now ambitious to become. Not all the writers I admired fished, of course. Flannery O’Conner may have, Salinger, probably not. I can’t imagine Kafka fishing; Nabokov captured butterflies. But as a Southern writer, which is what I was or what I would likely become once I wrote anything, fishing was a requirement. Up until that point, for most of the almost quarter of a century I’d been alive, I had stayed indoors, preferring hot showers, soft pillows, and central air. But there was no story there. I was afraid that my desire to be a writer would not be commensurate with things to write about; I was afraid I would never have an opportunity to use the word commensurate. I remember wishing, honestly wishing, that I hadn’t missed Vietnam, because there was so much great material there! Going After Cacciato, Dispatches, The Things They Carried. I loved those books. In Vietnam I would have had lot of friends who would have died, or parts of them would have been blown off, and maybe parts of me as well, and I would have watched as whole villages were razed and women and children sent fleeing into the forest. Dark and unspeakable tragedy upon tragedy. It would have scarred me, but at the end of the day I would have been okay enough, at home with my typewriter, writing about it. William had not gone to Nam either, but he had read a hundred books about it and maintained all of his life a weirdly intense and fiery hatred for Lt. William Calley, who perpetrated the massacre at My Lai.
William was the kind of man Hemingway would have liked, the kind of man who could be dropped into the middle of a jungle with no more than a half-chewed piece of bubble gum, a piece of dental floss, and the pop-top from a cola can and somehow still save your life.
I borrowed one of his fishing rods and we got up early and bought some night crawlers at a bait shop. Night crawlers are worms, worms as big as garter snakes, and you could buy a box of them for three dollars. We bought two boxes and headed out to the country where a friend of William’s had a medium-sized pond stocked with bass and bream. We took the poles and night crawlers and an ice chest big enough to hold two six-packs. The plan was that when the six packs were gone we were done fishing whether we’d caught anything or not.
It was the kind of summer when it was never not unbearably hot except for a few seconds just before dawn. But as soon as the sun rose and there was a light over the dusty rain-starved pine-tree-mottled land, you felt seized by the heat, as if in the arms of a chain-smoking uncle you never really liked, all sweaty and pungent and sticky. Mosquitos traveled in cloudy gangs and attacked with the single-minded ferocity of hungry lions.
Why fishing, though? Why not hunting? He was expert with a bow and arrow, and with guns. He had an affection for guns and, same as everything else he cared for, knew a lot about them. He had quite a few of them that I’d only seen once. William and Holly’s bathroom was expansive. It was one long room, like a railroad car, separated by sliding wooden doors. One room was the actual bathroom, the second was a changing room, and the third was where they kept the washer and dryer.
One summer day I was visiting, swimming in their pool.
“I was hoping I could borrow a towel,” I said.
William took me to the changing room where the towels were hanging from hooks on a wall. I saw, as I took one that was only slightly damp, an almost imperceptible crack in the wall.
“Look at this,” I said, as if I might be showing him something he wouldn’t already have known about. He kept a keen eye on every nook and cranny of the little kingdom he had created.
“Oh that,” he said. “Yeah.”
He pulled on one of the hooks, and the wall moved. It opened. It wasn’t a wall at all but a “fake” wall he’d inserted during construction. Behind it was a display of shotguns, handguns, rifles, and scary-looking knives and machetes. He kept nunchucks back there, too, and bows and arrows.
“Just in case,” he said. “For the end times.” He chuckled, making fun of the kind of people who believed in that sort of thing, even though, you know, he kind of believed in that sort of thing.
He lived for desperate moments, for the most exceptional emergencies in which to perform. What more exceptional emergency was there than the end of days?
The man who owned the pond we were fishing was named Rod Farb. Rod was thirty-five, and a deep-sea diver. He’d explored the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Carolina looking for ancient shipwrecks, and he had found some, too, and he wrote books about that. He was a big man with long black hair and a grand mustache in the style favored by Mongol invaders, and he wore the kind of glasses that turned dark in the sun. He seemed to me to exist in the same world William did, full of brilliance and arcane knowledge. They were men who saw the world as something to be fathomed through direct experience—something I wanted, too, but I wanted to have it without actually having to experience it that much. I wanted access to it through hanging out with people who did experience it, and then writing about the things they did.
Rod never fished with us, but after the third or fourth time out there, he joined us for a cigarette.
“William told me you were a writer.”
“Not really,” I said. “Not yet. I’m learning. Giving it a shot.”
He nodded. I felt him take my estimation behind his dark glasses.
“I want to show you something,” he said, and gestured for me and William to follow.
He took us about twenty yards away from the pond and we edged through a copse of thick pine until we came to a clearing and a large metal cage, about twenty feet square. Inside the cage was a Bengal tiger, all golden brown with slashing black stripes. She lay there, looking at us with her I’m-Not-Kidding-I-Will-Eat-You eyes. Then she stood and paced from one end of the cage to the other, impatiently, as if she were on a platform waiting for a train.
“Can you go in?” I said.
“In the cage? I can,” he said. “But just me. Anybody else and she’d rip them apart. Want to give it a shot?” His smile was almost hostile, almost as if he would have let me if I’d taken him up on it.
“No thanks,” I said.
“I didn’t think so,” he said, and Rod and William laughed.
I don’t know how he got the tiger, or where it came from, or if it was even legal to have it there. But just a few minutes ago I had been fishing and then I’d been taken behind a scrim of green and now here we were and it was so random, as if anything could have been hiding behind the pine trees, anything at all, but today it just happened to be a tiger.
We left the beast and returned to the pond, and drank beer, and fished.
We caught a few. Most of them we threw back because they were so small. But I hauled in a bass that weighed over a pound and William taught me how to kill it, descale it, and gut it right there. A fish skull is so fragile. All you have to do is lop it once or twice with a rock or a stick or knock it against a hard piece of wood like a dock, and the fish will be dead. William used the knife he always had with him and showed me how to shave off its scales, and how to slit the underbelly and remove everything inside until it was hollow, just bones and meat. Other than ants and grasshoppers, this fish was the first living being I had ever killed. Later we would take it to his house and cook it up. It was good and fine and true, as someone might say.
Yes, I needed more of this in my fiction. More guts, more death, fewer broken hearts and talking dogs. I was so bored with myself and despairing of ever writing anything worth reading. This half-acre pond was where stories were born, I thought, in the dark and unexplored forest around it, on the reefs where ships sank, with the wild animal hidden behind the pines. I needed to be more like William, like Rod. I needed to get in the cage with the tiger.
In 2003, Rod Farb murdered his wife, her daughter, and a friend of his wife’s who had come there to protect her. Then he killed himself. All this at the house by the pond where William and I had gone fishing. Rod had a drinking problem, they said. In 2000 he’d been charged with flying while impaired, when he crashed a plane. But news reports said “there was not a lot in Farb’s background” to suggest why he’d killed three people before killing himself, and no one, including one of his stepsons, has been able to shed a light on it. The tiger was gone long before this happened, but why he got rid of it, and where it went, I don’t know.
11 A White Christmas
William and I would drive in tandem from Chapel Hill to Birmingham, for Christmas, then drive the eight hours back. We did this year after year. Sometimes Holly would stay a little longer and fly back later. Before leaving Birmingham, we’d get a gram of coke from Edgar—a Christmas present. We’d take turns holding it. We could have split it up but if the worst happened and one of us was busted the other could go for help. William had thought this through.
We had CB radios. We’d find a channel all our own and chatter, the lead car miles ahead watching for speed traps.
Smokie at mile marker 177, over.
That’s a 10-4, over.
The lead car had the coke. An hour into the trip we’d make the first exchange.
The next rest stop, over.
Copy that, over.
Then, minutes later: Second one down from the door, over, he’d say. William loved codes. He could have been a secret agent or a detective, I thought.
I’d pull into the rest stop. William would be long gone. In the second stall from the door, behind the tank, he would have taped the bindle. I’d retrieve it, do a line sitting on the john. Eventually I’d pass him, becoming the lead car, and would perform the same exchange an hour later. This is how we’d drive through Georgia, South Carolina, and home to Chapel Hill. By the time we got back it would all be gone, and Christmas was officially over.
I loved my life with William.
In the summers in the eighties we’d ride our mountain bikes into downtown Chapel Hill, thumping down flights of concrete stairs on campus, on sidewalks in front of the Varsity Theater, in and out of traffic, as free as anybody was anywhere, as free as anyone ever had been. Eventually, we’d end up at the Cave, a bar in the basement of a building. The chairs were hard and uncomfortable, the lighting was bad, it was poorly ventilated, everybody smoked. There was an old jukebox featuring scratched-up 45s, of Otis Redding singing “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” of “Yellow Submarine” and the Ramones, and yet no matter how loud it got, you could still hear the crack of a cue ball crashing above the felt. There was an ancient black payphone with a rotary dial, with the number of a cab service scrawled on the wall. The front door was at the bottom of a steep grade of worn concrete stairs, which always seemed damp. The back entrance was a door off an unlit gravel parking lot, where even a short man had to stoop to enter. This is where we’d park our bikes—no locks, just leaned them against the wall—and play pool for hours.
Holly rarely came. There was nothing for her to do, no comfortable place for her to sit, and it wasn’t bright enough to read. It was just the two of us. Surely this is where we became true friends. These nights. A little brother no longer, I could do everything he could do, and we could do it together. Riding bikes, smoking cigarettes, playing pool, drinking cheap beer: these were the rituals that brought us close. We never said as much—ever. We never would.
There were the songs we listened to, and bands, and there were specific sounds we were drawn to—loud, angry and playful at the same time. The singer-songwriters of the 1970s were torture for us. Anyone who could write and sing about their inner demons and broken hearts made him snarl and I snarled along with him. If Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills and Nash walked into a bar we were in, we would have walked out.
The Ramones, Captain Beefheart, the Go-Go’s, the Rolling Stones (not the Beatles), Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Psychedelic Furs, Concrete Blonde, Alice Cooper, the B-52’s, Devo, the Cars, Holly and the Italians (“Tell That Girl to Shut Up”), Frank Zappa, the Hampton Grease Band, the Modern Lovers, Pet Shop Boys, the Pretenders, Romeo Void, the Vapors, the Beastie Boys and, for Holly, Leon Russell (“A Song For You”). William made mixtapes for the cassette player in his van and at stoplights he’d match the beat of the song with his hands on the steering wheel, drumming, the music up too loud to talk. He would never sing along. The music we liked was tough, hard-edged, with as little naked, tear-stained emotion in it as possible. No tear stains, please. My memories of these days, these years, are so vivid, but no stories are being told. The beginnings, middles, and ends don’t fit together. I remember bits and pieces of a night, of an adventure. The two of us on our way to campus, windows down, on our way to the gentleman’s club that time, biking to Italian Pizzeria III for a slice. Watching a band at Cat’s Cradle. Smoking, chewing Nicorette, both at the same time. My memories are like scratchy, unfocused surveillance photos of my own life. So much must have happened that I can’t remember enough to know what I’ve forgotten.
But always there was music and musicians. I remember them all. And more than any of the others, and maybe more than any of them put together, there was Warren Zevon, especially his LP Excitable Boy. “Werewolves of London,” “Excitable Boy,” “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”—about a mercenary, “a warrior,” who, even after his head is blown off, continues on a revenge quest for those who killed him—was a very real part of William’s brain, his worldview, his sense of self, and the soundtrack to our lives back then. They can still see his headless body stalking through the night.
The one song that seemed to break all the rules with its openness to sharing the deeply felt anguish of existence was “The Beast in Me,” by Nick Lowe. The quiet emotional torment of the singer, who understands his condition but also realizes there is absolutely nothing he can do about it, is so deep and real. It’s as if Dr. Jekyll wrote a song about Mr. Hyde. William had this on a mixtape, maybe on more than one. It spoke to him in ways I wouldn’t understand for decades. “The beast in me / Is caged by frail and fragile bars.”
I thought it spoke to me, too. But I wondered, and I still wonder, how much of it was me and how much of it was me trying to be William. To appear to be the kind of man who is on the side of the angels most, but not all, of the time; who shows no vulnerability because he is so vulnerable; who carries around some dark secret that’s so sharp it can’t be touched, and so heavy it can’t be moved. And I thought back to the day we saw the tiger by the pond where we were fishing. I asked Rod if I could get in the cage with it, and William and Rod laughed—at me, I thought at the time. But now I think they laughed because here was this kid wanting to get in a cage, right in front of these two grown men who would have liked nothing better than to get out.
12 Renaissance Man in a Neoprene Suit
I see white water, climbing, fishing etc not only as athletic pursuits but a way of being in the picture, a part of the gestalt. Sitting in a beauty spot, I’m aware of myself sitting, looking out of my “eye windows.” A disconnect. On a bike or a rope or in a boat you’re a physical part of the picture and (depending on the level of concentration/fear) objectively involved (unity) with the environment.
—William Nealy, 1989
This should be the easiest chapter in the book to write, but it’s not. It’s one of the hardest, even though—or maybe because—it’s where all the good things happen. I want it to be the last chapter, where I somehow eke out that rare and elusive happy ending. But I know how this is going to end, no matter how many of his dreams come true. That’s why all the applause he gets, all the kudos— the public recognition an artist can never count on but can only hope for—comes off as sort of flat to me, and maybe why it didn’t inspire or delight him very much either: I think he knew how it was going to end as well. It’s supposed to be the chapter of the victory lap, the rising crescendo of the audience going wild, a montage of pure joy, the part of the story where you realize that it’s all been worth it. This is supposed to be his moment.
