Bill

Last Sunday morning, the sunshine felt like rain.
Week before, they all seemed the same.
With the help of God and true friends, I come to realize
I still had two strong legs, and even wings to fly.

And oh I, ain't wastin time no more
'Cause time goes by like hurricanes, and faster things.

Lord, lord Miss Sally, why all your cryin'?
Been around here three long days, you're lookin' like you're dyin'.
Just step yourself outside, and look up at the stars above
Go on downtown baby, find somebody to love.

Meanwhile I ain't wastin' time no more
'Cause time goes by like pouring rain, and much faster things.

You don't need no gypsy to tell you why
You can't let one precious day slip by.
Look inside yourself, and if you don't see what you want,
Maybe sometimes then you don't,
But leave your mind alone and just get high.

-The Allman Brothers Band



That song always makes me think of Bill Strout. The lyrics
are similar to things he said to me, and when I have listened
to the song over the years, it has always lifted my spirits in
the same way that he was able to do.

When I met Bill, he was a bright young litigator at the
politically-active law firm where we both worked. Prior to
our firm, he had worked for David Walters in his successful
bid for Governor. His legal assistant, Sandra Monko, remains
one of my best friends, although we don’t see each other as
much now. She was extremely close to Bill. Another bright
young lawyer, Scott Thompson, was Bill’s best friend, and
the four of us used to go out drinking together and we would
eat lunch together on a regular basis.

I wanted to put Bill’s picture on this post, but none of us seem
to have one. Bill was a tall, dark and handsome Texan. He
always dressed well. He drove a great big shiny pickup truck
of one kind or another the whole time I knew him. I’ve
known a lot of arrogant litigators, but Bill was more arrogant
than all of them put together. He was a good lawyer, a good
writer, and he could talk. Oh, man, could he ever. He could
lift you up or knock you down with his words. He was
also goofy at times, and crude - always.

Bill lived in a whirlwind; Bill was a whirlwind. In the
middle of a case, he would work non-stop, night and day,
until he made himself ill. He would call me at two or three
in the morning from the office. He never really needed
anything; I think he just wanted to hear someone’s voice –
it was lonely in the office at night - and he had already
talked to Sandra and Scott until they finally told him they
had to get some sleep. Bill didn’t sleep much.

Hanging out with Bill was nearly always a good time. He’d
give me a call in the evening or I’d give him one and he’d
pick me up and take me for drinks and a steak, or a dozen
oysters, or both. We’d sit and talk, mostly about fishing.
He’d tell me about his trips to the Gulf of Mexico. He and
friends would rent a boat and catch huge fish. When we
went to lunch with the others, Bill would often rope me into
sharing a pizza with every type of fish the restaurant had on
it – shrimp, smoked oysters, anchovies, the works. Nobody
else would touch it. He loved to eat and he loved to drink.
He drank too much and, when he was on medication, he
wasn’t supposed to drink at all.

Despite the fact that my contact with Bill was come-and-go,
he sealed his position as a true friend in two ways. First, he
took the details of one my most embarrassingly irresponsible
moments to his grave. Second, ironically enough, he helped
save my life.

Before you start wondering about my irresponsible moment,
it wasn’t as simple a thing as sleeping with Bill and I wish it
had never happened, so you ain’t gonna hear about it.
Despite having witnessed it himself, he apparently revealed it
to no one. To his credit, he only mentioned it to me once and
he only laughed a little (and mostly with me, not at me).

I met Bill at one of my lowest times. I had just disrupted the
lives of everyone I loved by having split with my husband of
11 years. I had started back to work after a one-year stint as
an at-home mom. My three-year-old daughter was upset to
have to return to daycare, and I was wracked with guilt.
During that period, I frequently fantasized about killing
myself. I told this to only a couple of people, Sandra and
Bill. Sandra helped me beyond measure, but that is a story
for another memorial, one I fervently hope never to write.

Bill’s help took the form of propping up my self-esteem. Bill
was an all-time, record-holding bullshit artist from the
Bullshit Artist Hall of Fame. In short, he could sweet-talk the
wimmins. The funny thing is that, even though you knew Bill
was full of shit, you still believed him when he told you how
smart you were, how pretty, what a great mom you were, how
much you had going for you.

It sounds shallow, but how can you keep on feeling bad when
someone else thinks so much of you?

He never chastised me for wallowing in self-pity. I suspect
he understood how I felt. He just stopped by, picked me up,
bought me a steak and a couple of margaritas, gave me a pep
talk, then dropped me off at the house feeling better. I didn’t
realize it at the time, but this was the equivalent of a drunk
staggering through a china shop and somehow managing to
bump the dishes into more stable positions. I don’t question
the miracle of this – I’m just grateful.

Bill, himself, wasn’t stable. He never took care of himself
and he seemed to only have fun when he was engaging in
self-destructive behavior. He crashed and burned once while
I knew him and had to be hospitalized for awhile. I believe
he was diagnosed as bipolar at that time. When he got out, he
was different for awhile, shakier, quieter.

I saw him several months later and he seemed his old self
again. I noted that he had started drinking again. I talked to
him about the counseling I was undergoing at that time and he
told me, dryly, that “those doctors don’t know what the fuck
they’re talking about – it’s all bullshit.” We all worried
about him.

He helped me again, a couple of years later, when I had just
had my heart broken. (Again, a story for another time.) He
showed up for a few weeks, just in time to prop up my self-
esteem, then he was gone. I didn’t know it would be the last
time I would ever see him.

Sandra called me, yesterday, and told me that Bill apparently
killed himself. It happened on June 6, 2005, in San Antonio,
but we know little else. His ex-wife in Oklahoma City didn’t
tell anybody here who knew him about his death, so we were
unable to attend services.

When he died at 35, Bill left behind several ex-wives, numerous
children, friends who wish we had stayed in better touch with
him, and at least one who did stay in touch as best he could.
Bill kept changing his phone number. He seems to have been
experiencing paranoid delusions before he died – he thought
someone was after him.

I fell asleep last night, trying to will myself to dream of Bill.
I have so many questions I want to ask him.

Big Chiefs

Big Chiefs have spoken.

Tribe's duties in Austin:

First night, rest and pray to Great Spirit
that tribe will have light feet and much joy.

Second day, trial by fire.

Second night, tribe will rest, see
medicine man, and thank Great Spirit
for living through trial by fire.

Third day and night, tribe will celebrate
with much fire water.

Don't mean to be a bitch, but this thing is. A bitch, I mean.

Pluggin' along.
Chuggin' along.
Not budgin'
From drudge trudgin',
But all the time, I'm
Afraid of the train.

It's drainin' my brain
To maintain
The mundane strain
Of this insane campaign
Without my main
Chiefs.

I'm in grief,
In disbelief.
They've forsaken me.
Shaken me.
It's breakin' me.
Oddly enough,
This thing’s tough.
C'mon boys, tell us,
Compel us.

Goals

We’re getting down to the wire, people.
D-day is just over a month away.
Time to assess where we are and where
we need to be to complete our goals.
I believe I can finish the marathon, but
at this point, only on bloody stumps.
I did 20 miles yesterday, my longest
distance, and I don’t believe I could have
gone one inch further. It will take a lot
more work for me to be able to go over
6 miles further than I did yesterday.
(Jaysus – 6 miles!!! Further!!!! Kill me.
Now.) In the next three weeks, I need to eat
right, drink enough water, and I must get out
there and run – no skipping a run, I just can’t
afford it – run, run, run.

Like the wind.

Birds

I listened to a story on the radio the other day about the avian flu
in Turkey. It mentioned some little girls who stood by, unhappily,
as their pet chickens were loaded into bags to be killed. Although
poultry is eaten and kept for eggs, the birds aren’t generally viewed
the same way in Turkey and China as they are here. Kids in those
countries play with them, hold them, pet them and give them
names, as we would a dog or cat.

It may be hard for some Americans to take seriously the concept of
a pet chicken, but I think most of us know that children can make a
pet out of almost any animal. Birds respond to interaction with
humans. Some birds actively seek out their human companions.

When I was seventeen, I had a pet tom turkey for about a year.
He was the only poult to survive out of a brood of a hundred my
father bought, obviously a failed venture. The tom lived in a
doghouse by our calf pen and clearly recognized me, probably
because I was the one who fed him. Whenever I walked outside,
he would come out of the dog house and spread his splendid tail
feathers, puffing up his back and chest until he looked twice his
actual size. “That turkey’s in love with you,” observed my
stepbrother, wryly. I moved back to Oklahoma, away from my
father’s farm, in September that year and was thus spared having
to participate in the tom’s inevitable Thanksgiving fate.

Although the subject of the girls in the avian flu story wasn’t
the reporter’s main thrust, I found myself unable to stop thinking
about them and their chickens. What was it about these little girls,
powerless to halt the killing of seemingly healthy pets, that
bothered me so?

And then it all came back to me.

When Danny and I were kids, our father kept a number of racing
pigeons. He was in a racing club and a lot of money changed
hands over bets on the races. Some of the races were 500 miles
long, and some of the birds were worth quite a bit of money.
Danny and I were intimately involved in their care. We fed and
watered them. We cleaned the cage. We shooed the birds away
from landing on the cage, so that they would stay in the air and
exercise. I held them while my father sewed up their wounds
and gave them shots of penicillin when they were injured by
a high wire.

Danny and I named our favorite pigeons. The ones that stand
out in my memory are those that we named first – a male, pale
grey with silver bars on his wings, and a female, white with
splashes of dark grey all over her body. They were “Silver”
and “Splash.” We were ecstatic when our father decided to
breed them. I don’t know if he did this because they were
our favorites, or if it was a happy coincidence, but, from my
9-year-old point of view, the pairing seemed more romantic
than Camelot. Silver and Splash hatched an ordinary-looking
lump of fat which pooped copiously and was covered with fuzz.
We christened him “Screaming Baby.” All young pigeons scream,
but he seemed to scream especially loud to us, hence the name.
One should take a moment to appreciate the budding creativity
that these descriptive names evidenced. (Cameryn seems to
have excelled over us; her favorite stuffed monkey, black
but for face, hands and feet, is referred to as “Blackamostly.”)

Looking back, I realize now that Screaming Baby probably
screamed louder than the other squabs because we were
forever handling him. We played with Screaming Baby all
the time. Before he was able to fly, we put him on the gear
teeth of our father’s cement mixer while it was running, a la
treadmill. It wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds.

Our father wasn’t a stable person, to say the least. Without
trying to diagnose him, I will sum him up for the purpose
of this story by simply saying that he was given to unpredictable
rages. Danny and I did the best we could to find normal
childhood moments together among the daily frightening and
violent events that made up our young lives.

One night, just after falling asleep in my pink and white room
across from Danny’s blue and red one, I found myself suddenly
awake, heart beating hard, limbs shaking. The tone of my
mother’s voice, frightened and breathless, had forcefully pulled
me out of my dream.

“What’s wrong?”

“I killed them.”

“What?”

“I killed them all.”

“All the pigeons?”

“Yes. I pulled off their heads.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why.”

“Even Silver and Splash?!”

“All of them.”

I cried, silently, in my bed. They were gone.

My father had a heart attack the next day. Mom
believed that this was, somehow, why he did it, but
I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now. He did things
like that all the time. He did it because it’s just what he
did. The pigeons were small things, much smaller and
more fragile, more defenseless, than even a 9-year-old
child. My father was a tornado. A hurricane. A terrible,
destructive force of nature. You don’t ask a tornado why
it kills. It would be futile.

Those little Turkish girls clearly understand this.

You can scream into the wind all you want, but it will
never hear you.

Emptiness

I have grown to understand that this process is about emptiness. To fill myself with worry is to deny myself the journey.

I will arrive at the starting line, an empty vessel.


Thirty spokes are joined together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that allows the wheel to function.

We mold clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that makes the vessel useful.

We fashion wood for a house,
but it is the emptiness inside
that makes it livable.

We work with the substantial,
but the emptiness is what we use.

Tao Te Ching - by Lao-Tzu
Translation by J.H. McDonald