Wish You Were Here
When you're a kid, you think 10 years is a long time. Then
suddenly you're a grown-up, and a decade passes like an exhaled breath.
Ten years ago yesterday, my brother had a fight with his girlfriend in my
Hollywood kitchen, drove back to the farmhouse he was renting near Fillmore,
Calif., and put a bullet through his heart.
Paul was a year younger than me, but he was the most fully alive person I've
ever known. He was a painter and a photographer and a semi-pro bicycle racer. He
was as strong as a bull and just as reckless. He was the kind of person who
would deliberately lose himself in the thickets of a Colorado canyon just to see
if he could find his way out, and if he happened to have a group of friends with
him, they'd simply have to trust his instincts. On that night ten years ago, he
couldn't find his way out, so he quit.
Three days later we surrendered his body to the crematorium, and I heard distant bells signaling that I let myself believe were a signal that an angel had gotten his wings. But soon I could sense that Paul was having second thoughts. He visited my dreams, and when I was telling my siblings in St. Louis that I could feel his presence around my house, the phone disconnected. When I immediately called back to tell them that Paul was playing tricks, it happened again. And I'm convinced that on the following Saturday he was the unseen force that gave the University Colorado football team a fifth down to defeat the Missouri Tigers.
Eventually the signals grew dimmer. While my family was
paralyzed by grief, the world kept turning. Now, ten years after my brother's
death, I think of all the things he missed by skipping the 1990s.
If I had driven home with him that night and he had given voice to his despair, I would have urged him to stick around for the year 2000, what with the flying cars and all. But as much as I would have enjoyed hoisting a glass of champagne with him last January, the millennium celebration turned out to be a bust. The best reasons for living are the things we can't predict.
Paul doesn't know that his dog and his grandfather both outlived him by eight years, that his younger brother is a golf pro in China or that his sister found a good husband on her third try.
If Paul had a waited a couple months, we probably would have gone to the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood to see "Dances With Wolves." Afterwards, he would have repeated his story about meeting Kevin Costner on the set of a movie called "American Flyers." He and Costner had gone for a bike ride in the Colorado mountains, and the unknown actor correctly predicted his own stardom. Paul would have related to Costner's character--Paul and a shivering bobcat once weathered a storm in an ancient pueblo, where he claimed he was visited by the howling spirit of an old shaman--but the next day he would have bought a video camera to prove he could do a better job. He would have loved "Pulp Fiction" and "L.A. Confidential." He would have thrown rocks at "Titanic."
The year that Paul died, CDs were still a novelty, but I can't make a convincing case that he missed a lot of great music. True, he doesn't realize that the little band we heard at a Hollywood nightclub became Nirvana or that the singer married a stripper we once saw at Jumbo's Clown Room (who started her own band and later earned an Oscar nomination for a movie about Larry Flynt); but the punchline of that particular story isn't exactly life-affirming.
The Internet, on the other hand, would have changed his life, and I imagine he would have built the first Web site about the guitar wizard David Lindley.
Paul wasn't around for the L.A. riots, but I'm sure he would have raced down the freeway to help me protect the fort. He doesn't know that the Rams left Los Angeles and won a Super Bowl in St. Louis. He died believing that O.J. Simpson was a cool dude.
He missed the Gulf War. He never heard of Bill Clinton.
Among my brother's possessions, I found the script of a documentary he wanted to make about the great bike racer Greg LeMond. LeMond was one of his role models; but in retrospect there was another American racer who had something more important to teach him. In the early '90s, Lance Armstrong worked his way up the same circuit that Paul had been riding. In 1996, Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He was supposed to die. But he underwent intensive chemotherapy, beat the cancer, got married and fathered a son. Three years later, he won the Tour de France, the most grueling and prestigious event in the sport.
Lance Armstrong knows something that I'm still learning, something that I wish I could carry back 10 years and tell my brother in that lonely moment before he closed the door: People can survive a lot more than they think.
--Joe Williams