Katie Died

Her name wasn’t Katie. Even though this was a long time ago, a lady deserves her privacy, and you don’t get to know everything. Her name wasn’t Katie, but it was something like that.

Katie wasn’t from Nashville. The Rebel Chapter of the Young Presidents Organization covered several moderately large Southern cities in four states, all more moderately large than Jackson, Mississippi. A lady deserves her privacy. You don’t get to know everything. She wasn’t from Nashville, but it was something like that.

I normally don’t ever look at blondes. It’s just not in my metal. Sometimes, they make me look at them, which surprises me as much as anybody. “Have we been in love before?” she said. That got my attention. At fourteen, women are vastly more adventurous than boys when it comes to things that won’t actually break your bones.

Most golf resorts built in Florida were for East Coast Italians and Jews who hated the summers in New York. Ponte Vedra was built for what few successful Gulf State businesspeople there were. They demanded less attention and played better golf. When he wasn’t playing at his own clubs, Ely Callaway played at Ponte Vedra.

The Young Presidents Organization was a club for people who found themselves in charge of something before they were forty. Like my father, many of them were the second generation of a notable family, wherever they were from. They met three or four times a year, but once a year, usually in the first weeks of Summer, they had the “family meeting” at some resort or another that could handle a group that size and still have things for little kids, tweens, and teens to do. Ponte Vedra, outside of Jacksonville, Florida, had a nice beach and tons of day trips.

I wasn’t a very social teenager. Remnants of my stutter stayed with me most of my life. When I thought about it, it got worse. I thought about it quite a lot. I was much bigger than everybody, including most of the dads, exacerbated by my constant weight-lifting. In two years, frustrated that there was always a mountain to climb, I began taking sports drugs. Male hormones I injected into myself that are illegal now, but something of a novelty then.

Hotels were just beginning to offer a gym on-site. The Ponte Vedra Club Hotel had a room with a Universal Weight Machine, some mirrors, a ballet bar, and a mat. We sold Universal Weight Machines. They’re sometimes credited for inventing the selectable weight stack in exercise machines. The idea was that each machine offered five or six exercise stations. You could set them up in schools and have entire football teams line up like a Ford Assembly line with players taking up the stations, then moving to the next one, until the entire team was worked out.

We made a lot of money selling Universal Machines to high schools. A young Arnold Schwarzenegger would do tours advertising their product, which is how I got to meet him. At the YPO family meeting, I developed a reputation as “that kid what lifted weights.”

Since I didn’t really consider myself qualified for the small talk and flirting most teens practice, I had my other obsession to take my time. Besides exercise machines, Mississippi School Supply company also carried art supplies, including three different brands of sketchbooks. I never traveled far without a sketchbook.

From the pool, you could see the beach. Hunched over one of the poolside tables with my sketchbook, I looked like some sort of prehistoric beast, but my drawings could be quite delicate.

Walt Disney had just re-released their animated symphony “Fantasia,” which I saw at the Deville Cinema at the end of a bicycle adventure from my house. Vaughn Bodē, the transgender underground artist who invented the Cheech Wizard comics, had done some drawings of the centaurs in “Fantasia.” Fascinated by the concept, I decided to try my hand at it, first in pencils, then in pastels. I attracted a small audience of teens and tweens.

“Have we been in love before?” a voice said behind me. “Like, in another life, I mean. Maybe we knew each other in another life and fell in love.”

“I’ve never been in love before,” I said. In the movies I watched, the monster always fell in love just before they killed him. I was against it.

Her eyes were enormous and crystaline blue. Her blonde hair hung below her shoulder blades, usually in a ponytail. I couldn’t talk at all. She talked quite a lot. We ordered hamburgers by the pool and charged them to our rooms.

Prosecuting a love affair when you’re fourteen and live in different states is done over the telephone. Her dad, where she lived, and my dad, where we lived, were involved with the phone company. The long-distance rates went down after seven o’clock. By that time, I moved the children’s line phone into my room and waited for it to ring. Usually, a minute after seven.

Katie was in the school choir where she lived and participated in children’s theater, even though she was a whole teenager. She introduced me to the concept of musical theater, which she loved considerably more than she loved me. We talked for hours, even at reduced long-distance rates, and listened to her records. She taught me the stories and the songs.

If ever I would leave you, it wouldn't be in summer
Seeing you in summer, I never would go
Your hair streaked with sunlight, your lips red as flame
Your face with a luster that puts gold to shame

But if I'd ever leave you, how could it be in autumn
How I'd leave in autumn, I never would know
I've seen how you sparkle when fall nips the air
I know you in autumn and I must be there

One day, Katie quit calling. She quit taking my call. Her mother was very polite and made excuses. Katie wasn’t mad at me; she just couldn’t talk. I’d been expecting somebody in Nashville, somebody smarter, better looking, better at sports, and better at singing to steal Katie away from me. That’s what happens in the movies. The real boyfriend comes along, and the monster gets shot by machine guns. This was my Waterloo, destroyed at fourteen.

A little more than two months later, my mother told me that “my little friend Katie” had died. Because of my brother’s schizophrenia, we talked pretty openly about mental health issues in my house. Katie hanged herself. She had bipolar disorder and wasn’t responding to treatment. One day, she became non-communicative, then a few weeks later, she was gone, just like that.

My brother’s schizophrenia was a pretty steady state, depending on his medication. He heard voices. Sometimes they said benign things. Sometimes they said terrible things. Believing the voices over us, he resisted treatment. Sometimes, it got pretty bad. Sometimes, it got really bad. One night at dinner, he threw his chair at me. At my size, bringing out the beast was a problem. My mother ran to protect my brother from what she imagined I was going to do to him.

There were limited options on how to teach a boy with ADHD, Dyslexia, and stuttering. My mother took it on herself. We grew very close as she experimented with ways to get me to read. Eventually, I worked it out myself. A simple index card, dragged down the page, isolating each sentence as I read it allowed me to force my way through books. I could read.

My brother’s illness and other issues began to form cracks in the bond I had with my mother. I was difficult to reach, at best, with anyone. Eventually, my mother quit trying. There were three other children and everybody at the Stewpot for her to worry about. If I wanted to cut myself off, that’d just have to be my choice.

Katie’s death caused a very deep wound that I never discussed with anyone. Even the psychologist they assigned me to after my brother was institutionalized for the first time. This was my business. It was also, I was fairly certain, somehow my fault. If I’d been there, if I’d known… I was so strong, the strongest kid anybody knew. I could have done something. She was so tiny. I could have lifted her up and pulled the rope out of the hook in the ceiling, and gotten her help, and nobody would know.

I was very angry with my mother for not telling me in time to go to the funeral. She insisted that she didn’t know herself, which is probably true. Katie’s parents didn’t call the parents of Katie’s friends to let them know what happened. My mother only knew because a mutual friend told her, and she called Katie’s mom to console her and to talk with her about her experiences with her own mentally ill child.

It’d be best if I avoid women, I decided. That worked for a little over a year until the next one started demanding my attention.

The next time I saw Katie’s parents was at my father’s funeral. Daddy died at the peak of his political and economic power. He had a reputation as something of a kingmaker. Three governors would go through the visitation line at Wright and Ferguson funeral home, but not the current one. Several of his YPO friends flew in for the occasion, mainly for my mom. Seeing Katie’s mom, I didn’t know what to say. It’d been almost fifteen years, but she held me very tightly.

If ever I would leave you, it wouldn't be in summer
Seeing you in summer, I never would go
Your hair streaked with sunlight, your lips red as flame
Your face with a luster that puts gold to shame