Lonely Boys Find Ways

a very blunt story about mental wellness

I turned sixteen the summer before. It's Thanksgiving. Everyone has eaten. Everyone is stuffed and lethargic. I have to call my parents.

“Hey. I don't know when I'm coming home. Mr. Williams shot himself. In the head. He shot himself. “

We don't have much conversation. My mother says, “Call us if you need us.” Mr. Williams was the father of my first real-life, in-person girlfriend. My first real-life, over the phone girlfriend, hung herself fifteen months before. A fourteen-year-old should never have to hang themselves.

Without knowing the details, my parents assumed I had things to do. Jackson is a small town in big town clothes. My father has connections with the police department that go back to high school football. The chief of police shows up. My father's fingerprints are on him. My explanation on the phone wasn't very complete, so he sent out a tentacle to gather the rest. Jim Black was with him. In about fifteen months, Mayor Dale Danks will appoint him one of Jackson's longest-serving police chiefs. With him is Sargent Manning. His brother was my orthopedist and a member of the kabal of Ole Miss KAs that ran Jackson for a while. They were inescapable.

He shines his light into my Ford LTD. Inside, my good clothes were soaked in a grown man's blood. I'd changed into my workout clothes so as not to upset anybody. If anybody noticed the smell, nobody mentioned it.

“You're too young to be this serious about a girl.” He says. He's right, too, but we’ve taken a pretty sharp turn away from what I had planned.

Before becoming my girlfriend, I would have said this one was number seven or eight among the girls I liked. Paige was number two. Number one remains a secret still, but I was able to write her anonymous love letters for years without getting caught. Nobody expects that kind of thing from me. Fooled them.

She moved from seven to one through a sheer act of aggression and assertion. Sins of the flesh can turn a boy’s head. I like slow, simmering seductions, followed by long, tearful good-byes. She liked boys with muscles. We worked out a compromise. Now her dad is dead, and everybody, even the police, are looking at me like I'm in charge.

After spending the night and most of the next day with my girlfriend’s family, the police, the door I shattered too late to prevent anything, and a dead body. I desired a cigarette and a beer more than humanly reasonable. About eight o'clock the next night, I said I had to go home to talk to my parents.

In their night clothes, they had a drink in the living room.

“Can you ask Tony if he can land in Piggot, Arkansas?”

Taking the company plane for personal business was allowable so long as I paid for the fuel. I had money because I never spent money. I had feelings about people who spent money to be seen. How many years later, the most expensive thing I ever did was get sick.

My plan was to fly the family to Piggot to bury their dad. Their plan was for me to drive his car behind the hearse carrying the body as we steadily made our way up the mountain. Shades of “As I Lay Dying.” Made me wonder if my mother was a fish, or maybe I was.

Mr. Williams was suffering from chronic depression that made occasional trips into bipolar and hallucinations. One night, he chased his son around the house, convinced he was a twelve-gauge shotgun. A toxicologist for the state of Mississippi, he'd been off work on medical leave for about a year.

The Williams family made a pretty intense effort to hide all this from me, which I found unnecessary because I'd been pretty open about similar issues with my brother. The one thing they didn't know was about the time the voices told my brother I was a demon and he tried to cut my arm off with a machete.

This was kept quiet for a number of reasons. Among them, my parents didn't want the rest of the family to be afraid of my brother, but more than that, assault with a deadly weapon charges meant more lengthy and complicated legal problems for my brother.

“He didn't know it was you.” Was my mother's position until the day she died. That we were just gonna sweep an attempt on my life under the rug was mine. Sometimes. I worry that writing about these things isn't an attempt from some part of me to get revenge. I hope not.

Mental illness is pretty common in the South. I blame the heat and our fractured, never mended culture. The food’s so good it might make you lose your mind. We talk about things so good they make you want to slap your mamma.

With my brother's illness, the whole family got psychological counseling. That was good parenting back in the day. I learned early on that part of my treatment was intended to dovetail me into the family plan to deal with my brother. I don't dovetail well.

My father and I shared the same doctor. After my dad died, I learned that Doug Draper told him once that he would regret not finding time for his boys. Looking at photos of him playing baseball and swimming with my brothers, I realized Doug meant me. I was born at just the right moment to be left behind by my father’s rocketing career.

I wake up at five am now because I woke up at five am then. It was the only time I got to spend fifteen minutes with my dad. Jim Neal was on the radio with his imaginary dog. That's how Feist-Dog became part of my life. He was my lonely spirit, just glad to see his dad.

The YMCA had a program where little boys could spend time with their dads. They called it “Indian Guides,” which, despite a bit of cultural appropriation, hoped to teach boys the basics of wilderness lore so they could become Cub Scouts. The main point was to spend time with your dad, but if your dad couldn’t make it, you could go alone.

After going alone five times in a row, I asked my mother if I could drop out. Because of my stutter and ADHD, I was a pretty lonely boy always. I think she assumed that was the issue. Sometimes, with lonely boys, it's hard to understand what they mean.

At nineteen. I began opening the company mail with my father at six am. No more Feist-Dog, but I'd have my dad for a couple of hours. It turned out, man to man, we kind of liked each other. We began having drinks after work. Because I was a useful boy, he began folding me into his round table of troublesome knights as a sort of squire and bartender.

Every day was a further step away from my mother. Faced with Sophie’s Choice, she picked not Boyd. I think I could have had a different attitude about it if someone had said “we’re sorry this happened to you” instead of “you could have really hurt your brother!” I could have sworn he was the one with the machete, but what do I know? Once people get set on a narrative, it's hard to change it.

I was a big kid. I was an extraordinarily powerful kid. I could move things. I could break things. I could cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war, and sometimes did. That makes me the obvious villain in a story about a boy struggling with schizophrenia. I was just going to have to bear this, so I did.

From the age of fourteen until about six weeks ago, there has been a significant suicide within the confines of my social circle about once a year. While I've studied it intently, I don't have any answers. Although I have crippling depression and suffer long bouts of antisocial behavior, I've never considered myself a candidate. Once you've held somebody as the life left them, you lose forever the will to do it.

I told a friend recently that I secretly always wanted to experience a hallucination, just to know what it's like. I’ve swallowed things you really shouldn't swallow in hopes of creating one, but all it really ever did was make me silly and tired, but unable to sleep.

My only companion in all this was Feist-Dog. There's only room in this boat for two. Growing up in the shadow of mental illness, you develop monumental feelings of abandonment and isolation that only an imaginary being, that's really a manifestation of the love you never allowed yourself to feel, can fill.

My mother clearly felt in over her head with all of this. Her library was mostly psychology books. The murder mysteries she loved got traded out pretty regularly at the used paperback book store. I always believed that I left a trail where she could find me if she wanted to.

Once, when I was almost forty, I asked why, in all the years I'd been involved in theatre and film, she’d never come to see my work.

“You never told me when it was.” She said.

I knew she was telling the truth. Lonely boys find ways to remain lonely boys.