by Marion Winik
He was a rock climber, a kayaker, and a wilderness guide, a fearless adventurer and a hopeless romantic poet, and he was not out of his twenties when it began. First the stumbling, the strange weakness, the trouble swallowing. Then the diagnosis, a string of terrible syllables that stood for losing everything, not just locomotion and speech but laughter and sex and beer and pushing his hair out of his eyes.
This broken young Hercules came from a line of men rooted in Wales, blessed and cursed by the stubborn belief that they could do the impossible. His grandfather had escaped from a German POW camp. His father, who was the boss at the software company I worked at in the eighties and nineties, had saved people from burning buildings, had learned whole computer languages in the course of a single weekend.
Fourteen buckets of ice water. One for each of the fourteen years. And then a smile. I hope the cruel gods were watching.
The Neatnik
died 2013
I WAS TWENTY-FIVE WHEN I met her at the software company in Austin; she was thirty-two. (I only mention our ages because what I’m about to say could lead you to believe we were in high school.) She had perfectly straight, shiny, light brown hair, a sun-kissed complexion, a wide smile and big blue eyes; she wore slim jeans and a pressed Oxford button-down every day. Her handwriting was beautiful and her office impeccably organized; though I couldn’t read computer languages, I can only imagine how elegant her programs were. She had grown up in Virginia—sweet Southern drawl, check—married her childhood sweetheart, and moved to Texas. Now they hosted our company parties in an airy A-frame on the wild outskirts of town. Needless to say, the spices were in alphabetical order. In a previous incarnation, she had probably invented Feng Shui.
In addition to all this, she was gentle, unassuming, kind, a very shrewd investor, and an animal lover. She meditated at her desk twice a day, which allowed her to work fourteen hours at a stretch with focus and accuracy. She and the boss, who was the company’s founder, CEO, and president, were often holed up in her office coding bug fixes long into the night.
Can you even imagine the tempest in our teapot when it was revealed that the boss was splitting up with his live-in girlfriend, who also happened to be the VP, and The Neatnik was leaving her husband, childhood sweetheart turned successful attorney, so they could be together? I may have been just a tiny bit less surprised than everyone else, as a few months earlier I had seen the two of them getting out of her black Mazda RX-7 in the parking garage. Some said her marriage wasn’t sailing as smoothly as it seemed. But still.
Of course there were varying opinions and conflicting loyalties. Though I felt for the VP and understood the general outrage, that it was in The Neatnik’s character to have conducted this secret affair, then go public and explode her whole life—that is something I will always admire. That is love, baby.
Soon the lawyer was back in Virginia and the boss was ensconced in the A-frame. He got her into his macrobiotic obsession, but she still threw great parties, now featuring seaweed-stuffed mushrooms that took days to prepare. After the software company sold, she became a substitute teacher at the local high school. Probably Feng Shui’d the classrooms, fed everyone vegan cupcakes, and taught the kids TM.
I don’t even know how to say that she died of uterine cancer less than a year after diagnosis. Partly to convince myself that it was true that she was gone, I flew down to help my boss with her memorial, held on what would have been her sixty-second birthday. One last sunset on the deck, one last margarita, or five. Oh, sweet Neatnik, goodbye.
The Velveteen Rabbit
died 2017
IN OUR SALAD DAYS, in the bloom of health and talent, early on our paths, headquarters was a sprawling stone rancher in West Austin, a long, low, Frank Lloyd Wright–looking thing that stretched out beside a turquoise pool as if it were a movie star. Inside, young women were writing poems and playing music, having long conversations that turned into romances that turned into friendships that turned into a lesbian folk-rock band that was a little bit famous at the time. She was the elfin blond in John Lennon glasses, on guitar.
I wandered into her little bedroom, walls covered with her brightly colored scritch-scratch paintings, and found her eating a hard-boiled egg. You’re always eating hard-boiled eggs, I said, and she told me in her matter-of-fact tone that she had eaten only hard-boiled eggs for the past two weeks. As a young mother, very concerned about what people ate, this did not seem right to me. But asceticism came to her naturally.
So did anger. Hypersensitivity. The first gnawings of mania and delusion. A group house, a democratically run band, a hazy poolside bacchanal could only last so long. She made two records by herself, but as the years went by, the static in her head drowned out everything. The salad days were long past when some of the old friends learned she was living in a storage unit. The bandmates gave a fund-raiser; another couple took her in. Eat, they begged her, sleep, take your medicine. Instead, she would tear off on some frantic mission, winding up in the hospital when bystanders called 911.
When death came to her at sixty-one, alone in a rented room, I had not spoken to her in more than twenty years. But always with me has been one of her beautiful-mind paintings; she probably traded it for a couple of haircuts from my husband. A wide, black frame is painted around an intricate, kaleidoscopically colored-in doodle. Part of it appears to be a psychedelic hardboiled egg, its yolk exploding with arrows and shazam lines into its white, which is orange. Around the image in a careful square she lettered a line from a children’s story. For where the tear had fallen a flower grew out of the ground, a mysterious flower, not at all like any that grew in the garden.
The Werewolf
died 2013
AT PARTIES BY THE turquoise pool, eating pescado Veracruz and drinking Mexican beer, her friends have no idea. He’s a little quiet for this boho crowd, but so is she. She is watching him tip a bottle to his lips, and she is afraid.
If you have never seen one, you may not believe in werewolves. You don’t know what can happen to a honey-haired boy from Chicago after the third glass of whiskey and the seventh beer. Even after you see it once, how the cold gleam comes into his eye, how his voice becomes a howl, how his hands curve into fists, even after you wake up sickened, covered with bites and bruises, you still tell yourself there’s no such thing as werewolves. Or, my husband is not a werewolf.
The first strange thing she noticed was how much he hated stoplights, how he struggled with a little yellow box trying to tell him what to do. Then it began in earnest, and continued in secrecy. Even though she had seen the old clumps of fur around the house when they visited his parents, she still imagined he would change.
One morning she woke with another kind of nausea, the kind that means birth control has let you down. Having a baby with a werewolf is quite a risk, but she gave him this last chance. Briefly, he was wide-eyed and sheepish with tenderness. Then came the night when he was not. Her friends arrived and loaded her and her daughter into their pickup, and that was the end of it.
The next woman was smarter. When he bought a gun, when he violated his restraining order, she called the police. After that, the werewolf was locked up for a while. When he got out, it wasn’t long before he fell down drunk and hit his head. Went to bed with a headache and never woke up. There’s a honey-haired boy from Chicago who might have agreed: it was a blessing.
The Queen of the Scene
died 2017
I MET HER AT a strip club called the Doll House. She was one of the Jam and Jelly Girls, bodacious backup singers in tutus who did burlesque routines with Dino Lee and his White Trash Revue. Tony and I elbowed our way backstage to introduce ourselves—as she herself was a famous groupie, we figured she’d understand. About five years later, she became my editor at the Austin Chronicle, and the last time I remember seeing her was in 1996, after Tony died and I wrote a book about it. She was in the studio audience at my stupid Oprah appearance. Her first husband was gay, as w
ere her father and brother, so she fit into the theme for the show, which was “Holy shit, I think this man is a homosexual.”
After sleeping with many rock stars, she began her writing career with a gossip column in the Austin Chronicle and quickly became its top music critic. By the time of her retirement at sixty, she was beloved as the patron saint, den mother, historian, and emcee of the whole scene. She went on to conduct what may have been the most glamorous, enviable, poignant, and lengthy death in history, which you could attend from afar on Facebook, with the city naming a park after her and legions of musicians and writers offering tributes in the months before she died.
She had several great loves, the last being a treasured Austin hash-slinger named Steve, and though they had about five minutes before she got sick, it was a damn fine romance. You know what, let me give her the mic. On a cold February day in early 2013, I told my boyfriend and my mother that something was wrong with me and I needed to go to the emergency room. I went into surgery the next morning and upon recovery was given a terminal diagnosis of Stage IV colon cancer. That quick, that fast. It’s a cruel luxury to know death will come soon, but it’s a bizarre comfort to know how.
A life writing about music wasn’t part of the plan, but then I’d had no plan. I’ve long joked that I got in through the back door, so whenever I am let in through the front door, I run to the back to see who I can let in.
The Volunteer
died 2013
AFTER MY COMMENTARY ABOUT Tony’s death aired on All Things Considered, I got quite a pile of condolence cards, one of which I remember down to the blue ink and the folded note paper. Direct and full of feeling, it was from a stranger whose son had died young because of drugs. I wrote back, telling her I was writing a memoir, and she wrote back telling me she was organizing a literary event.
My correspondent turned out to be the founder of the Texas Book Festival, an open-minded, down-to-earth woman whose generosity was legendary. After my reading from First Comes Love at the festival, she brought someone over to meet me at the book table—her friend and cofounder, Laura Bush. Laura bought a copy of the book for each of her twins for their fifteenth birthdays. This definitely made me rethink Laura Bush, and if you ever read it, you will, too.
While running this book festival would have been enough for most people, the cause of literature had to share The Volunteer with the causes of wildflowers, freedom of speech, health care, public art, historic buildings, cancer research, the advancement of women and minorities, and a small army of people she individually mother-henned. All were at a loss when cancer stole her at seventy-three.
Another writer told me how The Volunteer had flown to her aid when her teenage son was having difficulties. These troubles were private, of course, but every town is a small town where such things are concerned. This writer and The Volunteer were at the book festival, heading to her reading, when they were accosted by a vaguely familiar woman. Why hello! she cried. Har yew? As the writer hesitated, the woman launched into her exciting news. USC and Stanford were fighting over her son! You know Billy, don’t you? He plays lacrosse! But what about your boy?
The writer gave her a small smile. He’s still finding his path, she said.
Oh?
At this point, The Volunteer put her arm around the writer and started walking. Honey, when a mother tells you her son is still finding his path, she called over her shoulder, that’s the end of the discussion.
She could start a real conversation or end a fake one with a single sentence. That’s time management.
The All-American
died 2014
HAVING NOW SPENT MORE of my adult life single than married, I have collected quite a treasure chest of kindnesses from other’s people’s husbands. Put that credit card away. We’ll pick you up in twenty minutes. You girls sit down; I’ll do the dishes. One or another of these guys has helped me arrange everything from my fortieth birthday party to my divorce, has dealt with my flooded basement, my dying computer, and my incompatible video format, has stood with me against egregious invoices, evil lawsuits, and greedy charlatans. And then there was the very much bigger problem, my sons’ father having died when they were six and four.
The silver lining of this tragedy was collectively provided by an all-pro team of loaner dads: two gourmet journalists, a conservative lawyer, a Cajun partier, a bipolar (but very sweet) neighbor, and a Texas outdoorsman: from a big Italian family in a small town, the kind of guy who still got together to throw the football and drink beers with his fraternity brothers, still a big kid himself. So tall, dark, and handsome, he could have played that guy on TV.
With a rare lack of snark, he and his wife split up when our kids were in preschool; he moved two blocks away to a townhouse overlooking the creek. His son, my son, and a third Musketeer would plan elaborate expeditions from our house to his, through the reeds, over the footbridge, up the incline to the apartment where he would cook them a he-man dinner of steak and spinach. Popeye the sailor man in his teeny bachelor kitchen. Not for long, though. There was a lovely blonde at work who had once announced during a discussion of engagement rings that she didn’t want one at all; she would marry the man who gave her a fishing rod. One day he showed up at an office happy hour with a large, oddly shaped bag from the sporting goods store.
Fourteen years later, she found him in his armchair in front of the History Channel, still flashing its battlefields and galleons. He was fifty-six, just like my own father who died the same way: the heart in the dark of the night that loses its place. Like me, his son was out of the nest by then. Old enough to know how lucky we were.
The Paid Professional
Codependent
died 2012
THAT WAS WHAT SHE called herself, the woman with the gorgeous red hair and big black sunglasses who picked me up at the airport for the Bay Area portion of my book tour. She looked more like a country rock star than a media escort. In fact, she was both, as well as a radio producer, a columnist, and the organizer of the Rock Bottom Remainders, the famous-author band of Stephen King, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, et al. Why do you think I bothered writing a book at all, if not to become a go-go dancer for this band? On the way to my first interview that morning, we stopped for espresso at a place with Latin music. Watch this, I told her, leaping from my stool to demonstrate my hip-swiveling abilities.
Essentially, a media escort is your best friend for one day. And just one day with this best friend was all I needed. The Rock Bottom Remainders had a show coming up over Memorial Day weekend at a booksellers conference at the Hollywood Palladium, and somehow this stop got added to my tour and I ended up onstage performing with all of the above, plus Roy Blount, Matt Groening, Cynthia Heimel, and Bruce Springsteen. Who else could have done this for me but her? But she would do more. The next time I went on a book tour, a couple years later, I had dragged my food-writer boyfriend along and it was my birthday and unbelievably we found out in the middle of it that one of our best friends had committed suicide. What a day that was. Thank God we had a paid professional codependent, the best in the business, to get us through it.
It was shocking to read that she had died of breast cancer at sixty-three. Her sixty-three was most people’s forty. According to the New York Times, she was surrounded by authors, among them Ms. Tan, Mr. Barry, Ms. Angelou. Ms. Collins called on the phone and sang “Amazing Grace.”
The Southern Writer
died 2012
IN THE HEAD-SPINNING MIDDLE nineties, I was occasionally sent by my publisher to stay in hotel suites with doorbells, to be driven around by escorts, and to speak at fancy events, like a charity fund-raiser in Bloomington, Indiana. There I found myself one spring afternoon in the back of a limo with three other writers: a bestselling women’s author, a courtly scrivener out of Mississippi, and another young beginner like me. Having never before met such a successful colleague, I had many questions for the grande dame, and she answered them graciously. Once again this ye
ar, she told us, she was missing the blooming of her lilies because of her book tour. She had begged Michael Korda—her dear friend—to change the schedule, but there’s only one good time of year to publish a blockbuster. I asked her about her daughter, also a famous writer with three names. Three Names was one of five children, we learned, raised while their young widowed mother, not yet a famous author, flew around the world as a stewardess for Pan Am.
Admirably, The Southern Writer, who wore lime green socks, and the beginner, a sweet-looking blonde, maintained strict poker faces throughout this interview.
Diving into The Southern Writer’s book after I got home, I found some of the most wonderful sentences I’d ever read, retelling one of the nastiest episodes in American history. The Southern Writer had grown up in the town where Emmett Till was lynched, and had been thinking about it for a good half century when he published this book. It recounts the story from multiple viewpoints, including the eye of the dead boy, weaving into the tragedy a skein of outrageous humor, largely created by his delicious use of language. Something about his writing evokes the blues, and it worked in the same way the blues does, making something beautiful out of evil and pain.
More than ten years later, when I was working at a low-residency MFA in Pittsburgh, a visiting author was rolled in in a wheelchair. I was squinting at him, thinking, Wait, don’t I know this guy? Marion Winik, he drawled. How wonderful to see you. At sixty-five, he was crippled and prematurely aged by a painful nerve disease, but his demeanor was as genial as ever and his memory obviously working better than mine. Here we were at yet another literary event, he pointed out, while our lilies bloomed at home unseen.
