The following is a document of an incident that happened to me many years ago. I changed the names for reasons of privacy, but the story is real.
Billie
It was a Tuesday night. I had come home from work and was working on my
resume. I wasn't looking forward to band practice; in fact I was thinking
of quitting. The phone rang. It was Jack. I wasn't surprised when he told
me that practice was canceled. Then he told that it was canceled because
his girlfriend Billie had killed herself. She had killed herself in his
car; the car had been towed to a garage at 50th and Martin Luther King and
he didn't want to drive himself home. He said something about it being his
fault and he cried, but he seemed reasonably calm given the situation. He
gave me the address and I told him that I'd be right over. I started to
change out of work clothes into street clothes. Part way through I wondered
why I was changing clothes. I then was angry at myself. I was now half way
dressed up and half in scruffy clothes. I felt ridiculous, but I thought
it would be worse to waste more time worrying about my clothing at a time
like this. I told my mother what little I knew and got in the car.
I drove leisurely to the garage. Mom had warned me not to drive panicked,
but I realized that I wasn't feeling in any rush. I don't know why I didn't
feel more rushed. The suicide got me thinking of possible lyrics for a song.
I sang one phrase and then another. I realized I didn't really think that
Billie was dead.
When I got to the garage I saw Jack sitting on the curb. He came toward
me wheeling his bicycle. His face seemed flushed , but I couldn't see him
well. He said, "Well, she did it," and gave the odd half-laugh
that he often gave. He didn't sound amused and I don't think he saw any
humor in the situation. I reached over to hug him, trying to sidestep the
bike. I don't think I'd ever hugged Jack before, and I felt clumsy and foolish.
Jack was a good athlete; tall, strong, and lean. He could also be clumsy,
tripping over cords when playing electric guitar or walking into things.
At this moment I was the clumsy one, though. Maybe it was because this was
really his crisis, and I was just a peripheral figure in what had happened,
a spear carrier in a tragedy.
Next stop was the coroner's. Jack had the address. On the way over he filled
me in. Billie stole his car in the middle of the night and gassed herself.
He had spent the day going from police department to police department trying
to find out what had happened to his car. The police would look at him strangely,
ask a few questions, and pass him on to another police department. He had
been sent from Berkeley Police to Oakland, and from Oakland Police to the
Park Police. When he got to the garage where the car had been towed he saw
plastic hanging in the car. He said he now knew something was very wrong
with the car as he was drawn to it. A tow truck driver yelled at him not to
go near the car. Jack hadn't really heard the guy. Jack was fixated on the
car and its wrongness. He finally yelled at the driver that it was his car
and he was there to take care of it. The manager chewed him out for yelling
at the driver. Jack replied that the driver had been rude and that he was
going to go back out to yell at the guy some more.
The manager said that the driver was upset because someone had died in the
car. When Jack got to the car he saw on the seat a record of Billie's that
hadn't been there when he had last seen the car. He had just realized what
had happened when he called me. I didn't realize this until later.
We had taken 580 and missed the right exit. I cursed myself and we got off
on Embarcadero, driving along the narrow road alongside the boatyards and
drydocks. I thought about how much I liked this stretch of road but decided
to say nothing, not knowing if I should talk about anything but the mechanics
of dealing with Billie's death. We pulled up to the building housing the
Coroner's Department. The building was a gray lump near the foot of Broadway.
We looked at the entrance to the building. The door was locked. The sign
on the receptionist's cage said "que no habla Espanol." We wondered
what to do when a woman came up and let us in. She gave us directions and
we walked into the Coroner's.
Jack filled out a form verifying Billie's ID. He signed it before viewing
the body, although I told him not to. I wanted to make sure it was Billie
first. A woman in her late forties or fifties, bad bleach job, pitted skin,
no chin, but kind-looking told us to go through the door into the viewing
room. You feel so grateful every time someone shows you any kindness at
these times. We went through the door. I was surprised to see what looked
to be a government-issue funeral home, which I guess it was. It wasn't one
of the sterile-seeming rooms I had seen in tv shows. There was glass on
one wall and a curtain behind it. The woman with the bleached hair pulled
a rope. I though that this was some sort of waiting room and that they would
wheel Billie in on a gurney. The curtain drew back fast. I don't know if
the bigger shock was seeing Billie dead or seeing her on display through
the glass like some sort of museum exhibit.
I figured that she wouldn't be a mess or gory. She wasn't. I hoped she would
look like she was strangely asleep like dead people look at funerals. She
didn't. She looked awful. Her eyes were almost shut but they looked shriveled
under the lids. Her mouth was barely open. Her skin was exhaust-colored.
Her features weren't recognizable to me. Her face looked narrower, her nose
and cheekbones harder. Her hair was the black with streaks of honey blond
that I had last seen on her. Nothing else looked much like Billie to me.
We said it was her. I don't think they had any ID of her before we were
there. The
report read Jane Doe. She was found 0725 hrs 03-05-86 at Lake Temescal by
Oakland Park Police. The first police report said they thought there were
pills in the car. A later report amended that: no pills.
I was mouthing her name. I kept thinking that if I called it out she would
stir. Jack was still staring at her when I turned away. His eyes were so
open that I could see the face muscles strain. Part of me thought I should
turn him away; he looked like he might burst. I decided not to. I thought
that maybe he needed to do this, to see that she was really dead and confront
that truth. There were many times that night that I did nothing, either
because I couldn't tell what to do or because it seemed that things were
going to take their own course and I had to just let them go. There was
a recurring sense of awkwardness, of uselessness. There were so many times
that I wanted to do something and either couldn't or shouldn't.
Jack filled out more forms. He started to call Billie's aunt but they wouldn't
let him use the government phone, he had to use the pay phone. There was
an AA sobriety button by the phone. I went to the bathroom. After Jack called
he went to the bathroom. He was there a long time. I could hear that he was taking
care of private business but I'm not sure what all it was. As we left I
asked him if he wanted a drink. He said no. I wanted one, but neither of
us had one. We crossed the street back to the car. I was walking in a tough-guy
swagger, trying to protect Jack from the passing cars and the dangers of
the neighborhood. I felt foolish when I caught myself doing it. I thought,
what could I protect him from? Look what had just happened to him. A moment
later I slipped back into the walk.
Before I left the coroner's I looked at the clock: 6:58 PM. We'd only been
at the coroner's fifteen minutes. We drove back to the garage. The rest
of the band showed up, and we all went to work on Jack's car. We disassembled
the hoses Billie had used to asphyxiate herself. I found a grapefruit and
a Kerouac book in her bag. She hadn't finished the book. I guess the grapefruit
was a snack in case she got hungry while she was waiting to die. I thought
that if I were reading a good book, I'd want to finish it before I died.
Maybe she decided Kerouac wasn't worth finishing.
Jack had to bail the car out of the garage. It didn't matter that his girlfriend
had just killed herself, or that she had stolen his car to do it. All that
mattered to the garage was that the car had been in storage all day and he had to pay
sixty dollars to get it out. I don't remember who or how we scraped up the
money. On the way back home we stopped at the Berkeley Marina. Jack looked
out and said, "You know, life goes on. Billie died, but the rest of
life goes on the same."
I felt so angry at Billie that night. I remember thinking how awful it was
of her to put Jack through what he had to deal with; finding out about her
the way he did, having to disassemble the equipment she used to kill herself.
I remember thinking, "I could kill her for doing this to Jack",
then remembering she had beaten me to the punch; she had already killed
herself. I thought of other times with I spent with her, like when she spat
towards a cop while waiting in line for a show. Jack and I had spent the
night trying to raise bail for her and waiting to pick her up at the Hall
of Justice. It turned she was never even booked and caught the show Jack
and I had missed trying to bail her out. I tried to remember the first time
I met her, and remembered that I had known her before I even knew Jack.
I thought about a couple months earlier, when I spent a day with her, in
part because I had heard that she had tried to kill herself. I wanted to
be supportive of her, but didn't know what to say. She was aware of the
tension, but didn't known the reason. She sadly said, "I suppose we
don't really know each other all that well." I thought of the haircuts
she had given me, and how she had tried to kill herself one night, failed,
and the next day got her cosmetology license. I guess life goes on for all
of us, even when we try to end it.
The funeral was a real nightmare. It was a military funeral. Billie was
an Army brat. Her father was ramrod straight and tearless, his face rigid
and hard. Her mom was pretty shaken up, and looked surprisingly sexy in
a short lavender leather skirt. Jack told Billie's parent that I was
a good friend to Billie, that I made bail for her once. One of her brothers
looked at the mourners, and made a beautiful spontaneous speech. He said
that he realized that he knew none of us, her friends, and that Billie must
have felt very separate from her two brothers, both younger. He wondered
if that was why things ended the way they did.
Damned if I know.
e-mail: kurt@ribak.com