Brad's dead. No joke.

AT FIRST, I KNEW Brad Bailey had died, but that’s all I knew. I didn't know how he died, or when he died, or who was there when he died other than those who are paid to be there when somebody dies. For a week or so, I didn’t know where his body was, whether he had any family to claim it, whether anyone knew enough about him to write the obituary or notify his friends. I didn’t know if he was going to be buried or burned or turned over to Tysons and ground into chicken feed.

A few days later, I learned he was given a green burial, which means he was wrapped in an eco-friendly shroud and either placed in a biodegradable casket or simply laid in a grave. It’s probably just as well that the EPA wasn’t notified. Otherwise, he’d have been encased in a concrete box bristling with radon detectors, and people living within a five-mile radius of the cemetery would have been advised to boil their tap water until further notice.

Do I exaggerate? Sure, but what do you expect? Tears? Altar candles? A Rosary Service? Jewel singing, “Who Will Save Your Soul”? Hell, does anyone think he had a soul? Even if he did, it had to be as shriveled as his liver. Pity the poor bastard who would have been assigned to perform the autopsy had an autopsy been required. It wasn’t because doctors knew long before he flatlined what would kill him. All they had to do was sniff his breath. 

Too irreverent? Too disrespectful? You must be kidding. If you think I’m being unnecessarily snarky, you didn’t know Brad Bailey. He’s the only person I know who saw the humor in the Challenger explosion. I doubt he would have batted an eye at anything I’ve written so far because we subscribed to one credo: “Nothing’s sacred.” Floods. Famine. Tsunamis. Covid. Ted Cruz. Nuns attacked by monster hornets. They’re all fodder for a puerile gag. You might say we put the "vile" in "juvenile."

For example, let’s say Brad’s sister is hiking in the Klondikes and is mauled and eaten by bears. Of course, he’s upset. He experiences pain. He exhibits empathy because he’s human, and humans are predisposed by evolution to care about their own, especially when bears are involved. Here's the catch: Brad may be suffering but, on the day of Brad’s sister’s funeral, he may wake up with a catchy tune bopping around in his head, and he can't help but tweak the lyrics so that, during the funeral service, he sings under his breath, “Today I met the girl I’m going to bury.” 

Even worse, he sings it loud enough so that the big-haired old biddy spewed in the pew in front of him hears him, and she gasps and gapes at him like he’d just eaten a cockroach. So, what does he do? He grins lasviciously and says, “You’re welcome.” No apologies. No regrets. For better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, he owns it. That was the understanding. That was the deal. That was how he rolled. For a while, that was how we rolled.

• • •

This sometimes worked out great. Sometimes, not so great. Let’s say Brad and I were invited to a dinner party. At 7 p.m., we're blending in. Three hours later, the host is shoving us toward the door because Brad's blitzed, and he's trying to dry-hump the next-door neighbor’s wife in plain view of the next-door neighbor, who has warned him to back off once already and now is preparing to gut him with a paring knife. 

I kid you not. I remember an office party where Brad had taunted a young reporter so mercilessly that the kid reached into a hall closet, pulled out a 4-10 shotgun and was about to lower the barrel at Brad’s belly-button when someone stepped in. It could have ended real ugly, and most people would have intuited this little chain of events as a wake-up call, but not Brad. Did he apologize? Did he do his best to make amends? Did he exhibit or express a scintilla of remorse the next day? Are you serious? He probably didn't remember it the next day.  

As stories of his shenanigans piled up, Brad developed a reputation as the life and death of the party. At 7 p.m., he was charming, clever and curiously handsome — sort of like Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear. Six or eight tall and stiff Jack & Cokes later, he flipped from rakish cad to Russian car-jacker, slouched behind the wheel of a stolen Mercedes, floor-boarding it through one red light after another, headed toward Moscow's Lefortovo Tunnel and a fiery head-on collision with a sleek black bullet-proof limousine owned by a Putin kleptomaniac.

So, what did Brad gain from all of this needless chaos and carnage? A black eye. A case of VD. A night in the clink. Banishment. Blinding headaches. Bloody urine. Failed marriages, but no wake up calls, not for a pretty good while, anyway.

He traded his talent, skill, health and sanity for beads and baubles and bar nuts at media hangouts like Joe Miller's, where he wasn't even invited to sit at the adult table because he wouldn’t behave himself, and we’re talking about world-class booze-hounds here. Brad embarrassed them. Do have any idea how hard that must have been? Virtually impossible.

As for his regular friends — the ones who didn't hold court every night at Joe Miller's — they began to shun him, too. A couple of years ago, I bumped into a guy I knew from my time in Tyler. Sitting at the gate in the Denver airport, we tried to make small-talk by dropping names, so Brad's was certain to come up. When I mentioned him, the guy stiffened and said, "I don't give a damn about Brad Bailey. I want to know how you're doing." Something tells me this guy might have been one of the next door neighbors.

I gave up on Brad in the early 1990s. I was in Austin, where I’d grown accustomed to a regular paycheck and a roof over my head. He was in Dallas, drinking and writing for either the Morning News or D Magazine. One evening, I was supposed to meet him at his place near Greenville Avenue and Belmont. We had planned to go to dinner, and I half-way expected to spend the night, so I arrived on time and found the front door unlocked. I walked in and waited and waited and decided to check out the neighbor’s yards, just in case he’d tripped and fallen into someone's pool. I couldn’t find him, so I wandered back into the house and waited some more, and then gave up. I tossed my bags in my car and started home. 

No more than 400 yards from his house, I saw him, wobbling down a sidewalk, arguing with himself. I honked and pulled over and called out to him. He glanced my way but apparently didn't recognize me, so he continued walking and talking. I didn't even bother to call him an asshole. I drove home and didn’t hear from him for at least 10 years.

Occasionally, I’d pick up a little chatter. He quit. He got fired. He got married. He got divorced.  Now and then, someone would ask, “How's that crazy friend of yours?” Of course, I didn't know because I didn’t want to know. I figured we were done. 

Then, I lost a very dear friend to cancer, and I began thinking about Brad and wondering whether he was still with us. I poked around the internet, and sure enough, Google spit out dozens of Brad Baileys — not a one of whom looked or sounded or seemed like the Brad Bailey.

Then, I came across a link to a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, and the letter sounded exactly like something the Brad Bailey would have written. I don’t recall the user name, but the author lived in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. 

“It's him,” I thought. "It has to be. I’ve found the son of a bitch.”

 

But I hadn't. I never did. Instead, I found out that David Barron of the Houston Chronicle had Brad’s email address. David was in Tyler at the same time Brad and I were, only he was too intelligent to allow himself to be sucked into our lunacy. Anyway, I asked David if he'd ask Brad if he could pass along the email address to me. To my eternal surprise, it arrived a day or two later, so I sent Brad a "Look at what the cat dragged in" note, expecting little if any response. He answered politely and promptly, and we took it from there.

 

This what I learned: The letter was his. His health was horrible. He had diabetes and suffered occasional organ failure. He was lucky to be alive. Against his will, he traded hard liquor for sissy beer. He still smoked, and he had that pickled pork rind smoker's skin. He looked like he'd just stumbled out of a Japanese prison camp. 

Be that as it may, he seemed strangely at peace. He had a computer and a television and cable and a few friends living nearby who kept him company. I don't recall a pet, but he might have had a cat. He'd always liked cats.

We ironed out our misunderstandings and misconceptions about who we were back then and who are now. He chided me for selling out and spending 30 years working as a state bureaucrat. I needled him for pissing his life away. I showed him an unpublished piece I’d written and urged him to write something introspective — maybe about his difficult childhood, his self-education, his early days as a reporter, his alcohol abuse, his good and bad choices in women. I wanted him to write about his regrets, fears, dreams, nightmares. I wanted him to tell me something I didn’t know or couldn't figure out in two minutes.

I also wanted him to stop writing about Donald Fucking Trump, especially if he insisted on saying with 25 adjectives what he could and should have said with one good noun and two precise verbs. 

He didn’t pout or recoil, but he didn’t buy in either. In the last time set of emails I received from him —September 25, 2021, 9:03 AM through September 28, 2021, 10:52 AM — he told me he was working on a piece about our time in Tyler. He seemed very excited about it.

“Send it to me. I want to read it,” I begged, but he declined. He said he wasn’t ready, that he was still trying to figure out what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. He let it slip that he was right around 50,000 words and still unsure of what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it.

• • •

That was the last I heard from him. After that exchange, nothing, so I knew something was up. I could feel it. I should have called him, but I kept putting it off. I knew he wasn’t going to live that long, but I didn’t expect him to die this soon. 

If I had to guess, I'd say he died alone. I hope he was ready. I hope it was what he wanted, and that he didn’t panic at the last second. I hope he chose to check out alone because he didn’t want anyone fretting over him, trying to console him or convert him or force him to confess or apologize or — egads — trying to talk him into writing about his dreams.

I hope his conscience didn’t barge in at the last second, making a ruckus, calling him a goddamn fool for not reaching out to an old lover or an old friend who would have been more than happy to hold his hand, or rub his shoulder or dab his feverish forehead with a damp cloth or even try to calm him by saying, “Take five, Brad. Close your eyes. Everything’s going to be fine. Let’s listen to a little Pink Floyd.”

Welcome my son. Welcome to the machine.

I wish I’d made it clear to him that he could have contacted me, and I would have done what little I could. He didn’t need to worry about sparing me the gory spectacle. He didn’t need to worry that I might have tried to ignore or deflect the obvious. He didn't need to worry about our agreement.

Well, Brad, if you’re listening. I have a confession. I apologize. I’m filled with regret. I’m furious at myself for not calling, for not reaching out, for not making sure you knew I wouldn’t have turned your last moments into a joke, some stupid gag. I would have never, ever done that. Some things are sacred. True friendships, for example. They're sacred.

• • •

A little back story: We met in 1976. I was a wire editor for the Tyler Morning Telegraph, and he was a general assignment reporter, and we worked the 2-11 p.m. shift, which allowed us to run wild all night and sleep ‘til noon the next morning.

We brought out the best and worst in each other. I’m reminded of Dick and Perry, the murderous pair in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” Neither one of them could have done what they did alone, but together, they were capable of anything.

 

Alone, I’d have never driven by a billboard that trumpeted, “The Answer is Jesus” and thought, “I think I’ll scrawl on this billboard ‘Who won the Frank Zappa Look-a-like Contest?’”

 

Alone, I’d have never climbed to the roof of the First National Bank in Tyler and then shot bottle rockets at the Smith County Jail, which sat atop the Smith County Courthouse. 

Alone, I would have never deliberately driven my Mazda 626 into a construction barrier, just to see if it would bounce off.

 

In concert with Brad, I did all three and worse, not that I’m proud of it, and not that I’m not. If you asked me what I remember about 1995 or 2005 or 2015, I couldn’t tell you much.  I did a whole lot of the same thing, I suppose. If you asked me about August 1976 to July 1977, I can tell you 15 or 20 stories off the top of my head.

That’s why, in September 2020, I drove from Austin to Eureka Springs to see Brad. We’d succeeded in reviving our friendship, but I wanted to see him in the flesh, as horrible as that might sound. He balked at first. He was recuperating. He’d been ill and wasn’t presentable. I persisted, though, and he eventually told me to do what I felt like I had to do. He wouldn’t try to talk me out of it.

It’s 574 miles from my front door to the Victoria Woods Apartments in Eureka Springs, and it took me right at 10 hours, but he was waiting in the parking lot when I pulled in. He pointed toward an empty space, and I parked and hopped out and walked over to him because he was leaning on a cane, and that’s rarely a good sign unless you’ve just graduated from a wheelchair. 

We eyeballed each other, then he invited me into his apartment for crackers and beer. He apologized for the mess, and we played catch-up. I showed him photos of kids and grandkids. He showed me photos of scars. He smoked and drank non-stop. I nursed one or two, maybe three beers. I told him I couldn’t stay long, that I had to drive back to Hot Springs in time for a late dinner. It was a lie, but I didn’t want to run the risk of overstaying my welcome. 

When it was time to go, he hobbled with me all the way back to my car, and we actually hugged and tried not to get emotional. I thought I’d made a clean getaway, but right as I was about to go from reverse to drive, I heard the tap-tap-tap of his cane on the bottom of my passenger side window.

I rolled it halfway down, and he leaned forward and said, “I will see you again.”

I smiled and nodded and then pulled out of the parking lot onto the winding county road that led back into the drizzly Ozark mountains and a late dinner alone.