What It Was Like, Seeing Phil

I. Intro
II. On the Road
III. Across the Big Piney
IV. Climbing
V. The Natural State
VI. The First Visit, Part One
VII. The First Visit, Part Two
VIII. In-Room Coffee
IX. Arkansas Nuclear One
X. Housekeeping Redux
XI. Rally the Troops
XII. The Other Side of the Coin
XIII. Back up the Mountain
XIV. Photos

I. Intro

Yesterday I could not think of the word for saddle. I can’t recall why I was even thinking about horses. That thing you put on the horse so you can ride it, so you aren’t going bareback. Seat, pommel, reigns. That’s all I had.

My friend Phil is in hospice down in Arkansas. Maybe I can bring him back. Why should I discount the possibility out of hand? Who’s gonna tell me it’s impossible? Mind meld, hand of prayer, talking our way away from the brink.

Brake ghoulish pursuit
in the love canal
dark tartar
studio martyr

II. On the Road

Fewest people I’ve seen on the road in a while. I’m all out of faith, this is how I feel. If you thought the shortages were bad before, imagine throwing a recession into the mix.

It’s cold and the market’s getting creamed. Crypto’s fallen into the crypt. Nothin’s going on.

If you own NFLX don’t worry. The construction workers have a long-term date arranged with their couches. Hashtag: streaming. From doubt to certainty and back and around again. The deer have retaken the fields.

I’m heading southwest on I-44. This interstate is my timeshare. A blinking red sign says the fireworks store is OPEN, OPEN. But it can’t possibly be. On a Saturday morning in the last third of January, nineteen degrees outside.

I’m addicted in the direction of good news. Check my email, check it again. Has anyone visited my blog? Just one hit, graphed in pink, inverse of a zero. Any day with a hit is a good day. Notice of the acceptance of submitted work by email? Let’s party.

But in real life, I’m headed to Russellville, Arkansas. I’ll drive through Springfield, MO; through Branson. Into northwest Arkansas. I’ve never been to Russellville. But my college friend Phil lives there, for now. In a couple of weeks, his hospice venue will shift from his own rented house to an official hospice facility in Little Rock.

The tumor in his mouth is inoperable. His dad Chuck said that Phil’s goal is to make it to his next birthday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day.

I met Phil as a freshman in college. Same dorm at Washington University. Liggett. Second floor. He lived two doors down. I was shy, he wasn’t. He partied, I didn’t. He had a stereo and wasn’t afraid to blast it. There were two other guys named Phil on our floor so he became known as DJ Phil, as a way for people to distinguish which Phil they were talking about.

I didn’t like all of the music Phil played but we shared a love of sports; and we had some similar taste in movies and TV shows. My X-Files posters drew some people in. I played taped episodes of Seinfeld on a VCR in my room. Those drew people in, too.

He started out in the School of Architecture. I was bouncing around Arts & Sciences. When I started taking more and more classes in the English Department, he did, too. We both wanted to be writers. Sophomore year I joined the school’s Ultimate Frisbee team. He wanted in, too.

Phil was a good athlete. Ultimate took him back to his high school days when he excelled on the soccer field. One of my fondest memories of Phil is him driving the two of us out to Lawrence, KS, for an Ultimate tournament. He had a maroon Subaru Outback. After a full day of Frisbee, the two of us ate Chinese food in a strip mall while the rest of the team went somewhere else.

*

Past the rest stop that’s in the median of the interstate, not quite to Sullivan, MO. Trucks lined up on the ramps: entrance and exit. They can only drive fourteen hours at a time. They have nowhere else to go.

I ate a banana. I’m sipping coffee. I’ve got a hotel booked for two nights. I’m hoping I can sit there and watch some football with Phil. I don’t know what to expect.

He’s in bad shape. According to Chuck, he’s down to ninety pounds. From a max of…180? He was pretty muscled up back in his weightlifting days. Sophomore or junior year. When he got the tattoo on his biceps. A Japanese character, I believe.

The sky is mostly cloudy but some morning sun pokes through. An old Ford truck passes on the left. In the days before electric.

Bald eagle—bam. A big bird, long wings, flap-happy. White head, seen from below.

It’s been a while since I’ve had McDonald’s. I could crush some biscuits right now, but I’ve got food and plenty. Two pieces of fried fish, a buffalo chicken wrap, chicken salad, crackers, and cheese. Granola, milk, berries.

Mile marker 223, with a lot of flower wrapped around the post. Springfield, 145 miles. I’ve already got to pee. But now I’ve got a fix for that. Travel container. I was using a tennis ball container. Hey it’s not pretty, but I do a lot of long-distance driving and being able to pee on the go has changed my life. And when something changes your life, you’ve got to sing about it. And you ought to. And you can’t let anything convince you otherwise.

Things that have changed my life, for the good: the U City woodlot, long underwear, the stock market, my parents, my wife, dogs, an array of reusable bags, towels, washcloths, rags, poetry, sunglasses, podcasts, food delivery, fire, THC, getting rid of things, not doing things I know I’ll regret, aluminum foil, coffee, tea, white wine, exercise, Farm, gloves, carabiners, allergy pills, borax, essential oils, box fans, pens, notebooks, getting my work out there, and good uses for bad weather.

That’s not the whole list. I’ll think of more as I go. But I want to write these things down. I want to share them before I forget them, because one day I will. I’m hungry. Time to eat that fish.

III. Across the Big Piney

I ate the fish. Even worked some tartar dip into the mix. Paper towels and car rags help. Uphill through the Devil’s Elbow. Then I rummaged with one arm through the snack bag for Uncle Ray’s pretzels and Bread Co freebie chips.

Then I took a whiz into the porta-potty. There was a little bit of collateral damage. Especially when dumping the contents out of the window. The tennis ball container was better in that respect, and might be better overall. The new one, made specifically for this purpose, has an “ergonomic” design but it doesn’t really add much.

I’ve switched from baseball podcasts to music. I need a pep rally. My allergy pills slip me the drowse, the road mickey.

Over the Big Piney again, uphill. An extra lane is added, an extra lane is taken away. Exit 163 to Dixon, for Highway 28. Last stop Farm. Aye, but not today.

Through Waynesville. A nice looking high school, albeit right along the interstate. Fort Leonard Wood is right around here. A state trooper enters the highway from an on-ramp. I don’t want patrol to see me see me writing and driving but otherwise I’m not worried. I’m one of the slowest vehicles on all the roads.

The trooper had been drafting a semi-truck. It did seem a little odd. Then the flashing lights came on. Was the truck a target? Eyes in the sky? No matter to me, drive on.

Passed a VW bus. All kinds of stickers on it. Zen Buddhism redone. The van was packed, its driver huddled over the wheel with a bomber-style hat on. Fur and ear flaps. Add reliable heating and cooling to the list of things I don’t want to live without. Or would prefer not to.

Semi-truck broke down, side of the road. Another one stopped there to help. Hood open, hinge at the very nose of the truck. Guy in a camo jacket up there looking for a fix.

Then an enormous lit-up sign catches my eye. “Biden is Building Socialism.” Really? From where I stand, it looks like Biden isn’t building much of anything. Then, “Biden is a Communist.” Oh, really? Check out the bankruptcy bill he shepherded through Congress, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2004. Get a clue before you get a big-ass sign.

For a minute I was behind a tractor-trailer, the payload being cattle, young ones. On the way to a feeder lot, probably. On their way to a slaughter. The back of the trailer was an iron gate, the young calf there was not comfortable, kept pawing at the gate with its front right hoof. Putting it through the pickets of the gate. Crikey. I had to pass that truck.

It’s warming up. 37°. I’m past Lebanon, not far from Springfield. There are many more vehicles on the road now. More of every vehicle type: semis, pickups, sedans, SUVs. People are awake, caffeinated, diner-fed, and passing me on the left. Drive on. Get in.

IV. Climbing

A cleared-out sky reveals a patchwork of contrails, a dozen of them making Xs where they cross. Thick, white, straight, and frayed. Window down, the cool air a welcome reviver.

Is there any way to bring someone back? There’s got to be some way, some miracle no one’s figured out yet. Why not me? Who says I can’t do it? I remember one time Phil and I were arguing. He wanted me to do something, I can’t remember what. It might have had to do with writing. A collaboration, or some expensive lark he had in mind. I wasn’t going for it and he was mad but he told me I was capable of doing anything I set my mind to. So if I was saying I didn’t think it could be done what I really meant was that I just didn’t want to do it.

In one of the phone calls from 2019 that served as the revival of our relationship, Phil referred to me as the Silent Soldier. Just plugging along, getting things done. But I can say the same for Phil because he was never going to let our relationship just die away for no good reason. If he called me, he knew eventually I’d call him back. He knew if he needed me that I would be there for him in the end.

Back in our college days, Phil became very interested in climbing, the kind offered at climbing gyms. I tried it once with him. New Year’s Eve, what? 2000? We were in Indiana, at his girlfriend Becca’s parents’ house. That was when and where we saw Fight Club together in the theater for the third time. I caught some acrophobia on that climbing attempt, something of a surprise to me. But Phil was in really good shape then. Strong. Arms, legs, core. You have to be strong to climb like that.

I remember drinking a lot of Miller Genuine Draft that night. Phil’s friend Andrew was there, too. They bonded as teammates on the high school soccer team in Platteville, Wisconsin. It was the only time I ever met Andrew. Becca’s parents came home from a party of their own, with an abundance of leftover shrimp cocktail. Andrew wasn’t a drinker but Phil and I were goosed. Drunk and happy, we plowed our way through those leftover shrimp in no time.

We were staying in a hotel room within walking distance (thankfully) of their house. As we made our way out to the sidewalk in front of their house, I unzipped to start a whiz against a big rock in their front yard. Phil ripped into me and he was right to do so. Bad form on my part. He loved Becca. It didn’t work out between them and Phil never quite recovered.

Over the Finley River. I don’t know it. Up a hill. Very smooth road through here. Springfield, south on 65. Through Battlefield, Nixa. The flagship Bass Pro Shop back there somewhere. Maybe I’ll hit it on the way back. Fair number of cars on the road, flying by as I write.

Billboards for something called “Dolly Parton’s Stampede.” Modest Mouse flowing from the speakers. Fire it up.

Hay bales wrapped tight. Silage? Tire marks across the sere, tan grass of a winter pasture. Old school buses. Cedars on a hill. Headed south.

Getting hilly. I guess I’ve been to Branson. Maybe not. My dad would always talk about it. Maybe we only made it as far as the Lake of the Ozarks.

Road-cut rock walls lining the highway, their tall faces highlighted by lots of waterfall icicles. Wizard’s beards. Cool.

Multiple places claiming to be the Branson Welcome Center. Mare’s tail cirrus catching light in the southern sky above. Hills. Blue hills. Appalachia-esque. This feels like Tennessee.

Lakes in the area. Table Rock, Taneycomo. A bridge very high above the highway. Engineering. Steel. Concrete. I was a Highwayman, I was a dam builder, I flew a starship.

Hotels, billboards, hardware stores, fast food, churches, and dispensaries. Goodbye for now, Branson.

V. The Natural State

Arkansas. The Natural State. Damn. How long has it been since I’ve been in Arkansas? Years. Not since passing through the state as B and I were driving back to Austin from a Thanksgiving in Monteagle, TN. 2004? Eighteen years, approximately.

Some taller evergreens on these hills. Maybe these are the shortleaf pines I read about but don’t see in the Missouri portion of the Ozarks. The ones that used to be.

There is snow still on the ground. Cricket Creek. It must have snowed here recently? Strange.

This place is hilly, it’s rolling. This is almost canyon land. Now I feel like I’m in New Mexico. I’ve heard people say that when you’re in northwest Arkansas, it doesn’t feel like you’re in Arkansas.

Through NorArk, the town of Harrison. Busy! Several lane switches, one dipsy-doo turn, and I’ve found my way to Route 7 south. Out of town and I’m in pastureland. Cows and creeks, a landscape with which I am familiar. Furrows of cirrus above. Some large hills to the southeast. Mountains? Can I call these mountains?

Wood for sale. 44°. Chuck texted to see if I was still coming to see Phillip. Hell, yes, I said. I had just crossed into Arkansas when I got the text. Full stop. There’s no looking back now.

A stars-and-bars spoils the mood. I was just starting to like this piece of country. Really, though. It is the Ozarks. Ozark gonna Ozark. Curvy roads, rock bluffs, a river around here somewhere. Descending. Road recently redone. It’s in excellent condition. Bogey on my six. Winding.

This is Buffalo country. Crossed over the Buffalo River. I’ve heard about it. It sure is pretty. From this bluff overhanging the chalky blue of its stream. Three hundred miles I’ve come and I’ve seen a river worth seeing. Five hours on the road without a stop. But now I must pull off and take a photo.

It is colder up on the mountain. Sign said steep and crooked next 37 miles. Drive with care. What I am passing through is Arkansas’ Grand Canyon. All kinds of views and lookouts, in all directions. This road, AR 7, rides a ridge. It’s like New Mexico crossed with New England crossed with the rural, hilly parts of southern Missouri. Only downside I see is a relatively high number of stars-and-bars. Most per capita I’ve ever seen.

Lots of snow here. Some surfaces still slushy, even some ice. One could get into trouble passing through here during a winter storm. I didn’t realize there was any threat of winter weather. This could have been dicey yesterday. Now I wish I’d filled up with gas back in Harrison. I’m OK but if I had to do it again, I’d take the tank back to full before driving this pass. And that’s what this is. A mountain pass.

Down from the mountain. Over the Illinois Bayou. Eleven miles to Russellville.

VI. The First Visit, Part One

All of those DVDs and Legos. Skin and bones. Phil could hardly walk because he could hardly walk but also because of all the stuff strewn and stacked about the place. I didn’t see many books but there were a few. Energy drink bottles, disposable masks, blankets, slippers. Unopened boxes of Legos.

“I didn’t have the heart to tell him no,” Chuck said.

Phil sat on a couch in the front room of the place, big TV going. He had a port in his chest, stabbed in there antiseptic between breastbones. Fed through a tube, smoothie-looking stuff from a bag, some machine whirring.

The oxygen. He never had it in. I nearly tripped on the cord walking into the house. He was gonna put the nosepiece in to take some so he could stay awake but he fell asleep before he could do it. The Packers were safely leading San Francisco late, I was getting tired—I left.

The Niners tied it somewhere between there and here, then won it as I smoked at idle in the parking lot. On a last-second field goal. I used to like the Niners, and Phil did, too. But Chuck is a Packers fan.

Chuck bought a pizza for dinner at Phil’s place. It was a Papa John’s supreme and it was delicious.

In a moment of lucidity, Phil was saying something, making a suggestion, about painkillers? Did I want to try some? Maybe he thought I was trying to be funny. He wanted to try the pizza. I cut a piece in half, to make two skinny isosceles. I inhaled one and gave the other one to Phil. He tore some off the end, ate it.

Chuck came out from his bedroom in the back of the house.

“Is it OK to give Phil some pizza?”

“He won’t eat it.”

I had sliced the rest of Phil’s piece into smaller pieces. Phil didn’t eat any more after I did that, but right before I left he snagged a piece of sausage that had rolled free of its slice. I told him I saw what he had done. I hope he heard me. He didn’t say anything in response.

VII. The First Visit, Part Two

His nails were a little long but his hands looked alright. Not skinny like the rest of him but freckled, a good color. Still some good strength in his hands, too. He wore red, no-slip socks. I noted how similar his walk was to my dad’s, who is eighty, has dementia, and has nearly lost his ability to walk.

Phil had no ass left. He had very little waist. His lounge pants were falling off of him. His arms were very thin. He looked like what the GIs must have seen when they liberated the concentration camps in Europe near the end of World War II.

Among the endless piles, collections, and toys were an old Nintendo and many games. Old liquor bottles, special editions, Johnnie Walker “Game of Thrones.” He always was into special-edition-type stuff. Stuff gave him comfort. Phil is the only person I remember who got into those mini CDs when they were popular for a minute. He also had a lot of sneakers and a lot of hats.

Chuck said Phil was close to getting married a couple of times but Becca is the only person I can think of. And they never dated past college, never lived together.

But there are gaps in the timeline of our friendship when Phil and I were not in regular communication, if we were in communication at all. Chuck talked about the time Phil spent in Chicago, which is the time I think of as Phil’s dark stretch. I saw him a couple of times in 2005; he was taking classes for a Master’s degree at DePaul. Sometime after that he had a nervous breakdown, during which he threw a radiator out of a window. I didn’t know about this until Chuck told me. I knew it ended badly in Chicago for Phil but I never knew the details.

According to Chuck, Phil was on anti-psychotics. Some kind of synthetic anti-psychotic? To control his mania? And then he was also on Zoloft for depression. And something else for an over-active thryroid.

During this breakdown he went around the neighborhood handing out the contents of his wallet including his driver’s license and credit cards. Chuck said he went around and got all of them back.

Then there was some involvement Phil had in Chicago with the Albanian mob. What the hell was that? An unexplained extra cell phone. Chuck was at Phil’s when Phil was in the hospital and a couple of tough guys showed up and made threats. Chuck said he made threats right back.

There were two cats skanking around Phil’s place. Phil got a cat when he moved South Carolina post-Chicago. That cat was named Hemingway. He had that cat for years. Then he had other cats when he moved to Arkansas. He would feed stray cats, which bothered some of his neighbors and might have contributed to him being booted out of an apartment he had been living in before he moved to his current rental.

Phil had been wearing a hat when I got there but quickly changed hats as I was settling in. The second hat he had on was a Star Wars hat, which he wore backwards, the tag still on.

Phil still had his hair. He still had his big eyes and pronounced eyebrows, the same rusty/ruddy sort of red-brown, the same color as his hair, same as before. His hair was thinner but it was also quite long, as long as I’ve ever seen it. Maybe he grew it out after the last round of problematic chemo.

He was trying to write things down in a notebook so I could read them, so I could see what he was trying to say. He couldn’t really talk because of the pain in his throat; because of the all of the damage done by the tumor and the effort to remove it or shrink it away. He had no teeth left. They had all been pulled out, back in March. That was one of the first things that happened when his tumor was finally diagnosed. I say finally because he had gone to Urgent Care a couple of times complaining about a sore jaw and an ear ache. It was an ear infection, they said, or he had a sinus infection. Now his cheeks were all puffed out and he had a softball growing from the underside of his jaw.

Unfortunately, Phil’s writing was a tiny scrawl and he kept nodding off. I was able to read a few things he wrote right after I got there but mostly it was chicken scratch.

It occurs to me now that I missed one thing he had written, which was the word “Ebay.” A reference not to the online auction marketplace but rather to a fellow classmate of ours at Washington U, who at least between us was known as Ebay because her first and last initials were E. B. This was a sort of code we shared, a secret language between friends. We had code names for several people. Stats, Wolf, Flash. Becca was Big Boy, like the diner. Her last name started with a B, and was a type of food. Stats was in my statistics class. Wolf was from New Mexico. Flash’s last name was Gordon. Phil and I were sitting there trying to come up with some of these old names. There were others, now forgotten.

VIII. In-Room Coffee.

Couldn’t someone have told me this was a dry county? Damn. And Sunday on top of it. I have a few beers left in the cooler but if I’d have known there was no beer to buy here, I would’ve brought a little more. And a bottle of wine.

Status check. Sunday morning, 8:46. Pope County, Arkansas. Dry as a dead creek after a long drought. I presume—or I hope—I can have some more of the bonded Dickel that was on offer yesterday at Phil’s place.

That was a blue-collar neighborhood he was in for sure. Nothing fancy about it. Russellville has a gritty, no-nonsense feel to it. One thing I liked was the pastureland smack dab in the middle of town, straight across the road from the university, Arkansas Tech. Cattle grazing on winter-tan, beat-down pasture grass. Pretty.

And… housekeeping comes right into the room.

Tap tap tap. “What?”

Boom! She’s in the room. What the heck?!

I look around and there aren’t any “Do Not Disturb” hangtags to be found. Even if I were slated to check out of this room today—which I’m not; I just called the front desk to confirm—why would someone barge in at 8:54?

This has been a lousy morning. There does not appear to be any breakfast on offer down in the lobby. What the hell am I paying for here? The Courtyard in Russellville: keep on driving, folks.

Sheesh. I gotta get my train of thought back on the rails. I made one in-room coffee and now I have a cup of Via instant using the hot water from the in-room coffee maker. Breakfast so far has been raspberries and blueberries. I brought milk and granola up from the car as well. I’m not even using the fridge in the room. It’s got some sort of timer on it. Auto-off after eight hours or something. I don’t even want to mess with it.

I didn’t get to sleep until after midnight. It was mercifully quiet last night but at around six this morning the guest(s) above me began to stir. Clomp-clomp-clomp. I guess I wanted the fourth floor, not the third.

The clod-hopping continued for about two hours. What could require someone to walk around so much in a hotel room? Going back and forth amongst a mess of things, packing?

I plan to go back to Phil’s this afternoon, at three or four. Before then, I intend to get another workout on the treadmill. But before that I want to say at least one more thing about this hotel, this town, this place. No one’s got a mask on and everyone seems to be smoking cigarettes. So if I’ve got this right: don’t worry about coronavirus, and smoke all the damn cigarettes you want, but don’t you dare try to buy a six pack of beer anywhere near here. I don’t get it.

The river country, the canyonland, that landscape and its vistas from atop the ridge as I drove here from Missouri were spectacular but if I’m never back in this town or county in Arkansas again, great.

IX. Arkansas Nuclear One

In my brief research into the particulars of this county, I have learned that it is home to the only nuclear power plant in Arkansas. Which explains a lot. Yesterday, I noticed blue badge-shaped signs along the main drag affixed to various posts including those holding the signs telling you where to get on the interstate. These signs were indicating nuclear evacuation routes, which seemed unusual or oddly out of place. Was this the evacuation route for people to follow in the event of a nuclear attack?

I was confused but I didn’t give it much thought because I was busy looking for a gas station that offered not only top-tier gasoline but also the widest array of beer in town. Of course, I found the gasoline but not the beer.

Second, Chuck yesterday mentioned something about a nuclear plant in South Carolina. Phil moved here from South Carolina with his dad a few years back. I understood it had something to do with Chuck’s job but I didn’t know how, exactly. I didn’t realize Phil’s dad worked in some capacity related to the nuclear power industry. Maybe I knew that at one time and I forgot or mis-remembered. I am at a loss trying to think back and put it all together.

Now that I am thinking back to yesterday when I descended the ridge and drove into Russellville, I do recall a big billowy cloud on one horizon. Not a natural cloud but the type of cloud a power plant makes on a cold day, visible from far away. I’m looking this up.

Arkansas Nuclear One. Owned by Entergy. Began operations in 1974. Two units then, generating enough power to meet roughly 56% of the demand of Entergy Arkansas’ 700,000 customers. The company is one of the area’s main employers, with 900 full-time employees and 100 contractors. Pressurized water reactor. The licenses expire in 2034 and 2038. Cooling water from Lake Dardanelle; water recirculating in a 447-foot-tall cooling tower. Counties included in the emergency planning zone include Pope, Johnson, Yell, and Logan.

X. Housekeeping Redux.

I don’t want to forget Chuck saying something about his wife—and it is always “my wife” and never “Phil’s mom,” which I found—

Annnnd…..Housekpeeing is back in the room! OMG, I am about to flip. Tapping on the door again and then her card slips in and voila the door is open and I am sitting here writing and this woman has come into my room for the second time this morning!

I tell her I do not want service. She says I need a sign for the door. I say I very much want a sign for the door. I say I have called the front desk to request a sign for the door, which they said they would send, and they have not. She gives me a sign and I hang it on the freaking door.

Chuck told me last night that Phil grew up in Pennsylvania (probably near a nuclear plant) and only moved to Platteville (Wisconsin) as a…high schooler? Did I know this? I am struggling to remember what, if anything, Phil told me about living anywhere other than Wisconsin. Chuck was in the Navy. Did Phil ever say he moved around a lot as a child? Did he and I just not talk about this?

Chuck’s sense of how long Phil’s sober stretches were seems inflated. He spoke about Phil being sober for stretches of months, even a year. A sober stretch leading up to Daryouche’s wedding. Then there was an incident at the wedding and Phil fell off the wagon. There was some sort of fall-out from the wedding, but I don’t really know because I wasn’t there. I didn’t invite Phil to my wedding in 2005 because he had seemed especially volatile that summer. Then I didn’t talk to him for a few years, not until he moved to South Carolina. Where he was in re-hab a time or two. He would find his way into re-hab several more times, including in Arkansas.

XI. Rally the Troops -or- TWTR

I entered a contact request on the website of Phil’s high school buddy, Andrew Taggart. He is Phil’s friend who I met once in Evansville, Indiana, New Year’s Eve Y2K.

Andrew is (now) a Zen Buddhist practical philosopher. Meditation leader and speaker. I don’t have any idea when or if he might respond to a rando contact request dropped onto a website that indicated he wanted to hear from entrepreneurs, financiers, and venture capitalists.

I’m not any of those so I listed my title/role/occupation as “Friend of Phil Williams.”

Then I sent a text to Adam, an old mutual friend of both Phil and me. Phil hooked us up. Adam and I had both signed up for an English criticism class with a woman named Lisa Eck. This was an oddball English lit/criticism class that exposed me to a bunch of poetry I ended up liking. I was just starting to smoke marijuana and I was writing some crazy (good) essays for this class and at least one other. Adam and I had almost nothing to do with one another until late in the semester. At some point I realized that the guy from my English crit class was a friend of Phil’s; they were in the same fraternity.

Then I took to Twitter, where I had not been active in over a year. Not since firing off an angry tweet at Missouri senator Josh Hawley in the wake of the attempted coup on January 6, 2021. I went onto Twitter to reach out to another old mutual friend, whose name I am not going to use. Instead, I’ll refer to this person as “the association.”

I met the association through Ultimate Frisbee. But in time he and Phil became really good friends. In fact, I’d say that at their peak they were much more closer than I ever was with either of them. They lived together for years; in two different cities. First along Melville in St. Louis then again in Chicago.

Yesterday I asked Phil what, in his recollection, led to a connection between us. He did mention The X-Files. And we did start to go on outings once I opened up, as a person, to the floor. Once I

—egad, derailed by checking back in to TWTR to find a nasty reply from the association. Damn. He took this opportunity to attack my integrity as a friend. Which hurts. I’m stunned.

He thanked me for the heads up about Phil’s condition but said he didn’t need any moralizing from me about how to be a good friend. It was something like, “Thanks for the news about Phil but as far as the advice about how to be a good friend, from you? Not so much.”

Ouch. Back in 2008 or 2009 he perjured himself when the FBI asked him about illegally distributed campaign materials. In a vague voicemail he asked me if I could help him with a legal matter. By that time, I had started to work for Raymond James and I couldn’t practice law so I never responded. I thought he was asking me for help getting a divorce.

I regret not calling him back. I told the association I was sorry when I saw him in San Francisco in 2012. He had also asked me to write a letter to his sentencing judge, hoping for a mitigated punishment. I waited until the last minute but I did write and submit a letter on his behalf. He and his lawyer didn’t like the letter I wrote, and they didn’t use it. But I did write one for him. If he were this hacked off at me about his legal trouble and my inability to help him, why didn’t he confront me about it in person in San Francisco? Or reach out to me otherwise since then?

That was a low-down, despicable thing for him to say to me. All I did was tell him that Phil was on his deathbed and could use a phone call. So much for getting onto TWTR for the first time in a year. I haven’t had any communication with the association in ten years. I can’t recall ever asking the guy for a single thing in all the time I’ve known him. I did go to his wedding, which Phil wasn’t at. And I went on a float with him and his other friends as a sort of bachelor party on the way to Tennessee where he got married. I was sick as a dog on that float with dysentery or something I had contracted after a recent trip to the Dominican Republic. But I kept it to myself so as not to ruin everyone else’s good time.

Chuck asked me to “Rally the troops.” He wanted people to call Phil. I reached out to anyone I could think of. One of them took the opportunity to stab me in the back. Association, if you were trying to hurt me, congratulations. Mission accomplished.

XII. The Other Side of the Coin

On the very flippest side of the coin, I did hear back almost immediately from Andrew. He sent a group text to me and to Phil.

Andrew told Phil that he loved him. He told Phil that he would always be in his heart, and would always be his friend. Damn, that’s pretty good. Things have a way of evening out, I guess. Just like on that episode of Seinfeld, the Even Steven episode. Elaine loses her job, gets dumped, loses her apartment. George gets a job with the Yankees after telling a beautiful woman he was unemployed and lived with his parents.

But, I can’t lie, and I can’t hide it. I am still stinging with that random rebuke. I’m just going to try to write it out. It’s not like my message to the association said something like, “If you’re a good friend you’ll do XYZ.” It said, “Phil is about to die. I know he burned a lot of bridges but if you can share a memory with him, that might help. His dad is here but otherwise he is going to die alone.”

I have wandered blindly and naively into the past. Where nothing is forgotten. There is no new, only the old coming back around again. Hungry jaw, hungry ghost, stuck on this spinning earth.

XIII. Back up the Mountain

A large, headless bird headed straight at me. Appearing headless. An eagle. It never gets old.

I got a decent view of the cooling tower just before I hung a right, headed out of Russellville. Headed north, toward the mountain. I queued up a new podcast from the BBC, about the Q-Anon conspiracy. It starts in 1993, with Bill and Hillary, in Arkansas. Coincidence?

I am headed back up the mountain. It is sunny, the sky is clear, it’s a crisp 39°. I did a terrible job peeling an egg while driving out of town. Don’t worry, there wasn’t anyone behind me and I was driving slow. But I don’t want to stop. I just want to keep on moving.

I saw Phil again yesterday afternoon. He was just so damn sleepy. I ended up talking a lot more to Chuck than I did to Phil.

Phil received a handful of calls, texts, and voicemails. They went to his phone anyway. I guess Phil listened to them. I’m not really sure. It gets dark so early. He wanted to watch a movie so he fired one up.

It was “The Prestige,” with Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, and Michael Caine. A movie about magicians. I had never seen it. We didn’t get all of the way through it, though, so the ending will remain a mystery. Phil fell asleep. I patted his arm, told him I loved him, and said goodbye to him for the rest of our lives. What else was there to do?

I’ll just put the pen down now and keep my eyes on the road. There’s that sign again. Next 43 miles, crooked and steep.

–MO/AR, 2022.

XIV. Photos

Postscript. There’s a lot I left out of this, and almost certainly some things I’ve gotten wrong or remembered incorrectly. One thing I didn’t mention was just how good a writer Phil was. And how much I enjoyed the times he and I did collaborate on writing in the early 2010’s, especially.

There was a stretch when I was posting accounts of dreams I had to my website. Phil started emailing me responses to these dreams. His own interpretation of them. Or he would pick up on a thread from my dream and take it in some different direction. He was kooky like that. Creative, inventive, singular.

And I was editing Phil’s writing. I took it upon myself to post Phil’s work to a blog that I ran for him. He wrote some really good journals when he was in re-hab in Arkansas.

I’m posting below two links. One is to Phil’s site. And another is a link to my dream journal entries, some of which include links to Phil’s responses (he had an alias of “cbw” so that’s him, the cbw).

Phil’s site

Dream journal entries with links to Phil’s caustic responses