Another October…

…without a good friend to everyone but himself, Billy; who appeared nightly on the boards of a thousand happy hours.

October 10, 1943 – August 26, 1983

…since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be with you all.

- “The Parting Glass”, after the Clancy Brothers

Avoirdupois, Billy, may some celestial bartender forever pour you Elysian liquor, never collecting the tab.

Last Call – Again

The heat of summer is beginning to lose a little of its punch, as August has given way to September, leaves are beginning to turn, and in this long-running drought, to fall a bit earlier than normal. As I do in these weeks every year, I remember my friend the late Billy Phillips, actor, comedian, raconteur. Sometime in the small hours of August 26, in 1983, Billy died in his sleep. The following October 10th would have been his fortieth birthday.

He was four days out of the hospital, after a three-week stay following a cluster of heart attacks which required two rounds with a defibrillator. Billy had arrived at the hospital emergency room a month earlier, feeling the onset of something very wrong, barely had time to tell the admissions clerk that he thought he was having a heart attack, and at that moment collapsed. The emergency staff hustled him into the nearest treatment room and began the intensive care that prolonged Billy’s life for three weeks and four days.

Friends and family gathered, and once Billy was moved to a room, that room became “Club Billy” for the rest of his stay. Billy entertained his callers, in his element, able to forget his looming mortality doing what he did best, telling stories, making jokes, putting on a few of his many characters. He was a performer. He may have suspected that this was the last play, and when this particular performance closed, his personal theatre would go permanently dark.

Since the patient was without family in town, or funds, friends volunteered to house him and watch over him in his convalescence, which officially commenced on a Monday. His father went home to Pennsylvania, and the first watch went on duty. Calder, the husband of the host couple, had been practically a brother to Billy when they were young. Calder’s family had given the young Billy a home, so that he could finish high school in Chattanooga, following his father’s transfer out of town. Billy was home, again.

Friday came, and the second shift of friends were on deck to take Billy in. The night before, his first shift had stayed up late with Billy, who had other old friends visiting that night, telling old stories, remembering good times and laughing much. Billy mentioned that he had a toothache starting, and was pretty tired. The friends wished each other good night, and so to bed.

The next morning, Calder and Betsy, his wife, went to work, careful not to wake the sleeping Billy. Betsy prepared Billy’s lunch, covering the plate and leaving it in the refrigerator, with a note reminding Billy of a follow-up doctor’s appointment that afternoon.

Betsy called to check on Billy at mid-day, and there was no answer. She called again. still no answer. Uneasy, she called her son who worked close to the house, and could get there quickly. A short wait which seemed long to her, and her son called back to say that Billy was in bed, blue and cold. Sometime after taking his toothache to bed, Billy had died.

Twenty-five years ago, and I remember hearing of his death as clearly as if it were yesterday. The news rippled out through the extended network of Billy’s friends, and funeral plans were made and carried out. A memorial service in Chattanooga at the funeral home, and burial the next day in Augusta, Georgia, the home of Billy’s mother’s family, where the family plot in an old cemetery had room for another member.

This upcoming October 10th, Billy would have turned 65. He would have had witty things to say, jokes at his own expense mostly, and mordantly funny references to mortality. But on that August early morning long ago, his own last call stopped age and decay and all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Billy usually finished his many evenings on the town at David’s, a bar now defunct, a few blocks away from his apartment. As the bartender called “last call” Billy would down his final beer, and with a lopsided, confiding sort of smile wend his way into the darkness. I have always thought it was probably around that same time, two-thirty a.m. on August 26th, 1983, that he made his final exit.

Selah.

The Springs of Grief

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

from Spring and Fall: To a young child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The above lines more and more come to mind as I grow older. In the natural course of a life, you encounter oftener the deaths of those you know the older you get. First the older members of your family, grandparents and great uncles, and their coevals, die. Since you are likely to be young when those older folks die, you may not mull over the implications of their deaths and your reactions overmuch.

Another Birthday without Its Honoree

William Joseph Phillips, III

October 10, 1943 to August 26, 1983

On August 26, 1983, I, and all the rest of a goodly company, learned that our friend Billy Phillips had died. Inheritor of a genetic predisposition for early heart disease, Billy only fitfully took care of his health. In the words of an old epitaph I once saw in a Massachusetts cemetery, “He ate and drank, and sinned and suffered, and squeezed his orange very dry.” Billy would have been forty the following October 10th. He had extracted the most he could from his short life.

On a Sunday of fierce heat, a packed funeral home chapel heard a eulogy for Billy, celebrating his paradoxical nature, as thunder grumbled and then crashed overhead, followed by torrents of rainfall. Billy did not go gently into that good night. Reluctantly, he loosed his grip on the world, and left much grief behind. For those of us of a like age, the departure of a friend by natural causes was a sobering experience. Mostly, though, we grieved for the departure of a unique friend, compact of wit, sorrow, joy, vigorous appetites and an imperfect sense of his own value to hundreds of friends.

Ah, Billy, you hardly knew yourself.

Now it is twenty-three years since Billy, an accomplished comedic actor and raconteur, trod the boards of his natural theatre, the scattered bars of a thousand happy hours, where he raised a host of characters from his prodigious imagination. He gave, and gave, and gave again, and his admirers were not sated, they laughed and shouted, “More, Billy, more.” Finally, there was no more to give. The candle had guttered out at both ends, and Billy slipped away in his sleep (found by the son of his friends, in whose house he was recuperating from a massive heart attack, the next morning. Blue of face and cold of body.)

As the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem sang back in the sixties, when Billy and his friends were young,

Oh, all the comrades that e’er I had
They’re sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e’er I had
They’d wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be with you all.

Tonight Babs and I will lift a parting glass to you, Charming Billy.

Billy and the Misadventure of the Baptist and Reflector

Billy often pulled tricks of his own, usually involving impersonation of some sort, as his skills lay in acting and doing different accents. Now, there was one stunt, involving a small restaurant which I will call the Tea Shoppe, much favored by Junior League types and various artsy folk for lunch, which did not work out quite the way Billy intended. The co-owner and manager was a woman whose husband had known Billy since childhood, and both he and his wife were well-disposed towards Billy and amused by his antics. This state of amusement did not survive the Lunch of the Baptist and Reflector Staff.

Billy, as I have said, had perfected the unctuous delivery of the Southern Evangelical Preacher. One morning, up at an unaccustomed, early hour, Billy hatched a Plan. Picking up the telephone, Billy called the Tea Shoppe, where staff was already preparing for the lunch hour. Asking for the manager, Billy put on his most oily preacher accent and explained that the staff of the Baptist and Reflector, the official journal of the Tennessee Southern Baptist Convention, were in Chattanooga for a Retreat, and had heard such good things about the Tea Shoppe that Brother Goodbody wondered if the restaurant could accommodate a party of 24 at noon for lunch? Somewhat of a challenge for a place that seated 60-70 at one time if all the patrons were real friendly with one another, but ambition rose to the challenge, and the gracious hostess assured Brother Goodbody that, yes, if the group would agree on one selection from the menu to facilitate service, this could be done.

So it was arranged, and as Billy hung up the phone and cackled to himself, his friend and resturanteur was already hastily inventorying her stocks and making a list of things to get from her suppliers, since all the food was not in stock in the quantities she required. With the time before lunch so short, the determined woman herself jumped into her car and made the rounds of her suppliers, returning just in time to set up for lunch and begin food prep.

Meanwhile, Billy had called up a friend of his and explained his wonderful joke, inviting Andy to accompany him to the Tea Shoppe to watch the fun. Andy had misgivings. But curiosity won out and he arrived at the Tea Shoppe with Billy about 11:45. As they came through the door, Billly and Andy saw the owner craning her neck to see who was arriving, and immediately going back to her work when she saw it was only Billy and friend. Stationed where they could watch the intently working manager, Billy and Andy were entertained by the increasing agitation of the poor woman. Andy nervously prompted Billy to tell the woman the truth, and end her agony. Billy did so. The resulting explosion and chewing out left Billy a shattered man. He may have amused himself, but what he went through in the five minutes before he fled the restaurant erased any memory of how funny it had been.

Billy eventually wormed his way back into good graces at The Tea Shoppe, by the expedient of persuading another friend of his, the food editor of a local paper, to run an interview with him about his diet, which high blood pressure had forced on him in the months after the Baptist and Reflector Incident. In the interview, Billy was fawningly complimentary of The Tea Shoppe, its menu, so helpful to a dieter, and the wonderful staff and management.

Billy was allowed back into The Tea Shoppe. But they kept an eye on him from then on.

Billy and Jedidiah

Among the friends of my youth, early twenties, actually, Billy was so ubiquitous that I sometimes forget that I never knew him when we were growing up. Billy became the indispensable “extra man” at social events among those of my generation who valued bars, bands and amateur entertainment, which always got better at closing time, especially when Billy was present. Billy often had girlfriends, but not usually for long. So he was often available for filling out dinner parties and foursomes. He was intermittently employed in various real-estate sorts of business, mostly in providing appraisals and title abstracts, although he occasionally sold a property, just not very often.

“Billy” is actually his real name, and as he left no family here in Chattanooga, and sadly it has been 23 years (damn, that long?) since he died, I won’t invent a name for Billy. But I won’t use his last name, either. Oh, he was a friend of Jack Gunn, among legions of others. I once told Billy, late one night when he was depressed at his precarious existence, that he could walk up to any one of several hundred houses in Chattanooga, even that late at night, and be welcomed with joy and plied with affection, booze and food, more or less in that order. That was a true statement. Billy was everybody’s best friend but his own.

His early death just over a month short of his 40th birthday surprised nobody, although there was grief in full measure in all of those hundreds of houses. Of the four siblings in his mother’s family, three died in their early forties of heart disease. Billy died in his sleep at a friend’s house, where he was trying to recuperate from a series of massive heart attacks. Though quite aware of the odds against him due to his genetic weakness, Billy had never moderated his lifestyle other than one six-month period when he was 38, when he went on the wagon and dieted down to a healthy weight. It didn’t last.

Billy made a living at his real estate businesses, and could have done much better had he worked harder at it, but that was his “day job,” his real occupation was entertainer. Billy did Little Theatre, he did commercials, mostly for local businesses (for which he got some pay, not much), and he talked sometimes of going to New York and seriously pursuing acting. He never left Chattanooga. Besides his more formal gigs, Billy appeared nightly on the boards, the boards, I mean, of many bars for “happy hours” that stretched into the night. And past closing time. Billy was well acquainted with closing time.

Nightly, his loyal, boozy audiences laughed and teased him, and asked for his many set pieces, such as the preacher of the “Full Gospel Holy Ghost Tabernacle of Baptised by Fire Redemption (and we give Green Stamps).” As the spirit moved him, other characters might appear, such as Meyer, the Jewish liquor store owner who assured the crowd that Billy’s name was in his list of good (credit-worthy) customers, “If your name’s in the book, you’re good, I tell Billy, he is such a fine customer.” This got a huge laugh from the crowd, who were all well aware of Billy’s chronic lack of funds.

Now, Jedidiah. I never met Jedidiah, and know of no person other than Billy who did. Billy often spoke fondly of “the old family retainer” who was devoted to him. But Jedidiah existed to answer the telephone and screen Billy’s calls. Due to the above-mentioned chronic fundless state, many of the calls were from folks who didn’t think Billy’s name should be in any book but a bill-collector’s casebook. Such callers were told by Jedidiah that “Dat boy be gone off out of town, say he goin’ on a job, but ain’t no tellin’.” Jedidiah was also given to grumbling to the callers his discontent at not being paid for varying lengths of time. Jedidiah was very sympathetic to the creditors, but unable to help them. Oddly enough, usually only the creditors talked to Jed. If a friend called Billy, the phone would pick up and an indeterminate noise or cough would sound, until the friend said something like “Is that you, Billy?” Immediately Billy would speak up, and conversation would proceed as normal.

Jedidiah was heard much less in later years, when Billy had bought an answering machine. Occasionally a close friend of Billy might hear Jed’s voice on Billy’s phone, as usual complaining, and sounding very much like he had been into Billy’s liquor. “You know what that boy done? He never tol’ me that Pres’dint Lincorn done freed my people, oh, LONG ago.” But that was all. And after Billy’s death, Jedidiah seemed to have finally found his forty acres and a mule. We never heard a thing from him. I expect in spite of his complaining, the old man suffered from a broken heart.