Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
3
Billy “Salad” Joseph
Wednesday, July 27, Walla Walla, Washington
B
illy died yesterday. The funeral is Sunday, and I have to decide whether to interrupt
my ride and fly to Los Angeles. I'm inclined not to. I was with him less than a month
ago, and I said good-bye then.
That was a dark weekend. I went to visit with my friend Bobby Ball—we met almost
forty years ago, when he was Billy's college roommate. We found him weak and dis-
tracted, in seemingly permanent discomfort and occasionally delirious. His stomach was
bloated, his eyes vacant, his voice small and far away. His midsection was riddled with
cancer, and he bellowed in agony at regular intervals. He slept only fitfully, with the help
of drugs, and drama accrued to that as well. Often deluded and hallucinating, Bill had
a prescription for morphine tablets, but persuading him to take them was an exercise in
black absurdity. We'd put a pill in his palm and he'd stare it.
“This isn't a pill,” he'd say, pointing at the pill. “This isn't a pill.”
“What is it, Bill?”
“I don't know,” he'd say.
“Take the pill, Bill. You'll feel better.”
“No. No. This isn't a pill.”
This happened half a dozen times. It would go on for ten minutes before he would
swallow a pill, which allowed him to sleep for a while.
Bill was angrily divorced two years ago, but his ex-wife, Sophia, had invited him back
home in his illness, and she was exhausted by the caretaking and the emotional strain.
Their two children, Andrew, who is fourteen, and Sharon, twelve, were pretending to
live their normal lives, though the specter of their father stalking the halls in his bath-
robe, clearly in pain, was nowhere near normal.
