Douglas Fisher

Two weeks after Vivian’s death I am sad and heavy, coming to terms with loss, but thinking about Will ClenDening too, escaping from remembering that I won’t talk to Vivian in the same way again, feelings I’ve already experienced with Will.

The second time that I remember Will was a Saturday evening in the summer of 2003. I had left St. Henry’s in Nashville, and was riding down West End after 9:00 PM. In my motorcycle’s rear-view mirror I saw a small truck run a red light in the distance behind me, and it was catching up fast – it put me on guard, as well it should. At the next light, around St. Thomas hospital, the truck caught me at a red light, and this time the truck stopped; I didn’t look left for fear of encouraging the lunatic, but after it rolled beside me I heard Will’s voice – “Hey, Doug, can I come to your place tonight?!” I looked at him, relieved; he seemed desperate and vulnerable. He had heard at St. Henry’s that I was having friends over to watch “John Carpenter’s The Thing” and he needed to be with people, and his friend Geoff told him to catch me, because Geoff was out of town or otherwise unavailable for reasons I can’t remember, and neither of them knew where I lived and neither knew my number – they just knew there would be understanding people at my place. Will followed me to my apartment and within moments, thankfully, because I was more tongue-tied in those days, Vivian arrived – the first of the guests, and for some time the three of us talked. The others came and we enjoyed the laughs, scares, and curiosities of “John Carpenter’s The Thing.” I remember Will leaving that night – happy and thankful though I can’t remember the precise issues that brought him to my door. I just know that Vivian gave him some sistering and that I gave him some brothering.

I know that I’d seen and talked to Will in the two years between that Saturday night and our first meeting in summer 2001 – I just can’t cite specifics. It was on a Friday night that I remember Will for the first time – as blindly angry and vocal a young man as I have ever encountered – it was F this and F that, and F everything else, railing against his boss at the Green Hills cinema and something about a customer who was irate at the lack of hot dogs near closing time, and his boss telling him that he’d have to go get a box from downstairs and get a hot dog ready pronto, and F that and blah, blah, blah – such anger, such drama. I joked after that I would think twice about getting a hotdog next time I was at Green Hills, and he shot me a look of hatred. The contrast of that ranting 21 year old in 2001 and the openly vulnerable character in 2003 is remarkable, but there was more change to come.

After that Saturday night gathering in 2003, Will and I became close friends … among that handful of “best” friends for which further ordinal distinctions make no sense. Will and I had a lot in common, though we were a good 20 years apart in physical age. Will was an artist, but he was an engineer too – he was some wonderful melding of both artist and engineer (http://perambulating.blogspot.com/2006/06/will-clendening.html). When I asked my mother for her old defibrillator and pacemaker (http://www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/~dfisher/good-deed.html), after her originals had been replaced, it was Will that I had in mind – excitedly we bantered about them as the basis of an artistic work. He asked me about computers too — what was possible with them. He expressed an interest in adding computer programming and graphics to his artistic tool chest. Will wanted to somehow visualize the way that a computer processed text. He asked me how text was represented in a computer. I told him about ASCII binary codes, where each character (e.g., letter, digit, punctuation) is represented as 8 bits (1’s and 0’s) or 1 byte. He thought of using a light source to flash on and off, representing 1’s and 0’s, the ASCII representations of the sequence of characters that made up a text — I think that we talked about doing this for the dictionary and some novel. We talked about this sequencing of flashing light being analogous to Morse code. I showed him a byte of memory (i.e., enough memory to store just a single CHARACTER of text) from an old, circa-1960 IBM 700-series computer. This REALLY excited him. This one byte was as big as small laptops of today that can store billions of bytes (or characters). It had 8 vacuum-tubes along the top, one for each bit. He imagined installing banks of 8-lights each (each light about the size of a Christmas light) in a dark room, and the banks of lights going off in rapid succession, perhaps with some parallelism, each bank representing a character of text. Perhaps visitors could type in text that would be translated to ASCII, byte representation and displayed. The basic idea of translating between representations or between modalities of perception was behind some of his other projects, like one in which bar codes were translated to audio.

Will and I shared art and engineering (because I too am a melding of both artist and engineer), other intellectual and artistic experiences, late night coffee and smokes, and close friends. But through all this we shared emotional and spiritual growing up, side by side, albeit from life circumstances and perspectives more than 20 years apart, which quite frankly doesn’t do much to distinguish people so far as I can tell, made obvious when you’ve been stripped of comforts and safeties. We were ‘childhood’ friends, but with the advantage of “knowing what we know now”. If I was a father figure to Will, it was only for an instant, during some phase transition, perhaps an older-brother figure for some period, but in the last 6 months or so of his life it was simply friendship. Will was coming to terms with his past (http://jphilwilson.blogspot.com/2006/01/return.html), and becoming comfortable with himself, and I was there to affirm that, as Will affirmed me – he told me, at one point, that what I did in response to my own trials was fine, by which he meant that I was on a path with integrity, even if there were missteps along the way. We took care of other friends together, and he and others took care of me, and vice versa. I was proud that Will was my friend, and I think that he felt similarly. In this same final period, Will took a great interest in motorcycles; he often asked me about them and the lifestyle of the daily rider, depending on two wheels and your feet, power and vulnerability side by side. Part of the joy of becoming an adult man I think is to openly acknowledge the adolescent. He bought a used motorcycle from a friend about a couple of months before he died, and took the safety course at Nashville Tech.

The last time that I saw Will ClenDening was the morning of June 3, 2006 at about 9:30 AM. He, Mark, and an acquaintance of theirs from safety school had come to my McGill apartment on the Vanderbilt campus at about 6:00AM that Saturday. I had blueberry coffee waiting for them and Will walked in, breathed the aroma deep, and said “I don’t care what anyone says, I love this blueberry coffee.” In truth, virtually everyone does. We drank coffee, talked about motorcycles I’m sure, because the three of them were new to riding, and headed to Green Hills to meet up with Deirdre and her pre-adolescent daughter, Emma, who would follow us by car down Hillsboro Pike, cutting over on old TN-46 to Leipers Fork, where we planned on breakfast as Puckett’s. It was foggy and cool. I saw in my rear-view mirror our little caravan spread out the during the 15 mile drive, disappearing in the curves, and reappearing after a time in the straight-aways – never out of sight for too long. 

At Puckett’s we sat in the front, looking out on the bright day at “main street”, all fog having lifted. We clowned around, hamming it up for Emma, and jabbing each other with old jokes between us, and then caravanned again down Natchez Trace, heading towards Highway 100, where we planned to turn towards town. We pulled to the side, and said goodbye to Deirdre and Emma. Mark, Will, and their friend wanted to continue on – it was a beautiful day, but I decided to head back to see friends at Westminster, as originally planned. I left them there, Will to finish a smoke, and rounded the turn onto Hwy 100, but pulled into a gas station at the junction, south of the Loveless Hotel, and waited for my friends to leave from behind the ridge, take the same curve I had, but turn west. I waited, got off and paced, but never saw them take that turn, and left for Nashville after about 15 minutes.  

At about Noon, Will’s friend Chris walked into Westminster, pulled me aside, and told me that Will had died in a motorcycle wreck about an hour before. I was stunned, disbelieving for hours, until I talked to Mark, who had seen Will’s body pulled from under the van that hit him, through no fault of the van’s driver. I went to see Mark that evening, who was devastated. Within a day or two, perhaps that same day, but I think it took me longer to confess it, I told Mark of my fear of guilt that perhaps I had contributed to an atmosphere of carelessness – we talked about my feelings, his feelings, and projected how the driver felt. He explained what had happened, as best he could, for he had been riding ahead of Will. I met Will’s father at Fido’s coffee house, and he gave me a copy of the accident report. Will’s bike had laid down on a curve; Will, with bike, had slid across the centerline and been hit by an oncoming van; Will had died instantly. Geoff, Mark, Chris, and I were pallbearers at Will’s funeral at modest St Mark’s, and I doubt that church had ever seen so many people. Will, like Vivian, had an ocean of friends and other well-wishers, and they packed the sanctuary and auxiliary rooms to beyond capacity. Will was revered in several communities. Two weeks after Will died, Mark and I rode to the accident site, coming from the opposite direction. I was surprised that it was a modest, harmless looking curve. I snapped pictures while Mark looked on absently. Before we left I rode down a mile, and then back the way that Will had come. The curve wasn’t banked, somewhat obscured by brush, following a prolonged straightaway. Riding it, I understood how easy it would be to slip in a way that I had not appreciated by looking.  

In the weeks following the funeral, I would tear up often, and remember sobbing once. I was depressed for several months, not rising when I woke, usually at 4 or 5 AM, but laying in bed for hours afterward. I was missing Will, but beyond that I was heartbroken by mortality. My friendship with Vivian was an important reason for my coming out of that depression. In the years I knew him, Will was authentic in his expression of feeling. Early on, he was angry, and I’m sure that that authenticity was responsible for his rapid growth – there was very little “faking it” about Will. He showed the world what he was, and he therefore let the world change him. This authenticity was also what attracted so many to him – they said so. At the end of his life Will was an authentic man, some warts, and pretty darn comfortable with them. “Judge not, Will, lest ye be judged!”

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Jesus said: “If spirit made flesh, it is a marvel. But if flesh made spirit, it is a marvel of marvels. Indeed, I am amazed that such great wealth dwells in such poverty”. (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 29)

“None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness and into the light”. (Dean Koontz, One Door Away From Heaven)

I’m so very thankful that I share my life with Will and Vivian. I cry more freely now.