More about Bill...

I know this writing about Bill things is partly a cathartic act, but I also want to share things about the man that I feel need to be shared... because... Bill.

I felt selfish when I told The Pie on Monday that not having Bill around makes me feel so terribly alone.  He was the only messenger left from the old guard in the "Uptoon" or "The Jar" (as he would call it).  Sure, I see folks from back in the day like Bill Nye and Leaf Life on the regular.  Occasionally, I bump into The Citizen, Little Mikey, The Dude, Mills, Eric "PMBAR Honcho" Wever (yeth, him), but Bill has pretty much remained the only constant.

Bill and his #1 rookie, The Wonderboy

Whether or not it was muttered, spoken aloud, or just understood, Bill and I had a competition.  It was always a healthy yet very unhealthy at the same time competition.  We were both counting on being the last messenger standing.  Now that I've won the race, I have truly lost "the race."

Photo cred: Bill... obvs.  Ten years ago.  Obvs?

Ever since I met Bill, we'd kinda had this thing.  He used to drive his Jeep to work when he first started messengering.  He saw me riding to work once and asked me if I did it every day.  I told him I did, but mostly because that's just what I do.  He'd commuted on bikes before (one of his former commutes that he described in this podcast (that you should totally listen to) sounded absolutely idyllic), but not in a shit stain like the bike-unfriendly Charlotte streets of the late '90s.  So just like that, he was riding to work every day too.

Because he would just do that.

He and I had pure shit commutes in Charlotte back then, before bike lanes and bike friendly routes with connectivity and bike racks on buses and...

It just sucked.  Obviously, bikes weren't on the city's agenda yet.

If you ever spoke to Bill about his commute, he would always talk about the Albemarlian Traverse, a sketchy section that I used to share with him (a long time ago) where you had to make the decision to cross two lanes of rush hour traffic so you could take neighborhood roads the rest of the way in or just commit to the narrow, hilly, four lane gauntlet down Central Ave... all while the drivers behind you seemed to be letting Jesus take the wheel instead of watching where they were going.

It was a lose-lose decision either way.

Anyways...

We both wore shorts year round.  We just did (well there were those awkward "capri years" we don't speak of)... until age and our inability to accept physical limitations caught up to us... but even then, we surrendered to knee warmers and that was as far as we were willing to take the "pants thing."

We both wore SPD sandals... year round.  I guess we were inspired by the messenger we called Flip Flop... because you guessed it, he wore flip flops.  Pure. Genius.

Shirts are for work and work is for jerks... also shoes.

I'm pretty sure at some point we made it into a competition to see who could go the deepest into winter with naked feet parts.  It got to the point that all four of our respective heels were developing cracks (more like fissures), and it hurt to walk around barefoot on hardwood floors before we allowed for socks when things got into the low 20s... mostly just for the commute to work tho.

If we were mountain biking, and I showed up for a two hour ride with one bottle and he had two, he'd pour one on on the ground.... and he'd finish the ride with half a bottle left over.  We headed out for a night ride in Tsali at dusk, and it came down to who could be the last one to turn on his light... because we were grown ass men with brains.  When we both were goofing off with fixed gear mountain bikes, I returned from Wilson Creek and after trying to ride down the steepest section of (old) Sinkhole, I proclaimed that a trail could actually be too steep to ride.

So naturally Bill went to Wilson Creek on his fixed gear and took a go at the steepest part of Beehive.  I didn't witness it, but standing down at the bottom, I heard his multiple incidents, trying, wrecking, getting back on...

Yeth, some things are too steep.  No one wins this round.

No one ever really "won" anything, when I think about it.

He's the reason that I did my first and only double century.  I plotted a route on a paper NC State map that was close enough to two hundred miles.  Member those tiny numbers on maps that would tell you how far each section of road was?  I member.

Bill showed up at my house before dawn.  His left Campagnolo brake hood heavily padded with all sorts of half-assery that we came up the day before...

Why?

Oh yeah.  Earlier that week, Bill had almost sliced his thumb off trying to tighten his front skewer... while riding.  It's what you do.  Regardless, we planned on doing this thing, and Bill wasn't not gonna do it.  Unfortunately, Bill relied on my planning skills, and being that I'd used a North Carolina map to plan a route that dipped into the less detailed portion of the map in South Carolina, I had no idea that we would be going through the Sand Hills region in the heat of the day.

You know what they have in Sand Hills?

Hills.  Lots of hills.  Probably sand too, I guess.  The baking sun submerging our eyes in salty sweat made it hard to see a whole lot around us.

Different adventure but Bill and his paper map because he refused to do that particular ride with information from an "internet."

Bill and his continually throbbing thumb kept moving forward.  We way underestimated our food needs, and our pace continued to drop well below what I'd anticipated.  It started getting dark.  We turned the blinkies back on, but the one I had loaned to Bill went dead.  Mine started dying as well.

It got dark.  It wasn't supposed to... according to the plan.  But it did.

I took the position in the rear, and whenever I felt like a car was coming, I pulled out the blinky outta my jersey pocket, turned it on... car goes by... turn it off.  Over and over.  I don't know how long we were out there that day, but it took us hours longer than we'd planned.  None of those things mattered tho, because Bill had this hard-headed way of always getting things done, and I was always willing to be there with him.

It wasn't the first time we were in a "situation," and it certainly wasn't the last.  One thing that I always knew was that Bill would never give up on me and I would never give up on him.  Ever.

We were that kinda friends.

Member when you and I trespassed across the roof of (what is now) the Wake Forest University building so we could get a better look at the implosion of City Fair RIGHT ACROSS COLLEGE STREET and they had to halt the countdown with just seconds to go because two idiots trespassed across the roof of (what is now) the Wake Forest University building so they could get a better look at the implosion of City Fair?

Member the next day at work when people asked us if we were the guys the showed up on the helicopter footage that it seemed like everyone in Charlotte saw on the local news?

I member.  I also member the cheers from all the crowds on the parking decks looking down on us, so it wasn't all our fault, emmaright?

Is there a statute of limitations on that one?  Can the crowds share the jail time?  Thank dawg cell phone cameras and YouTube didn't exist back then.

Although Covid has me feeling slightly different about the topic, another thing I shared with Bill was that the only way we were ever calling in sick was if we weren't conscious... which means someone else was making the call, I guess.  As fate would have it, he was there when it happened to me.

Long story short, I woke up in the street in a pool of blood around my head.  I was just on my way to work...

And then Bill rolls up.  Of course.  This was when we had a shared commute and my day started slightly earlier.  I think Bill was there before the cops... and the medics.  He captured the moment with his camera (which he almost always carried), and then I called in "unconscious" to work.

Bill's bike doing the B.O.B. trailer lean behind me.

Besides, my front wheel (along with a large portion of my two front teeth) were missing.   Seemed like a good time to call it a day.

For Bill, the closest he probably came to calling in "sick" was when he broke his collarbone on a Tuesday night urban ride.  He borrowed the brace I'd had from when I broke mine, his wife added on to the straps to make room for his broad shoulders, and he was back at work the next day.  Since then, I've seen him at work, white as a ghost, covered in cold sweat, coughing, eyes bloodshot...

Like I said, different times for sure.

So.

Back at work yesterday and I'm looking at the bench that he'd sit at outside the building waiting for me to escape the clutches of the tall tower that now imprisons me between runs.

Used to be more messengers than you could shake a stick at sitting here.  Then it was just Bill and I.

I see the chair in the lobby where he'd sit when it was raining or too cold to sit outside (which it has to be really cold for Bill to seek refuge indoors).  Two chairs sitting opposite one another that were made for people 5' 9" or taller.  Little people like Bill and I were left with our legs out straight, feet off the floor. 

We looked like two unshaven toddlers at preschool in our tiny shorts and tiny hats and tiny feet hanging in the breeze... but talking about politics and money and bikes and personal escapades and war and hair and kids and quantum physics and...

I don't know if there's a topic that Bill has ever left off the menu for the last twenty two years I've had conversations with him.

And now there's no one to have those conversations with anymore.

I feel like I've "won" nothing and lost everything.

In looking for some kind of comfort, I truly believe that Bill had let go of some of the load of his internal struggles over the past few years and really started letting go and enjoying life to its fullest.  I thought it was strange when he told me that he'd bought a boat... a motor boat... but when I started seeing images of him, his family and dogs on the boat and heard his stories from the weekend...

That was a Bill I hadn't really seen in years.  His face was beaming and he truly seemed joyful.  A carefree man that didn't have the burdens of the world on his shoulders anymore.  Or at the very least, he knew he could set them down from time to time and take a break.

That's the Bill I'll remember.

Well...

and the dancing Bill, and the barking Bill, and the cigar chomping Bill, and the pointing his face at the sun with his eyes shut Bill, and the hucking his rigid bike to flat Bill, and the Bill who was there for me at work when my father died...

Is that enough for now, Bill?

Yeah, that's enough for now.

Bill's obituary is here, and if you would like make a donation to the Humane Society of Charlotte in his memory (Bill loved all living, breathing things), that link is here.