Spooky being Spooky. Figuring out a plan. Pushing himself toward disaster. Rushing back to the safety of home. That was his charm: He was a lover and an adventurer. He was a homebody who sat on your lap one hour and hunted snakes the next.
He even welcomed a new cat into the family, a black kitten named Zippo. This was just after Bill met his wife, when he was working and spending a lot of time in bars playing pool, and he thought Spooky needed a companion. Somewhere along the journey, Spooky had contracted FIV, the feline form of AIDS, so Bill put an ad in the newspaper seeking a friendly, FIV-positive cat. A young couple couldn’t afford the medication for their sick kitten, so a few days later, Zippo joined the family.
Spooky loved him instantly. From the first moment, he not only adopted the kitten, he treated him like a brother. If ever there was a natural pair, it was Spooky and Zippo. Spooky was the leader, always into something, while Zippo . . . well, Zippo was a fat, jovial butterball. Spooky chased insects; Zippo lounged in the house. Spooky followed Bill down the street; Zippo watched from the window. On the rare occasions he toddled outside, Zippo could never remember to come back when called. He’d get distracted by a blade of grass or a shadow on a fence and not come inside until the food dish was down. One weekend, Zippo was having one of his rare outdoor adventures when he found an enormous wolf spider in the grass. He played with the spider all afternoon. When he was tired of it, he waddled inside. Spooky was napping on the bed. Zippo jumped up and started looking at him. Spooky’s head jerked up. He “listened” to the silent message, then sprang off the bed, ran straight to the spider, and started playing with it, too.
How close were the two cats? Bill once snapped three pictures of them in quick succession. In the first, Zippo was licking Spooky’s ear. In the second, Zippo had his tongue out and a horrible look on his face, as if he’d just tasted the worst substance of his life. Spooky looked like he was laughing. In the third, Spooky was licking Zippo’s ear. That’s okay, brother, he could have been saying. I got you that time, but we’re still friends.
They had each other, the three boys. It was a good life. But that didn’t mean life was easy. The divorce left Bill hurt and confused, unable to put his finger on exactly what had happened and sure there was something wrong with him. Why couldn’t someone love him? Why couldn’t he make the marriage work? There had been a wall between them. In five years of marriage, they had never spoken a single word from the heart. He didn’t blame his wife. He blamed himself.
“I went through some heavy drinking after the divorce,” Bill admits, “and then I went through some heavy working.”
When he was a kid on his family’s Michigan farm, Bill had dreamed of becoming a forest ranger. He had a forestry degree; he had fought forest fires; he had even worked for the Bureau of Land Management, but his yearly application to the U.S. Forest Service always received a “Thanks, but no, thanks” reply. He always scored high on the aptitude tests, but less qualified people were given the jobs. In despair after his eleventh rejection (not to mention his divorce) and convinced the world was against him, he pulled into the first factory he passed. As he was filling out his application, a foreman walked into the office, threw a bunch of papers on a desk, and said to the secretary, “Write up his last check. He’s out of here.”
He turned to Bill and said, “Do you know how to braise?”
“Sure do,” Bill fibbed.
“Then you’re hired. Bring your application in the morning.”
Bill left the office and went straight to the library to look up “braise.” He had no idea what the term meant. It turned out braising meant joining copper to copper, like a plumber does when he solders pipes together. There was a metaphor in there somewhere about two like substances (a man and a cat) who came together to form a solid and unbreakable whole. But there was also a career. The factory made jet engine blades; the braising job was an introduction to the airline industry. Bill worked in the industry on and off for twenty-two years, until retiring from Boeing in 2001. For much of that time, he worked as much as he could physically take, sweating out his frustrations and keeping himself busy on the line.
But even on the longest days on the job, and even when those days stretched into months, Spooky and Zippo stuck with him. He might be gone for sixteen hours, or even whole days, but when Bill Bezanson walked through the door dead tired or drunk, Spooky was always there to meet him. Before he sat down to unwind with some television, Bill made sure to put everything he could possibly need within arm’s reach: beer, chips, remote control, books, paper towels. He knew Spooky would be on his lap before he hit the sofa, and he didn’t want to have to get up and disturb him. When he went to bed, Spooky crawled up next to his face, as he always had, and demanded to be cradled. Bill fell asleep to his purring, breathing in his fur. Zippo snuggled against Bill’s back.
By the time he came out of the fog of work and drink, Bill was ready for a change. He was tired of the cycle: the drinking, the succession of cheap apartments, the mind-numbing jobs with only Spooky and Zippo to keep him company. In California, just before his marriage, a friend had contracted AIDS. It was the early 1980s; everyone was terrified. No one would go near her. Only Bill would touch her. So he took care of her: cooked her meals, bathed her, cleaned up her messes. He did everything but give her shots. He was there as she withered, and he was there when she died. It was the closest thing to useful he had felt since 1968.
Ten years later, he cut back on his drinking and looked for a second job, in health care. After his ten-hour shift on the aircraft assembly line, he worked a ten-hour shift as a night guard at a drug rehabilitation center, but you can only survive on three hours’ sleep for so long. When a friend contracted brain cancer, he applied for work at a traumatic brain injury center, where he helped people who had suffered serious accidents. He became a hypnotherapist. He helped crime, accident, and rape victims through their struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder without ever realizing he had PTSD himself. It was physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting work.
Why did he do it?
“I felt I was paying back.”
How so?
Silence. “Because of some of the situations I got out of without being killed or maimed.” Another pause. “Because somebody helped me then.”
During one particularly long airline industry layoff, he took a job in hospice, working for the dying in their homes. For his first assignment, the company sent him to the most difficult patient on the roster. She was a nasty, cussed, constant complainer, and no caretaker had ever lasted for more than a few days. On the second day, she was screaming at Bill as fiercely and as loudly as she could, when he turned to her and said, “You’re afraid of dying, aren’t you?”
She quieted down. She stared at him. She looked like she wanted to say something, but then she dropped her eyes and stared at her hands. Bill sat on the bed beside her, and they talked about her life, about its past and its end. They talked until she didn’t have anything else to say.
A few days later, on his off day, he received a call from the woman’s children. “Mom’s dying,” they said. “She wants to see you.”
When he arrived, she ushered her children out of the room. “Tell me what it’s like again,” she said, a tremble in her voice.
“Picture the most beautiful place you’ve ever been,” Bill told her, “and you will drift there.”
She closed her eyes. When she spoke again, it sounded as if she was shouting softly from a long way away. “You were right, Bill,” she whispered just before she died.