S-Town

Brian Reed

2017

© 2017 S-Town Podcast and Brian Reed

Chapter 1

“If you keep your mouth shut, you’ll be surprised what you can learn.”

Part 1

When an antique clock breaks, a clock that’s been telling time for two hundred or three hundred years, fixing it can be a real puzzle. An old clock like that was handmade by someone. It might tick away the time with a pendulum, with a spring, or with a pulley system. It might have bells that are supposed to strike the hour. Or a bird that’s meant to pop out and cuckoo at you. There can be hundreds of tiny, individual pieces, each of which needs to interact with the others precisely.

To make the job even trickier, you often can’t tell what’s been done to a clock over hundreds of years. Maybe there’s damage that was never fixed, or fixed badly. Sometimes entire portions of the original clockwork are missing, but you can’t know for sure because there are rarely diagrams of what the clock is supposed to look like. A clock that old doesn’t come with a manual.

So instead the few people left in the world that know how to do this kind of thing rely on what are often called ‘witness marks’ to guide their way. A witness mark can be a small dent, a hole that once held a screw. These are actual impressions and outlines and discolorations, left inside the clock, of pieces that might’ve once been there. They’re clues to what was in the clock maker’s mind when he first created the thing.

I’m told fixing an old clock can be maddening. You’re constantly wondering if you’ve just spent hours going down a path that will likely take you nowhere, and all you’ve got are these vague witness marks which might not even mean what you think they mean. So, at every moment along the way you have to decide if you’re wasting your time or not.

Anyway, I only learned about all this because years ago an antique clock restorer contacted me, John B. McLemore, and asked me to help him solve a murder.

Something’s happened. Something has absolutely happened in this town. There’s just too much little crap for something not to have happened. And I’m about had enough of Shittown and the things that goes on.

From Serial and This American Life, I’m Brian Reed. This is Shittown.

John B. McLemore lives in Shittown, Alabama. That’s the subject line that catches my eye one day in late 2012 while I’m reading through emails that have come into our radio show, This American Life. Emails from John B. McLemore. Shittown is capitalized.

“I am an old-time listener who just recently rediscovered your show,” John writes. “I live in a crummy little Shit-town in Alabama called Woodstock. I would like to tell your producers of two events that have happened here recently. I would hope you have the facilities to investigate.”

One of the events, John writes, involves a local police officer with the county sheriff’s department. John’s heard that a woman has been saying the officer sexually abused her. The guy’s still on the force. So, that’s one.

The other event is a murder of a guy in his early 20s named Dylan Nichols. The murderer, John says, is the son of a prominent local family. His name is Kabram Burt. The Burts are millionaires. The own lots of land in the area, as well as a large timber operation with lumber yards and sawmills all over. One of which is right near John’s. It’s called K3 Lumber.

John says it seems the Burt family has effectively made this event disappear, except that Kabram is now going around town bragging about it, quote, “bragging about how it only took 30 seconds of kicking this boy, Dylan Nichols, in the head for him to become a paraplegic, and only a few more days for him to die.”

“We really need people like you to come down to this pathetic little Baptist Shittown and blow it off the map,” John writes. “I would like to talk with you by phone, if possible. This is just too much to type.”

J: Hello?

B: John?

J: Hello?

B: Hi, it’s Bryan.

J: Hey.

B: Here we are. This is happening.

J: Hahaha, that awkward moment of silence when you realize, after about a year, it’s finally happened!

When I make this call, it’s been a year since John first emailed. We’d written back and forth a couple times over the months, but we’d never talked, until one day he sent me a message, and this time it had a link to a news report.

The news story was about a sergeant with the Bibb County Sheriff’s Department, Bibb County is where John lives, who’d been indicted for pulling women over and forcing them into sexual acts both on the side of the road and back at the station. Another guy allegedly helped cover up this abuse. I thought if corruption like this existed in the Bibb county sheriff’s department, then maybe the other rumor John had written to me about could also be true. That maybe it was possible a murder had happened and had then been covered up. So finally I get him on the phone and we talk for a while.

J: Yeah you know my life is kind of a, a nuthouse because I take care of my mom that has Alzheimer’s, and we’re in about our seventh or eighth year of that, so sorry about the other day when you tried to call and all hell had busted loose.

B: No, I’m sorry you have to deal with that, I’m sorry.

J: Of course losing the dog the other week, that didn’t help. You know I take in strays, which shouldn’t surprise you, you know, considering where I live, you shouldn’t be the least bit surprised that these people out here just dump their dogs out on the side of the road. At one time I’ve had as many as twenty one. I’ve got fourteen now, well thirteen, yeah, so that was, that was really hard cuz that was an old dog and a good dog, but yeah that’s another one of my projects that I take on, I’m sort of a local humane society.

B: Do you, do you have a lot of property?

J: Ah, I like to say it’s my grandfather’s property, it’s 128 acres

B: And you, you grew up in Woodstock, is that right?

J: Yeah, see Woodstock, this, this whole area needs to be defined. You know if you look at the demographics charts for the state of Alabama and go over the poorest counties, Bibb county is maybe the fifth worst county to live in. We are one of the child molester capitals of the state. We have just an incredible amount of police corruption. We have the poorest education. We’ve got 95 churches in this damn county. We only have two high schools, no secondary education, and we got Jeebus, cuz Jeebus is coming, and global warming is a hoax, you know, there’s no such thing as climate change, and all that. Yeah, I uh, I’m in an area that just hasn’t advanced, for lack of a better word. I’m gonna have to eat a Tums here. Sorry about this. Oh, it’s one of those awful cherry flavored ones. That would be the first one to hop out.

B: Is your stomach bothering you? (Laughs)

J: Oh I have constant acid reflux, you know, had it all my life.

B: So what, can you tell me why did you email me?

J: Well you know the original um, the original reason which I gave you was just some of the things I had heard about you know some of the goings on down here. You remember I told you about the boy, Dylan Nichols, that got murdered and apparently that was swept under the rug, I guess we’ll cover that one first.

B: Yeah tell me what, so just tell me what happened. I mean you kind of mentioned this in an email but there wasn’t really a lot of detail, (same time)[J: Yeah, that’s the problem] and I did a little googling online and didn’t really find much so yeah, tell me what, tell me what you know.

J: I’m hoping that’s one of the things y’all have the capability of doing is finding much. All I’ve managed to find out is that Dylan Nichols went to school down here at West Blockton high school. Basically I’ve got these kids out here digging a hole between the house and the yard in the summer, and we’re gonna plant some cast iron plant, that’s Aspidistra elatior in case y’all don’t know,

B: I don’t know what either of the things you just said are, but that’s fine (laughs).

J: OK well that’s the scientific name, that’s cast iron plant. You know how these kids talk on cell phones all day long? You can’t get them to do nothing cuz they’re on their cell phone. And they’re tweeting and they’re YouTubing and they’re always on Facebook, and I’m out there on the back porch, and if you keep your mouth shut you’d be surprised what you can learn, cuz you know kids around here have grown up so destitute they don’t have enough sense to be ashamed of things they say, they’ll just tell everything. One of them yakking away that uh, that Dylan Nichols is in such and such hospital, he’s a quadriplegic now, he just got in a fight with Kabram Burt, and he’s not expected to live through the night. Well buddy when I heard the last name Burt, you know my attention just peaked. I decided I’d stick my nose in and ask, “This isn’t by any chance related to the famous Burt family down there that runs the K3 lumber store in Greencon and the uh you know KKK lumber mill in Tance is it?” Oh yes that’s Kendall’s son. Took them a day or so do to their work out here and they chatted and chatted about it and over the course of the next few days of them tweeting to girlfriends and tweeting to other friends it come to pass that indeed Dylan Nichols had died, deader than hell. And Kabram Burt’s whereabouts was unknown. Well later on I had the uh Goodsons working out here, two boys it just so happened, one of them Jake Goodson, apparently he knew the Kabram boy, and right at the durned Little Caesar’s Pizza in Woodstock just happened to run into him, hadn’t seen him for a year, asked him where he’d been. Well I’ve been in drug rehab you know, I’ve spent such and such months in rehab. Well what happened? That’s when the Kabram boy just got out there and spilled the durn beans. And the story that I was told is that they were at some party and the Nichols boy and Kabram and his buddy had ganged up on him and was calling him a bitch boy, or a bitch boy, or a bitch boy and all that, and the boy essentially smacked one of them and they jumped on him. Well the boy they jumped on, that’s Dylan Nichols, pulled out a little knife and cut the throat of Kabram’s friend. Well Kabram pulled his belt off and wrapped it around the neck of the friend whose throat got cut and got the Nichols boy down on the ground somehow and kicked him in the head repeatedly and kept kicking him in the head until he was basically unconscious. Well of course you know the rest of the story from the first part that I told you. You know the boy paraplegic, died in a few days. Jake is nosy, he asked him how’d he just get by so easy? And you know the Burt boy, Kabram Burt had told him, you know they just claimed it was self-defense and the other guy kept his damn mouth shut. Course Kabram’s family’s got plenty of money so naturally it wasn’t murder.

B: So just to clarify, so what, so you’re hearing this from a guy named Jake Goodson?

J: Uh hum.

B: He ran into Kabram

J: Uh hum.

B: And Kabram told him that we told the other guy to keep his mouth shut and we claimed self defense, that’s what we told him?

J: There you go. Now at some time I was up there at that hardware store and Kendall, that’s Kabram’s father, is back there on that phone yakking his big mouth, He’s one of those big mouth Rush Limbaugh types, loves Glenn Beck, running that mouth running that mouth, and what I heard come out of that office was “He’s my son and I love him but he’s guilty as hell and I know it.” And he finally realizes someone was standing out there waiting to be waited on, and pulled up slammed the hell out of that damn door and then got a lot quieter with that conversation.

B: Really?

J: We’ve obviously got too much little dipstick gossip going around for something not to have happened. We’ve got the kid out bragging about it in front of the Little Caesar’s Pizza Hut, and we’ve got a teeny little snippet of conversation inconveniently audited over at the store one afternoon, so this crap happened.

B: And as far as you know is Kabram Burt just living in town now?

J: He’s working up there at the damn K3 Lumber yard! He’s covered up with tattoos, he’s almost skin and bones, he looks like a crackhead! (laughing) Hell I saw him this week. (sighs) You know I contacted you for a while and then I quit contacting you. And I go through these stages of depression. When you live in an area like this, it’s like the Darfur region of Sudan. You realize you’re in one of these areas where stuff happens and you can’t help it. And after this dude got arrested you know that recent email I sent you about that Irvin Lee Heard that had been basically falsely imprisoning women and using them for sex slaves, no one talks about that.

B: Irvin Lee Heard is the name of the Bibb county police officer who had been sexually abusing women he pulled over.

J: And I decided, you know what, I need to contact him again. I need to get out of my depression, I need to get over this attitude problem I’ve got that you know nothing can be done, and tell someone some of the crap that goes on down here.

B: Cuz, what do you, what do you get depressed about?

J: Sighs oh my god, I am 49 years old, or is it 48? Well I’m closer to 49. I should have, you know boy if you use this in the future you’ll sure have to have the cuckoo bird bleeping, I should have got out of this goddamn fucking shit town in my 20s. I should have done something useful with my life. I love my home. I don’t know why. You know I’ve lived here all my life. My mom’s lived here all her life, my dad’s lived here most of his life, and Grandpa Miller’s lived here all his life. Places like that should be important. I’m looking out over a yard. We got a rose garden here that’s 300 fucking feet long. I plant a hedge maze out here. It’s the only one in the state. You can go to Google Maps and enter 33.202461,-87.13115

B: Woah woah, slow down. Let me type this in as you’re telling me.

J: That should actually bring you to the center of the maze.

B: Tell me the numbers again?

J: 33.202465,-87.1…

B: I’m gonna hide a couple of coordinates here, for John’s privacy. I type them into Google Maps.

J: That should be close, to within a few feet.

B: Oh, there we are. That’s your yard?

J: Yeah

B: Oh my god.

J: You know now…

B: It’s an aerial view of acres and acres of forest. And then there in the middle of the woods is a huge labyrinth made of concentric circles of hedges with a path weaving through them.

J: It also has little gates in it now which that picture doesn’t show, so you see, you can swap the solution around. It actually has 64 possible solutions depending on how you swap the gates around.

B: Oh wow, so it really is a maze!

J: 64 possible solutions yes.

B: That’s crazy! Do you ever just go in and get lost in the maze?

J: Well it’s not tall enough to get lost yet, it’s only about hip high. You can still see over it. You’ll able to get lost one day. Yeah it is in other words if you’re asking do I use it to walk around in while I’m thinking? Sure, sometimes I do.

B: Yeah.

J: You know I’ve never really had anyone to really sit here and ask me, I guess what I’m depressed about, because I’m looking out over the trees here and I realize that the people in the south Forty Trailer park have a much worse life than I do, but I think the thing that’s happened is that I’ve gotten myself in an almost, you know, sort of a prison of my own making, where you know all my friends have died off because I only had contact with people much older than me. Even when I was a kid in school I didn’t want to hang around other kids, cuz you know kids are talking about you know, getting girls. Or deer hunting, or football. Where as I was interested in the astrolabe, sundials, projective geometry, new age music, climate change, and how to solve Rubik’s cube. But you can’t tell a redneck that the cool you know Greenland melt falling directly into the less dense water where the thermohaline convector normally heads back south is sufficient… Firstly try to explain that the earth is more than 5000 years old.

B: John, is there, is there, I’m curious, is there anyone down there that you’re able to talk about these gripes or ideas with, and you feel like you’re on the same page?

J: (laughing) My lawyer, hah, the town lawyer, he is the only, he’s, everything I’ve talked with you about I’ve talked with him about. Now he lives in Tuscaloosa, he’s got too much sense to be living down here, but absolutely. I’ll go over there and talk with the town lawyer every now and then.

B: But that’s it? That’s all you’ve got?

J: Ah, you’re beginning to figure it out now, aren’t you? So why don’t I move? There’s gotta be people in Fallujah right now, or Beirut, that just asked each other the same question you know. Why the hell don’t you get out of here Hassan, you know? And Hassan’s answer is, you know I don’t know. You know Hassan’s probably got out there and made a sand maze or something. You know his aging mother can’t decide which one of her hajib’s she’s gonna wear that day, and she ends up peeing all over herself, he has to clean her up or some damn something, and he keeps thinking OK, maybe one day it’ll get better, although secretly he knows it never will. You know I have his crummy old Ford truck, you can’t be a redneck and live in Alabama without a damn Ford truck, can you? And I keep thinking, could I put everything that I would put in that truck and drive down that driveway for the last time? But then again who would take care of Mama, who’d feed the puppies, who’d water the flowers, who’d prune the maze… You must think I’m just totally nuts at this point.

B: No, I understand. It’s home.

J: I’m sorry if I got off subject and all that…

B: No, It’s all, it’s all good. I can point you back to it a little bit. Why do you think it’s important to try to figure out what happened with this?

J: I believe we have a genuine murder that resulted from some kids probably picking on a boy that defended himself that’s almost certainly been covered up.

Part 2

After that first conversation with John I do some research online, and I find no evidence of this murder. I see there is a place called K3 Lumber owned by the Burt family. K3? In rural Alabama? Is that just a coincidence?

The family also owns a large timber operation, John called it the KKK lumber mill. But it’s actually called KyKenKee Inc. And on their website they explain that the Ky, Ken, and Kee in KyKenKee refer to the three brothers who currently run the family business: Kyle, Kendall, and Keeth Burt. Kabram Burt is Kendall’s son. His name begins with a K too by the way. I discover a Facebook page for a Kabram Burt in the area, with just a single disturbing post that tells people to raise hell and kill black babies. Though it uses a word other than black. I don’t know if Kabram made this page or what. I also find court records for a DUI charge that suggests that maybe he did disappear for a little while like John mentioned. At one point, there was a stretch of court dates he didn’t show up for, and a notice from his lawyer telling the court he hadn’t been able to reach Kabram.

Other than that, I find nothing. Nothing about a murder, or even assault, involving Kabram. Or an obituary for a Dylan Nichols, or any event in newspapers or court filings that seems like it could be the fight John’s talking about. Honestly there’s not much about Bibb county online at all.

But John kept emailing me. He kept insisting this was a story I needed to cover. And when I’d call him back to say I was having trouble finding anything, or just to quickly double check something with him, almost without fail we’d end up on the phone for hours. With him going on and on, not just about the murder but about his life. And his town. We talked on weekends. Once he got in touch at one thirty in the morning because a bunch of cops had been in his yard.

J: And I had the Pretorian class towering behind that uniform.

B: It felt as if by sheer force of will John was opening this portal between us and calling out through it. Calling out from his world. A world of-

J: proleptic decay and decrepitude.

B: So eventually I decide I’ll come check it out.

J: I was just dying for them to search this house without a warrant. I think they knew it.

That’s right after this.

John says hi hometown is filled with “proleptic decay and decrepitude.” I’m not ashamed to say I had to look up the word proleptic. It means “using a word or phrase in anticipation of it becoming true.” When I go to Alabama I don’t want to cause any trouble, proleptically speaking, so John and I discuss a plan. After all what he’s alleging, about the murder, that Kabram Burt has beaten someone to death, feels comfortable enough to make small talk about it out in the open, and a bunch of people know but no one has done anything, it’s pretty scary. A reporter showing up from New York, asking questions, who knows how people might react.

B: I do not want to do anything that’s going to put you in any kind of danger.

J: You’ve got more experience with this than I do. This is your stock and trade.

B: Well I’ve never gone into a small town and investigated a murder. And this is your small town.

John and I agree when I come I need to keep a low profile. I won’t talk to any authorities yet. The one thing I want to do, I tell him, is meet with Jake Goodson. That’s the guy John originally heard the rumor from. The one Kabram supposedly admitted everything to, outside the Little Caesar’s.

J: It’s wherever you want to be with it. If you’re fine with it I’m fine with it.

B: OK, are you sure?

J: I guess so.

B: You guess so?

J: Too damn late to back out now.

B: No, I don’t see that’s what I don’t want you to…

J: I think you’re second-guessing this more than I am.

Music

B: That’s John’s road.

On a windy afternoon in October 2014, I’m driving through Woodstock, Alabama, about 40 minutes southwest of Birmingham. Headed to meet John for the first time. To get to his house, rather than use his address he’s suggested I navigate by latitude and longitude. And even then, I miss his place the first time past. It’s just thick woods all around. From the road, I have no idea there’s a house back there. But when I come back by, I notice there’s an opening in the trees and a dirt driveway cut through the forest. It takes me deep into the woods, trees arching over it, until finally I reach a clearing with an old wooden house with three chimneys that looks like it hasn’t changed since the Civil war. The whole place feels like it’s of another time. And it is. Literally. John doesn’t follow daylight savings so his property’s on a time zone separate from the world around it.

The front door of the house opens and a man comes bounding out of it.

B: John

J: You found it

B: How are you? Nice to meet you.

There’s no ‘nice to meet you’ back, no ‘how you doing?’, no handshake. John just takes off around the side of the house with a pack of dogs following.

J: See if we can see Mexican petunias blooming. Come on Pipsqueak!

He’s a redhead, with a red goatee and glasses. Looks a bit younger than his 48 years. In ratty jeans and ratty sneakers and a Sherwin Williams t-shirt that he probably got for buying a can of paint at the hardware store. Presumably he’s giving me a tour but I’m scrambling to keep up with him. He’s naming the plants all around us as we move. Goldenrod, Russian Sage, a Climbing Ladybanks Rose. There are stone walls everywhere, wildly colored bushes, a giant bed of purple petunias stretching for hundreds of feet. There are apple trees leaning on trellises, tilted at a precise angle to lengthen their stems. There’s a sweet smell floating on the breeze. The smell of the thorny elaeagnus bush, John tells me. John’s 13 dogs are running around freely and they have a dog house that is an actual house, with two floors and a small swimming pool outside made of stone.

J: You’re not afraid to walk about 110 feet, are you?

B: Nope

John and I go past his workshop, which I’ll later learn is filled with disassembled clocks, as well as the rare machines and tools and chemicals he uses to restore them. We go past a big trailer and two old school buses. One yellow and one blue. They’re filled with lumber for John’s house that he’s aging, to get the wood as close as possible to what they used to build the house 200 years ago. We go through a small gated cemetery where the people who built this place have been buried since the 1880s. “Having finished life’s duty,” one footstone reads, “they now sweetly rest.” Later we’ll also meet John’s mother, Mary Grace McLemore.

M: How do you like down here?

B: I’m sorry?

M: How do you like down here?

B: I’m enjoying myself very much.

M: Sir?

B: I’m enjoying myself very much.

M: I’m glad.

B: Yes.

She’s a tiny, brittle looking woman who I swear to you can go a whole conversation without blinking once. She’s been on this land her whole life. Forever seems about right.

M: This is an old area.

B: Yeah?

M: Where we live it’s real old.

B: How old?

M: (laughs) Since time I reckon.

Part 3

J: Rosemary that the winter killed. An old house that looks like Nosferatu.

Finally John and I reach a hill. We come to the crest and there it is: the maze. Stretching out below us. Though he and I have completely different reactions to it.

J: Oh god, here we go. See the brown from here?

B: Oh my gosh!

John’s upset. They’ve been in a drought for weeks. A D1 drought. He’s been monitoring it. And he sees the hedges turning brown. But I’m just in awe. The maze is so cool.

B: Oh my gosh.

J: See, that’s the climate change.

B: I mean you may see climate change, but this is an incredible approach, John…

J: You know, we’re gonna have to get the damn cutters. I said before y’all came out here I was gonna get out here and do something and it never happened, I just got miserably depressed and said, “Oh screw it.”

B: I’m like, I have chills.

J: Chills? (laughing) I have chills looking at all the brown bushes over here on this side.

B: I don’t even see the brown, there’s all these green… this is incredible.

We enter the maze and John rearranges the position of three gates inside.

J: Let’s go ahead and put this one here.

To set a new solution.

J: Let’s go ahead and move this one over here. There you go. Now it’s all screwed up now. Let’s see.

John build the maze as a series of splits. One path comes to an end, then it splits left and right. Each of those paths end, then they split left and right. Over and over again you have to choose which way to go. John and I are walking through trying to reach the middle.

J: You know I designed this thing myself so it was designed by a madman. And that’s what people tell me.

B: I do feel like I’m walking around in your brain or something.

J: Oh just imagine when it gets over your head.

Saved on John’s computer is a comic, and when I think about it now I realize it captures his worldview perfectly. It’s three drinking glasses with arms and legs and cute little faces, each with the same amount of liquid inside. The first one smiles and says, “I’m half full!” The next one frowns and says, “I’m half empty.” The last one throws both arms up and says, “I think this is piss.” Later John will take me on a tour of Bibb county and this worldview will be on full display. He’ll rattle off a constant stream of grievances as we go. Historic buildings are being demolished overnight. Dollar Generals and Walmarts are popping up in their stead, serving a populace that is getting fatter and more tattooed by the day.

J: Another junkyard.

No positive comment, no matter how innocuous, survives his virtuosic negativity. At one point, I mention that the landscape around here is really quite pretty.

J: There you go. There’s our legacy, going down the road.

B: Lumber truck.

Carting away that pretty landscape one tree at a time. In the afternoon it will start to thunderstorm, something John has been saying all day that they desperately need to combat the drought. So that’s good, right?

J: We’re getting rain, what, about 10 weeks too late. Now everything’s died.

B: Glad you’re getting something.

Everything I say.

B: That’s a beautiful butterfly.

J: Yeah, we don’t have as many butterflies as we should have this year either, that’s something else that disturbs me.

It’s a comprehensive tour.

J: Off of the right is where I went to high school. I like to call it Auschwitz.

Yeah

J: See the crematorium? See the long low killing facility on either end?

B: No it looks like a high school, with like a baseball game going on out in front.

J: (laughing) To me it looks like Auschwitz.

Part 4

Before the jaunt around Shittown, back inside the maze, John and I have stopped walking for a second. We’ve hit dead end after dead end and now John is craning his neck and scoping out our options.

B: (laughs) He scouts his direction.

J: It is, it’s kind of funny to be lost in something you designed yourself isn’t it. Let’s see. Oh no!

We’re stuck.

B: Are we really lost, or are you putting it on for me?

J: We’re actually lost in our own maze, isn’t that exciting? Oh, oh I see what I did. I see what I did. Oh I see what I did.

Evidently while the various gate combinations create 64 different solutions, there is one combination that leaves you with absolutely no way out.

J: Oh god, it’s possible to set it up to where there’s no solution and I accidentally did that.

B: It’s like a null set, or something?

J; A null set, there you go.

I can’t tell if John’s being straight with me. John seems so smart and in control it’s hard to believe he could accidentally be stumped by his own maze. I could see him engineering this situation to make things more, I dunno, literary? Conjuring this garden path metaphor, that he knows I won’t be able to resist.

On the phone before I got here John had said he could introduce me to Jake Goodson. Jake, again, is in his early 20s. He’s one of the guys John hires to work on his property, and who John first heard about the murder from. Jake’s the one that learned about it from Kabram, outside the Little Caesar’s Pizza. But now that I’m in Woodstock, all of a sudden John can’t reach Jake. He’s been working long hours at the local steel mill, John says. A job that won’t be around much longer, by the way, once our supply of cheap fossil fuels implodes, but anyway John’s called Jake’s wife, and his brother too trying to reach him, but still no luck. Eventually I head to my hotel, and John and I check in later on the phone.

B: No word, right?

J: Yeah, I’m just kind of totally annoyed that I can’t get ahold of him. Gets on your damn nerves, and I know you’re on a schedule, you ain’t got time for a bunch of bullshit, you know, shit or get off the pot.

John keeps emailing me updates. “Not a damn thing so far,” he writes. An hour later, just a subject line. Quote, “So far the null set.” 8:38pm. I had to leave Bibb county to find a hotel, so I’m in Bessamer, a small city about 15 miles down the highway where the far reaches of the Birmingham metro area dissolve into the rural counties like Bibb to the west. I’m at a Best Western just off the exit ramp, behind a Waffle House. Even though I’m exhausted from traveling, I turn on the lamp and pull out the bedtime reading John’s given me. Bedtime reading. That’s what he called it. There’s William Faulkner’s short story, A Rose for Emily. Narrated by the gossipy collective townsfolk of imaginary Jefferson, Mississippi, who tell the tale of Miss Emily Grierson, an unmarried, middle-aged outcast who lives alone with her father and after he dies holes up in her house for years. There’s the Ge de Monpuissant story The Necklace, about a woman who longs for a much grander, more spectacular life than the one she has, and gets it, for a single night, only to have to pay for it dearly every day for the next 10 years. And then there’s The Renegade by Shirley Jackson, about a woman who recently moved from the city to a small country town, whose family dog, Lady, is accused one morning of killing a neighbor’s chickens. The woman listens in growing dread throughout the day as townsperson after townsperson laughs at the torture and death that will befall Lady as a result. Including, finally, the woman’s own children, who describe to Lady’s face in gleeful detail how they will use a spiked collar to chop off her head. I notice a unifying theme to all these stories: a creeping sense of foreboding. In these places that are allegedly home to polite society. An undercurrent of depravity.

Morning comes. No word from Jake. In the meantime I try to come up with some other ideas. The obvious one in a situation like this would be to contact the victim’s family. But at this point I still don’t know if anyone’s actually died. And so that’s an awkward phone call to make. I can’t get local hospital records. I try, but they’re not public. Ditto with death records in Alabama, also not public. Again, I found no obit or news story about any of this in the papers. I was able to find two Dylan Nichols in Bibb county. Both were the right age, early 20s. One spelled his first name Dylan. The other spelled it Dillon. It looked like Dylan had played football at Bibb county high school a few years earlier, but other than that he had basically no footprint online, which is strange for someone his age. Like maybe that means you’re dead? Dillon on the other hand appeared to be alive and well and actively maintaining his Facebook page. Not only that, but he’d gone to Kabram Burt’s high school and was Facebook friends with him. Which made both John and me wonder if somehow the rumor got messed up, and maybe Dillon wasn’t the dead guy. Maybe he was the friend with Kabram who’d got his throat cut and kept quiet about the whole thing. So I held off on contacting him. So too afraid to talk to the cops, too afraid to talk to the Burts or the Nicholses, I lay out another idea to John. My thought is, we believe the murder happened sometime in the summer of 2012. If we can somehow narrow the time period to just a couple of weeks, maybe, we can go to the public library and look through the archive of Bibb county’s local newspaper, The Centerville Press. The old issues aren’t online so maybe there’s an obituary or some other clue in there that I haven’t been able to see. John has an idea for how we can nail down a more precise date.

B: So what is this?

J: Uh, just every time I spend a dollar working on this damn place.

He shows me a notebook, a makeshift ledger where he keeps detailed track of all the projects on his property. We sit on his twin bed and he flips through and shows me his whole system. How he notes the people that worked each day. A rotating crew of young guys and handyman types from around town. What they were working on, how much he paid them.

J: The red means it was for the yard. Of course if it doesn’t have the red it’s in the house. And if you see a letter M with a circle around it, that means we were planting the maze. John’s pretty sure they were laying the slate area behind his house when word was going on about the murder. Wherever they were working on that, that’s probably when it happened, he says.

J: Yard, shed, rock, roof, tar, yeah, working dog pens, slate, and bridge. This is, this event would have happened right around this time period, August of 2012.

B: August 7th, August 8th, $900, $500, and then August 12th it’s the same. You paid him $20 on August 12th?

J: Oh yeah, that means someone didn’t have enough gas to go home.

B: Oh.

Part 5

B: Can we pinpoint any closer than August, do you think?

J: Ahhh, probably pinpoint, between the 7th and the 21st would sound real good, that’s about the closest you’re gonna get, between the 7th and the 21st. the 7th and the 21st.

So we’re off to the library. To the microfilm machine in the back room. Though by this point I’m noticing that John’s been acting kind of weird. Weird for him. Like evasive. I’m trying to get him to look through the newspaper archive with me, but instead he’s just wandering over by the bookshelves avoiding me.

B: Alright John. You’re not interested to see this?

J: I figured you was gonna do your thing and I was gonna…

B: This is our thing, we’re trying to figure out if this guy died. This is not my thing…

J: There’s not room for two faces in front of that little bitty machine…

B: Yeah there is, come on, come help me.

Then as we’re going through issues.

B: Alright, Centerville News…

I don’t know. Feels like he’s trying to rush me through this. Like he doesn’t want me to be as thorough as I’m being or something.

J: You know what, if we go all the way into September and don’t find anything I bet there’s no… well you probably don’t even need to go past, yeah.

B: Let’s do September. Hmm, look at this front page. This is Wednesday, September…

Spinning the broken microfilm wheel with my finger, I read through every issue of The Centerville Press, mid-July through September. It gives a pretty detailed snapshot of the summer of 2012 in Bibb county, Alabama. Some cousins drove in from Versaith, Georgia with a 4 tier for Kelsey Connel’s sweet 16 party. 1,965 people called complaints into the sheriff’s office. 20 people violated probation, and police discovered 14 illegal piles of garbage. The mayor of Centerville started campaigning for reelection. Some brothers went off to Space Camp together. A guy hired a hitman to unsuccessfully try and kill the West Blockton police chief. And Jean Ingram served chicken salad for lunch one day to Benny and Joe Russel. You know what did not happen in the summer of 2012, according to the reporting of The Centerville Press? A murder by a guy named Kabram Burt, or the death of a guy named Dylan Nichols.

After looking at every police blotter, every obituary, we’ve got nothing. Nothing nothing nothing.

J: We gonna hit that or what?

B: What’s that?

J: Out there in front.

B: Oh yeah…

But John doesn’t seem to care that we’re not making much progress. He’s goofing off. One afternoon I find him in his shop with Tyler Goodson, Jake Goodson’s brother. Tyler does work on John’s yard too. He’s here to chop up a fallen tree, but it’s also clear he and John know each other pretty well. They chat easily, and Tyler has a pile of belongings that he’s keeping here at John’s house while he’s trying to get a permanent place to live.

If Tyler has his shirt on, you know he must be going to court. At least that’s what his mom will tell me one day. Today apparently he’s not on the docket because he’s standing here, shirtless and tattooed, with an anatomical heart on his chest that says misery loves company, sharpening a chainsaw tooth by tooth. John’s pointing to the bottle of Wild Turkey on the workbench.

J: I ain’t gotta drive you tonight nowhere do I?

B: No.

J: Hand it over here. You want a hit Bryan?

B: Sure

J: Make your sticker poke out. Ho! I bet he don’t hit it like I do.

John is getting drunk. Tyler is filing away, telling stories about run-ins with the cops. I am standing in an antique clock shop in the middle of the woods. I take a drink. Then Tyler and John show the 19th century French carriage clock they’re restoring that they found at the junkyard, its pieces scattered about the bench, and at one point suddenly for no apparent reason, and certainly not because I asked, John yanks up his shirt and flashes me.

J: I wasn’t gonna show you that abuse (laughing)

The entirety of John’s chest is tattooed, and his shoulders too, though it’s all perfectly covered when he’s wearing a t-shirt. The flashing is quick, so I can’t take it all in, but I see a glimpse of what’s possibly a beaker, and maybe a clock-type thing. It takes me aback because John has made clear to me how much he loathes tattoos; they’re one of the things he hates about Shittown. I believe he once called them “an expression of hopelessness.” Doesn’t compute.

B: That’s like your entire chest John!

J: I know (laughing)

B: And nipple piercings!

J: Oh, we weren’t gonna talk about those!

Then, as if of course this is the next logical subject of discussion, John gets on the topic of the small quantity hazardous waste generators regulation of 1998, and its effect on the electroplating trade.

J: Viovalent gold chloride, and you know chelated up into the solution with single salt potassium cyanide, you buffer the PH around 10.4 and…

Tyler and I give each other a look. John meanwhile is on his own plane. He’s rolling.

J: You know it’s usually operated at around 140-160 degrees Farenheit at you know 2-3 amps per square foot.

“Do you have a spare coin?” John asks. He wants to make me a souvenir. I dig out a dime from my pocket. He starts futzing around in the back room of the shop.

J: It smells like Chernobyl after the blast in here.

Untangling wires, filling up beakers, like a drunken mad scientist.

J: Whoo, do not breathe any of that. If you smell anything that smells like almonds, you need to get the fuck away.

I’d say it’s about this point that I ask myself, ‘Is John fucking with me?’ Is he just a bored guy who contacted me on a lark and never expected me to actually follow through? Is this murder not real and he knows it? It’s not only the fact that he is right now pouring potassium cyanide into a bucket in front of me, that makes me wonder this.

J: There you go, there you go, oh shit, oh shit, oh there…

It’s all the little moments from our conversations over the months that I’ve ignored or written off, as just one of John’s quirks. For example, the couple times months in when he casually raised the possibility that you know what? Maybe Dylan Nichols didn’t actually die.

J: He’s either died or he’s been paraplegicized. It’s one of those two.

Or the times he seemed cagey about putting me directly in touch with Jake Goodson.

J: He doesn’t know this is being investigated. He might get real scared and get real quiet. If you call him would you want to allude to the fact that I had spoken to you…

Or all the times John offered to reimburse my employer for my travel expenses to Alabama. No matter how much I told him I’d never let him do that, because he was so worried that the investigation might turn out to be a goose egg.

J: Well let’s face it, you’re broke. Well, public radio’s broke.

B: We’re not broke, we’re good. We’re good. We’re very lucky. We’re good.

And then just so many odd little interactions I’ve had with John. The poetry recitations he’s given me. The never ending emails about every topic imaginable. The long personalized lectures on climate change. The uncomfortable moments like this one, when I was talking to John about how he would explain to people in town about what I was doing down there, if they saw me with him.

J: Since everyone around here thinks I’m a queer anyway I could just tell you I’m sucking your damn dick.

B: Oh, that would be a really good way to introduce me to your neighbors.

Now John’s acting as if he’s not interested in the murder. I’m possibly breathing in dangerous chemicals. What am I still doing here?

J: Which I’m sure it is. Whoo, where’d it go? Oh my goodness the dime has escaped!

In the shop, Tyler continues to sharpen the chainsaw, and John drops my dime into a bucket in a large sink, hooks up wires to a car battery, runs them into the bucket, and then zaps it, cranking up the current until the dime turns gold.

J: I may be dead and gone one day but you’ll have a souvenir from Shittown, Alabama.

T: A golden penny!

J: A gold dime!

T: Ooh!

J: A motherfuckin gold-plated dime! (burps) Shit.

Part 6

For thousands and thousands of years we did not have clocks or calendars or any method for telling time in the way we think of telling time now. And time was happening nonetheless. As humans we must have sensed it. Maybe we heard it: the rhythm of it as we sharpened a tool. It’s amazing if you think about it. The sheer variety of methods we’ve concocted over the centuries to keep track of time. We pour sand through a glass. We swing pendulums back and forth. We count the cycles of radiation coming off an atom. We count Mississippis.

When John was a teenager, he became fascinated with what was possibly the very first formalized way humans came up with to keep track of time: watching the sun and the stars and the phases of the moon. He built his own version of something called an astrolabe, which he’s showing me.

J: Where we’re standing is the zenith, that’s this point over here.

The astrolabe looks kind of like a clock crossed with a compass. It’s a flat dial with a map of the night sky laid over it, and a pointer, or I guess a sight, attached on top of that. You pick a star in the sky and aim the sight at it, twist the skymap until it aligns with the sight in a certain way, and then the dial shows you your direction as well as the month, day, and time.

It’s a beautiful, complex device, and as a kid John longed to figure it out, to put himself inside the brains of the people who puzzled through the earliest versions. The Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who devised the mathematics behind it, or the 10th century Islamic scholars who refined the invention to help them time their daily prayers.

John wanted to go through what they had to go through to create an astrolabe. Which is why he made his own, designed specifically for the coordinates of this house. It hangs on the wall of his mother’s bedroom. That’s what he’s showing me, his astrolabe, when Skylar Goodson happens to walk in the front door.

J: Oh, Skylar’s here to come collect her money. Here’s Jake’s wife… oh you brought spaghetti. Is Jake bringing his ass over here?

Skylar is the wife of Jake Goodson, the guy I’ve been desperately wanting to talk to. She’s 21, outgoing, she has her little son with her who’s crawling on all fours at our feet, pretending to be a dog. We make some small talk and eventually as casually as I can I ask her, you don’t happen to know about the incident John and I have been talking about, do you?

J: She knows.

John says quietly. But Skylar seems confused.

J: The uh –

S: Sometimes you have to remind me a little bit.

The big fight between Kabram Burt and that dude, he tells her, that resulted in the dude’s death. I can see Skylar recognizes what he’s talking about. “Yes,” she says. Yes.

S: He straight up told us that he killed him. Cold blooded murdered him.

B: He told you that too?

S: Yes!

She says she was with Jake when it happened.

The Little Caesar’s, seeing Kabram for the first time after he’d vanished for a while, Kabram telling them he’d claimed self-defense and gotten off. According to Skylar it all went down just how John said it did.

S: Well he pretty much, in those words, pretty much said that he had murdered the guy and just -

B: Used the word murder?

S: Yeah, kill, that he had killed him.

B: So not murder, killed.

S: Uh, he probably used a little bit of everything, like it was a casual conversation, like hey, how you been, well this is going on in my life, I got arrested, cuz I murdered somebody, and yadda yadda yadda, and let me tell you about it. And it was just like there was nothing to it. That he had just beat him to death. And I can’t, just, I just can’t imagine sitting there and repeatingly hitting somebody until they die.

B: Yeah me neither.

B: What did you guys say? I mean what, were you like -

S: Just stood there. Just stared at him. It didn’t sound like it was something that you should be having come up, casual conversation about it. It seems like he should have still been in hiding.

Skylar says she’d actually heard about the murder, before talking to Kabram. That it was kind of an open secret. That’s the thing that freaks her out most about this, even a couple of years after it happened. The fact that so many people know and still have done nothing. The complicity. I mentioned my trip to the library to her, my hope that there’d be some record of this in the newspaper. But she has no illusions about that.

S: Most of it’s probably hidden, it’s not even in there.

B: What do you mean?

S: This town has a way of forgetting information and hiding information. If somebody don’t want people to know about it then it won’t be there.

John stands by as Skylar talks. He’s uncharacteristically quiet, a small grin on his face. I’m hanging on Skylar’s every word. I can’t believe I’m finally getting a firsthand account of all this. But John is calm, matter of fact. Like what’s the big surprise? It’s a shit town. This is what I’ve been telling you all along.

Chapter 2

“Has anybody called you?”

Part 1

In one of my first phone conversations with John before we met I asked him if the thought it was possible that maybe Kabram Burt hadn’t killed anybody. If it was possible that the murder he’d contacted me about was actually just a rumor. A fiction. No, John said. There was little doubt in his mind that it was true. And then by way of explanation he launched into this parable.

J: Let me tell you something I saw one time.

I should admit that at the time this story was completely lost on me.

J: Me and Roger Price had went up to the truck stop together to get a little dinner. We came back by and we was passing by the South 40 trailer park. So Roger’s one of those dudes, he’s a durn transmission mechanic, he’s not really talkative, he’s a good dude but he’s just you know he only has one tooth. And it’s really amusing to see how he can balance a cigarette on that one tooth. The whole time he’s talking that cigarette is just bouncing around all over that one tooth and he never loses that son of a bitch. So we’re coming by this welcome to South 40 sign and there’s this girl out there walking around in front of the damn sign, holding a cell phone, and she’s got on a pink top and nothing else. No fucking panties, no goddamn socks, barefoot… and I remarked that to Roger. I don’t remember what I said, I probably said “My god! Look at her,” or something like that. And Roger’s sage advice was, “Usually when you see jokers that look like that they done something to get like that.”

B: That’s, that’s the lesson?

J: (laughs) That went just straight through you.

Like so many things having to do with John, it took me a long time to understand the meaning of this story. Years. But I think I finally get it now.

From Serial and This American Life, I’m Brian Reed. This is Shittown.

My second night in Alabama, I finally get to talk to Jake Goodson. Jake’s the guy who’d originally told John that Kabram Burt had bragged to him outside the Little Caesar’s, about beating a guy to death. I sit with Jake in John’s kitchen, asking him to rack his brain for any extra details that could help me solve this. It was a while ago he says, his memories, are fuzzy, but he makes a suggestion that, I don’t know, seems crazy to me.

Jake: I dunno, I could, I could get him and ask him and he’ll be able to tell me. He’ll probably come up here and talk to you about it.

B: Who?

Jake: Kabram.

Kabram lives right nearby. Why not just get it from the horse’s mouth?

B: No.

Jake: Probably so

B: That makes no sense. I would stick a microphone in his face and he would tell me about a guy he killed?

Jake: Probably. He’s, he’s burnt up. He wouldn’t know no better. He’s probably just laugh about it with you.

I told Jake no thanks, at least not now. I do not feel like I am armed with enough information to confront Kabram yet. Aside from seeming far-fetched, the idea also just sounded potentially dangerous. For John, for Jake, and for me.

But then the next night a bunch of other people proposed the exact same thing.

U1: He’ll talk to you dude.

U2: Man, he’s burnt out.

U3: He’s arrogant dude! He don’t give a fuck.

B: He would talk to me about it?

U1: I know he would. I’m pretty sure he would.

U2: Probably tell you the truth.

I’m chatting with a few guys in a tattoo parlor, all of whom have heard about the murder. Some are pretty sure they heard it from Kabram himself.

U1: You want me to call him and ask him?

B: No, don’t do that.

U1: Why? I’m not a puss dude. I don’t give a fuck.

Apparently I’m the puss because I do not want the dudes I’m talking to to call Kabram right now. Already this tattoo shop does not feel like the safest place to walk into alone, at night, trying to dig up info about a covered up murder by a guy everyone seems to know. All of which are things I’ve just done. The last thing I want right now is for the alleged murderer to show up.

I was invited here by Tyler Goodson, Jake’s brother, whom I met in John’s workshop while he was filing that chainsaw. He’s one of the owners. Tyler knows Kabram. They’re both in their early 20s, and I thought maybe some of Tyler’s friends who hang out here might have more information about the possible murder. John didn’t feel like coming with me because he doesn’t like driving at night.

When I walk in at first it seems like a pretty small place: just a couple tattooing stations, and a little waiting area. But if you push the back wall of the shop it swings open. It’s a secret door which leads into a hidden clubhouse in the back. There’ s a bar with some people around it, a pool table, a small stage with motorcycles parked there, and a brass stripper pole that’s currently vacant.

The shop is called Black Sheep Ink and I’ll learn that the guys that hang out here take the name to heart. They see themselves as a collection of misfits, of self-proclaimed criminals and runaways and hillbillies. And Tyler has built this place as a haven for them, a place to swap their tales of getting jerked around by cops and judges and clerks and bosses, and to cultivate a sense of pride in their status as the outcasts of their world.

There’s this gentleman, whose name I never do catch, who tells me, quote, “I’m so fucking fat I don’t care no more.” And lifts up his shirt to show me the giant words he has tattooed on his stomach: Feed Me.

FMG: Tell ‘em, tell ’em, give ’em a picture. I’m a 6 foot, 350 pound bearded man in a John Deere hat with ’feed me’ on my belly, just so y’all get a clear picture here.

There’s a guy who’s been wearing the same trucker hat for seven years.

Hat guy: Seven years. Same hat.

Then there’s this guy.

Razor: (Ringing sound? Chewbacca sound?)

People call him Razor.

R: Beep beep, and it was backing up, I was parked up on the side of the road up there. I looked down there I says, son of a bitch, he, Willard, drinks up. Yeah Walter Odom come by man, seen him layin’ in the yard and thought he’d died. Hell ambulance is already, they’d already called the ambulance man. The bastard is layin’ out there in the yard got an ounce of pot laying inside him, six beers, he was just shitfaced. (laughs)

I believe he’s telling a story about his friend Willard who is impervious to death.

Razor: You don’t run over there three times in one fucking night. Three times dude, one night. And the bastard won’t die.

And then there’s Tyler, who’s been sleeping at the tattoo parlor lately because he can’t afford anywhere else to spend the night, who’s 23 years old and has three daughters with three different women, and who’s been haunted his whole life by people assuming he’s just like his father.

His father who abused him and his siblings and his mother, and who is a convicted sex offender for having sex with a minor. One day Tyler will tell me that he often wakes up in the morning in a puddle of sweat, having dreamt during the night of killing his dad.

Tyler is friendly to me when I arrive, welcoming. But as I’m getting out my recording equipment I hear murmurs from other people wondering who I am, wondering if I might be a cop. People are asking me questions, feeling me out. A few guys ask if I’ll smoke a bowl with them out of some deer antlers. I don’t want to be stoned, but I also don’t want to seem like a narc, so I pretend to take a puff.

I pretend to do a number of things that make me feel very uncomfortable in order to keep as low a profile as possible. Such as act like I’m not shocked or upset or scared when someone says this to me, a radio producer with a microphone in the first few minutes that we’re talking. At the risk of ruining any surprise, the statement is racist, and nonsensical, replete with multiple uses of a terrible word.

Bubba: You know we had a tax free labor, it didn’t have nothing to do with a bunch of niggers picking cotton and we worked our ass off and we got, we earned everything we got.

This is a tattoo artist who goes by Bubba.

Bubba: So now if you got a tax paying job you gotta take care of some nigger’s wife that’s in jail, because she’s drawing a child support check on each one of them…

Later Bubba will display a rather fluent knowledge of the differences between various white supremacy groups. Mind you we’re in a majority black city right now, Bessamer, about 20 minutes from Bibb county heading towards Birmingham. But everyone in here is white, including me. Someone mentions offhand that the small tattoo area in front is about as much shop as you want here in Bessamer, otherwise the place would be filled with black people who’ll piss you off and won’t pay anything. Hence the secret door.

Before I left for Alabama, my girlfriend Solange, now my wife, who’s black and who’s family is from the south, had insisted I make my Facebook and Instagram accounts private. Because they’re filled with pictures of us together. I told her she was being silly, overly paranoid. Now I’m grateful I decided at the last minute to follow her advice.

When someone asks me what the women look like up in New York, I tell them they’re all shapes, sizes, and colors. When someone asks what my ethnicity is I tell them about the Italian part without mentioning the Russian Jew part. But there’s no hiding the fact that I’m a Yankee.

B: What’s that?

U: Y’all’s just as racist as we are.

B: It’s, go quieter.

U: Y’all left em the fuck down here. (laughs)

In an effort to change the subject, I turn the conversation to one of the few things I know I have in common with these guys.

B: So you guys know John?

Our mutual acquaintance, John B. McLemore.

U1: Oh yeah.

U2: He’s a character.

U3: I ain’t never met nobody else like him.

U1: Nobody.

U3: Nobody else like that.

U2: He been buggin’ the piss outta you?

B: What’s that?

U2: Has he been buggin’ the piss outta you?

B: I’m not there yet, but it’s exhausting to hang out with him for a long day.

U2: Damn right. (laughter from all) He’s exhausting after all day.

U3: His brain needs to slow the fuck down is what you wanna tell him. Slow the fuck down for a minute.

They tell me John comes around the tattoo parlor pretty often and likes to lecture them and give them a hard time. He’ll argue with them about their views on the south, on politics, on race. Bubba says he’ll submit them to tirades about the coming climate and energy apocalypses.

Bubba: About how we’s running out of fossil fuels and the world’s gonna come to a fucking end, and…

John tells off their customers for talking about what he sees as inane shit, tells these guys that their lives are amounting to nothing. That they’re examples, in the flesh, of what’s wrong with this place.

Joel: The guy’s crazy. He thinks everybody’s a failure, everything that’s going on is a failure.

This is another tattoo artist, Joel.

B: He calls you guys failures?

Joel: Fuck yeah he calls us failures, you know what I mean?

B: Like jokingly, or…

Joel: No. Everybody’s a failure. Like in his brain, everybody’s a failure. For all I know you could be a failure. You know sometimes I wish he’s kind of fail…

These guys dish it out too. They tease John for his many peculiarities. Like how he’ll devour whatever leftover food is around, no matter how old or rock hard it is. His inability to buy new shoes to alleviate his athlete’s foot, which he’s allegedly had for three years. His extemporaneous solving of math problems. His utter aversion to being in a room with more than two or three people at a time. His living with his mom his whole life. His being a loner.

It’s friendly though, they like John. After all, John is the granddaddy of all black sheep, so this crew gets him. They truly seem to accept him. Though that doesn’t stop them from wondering.

FMG: I’d love to know what he’s worth.

I’d love to know what he’s worth, the Feed Me Guy says.

FMG: Just, not because I give a fuck but just to know why does he live like that.

Tyler: I mean he lives like he’s poor as a church mouse.

That’s Tyler saying, “He lives like he’s poor as a church mouse.” And Tyler would know. He and John are close. He’s the only reason all these guys know John.

Tyler helped build John’s maze. He’s done all sorts of different odd jobs for him. He’s over there all the time. And as far as the church mouse, I did notice that John’s refrigerator’s pretty bare. His mom invited me to stay for dinner one night, so long as I didn’t mind eating like po’ folks, she told me, in a way where I couldn’t tell if she was joking. They live without air conditioning, without TV. It’s mysterious to me too because at the same time John has all these dogs he feeds, and brings to the vet, this elaborate yard that requires constant upkeep. He mentioned to me that he spent more than $60,000 on the maze alone.

Feed Me Guy says to Tyler:

FMG: I don’t understand why, if he’s, if he’s as loaded as you say,

Tyler: Oh, he’s worth millions.

B: Millions?

FMG: Have you not done any research on John?

Tyler explains that John’s family comes from money. He says that one of his grandpas was a judge, and that John got an inheritance, played the stock market with it, and made even more money. Plus aside from all that Tyler says John made good bank restoring old clocks. All of that sounds like it could be true enough, but then Tyler and his friends start listing off John’s assets and I can’t tell if any of that is real. Or if they’re just letting their imaginations fill in the blanks about their local Boo Radley.

They claim John has $400,000 in cash, a hundred some-odd thousand worth of tools in the workshop, all the antiques around his house you’re gonna get $150,000 bucks if you sell that old ass shit, Bubba says, rare books in the basement, a single clock worth $10,000 that’s just sitting on the floor in a plastic storage bin. Not to mention, says Tyler…

Tyler: Gold that his granddaddy, his granddaddy’s gold, his daddy’s gold…

Tyler’s up on the counter of the bar, crouching. He has a brown briefcase he carries around with him. He calls it his minister’s case. It has a sticker that says ‘minister’ slapped on the outside, and it’s filled with his tattoo machines and a gun and his welder’s cap and some nipple jewelry and his Black Sheep Ink business cards, and also his minister’s license which he got online because he wanted to found a non-denominational church where people of all backgrounds could come together and talk it out. This clubhouse is meant to be a version of that. He says it’s his church. Tyler stares down at us from the corner of the bar, like he’s about to divulge a secret. When it comes to John, he says, there’s no telling…

Tyler: What he’s got, because there’s a lot of shit that I’m sure I don’t know about, because I been finding stuff out slowly over the years, and there’s damn secret little dungeons and shit under his damn house man, I ain’t playing. I’ve built gates for him. I’ve built gates for the dungeons.

I’ve built gates for the dungeons, Tyler’s telling me, dungeons in John’s basement.

He soon clarifies they’re actually old crawlspaces. But the way John had them rigging them up, Tyler says, with tiny doors and these locking iron gates inside, dividing them into sections, what was the purpose of all that? It was creepy. Though Tyler digs creepy stuff so he also thought it was cool.

That guy Bubba, the one who’s especially outspoken about his racist views, as the night goes on I put together that he’s the one that gave John all his tattoos. The tattoos that John showed me abruptly at his workshop that cover his whole chest. Bubba, he explains that being a tattoo artist is a lot like being a therapist. People sit in his chair for hours on end, and each person he works on is getting that tattoo for some specific reason. It’s his job, as he sees it, to uncover that reason. Maybe it’s a meditation, a milestone, an excuse to get out of the house, a new girlfriend, a death. John’ s motivation was especially bewildering to Bubba because John had made it clear almost every time he came in the shop how deeply he despised tattoos.

Bubba: If you got a tattoo on you he’d tell you you wasn’t shit. You’re a lowlife. You shouldn’t have that on you.

So as shocking as it was to me when John lifted up his shirt to show me all his tattoos, it was far more shocking to Bubba when John strolled in one day, at the age of 47, and asked him to start putting them there.

Bubba: I thought he was gonna commit suicide. You know that’s what I thought in my mind.

B: Why?

Bubba: This is something you’re completely against, you think fucking failures have tattoos, you know what I’m saying? Why in the fuck would you just start tattooing your whole upper body like that, you know what I mean? And around your neck. Pistons, tattooing pistons on him, you know redneck-ass tattoo, you know? So I mean, first thought, I thought he was gonna kill hisself. (laughs) I thought he was gonna get tatted the fuck up and blow his brains out or something, fuck I don’t know. And then the more I got to doing it, you know I realized, you know we’re in a, in a rut, you know, we need some money and he helped us out. I mean, he helped a lot.

Bubba and Tyler co-own Black Sheep Ink together. And Bubba started noticing they’d have a bill about to come due for the business, they’d be wondering how they were gonna pay it, and then conveniently John would come in and hand over $300 or $400 and ask for another tattoo on his chest. Bubba says people around here don’t throw down money like that. But John would, just in the nick of time, and then schedule another appointment for soon after.

Bubba: He might not have said, ‘I’m helping you out.’ But when you sit down and pay me $2000, $3000 in a couple weeks span you’ve just helped me out. You know, you’ve just got all my bills caught up, you’ve just got everything back to where it needed to be. You know.

B: You think that’s why he did it?

Bubba: Now I do. He keeps a book, man, he writes down everything. So he knows when we’re having a bad time. He’d ask certain things like what the rent, you know, what’s your power bill? When it due? And he already knows this shit cuz he writes shit down, and he just, you know planned his tattoo out to where it just about paid everything up in increments.

B: Wait, it was like that exact almost?

Bubba: (laughing) Yeah. If it wasn’t for John we’d be shut the fuck down.

B: If it wasn’t for John?

Bubba: Yeah, if it wasn’t for John I’d be tattooing at my kitchen table right now. I think he sacrificed his skin to help us out.

Bubba says John is an emotional guy. And sure a lot of that emotion is disgust, but there’s also sympathy. In particular for Tyler. If he’s helping the tattoo parlor, he’s only doing it because of Tyler and his brother Jake.

Bubba: He’s just watched them boys, man, he knows how his daddy was. I mean the kid was laying block at five years old.

Tyler that is.

Bubba: You know on the job site, working. Not going to school, working. Going to school two days, a work week, work five days a week, you know what I mean? So he just seen it and he knows it wasn’t right, sees what, how Tyler’s been programmed to be, the way he is by his raising and his upbringing, you know. And feels sorry for him, I guess. I don’t know. He knows that he’s smarter than he’s letting on, I mean I don’t know.

B: That Tyler is?

Bubba: Yeah.

When John hires Tyler to chop down trees in his yard, or build iron gates in his crawlspaces, he doesn’t really need that stuff done, Bubba says. He’s just trying to find an excuse to put money in Tyler’s pocket. When Tyler gets caught driving with a suspended license and ends up in jail, something that happens now and again, Bubba knows John’s the one to call because he’ll bail him out.

Bubba: He loves Tyler. I mean, Tyler’s his boy. I mean, that’s his boy. Tyler’s brother, he cares about Tyler’s little brother Jake, you know. John can say anything he wants to, but he loves Tyler probably just about as much as you would your own son. Your own flesh and blood. And I ain’t figured it out.

We’re standing in the backyard as we’re talking, behind the tattoo shop. A train whistle starts to blow in the distance. Eventually someone comes out and tells me I might be interested to know that Kabram’s sister, Kassian Burt, is here. Like, right inside, 15 feet away from me. ‘Why don’t we just go ask her about the murder?’ This town.

I go to the bar, leave six bucks for my beer, and careful to avoid Kabram’s sister head out the secret door, not knowing what I eventually will know, months and months from now. That Kabram Burt didn’t murder anybody. But also that before this is all over, someone will end up dead.

More, in a minute.

Part 2

B: Kabram? Hey, I’m Brian Reed.

K: Nice to meet you bud.

B: So I’m doing a radio story, I’m a reporter, I’m here from New York. Is there somewhere quiet we could sit?

It’s a year later and I’m pulling into K3 Lumber on a Friday morning, nervously asking if Kabram’s around. I feel comfortable doing this only because I have finally determined that the incident John contacted me about, where Kabram allegedly got into a fight and beat a guy to death, although it did in fact go down almost exactly as John and Jake and Skylar and others told me, was wrong in one relatively important detail: the ‘to death’ part. The guy Kabram beat up did not die. They just thought he did for a while. That’s what I eventually gathered from talking to people more. Once I heard that I started contacting law enforcement to find out what did exactly happen.

It turns out the incident in question actually took place in adjacent Tuscaloosa county. A chief at the sheriff’s department there read to me, from a detailed case file, showing that the police had investigated the fight thoroughly, that no one had been killed, and that they had closed the case not because they were paid off or anything, but because none of the guys involved wanted to press charges.

And so here I am at K3 Lumber to ask Kabram why he would go around bragging to people that he’d killed a guy he had not killed. He’s with some coworkers in the lumber yard, in a plaid shirt, green trucker hat, and dark sunglasses.

B: Kabram? Hey I’m Brian Reed. Nice to meet you.

There’s a particular philosophy I’ve encountered down here, and will continue to encounter. That is, the ‘fuck it’ philosophy. A belief that there’s no sense in worrying or thinking too much about any given decision because life is gonna be difficult and unfair regardless of what you do. It’s more than a belief really. It’s a way of moving moment to moment though the world. And from the get go Kabram seems to be a subscriber. I show up with a microphone and ask if I can talk to him on the record about a matter I’ve yet to name, and he’s immediately game. Fuck it. And we walk over behind some stacks of lumber to be alone.

K: What you wanna talk about bud?

B: So basically, um, like were you at one point going around telling people that you’d killed someone?

K: No, a boy cut my buddy’s neck right here with a knife, but no like I beat the piss out of him. What happened was…

What happened was, Kabram says, was they were at a party, and he doesn’t know how the fight started because he and almost everyone else was zonked out of their minds.

K: Drinking and doing everything else under the sun.

B: Like substance-wise.

K: Like taking Xanax and doing, mixing speed with it, and stuff.

According to the police report, it was a clear moonlit night, about 4, 4:30 in the morning on August 4th, 2012. Just a few days outside the time window John had discerned from his records. Kabram says all he remembers is they were in the middle of the woods, chilling around a fire. A fight broke out and then suddenly this dude Dylan, not Dylan Nichols as John had told me, he was not involved. But another Dylan with a different last name came up from behind with a knife and cut Kabram’s buddy Tim in the neck. So Kabram went after him, held Dylan’s head down, punched him, hit him with a beer bottle. Tim got involved, might have bit the guy in the cheek, Dylan kept swinging his knife the whole time. He stabbed Kabram too.

K: Right up here.

B: It’s like up in your thigh there.

K: Yeah, like I almost cut my gooch meat. (laughs)

And then it was over. Kabram thinks the whole thing lasted maybe 15 seconds. It wasn’t some beautiful drawn-out movie fight, he says. It was a real life fight. Which means it was scrappy, awkward, and quick, and left his friend Tim clutching a 4 inch gash on his neck that was gushing blood.

B: Did you think like Tim might be, like it might be life-threatening?

K: Yes, that is the craziest shit I’ve ever seen in my life.

Kabram looked around and saw almost everyone at the party, maybe 30-40 people, scattering. Tim was in a bad way, so someone had called 911, and now people were driving away or hiding in the woods before the police got there. The ambulance came, carted Kabram and Tim to the hospital, and after getting a few stitches near the meat of his gooch, Kabram went outside to smoke a cigarette and bumped into a group of random girls from the party.

K: Tellin me all kind of crazy shit like somebody had died, like up, that boy you got in a fight with died.

B: What did you think?

K: I think I don’t think that boy died. Said you wouldn’t think so, hell the fight didn’t last that long.

B: But still you had like, this part of your brain that was like maybe

K: Well yeah I started coming down off them Xanaxes and you get to thinking oh god, I hope I didn’t do something stupid. I don’t think nobody died but if they did I ain’t gonna hang around to find out.

Kabram says he was kind of wigging out, wondering if he’d killed someone. He called a buddy of his to come pick him up at the hospital. That buddy was at a motel room full of methheads in Bessamer, Kabram says. And judging from police records and other sources, it seems possible the rumor that Dylan had been killed started in that motel room and then spread from there. Kabram says by the time he got to work on Monday it had already taken hold. People were coming up to him at the lumber yard and other places around town asking if he’d killed a guy.

B: And so you never, I just wanna ask you this again, you never maybe were drunk one time and saying yeah, I beat that guy to death to anyone? Because I heard that you were bragging about it from multiple people.

K: Number one it wouldn’t even be something to brag about. It ain’t like a deer or something. You know.

B: I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear you say that. I gotta say. So where would people get that from?

K: Just damn small town, man, shit gets fucking twisted.

B: But saying that you told them, directly, to their face.

K: Hell, I don’t know buddy.

I don’t know either. I can’t tell if what Kabram is saying to my face right now is true or not.

I spoke to Kabram’s father too, Kendall Burt, and told him that John said he’d overheard him on the phone here at K3 one day. Saying something about how his son was guilty as hell and he knew it. And Kendall told me he doesn’t know what John thought he heard him say, or if he heard him say anything, but that he’s a tough love kind of guy and that if his son had done something like killed a person he would never cover that up.

According to Kabram there is a moral to this story. He shares it with me after I wonder aloud to him about something one of the police officers told me. Why did his buddy Tim, rather than pressing charges against the man who’d almost killed him with a knife, decide instead to shove his middle finger in the face of the cops when they came to talk to him in his hospital bed?

K: I mean nobody wants to be a tattle tale.

B; I mean, dude almost died, got stabbed in the neck.

Kabram takes a drag of his cigarette.

B: You’re shrugging your shoulders.

K: If you’re gonna live like white trash and shit, then hell, you know you might as well not tell on nobody because if that’s the life you’re trying to live you can’ t be mad when, you know, low down dirty shit like that happens when you hang out with low down dirty people.

Part 3

B: You there?

J: I’m here.

B: Cool.

J: I’m waiting on tea to boil.

B: Do you have time to talk? I have some stuff I’d love to talk with you about…

J: I’m sitting here right now, 2:25, with my orange pants on, waiting for Tyler to get his ass back over here. I figured you was calling to lower the boom or some damn something, go to town.

B: Yeah, it’s my turn to talk a lot, I have a lot to catch you up on actually.

I’m excited to tell John what I’ve figured out, finally, after all this time. I now narrate the story of the real crime back to him, almost a year and a half after he first told me about it, with details colored in and facts illuminated. Including the rather germane one that Kabram did not kill anybody. After I’m done John summarizes my findings.

J: A bunch of fussin and fightin, snaggle-tooth stolen trucks mess laughs stabbin hoopin hollerin going to jail. I can’t believe how much you’ve worked on this son of a bitch and at the same time (deep sigh). My god.

B: What? Why the sigh?

J: I’m sitting here looking out the window at the clouds going by, just in loathing disgust at the town that I live in, and the fact that I didn’t pack my bags and get the hell out of here decades ago. I think it’s the part about hiding in the woods that did it. That’s just so classic Bibb county. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that expression in my life, “hiding in the woods.” I think hiding in the woods in Bibb county is like having your afternoon tea in London.

You know there is another way John could have responded to all this news. I dare call it the normal way. That sigh he let out, rather than being one of despair, could have been one of relief. Relief that a young man has not been killed. That local officials have not been bought off by a powerful rich family, and that in fact law enforcement has done what appears to be a competent job responding to this incident. Shittown, at least in this case, doesn’t look so so terrible to me.

B: I dunno, progress, right? (laughs)

But no, I’ve learned that sometimes you catch John in a spell of depression, sometimes you catch him in a bout of mania, and sometimes, like today I think, you catch him in an alchemy of the two.

J: (sigh) I’m trying to think of a snappy comeback to that.

B: Cuz what is it if not progress?

J: (laughing) Oh my god, oh lord, it’s just a clusterfuck of sorrow isn’t it.

B: A clusterfuck of sorrow.

J: It’s kind of like progress, as in ISIS is making progress. (laughing throughout) You know, it’s that type of progress. ISIS is, it’s all like…. Oh shit.

B: Damn man, I’m over here busting my ass off… when you contacted me you wanted to know what actually happened. So it’s progress in that sense, right?

J: It’s progress in that…

B: I am not saving the world over here. Climate change is…

J: You are definitely not saving the world!

B: Climate change is not ending, I am not bringing jobs and sustainable employment to Alabama, and lifting people out of poverty, but you asked me to try and figure out what happened here. On that front I have made progress.

J: I think you’ve done pretty goddamned good.

B: Well thank you.

J: I guess if I sound like I’m disinterested today it’s firstly cuz I’m tired wore-ass out, and secondly because you know, I just, I’m not the most cheerful person. You know I spend most spare time now either studying energy or climate change, and it’s not looking good. So uh, yeah sometimes it’s hard for me to get focused back on something when the whole goddamned Arctic summer sea ice is gonna be gone by 2017. You know, we’re fixing to have heat waves in Siberia this year, and sometimes I feel like a total idiot because I’m worried about a goddamn crack head out here in fuckin, you now Shitttown Alabama, so yeah that’s just a personality disorder of mine. You know sometimes when you call me I’m in kind of an upbeat mood and sometimes like today you’ve caught me in one of these tired, somber, you know, reflective moods where I’ve been you know sitting there mulling over climate change for about the past 10 damned hours. Oh, I mean, my god.

When John says he’s been mulling over climate change for the past 10 hours, what I think he means is that he’s been mulling over climate change for the past 10 hours. I don’t think he’s exaggerating. It’s like work for him, like he’s made it his job.

We’ve now been talking to each other for a year and a half, and while some of that time we’ve discussed the murder there’s been so much other stuff that John wants to chat about. It’s interesting stuff but it’s all over the place. Even if I haven’t talked to him in a while nearly every day he sends me emails about all sorts of global calamities that he continues to keep up with even though they’ve fallen out of the news.

J: How many people are still concerned today about the Philippines?

He’s referring to typhoon Heian from 2013. Or how about the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004, John says. Or the terrible flood in Pakistan the year before last?

J: You’re not hearing a lot about that, are you.

How about the fallout from the Ebola outbreak, the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, or a deeper cut, Chernobyl? The list goes on and on. And it’s not just catastrophe. John also gives me lectures and sends reports on the systemic problems he sees leading to complete breakdown of the social contract. Problems in our food production chain, our healthcare industry, our monetary policy…

J: All the fucking Hadolic regression, geometric weighting…

He also shares a variety of disturbing stories that he manages to dig up from all corners of the country: about the son a US senator suffocating 21 dogs, or a KKK branch giving out bags of candy to children as a recruitment effort in South Carolina. Or a guy down the street from John, trying to kill his wife by running her over with a Bobcat.

J: I was on homefacts last night, the city of West Blockton has outdone Vance as being the child molester per capita capital of Alabama.

This is another data point John likes to send me now and again, the number of sex offenders per capita in his area. Vance and West Blockton are both towns in Bibb county.

J: Vance is now one child molester for every 192 citizens, West Blockton is for about every 63 or 64.

B: Why do you check that statistic so often?

J: Why do I check uh, crude oil plus least condensate production so often? Or why do I go pour over the tables from the IPCC so often?

The IPCC being the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

For the longest time I thought the only connection between all of John’s random interests was that it was all shitty. But the connection is deeper than that. He’s distressed by the lack of outrage, compared to the amount of shittiness in the world. To him that ratio is totally out of whack. That’s why he was still upset about the Kabram rumor even after I told him it wasn’t true. Even though the murder and the cover up weren’t real, everyone sure did believe they were. And still they did nothing. That part, the inaction, that’s more disturbing to John than the idea of the murder itself.

J: You know I really hate that these kids know all the things that they know, and they just accept them as normal.

B: I know, that seems to really bother you.

J: It’s accepted as something you can’t do nothing about.

The shitty misfortunes John fixates on, they’re not a bunch of disparate things. They’re all the same thing. His Shittown is part of Bibb county which is part of Alabama which is part of the United States which is part of Earth which is experiencing climate change, which no one is doing anything about. It maddens John. The whole world is giving a collective shrug of its shoulders and saying fuck it.

What I admire about John is that in his own misanthropic way, he’s crusading against one of the most powerful insidious forces we face: resignation. The numb acceptance that we can’t change things. He’s trying to shake people out of their stupor, trying to convince them that it is possible to make their world a better place. Yes, that lady over there, she’s barefoot, and she’s pants less. But we can lend her shoes! We can give her some pants! Instead of just putting our heads down and speeding past her and muttering that she must have done something to get like that, we can ask her if she’s in trouble, and we can offer her help. There is a different way.

That’s why John rants and raves at the tattoo parlor. That’s why John adopts dozens of stray dogs. That’s why he devotes night after night to studying and writing about climate change. That’s why he contacted a national radio show and asked me to come investigate. And that’s why I now see John is devoting so much energy to what is arguably his most ambitious project of all: radically altering the life of Tyler Goodson.

Part 4

J: Tyler almost embodies everything I hate about this Shittown in one convenient package. Have you ever thought of it that way? I bet you haven’t dared.

As the months have gone by since my trip to Alabama I’ve heard more and more about Tyler. I’ve heard about his tough childhood, the petty legal troubles that continue to dog him, his persistent financial problems, his struggle to support his three daughters, whom he had by the age of 21, and whom he loves dearly.

John has devoted his life to restoring old clocks. Methodically and thoroughly he sorts through the busted parts of these timepieces, trying to revive a sense of beauty and order. And in a way that’s what he’s attempting to do with Tyler. Every time John picks up the phone and I ask what he’s up to, Tyler’s either there, or he was just there, or he’s waiting for him to get there. It seems like he’s giving him consistent work. John’s also been accompanying Tyler to court and hiring him a lawyer to help him clear up some misdemeanor charges and get his driver’s license back. And Tyler’s recently moved to the trailer park across the street from John, so now he can easily walk to John’s place. John’s even talking about writing Tyler and his brother Jake into his will.

J: I don’t want these two bastards to know this, but when I fall over dead each other of them’s gonna get 20 ounces of gold each.

B: I’ll uh, I’ll keep that secret.

J: That’s assuming the goddamn cops don’t come in and steal it!

But John’s relationship with Tyler is not just as a benefactor. I can tell that they get something more from one another. John will mention a walk he and Tyler took through the woods, or an expedition they made to the junkyard to search for treasures, or he’ll recount some bit of their conversation. They like to spend time together.

One day John was on the phone with me and he looked out his window and started listing off the flowers that were in bloom in his yard. And the ones that were dying. He sighed and said:

J: It’s tedious and brief. That’s a sundial motto. Tedious and brief.

Before we had clocks we had sundials, and I had never thought about this until I started talking to John, but watching a sundial, which can be as simple as a stick in the ground, as the shadow crept along, you were actually witnessing the rotation of the earth. It’s so much less abstracted than a clock, a level closer to time itself. Anyway John told me sundials often have mottos engraved on them. John says tedious and brief is one.

B: What do you mean? Tedious and brief?

J: Your life is tedious and brief. All sundial mottos are sad like that.

There are hundreds of these mottos. Life passes like the shadow. Make haste but slowly. Use the hours, don’t count them. Even as you watch, I’m fleeing. Soon comes night.

These little reminders are out there, hidden in crannies around the world. I recently happened upon a sundial in the cemetery of an old Catholic mission next to a grave. Because of John I knew to look for the motto. It read: Nil bone hodei, diem perdidi. I did nothing good today. I have lost a day.

J: You know I told you I used to make sundials, but you know I made them for the mathematical exercise, I would pick difficult dials to do as a test of my abilities of geometry and trigonometry. And these are things I wish Tyler and Jake could experience. There’s a real excitement in geometry and trigonometry that just you know… I think when we was building the swing, I built a swing for Tyler…

This is one of the ways John and Tyler have been passing the hours together lately. They’ve been constructing an adult swing set, a giant rectangular frame, to the side of John’s house, not far from the apple trees, with a single John Deere tractor seat hanging from it. It has a 20 foot arc of action, John says, which I understand to mean it’s a pretty gnarly swing. When John first told me about it he’d said he was building it for himself, but now he amends that.

J: You know I think I built the swing for Tyler actually. I found out that an old man of 50, when he swings in a swing for about 20 minutes his back hurts and his knees hurt, so I didn’t build it for me after all. Done found that out. So I think I built it for Tyler, fuck it. Oh and I built him a pull up bar cuz he wants to be strong. I told him, well it’s nice to be physically strong but you need to be strong between the ears because physical strength goes away, you know. You need to have strong neurons. I told him you need to have a little bit of general algebra and you should always have some trigonometry and you should have some geometry.

B: What does he say?

J: He never, I remember this conversation, he said he never saw how it is that had anything you could do much with.

I like imagining this odd pair, a polymathic middle-aged clock restorer and a tatted up kid in his 20s with a Harley and a revolver in his briefcase. Out in John’s yard on a summer’s day, sticking swing set poles into the ground, the dogs circling around them, maybe a butterfly fluttering by. I like imagining John interrupting their work for a little bit, to give Tyler a math lesson, feeling gratified that he has someone to give a math lesson too. And Tyler perhaps taking something from it, but at the very least humoring John, because he’s grateful that John’s helping him get his life together. I like know thing that this is how two people have chosen to spend an afternoon together in Bibb county Alabama.

Take the gifts of this hour, one sundial says. Another, it’s later than you think.

J: And I pointed out the diagonal chain that was going to shore up the uh, you know, upright,

B: Of the swing set?

J: Yeah, I told him now the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the two sides. He hadn’t used Pythagoras’s theorem. See we could calculate the length of chain without climbing up on the goddamn top of the pole and pulling the damn diagonal with a tape measure. That was my answer.

B: And what did he say?

J: “Hmm,” or something like that.

B: Hmm.

J: Yeah he has a lot of his daddy’s mannerisms. Hmm is often heard when there’s not a significant answer. Uh, hold, on, let me, hold on, I’m gonna piss in the sink, I hope that’s politically incorrect. Something that slipped Tyler out, yes I just pissed in the kitchen sink because uh, if the phone has enough signal I’ll just go out there and piss near one of the gardenias, the azaleas, the camellias, or the crepe myrtles because you know they like the acid. (blows nose) But I didn’t think the phone had enough signal, also instead of wasting three or four gallons to flush the commode I just peed here in the kitchen sink and used, about what a cupful of water to flush the sink. And I got a little short dick but I got a pretty good aim so I can usually aim right for the center of that damn thing without splashing everywhere.

B: (Laughing) Oh man…

J: But in any event, I, what was the question? I forgot.

B: I forgot too.

(Phone ringing)

Skylar: Hello?

B: Hey is Jake around? Is this Skylar?

It’s been a couple weeks since I last spoke to John and I just got a text from Jake, Tyler’s brother, asking me to call him when I get a chance.

S: Yeah this is Skylar. Uh I was the one that called you, Jake texted you for me.

B: Oh, hey.

S: Um, has any – hold on for just one second. Has anybody called you?

B: Umm, no, not that I know of. I have a few missed calls, but I don’t think they’re from anybody down there.

S: Oh.

B: Why?

S: Well we have some bad news to tell you.

B: OK.

S: John B. killed hisself Monday night.

Chapter 3

“Tedious and brief.”

Part 1

Skylar: Has anybody called you?

B: Umm, no. Not that I know… I have a, I have a few missed calls but I don’t think they’re from anybody down there.

Skylar: Oh.

B: Why?

From Serial and This American Life, I’m Brian Reed. This is Shittown.

Skylar: Well, um, we have some bad news to tell you.

B: OK.

Skylar. John B. killed hisself Monday night.

B: Are you kidding me?

Skylar: No.

B: Oh my gosh.

Skylar: With everything that happened we wasn’t able to call yesterday. His body was found yesterday morning. And it happened yesterday morning, I mean it happened between last Monday night and Tuesday morning.

B: Oh my god.

Skylar: Yeah. So right now, um, his mother is ok…

B: Oh Skylar.

Skylar: And we’re just trying to get her taken care of and make sure she don’t go to a nursing home.

B: Oh my gosh. (groans)

Skylar: And the way he killed himself is he drank cyanide.

B: Oh my god. Oh I’m so sorry, I, mm -

Skylar: Yeah, I mean we’re just, we’re just, it hurts, but we’re just mainly trying to focus on his mom right now. They took her to the hospital for evaluation to make sure that, I mean, to make sure that John hadn’t tried to give her any of it, but her system was clear. She’s been healthy and everything. She ain’t, she knows what’s going on. She understands to a certain point, and she just basically wants to go home, and you know

B: I’m sorry, I’m still just trying to take all this in. I’m trying to follow what you’re saying but it’s just so shocking. I’m, I’m like hearing you but it’s not all registering. It’s just, like, you know he emailed me the other night, like

Skylar: Hold on one second let me walk out right quick.

B: (sighs) John.

Sitting in the studio in a daze on the phone with Skylar I searched my inbox for the last message I received from Hiruit Nguyse, the pseudonym John used for his email address.

B: I mean the last thing he wrote me… I mean I didn’t even get a chance to totally read all of this.

He sent it on Sunday. Father’s day. 8:55 pm.

Skylar: And it happened Monday.

It’s Wednesday now, early evening, just three days ago John was alive. Standing at the computer in his bedroom, emailing me, thinking of me, sending me a graph of the increasing gold reserves of the Russian central bank, saying what do the Ruskies know that we don’t? I don’t know why we do this when we’re told someone has died. Hold up our last interaction with them and point to the nearness of it in time to explain our disbelief. As if time gives a shit.

Skylar: And I bet you’re feeling the same thing that I’m feeling. You probably didn’t message back. You were busy.

B: I just wrote back today. Like a couple hours ago.

Skylar: Yep. I understand how you’re feeling. We’re all feeling it. I talked to him Friday night. Me and John stayed on the phone for 4 hours. No lie. You know how you can get when you talk to him, and like not stop. We stayed on the phone for 4 hours and he was fine. I knew he had issues but he was fine. He talked about how bad this world was, like the main thing we talked about the other night was how bad this world was and what it’s coming to and everything, and how me and Jake shouldn’t bring any more kids, and nobody else should bring any more kids into this world because of how bad it’s gonna end up getting, and, like but I mean he was fine it was just like a casual conversation about it.

B: (starting to cry) It was a John conversation.

John talked about committing suicide. He talked about it to me, and I knew that he talked about it to others. He never called me on the verge of it or anything like that. When it came up it was usually very matter of fact, like of course this is my plan, I’m gonna do this someday. The way someone might talk about their plans to retire, or move.

John actually wrote me several emails that Sunday, Father’s Day, the night before he committed suicide. The one about the Russian gold reserves was the very last, but there was a string of messages just before that. I’d recently sent John a series I produced for This American Life, about the fayed relationship between cops and African Americans. While I was working on it months ago I hadn’t been so good about keeping in touch with John, so when it was finished I wanted to share it with him so he could hear what had kept me so busy. On Sunday night he wrote me as he was listening, telling me how disgusted he was with the police abuses I was reporting about, how our country wasn’t worth defending, how he would let his mother lay over and die before he called his local police. And then he sent me an email titled ‘Collapse List,’ which is the email that I saw come in but didn’t get a chance to fully read because it was very long.

John prefaced it by saying that he was inspired to send it after listening to our cop episodes. And then, the bullet points start. 99% of rhinos gone since 1914. 90% of big ocean fish gone since 1950. 50% of Great Barrier Reef gone since 1985. Ocean plankton declines at 1% per year means 50% gone in 70 years. Ocean acidification doubles by 2050, triples by 2100. One million humans, net, are added to the earth every 4 and a half days. We must produce more food in the next 50 years than we have in the past 10,000 years combined. Earth has only 60 years of farming left, at current world soil degradation rates. On and on it goes like this, like his ledger of expenses. And that’s after a disclaimer from John, saying “Note that I do not include energy or economic issues with this list.”

It’s numbing.

I found out later that John didn’t actually write this list. It’s made its way around apocalyptic websites and comment threads, so you’d expect this kind of thing to be wildly inaccurate. But after checking some of the statistics, it doesn’t seem to be. When I look at this right now, in the shadow of John’s suicide, I guess it’s clear this was the fixation of a person in a deeply depressed mental state. But when I read it just three days before I didn’t see that. Hell, I didn’t see it as I was looking at it again today. Just a few hours before Skylar called, when I finally sat down to reply to it, and told him, quote, “This is fascinating.” I just saw it as the normal, cynical, John B. McLemore I’d become used to. I saw it as a glass full of piss. All the world was a Shittown to John. And he bore every disgrace of that world in his heart.

Skylar tells me that as we speak Tyler, her brother in law, is at the hospital with John’s mom, working to get power of attorney so they can bring her home and care for her in her own house. Skylar says John called and messaged several people the night he killed himself, and that Tyler was one of them.

It also appears that Tyler was the last person, besides John’s mother, to see him alive. I ask if there will be a funeral. They’re working on that, Skylar says, but yes there will likely be a service in a few days. Skyler says it will probably be small, just the Goodson family and John’s mom.

B: I mean I wanna, I would like to, come down and see you guys. I don’t know, like, I don’t know what’s appropriate. Given my, I mean you know I was doing, I was slowly doing a story that involved John, and I got to know him and care about him, and know you guys and I’m not sure where that leaves me, as like, who am I to this, to this situation –

Skylar: Well I mean…

B: You know?

Skylar: What, if you wasn’t anything to this, I wouldn’t have called.

Before John and I ever spoke he warned me in an email, quote, “I must tell you it will take a long time for me to just impress on you what a crudfuck town and county this is.” When John was alive I had trouble seeing the Shittown that John was seeing. I saw parts of it but not the full and glorious relief in which he saw it. But in the aftermath of his death, a whole other story unfurled in front of me, piece by piece. A story I could picture John laying out for me with outrage and humor and sadness. Maybe even written by one of his favorite short story writers. I could see John handing it to the next visitor he coaxed down to Bibb county as their bedtime reading. Saying, “Read this. It will help you understand this place I have lived nearly every one of my days. It’ll help you understand me.”

John brought me to Bibb county to search for a body of the man he believed, wrongly, had been killed by Kabram Burt. John hoped, if we could expose that murder, uncover the body so to speak, finally everyone would see Shittown for what it was. But that dude in the fight with Kabram, his wasn’t the body that would expose Shittown. John’s was.

The day after I learn of John’s suicide I call Tyler, to give my condolences. And also because he was seemingly the last person to be with John besides John’s mother, to see if something had happened that prompted John to do this now.

I tell him I’m sorry, ask him how he’s holding up, and immediately he starts telling me the story of the days and moments leading up to the suicide. I called him from my own phone, but I interrupt and ask if he’d mind me calling him back from the studio.

Tyler: Hey.

B: Hey man. Alright, so I’m recording just so you know.

T: Ok. Well I’m gonna start from the beginning then.

B: Yeah.

T: From Father’s Day, because he wanted to spend Father’s Day with me, and we’d done planned something, cuz you know I ain’t, I ain’t never had no daddy worth a damn, he’s just about the only daddy I’ve got.

B: They’d planned to spend Father’s Day together, but in the end they didn’t because John went and did something a couple days before that made Tyler mad.

T: I was pissed off at him because I brought my youngun, one of my younguns over there to swing in the swing, you know, and John just had me give them a haircut, he wanted me to skin his head and I did. And uh, my little girl said, was kind of poking at him, said “John you got a haircut like my Daddy’s ahahaha.” And he said, “Well, you’ll have it soon enough at Julia Tutwiler.” Now that’s the woman’s prison.

B: Oh.

T: And I, and that, pissed me off. You know my little girl didn’t understand that, but I did, and buddy that pissed me the fuck off.

B: Why did he say that?

T: I don’t know. I calmly said, Noelle, go get in the truck baby, we’re going, we’re gonna go on over to the house. And I calmly eased outta there. But that shit he said pissed me off and you know, I didn’t show up the next morning and didn’t talk to him all day. Come Saturday night he called me and I’d kinda been ignoring him, but I finally answered him that evening. And hell I bout broke down crying whenever I was telling him cuz he was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, John B. I just don’t understand why you say the shit you do.‘I said, the shit that you say in front of me I can kind of handle but when you say this shit in front of my girls, I said I just don’t know how take it buddy. I said I just figured you was trying to run me off. And he said, ’No, that’s the last thing I wanna do is run you off. And so what in the hell did I say to make you mad?’ He didn’t have not one clue what he said that pissed me off.

B: Oh really. I’m sure it was, he meant it as a joke that went wrong, you know? Like…

T: I guess, I don’t know

B: That’s all I can think of.

T: Well he acts like I don’t discipline my kids enough, so he’s thinking that they’re gonna end up in fuckin prison, I don’t know.

B: So did he say he was sorry? Or what did he say when you told him?

T: Oh yeah, I mean, I, I, we was alright, he ’bout started boo-hooing on the phone and I did too, and he told me he loved me, and I told him I loved him, and then I thought that might have been Sunday because the next morning I went over there, and…

This was Monday, June 22nd, 2015. The day John died. Tyler says they called it their Father’s Day.

T: I was supposed to, you know, do yard work or something, and we decided that we was gonna go fishing down there at the Cahaba River. I lied to everybody and told everybody that I was over there cutting his grass, but we was really out fishing. (sighs) And then that day we had a great day. We had a great day, except for the few little spells he had.

Tyler says he bought John a small bottle of whiskey and John was sipping it as they drove to the Cahaba River. John was getting nostalgic and blue as they rolled along old back roads where he used to drive with this dad who died years ago. They went by his Aunt Gertrude’s old house, his old girlfriend’s house. Everybody’s dead and gone, John told Tyler.

T: And he kinda got upset on the ride down there but once we got to the river he was fine. We had a good time and…

B: And what’d you guys talk about?

T: I said John, you just gotta learn to just stop and take some time for yourself and try to enjoy life and he said this is the most important day of your life. Talking about bein out there on that river. And hell, you know John can’t swim. I mean hell, we wasn’t in no deeper water than about waist deep, and he wouldn’t go nowhere without me holding his damn hand like a kid.

B: (sad laughter)

T: And we waded up and down the river and stuff, and I was flipping over rocks finding some crawfish and (unknown) and stuff and showing him. And he ain’t never done stuff like that before so it was new to him.

B: Did it seem like he was saying goodbye?

T: (sighs) I don’t know. Hell we spray painted our damn names up there under the damn bridge.

B: Really.

T: Hell yeah.

B: Oh Tyler, I’m really sorry man. I’m really sorry. That’s really hard.

T: It damn sure is, isn’t it.

At the end of the day, Tyler dropped John off at his house.

T: When I brought him home, he was just about lit. He had a pint of Wild Turkey 101 in him. A pint of Wild Turkey will have anybody gobblin. I mean I shouldn’t have left him that drunk, but I, I’d done got tired from being out all day, and I had to get back home to my kids. But he was begging me to come back over there.

Back at his trailer with his girlfriend and two of his young daughters, Tyler kept getting messages from. John. He says John was imploring him to come back, come back. Put your kids to bed and come back. And he also started threatening to kill himself.

T: And he texted me a couple times to tell me, he said, I got all the messages on my phone, he said it’s all I can do to keep from blowin my fuckin brains out right here in the driveway. You know I, I paced the hallways in my place just worried about him. I was pretty damn concerned, but you now he’s, he’s done said this stuff so many times, and my old lady was sitting here on the porch with me, cuz I’m like look I’m just about to go over there, and she said, “Tyler if you keep running over there every time he says he’s gonna kill hisself you’re gonna go crazy from this shit. He just keeps on telling you that to get you to come down there and you can’t just, you know, live your whole life around John.” Cuz that’s the way it’s gotten, he’d just gotten so he don’t want me to leave, you know. I’ve been down there all day, he wants me to stay down there all night. And I’ve got clothes down there and I’ve got a bed in the dining room. So I mean, I’m just pretty much residing down there anyway. Cuz I take care of Mama, I take care of him, I’m taking care of the dogs, the yard, everything. It’s like they depend on me. So I said, yeah, you’re probably right. And I went in there and laid my ass down and went to sleep.

The next morning, Tyler says, when he got the news he went to John’s immediately. There was police tape up. It was a crime scene. John’s body had already been taken away, but Tyler noticed something on the porch floor and stooped to look. They were John’s glasses, twisted up, with some kind of blood or vomit on the lenses. That’s where John died. On the porch.

T: I dunno man, I hadn’t been able to sleep, I hadn’t been able to eat… Shit’s got my fuckin brain so damn fucked up, man.

B: What’s that?

T: Got my damn mind so fucked up thinking about this shit.

I felt for Tyler. Not only was John, as John put it himself, a kind of ersatz father for Tyler, he was the person Tyler spent almost every day with. He was also his employer, his source of income, and of stability.

Tyler told me about something else that happened right after John died. The next day, with the house empty, he made sure all the dogs were fed, locked up all the doors…

T: And I went straight to the hospital lookin for Mama.

He means John’s mother, Mary Grace.

T: I call her Mama, so…

B: Uh huh.

T: Well on my way up to the hospital I got a phone call.

It was from a married couple Tyler didn’t know. The woman was John’s cousin. She and her husband said they’d just driven in from Florida where they live and that they were at John’s place right now with a local police officer trying to get into the house which was locked. The police officer had told them Tyler probably had the keys and the cousins wanted him to come back and let them in.

T: I said well, I said I’m trying to go check on Mama at the hospital. I said y’all hadn’t been to the hospital yet? They said no, uh, we was uh… we was trying to get some clothes out of the house, and you know it was sounding crazy from the start.

B: Had you ever heard about them before?

T: No. Never. John always told me that he had some distant cousins or kin, and that they wasn’t nothing but trash or drunks, and they wasn’t no good for nothing. Well I turned around and went to the house, went back to John’s house, and while I was coming down the driveway I called the hospital room and I got Mama on the phone, you know John’s mama. I told her, I said, Mama, your cousins are down from Florida. I said, have they been down by there to see you? She said, well lord no. I said well, I said they’re at your house trying to get in. I said what do you want me to do? She said do not let them in my house. She said if they ain’t even come up here to see me yet they ain’t goin in my house. She said do not let them in. I said yes ma’am.

When he reached the end of the long driveway Tyler saw a Woodstock cop he knows and a middle-aged couple waiting for him in front of the house.

T: So I walked out there just as polite as can be, I said I’m sorry y’all don’t know me, but mama told me herself to not let anybody in her house. She said for y’all to come to the hospital. And buddy they blew up. They started cussin me. The fella that was with her said I don’t give a fuck, right in my face, I mean they was furious that I wouldn’t let them in the house.

Tyler was angry but he says he tried to stay calm.

T: I said, y’all haven’t even went up there to check on that poor lady. I said y’all don’t give a damn about her it looks like. And then the woman was just, she was cussin she said she will not come back to this house. And then 30 minutes later they was at the hospital in front of me and they’re pretending to cry.

Tyler had not let the cousins in the house. Instead they were now all at Mary Grace’s bedside, and Tyler says the cousins were going on about how heartbroken they were about John Brooks, how glad they were to see Mary Grace. They started naming relatives they had in common, talking about other family members who died over the years.

T: I swear to god they was in there trying to squeeze a tear out, (fake tearfully) “Oh I missed you Mary Grace, I’m so sorry.” They was just putting on an act and you could tell it buddy.

Tyler says Mary Grace explained to the cousins who he was. That John loved him to death, and that he’d been helping take care of her and the house for several years. He said she told him she wanted to go home, and have Tyler keep taking care of her and the dogs, that she was planning to go with him to the family lawyer’s office tomorrow and get the legal stuff in order to make that happen. And Tyler says he and Mary Grace also had plans to make funeral arrangements for John. The cousin protested a bit, but Mary Grace insisted, and eventually the cousin gave in. She said, “Okay, if that’s what you both want.” And they left Tyler and Mary Grace together.

But the next day, Tyler says, when he went to take Mary Grace home, the hospital wouldn’t release her. John had said Mary Grace had Alzheimer’s. I’ve since learned she doesn’t, but she does have significant dementia and memory loss. So even though she was demanding that they let her leave with Tyler, a case worker said she couldn’t because they’d deemed her mentally unfit to make decisions for herself. And Tyler isn’t next of kin. The cousins are.

T: These damn Florida folks, they ain’t no good for nothing, man, it’s got me so damn mad.

Tyler is sure the only reason they’re here is to cash in on John’s estate.

T: I’m telling you man, his Mama has got pearls and diamonds and damn, they’ve got, I know they’ve got gold. I mean he’s showed me the gold. I don’t know where it’s at now. I mean I know John B.’s worth millions, but I’m worried about Mama and them puppies and the property, I ain’t even studying the damn gold.

According to Tyler right now, as he and I speak, Mary Grace has technically been released from the hospital, but she’s still stuck there because her cousin hasn’t come to take her out. She’s pacing the hallways, he says, frustrated, confused, crying, missing her puppies, asking Tyler why John abandoned them like this. Asking him questions he’s also asking himself.

More, after this.

Part 2

I’ve been told by Skylar that John’s funeral would be small, probably just the Goodson family and his mother, Mary Grace. But when I arrive at Green Pond Presbyterian Church on this sweltering Monday morning, a week after John died, June 29th, 2015, far more people have shown up than I expected. There are 30, maybe 40 people here, and I know who very few of them are.

We’re gathered in the cemetery behind the church where a small tent and some chairs are set up for a graveside service. John’s coffin is suspended above an open grave, next to the headstone for his father, Tom McLemore. There is no headstone for John. People flitter among small clusters, shaking their heads, talking lowly, muttering certain words that I overhear again and again, in particular the words “so smart” and “genius.”

Tyler is wearing a black T-shirt for the occasion, along with dark jeans and boots. He’s carrying a framed picture of John as a boy to give to John’s mother, and one of John’s old children’s books from when he was a kid that Tyler says he’d recently been reading to his daughters.

I came to the funeral with the Goodson family. Tyler led our procession here on his motorcycle, but it’s clear now that we’ve arrived that they are not the ones running this event. A Cadillac pulls up close to the cemetery gate and out of the backseat climbs Mary Grace with her cane, escorted by a middle-aged couple that I assume to be the cousins. Everyone hushes as they walk Mary Grace to a chair directly in front of the coffin. We all move in closer to the grave.

Brother Ben: We’re gathered here today for the rites of John Brooks McLemore.

An older man, introduced as Brother Ben, who’s in a wheelchair with a fedora in his lap, begins to speak. I record on my cell phone.

Brother Ben: Let us pray. Our Father God, we can say with Psalm (unclear) I had fainted, I had been overwhelmed, lest I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

Immediately we’re praying, and immediately I’m disoriented. Because John was an atheist. And not a casual atheist or an atheist by default, he was as fervent a critic of religion as the most zealous evangelist for it. From the very first time I talked to John he made clear how hypocritical he thought religion was, how vacuous and damaging. He could be straight up mean about it. He created video mashups of footage of worshipers speaking in tongues, dancing around and rolling on the ground, set to songs like this

(Limp Bizkit’s Rollin’)

He once mentioned to me in passing that his favorite bible verse was Ezekiel 23:20. He didn’t recite the verse but I’ve since read it. The choicest line was quote, “there she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of horses.” Watch their jaw drop when they read that sweet little bit of information, John had told me.

Brother Ben: Can I get a witness right there?

In his 20 minute service Brother Ben only talks briefly about John himself. “One thing I knew about John,” he says, “And all of you will probably echo this.”

Brother Ben: He was very very smart. Very intelligent.

Brother Ben says there’s a story someone told him the other day from when John was a boy. Mary Grace went to a local garage and asked if they had any extra motors her son could tinker with.

Brother Ben: John got that motor and tinkered with it all right. He took it down and put it back together just perfectly.

He put it back together just perfectly, he says. And that’s the story. John had a brilliant mind, Brother Ben says, mechanics would call him for help with pesky motors, and then we’re back to scripture.

To me it was sad to see the life of someone with such personality remembered with so little. To see John honored with a service so utterly devoid of him. But for the person here who matters most, Mary Grace, it does seem to serve its purpose. Near the end, as Brother Ben is beginning the final prayer, she thanks him for helping lay her son to rest.

Mary Grace: It makes me feel good that you thought so much of him.

It makes me feel good that you thought so much of him, she says. Enough to put him at peace.

Mary Grace: At peace. I’m sure he’s at peace now.

Mary Grace begins weeping. Tyler’s mother, whom I met for the first time right before the funeral, is standing next to me. She has tears in her eyes, and as Mary Grace speaks, Tyler’s mom clutches my arm. “He’ll always be with me in my heart and my mind,” Mary Grace cries. “I just cannot bear the thought of not having him.” The cousin puts her hand on Mary Grace. “Brother Ben is going to say a prayer now,” she tells her.

Brother Ben: Father God, thank you again. The mind that he had could do things Lord…

Part 3

When the service is over there’s some milling about. People give their condolences to Mary Grace. Then the cousins help her toward the car. Tyler is there and for a few moments I see him and Mary Grace talking. Then I see the female cousin intervene and guide Mary Grace away from him.

Later Tyler will tell me that he was just telling Mary Grace that he loves her, that he hopes he gets to see her again, and that she thanked him for being by her side and said he was welcome to go back to her house anytime he wanted. And then, according to Tyler, the cousin jumped in and said, “No Mary Grace, that would be trespassing.” Even without being able to fully hear this interaction myself, I can still sense that it’s a tense moment, and as the cousins walk Mary Grace to the car, I can hear Tyler’s mother, half shout to them, “I hope you do the right thing.” Then Mary Grace gets in the Cadillac and is driven away.

One scripture Brother Ben referenced at John’s funeral was Luke 12:15. Brother Ben told us, “take heed. Beware of covetousness. For a man a person’s life consists not in the abundance of things which we possess.” Life is not stuff, Brother Ben told us. Death though? Death can leave a lot of stuff behind. It can go very quickly from the spiritual to the material.

The way Tyler understood it, John wanted to leave him and his brother something when he died, which was my understanding too. John told me as much on several occasions. And minutes before he committed suicide John texted Tyler, saying quote, “Anything you want in this house you can have,” unquote. Obviously those communications don’t mean much legally without a will. And that seems to be the situation. Tyler and Skylar told me after John died, they heard that he didn’t have a will which was shocking to them.

Seeing what’s happening to Tyler, watching the cousins squeeze him out of John’s affairs, it doesn’t seem like what John would have wanted. It fact it strikes me as exactly the kind of scenario that would have tormented him, someone who’s vulnerable like Tyler trying to stand up and take responsibility for making things better and still getting screwed. Tyler’s been a consistent part of John’s life in recent years. Meanwhile Tyler says the cousins haven’t been around for decades. I don’t think this was the clockmaker’s intention.

I find it hard to believe that John would have taken his life without having a will. This is the same guy who kept detailed track of every expenditure he made, who logged every shot his dogs got, for him to leave none of his affairs in order, no arrangements for his mother’s care, it’s weird. But I visit his lawyer, the memorably-named Boozer Downs, and he confirms it.

Boozer: He didn’t do anything that would help the situation really.

No will. John never finished it, he says.

Boozer: But that had been going on for years, trying to get stuff in order.

B: And he just wouldn’t?

Boozer: Just wouldn’t. We talked about it but he never would do anything.

Boozer says John discussed suicide with him too and besides discouraging him from doing it, he at least tried to get him to make proper arrangements. For instance, he suggested they find some non-profit or other organization to take care of the property and the maze and the dogs.

Boozer: I said we can find somebody, we can get a historic trust, there are lots of things. And he didn’t have any faith in that. He said, ’Oh, those sons of bitches will just go sell it. And nobody’s gonna take care of it anyway, and I’ve spent too much money and they’ll just sell it out." Smart and as thoughtful as he was about so many things, why didn’t he tell us what he really wanted?

At one point I ask Boozer what we’re actually talking about here when it comes to John’s estate.

B: What assets are there?

And it’s when we get to that that Boozer becomes kind of cryptic.

Boozer: That is one thing he asked me not to mention to people, he had an idea of what he wanted to do with his assets. Now whether he really did it, I don’t know.

B: So he told you he had plans for his assets?

Boozer: Yes.

B: That he wanted you to keep secret.

Boozer: Yes, yes. Yes. But he didn’t tell me where it was or how he was gonna do this, he just told me the form it was gonna, what he was gonna convert, that’s all.

B: Did he talk to you about being unbanked?

Boozer: Yes.

This is something John mentioned to me once or twice that I didn’t pay much attention to at the time, but now that he’s dead suddenly feels significant. He said that he was unbanked, that intriguingly he kept his money and assets somewhere other than a traditional bank account. John, it’s probably no surprise, was not a fan of financial institutions.

B: What happens in the case of someone being unbanked?

Boozer: I’ve never had that before so I don’t know, but I guess if you’d think someone has some valuable asset they’ve hidden in the walls or in the mattress or something you go looking.

B: It’s literally a treasure hunt?

Boozer: I’ve never, I’ve never had that before, I don’t know, I’d guess so. That’s my best guess, you know.

Part 4

While I’m at Boozer’s office he invites someone over to meet me that he thinks I should talk to. Her name is Faye Gambell. She’s Woodstock’s town clerk, and in fact Faye, not Tyler, was the last person to speak to John before he committed suicide. She and I go back to her office at town hall, just down the road from Boozer’s. It’s a small building with the mayor’s office in it and the Woodstock Police Station, and a common room that retirees play card games in in the mornings, some game called Skip-bo, but on one Tuesday a month becomes the municipal courtroom.

Faye tells me she met John when she first started as clerk 10 years ago. He had been friends with the woman who’d been town clerk before her. And once Faye took over he came into her office one day and introduced himself.

Faye: It was funny how he introduced hisself because he, his introduction was, ‘I guess you know who I am.’ And I said, no sir, and he said ‘Well I’m John B. McLemore.’ And From that day on you know I’ve always know him as John B.

John would swing by town hall and shoot the breeze with Faye. They’d compare how their plum trees were doing, he’d chat about Socrates and Kant with the town building inspector. Faye had visited John’s maze and admired his flowers. But John would also complain, Faye says, about the way the town was run, the economy, the state of the area. He used town hall the same way he used Tyler’s tattoo parlor. Faye says she and the building inspector tried to get John to put his intellect to productive use, to pick a project that would help the town and work on it. The inspector even gave him his first computer, and old one they had lying around, to encourage him to do research about local environmental issues for them. But that never ended up happening.

And in the meantime, John had started calling Faye, talking about suicide. Once in the last year he even called her at night, sounding as if he was about to go through with it. She’d always been able to talk him down, until last week.

Faye: I was, uh, eating dinner after a funeral visitation, and he called me on the phone and told me… (to Brian) do you want this?

B: Are you comfortable talking about it?

Faye: Yes. My phone rung at 9:15 and it was all again, just like he always answered. He wanted to know if it was Faye Gambell and I told him yes, and he said ‘This is John B. McLemore,’ which I knew who it was, and he said um, ‘I just want you to listen to me. I’m going to commit suicide tonight and I just want you, do not call the police because if you do I will shoot them.’ He was very hyped up and I was just saying John, John, please just listen to me, listen to me, and he was like ‘This is not gonna work tonight. You’re not gonna talk me out of this. You just listen to me.’

John gave Faye instructions. He told her to euthanize his dogs. He told her where to find an envelope of cash to pay for that.

Faye: And he was telling me about what he was gonna do it with, and he was telling me step by step about he was actually mixing something, getting something out of the refrigerator and he was gonna drink this, and he told me what it was, uh, the potassium cyanide, and that uh, it would be quick. So I listened and I said John you do not want to do this. And he says I am doing it right now, I am getting it out of the refrigerator. And then he started drinking the mixture, and then he was screaming at me telling me how it burned and how he hurt, how horrible it was, the pain. And then I heard the screen door, um, and then it just went totally silent except for dogs barking.

B: Oh Faye, I had no idea that that’s how it happened. I’m so – that’s horrible.

Faye: Every night it’s a replay. I’m still just uh, there’s not a night that I don’t think about it, that I don’t have, wake up dreaming about it, or uh, thinking about him. Not a night.

Faye tells me she understands that to someone hearing about this it could sound like what John did to her was cruel, like he must have been angry at her to submit her to such a terrifying, traumatic phone call. But she says it wasn’t like that. She didn’t get the feeling that she was taking something out on her. Faye doesn’t know why John chose to contact her. Maybe he just wanted to talk to someone he trusted. Maybe he thought she could handle it. She says he did give her other instructions besides to euthanize the dogs, but she’s vague with me about what some of them were. She says he told her where to find quote, “certain things,” unquote. That quote, “He wanted me to know where certain things were.” What those certain things are she leaves to the imagination.

Faye says John also told her that a bunch of Tyler’s belongings would be in the workshop, and while Faye says John didn’t mention anything that night about a will or leaving assets to Tyler and his brother, she says he had told her previously that he wanted to do that. Just like he told me.

Part 5

Right after the funeral there’s a luncheon at the house of someone who works at the local bank, but Tyler and the rest of the Goodsons don’t feel welcome there, so they go to Tyler’s grandmother’s place instead. This is their family headquarters. Pretty much all day and into the night you can go to Granny’s and expect to find some combination of Tyler’s family hanging out around the little concrete table under the tree in back. Which is where they are now, having their own post-funeral gathering. People wander in and out, seeming a little out of it, saying the things you say on a day like this. Things like “This all feels like a bad dream,” and, “I keep thinking I can just pick up the phone and call him.”

The gathering includes Tyler’s Uncle Jimmy, his mom’s brother, who one methed-up night in 1993 was beating on the door of somebody’s trailer and got shot in the head as a result. And because it was too risky to take the bullet out, it’s still lodged in his brain, 22 years later. Anyway, it affects the way Jimmy communicates. He understands what’s going on around him.

Jimmy: Death. Death! Oh, Death!

But his vocabulary is limited. So as Tyler tells me how hurt he is, that the cousins stopped him from talking to John’s mother after the service, Jimmy kind of just chimes in affirmatively in the background.

Tyler: I don’t know what folks think of me when they look at me, but they don’t have a fuckin clue.

Jimmy: Yessir!

Tyler: They look at me, tattoos, and scruffy face I guess, I don’t know, they just judge. I mean I’m sitting out there at that funeral thinking –

Jimmy: Yep.

Tyler: None of those folks even knows me really, and they have no idea that I paid for the fuckin tip on that old woman’s cane out there.

Jimmy: Yessir!

Tyler: You know what I mean? Simple shit like that it don’t mean a hill of beans, but it’s just none of them have a clue what I might mean to that little old woman.

Jimmy: No! Money! Money!

Tyler: Yeah that’s all they care about.

Jimmy: Goddamn right! Money!

Maybe Tyler’s naïve to think that he could add an 88 year old woman with dementia to the roster of people he’s responsible for taking care of. But it’s sort of sweet that he wants to. It would be nice if at least he could stay involved in her life, and keep some connection to John’s life, maybe take care of his dogs, maintain the maze, take part in his funeral. He didn’t get to speak at John’s service. I ask him if he had words in mind that he wished he could have shared in remembrance of his friend.

B: Is there something that you would have wanted to say? You could say it now, what would you have wanted to say there?

Tyler: Well, John B. I mean, he had to know that I cared about his ass. You know, cuz I mean, whenever I left from there, he’d say, “I love you man.” Every time. And I’d say “I love you too John B.” And sometimes he’d say, “Just because I say I love you don’t mean I’m trying to get up your butt or anything.” And I said I know, John B. Goddamn. Cuz he knew, I mean, he might have had a little sugar in his tank, but he knew, you know, he didn’t ever try anything with me, like that, you know what I mean.

B: That’s what you would have said? (laughing)

Tyler: Yeah.

When John introduced himself to me via email, he began, quote, “Me, I am 47, unmarried, sort of, ahem, like ahem. Let’s just say I might be a fan of David Sedaris, or in other words, I might know who Audrey Lorde and Ann Bannon is, if you get the idea. Of course that could get you killed around here.”

I took that to mean John was gay, though when we talked about it after he told me that he’d gone both ways in his life, and whenever it came up he never called himself just gay. It was always “semi-homosexual” or “a semi-practicing homosexual” or “a celibate homosexual.” I haven’t been sure if other people around here knew this about John, if Tyler knew. But apparently he does and he’s fine with it, which is not nothing in Bibb county, where at this same moment in the summer of 2015 it is one of the handful of places in the country defying the Supreme Court decision declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right by refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. “I ain’t got a queer bone in my body,” Tyler says he used to tell John, “but if you do that’s your business.” I can imagine John appreciated that about Tyler.

Tyler will be the one who makes John’s tombstone. It will be a couple months before he does it, but as time goes on no one else will get John one. John loved old cemeteries and gravestones, and it will start nagging at Tyler that John’s in the ground, decomposing into worm dirt, without so much as a marker.

Tyler won’t have any money for it, so he’ll find an old piece of grey concrete, actually a leg off one of the benches at the table in back of his Granny’s house, and he’ll paint it a rich brown so that it looks like a carved piece of oak or cherry almost. The cement is curvy, with a design in it like two bass clefs. The whole thing once it’s painted will look like the flourish on a fancy pillar. When he’s finished it Tyler will haul the heavy stone into the cemetery and place it at the head of John’s grave. It’s shorter and squatter than most tombstones, and will look like nothing else in the whole cemetery. On top of the stone Tyler will inlay a pretty piece of stained wood, into which he’s burned ‘John B. McLemore, 1966 – 2015’ with his favorite photo of John sealed into it with polyurethane. A picture of John leaning back in a chair, outside, feet up on a table, shirt off, his chest of tattoos and nipple piercings in its full glory. It’s a version of John that was hidden from the everyday world. A version that most people at his funeral surely did not know.

But Tyler did.

B: What’s the name of the book that you brought to his funeral?

Tyler: Just only John. I got it in there I read it to the girls last night, and it was everything I could do to finish it, and I gave the girls a hug and tried to get out the room as fast as I could cuz I was just fuckin crying my eyes out over that damn book. It’s just a kid book, and it’s a kid, you know, he wanted to be a fuckin dog or a tiger or something like that, and some witch put a spell on him and if he said he was this would be that but he wouldn’t know how to act being that so all the, everything he wanted to be, he was just John. And uh, yeah it just broke me up. Trying to read it to them, and the babies knows it’s his book, and they’ll talk to me, tell me all the time, I know you miss John, Daddy, and we miss him too, and we’re gonna, we’re not gonna color in John’s books Daddy, and stuff like that. And it’s just… (sighs). I miss that old fucker.

John once said to me, Tyler embodies everything I hate about this Shittown in one convenient package. What he meant was that Tyler was the product of everything he hated: of violence, abuse, injustice, hopelessness. And John was trying to counteract all that by helping Tyler. As Tyler and I are talking after John’s funeral, he tells me, and Uncle Jimmy confirms, that he and John had recently reached a kind of understanding where he wasn’t gonna charge him anymore for general upkeep of John’s property, cutting the grass, pruning the maze…

Tyler: Cuz it’s kind of like, uh, my responsibility cause like it was gonna be mine one day or something.

Jimmy: Yep, thank you!

Tyler: He told us he wasn’t gonna leave us no bunch of damn cash because he said we wouldn’t appreciate it, so he was gonna leave us gold and –

Jimmy: Yeah, oh god.

Tyler: and shit like that. But and the property.

Jimmy: Yep.

Tyler: He’s got 140 acres out there.

Jimmy: Beaucoups and beaucoups of stuff! Beaucoups and beaucoups of stuff.

Tyler tells me there’s no way he’s giving into the cousins so easily. He’s already begun fighting back. He’s been going over to John’s place, retrieving things he doesn’t think John would have wanted his cousins to have. Stuff that, as Tyler puts it, didn’t need to get into the wrong hands. The police have threatened him with trespassing, but he hasn’t let that stop him. The cousins put a padlock on the front door, but what they don’t know, he says, is that he also has keys to the back. He says the took John’s laptop, and then he gathered up every stitch of paperwork he could find in the entire house, down to birth certificates and deeds and John’s grandfather’s old railroad stock papers. He also took John’s two vehicles.

Right now Tyler’s holding it all here, at his grandmother’s house, to protect it from the cousins. He’s also meeting with a lawyer. He’s gonna try and fight the cousins the official way, through the courts. But if that doesn’t work, he’ll take matters into his own hands.

Chapter 4

“If anybody could find it, it would be me.”

Part 1

My first visit to Alabama. John’s bedroom. When he was still alive.

J: Go go go go, get down to climate change now, go go go…

Standing in front of John’s computer, which sits eye-level atop a large, professional-grade sound system, his prolific collections of CDs and unopened Furbys on the shelves behind us, John’s scrolling through, showing me a manifesto he’s written.

J: Go go go go…

B: How many pages is this?

B: I’ve got no fuckin idea, go go go go…

It’s 53. The document is filled with charts, graphs, images of violence, and pornography. Of Westboro Baptist Church protesters and of Lady Gaga getting vomited upon by a so-called vomit artist, as well as paragraph after paragraph, all laying out a McLemorian unified theory of economic, environmental, and societal decline. And oh, at one point as he’s showing me this material, John quickly and casually pulls up this document.

J: Oh yeah, I have this on file at all times in case it’s necessary. You never know.

B: Your suicide note?

J: We weren’t gonna call it out loud, but (laughing) you did!

B: Well we’re looking at it. It’s right here.

J: (laughing) I keep it on file, yeah, well we didn’t have a camera, big mouth.

He doesn’t linger on the suicide note long enough for me to read it. He claims he doesn’t want to talk about it.

J: (whispering) You shouldn’t have said that. Fuck it.

But he’s the one that brought it up, and as the day goes on and he continues to tool around on his computer, moving on to other topics, he keeps mentioning it. I’m not sure why, what exactly John is trying to tell me, but after a while I tell him what I think.

B: I would like it if you wouldn’t kill yourself.

J: (laughing) Ok, well it’s not gonna happen this afternoon! I’m in a pretty good mood today. (blows nose)

This is what it was like to talk about suicide with John. He was so cavalier about it. He’d dismiss your concern, laugh it off, and try to change the subject.

J: I found a better video that describes the entire history of the fossil fuel industry in about 17 seconds.

B: But wait a minute, I want to go back to this. Cuz you’re dumping a lot on me here. Why do you have to kill yourself? Turn away from the computer because you’re getting distracted. I want you to seriously think about this.

J: Doesn’t everyone? OK this is not distracting, this is another reason. FDIC BOE resolving systemically…

B: You know what? Forget that. You’re, you’re changing the subject.

J: There was a very good chance of me not being alive at the time you got out here, so…

B: Why?

J: Tired in a way that I can’t put into words. Tired. Tired.

I wasn’t the only one John showed his suicide note to, apparently.

J: I also emailed it to town hall and my lawyer over there to keep on file, and –

B: You emailed your suicide note to town hall and your lawyer?

J: Um hum. Yeah I actually, uh, mailed a uh, email to the town of uh…

He pulls it up, the email, and reads the information he sent them.

J: How many dogs I had, and the way to identify them, and the vet, a list of people to contact in case I decide to blow my damn head off, where some of the money is hiding, but not all of it.

That is, where some but not all of John’s money is hiding. He did not disclose those details to me.

J: And there’s things I won’t discuss with that thing turned on now, but I’m unbanked, and you can make as much as you want to make of that.

John did tell me that if he died that afternoon, $100,000 would go to PETA. He also said this.

J: I’ve often thought that I can continue to live and burn up my saved money or I could donate it to someone that might need it more, that’s younger, whose life is ahead of them.

B: Tyler and Jake?

J: Um hmm. I wanna leave them kids a shit pot full of money instead of me burning it up and staying alive.

From Serial and This American Life, I’m Brian Reed. This is Shittown.

Tyler: I gotta take these dogs to the vet. John’s little dog, that one right yonder, Pipsqueak, that’s Madeline…

It’s been more than two weeks since John died. And in the absence of a will, PETA was not bequeathed $100,000, and Tyler Goodson was not bequeathed a shit pot full of money. In fact there’s not even money for John’s own dogs. Tyler’s taking care of a couple of them here at the tidy trailer he’s living in with his girlfriend and two of his daughters, and he’s had to scrounge together cash to cover their vet appointment this morning.

But the more important appointment Tyler’s preparing for today is at the Bibb county probate court, the court that handles matters involving estates of the deceased. At 10 am John’s cousins from Florida have a hearing scheduled to request permanent guardianship over John’s mother, Mary Grace, which because John didn’t have a will, would mean the cousins would get control over the property and all of Mary Grace’s and John’s belongings and assets. So Tyler is gonna go as well to petition the probate judge to intervene and try to get what’s his. He says he has a bunch of things over at John’s that belong to him, and the cousins won’t let him on the property to get them. They’ve even put a gate across John’s driveway with ‘no trespassing’ signs around it. Tyler estimates the total value for all of his stuff, conservatively, at more than $25,000. He’s typed up a list with the description, location, and value of each item that’s very thorough.

B: You’ve got a case of black spray paint, large glass jugs…

Extension cords, a copper teapot, toys Tyler tells me John bought for his kids, even the swing set is on there. Plus there are a lot of tools, which Tyler says is a particular problem for him right now because he’s had a falling out with his partner at the tattoo parlor, so he no longer has that business, he doesn’t have John anymore to employ him, and now he can’t even drum up odd jobs, he says, because he can’t get to his tools: his lawnmower and his welder, and his masonry stuff.

For a lot of these items Tyler doesn’t have proof of ownership. Though, for a few of the big-ticket ones he does. He shows me a couple short receipts, handwritten on notebook paper, and signed by the sellers.

B: This is the, the bill of sale for uh…

Tyler: Sale’s for them school buses and stuff down there on the slab. Two buses and an 18-wheeler trailer.

B: Oh those are yours?

Tyler: Yeah.

John showed me these buses when he took me around his property. One’s yellow and one’s blue. There’s also a big 18-wheeler trailer. It’s all really old, the buses don’t run anymore, but they’re chock full of wood and building materials and antique appliances. John didn’t mention that stuff was Tyler’s.

Tyler: You see, me and John had been planning on building something out there for a while now, and we’d just been accumulating old bricks and the lumber and stuff like that. I got just about everything down there to build a house with. I’m ’bout to lose it all if something don’t get done, but hopefully this little bit of proof will help me.

The probate court sits on the town square of Centerville, the Bibb county seat, in a drab annex building across from the main courthouse. It’s not even a traditional courtroom. It’s mostly just a waiting area and reception desk, like a DMV. As people come inside they go under a sign hanging over the front entrance that says, in elaborate font, ‘Through these doors pass the most important people on earth: the citizens of Bibb county.’

When I arrive, Tyler’s sitting off to the side stoically, his tattoos peeking down his wrists. I followed him here and let him go in on his own, because I have my own reason for going to court today. I want to introduce myself to John’s cousins and ask if they’ll do an interview with me, and I don’t want them to get the wrong idea, think I’m working for Tyler or something.

The cousins are standing there, not far from Tyler, the middle-aged couple I remember from the funeral. I’ve learned that their names are Rita and Charley Lawrence. They’re huddled with two other people I don’t recognize. Rita, like Tyler, is holding some papers. She has glasses and short greying hair. I walk over to her. “Excuse me ma’am,” I say, “Are you Rita?” Yes, she says. “I’m Brian Reed, nice to meet you.” I tell her I’m sorry for her loss, that I’m very sad about what happened with John. I explain who I am, where I work, how John got in touch with our radio show, and that I started investigating some local goings on with him. She seems both surprised and confused by me which is completely understandable. Your cousin drinks cyanide and then a reporter shows up at court afterwards, saying he’d been investigating potential crimes and corruption and wrongdoing with him for more than a year. It’s not the most normal sequence of events.

“So where do you live?” she asks. New York I tell her. “Are you serious?” she says. “You come down here from New York for this?” I ask Rita if she’ll meet with me. I want to tell her more about the story I’ve been doing with John. I want to ask her about him, his family history, and find out what’s going on with his affairs. She seems OK with it, and says sure, after the hearing we can go somewhere and talk. And then, we stand there, awkwardly, waiting for the judge to call them back to his chambers. We make small talk. Which hotel are you staying at? How long are you in town?

At that, suddenly Rita leans in very close to me and whispers, (whisper voice) “We’re leaving tomorrow.” “Why are you whispering?” I ask her. “Do you know that guy there?” she asks, still under her breath, twitching her eyes towards to Tyler who’s right behind me. “Tyler?” I say. “Yeah,” she says. Her voice gets even quieter. (whispers) “We’re leaving tomorrow, but I don’t want him to know that we’re leaving. He’s been causing nothing but trouble.”

Soon Judge Jerry Powell will summon Rita and her husband Charlie, as well as the two others they’re here with and John’s lawyer Boozer Downs, into his chambers to have a private meeting. And Tyler will go in with them to make his final plea. Despite John having said that he wanted to leave money and gold to Tyler, despite John texting Tyler minutes before he died that he could have anything in his house that he wanted, all Tyler will ask the judge for today is the stuff that he says was his to begin with, that he’s documented neatly on his list.

Tyler does not like going to court. He feels the courts and cops and lawyers have done nothing but victimize him since he became a teenager. But here he will suck it up and make this one last effort to do things the proper way, within the system. And the system will not be sympathetic. Judge Powell will explain to Tyler that this hearing isn’t about his stuff. It’s about signing guardianship over to Rita. He’s about to do that, he’ll say, and once he does she’ll have control over the McLemore property and everything on it. Tyler will have to work things out directly with Rita or take the matter across the street to civil court. Tyler will try to protest, but Rita will sell everything before I have a chance to bring a suit, he’ll say. And Judge Powell will tell him that if someone gives you something, he advises that you take it home with you. And that will be the end of it. Dejected, Tyler will walk out of the chambers to his car, underneath a sign reminding him that he’s one of the most important people on earth.

I wait for Rita in the reception area, and as she and her husband leave I ask where she’d like to go so we can have our conversation. But now she says she can’t; they have too much to get done before they head back to Florida the next day. We chat for a bit though, and before she goes out the door she does ask me a question about John. Quote, “Did he tell you where his money was hid?” Unquote.

Tyler: They done gutted the damn place.

B: Really?

Less than a week after the cousins gain control of the McLemore property, Tyler tells me they’ve gutted the damn place. And even though he’s not supposed to, he’s been going over to the property.

Tyler: Well I snuck down there, and you know I always go down there checking on my stuff, and everything, and John’s shop’s gone, all the toolboxes and everything, they done had somebody come down there and probably bought it all, you know those different clocks that was on the walls, all of my shit, my welder and all that stuff’s gone. The place is cleaned out.

B: When you’ve been over there have you been poking around for the, for the buried treasure? For the gold, or the cash or whatever there is?

Tyler: Well hell yes! (laughing with Brian) I need to get it before it gets scraped off. We got to find it, Brian.

Rita suspects that John had money or gold hidden somewhere, but Tyler’s all but certain of it. He says when they would make purchases around town, John used to say, “Well, gotta go dig up some more money.” And Tyler says he knows for a fact John was buying $30,000 worth of gold at a clip. John even showed him some of it once. A small box out of which John pulled a single tiny gold bar, though it was clear the box was filled with others, Tyler says. And John strongly implied that there was much more gold where that came from.

B: So where have you looked? You mind telling me?

Tyler: I mean it could be in the graveyard, it could be in the maze, it could be anywhere but, I think it’s up there under the damn doghouse or something.

Here’s Tyler’s theory about where the hidden treasure might be. The doghouse is near the human house, and you can see it from the kitchen window where John spent a lot of time, talking on the phone, brewing highly caffeinated tea, pissing in the sink. Tyler thinks John would have stashed the treasure in a spot where he could always see it from the kitchen.

Tyler: And plus I think all them mutt dogs protected it.

B: So have you, what have you, have you poked around on that yet? The doghouse?

Tyler: Well, I’ve went out and I’ve looked in the dog’s house and seen if there was any type of compartments built up under it or whatnot, and I’ve been up under the house, and I’ve been out in flower beds and shit like that, but hell, Brian, up under John B.’s house he had me weld up these little metal doorways.

These are the gates Tyler once told me about, that he built for the dungeon-like tunnels in John’s basement.

Tyler: But I’ve done been up under there. I’ve done been all up under there and all them fuckin spider webs and rats and snakes, and I ain’t seen the first sign of anything. You know, we’ve done so many projects around there that it’s got to be somewhere in one of them projects that we’ve done, you know. Somewhere that if anybody could find it, it would be me. And you know he’s probably left me some type of clu –

Tyler’s phone cuts out for a second, but he was saying John probably left him some type of clue.

Tyler: Yeah, I’m sure he’s left me some type of clue. And I just ain’t thinking of it.

In one of our phone conversations, John did say this to me.

J: A wise man has his money where he can sleep best at night. A wise man does not have a lot of paper money in a wood frame house. A wise man has some hard assets. See hard assets mean different things to different people. To some people it may mean silver and gold. A wise man may have some of them out in the fuckin woods.

I didn’t mention this to Tyler, partly because I didn’t feel like it was my place to encourage treasure hunting on John’s property, but also because I have no idea if John meant this literally or was just saying stuff. Plus there are like a hundred acres of woods there anyway, something that Tyler’s very aware of.

Tyler: It is on that fuckin property, Brian. I’m thinking I’m gonna have to get a metal detector and go over the backyard.

The next time I see Tyler he tells me he has procured the metal detector and has been using it to scour John’s place every night for two weeks straight. He uses a police scanner app on his phone to keep an ear out for cops while he’s there. One of his most promising clues were these pages he found of coordinates John had written down, latitudes and longitudes for the town of Woodstock, or Shittown as it was labeled on the document, along with coordinates for K3 Lumber, the trailer park Tyler lives in, as well as, naturally, the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl.

Among those were coordinates on John’s property. One set was for John’s house. And another set, when Tyler typed them into Google, brought him to the maze, though just a little bit to the side of the maze, which seemed promising. In that spot he saw an old plastic tub, upside town on the grass. He kicked it over and waved the metal detector over the ground it had been covering. It started going off, beeping. Tyler dug, and he found a bunch of bottles, just a bunch of old glass bottles. He asked me if I’d ever seen the movie Holes, because that’s what it looks like over there after all his digging.

The hunt continues, in a minute.

Part 2

When Tyler cleared out all that paperwork from John’s house, in the days right after he died, he did find something else that was curious. It’s a list John wrote, on a sheet of yellow notebook paper, titled at the top, “People to contact.” Tyler sent me a photo of it, and Faye Gambell, the town clerk, told me that John sent a copy to her as part of his instructions before he drank cyanide.

There are 15 names and phone numbers on the list. Tyler’s name is not one of them. A handful of the people are local to Bibb county, including John’s lawyer whom I’ve talked to, the number for Woodstock town hall, his vet. His cousin from Florida, Rita Lawrence, is on there. But there’s this whole group of names at the top who are all from out of town, and in a number of cases out of state or country, and each of those names is a mystery to me.

In my very first phone conversation with John he had told me that all of his friends had died off. He used that word, all. Yet here’s this list, and the strange thing about it is that not one of these people, these first seven names at the top, not one of them showed up at John’s funeral. So this list, maybe it’s a clue?

Allen: Uh, it looks kind of like a bomb went off in here, but believe it or not we know where everything is. This is our clock shop.

On an early Saturday afternoon I meet a man named Allen Bearden at his clock repair shop in the back of an antique mall near the interstate in Pell City, Alabama. He’s the first of these names off John’s list that I contact. Pell City’s about an hour east of Woodstock, on the other side of Birmingham, and the vibe here is different than Bibb county. It’s situated on the Coosa River which has all these switchbacks and detours that make it look more like a smattering of lakes than a river. The place feels livelier than Bibb, there’s a big rodeo going on, boats on the water, families vacationing.

Allen’s in his 40s, an athletic, outdoorsy guy who makes time for me after a fly fishing lesson he gave in the morning. He’s a clock restorer like John was, though he says he works in the quote, “horological field,” which is a term I’ve never heard until talking to Allen. Horology.

Allen: You know horology is the study of time.

That makes Allen and John horologists, or more precisely, because they fix old clocks, antiquarian horologists.

Allen: He studies time.

Allen tells me horology experienced a kind of heyday in the 90s, particularly as antique collectors took to eBay, but that boom has been over for a while and especially, with time so easily accessible now on our appliances and cell phones, it’s definitely a dying trade. John saw that coming, Allen says, and by the time he met him, around 2012, John had largely gotten out of horology, except for the odd job here or there. They met because Allen was having a problem with an Elliot grandfather clock he was trying to fix.

Allen: It was a very imported piece, it was uh, it wasn’t a clock that you’ve seen every day. This clock had actually come out of a jewelry store in London off Trapart square.

B: How much was it worth?

Allen: Uh, estimatedly, it could have been a hundred something thousand dollar clock back in the 90s.

B: Wow.

The clock was driving Allen nuts. He couldn’t figure out a proper fix for it. He asked a horologist friend for his advice, and his friend said you should call his guy John B. McLemore.

Allen: I remember I called him up one day in this shop right here. When I got him on the phone it was like, oh my gosh.

Allen heard a cacophony of dogs barking on the other end of the line, and a man shouting obscenities at them.

Allen: And I’d been warned, you know, John’s not the average person. Uh, expect a lot of profanity, expect a lot of strong and bold statements.

Allen explained to John that he was having trouble with a rare clock and John said, well, bring it by.

Allen: Which I’d never heard of Woodstock, Alabama in my life. It was very hard to find his place. I had a physical address but my GPS kept carrying me 2 or 3 miles down the road.

B: I’ve been there.

Allen: Yeah. And you know when I pulled up there it was like I went back in time.

It’s a weird sensation. This man I’ve just met seems to be describing to me an experience that I once had.

Allen: He uh, came out and met me in the driveway and he was, he was immediately uh, “Well if we’re gonna get it fixed bring it, drive your truck around here.” And uh it wasn’t really any kind of welcome or anything, it was like, you know, he had known me. And uh, I’m carefully unloading this uh clock movement into his shop, and he’s like well what do you got here. And I said, I was telling him it’s an Elliot, and he said yeah that looks about right. And then he said let’s get it set up here. So we set it up on his rack and I just thought he was just gonna meticulously start looking over it. First thing he did he got a pair of pliers and some screwdrivers and stuff and he immediately just started yanking stuff off the clock. We don’t need this, we don’t need that, we don’t need this, and he was throwing, and these pieces were coming off the clock and flying over to the table and he was just like tossin them. And I mean I was just thinking to myself, “oh my god I have made a horrible mistake. This guy is actually certifiable crazy.”

Allen: He’s just running off at the mouth about this and that about the clock and how horrible the clock had been treated, you know, pliers must have been on this, incompetent uh, clock maker on it, I mean he wasn’t particularly talking about me, but.

John was referring to the other horologists over the last hundred years, who, judging from the witness marks he was observing, holes and impressions and discolorations, had subjected the clock to sloppy workmanship over the course of its life. Allen knew what the problem with the clock was. That he’d been able to diagnose on his own. It was an issue with a piece called the gathering pallet. He says the probably could have machined a replacement that would have made the clock run, but that would have been a quick fix, not a restoration. The kind of horologist Allen is, and John was, they aren’t trying to simply make the clock work again. Their goal is to preserve and reconstruct the original craftsmanship as much as possible. But Allen had never restored an Elliot clock before, so he’d never seen this type of gathering pallet in working order. And when he looked for diagrams of it he couldn’t find any.

Allen: John knew out of the top of his head what that gathering pallet actually looked like, just from his years of experience –

B: What it should have looked like.

Allen: What it should have looked like, and um, what he did was he uh, took a piece of steel and uh, he hand-filed that thing out by hand. And got it fixed and got it, put it on there.

B: He did it in front of you that day?

Allen: He did it that day it took him almost about three and a half hours but he sat there and hand-filed that out. And after I saw that I was just totally amazed, just to file something blankly out the top of your head with some needle files, and not to have any kind of diagram or anything like that, I mean he just filed it out and started fitting it to the clock.

B: What were you thinking when you watched it?

Allen: That this is a master.

Part 3

That, Allen says, was the beginning of his and John’s friendship. They emailed often, talked every few days. About once a month Allen would go visit and they’d troubleshoot a clock together, wander around John’s yard, get lunch at the local grocery store. Allen tried to get John to come to his neck of the woods. He wanted to take him out boating on the lake, but John never came. He said he couldn’t leave his mom for that long. Allen told me something I hadn’t known about John: John had an impressive reputation for working on world-class, high-end timepieces. Some of the finest clocks in the world.

Allen: You know he was just an absolute genius, I mean, if you uh, wanted to know something or had a problem with clocks you needed to go see John McLemore.

B: Really? That’s like, that was known throughout…

Allen: That was actually known, probably, I know on the eastern seaboard. He would have people coming down from, uh, Massachusetts driving their car to Woodstock, Alabama to get their uh, bracket clocks fixed and stuff like that.

B: Because he was the closest and best they could find?

Allen: Well not the, I wouldn’t say the closest, probably the best.

In his earlier years, John used to travel to England where he visited with fellow horologists. He wrote about horology, consulted on horology books. And he was known for doing elements of restoration that very few people still do. Such as an ancient process for making things gold known as fire gilding, that is very dangerous and illegal in some places because it requires burning mercury. And another thing Allen tells me that I wanted to find out, John made good money.

Allen: John probably in the 90s could have sat on his butt and worked 2 or 3 days a week and made $150,000 a year. Easy. There’s no telling how much money he made in the clock trade. And John just probably packed that money away.

B: I mean who knows, but that sounds to me like the kind of money that could potentially amass to a bountiful hidden treasure.

There comes a point in our conversation when Allen has a question for me.

Allen: But uh, as far as John’s… you said you found out through Tyler?

B: Uh, his sister-in-law.

Allen: His sister-in-law?

B: Yeah.

That is, as far as John’s suicide, though Allen doesn’t speak the word.

Allen: I guess that was, how long, how long ago?

B: I was able to, I went to the funeral. I was able to go to the funeral. It was right before –

Allen: You was? Well you’re better off than I was. I didn’t find out, till a uh, nearly a week and a half later, you know, I didn’t really have a chance to, you know, say goodbye to him.

B: I’m sorry.

Allen: Yeah.

Allen had been out of town for a watch and clock convention shortly before John died, and hadn’t talked to him for a while. When he got back he and John emailed a bit. The day John would go on to kill himself Allen wrote him, telling him he wanted to come visit that week. That night, while Allen was teaching vacation bible school, he saw a call come in from John. He silenced it, and then called him back when he got home. No answer. Called him the next day. No answer. As the week went on it was the same. Allen got in touch with a mutual friend of his and John’s, a mechanic in Birmingham, whose also on John’s contact list, and asked him if he’d heard from John. He hadn’t. Allen wanted to drive to John’s place to check on him, but his wife was pregnant and sick. He decided to give it one more day, and if neither he nor the other friend heard from John, he was gonna call the Bibb county sheriff’s department. He knew John hated cops and authority, and might not forgive him for it. But he also knew John had talked about suicide, so he was ready to risk it.

Allen: You know sometimes I had to weigh that out in my head, was it worth it losing him as a friend just to, uh to uh see him get help. And I tried to get John help. I tried, I was like John, you know, let me carry you to a doctor or something. Let’s get you on some medicine or something, you know. I said we’re not going to no psychiatrist or noting like that, we can just see a regular practice doctor and see if we can’t get you on some kind of antidepressant, some kind of mood stabilizer, and he was like oh no, I ain’t taking no medicine, I’m not doing this, I’m not doing that. Even went to the bookstore and got a herbal book, uh, of more holistic, you know healing stuff that would help with depression and mood swings, and uh, carried that to him said why don’t you read this right here see if you can get something out of this? I said you probably have this in your yard. And I thought he would take on that since you know he liked horticulture maybe he could –

B: That’s a good idea.

Allen: Could help or heal himself holistically. And uh, that book just sit there. It’s probably sitting there to this day in his shop.

B: Wow, I had no sense talking to him that he had people in his life, like you, who were trying to help him this way.

Allen: I don’t think John realized how many people cared for him. And I just think that’s really sad because I actually think he died thinking he was lonely.

Though I’m not sure there’s much of a difference between being lonely, and thinking you are. Allen never got to the point of asking the sheriff to check on John, because the night before he was planning to do that he was driving home from church with his family and got a call from Faye Gambell, the town clerk who John had called as he drank cyanide, and to whom he’d given his final instructions and contact list. Allen says as soon as she told him she was with Woodstock town hall, he knew. He immediately pulled over to the side of the road. He was devastated. His whole body was shaking. But then Faye told him when John had actually died. And to the sorrow were added some other emotions.

Allen: When I found out when it had happened, you know, I was kind of irate. I didn’t find out until after John had done been buried.

John had been in the ground for more than a week and Faye was just now calling him. Allen says he pressed Faye on it, asked her why she was notifying him after the funeral. And he says she acted kind of weird about it.

Allen: She tried to say that she, uh, tried to call me but I looked back through my phone there was no call, no message or anything. I’ve got nothing. I mean that just seems like a pretty weak excuse, somebody call and say you well, I tried you and I couldn’t get you on the phone and not leave a message or anything like that.

And it’s not like she had to dig up his information or something. John sent it to her.

Allen: I mean I’m what, like fourth on the list right there. This would be like, this is who you need to call and contact. I mean, I’m just, I find that kind of uh, that kind of disturbed me.

It disturbed Allen not only because it caused him to miss his friend’s funeral, but because it’s pushing his mind to some unpleasant places. The day before I met with Allen he actually spoke with Tyler for a while and got the whole low down on the cousins. Rita, the cousin, is listed halfway down on John’s contact list. Allen finds it questionable that Faye or someone else managed to reach her yet he and these other names are all at the top of the sheet, and somehow he was skipped over.

Allen: I’d be very interested to know, you know, the other people, when were they actually called? Was it just me, was it, uh, the top people on his contact list? Cuz I think they knew that these people knew John best. And I think they probably actually tried to keep us away from the situation for some reason or something.

B: (surprised tone) Really?

Allen: Yeah. I mean, from talking with Tyler, the way stuff’s uh, played out in this, uh, it’s uh, it’s a little fishy.

Allen continues in this mode, tiptoeing toward something.

Allen: I’m just trying to figure, you know, what would it benefit a person not to try to contact a person? I don’t know if they just wanted, they didn’t want people down there until the situation was under control the way they wanted it to be. Maybe it’s somebody trying to uh take control of something. Cuz they would know that John’s close close friends would know what I’m talking about.

B: I can tell Allen is being purposefully vague here. I think maybe he’s not sure what I know already, or else maybe he knows I know? So he knows he doesn’t have to say it out loud? But I’m not actually sure I do know what he’s talking about, though maybe I do know. Anyway, he is now making weird eyes at me.

B: Yeah. You’re looking at me in like a coded way. Um.

Allen: You know I can tell you my theory about something but I’m not gonna do it on the air.

B: Do you think I should call the other people on the list?

Allen: I think it would be a good idea, I mean, to further investigate. And just for the simple fact that they, they could possibly not even know. I mean, you’d be doing John a favor, cuz surely he would want them people to know or they wouldn’t be on the list.

(phone ringing)

And for the second time, I find myself embarking on an investigation at the behest of an Alabamian horologist.

Part 4

(phone ringing)

Bill: Hello?

B: Hi, is this Bill Meyer?

Bill: Yes.

B: Hi, um Bill, were you a friend of John McLemore’s?

Bill: Yeah?

B: Um, I’m calling with some sad news that maybe you’re aware of, but he passed away earlier this summer.

Bill: Who did?

B: John B. McLemore, yeah.

Bill: Oh, I didn’t know that! I’ve been uh, writing emails to him and he hasn’t uh responded. And I called him I think… oh, what’d he die from?

B: Uh, he actually committed suicide I’m sorry to say.

Bill: Oh for god’s sake. What happened to his mother?

Bill Meyer, number 7 on John’s list. Clearly he wasn’t called. Bill was a friend and clock customer of John’s for decades. He lives in Utah, in a house he describes as being more like a museum than a house. He’d drive from Utah to Alabama sometimes to visit John.

Bill: John seems to have made a insurmountable challenge out of living. It’s so sad to hear that he finally did it. It just, uh, it just makes me so incredibly sad.

Machine voice: Hello. You have reached micros and the escapement maker.

This is the answering machine of a horologist friend of John’s, in a small town in the pacific northwest, who asked that I not use his name because he’s very private. He picked up as I was leaving a message. He says Faye did tell him John had died, but only after the funeral.

Horologist Friend: John meant a hell of a lot to me. He meant a hell of a lot to me.

And then another Brit from the list, Duncan Grieg.

Duncan: At the moment, I’ve in front of me got a whole load of letters and photographs that John’s sent me over the years.

A respected clock restorer from Tonbridge, England, who never met John in person but over more than a decade spent many late-night hours developing a friendship with him on the phone and via letters. I was the one who informed Duncan of John’s death.

Duncan: Yeah as you can probably tell I’m very sad about it. I think he should have gone on to been a curmudgeonly old gentleman that survived the ravages of time.

Tom: The enigma that John McLemore was.

And Tom Moore, John’s chemistry professor in college, now a university chancellor who went on to become a lifelong friend.

Tom: One of the most incredi – I’m gonna start crying. I can’t help it (crying a bit).

B: It’s OK.

Tom: (teary voice) One of the most incredible people I’ve ever known.

Like with others, Tom says the town clerk, Faye, did call him about John’s suicide, but only after he’d been buried. After talking to the seven people at the top of John’s list, I learn that none of them were at John’s funeral because none of them were contacted in time, and some not at all.

It was interesting. Most of these men didn’t know each other beyond maybe having interacted once or twice in horological circles over the years. The men talked to me for hours, without batting an eye, even if I’d just called them cold and informed them that their friend had committed suicide. Which, at first I thought was pretty remarkable. But then it occurred to me that they were all friends of John B. McLemore’s. Which means you are predisposed to having long, rambling conversations on the phone. Of these friends, the one who knew John the longest, since he was a teenager, was Tom Moore, John’s college professor. John showed up in Tom’s general chemistry course as a freshman at Birmingham Southern College in the early 80s.

Tom: Walk in to a class of 85 to 95 students and look around, and boy, what’s that kid doing here?

Birmingham Southern is a small, private, liberal arts college that’s been around since the 1800s. Tom says at the time when John was there the student body was made up largely of children of professionals: doctors and lawyers. They were preppy. John was not.

Tom: Bushy red hair, unkempt, clothing from a different socioeconomic background. He was clearly different.

Tom says John didn’t make any friends at Birmingham Southern, and he didn’t live there. Every night he drove back to his parents’ house. Back to his childhood bedroom. Back to Bibb county. And Tom could tell that as much as John didn’t fit in at college, he didn’t fit in back home either. Tom got the sense that John had been picked on a lot over the years, growing up.

Tom: He would do things, uh, as a college student to bring ridicule on himself. I want to say he would wear a red wig, or a green wig to class.

Sure enough, Tom says, the other kids would laugh at him. And that was the point.

Tom: I took it to be out of, this history that, I’m gonna be made fun of. And I can’t stand being made fun of just by being who I am. So I’ll do some things that enable me to understand why people are making fun of me, and it’s not just me being me. It’s pretty tragic. I saw that in him, and that’s part of why I reached out to him.

John B. McLemore’s education is the source of some gossip in Woodstock. I have heard that he held multiple degrees: in chemistry, in biology. I have heard that he quit school because he was smarter than the professors. I have heard that he had to leave after blowing up a laboratory. The reality was less dramatic.

Tom: He was bad at school.

John was a college dropout. He left Birmingham Southern after three years. According to Tom, if John was studying a topic he was interested in, he would learn it exhaustively. Tom spent many afternoons watching John scribble on the blackboard in his office, obscure calculations and theories that were beyond even Tom’s comprehension. But when it came to stuff the professors wanted him to focus on, John was almost allergic to it. Tom thinks John got a D or maybe a C in his chemistry class. But John spent hours in the lab on his own, outside of class, figuring out techniques he could use in his clock restorations. Tom risked getting in trouble and let John access the lab when he wanted. Remember this?

(sound of pouring)

J: (whispering) There you go, there you go,

When John gold-plated a dime for me in his workshop one afternoon?

J: I may be dead and gone one day but you’ll have a souvenir from Shittown, Alabama.

Tyler: A golden penny.

J: A gold dime!

Tyler: Oh!

J: A motherfuckin gold-plated dime! Shit.

I do still have the dime, by the way. That electroplating process, John worked it out as a student at Birmingham Southern as a way to gild clock pieces that doesn’t require burning dangerous amounts of mercury. It uses potassium cyanide instead.

Sometimes in college when John came into Tom’s office in the afternoon for one of their blackboard sessions, Tom says John would seem depressed, to the point where Tom thought, he might be trying to say goodbye for good. Tom says he recommended John to a school counselor, and John saw her for a bit, even went on medication, but according to Tom, John didn’t like the way the medicine altered his personality. And he chose not to seek any more treatment.

Tom figured out that if he asked John to tell him about a clock he was working on, or some other topic he was studying, he could get John excited and redirect his attitude so that by the end of the session he would seem lifted out of his despair. Though this could take hours. Tom says he can vividly remember sitting in his office with John on a fall day, glancing at the sun while it set outside his window, watching the sky turn colors over campus as he thought about his wife waiting for him at home, but looking back at John and thinking,

Tom: That I’m not sure John’s ready to go yet.

Then listening to John go on, as outside the sky turned dark.

Part 5

I really enjoyed my conversations with the guys on John’s list. I learned a lot about John, but also about the people John kept as friends. I learned about lathes, and dividing engines, and double helical gears, and tolerances, and sidereal time, and also what an escapement is, the mechanism inside a clock or a watch that actually does the ticking. Many of these horologists and clock collectors told me how they had become fascinated with clocks as children, and how even at age 57 or 80 that fascination hadn’t dwindled.

One man told me the story of the clock that cemented his and John’s friendship. A clock the man retrieved himself from a crypt near Greiling, Germany, where it had been hurriedly disassembled by someone during World War II and hidden amongst the bones and remains.

One friend told me about a clock that was so complicated no one else could restore it, and it took John seven years, and another about a job that was so difficult that John started crying as he was hunched over it in his shop, and said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

One man remembered the time he started telling John about a weird story he loved by Edgar Allan Poe, called Berenice, about a man who becomes obsessed with his wife’s teeth, eventually digging them up from her grave, and how as he was describing the story to John, John suddenly began reciting passages from the story back to him, from memory.

One friend told me how his coworkers would tell him not to talk to John so much, because he was a weirdo. And another told me, people think I’m weird, like John B.

As for the question of John’s assets, his friends had gotten different bits of information over the years. John had told some of them he’d been running down his savings after retiring from the clock trade a decade or so ago. Some thought maybe he’d suffered some losses on his investments, during the 2008 crash. But others got the impression that he did have a lot of money. He’d mention having pulled it out of the bank, having converted some to gold. Having hidden it. He also talked clearly about putting together a will, so it was shocking to friends to learn that apparently there wasn’t one. That, coupled with the fact that they were all kept in the dark about his death for a while, a number of them did find that suspect.

Friend 1: But there’s a lot of money. He had it hid. He hid it.

I met with two of John’s friends in a restaurant one night, and they posited theories to each other. Maybe it’s the cousins who are up to no good, one says.

Friend 2: And if, you know, you talk about some relatives in Florida.

Friend 1: All of a sudden they show up.

Friend 2: Like here we got a piece of land.

Though the other says maybe it’s the Goodsons, Tyler and his brother Jake.

Friend 1: See I’m wondering if they got the money.

B: If the Goodsons did?

Friend 1: Yeah.

B: They haven’t told me that they have.

Friend 1: (skeptically) Do you think they would?

Friend 2: The only thing I can come up with is if the Goodsons were involved in any of this, maybe they didn’t want you or I to –

Friend 1: To even know

Friend 2: To know about it.

Friend 1: That’s probably true, isn’t it? And it took you…

It’s not like John’s friends think they’re owed anything from John’s will, or want the gold for themselves. At least that’s not what they say to me. They just all share the opinion that someone might be taking advantage of the situation. That someone is getting away with something they shouldn’t. But who is the someone? And what is the something? It seems like I should be able to figure that out.

If you ask Tyler who’s getting away with something they shouldn’t, he says it’s clear: John’s cousins, Rita and Charley. As the weeks go on he keeps the updates coming, about the steps they’re taking to get him out of the picture. Rita and Charley recently tried to get his girlfriend arrested for theft, for picking up a package at the post office that was addressed to John, but nothing ever came of it. Also John’s lawyer, Boozer Downs, attempted to hold an informal mediation session between Tyler and John’s cousins, but it fell apart when Tyler tried to tell John’s mother, Mama as he calls her, how much he misses her and she looked at him coldly and said,

Tyler: Don’t call me Mama no more.

Tyler’s convinced that the cousins, Rita and Charley, have brainwashed her against him. He says they’ve gone to new lows to secure all of John’s assets.

Tyler: And them cousins trying to take the damn titty rings out, thinking that they was gold or something.

B: Wait, what? That happened?

Tyler: I thought I told you about that.

Um, no. I have not heard anything about titty ring removal. Apparently this information came to Tyler from Boozer, John’s lawyer.

Tyler: Boozer said, “Is them rings in John’s titties gold or something? They was trying to take them out.”

Somehow I doubt that’s a verbatim quote from Woodstock town attorney Boozer Downs, but I’ll let Tyler paraphrase.

B: The cousins were physically trying to do it? Or they were trying to get the mortician to do it?

Tyler: I don’t know. I mean he told me that the cousins was trying to take his titty rings out at the morgue or something, thinking they was gold. I said fuck no, they’re brass! Silver-plated brass. He said they was thinking they was gold, trying to take them out. I’m like god fucking damn.

Is this possibly true? I do not know. And one day Tyler texts me, and says, “I’m repo-ing the buses and 18-wheeler trailer today.”

Tyler: Hey, come on up with it! (machine noises)

He calls me while he’s doing it, hangs his phone on his belt so I can hear. He tells me he wanted to get this stuff, which he says is his, before the cousins had a chance to sell it, like he says they did with his lawnmower and some other things. The buses and trailer don’t run, so he’s hired a crew of guys with big trucks to tow them out, around the side of John’s house and down his 910-foot driveway.

(big machinery beeping)

The buses are filled with lumber and there’s a clawfoot tub and a wood-burning stove. Stuff that Tyler says he was gonna use to build a small house with on John’s property. Now he wants to use it to build a house on his grandmother’s property, for him and his daughters.

Tyler: Whoo! (beeping in background)

The cousins were home in Florida while Tyler did this, but they must have gotten wind of it because the next day he tells me a warrant has been issued for his arrest for trespassing. Eventually a grand jury will charge him with multiple counts of felony theft.

Part 6

It’s not long before I realize, follow any finger that is being pointed in the aftermath of John’s suicide and there will be another set of fingers on the other end, not only pointing right back, but in a bunch of other directions too. Everyone is pointing at everyone. One afternoon at my Best Western along the highway I’m walking to the elevator to go to my room when who should pop out of the stairwell but John’s cousin, Rita. By the time it registers in my brain that it’s her, we’ve already moved past each other and it’s too late and awkward to turn back and say something. This is weeks after I’d met Rita at probate court and she declined to do an interview, a whole separate trip. I had no idea she’d be in town, and now I’m afraid she might think I’m stalking her. So I ask the front desk which room she and her husband are in, four rooms down from mine, and write her a note which I slip under her door, explaining that I didn’t know she would be here, but since we both are, would she be open to meeting with me? And by the way, sorry for creepily leaving a note under your door.

The next afternoon we all sit around a table in the hotel common area. It’s Rita and two other women who introduce themselves as cousins of John’s, as well as Rita’s husband Charley. They don’t allow me to record. They are livid with Tyler. They are saying he’s the person who’s getting away with something, taking all sorts of stuff from John’s house that they say is not his. The buses and trailer, but much more too. They call him a con man.

They show me Google Maps satellite images of John’s yard with the buses and trailer in them, dated from 2010. Which means that they were in his yard at least three years before the dates that are on Tyler’s bills of sale, which are dated 2013. This is proof, they say, that Tyler’s documents are bogus. And I have to say it is suspicious, though Tyler’s not the only target of their suspicion. There’s Faye Gambell, the town clerk. Rita asks me if I’ve spoken to her. I tell her yes. That’s interesting she says, kind of to herself. She says she didn’t talk to you. Rita and Charley say Faye hasn’t passed along any instructions to them from John. They’ve heard she has a list of people to contact, but she hasn’t given them that either.

Then there’s Boozer Downs, John’s lawyer. They tell me he was supposed to take a written statement from Faye, of what John told her the night he killed himself. But it’s been more than a month now, and curiously he still hasn’t done that. And then there’s me. Charlie clearly thinks this meeting is a terrible idea. He keeps getting up from the table and pacing, speaking to me sharply, saying I just want them to get in a, quote, “pissing match with Tyler.” At one point I ask, I thought harmlessly, where Mary Grace is living now, and Rita thinks on it for a moment, and then tells me, “I’d rather not say.”

I also ask about the text message Tyler showed me from John, which said Tyler could have anything he wanted in the house. Rita thinks Tyler fabricated it. She tells me it’s strange that it was sent from John’s computer and not a cell phone. I tell her, I don’t think it’s all that strange, and one of the other women cuts me off. “Of course you don’t.” “What do you mean by that?” I ask. “We know you’re like, friends with him,” She says.

On and on the accusations fly. It’s head-spinning. One day Tyler suggests to me that Boozer Downs, John’s attorney, might be in cahoots with the cousins, and that he might had suppressed John’s will so that they could split the assets. Meanwhile Boozer sends me an email asking if he can retract the interview he did with me because the cousins suspect him of being in cahoots with Tyler. “It got ugly in hearing,” he writes. “I am concerned that I should not have spoken to you on the recording.” Boozer says he did not hide John’s will because there was no will to hide.

I also get an email from one of John’s friends, who I met in the restaurant. He’s certain there must have been a reason he wasn’t contacted about John’s death. He includes the words, “Maybe I knew too much.” Then I call back the first guy I met with, John’s fellow horologist Allen Bearden, and tell him I’ve done what he suggested, contacted the other friends on the top of John’s list, and indeed none of them was called in time for the funeral, and a few not at all.

Allen: Now don’t you find that very strange, Brian?

And then Allen clarifies his theory for me. He thinks all the weirdness surrounding John’s death, the fact that he and other people on John’s list weren’t contacted, is because someone has taken John’s gold. He is not exactly sure who, but what he suspects is that there is potentially a large conspiracy taking place within the local Woodstock town government and police, to cover it up.

Allen: If the gold was there I think, you know, somebody came and got that gold, you know? I mean, and probably, probably stepped over John’s body and took care of that before they even did John. Now who did that, I don’t know. But I think it’s somebody to do, with inside that city hall. The whole thing, it’s just, it’s very suspicious. (laughs ruefully) Very very very suspicious. Somebody has that gold.

Part 7

Finally, I make a second visit to the Woodstock town clerk, Faye Gambell, who, after seeming not to have done a very thorough job contacting the people on John’s list, has been the subject of much of the suspicion. And after some inscrutable responses to my questions…

B: Did you call everyone on the list?

Faye: Everyone that I could get in touch with, yes.

Faye insists, she called everyone.

Faye: I promise you I did.

B: Were they called before the funeral?

Faye: Oh yeah. Yeah, they were called from the town hall phone, yeah.

Faye says most of the people she didn’t reach at first, but she claimed she left messages. I tell her that according to everyone I’ve spoken to, that doesn’t appear to be the case. What I’d personally thought had happened was that maybe Faye was so traumatized by John killing himself while on the phone with her, it’s possible she just couldn’t bring herself to make these calls. Which would make complete sense to me and I think most people would understand, but I ask Faye if that’s what happened, and she says no. She called everybody in the first few days after John died. She also says she’s since given the list to John’s cousins, and contrary to what Rita told me, Faye says she never claimed to them that she hadn’t spoken to me.

Then, I bring up the subject of the gold. Faye was the last person to talk to John, and I know he’d given her instructions about his assets in the moments before he died. Did he tell her if there was gold? If so, did he say where it was? The first time I’d interviewed Faye she’d been cryptic about all that. But this time?

B: I mean can you tell me where he said it was? I understand if you don’t want to, but I’m, if if you feel comfor–

Faye: He said it’s wrapped in a towel in the freezer.

B: So gold bars, wrapped in a towel in the freezer.

Faye: Uh hmm.

B: Did he say how much worth of gold?

Faye: Uh uh. Just gold bars.

B: Were there any other spots, like outside or anything like that, that you know of?

Faye: Uh uh.

After John’s phone call Faye rushed over to his house, along with the Woodstock police. But she said she didn’t look in the freezer. She told the police officers that John had said there was gold there, but she doesn’t know if they looked either, and she doesn’t believe the cops would have taken it. What Faye does happen to know, she says, is that when John’s cousin Rita got into his house three days later and looked in the freezer, there was no gold there.

B: So what do you think was going on? Do you think there was gold and someone got to it?

Faye: I do.

B: Do you think there wasn’t gold?

Faye: I think they either have not found it or that somebody had went right in there.

B: But who? I mean like, how much time passed between you being on the phone with John and arriving with the police?

Faye: Well I know that when Rita came up that she went into the house and there was things that she could not find. Things that were totally gone from over there.

What she’s saying is that someone was in the house before Rita got in there and could have raided the freezer, because she knows for sure some other things had disappeared by then, things…

B: That were there when you were there. I see. Like what?

Faye starts moving her mouth without letting actual sound out. Eventually she’ll reveal that when Rita got into John’s house, she couldn’t find John’s mother’s purse, or her checkbook, or John’s laptop, which, I know who has that. But when I ask Faye who she thinks took that stuff, Faye is purposefully vague. I think maybe she’s not sure what I know already, or else maybe she knows I know, so she knows she doesn’t have to say it out loud, etc. etc. Anyway, now she’s making weird eyes at me.

B: You got a little grin on your face, and a knowing, like, eye roll here. Um, I know probably who you think it is. So like, do you think like, is the running theory that it was Tyler? Do you wanna talk about that or no? No. Ok.

Faye: Because I know things I can’t talk about.

B: You know things you can’t talk about?

I did eventually read John’s 53-page manifesto. John emailed it, saying it was the most important thing he’d ever send me. It was his fifth revision, and he’d titled it, “Critical issues for the future.” And if I had to distill its message, it would be this: as we run out of affordable fossil fuels, as climate change renders the places that we live more difficult to inhabit, do not expect a great coming together. Instead, John writes, “Prepare for the U.S. to crumble into a bunch of competing autonomous regions. A few of them may become cohesive societies,” says John, “but expect many of them to descend into carnage.” To quote, “enter a new dark ages, a kind of new feudalism ruled by theocratic dictators.” He goes on, quote, “Expect public mutilations, executions, and torture to make a comeback in this region. Flogging, boiling, burning, hand-cutting, hanging, evisceration, honor killings, gang rape. Due process will perish,” he writes, “And Confederates will betray each other for miniscule gains. That gain may be as mundane as a morsel of food or a drink of water. Goodbye to civil liberties and minority rights also. That was another byproduct of the cheap oil economy. Civil rights are not a consideration of the undernourished.”

I remember reading this in 2014 and thinking, wow. John does not have a high opinion of modern humanity’s ability to solve problems. I also remember thinking, that’s not really gonna happen. At least not anytime soon. Which is the same thing I thought when John told me he was gonna commit suicide.

Chapter 5

“Nobody’ll ever change my mind about it.”

Part 1

On a Sunday evening in 2015, with Christmas less than a week away, I log into Facebook at home and notice I have an urgent-seeming message from Tyler’s mother, Maya. FYI, she writes, Tyler will probably be in jail Monday. There’s a warrant out for him, theft in the first, grand jury. John’s still haunting us. I think he’s giving up, she tells me of Tyler, with a frown emoji. Then she writes, “He won’t last a day in prison. I think he’ll pull a John.

Miss Hicks: Hello?

B: Hi, Miss Hicks, this is Brian Reed, the radio reporter.

I quickly call Maya from my cell phone, hence the lower-quality recording, but her mother, Tyler’s grandmother, Miss Irene Hicks, picks up and says Maya’s not feeling up to talking. So instead, Miss Hicks explains to me what’s happening with Tyler.

Miss Hicks: They got nine felony charges against him right now.

B: Nine felony charges?

Miss Hicks: Yes. He’s saying, Cordelia cook me some supper cuz I might not get nothing but jail food for the next couple of months.

Tyler’s grandmother, Miss Hicks, says she doesn’t know all the details of the charges against her grandson. They’re not publicly filed yet. But Tyler’s mom, Maya, heard from a family friend who works in local law enforcement that a grand jury had indicted Tyler on a felony count for theft of the 48-foot trailer he took from John’s property, along with the buses filled with lumber and antiques. Tyler’s had misdemeanors before, but never a felony. And to exacerbate things, it turns out about a month ago, around Thanksgiving, in an incident unrelated to John, Tyler was also arrested for armed burglary. He went to pick up his youngest daughter, who lives with him, from her mother’s place and according to Tyler, her mom wouldn’t let him in, and he was concerned for his daughter’s safety so he busted down the door and pulled his daughter out, and the mom called the cops who charged him with armed burglary because he had a gun, which he says was in his car but which the mom said he had on him. Tyler has a court date tomorrow for the burglary charge, and his mother and grandmother are worried that the judge is gonna toss him in jail when he sees the new theft count for the trailer from John’s. This all couldn’t be happening at a worse time, because Tyler recently found out he has a fourth baby on the way, with his current girlfriend.

B: Oh man. What a mess.

Miss Hicks: (laughing ruefully) Tell me about it.

As we’re talking, Miss Hicks does this thing I’ve heard so many people do, not only in Bibb county but everywhere. Talking about what she sees as one injustice that’s happening to someone close to her, her grandson, suddenly gets her thinking about another injustice a little further removed, and then another, further removed from that, and then another, further removed from that. We’re on the phone for 45 minutes and she ends up giving me this whole litany. She’s complaining about sexual abuse by police officers, about the cop in Chicago who shot a black teenager 16 times, the atrocious candidates for president, and her quote, “sorry governor, Robert Bentley.”

Miss Hicks: Holy mackerel, it’s just a whole bunch of mess.

B: Miss Hicks, you sound like John B. McLemore.

Miss Hicks: You know what? (laughing) Well I mean right now it is very precarious.

Right now it’s very precarious, Miss Hicks says.

Miss Hicks: I tell you, the whole system is bad.

Miss Hicks’ life has felt precarious for a long time now. Tyler’s ordeal is only the most recent trouble to wedge itself into her days. Miss Hicks still cares for her son Jimmy, Tyler’s uncle Jimmy, even though he’s 58 years old, because he’s severely incapacitated by the bullet lodged in his brain. She also supports her 45 year old daughter Maya, Tyler’s mother, who lives with Miss Hicks too and who, despite being really smart and having a college degree, finds it hard to hold a job because of depression and other health problems. There was also an extended family member living with Miss Hicks for seven years, after he got out of prison for a sex offense. He just moved out, and no sooner did his room clear than in moved a granddaughter. Meanwhile someone’s left a dog behind who’s about to have a litter of puppies, and Tyler and his kids and pregnant girlfriend are living in a half-finished house Tyler’s been building in Miss Hicks’ yard.

Miss Hicks: You find a solution for my, my my my conditions here I would appreciate it, any, any idea you have I, it’d be welcome. Kick ’em out and shoot ’em all, or do something. (laughs) Whoo! I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. If I had a different, uh, disposition I would probably would go stark raving crazy. I’d just take my medicine and take my Bocelli, and if you hear me play Bocelli then you know I’m sad.

Andrea Bocelli. Miss Hicks is an opera lover.

Miss Hicks: Oh yeah, I like all opera. Yeah, Bertie’s? my favorite, but

B: Bocelli’s for when you’re feeling depressed?

Miss Hicks: If they hear me play the Bocelli out here they say, uh oh, Granny’s upset about something, don’t bother her right now. (laughs)

B: Have you been playing it lately?

Miss Hicks: Oh I play it all the time.

B: So you’ve been feeling sad?

Miss Hicks: I’ve been feeling sad, well and upset about things that I can’t alter. I mean, misery loves company so Maya and I be good and sad together, and you can see tears rattling in our eyes when we hear of a sad story, I said uh oh Maya don’t start your crying, I says you’re gonna make me cry now. (laughs sadly) But when she talks about Tyler she always cries here. She says she don’t have no tears left. I’m just like that middle man you know cuz I feel sorry, I mean I love Tyler more than anything, but the idiot just won’t do right you know. (laughs) He’s doing some dumb things. I can’t make up my mind whether to scold him or love him or something.

(‘La Donna è Mobile’ plays)

Whether to scold Tyler Goodson, or whether to love him. A conundrum that has driven its fair share of people, mother, grandmother, girlfriends, buddies, John, a radio reporter from New York, driven all of us at one time or another, to salve our exasperation with our own personal versions of Bocelli.

Miss Hicks: Oh, that man’s got a voice like an angel.

From Serial and This American Life, I’m Brian Reed. This is Shittown.

Unknown: Hey man, How y’all doin? (a group of people chattering)

Let’s back up. A month and a half before my Sunday night phone call with Tyler’s grandmother, before the news of the grand jury and felony charges, to Woodstock town hall. It’s four months after John died, four months into this battle, between Tyler and John’s cousins, and another of Tyler’s court hearings has just ended, this one for misdemeanor trespassing, with which he was charged after going onto John’s property and taking the trailer and buses.

John’s cousin Rita and her husband Charley are here from Florida. A special prosecutor was called in from out of town and Tyler’s lawyer came in from Bessamer. The only person who wasn’t present for Tyler’s hearing was Tyler, because he got a temporary job at a factory in Georgia and says he didn’t want to lose a day’s work to come back to Woodstock, so he sent his lawyer in his place. Rita and Charley, John’s cousins, drove 10 hours from Florida, all to watch as the judge slapped Tyler with a new offense, failure to appear, and in the course of two and a half minutes, adjourned court.

The last time I saw Rita was our meeting after I discovered that we were staying at the same hotel and left a note under her door, though she didn’t want to talk on tape. But now, as we’re lingering in the town hall parking lot with the sun setting, we start chatting, and she says it’s OK if I record. She seems frustrated with Tyler.

Rita: I’m upset, because um, of the whole situation with him taking advantage of an 89-year-old that can’t take care of herself.

Rita says they found just one bank account for John that he used for his mother’s expenses. It had 98 dollars in it. All the items that Tyler has taken from the McLemore property, in his eyes to keep from falling into the nefarious hands of the cousins: the buses full of lumber, the trailer, the vehicles, Rita sees as Tyler stealing from John’s mother, his legal heir, Mary Grace.

Rita: And she has no money, and um, and you know, you just see her whole life, um it just wasn’t meant to be this way, you know? It just breaks my heart that there’s people like that in the world, you know, that can take advantage of good people. And I personally think there was uh, something more than this. Um…

B: What do you mean?

Rita: I don’t think John would have ever taken his life uh, and left his mother in the shape that he did. Yes, he probably would have ended up killing himself, but I think it came prematurely.

Evidently this is how dark this feud has become.

Rita: I think he drank cyanide, but I think he was forced to drink cyanide. I think he was probably intoxicated, and someone just cheered him on, and it was something he wanted to do eventually anyway and he just did it prematurely.

B: I mean, someone, do you think it was Tyler?

Rita: Um hum. I do. I’ve told the police, I think they uh, dropped the ball on this one. I really do. I think John and Tyler had an argument. I think he probably got fed up with John and –

Charley: You’re speculating. Just, just don’t do that –

Rita: I know, I am speculating and I’ve told him I’m speculating.

Charley, Rita’s husband is hanging around, not exactly thrilled that Rita’s talking to me. And he’s right, Rita is absolutely speculating. There’s just no evidence at all to back this suspicion up. There’s nothing noted in the police incident report for John’s suicide, John was texting Tyler minutes before he downed the cyanide, and Faye Gambell was on the phone with John as he did it and reported nothing about hearing another person in the background, egging him on, or anything like it. She says all she heard were dogs. Rita acknowledges this, that there’s no evidence whatsoever. Still, she says,

Rita: I just still believe it.

B: You do?

Rita: Yeah, I certainly do.

Tyler’s a thief, Rita tells me, whose trespassed repeatedly onto the property of a dead man and his infirm mother, ransacked it looking for gold, and taken valuable things that weren’t his. Why wouldn’t he be capable of offing John?

Rita: We’ll never know, but nobody will change my mind about it.

At one point, Charley starts making a ‘cut it’ gesture across his neck.

B: Charles wants you to stop (laughs)

Charley: Come on, let’s go.

But somehow they don’t go, and before we know it we’ve been taking for more than an hour. Rita tells me all the ways she’s tried to track John’s gold. She’s called the mint, the US treasury, but she’s had no success. She also pulls out a baby book that Mary Grace kept for John, and shows it to me. It has family pictures and class photos, and report cards, and John’s birth certificate. She offers to make me copies of it. I ask how Mary Grace is doing.

Rita: Oh my gosh, she just got back from uh, Gatlinburg.

B: What was there?

Rita: She went just up to see the leaves change.

And that’s a surprise to me, because when I met Mary Grace while she was living with John I did not get the impression that she was healthy enough to travel. But now Charley and Rita have her staying with family friends, and they say, except for the moments she gets emotional about John, she’s doing quite well. She has a TV to help her pass the time, which she didn’t have living with John. Charley says she’s gotten sharper, and become more aware of current events. She used to be a librarian and cared about that kind of stuff. Her caregivers bring her out to eat a lot. She’s gained 18 pounds in the last three months.

Charley: She went to the river, she went and they carried her on a boat ride to the river here not long ago.

B: Really?

Charley: Yeah.

Rita: She does fine in the boat.

Charley: So she’s really doing good.

Hearing about all this, it occurs to me for kind of the first time that John probably wasn’t providing the best life for Mary Grace. I don’t like to judge the way people live, and so I hadn’t the few days I was there with Mary Grace and John, but Rita says before John died Mary Grace probably hadn’t been on a trip in 30 years. She didn’t have new clothes, there were fleas all over the house when they got in there. The windows in Mary Grace’s bedroom, John had boarded up. Rita says he’d told her he’d had trouble keeping Mary Grace in the house. Rita says Mary Grace’s nurses told her living in a dark room like that can cause a dementia patient to lose track of time. In Mary Grace’s case Rita believes she lost 10 years because she knew when her birthday was, but said she was 78 turning 79, instead of 88 turning 89, which is the age she actually was.

Rita and Charley have lived in Florida for 30 years, but they both grew up here in Woodstock, they still own property here. And they’ve kept in touch with John and Mary Grace over the years and visited with them on trips back to Alabama. So Rita says she feels embarrassed and mad at herself that she didn’t put together what was going on and intervene sooner. I’m glad to hear Mary Grace is doing better, I tell her. By now the sun has set. Rita and Charley and I are standing in a dark, empty parking lot. This whole time the door to their SUV has been open right next to us, and I kept feeling like they could get in and speed away from me at any minute. And now, finally, they do.

Rita: OK.

Charley: Have a good night, enjoy your stay.

B: Enjoy your stay.

Two months later I get an email. “Hey Brian, I know you are a busy, busy man, so when you have time please call me. Thanks, Rita.” Sitting at my kitchen table I call.

B: OK, I think we’re recording now.

Rita’s says it’s OK for me to tape on my cell phone. She’s at home in Florida. Charley’s out of town, which makes for an opportune time to call me, because she knows he might not approve. Rita tells me, there’s something she wants to ask me about.

B: So, what’s up?

Rita: OK. I am trying to get some information. Obviously, you know more about what is going on with the Woodstock police and Bibb county, blah blah blah. You don’t have to tell me what you know, but I’m not really sure who I can trust and who I cannot trust. And…

Rita goes on for a bit, and I can’t figure out what she’s trying to ask me. She’s talking about the Woodstock police officers. There are four of them full-time, and how she suspects that they’re working against her. John was skeptical of the cops too, she says.

Rita: You know he called, excuse the expression, but he called Woodstock a Shittown. He hated it you know.

B: Oh, I’m well aware of that.

Isn’t that what John first got in touch with me about to investigate, she says, corruption in the local police?

Rita: Was John telling you not trust the Woodstock, that Woodstock police could not be trusted? Was there one certain guy?

I tell her, John called me down here to investigate a murder that, in the end, never actually happened. Yes, he hated the police and town government, but in a completely unbiased and all-encompassing way. He wasn’t ratting on one specific person. It’s still confusing to me why exactly Rita’s asking about this until she tells me this next part, about Tyler. She’s discovered something she believes he’s done, something more serious than taking the trailer or buses, and this time she has actual evidence.

Rita knew that after John’s suicide one of the things Tyler had taken was John’s pickup truck, so one day she called the state motor vehicle office to order a copy of the title, and when she told them the circumstances, that John B. McLemore was deceased, the woman on the phone was surprised. John B. McLemore died in June? That was strange, because someone signed his name on the truck’s title in July and sold it. Oh, Ok, Rita said. She got the name of the guy who bought the truck and tracked him down, not far from the Mississippi state line.

B: What did the guy say? Did he, did he get it directly from Tyler? He bought it directly from Tyler?

Rita: He got it directly from Tyler, and Tyler had posted it on Facebook, and he went over to Tyler’s house and met Tyler and paid $3300 for the truck. And Tyler told him that he had bought the truck from his stepdad, John McLemore.

Meanwhile Tyler told me once that the truck was John’s. The state revoked the title. Rita got the guy to write out what happened in a statement, and he gave her the truck, saying he’d eat the 3300 bucks he’d paid for it if it meant avoiding trouble with the law. Rita also just discovered that Tyler allegedly pulled off the same shebang with John’s Mercedes. That he sold for $900.

Rita: And I do not want anyone to know this, because I just don’t know what they’re feeding Tyler.

Which brings us to why Rita was plumbing me for intel on the Woodstock police. She doesn’t want to tell them about her investigation because she believes they’re protecting Tyler. She says she asked the cops to look into these vehicles months ago, but that they came back and told her that everything was fine, that they belonged to Tyler. And there’ve been other issues she’s reported since John died, where Rita feels they’ve chosen not to investigate or arrest Tyler. Take the saga that started one day, back during the summer, when Rita and Charley were home in Florida and sent their niece, who lives in Woodstock, to check on the McLemore property. Rita says her niece arrived and saw that John’s workshop had been broken into, so she called the cops.

Rita: Well she got Leitze.

That’s officer Jerry Leitze, a veteran Woodstock cop in his 60s.

Rita: And Leitze says, “Where is Mary Grace? The homeowner should be calling.”

Jerry Leitze was familiar with the situation. He had to have known that Mary Grace would not be handling something like this. “Where is Rita?” he asked. “In Florida,” Rita’s niece told him.

Rita: And he told her we don’t have time to come over there. I’m not gonna file a report. And then the very next day is when Tyler took the buses.

A friend of Rita’s in town called her when that happened to say she’d just seen Tyler riding in front of a giant tow truck with one of John’s buses, so Rita and Charley quickly packed and booked it, first thing in the morning, to Bibb county. They went to Tyler’s grandmother Miss Hicks’ house and drove slowly by, snapping photos of the buses and the large trailer Tyler had also taken from John’s, which were all sitting in plain view in the yard. Soon after, Rita says, the person who was watching their house back in Florida picked up the phone there and someone who identified himself as Tyler, said…

Rita: If you don’t quit driving by my house and harassing me I am going to fill your ass with buckshot.

Rita wasn’t intimidated by this threat. Let me say this, she told me. We carry a gun when we’re in Woodstock. But she was pissed. She went in person to the Woodstock police station to report it, and who should be there but Jerry Leitze.

Rita: And when I walk in Jerry just hits me with, with all barrels, saying “You have got to quit riding by Tyler’s house! You have got to quit harassing him or I’m gonna have to, uh, arrest you.” And I’m like, “You gotta be kidding me! You mean to tell me I can’t drive down a public road but he can go over at Mary Grace’s and steal all of her stuff?” Which, I really didn’t say stuff, because I was mad. And then, you know, he’s like, “Lady, you gotta back off!” And I thought, wow, I think he’s on Tyler’s side.

Rita: I don’t know. I swear, I just, I don’t trust Leitze. And I’ll tell him that to his face. I’m not talking behind his back.

I tried asking Officer Leitze about all this to his face. After a few phone calls I approached him one morning in the Woodstock town hall parking lot, but he declined to speak to me. The Woodstock police chief, Lynn Price, didn’t respond directly to Rita’s claims that the department’s been on Tyler’s side, but he told me that he and his officers made clear to Tyler that he could not take anything from the house until matters were settled in probate court. He also told me that the cops found no money or gold in John’s house, and he made a point of mentioning that the town had to pay for the cleanup of the suicide scene. All that said, I do have some insight into what’s going on with Tyler and Jerry Leitze.

Tyler: Hell, he comes over here pretty often.

Jerry’s a family friend. Tyler says he’s especially close with his sister and her husband, and Tyler’s mom, who’s told me herself that Jerry’s a pal. Not long after Rita vented her worries to me about Letize covering for Tyler, Tyler tells me that Leitze swung by his grandmother’s recently. Tyler’s been constructing his house there, out of the old lumber that was in the buses he took. I’ve been observing Tyler’s progress on the house myself every time I visit, and it is truly remarkable.

As the heart of the house he’s used the white trailer from John’s place, outfitting it with a kitchen, and then assembled this giant, fascinating, two story structure all around it, kind of like a non-treehouse version of the Swiss Family Robinson, making use of the bus lumber but also all sorts of other material he’s scavenged: bits of driftwood, wisteria vines, telephone poles he was able to buy off a guy, an old deck he took apart, pieces of fence, a horse’s watering trough he’s turning into a shower. There’s a huge workshop with a pool table, and bedrooms for all his girls, and a second-floor porch that looks out over a pond in the forest. I come from a family of home builders and I’ve never seen anything like it.

Anyway, Officer Leitze came by not long ago and Tyler gave him a tour.

Tyler: He walked in the house, and even walked around and looked at the back side of the addition there and everything.

B: So you gave him a tour of the house that you’re building with the stuff that’s disputed that his office technically arrested you for and is going through the courts?

Tyler: Yep. I told him, I said yeah, it’s gonna be nice if I can ever get done with it. And if I stay outta prison. And he said, yeah, you better hope they don’t want this damn thing back, talking about the trailer. I said this thing ain’t going nowhere, Jerry. He said, oh, this ain’t the same one, is it? I said no. He said Oh, OK. (laughs) And then we just carried on the, another conversation.

Tyler says it was like Jerry was winking at him, being his buddy. Tyler’s mom told me Jerry stressed over Tyler’s legal issues, given that he’s their friend, and that he’s quote, “eagerly waiting for his retirement date next year.” Tyler says Jerry’s told him he’s tired of having to choose between his friends and his job.

There’s more, right after this.

Part 2

B: Can I tell you what Tyler’s view of you guys is? Would you mind if I told you that? Can I just, I’m curious to hear what you say.

Rita: Oh, no!

On the phone with Rita I realize there’s this whole version of her that I’ve gotten from Tyler that casts her and Charley as heartless, money-grubbing carpetbaggers, swooping in conveniently after John’s death to wrest control of the property and assets from Tyler, without a thought for Mary Grace. But then there’s the other version of Rita and Charley that I’m getting from them. Of high school sweethearts who’ve been married 41 years, who seem to have a nice relationship, who make each other laugh and don’t appear to get on each other’s nerves, even after a 10-hour drive from Florida to Woodstock. Almost every time I’ve seen Rita and Charley, at probate court, at our Best Western hotel meeting, at John’s funeral, Charley has been wearing some kind of Hawaiian shirt as if he’s trying to will these unpleasant settings into the fun-filled retirement he’d imagined. They stopped working about seven years ago, and they tell me they’ve been trying to enjoy it, except for the fact that for months now they’ve been having to drive back and forth between Charley’s father, who recently had surgery and moved in with them in Florida, and this whole mess in Bibb county, John’s suicide, and Mary Grace needing care, and no money to be found, and this never-ending fight with Tyler on top of it all.

I know that for Tyler whenever I bought up the possibility that this could all be a misunderstanding that snowballed, that both sides could have meant well, and maybe if they just hashed it out bygones could become bygones, what he always returns to, what he can’t seem to get over, was that very first interaction he had with Rita and Charley, in John’s driveway. Over the months he has repeated that story to me, how Rita and Charley passed the hospital where Mary Grace had been admitted after John’s suicide, to go straight to John’s house, trying to get in. How Tyler called Mary Grace on his way to meet him there with the keys, and she instructed him not to let them in the house. The whole thing rubbed him the wrong way.

B: He didn’t like the fact that you went to the house before the hospital.

Rita: Yeah, and he said that to me that day. He said, I can’t believe – well first of all he was like, “Well Mama this,” and I’m like, who in the heck’s Mama? I didn’t even know who he was talking about.

Mama, you might remember, is what Tyler called John’s mother, Mary Grace. Rita says the only reason they went to the house first was to pick up some essentials for Mary Grace, clean clothes and her purse, and she says actually they didn’t pass the hospital to get there because they came through Montgomery, not Birmingham, like Tyler assumed. When they arrived in Woodstock the police chief escorted them to John’s house, but they found that the door had been padlocked. The chief told them Tyler Goodson had probably put it there, and that was the first time Rita had heard his name.

Tyler’s told me some stories about Rita and Charley, especially about that first day when they met in John’s driveway. He told me it escalated into an all-out fight really quickly, which, I wasn’t sure how fully to believe. It was hard to picture these harmless seeming retirees getting in a row like that, especially in front of the police chief. Tyler says Rita and Charley were screaming at him in the driveway, telling him off. Rita says,

Rita: Absolutely!

According to Tyler, Charley cussed at him. According to Rita,

Rita: Charley says I don’t really give a F what you think.

As she goes through her side of the story, it’s like nearly every little thing that Tyler said happened, Rita confirms, only the opposite, if that makes sense. Like she’s the lost roll of negatives to Tyler’s developed photographs.

Rita: And then when we got into the hospital, we got to the hospital he had basically turned Mary Grace against me.

What happened after the driveway quarrel, if you recall, is that Tyler refused to unlock the house for Rita and Charley, and they all went to the hospital to see Mary Grace.

Rita: You know we get to the hospital and he’s sitting just about as close as you can get to Mary Grace without being in her lap and I walk in the door and I say, “Mary Grace, I am just so sorry,” and she says, “You never had kids! You’ve never lost any kids! You don’t know how I feel!” I said, “Mary Grace do you know who this is?” She says, “Yeah, I know who you are Rita.” So I went out to the nurse’s station and asked them what was going on? They said, “She’s upset because he told her you were taking her to Florida.”

Which wasn’t the case. They barely even knew what was going on, Rita says. There were no plans yet.

Rita: And the nurses were saying, “Who is this guy? What connection is he to her? Is he her adopted son?” He told him he was her adopted son! And so I go back in there and you know I said, “Mary Grace, now I’m here to see if, is there anything that I can do to you know, help you or whatever.” And Tyler is like, “Well I’m gonna get, you know, I’m gonna get Mama home and, oh me and Mama sit out on the porch and we talk about old times, and Mama I’m gonna get you some new shoes, and Mama my kids are gonna pick you fresh flowers every day, and…” I walked out and I told Charley, I said, “Charley, if I hear him call her Mama one more time I’m gonna go ballistic.”

B: Before you move on, can I tell you, the way you’re describing Tyler, at the hospital as putting on a show for you guys, that’s how he describes you at the hospital, as putting on a show, (Rita laughs) saying that you guys were crying over Mary Grace, and were like all boo-hoo-hoo or so…

Rita: No! No! I went in and I did say Mary Grace I am so sorry, I’m not saying I wasn’t crying, I probably did cry, I mean my god, I knew John Brooks. It wasn’t like he was a stranger. He’s family. But I wasn’t (theatrically) “Oh Mary Grace! I’m so sorry!” You know.

At that point, Rita says she really wasn’t sure what to make of the situation. Mary Grace was saying that she wanted to go back to her house and her dogs and have Tyler take care of her. Rita hadn’t seen Mary Grace for a while, and says she didn’t yet realize the extent of her dementia. So after a while Rita turned to Tyler…

Rita: I just told him, I said look, if Mary Grace wants you to move in and take care of her, and you wanna do that, so power be it! I’m going home. I will stay after the funeral and then I’m going home to Florida. I don’t need this. Good luck to you.

B: Wait were you actually willing to let Mary Grace go with Tyler?

Rita: Yes!

B: Like was that, were you just really calling his bluff, or was like…

Rita: No! No, I was serious. She said it was OK, she liked him, he liked her, I’m like, fine. And then the social worker called me at my motel and said, “We’re not turning Mary Grace over to him.”

Part of the reason was that Tyler isn’t kin to Mary Grace, but Rita says in addition to that the hospital staff had doubts about what Tyler was claiming.

Rita: He sat over there and said, “Well I been taking care of Mary Grace for years. I take her to the doctor, I do this, and I do that.” Well what’s the doctor’s name? “Uh uh uh uh, I don’t know.” Who’s the healthcare? “Well uh uh uh uh, I don’t know.” Well does she take any medications? “No, she don’t take anything but vitamins.” Well they knew that was a lie, cuz they had her medical records. So he just dug hisself a ditch.

Part 3

One thing Rita has in common with her cousin John, she too is a fastidious record keeper. She’ll eventually give me a copy of a daily journal she’s been keeping of what’s occurred since John’s death, in impressive detail. She lists each little interaction with authorities in there: lunches, visits to the pharmacy. When we’re done talking tonight, Rita will enter this, our very phone call, into the journal. Quote, “talked to Brian Reed, reporter, for over three hours.” I’m also in there on day 18 at probate court, described as, being with America Radio, and that I showed up and, quote, “seemed to know a lot of information,” which I find flattering. On this day, according to Rita’s journal, after the social worker declined to release Mary Grace to Tyler, Rita got a call from a friend…

Rita: Saying that Tyler was over at the house with two trailers and two trucks.

At John’s house, there to load up stuff, allegedly.

Rita: So I got in my car and got down there and the police have already run him off. And the police is the one that told me you know, you might want to go ahead and try to get custody of Mary Grace.

In her journal she wrote, quote, “That is when I realized that Tyler was a gold-digger, and I decided to fight him for Mary Grace’s sake.” And the days become immediately busy. The journal documents an urgent and successful effort involving Faye Gambell, the town clerk, and Boozer Downs, the town and John’s attorney, to get Rita temporary guardianship over Mary Grace. It documents a trip to Lowe’s to purchase locks to secure Mary Grace’s house. A trip to the post office where Rita says she learned that Tyler’s girlfriend had picked up a package addressed to John’s PO Box. A trip to the police station to report that, and choose Tyler’s girlfriend out of a lineup, which never led to any charges. A trip to the nail salon for Mary Grace to get a pedicure. Leftovers for lunch on Tuesday. The trip to Boozer Downs’ office where they met with Tyler and kind of sort of tried to talk things out, but that went south when Mary Grace said to him,

Rita: Don’t call me Mama. I’m not your mama.

Which Rita says Mary Grace uttered of her own volition. She also says she didn’t break up Tyler and Mary Grace’s conversation at the funeral, like Tyler told me, that she’s not brainwashing Mary Grace against him. There’s a trip documented in the journal to Walmart to get John some burial clothes, a trip to the funeral home, and to the florist. To the cemetery, to point out where to dig John’s grave.

Rita: And let me tell you another funny story, well it’s not funny, but. The uh, undertaker came out and told me, he says, now you know John’s got some real big gold nipple rings. And I says, really? I didn’t know that.

When I said Rita corroborated nearly everything Tyler told me, well, here you go. Rita told the undertaker…

Rita: I want those nipple rings. I just want them.

Sure, the undertaker said. No problem. But then as Rita and Charley were leaving the cemetery they realized he hadn’t given them to them.

Rita: So I went and asked the undertaker where were they, and he said, Oh we couldn’t, we couldn’t get them off. Something about how they were screwed on and all this stuff. And uh, you know, I really wish I had pursued that now that I think back. I really don’t think the nipple rings were on him. I think the undertaker got them. Cuz you’re telling me that you got a guy there that y’all’ve done an autopsy on and you’ve cut him from neck to privates and you can’t get a nipple ring off? Cut his nipple off! He’s dead!

B: (repulsed) Ugh! Wait, why, that’s like… why would you want those?

Rita: Well, you know what, the main thing I got to thinking about is I didn’t know if it was just something that I would have of his that maybe I could pass on to Mary Grace or something, or just something to keep of his, you know what I mean?

B: But wait, you would have given the nipple rings to Mary Grace? But she didn’t know…

Rita: Well I wouldn’t have but it seemed it was just something of his, I guess, that… I didn’t have anything of his.

Rita says part of the reason is that she’s had a lot of deaths in her family and doesn’t trust funeral homes. But still.

B: Ugh. I’m sorry, I’m just reeling from you saying that they should cut his nipples off. Ugh.

Rita: I’m just saying, don’t tell me that you couldn’t get those nipple rings off.

Rita is now going after Tyler on multiple fronts. She’s pressed charges for trespassing, she’s pressing charges for theft, of the trailer and buses, both of which the Woodstock police chief pointed out to me they did arrest Tyler on. She will soon bring the district attorney’s office the evidence she’s gathered that Tyler faked John’s signature on the titles for John’s cars. And a grand jury will also indict him on multiple counts of forgery. The assistant district attorney told me he’s impressed by how industrious Rita’s been, investigating these matters completely on her own. Rita tells me she thinks Tyler should do time for what he’s done.

Rita: To me, anyone that goes over and takes other people’s possessions is a criminal.

Charley told me he’s not necessarily mad at Tyler. Tyler’s just doing what he knows. He’s a criminal. That’s what Tyler’s been reduced to in their eyes. But this is what conflicts like this do to the participants: reduce them. Half a year into the fight Rita says she feels minimized by it too. Like the fight has turned her into someone meaner and cruder than she is.

Rita: I’m serious, I mean, as a Christian I even have trouble with this because you know you’re supposed to love everybody and I don’t want him to think that this is the kind of person I am. I’m not a bad person. I’m not, I’m not that type of person.

Part 4

Tyler: You’d think I was some kind of drug addict, or a thief, or a goddamn, some kind of criminal with all these, all this mess on me. But I don’t know I don’t consider myself a damn criminal. I mean, hell I don’t do nothing but work and take care of kids.

The feud is wearing on Tyler too. That Sunday night when I spoke to his grandmother on the phone, the night that she and Tyler’s mother were freaking out that the judge might throw him in jail the next day, well that didn’t happen. Tyler paid his $1000 bond and remained free. Right now his forgery and theft case is scheduled to go to trial in early summer. He says he sees nothing wrong with the measures he’s taken. Yes, he took the trailer and buses. But would a criminal have bills of sales for those things? Which Tyler has, even though Rita and Charley claim they must be fake, based on the dates. And would a criminal have asked the Woodstock police, after telling them about the bills of sale, if he was allowed to go on John’s property and repossess the trailer and buses? Because according to Tyler that’s what he did, and the police said it was OK. And would a criminal say this, when he got wind that he was being investigated for possibly forging John’s name on a document?

Tyler: I don’t see how in the hell they can prove that, you know.

B: Is there something to prove?

Tyler: I don’t know, I mean I don’t know what they’re trying to prove, but uh…

When Tyler and I talk about this, he doesn’t yet know what the forgery allegations are about exactly. The county hasn’t yet filed the charges against Tyler, claiming he’s forged John’s signature on the titles for John’s truck and Mercedes. They’ll file those soon, but at the moment when we’re talking, he’s simply heard word that someone has been going around, asking questions about him, about a forgery, and he thinks it maybe has to do with the bills of sale for the buses. Either way, I ask him broadly,

B: But is there a forgery that happened, Tyler?

Tyler: Oh, I don’t know.

B: OK.

Tyler: Not on my part.

Not on my part, he says. For a year, Tyler and I have talked regularly, on the phone and when I come to Alabama. He’s told me all sorts of stories, some about John, but even more just about his life. About the abuse his father Rodney inflicted upon him and his family when he was a kid. Abuse Tyler’s mother and grandmother have told me about too. Rodney, by the way, said to me that he was not abusive. He used a different word. He said he whooped his family. Tyler’s told me about what it was like just as he was entering high school, to have Rodney get convicted for sexually abusing a child, to have to suddenly cram with his family into his grandmother’s house and have everybody at school know what was going on. About what it’s like to have your license suspended for failing to pay a fine one time, for a minor traffic offense, and then to keep getting pulled over again and again because you have no other way to get to work in rural Alabama so you’re driving without the license, and the fines keep mounting, what John called fine slavery, and so much of the money you do manage to make you have to shovel right back over to the courts or lawyers. About what all that does to your world view.

Tyler: I know I got some bad luck, I’ll tell you that. Like I just expect the worst to happen everywhere I go and just hoping I can get surprised that it don’t.

Getting Rodney as a dad, that is a bad hand. A cashier refusing to sell you beer at Walmart because you happen not to have a valid ID with you, not so much. But Tyler complains about that kind of thing all the same. Bouncing between his many grievances, between big injustices he’s experienced and petty ones. He and I have had long, sometimes frustrating talks about this, where I’ve tried to understand his justification for some of the choices he makes, like earlier on when the legal battle was just starting to get more serious with Rita and Charley and I suggest that he might have an opportunity to prevent it from escalating.

B: Have you considered giving the buses back just to avoid the trouble?

Tyler: Fuck no!

He told me it tickled him. That was his word, tickled, to see Rita and Charley struggle. And then there’s this story, which gave me a vivid sense of how Tyler sees things. He had recently hired a guy to do some electrical work on the house he’s building, and according to Tyler the guy stole two of his grandfather’s old guns out of Tyler’s home, so Tyler came up with a whole plan. He contacted the guy and acted like he hadn’t noticed, told him there was more work to be done, and tricked the guy into coming back over to his house where he was waiting for him with a rifle in hand, and walked him over to a shed.

Tyler: I had a chair sitting out there in that shed, and some damn snips, hedge clipper snips, propped up beside it waiting. And I was gonna cut a finger or two off. I mean, I was gonna snip fingers until he had my guns delivered back here.

B: (shocked) Tyler, really?

Yes, really. At first I thought maybe Tyler was just saying something ridiculous, embellishing. But I ask him about it and he’s clear with me. He was serious about this and going into that shed had every intention of following through. He says he did have a change of heart once he got the guy into the shed, and ended up instead whipping the guy across the face with the gun and beating him silly, rather than dismembering him. But he hasn’t had a change of heart about the appropriateness of this plan. As we discuss it in retrospect he still thinks it would be a completely acceptable thing to do, given the situation. Which I find unsettling.

B: (shakily) You thought it would be OK to cut his fingers off?

Tyler: Buddy, if he thought it was OK to come in here and steal my granddaddy’s gun that is irreplaceable, then yeah. I was gonna fix a thief. I believe it would have took one finger and them guns would have been found, if one finger hadda went. It wouldn’t have took two or three, I guarantee you.

I kept questioning Tyler, trying to understand why he thought this was OK, but nothing he said did quite make me understand. And I realized it was probably gonna stay that way. Eventually as I’m saying goodbye, about to hang up the phone, Tyler asks me this.

B: Alright man, I’m gonna let you go. Can you just do one favor for me?

Tyler: I don’t me being I’m a bad person at all, do you? Do you see me being a bad person?

B: Do I?

Tyler: Yeah.

B: No man, I see you as a complicated, normal person, you know?

Tyler: Yeah.

B: I mean, I, I disagree with some of your decisions, but you also, you’ve had a very different life experience than I’ve had.

Tyler: Yeah.

B: Why, do you feel like a bad person sometimes?

Tyler: Naw, I just, it’s just, I just want to know what people think of me because I mean, hell I’d do anything for anybody. I’d help somebody goddamn, anyway I could. And I ain’t out to rob nobody or steal from nobody or nothing like that. I don’t, people make me out to be this, they, they treat me like Rodney is what it is. That’s the way it’s been my whole life, basically.

To Tyler, Rodney, his dad, that’s a criminal. And that’s how Tyler measures if he’s being a good person. Is he acting like Rodney.

Tyler: I mean yeah, I have a temper. But I don’t beat on my kids or my wife, or my mama, or my sister. He does. I have made some mistakes for damn sure. But damn. I wish I had a little bit better guidance.

Part 5

John had a phrase for the M.O. Tyler would often employ when faced with an affront. Quote, “The whoop ass now solution.” John cared for Tyler, but he was also perpetually frustrated by him, and was fixated on the possibility that if Tyler didn’t get his life in order soon he could end up becoming an irredeemable fuck up. When Tyler did something John didn’t approve of, like party too much at the tattoo parlor, or get in a nasty screaming match with one of his exes, or get locked up in jail and ask John to bail him out, it would annoy John.

J: I told Tyler I’ve never seen the inside of a jail in my life until I met you. Keep your ass…

And I would hear about it.

J: See that’s what he can’t do. He can’t keep his fuckin ass outta trouble. Am I expecting too much? You know he was raised by a fuckin child molester. Maybe I’m expecting too much.

And just like with Tyler’s grandmother, talking about Tyler’s tribulations could quickly get John riled up about tribulations the world over. Which I know we’ve all heard John deliver this kind of harangue before, but I share this only so you can see how riled up Tyler could make John. He really inspired some of John’s most virtuosic [sic] work. Here, I’ll save you all the windup about Tyler, and go straight to the money.

(opera in background)

J: We ain’t nothing but a nation of goddamn chickenshit, horse shit, tattle-tale, pissy ass, whiny, fat, flabby, outta shape, Facebook-lookin, damn twerk fest, peekin out the windows and slippin around, listening in on the cell phones and spying in the peep hole, and peepin in the crack under the goddamn door, listenin in the fuckin sheetrock. You know, Mr. Putin please, show some fuckin mercy! I mean, come on, drop a fuckin bomb, won’t you? (opera crescendos, ends) (Sighs) I gotta have me some tea.

Still, John really stuck with Tyler, despite the irritations. He gave him more and more work, helped him out with more and more money, kept track of his court appointments on a calendar. Hired him a lawyer, accompanied him to court. Gave him lectures and advice. Though it could sometimes feel to John like a one-way street. On the phone one time I asked John a lame question about him and Tyler, but the way he responded stayed with me.

B: Do you think your guys’ relationship is more of a friendship, or more of a paternal relationship?

J: What you wanted to say but you didn’t come out and say it, is, is your guys’ relationship more of a friendship or more of a “usership”? (laughs) Ha, that’s what you wanted to say!

B: No, it actually wasn’t what I wanted to say, it’s what you wanted to say apparently.

J: (laughing continues)

B: Why do you say that?

J: You do say that when you’re pissed off at two in the damn morning, and you know he’s all sort of damn drunk. See this isn’t the first time I’ve pulled this stunt. I could keep you on this phone for hours with another case by the name of Michael Fuller.

John brings up this name, Michael Fuller, in the last conversation he and I ever have, a little more than a week before he killed himself. He doesn’t reveal a ton about him, just that Michael was a 20-something guy John had also kind of taken under his wing years ago when he was much younger himself. Unlike Tyler, John says Michael came from a family of professionals, a quote, “good family,” but was rebellious, didn’t hang with the best of influences.

J: You know he was gonna be out with that wild crowd partying, hanging out at Senor Frog’s and the Quest, and all these damn discos, and doing all this damn dope, and he just made a career out of going to jail. He would be… he would be about 45 now. And the last time I heard from him he was living up there in your neck of the woods paying some, you know like $1800 a month to live in some scruffy apartment that didn’t even have a damn bathroom, and he was shacked up with some damned old Argentinian girl that was bringing up high powered pot. So yeah, I’ve seen this shit before.

John felt like he’d failed with Michael, and he worried he was about to fail with Tyler too.

J: Doesn’t seem like a very good track record for me, is it?

Part 6

After John died, I found Michael Fuller in New York City, called him to set up a time to visit. And what I walked into is this bleak scene.

Little girl: So yeah, I wanted to take a selfie, but nobody had space on their phone. (laughing)

Michael Fuller does live in an apartment in New York, and he may be paying $1800 a month in rent, I don’t know. But I believe that would be under market for his lovely apartment in upper Manhattan. Which not only has a bathroom but three bedrooms. Michael’s a waiter. He likes his job. And he is shacked up with a woman, though she’s Brazilian, not Argentinian as John had said. And she does not happen to be a smuggler of high-powered South American marijuana, but rather a sweet Montessori teacher who is also Michael’s wife. They have a smart and precocious seven-year-old who speaks Portuguese and English, and cheers for Alabama football from afar. Michael tells me that he got to know Michael in his early 20s, when he was living down the road from him in Woodstock.

Michael: I was over there a lot. Kind of just as just a safe place to be.

B: You thought of John’s as a safe place to be?

Michael: Yeah.

Michael uses a version of that word several times to describe John’s. A safe place. A safety harbor. A place of safetyness. He was partying a lot then, he says, over in Birmingham, dancing as a scantily-clad cowboy in a traveling male revue, doing a lot of drugs, drinking. And John’s was somewhere he could go to sober up, or escape the scene for a while, and he always felt welcome there because John would be eager for the company and would usually be up in the middle of the night after Michael was done clubbing, working on clocks. Michael says once he even hid out at John’s for days from the police, when he had a warrant out for skipping a court appearance.

Meeting Michael I realize John couldn’t have been more wrong when he said his project had failed. Michael says without John as a refuge, a voice telling him to slow it down, to drink less, he might have ended up dead some night, from drunk driving, or in jail more than he did already. And it was John’s place that Michael went to when he was about to hit the bottom of his addiction. From there he headed back to his family and on to rehab.

B: So you really think John had that much influence?

Michael: Oh yeah. That drinking got bad. And he was a good person to be there, you know for me at that time. He helped a lot.

B: It’s interesting. Like one of the reasons I wanted to come talk to you, are you familiar with the Goodsons? Does that name ring a bell at all?

Michael: No. The Goodsons? No.

I explain to Michael the context in which John had told me about him. How John mentioned him because we had been talking about this other guy, Tyler Goodson, who John had also recently been trying to shepherd through a rough period. And while I’m telling Michael about this, about the things John was doing for Tyler, he interrupts.

Michael: That sounds like John, yeah. Caring, helping and that’s John.

B: You’re smiling, like, with recognition.

Michael: Yeah.

I ask Michael if it sounds, from what I’ve described, like Tyler is a later iteration of him. And he says it’s weird, but yeah, that does seem about right. John would let him stay at his house as long as he wanted, Michael says. Then he says, and that’s how he was with Tyler I guess. A thought seems to be occurring to him, about John’s suicide.

Michael: And something probably happened with Tyler. I don’t know. Maybe, I don’t know if… I think John was gay. Uh, which has nothing to do, doesn’t bother me at all, but…

B: What do you think, do you think something happened with Tyler?

Michael: Like, he could have stopped coming around, he could have found a girlfriend, you know. Something like that. Is that what happened?

B: Yeah. Like right before the end.

Not long before John killed himself, Tyler had started getting serious with his current girlfriend, Cammy, and they had recently moved in together. And when Michael said that Tyler could have stopped coming around, all I could think of is the weekend leading up to John committing suicide, the weekend of Father’s Day, when Tyler had been avoiding John and not speaking to him because John had made an insulting comment about his daughter on the swing set. Michael says this is something he’d always sensed about John. All those years ago.

Michael: He kind of wanted you by hisself.

He didn’t want to share you, especially not with a woman.

Michael: I’m just saying, when I took a girl over there, you could tell he would, let them go, would you stay.

B: How could you tell?

Michael: You could just see it. You can tell. It was always with girls, it was, they’re nasty. He was never really talking nice about women.

This is true. John could be scathing about lots of people so when he was alive this didn’t necessarily jump out at me, but in retrospect I have noticed that John could be particularly mean about women. He often used the word whore, as well as some more vulgar and inventive language to talk about women, and it sometimes seemed like he reserved a bit of extra vitriol just for them. On the other hand, John also expressed interest in feminism, bemoaned the fact that women in his area were more educated than men but didn’t seem to get the same opportunities, talked about reading Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, and was a fan of Audrey Lorde. And he was enraged by sexual abuse. So as usual with John, it was complicated. But since he died, quite a few people have told me, like Michael, that he was a woman-hater.

Michael has now formulated a theory in front of me, a speculation to be sure, but one that he’s compelled by nonetheless. That Tyler, retreating from John that weekend, and then the night he killed himself, Tyler choosing to stay home with his girlfriend and kids, rather than heeding John’s pleas and going back to his place, Michael thinks that’s what led to John’s suicide.

Michael: I’m just thinking that that’s what pushed him over the edge. He’s afraid he’s fixing to lose Tyler.

I ask Michael something I’ve wondered often about John: if he ever knew him to be in a relationship. I have no idea, Michael says. I don’t think so. I know not with a woman. And I have no idea about a man, but he never mentioned it to me.

B: Do you think John’s relationship with you, and then now Tyler having heard about it, like was the closest thing he had to a romantic relationship?

Michael: I would think so. Yeah. Yeah. I would think so.

B: Is that sad or not sad?

Michael: It’s sad. Because we’re both straight.

It is sad. But as I’d learn, Michael and Tyler being the closest thing John had to a romantic relationship, that’s also not true.

Chapter 6

“Since everyone around here thinks I’m a queer anyway.”

Part 1

From Serial and This American Life, I’m Brian Reed. This is Shittown.

J: Phew. Stinkin old car. Oh man, time to get another one.

After a long day running around Bibb county together, to the courthouse and the library, and past the Burt family compound just to have a look at it, John and I are driving in his beat-up Mercedes back to his place. It’s my last night here. I’m flying home tomorrow. John wants to swing by the Little Caesar’s to pick up a pizza for his mother. It’s getting dark.

J: OK we’re gonna take the shortcut through here since the sun’s diminishing arc is passing beneath the horizon. (a little under his breath) As the sun’s diminishing arc passed beneath the horizon…

A rare moment of quiet with John, in the dusk.

J: (sighs) I’m gonna miss you, I hate to tell you that.

B: I’m gonna miss you too.

J: Shoot.

B: Hopefully I can get back down here.

J: At least come down here once every now and again for a lecture on climate change and energy.

B: (laughs)

J: The impossibility of paying our debts.

Unknown: Order Out Pizzas!

(door chimes)

John grabs a pepperoni pizza from the Little Caesar’s to bring home to Mary Grace, and as we’re climbing back into the car in the parking lot a very minor confrontation occurs. A manager emerges from the pizza place and says to me, “Were you recording in my store?” I tell him yeah, I was recording John. He says there’s no recording allowed. That’s alright, I say, we’re leaving anyway.

B: Sorry…

Unknown: No it’s alright, I just, you know…

B: Yeah.

That’s it. The guy was fine to me. This was not a big deal. But as we drive away John will not let it go.

J: My store. My store! Oh I love it! Oh, my store! That motherfucker, he doesn’t own a pot to piss in or a window to sling it out. He probably lives over at South 40.

South 40 trailer park, where Tyler lived at one point, across the street from John.

J: He thinks he’s a top dog! He runs the Little Caesar’s in Buttfucksville, Alabama and my store! Is you recording anything in my store? (laughs)

Like, I am over this. But then John busts out this lovely word.

J: He’s probably a fag too, they always overcompensate. You know I’ve been on both sides of the fence so I know the psychology of heterosexual and homosexual. That’s probably the type that likes to overcompensate. They call themselves tops, you know they shout down the bottom, that’s usually how that type of relationship works.

John talking like this, it did make me wonder.

B: This is gonna sound like a ridiculous question, but is there a gay scene down here?

J: Oh my god, there’s no telling how many closet cases are in this town. You turn that off and I’ll tell you something. Hit the kill button for a sec.

This is one of the few times John ever asked me to turn my recorder off. What that usually means is that I wouldn’t tell you what he said without getting his permission to describe it. But there are a few reasons I am going to give you an overview of what he told me in the car that day. First, since John died, two other people who knew him well have told me this same information, on the record. Also, John was very clear that he did not believe in God or an afterlife, so John in his own view is worm dirt now, unaffected by this. And lastly, what John disclosed, and where it led me after he died, helped me understand him so much more. And I think trying to understand another person is a worthwhile thing to do.

So what he told me was about a local man with whom he’d had a sexual relationship not all that long ago. I’m not gonna say exactly who the man was because that’s the part John wanted secret. It wasn’t the fact that he had been with men that he didn’t want recorded, but that he had been with this particular guy because John had talked to me about this guy already multiple times and told me that he was not a good person. The guy worked on John’s yard over the years, and for a while they’d been close. After John committed suicide I went to meet with the man. We did an interview on the record but I’m not gonna use the recording. He’s friendly when I arrive and open to talking. We sit and periodically as we speak his wife wanders by and eavesdrops. He says his relationship with John was close, but a working one. John would pay him to do projects on the house and yard which John did with lots of people, and the man says that over time, John became overly attached to him. John didn’t like for the man to leave or when he had other commitments.

At a moment when his wife wasn’t around I ask the guy if his and John’s relationship was romantic. If it was sexual. “I think that’s what he wanted,” the man says. “I think he just wanted a partner, not so much sex I guess. I hope not. Had me scared though.” “And so it wasn’t ever sexual with you guys?” I ask. “Uh uh,” he says. “Cuz he said otherwise,” I tell him. The man snaps his head towards me with big eyes. “Mmm,” he says. I tell him he doesn’t need to talk about it if he doesn’t want, but because John told me about it I felt compelled to ask. “Mmm,” he says again. He pauses. “Um mm.” And that is all that is said on the matter. Though there is one moment later in the conversation, when the man is telling me about the reason he and John started spending less time together. The man had started dating a woman, and John would say harsh things about her. He says he knew what John was trying to do. He was trying to get the man to be with him instead. “But that ain’t what I wanted,” the man tells me. “I don’t want no boyfriend. I want a girlfriend. I’m straight, and gonna stay that way too.”

I left my visit with that man, more than a year after John killed himself, feeling lots of things, but mostly feeling like, “Ugh, is that what passed for love in John’s life? This guy maybe who has a wife, and doesn’t acknowledge their relationship, and who John thinks is an asshole anyway?” John did have Tyler I guess, and Michael Fuller years back, both of whom he clearly cared about, but both of whom were in very unstable situations and oh yeah, were also straight. Tyler says he and John would tell each other, “I love you man,” of course with the requisite caveat that they weren’t trying to get up each other’s butts. But that’s not love, like love-love. The kind of love I hear about all the time on the country music stations as I’m driving around West Alabama.

(Canaan Smith’s Love you Like That: Slow as the Mississippi, strong as a fifth of whiskey, steady as a Tom Petty track, girl, I wanna love, wanna love you like that, deeper than a sunset sky, sweeter than muscadine wine, all night till the sun comes back, I wanna love, wanna love, wanna love you like that…)

Did John ever have love in his life? Not ‘I really feel something for this kid Tyler’ love, but Mississippi river love, fifth of whiskey love, muscadine wine Tom Petty track all night till the sun come back love? Or even a quieter, steadier, maybe even longer love? Did John ever have a relationship resembling any of that? Or did he spend the entirety of a lifetime without it?

One night in October 2015, as I was getting married actually, an email showed up in my inbox. No, I was not checking my email during my wedding. I noticed it the following week. “Hello sir,” it began. “My name is Olen Long and I was a friend of John B. McLemore for 12 years. I recently learned of his death.” Olen Long. I had never heard that name before, and it was not on John’s contact list that he left behind after his suicide. Olen goes on to explain in his email that he had corresponded with a friend of John’s who was on the list, whom I had spoken to, and that man told Olen about me, that I was doing a story about John. “Can you let me know when the segment will air?” Olen writes. “I would very much like to listen. Also I need to know the radio station number, AM or FM, thank you.”

I write back and tell Olen it’s nice to hear from him, albeit under unfortunate circumstances. I’ve been talking to all sorts of friends of John’s, I explain, learning about him. Would he be open to speaking to me sometime? He agrees. He tells me he lives in Birmingham, about 40 miles from John’s place in Woodstock. He prefers not to meet at his house, so a few months later I rent a motel room and set it up as a makeshift recording studio. Waiting in the lobby I see a man walk in, peering around. He’s fit, but not skinny, neatly dressed in a well-fitting red sweatshirt and jeans. It’s Olen. We shake hands and head into the room.

B: Welcome to the uh, to the digs.

Olen: To the recording studio.

B: Yeah.

Olen: Alright.

Later when we get to know each other, Olen will ask me how old I think he is, and I’ll guess John’s age, about 50, maybe even younger, but he tells me he’s about to turn 60. The years haven’t shown on him the way they do on others. He sits with good posture, military posture I learn, when I ask him to talk about himself so I can check the levels of the mike.

B: Let me get a quick level on your voice.

He was a linguist in the air force with top secret security clearance, specializing in German and Russian.

Olen: What I did was just listen to Russian pilots talk and send it to the National Security Agency.

These days he’s a registered nurse at a nearby hospital.

Olen: I work in the surgical intensive care unit there.

B: Oh really?

Olen: Yeah. Are you getting a good reading here?

B: It sounds great. And also I’m learning about you, which is helpful, because I have no idea about who you are. (laughs)

Olen: Oh gosh.

B: So we’re rolling.

Olen: How did you know John? I figure you must have met him…

I begin to explain how John wrote to our radio show, how he and I spoke on the phone for months before I ever went down there, and before I can get into much more of the story, Olen takes over the conversation. He seems eager to talk.

Olen: That’s very similar. When I met John we talked on the phone for 15 months very regularly before we ever met in person. I’m going to tell you, we met on a singles line, for men. The only good thing that came out of that singles line experience was a friendship with John. I met John on the line and I called him back at the number, and within just a few minutes I knew that I was talking to someone brilliant. I learned of John’s death on the condolence website. I had not heard from John in probably a year. So I got curious and I…

Olen doesn’t tell me why he hadn’t heard from John in a year. “Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself,” he says. One day after all that time not speaking, Olen says he wondered about John and finally called him, but his phone number was disconnected which Olen thought was strange because John’s family had had that phone line since the 1960s. So during some downtime at work he typed ‘John B. McLemore obituary’ into Google and there it was.

Olen: And that’s all I had to go on, because in all the years I knew John we had no friends in common. I had no one who knew him, so there was no one I could call.

Olen says in the more than six months since that happened he’s been grieving alone. He has one friend at work he’s told about John. He’s been writing about John in his journal, and one afternoon he visited his grave. And he corresponded with another commenter who left a message on the condolence website who’s the friend of John’s who told Olen about me. Olen and I will end up sitting in this motel room for five hours tonight, and more than six hours tomorrow, talking about John. He tells me that it feels exhilarating to finally talk about his relationship with John, to try to make sense of it now that John’s gone, with someone else who knew him too.

The singles line Olen and John met on was called Megaphone. This was in 2003, before online dating became ubiquitous. It was essentially Grindr for your landline. You’d dial into the service, listen to short messages people had recorded describing themselves. If you liked them you’d beep them, as it was called, and then if they were intrigued they could pay to be connected with you on the phone. That’s what happened with Olen and John. John beeped Olen, and Olen called him back.

Olen: One of the first things that he said to me was that he lived with his parents and he lived in a small town, and he said I hope that’s not a problem. Well we just started talking.

And that talking went on for months, 15 months as Olen said, before they met in person. Usually talking in the middle of the night because Olen keeps night shift hours, even on his days off, and John would just be finishing up his work in the clock shop which he did in the evening because it was cooler.

Olen: And I just remember enjoying talking at night. Maybe even sitting in the dark with no lights on, just talking on the phone with John.

They found a lot to discuss. Books they were reading, Olen gravitated more to fiction, John to science. They talked about music, things going on in the world, about growing up, and a lot about being gay men in Alabama. Olen didn’t still live in his hometown like John, but was born and raised in Alabama too, and had lived much of his life there. I have to say, Olen has such a ridiculous recall for the details of these conversations. He could be John’s official biographer. Like what he remembers about John’s father…

Olen: Tom McLemore had one eye that was straight and the other one was a little off-center.

Who Olen recalls only from a photograph he saw hanging on John’s wall. He never met the man. Or John’s mother…

Olen: Mary Grace’s birthday is November the 29th or November the 30th, 1926.

Who remembers that about their friend’s mother?

Olen: She got married in 1951.

Oh yeah of course. What about cousin Jimmy on John’s father’s side?

Olen: Jimmy was born, and I’ll never forget it, four, four, forty-four, April the 4th, 1944.

Of course, as Olen and John were chatting, they were feeling each other out. At one point before they’d met, John sent Olen a photo of himself, standing on a chair, alongside a very tall grandfather clock at his house, with the ostensible reason of showing Olen how large the clock was. Olen looked at the clock, then looked at the man standing next to it. He noticed John’s red hair, his lack of freckles, and thought, “He’s not bad looking.” When finally Olen visited John in Woodstock, he did so with curiosity.

Olen: I was trying to decide if I was attracted to him, because I’m gonna be honest with you, when I would go down there and visit him the few times I’d go down there, it was to take a second look.

Though if they were trying to impress each other, John didn’t necessarily put in a ton of effort.

Olen: I mean I went over there dressed like this one time, and he said, “I only dress that way to go talk to the lawyer.”

I mean, Olen was dressed, in that he was wearing jeans and a shirt.

Olen: The difference is that mine were clean and un-tattered. He was wearing a T-shirt with holes in it, paint stains all over it, and the uh, trousers he had on, very much the same. And then of course I was down there one evening in his bedroom and, and he had a, he had a pile of handkerchiefs there on the floor, and I suspected they were used handkerchiefs, and surely enough he had to blow his nose and he went over there and he picked up a used, wadded up handkerchief and blew it and then threw it back down there in the pile. And I didn’t say anything, but I thought, “I don’t do that.”

So, that gave Olen pause. But still, night after night he and John found themselves talking for hours on the phone. They were getting close.

Olen: We got on well. He was somebody that I could, there was intimacy there. And I’m going to tell you the definition of intimacy that was given to me by a counselor. Intimacy is the feeling that I can tell another person my thoughts, and my behaviors, without fear of judgment. If I can tell them the things that I’ve done, even the things that I’m not proud of, and they’re still gonna answer the phone and say, “Hey Olen, how are you getting along?” That’s how John would do, say, “How are you getting along?” So we did have a close friendship there.

As Olen and John got to know each other, they did what you do. Talk about past relationships. And there they had a lot in common. They’d both dealt with a lot of secrecy and repression.

Olen: He told me that he had had a relationship at one point with a, an older man, he called him William.

This was John’s first relationship, according to Olen. He says John was probably 21 when he met this man he called William, which would have been in the late 80s. John told him it was a hot summer’s day.

Olen: And there was a road crew working on the highway right out there in front of John’s house. And John said he went out there with some water, kind of like the water boy at a football game, and William was one of the guys out there working on that road crew, and as John said later, William said, “the first time I saw you I knew you’re hiding something, that you needed help.”

Help coming out of the closet, if not to the world, then at least to one other person in the world, which as far as Olen knows, at that point John had never done. Olen also had an older, more experienced but still not publically out man, coax him out of the closet and teach him the ropes of gay life as he knew it. His was a professor at his college. A married professor. John’s was a tattooed road crew worker, in Bibb county.

Olen: According to John I don’t think anyone else down there knew. William was not obviously gay. No effeminate mannerisms at all. I also know that he was not very literate. It was like a symbiotic relationship. He had something to offer to John, something to help John come out of his isolation, but at the same time if he got letters in the mail that looked official and he couldn’t read them well, John would interpret those things for him. John might write his checks for him.

And in exchange William imparted on John knowledge he had. Olen refers to them as lessons about sex. I noticed that Olen is rather forthright when talking about sex, but he uses somewhat clinical words to do it. Gay people are homosexual. Being gay is your sexual orientation. People sleeping together is –

Olen: Sexual activity.

Or physical contact. Or once in a while, when he lets his hair down a little bit, a sexual interlude. Olen believes John and William were together, engaging in sexual activity, in utter secret, for at least two years before William moved away. A two-year apprenticeship that William provided to John.

B: Did you get the sense that he taught him at all about how to be a gay person in that area?

Olen: I’m glad you asked that. No, I didn’t get that impression. I didn’t get that impression at all. I think it was mostly sex. I don’t know that there was any, “how do we feel about each other?” Any discussion of the relationship. I got the impression that William’s experience with gay life, even though it may have been extensive, was mostly centered around sexual connections. Not relationships.

And Olen could relate to that because his experience with his professor was very similar. At 19, Olen admired the man, and was grateful to him, but the man was also cheating on his wife, and instead of teaching Olen how to have a healthy, open relationship, gave him lessons on how to cruise for sex in parks at nighttime, and in public bathrooms.

Another thing Olen and John could relate on, they both came out to their families and weren’t accepted. Olen told his mother when he was 26, and after that, he says she never mentioned it again of her own volition. He’s about to turn 60. He has never brought home a partner. Olen says when John tried to come out to his mother years ago, she simply left the room, and they never spoke of it again either. Although Olen says he never heard John use the word ‘gay’ to describe himself, he always used ‘queer,’ and told Olen he was quote, “Only 60 to 70 percent that way.” John and Olen both kept their sexuality hidden for much of their lives. John talked to Olen and to me about how he had to be very careful about that where he lived. And it seems there were only a handful of people in his life he was out to. Olen says John had a refrain he’d use to describe his life in Bibb county. “You just learn to live without,” he would say. Without sex, love, romance, support, companionship, the touch of another person, a partner. You learn to live without.

Olen: I’ll tell you one of the similarities between me and John is that we can be celibate for long periods of time. And I’ll just being honest with you. I don’t mean to get into all this, but I don’t mind telling you. It will soon be six years.

And when they had tried to find a relationship it had often been disappointing. By the time John and Olen met on the singles line, Megaphone, they were both pretty disillusioned with it. They’d each joined, naively, Olen now realizes, in the hopes of actually dating people, sitting down, getting to know someone, maybe, who knows, some romance. Living in Birmingham, Olen says at least he had places to go on a date, places where he could sit with another man in public and get a coffee or a drink. But John had nothing like that. There’s not a single bar in all of Bibb county. And even if there was, it’s hard to imagine two men feeling comfortable or safe going on a date there. So instead, according to Olen, John would invite guys from the line to his house, which seemed to set a certain expectation, or else he would come up with some other rendezvous point in Bibb county.

John told Olen about meeting a guy from the line in the parking lot of a Church of Christ near his house on a weekday afternoon. The guy called John once he was there, and John freshened up from doing work on the yard, changed his shirt, but John told Olen when he got to the church and saw the guy, he found him repulsive-looking: a chain smoker with tobacco-stained teeth. The guy promptly made some lewd comments to John, and as John put it, the next thing he knew the man had grabbed him and shoved his tongue down John’s throat, so John pulled away and left, and refused to swallow the whole ride home, terrified that he might catch some disease lurking in the guy’s saliva, until he got into his bathroom and scrubbed his teeth frantically, and gargled, and took a bath.

Another time, Olen says, at John’s house…

Olen: He had one guy come over, and John had invited him in and they were in the kitchen. Now of course Mary Grace’s bedroom is nearby and so she’s in her room, asleep, and John asked the gentleman, “would you like a glass of water?” And he said he said, “Sure” so he got him a glass of water. And as he was holding the glass under the faucet running the water he felt someone come up behind him and start trying to pull his pants down, but John said he gently stopped that. And they ended up out on the porch, and the uh, guy, had to um, expend that sexual energy so he masturbated on the front porch and John said he masturbated into whatever that flower bush was there, and then he left.

So much for romance.

There was one time Olen knows about when John did fall in love. About two years into their knowing each other, Olen says there was a period where he stopped hearing from John as often as usual.

Olen: And I called him one night and it wasn’t long before I could tell that there was something on his mind. And the next thing I knew he went into tears.

John told Olen that he’d recently become friends with a guy in town and they’d started sleeping with each other and spending a lot of time together. The guy had told John he’d had his eye on him for a while. He had some college, and he seemed to have ambition in his career which John liked. John was head over heels for the guy. He said to Olen that he’d told the guy he loved him, but that the guy didn’t seem to reciprocate it. And now John hadn’t seen him in a while, and he was leaving him messages, saying, “I love you. Call me sometime.” And not getting any calls back.

Olen: He told me what was going on and then he burst into tears. And he sobbed. It wasn’t just a few tears. It was, it was sobbing. He was in the kitchen, you know he only had a phone in the kitchen. So he was sobbing in there.

B: Had you ever seen him cry?

Olen: I had never heard him cry, never heard him. I mostly, mostly what I heard from John was humor, disgruntlement, disgruntlement turned into humor, a little anger, and I didn’t know that he would cry. I knew I could, but I didn’t know that he would cry. And I just listened and I, and I consoled him, I said, that’s hard. I’ve been there. I’ve been there. And I think I said if you need to cry, go ahead. Finish. Get it all out. When we were on the phone, there was never any hurry. There was never any hurry to get off.

Olen: He was desperate. He said, “I’m desperate to have that kind of a relationship, you know, a one-on-one partnership kind of a relationship. I want it desperately.” He only said that one time. And I heard the word desperate.

More, in a minute.

Part 2

Olen and I are sitting with each other, the first night we’ve met, and he’s telling me all these memories of John and it takes hours before I understand for sure whether he and John were ever a couple, if they ever actually tried. I don’t ever ask Olen outright, but I don’t need to because it gradually becomes clear that it never happened for them. And that for Olen his relationship with John still feels unresolved. He’s telling me stories, remembering things, and in the course of this his mind drifts now and again to a few tiny moments, way in the past that stayed with him because in them he and John seemed to acknowledge something that they found very difficult to speak about. Like one time when they were riding in the car together through Bibb county and John had made some remark about Olen that Olen thought was unfair, and Olen told John as much.

Olen: And when I finished he smiled and he laughed, he said, he said, “You and I could never live together.” He said, “I’d just piss you off too much.” And I didn’t know what to think of that. We weren’t talking about living together.

Or another time on the phone, when…

Olen: He asked me, “As long as we’ve been talking on the phone, do you still consider yourself searching for a partner?”

And Olen thought for a moment, and then said, “Not really, John.” He wasn’t really talking to anyone else.

Olen: And there was some silence there, and I said, “Why do you ask?” “Ah, I, I, I don’t know. I don’t know.” I think he was, I think he was trying to express an interest. I think it’s, I didn’t know how I, I didn’t, I didn’t delve any deeper. I didn’t delve any deeper.

B: I’m trying to figure out how you feel about this. Like, is this something that you feel is a missed opportunity?

Olen: (sighs) I’m not really sure. I think we had talked so much and I wasn’t comfortable enough with what I was feeling. I couldn’t identify it.

B: Cuz what was so…?

Olen: (sighs) There were certain things that I was, that I found it hard to get past. Some of his profanity and some of his anger, I was somewhat afraid of his anger. Even though I was wondering what it would be like, I wasn’t certain that it was really a good place for me to be. Does that, does that make sense?

Olen and John could get on each other’s nerves. If you were feeling sensitive or emotional, John was not necessarily the greatest guy to talk to, and Olen felt he could sometimes just be thoughtless or mean. They once had a huge fight that was actually over Olen’s favorite movie.

Olen: I got very angry with him when the movie Brokeback Mountain came out.

Brokeback Mountain, of course, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, playing two cowboys who fall in love one summer on a mountain in 1960s Wyoming. When I say this is Olen’s favorite movie, he loves this movie. I’ve noticed during our conversation that a couple times Olen dates life events as being before or after this movie’s release.

Olen: It was 2005 because it would have been before Brokeback Mountain came out.

And he knows a ton about it.

Olen: The movie was filmed, they wrapped up shooting in August of 2004. It wasn’t released until December of 2005, so we’ve got a year and a half of post-production.

B: Olen, how many times have you seen this movie?

Olen: I would venture to say probably 50 or more times. When it first came out I couldn’t get enough of it. I watched it about every day.

This movie meant so much to Olen. His favorite part is the first 45 minutes when the cowboys are falling in love, alone together on Brokeback Mountain, without the world there to judge or threaten or intrude. To see a love story about two men like that, it moved him. After he saw the movie the first time he purchased a 52-inch TV specifically so he could have a better repeat viewing experience at his home. He asked a local cinema to present a special screening of the film once it had left theaters. He devoured the short story the movie was based on, and poured over all the behind the scenes features.

Olen: And I got so excited about it I got on the phone and I was telling John about it, about the movie, and he was listening and listening and he wasn’t saying very much, and then he started talking and telling me I was making too big of an issue out of this, you’re getting too much into it. And one thing I’d really dislike is when I’d get excited about something, something that I find important and I’m trying to make it a point and it gets discounted so I got really irritated so I got off the phone and I think I went outside. I know what I did.

He went into his backyard and pounded the ground to let out his frustration with John. Olen saw parts of himself in both the movie’s characters. Heath Ledger’s character’s fear, of the world knowing he was gay, but also the way Jake Gyllenhaal’s character could feel so hurt by that fear. And he really thought John would get a lot from it too.

Olen: I wanted him to relate to that. I wanted him to relate to it and he didn’t at first. But then over time we talked again. And I talked about it more. And I talked about it more. And then he began to be interested in hearing more of it. So I said, “what is your address?”

John didn’t have a TV, or go to the movies, so Olen ordered him a copy of the original short story.

Olen: I did. I ordered a copy and I had it sent to John. That was the second time I heard John cry. Because he read it. He read Brokeback Mountain.

He read about Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, their secret trysts after falling for each other on the mountain with their wives and children at home, and how despite Jack’s pleas to Ennis, to just get a ranch with him and have a real relationship, never do that, because Ennis insists, “I’m stuck with what I got. Caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it.” And who’d go on like that for years, Jack desperate to break out of the loop, and Ennis too afraid, until one day Ennis sends Jack a postcard and it comes back with a stamp, saying deceased.

Olen: We were on the phone and he was crying about it, he had read it, and after that he always referred to it as ‘The Grief Manual.’ He said, “I took down The Grief Manual and read it again tonight.”

And so this is what Olen and John’s relationship eventually settled into. They were confidants and close friends, supporting each other through this experience they were both living, of being middle-aged and gay in Alabama, and alone. John giving once in a while hints that maybe he wanted the relationship to be something more.

Part 3

Olen: I want to ask you a question, if I may.

B: Please.

Olen: How did he take his life, and what were the circumstances?

I tell Olen how John did it. He had assumed, based on conversations with John, that it was a gunshot to the head.

Olen: He drank cyanide?

B: He drank cyanide.

Olen: Um, OK.

B: Yeah.

Olen: Well that’s surprising, cyanide. (sighs)

B: I’m sorry.

Olen: Lord no, that’s alright, that’s alright, that’s alright. I was thinking of him, you know, this, I, I, I, I just, I need to know and I’ll work through this. Poor John. John.

B: Yeah.

Olen: John. (groans quietly)

What led to John and Olen’s not speaking during the last couple of years of John’s life was a growing preoccupation with several subjects that Olen says John would not stop ranting to him about.

Olen: I heard a lot about climate change.

Also the economy. Olen was a good friend. He would listen to John and actually engage with him on these topics. John would refer to certain books a lot, and Olen actually went out and read several of them. ‘Going Dark’ and ‘Walking Away from Empire’ by Guy McPherson, and Al Gore’s book ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ He told John, “I believe in climate change. I think it’s an issue. I try to do my part. I switched over to energy saving lightbulbs. I don’t know what else we can do, besides have everybody do their part.”

Olen: Then there was mostly Shittown. That was mostly it.

And these tirades bothered Olen the most, because Olen felt, compared to climate change and oil and the economy, this was something John could actually do something about. John would go on and on about the miseries of Shittown. And Olen would tell him again and again, “If it’s really that bad, you can leave. You have the means. You can leave.” And John would say, “I know. I want to leave.” And then the next time on the phone from his kitchen he’d be howling about Shittown again.

Olen: And I just couldn’t hear any more of it. I couldn’t hear Shittown, Shittown. I couldn’t hear it anymore. If you’re not going, if you’re, if you don’t like it, leave it. You can leave it. You can leave it.

After one such conversation in September 2013, having heard it for the umpteenth time, Olen hung up the phone.

Olen: And he sent me an email within a couple of days that was extremely profane.

John had witnessed an incident at the Green Pond grocery near his house that had set him off. Olen thinks it had something to do with how a father had disciplined his young son there in public, but Olen says John also made some indirect jabs at things Olen had expressed in their previous conversation. It wasn’t a humorous message, he says. It was angry. And Olen felt at the end of his rope. So he responded and wrote simply, “John, please don’t send me any more of these profane emails.” And John replied with another profane email back.

Olen: It was not as scathing as the first one. But it sounded like, sounded like an ending. Relationships, friendships come to an end. And I thought, “Well maybe this one’s run its course.” So I took a few deep breaths, and I thought I’m gonna send him one back, but mine’s gonna be honest. So I sent him an email back, a lengthy one. I told him everything that I had ever appreciated in him as a friend. I thanked him for being a friend, but I didn’t put an end to it. I just said, then, I just said, “I just simply cannot hear any more of these complaints, particularly about Bibb county.” So I sent it back to him and this is the email I got back. It was much much calmer. And he said this to me, he said, “I always got the impression that you thought that I was crude, vulgar, and beneath you. And that is why I knew that you and I could never be an item. But call me sometime.” I never called him again.

Olen wasn’t the only one who went through this with John. What I learned talking to lots of John’s friends, is that while they say John had been a tormented person for as long as they knew him, climate change and the collapse of society and Shittown only became fixations for him in more recent years.

One clock collector who’d been close friends with John for more than two decades, who lives in Alabama not far away and used to spend entire nights hanging out with John as he worked in his shop, told me that he got to the point where he just couldn’t talk about climate change and the dissipation of cheap energy any more. He said he realized that John’s negativity was contagious, and he’d leave there feeling depressed himself, so he had to begin psyching himself for their visits, reassuring himself that he wasn’t going to come away in a gloomy mood, and that everything was OK. Until he just slowly started spending less time with John, going from talking to him two or three times a week, to once a week, to a couple times a month, to having not talked to John for several months before he died, and not having visited him in about a year.

As best I can tell, this retreat by Olen and some of the other people who were close to John started happening in the last few years before he died. Which also happens to be right around the time John wrote an email to a radio show, saying, “John B. McLemore lives in Shittown, Alabama.” It sounds like the John I knew was different than the one his friends had known for years. I got to know John, it seems, at the beginning of the end, just as he was driving some of the closet people in his life, like Olen, away. Which ended up leaving him even more isolated there, in Shittown.

Olen not calling John after that final email exchange, he says he wasn’t thinking of that as, “I’m never gonna call John again.” He just needed a break. And then in the midst of that break, his time with John ran out, and now he doesn’t exactly regret that they never got together, but it’s hard sometimes not to wonder what it would have been like if some days had gone differently.

Like this one day, Olen says, about 10 years ago, during a short time when John was running a small nursery in Woodstock and Olen had ordered some azaleas and met John in the parking lot of a Birmingham doctor’s office to pick them up, and sat with him there, in the front of his truck, talking, cracking jokes about the dating line they’d met on, the azaleas sitting in the sun while John’s mother had an appointment inside, John waiting for the doctor to call him in.

Olen: And that may have been why he put on a clean, navy blue shirt which I thought really enhanced that red hair. And he was wearing a pair of pants, I don’t know if they were jeans, made out of denim jean material, but they hugged the top of his thighs and such and his belly, and I just remember I just wanted to lean over there and do some stuff. Cuz I’m sitting there in a truck with John B. McLemore outside a doctor’s office picking up my azaleas and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to reach over there, I wanted to pull his shirt up, expose his belly, and just kiss all over his belly, around that red hair. Just to that extent, and I wanted to do it slowly and sensuously. That’s what I wanted to do, and see what he thought about it. He’s doing nothing but sitting there under the steering wheel of an F-150 pickup truck, but it was just the whole aura. It was the hair, the skin, the intelligence, the jo – he was in a jolly mood that day.

B: And yet instead of doing anything…

Olen: I kept those feelings to myself. I think now, if I could go back, if I could get in a time machine, and go back there and relive that moment I would at least speak up and tell him what I was thinking. I’d probably look over there and say, “John I don’t know how you’re gonna feel about this, but I really wanna kiss you right now. There. I’ve put it out there. That’s what I want.”

F-150 pickup truck love. Denim hugging on your thighs love. Azalea love. Doctor’s parking lot love. Kissing on your belly and all around your red hair love. Too bad that didn’t actually happen. Because that’s something you could write a country song about.

Chapter 7

“You’re beginning to figure it out now, aren’t you?”

Part 1

Before I got to know an antiquarian horologist and he committed suicide, I’d never thought of clocks as anything special. To me, they were just like appliances that tell time. And, an antique clock? I didn’t think of that as any different from, say, an antique chair. But then I went to John’s friend Bill’s house. He asked that I not use his last name.

B: Hey sir, nice to see you. How are you?

Bill: Good to see you

B: Thanks for having us.

Bill’s a long-time customer of John’s and his house is just a normal-looking suburban house on a cul-de-sac not far from Bibb County. Until the moment that I step inside and suddenly I feel like I’m in a museum. There are rare antique clocks everywhere: in the dining room, in the living room, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on the ceiling. Close to a hundred or so. Bill tells me John restored all of them.

Bill: He’s worked on this one, that one, that one, that one. This is his, his life’s work.

Being in Bill’s house, I realize that these clocks are not appliances. The clocks he collects and that John worked on are strange and beautiful. They’re works of art and feats of engineering. Bill says he likes to collect clocks that make you think. There’s a clock with a turtle that bobs in water in a dish, and the turtle floats from hour to hour to tell the time. There’s a clock with a woman pulling a sheet over the face of it, covering day with night time. There’s one small clock encrusted in super detailed silver and gold and green gold, which I’ve never even heard of, that’s shaped like the kind of chair servants used to carry royalty in ancient parades. Except instead of an emperor in the seat, there’s a tiny intricate clock movement. There’s an original mystery clock – that’s what it’s called – made by the famous French magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, with an hour hand floating in the middle of a glass dial, not visibly connected to any gears or clockworks, and yet somehow it still moves like a normal clock hand; no hint as to how.

BR: This is amazing. I just, I mean, I want to remember all this.

John worked on all parts of these clocks, inside and out. He’d fix the complex inner workings, sometimes with hundreds of tiny little pieces and gears or floating turtles. And he’d refinish the exteriors, gilding them with gold or silver or other elements, using methods from the period the clock was made. And then, maybe even more impressive, John built his own timepieces from scratch.

I was visiting John’s old college chemistry professor, Tom Moore, at his office in South Carolina, where at the time he was chancellor of a state University. He and I were talking about the astrolabe John made when he was a teenager that he’d showed me in his mother’s bedroom. And I’m telling Tom how I don’t even think that I’d ever heard of an astrolabe before meeting John, and I was trying to grasp what it was exactly when he was showing me, this complicated medieval instrument hanging on John’s wall. And Tom’s nodding, and he says…

Tom: We’re at a point where I need to show you uh, something that personifies John. I’m gonna bring it over here.

B: Okay. Sure.

Tom gets up and comes back with something in his hands that he’s holding delicately.

Tom: This is one of my prized possessions. This, this is a sundial.

Though on first glance it doesn’t look like a sundial to me. It’s a small brown circular wooden case.

Tom: Sometime when John was a student of mine, he told me he was gonna make me a sundial for my birthday. And this was 1984 or ’5 I’m guessing. Um, he mailed it to me. I got, he called me and told me that he’d finished it and he was mailing it to me for my birthday. I think I got it in 2012.

B: Wait, you just said that he started mentioning this…

Tom: ’84 or 5

Tom holds up a piece of paper in front of the wooden case, to block my view of it. He’s opening it to get something out and he doesn’t want me to see inside yet. Then he puts the lid back on, removes the paper, and I see he’s pulled out two very small, precise instruments: a compass and a plum bob level that John machined himself in brass. Tom uses them in conjunction with this tiny little point on the top of the case to make sure the case is facing the proper direction, and that it’s sitting level on the table. And then, finally, he starts to lift off the cover.

Tom: I can’t wait to see your reaction when you, when you see the inside of this thing. Are you ready?

B: Oh my god. (Brian and Tom laugh)

Tom: Can you believe that?

With the lid off you see an intricate floral pattern that John cut from a sheet of brass, as if it were a paper stencil, and laid atop purple felt, the color of the Mexican petunias in his yard. In the middle there’s a tiny button which flips up the gnoman. That’s the centerpiece of the sundial, the one that casts the sun’s shadow. Gnoman means “the one who knows.” This gnoman has Tom Moore’s initials in it. And the sundial is designed specifically for the latitude and longitude of Tom’s home.

B: It’s really arresting. All with the precision of it being able to tell time based on the sun’s shadow.

Tom: It’s unbelievable to me, what it took in knowledge and skill to be able to make this. Off the charts. (starts crying) What’s more valuable to me than this? I think you get that.

When John’s friend Bill was showing me his clock collection in his house, he cried too. I’d asked Bill what the allure of clocks was for him, and he’d started telling me about the first clock he was entranced by: a cheap kitchen clock in his grandparents’ house. He’d watch his grandfather pick it up and wind it every Sunday when he was a young boy. He was mesmerized by how this object suddenly became alive, ticking, hands turning, and he began crying as he told me. “Is it that clock,” I asked him, “that was emotional for him?” “It’s not any one personal clock,” he said. “It was just, the measure of time had something to do with me.” I didn’t totally know what Bill meant by this. ‘The measure of time had something to do with me.’ But I think he was saying that even as a kid, the clock captured this feeling of time going by, going by and never coming back.

J: If someone says the name John B. McLemore 25 years in the future you’ll remember exactly who that is.

B: Oh my god, John I’m never gonna forget you. Come on. (laughs)

John once sent me an essay he wrote called, “A Worthwhile Life Defined,” in which he breaks down exactly how much meaningful time there is in one life. He begins, quote, “When one considers that the undistinguished life of an industrialized man, in an industrialized nation, consists of about 25,000 days, and that about 33 to 38% of those days are spent in slumber…” And then he runs through a bunch of calculations; shaving off time for sleep to come up with the total number of waking hour days, then shaving off time at work, time commuting, time spent on family commitments, time spent convalescing when you get older. In the end he concludes, the average industrialized man, with 25,000 days on this planet, may easily secure only about 4500 waking hour days of beneficial life. That’s a quarter of your life if you’re lucky, John says. A quarter of your life during which the average person can pursue matters that are meaningful to them.

When I first read the title of this essay, “A Worthwhile Life Defined,” I figured John would lay out in it a vision of what such a life would look like. What you needed to do and accomplish to make your life worthwhile. But he doesn’t do that here. Instead of defining a worthwhile life, he defines the amount of time one has in which to achieve a worthwhile life.

His calculation is based on the assumption that we will live to 68 years old. John, of course, cut his own life far short of that. He allocated himself even less time. So did he do it? Did John live a worthwhile life as he defined it? He doesn’t give an answer in this essay, but by the time he reached the last of his waking hour days, John had formed an opinion on it. John did have an answer to that question, at the end.

From Serial, and This American Life, I’m Brian Reed. This is Shittown.

John B. McLemore lived in Shittown, Alabama. But there was a time, believe it or not, when he seemed to be happy there. It was during the town’s beginning when Woodstock was incorporating as an official municipality, starting in 1996 when John was in his early 30s. It was a time when you could ask someone at town hall what John B. McLemore was like, and they might say something like…

Daphne: Never complained. I don’t, I don’t remember him complaining.

Daphne Brooks was one of the early members of the town council.

Daphne: I mean he was, in talking to me, more, um, idealistic.

Are you sure we’re talking about the same John B. McLemore? Red hair? Clock restorer? Says stuff like this about government officials?

J: These motherfuckers would have five guys to jack their damn dick off. One to put the condom on, and one to rub the Vaseline on, and four more to file the fuckin papers, and the environmentalist would clean up the damn contamination and analyze all the byproducts, and declare the jack-off site to be a superfund place.

Apparently we are.

Cheryl: I mean if I was stuffing envelopes I don’t, I don’t see that John wouldn’t have sat there stuffing envelopes with me. Whether it would be a parade notice, or a business license renewal, I mean I could definitely see…

This is Cheryl Dodson. She was the town clerk for Woodstock shortly after the town was founded. She was clerk before Faye Gambell took over.

Cheryl: Planning the Christmas parade, planning the open house, and he, he always helped me with that.

B: He helped you with the Christmas parade?

There was a stretch, in those early years, when Woodstock wasn’t even officially called Woodstock yet. When it first incorporated it was the town of North Bibb, which apparently lots of North Bibbians thought was a lame name, because they voted to change it to Woodstock a few years in. Cheryl says there was a lot going on during those early days, and John was always around and involved, hanging out at the town hall. His mother too, Mary Grace.

Cheryl: She was funny.

This was before Mary Grace’s dementia had set in, and Cheryl said she had a Pippy Longstocking vibe about her. She’d go around town in a red skirt and green sweater and purple hat and socks that clashed with her shoes, and the kind of bright red hair that you get out of a bottle.

Cheryl: She’d come to the town hall, “Is there any scandal? Any unplanned pregnancies? Any children out of wedlock?” Which you know, John would say, “She’s the scandal!” He would point at me, you know, I was the one getting a divorce or something like that, you know. He’d say, “She ain’t gonna tell you about the scandal, she’s the scandal!” And I’d be like, “Hush, John.”

John came around so much he and Cheryl stared spending a lot of time together. One of the main things Woodstock was doing during this period was annexing property into the town, lot by lot, to make it bigger. As town clerk at the time, Cheryl Dodson worked on these annexations which meant she was often making drives to the probate court to pull deeds. And John, who had nothing better to do, took to going with her. She says he was helpful, dealing with records of the court. He was giving her a hand with real work, not getting paid. He attended town council meetings regularly with his mother, and they annexed their own land into the town, which had a significant impact on its borders because their property’s so large. Cheryl says John got a kick out of contributing to Woodstock.

B: So he seemed like, engaged, as like a, he was like a good citizen?

Cheryl: Well yeah, he voiced his input in things, but yeah, he was a part of it.

B: I have to say, it is so at odds with the John I knew. He was like, close to obsessed with just how terrible this place was.

Cheryl: Really? He might have complained about taxes or something like that, but I mean. We were building a town when I was there. It was exciting for us. The town was new.

John and Cheryl ended up becoming close friends. On one of their drives to probate court John happened to notice Cheryl’s fingernail polish. It was red, though Cheryl told him the actual name of the color …

Cheryl: Was, “I’m not really a waitress.” And he thought that was hilarious, that fingernail polishes had names like that.

When they got to the probate court, Cheryl said there was an older, heavyset lady behind the counter. She didn’t want to lift the heavy deed book for Cheryl and John and asked someone else to do it for her.

Cheryl: When they brought it to her she said, “You so good, my legs so tired.” And he thought that was hilarious. He said, “That would make a great nail polish color.”

The next week a bouquet of flowers was delivered to Cheryl at work, at the town hall, from John.

Cheryl: And when I opened the card it said, “You so good my legs so tired.” So it definitely looked like a different meaning than what, you know, it definitely looked different from a nail polish color.

Looking back, Cheryl thinks those years when they were still building Woodstock may also have been some of the best years of John’s life. And thinking about it more, it makes sense. John liked a good project. For him creating something new, or restoring something, was a worthwhile way to spend one’s time. Before he had the maze, or Tyler, he had the new town of Woodstock.

In 2005 Cheryl and John went on to open a small business together for a season, a tiny nursery next to Cheryl’s house, Woodstock garden center, which John threw himself into sourcing plants and flowers from different parts of the state. So John was at Cheryl’s place a lot. She and her husband Jeff seemed to have that type of home anyway, where the door was always unlocked and all sorts of people come and go as they please. They have five kids, plus they were often taking in foster kids or exchange students. It was always sunshine and flowers at their house, Cheryl says. Tearing open a pack of hot dogs for the children, or pulling them around in a wagon. And she says John fit right in with all of that.

Cheryl: Oh yeah, I mean, in there on that door there’s his height. I mean, he got measured with the kids. We have a door that we always measure the kids’ heights on and I’ll show you. It’s, there’s John. B.

Cheryl does show me. It’s a brown, stained door that she and her husband have moved from room to room over the years. These days it’s on display in the center of their living room. There’s a child’s painting of their house on the bottom, a rainbow and heart and sun overhead, and then, above that, it’s just covered with the name and age of kid, after kid, after kid, each name slowly moving up the door, the door its own kind of timekeeper. And there, in the center at 6 feet, between 14-year-old Scott and 18-year-old Colby, is John B. McLemore, 38 years old.

B: It seems like John was kind of, I mean I don’t know, part of the family for a little while. That like…

Cheryl: Oh he was.

B: You guys were tight?

Cheryl: We were family, um…

B: So what happened?

Cheryl: Um…

What happened is, Cheryl got married to her husband Jeff, and John didn’t like Jeff. It was the same scenario that played out for John over and over in his life. He’d gotten close to someone, and then she’d gotten closer to someone else. The three of them were also running the flower shop together, and that’s where everything came to a head. After staying open for just eight weeks, they started fighting and ended the business acrimoniously. Cheryl and Jeff felt that John wasn’t a good businessman. They say he was more interested in the flower itself than selling the flower, that he spent too much money, and that he stocked weird plants that normal customers didn’t want. John on the other hand claimed that Cheryl and Jeff hadn’t pulled their weight, and that they owed him money. Boozer Downs, the Woodstock town attorney, says he witnessed one of their arguments, and that Jeff, who’s a boxer, was pacing angrily around John as John spouted the Latin names of plants at him as a way to piss him off. After that, Cheryl says…

Cheryl: He grandstanded and embarrassed me at a council meeting. He come in to the town hall and hollered, “town clerk owes me $10,000!”

Cheryl says she did not owe him $10,000.

Cheryl: And I walked over to him and I said, “John, what are you talking about? This is my job, you can’t, you can’t come in here and you know, say I owe you $10,000, you know?”

B: Were you embarrassed?

Cheryl: Yeah! I mean it was my, but, but now that being said, they knew him too, I mean, it’s not like John was a stranger. Then like I said we went to court.

John sued Cheryl and Jeff. The complaint he submitted to the court is really something. There’s a table of contents and more than 50 pages of narrative and exhibits. John also tells the judge that he has a small pocket notebook diary containing the full account, including times of day. Quote, “this diary is available for his honor if he wishes, but it must be observed that it was written under duress and thus is true to life with no opprobrious words omitted.” End quote. All this to try and get back some money John felt was owed him, mostly for potting soil. $2,792.

Cheryl: I don’t know, I kind of felt like that was more of John’s just, way to see me again. I mean you know, I mean John, I mean…

B: Really?

Jeff: Really. I thought so.

That’s Cheryl’s husband Jeff agreeing, saying I thought so.

Jeff: He’s not wanting to sue you, he’s not wanting to, he just don’t know how to get you to get back in. How do I get back into a relationship that I liked or enjoyed or whatever? I mean you can pressure them into friending me again or something, I don’t know.

Cheryl says she met John at court, and they agreed she would pay him $100 a month for 10 months. She thinks if she had brought her monthly checks to John in person, rather than mailing them like she did, he probably wouldn’t have taken them. It would have just been an excuse to see her again. She did bump into John now and then after all that, but there was no coming back for their friendship.

Cheryl: I just saw him in the store a few times and he you know, he would say, “You should come by the house. Come by the house!” I’m thinking, John you sued me, you know, I’m not gonna hang out with you buddy. Yeah, I mean that’s there, it’s sad.

John’s depression and the fact that he attributed it to his home, Woodstock, this town he helped at least somewhat to build, it troubles Cheryl because she loves this place so dearly. Like John, she too has lived her whole life here. And it’s interesting for me to talk to her because I haven’t hung out with that many Woodstock boosters, but she is definitely one. She loved raising her children here, knowing all their teachers because she grew up with them. Knowing before her kids got home from school where the party in the woods was gonna be later than night. When Cheryl’s brother died some years back, he drowned, another family anonymously paid for his funeral. Jeff, her husband, just ran for mayor of Woodstock last year and won, unseating the 13-year incumbent. Now everyone’s calling her the first lady. She’s got hopes to spruce up the town hall with antiques and flowers. She loves the Christmas parade, trick or treating on main street for Halloween, homecoming.

Cheryl: Oh it’s wonderful at homecoming to go to the turnip green supper and there’s a bonfire and everybody you went to school with, and everybody brings a dish, and I mean, I’m sure you know who made, you know that Miss Lela’s made the turnip greens, and you know to oh, try her coconut pie, Miss Daily’s banana pudding, you know to get their Tupperware back to them…

I don’t know when exactly John turned on the town, but at some point the town of Woodstock began to do what governments tend to do, disappoint him. There was a scandal involving the water board and the resignation of the police chief, which I know bothered him. He was also upset when a town council member was put in federal prison for embezzling nearly a million dollars from the company she worked for. And he hated when the South 40 trailer park was built across the street from him. Though Cheryl says John’s wrong about this place. She says poverty isn’t that bad in Woodstock. There’s some crime, some corruption, but no worse than other places. And she says the schools are actually quite good. But John’s depression became so intertwined with his loathing of his home, the two fed each other. And Cheryl thinks John got to a point where he just began ignoring the positive stuff.

Cheryl: There’s a beauty in this area that John probably just didn’t see. But I don’t know that he interacted with people to see things like that. That’s I guess what’s sad about depression and things like that. The very things you need, you, you draw away from, you know, the you know, when you got depression and you want, you want the blinds down and you want the dark room and you need the sunshine.

John was depressed for sure, but still he didn’t do what Cheryl’s saying. He didn’t hole up in a dark room with the blinds down. He may not have gone to the turnip green suppers, but he created his own place that was filled with sunshine. His 124 acres, which he designed to be incredible: bursting with beautiful flowers and an orchard, and an old preserved house, and a historic graveyard that he maintained, and a custom swing set. And, of course, a spectacular giant hedge maze, with 64 permutations of the solution, and one null set. And then John did share that with people. He didn’t host big community events, but he made a point of inviting people over, giving them the tour he gave me, spending quality time with neighbors there.

There was a soft-spoken tree-removal guy who was in tears as he and I talked about John. John hired him once and then they became good friends because they liked to walk around his property together, admiring the trees. A quiet, middle-aged mechanic I talked to told me how he’d sat with John in the yard one night as John pointed to the sky and taught him the names of the stars and constellations. Things he’d never learned before that he really enjoyed.

John was actually quite good at appreciating the time he had. That wasn’t his problem. His problem was a proleptic one. He saw nothing but darkness in the future. Shittown, for John, was not believing that anything good would last. That we would inevitably mess it up. Relationships that are meaningful, the earth as a place that can adequately support human life, even John’s remarkable maze.

J: You know, that was one of the most fun projects I ever did in my life. And you know what? It was also one of the most foolish.

B: Why?

J: Because at my death this place out here only has one destination. It’s to be paved over with a Walmart or scraped off.

B: Oh.

J: That’s that’s, that’s why we don’t have mazes in Shittown.

And with that prediction at least, John was right. Because guess who owns John’s property now?

B: Can you just introduce yourself?

Kendall: Kendall Burt.

Kendall Burt. That’s Kabram Burt’s father, the owner, with his brothers, of K3 Lumber. The family that inspired John to contact me in the first place, who he asked me to expose.

Kendall: I bought John McLemore’s place when he committed suicide and left his mother here alone, a very selfish act.

Kendall bought it through John’s cousin, Rita. He buys up land in the area as investments, and so his company can harvest it for timber. I did get a chance to ask Kendall about the name of his company, by the way. K3. Is there any double entendre there with a certain white supremacy group?

Kendall: I’m assuming you’re one of these left-wingers, that we upset in the election? (laughs)

He says he doesn’t have a problem with the name K3. “Does he have any plans for John’s place?” I ask him.

B: It’s a beautiful property.

Kendall: No.

B: How about the maze?

Kendall: Now I would like to see the maze reach maturity, but I probably will not put forth the effort or the money to do so. But it’s a real neat concept.

I have one other question for Kendall. Since he now owns Johns land, and I assume anything buried within it…

B: Have you heard these rumors flying around about the gold on the property, or hidden treasure, things like that?

Kendall: Yeah. I also heard about the uh, pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but I’m not chasing rainbows. I think John threw away every penny he could get his hands on before he died.

Kendall’s not the only one who thinks that. John’s cousin, Rita, says judging from the accounts and records she knows of, he was broke. But it’s just weird, because I know that John was still spending money at the end. He actually went on a buying spree, stocking up on a bunch of antique toys and these glass chickens he was obsessed with, and all the materials for the swing set. And of course, he talked to so many people about having cash and gold hidden somewhere.

Speaking of that, for a while I was checking in with Tyler to see how his hunt for the treasure was going. I obviously wanted to know if he’d found anything, but it also felt like what I was asking, if the answer was yes, could potentially be incriminating. So one night, relatively early on, long before all the felony theft charges and the impending trial, he and I were talking about his search for the gold and how he’d been slapped with a trespassing charge for going onto the McLemore property, and I told Tyler, just to make sure he understood…

B: Well listen, I clearly want to know if you ever do find it, but you should think about it before you tell me. If you ever do. Because its gonna then be public.

Tyler: Yeah, I know. That’s what I’m scared of now.

B: Well, as far as just talking about this stuff?

Tyler: Yeah, kinda.

B: I mean you already got the trespassing charge.

Tyler: Yeah.

B: But I would worry if you found a million dollars of gold, or if you found like a bunch of gold.

Tyler: (sighs)

B: Just consider it before you ever tell me, alright?

Tyler: Turn that thing off for a minute.

Tyler asked me to turn my tape recorder off and then we sat on the porch of his trailer and had a discussion off the record.

Lately Tyler and I haven’t been talking very much, at the request of his lawyer, because of his upcoming trial this summer where he’s due to stand charges of theft for taking the buses and trailer from John’s property, of criminal trespassing, and of forgery for allegedly signing John’s signature after he died in order to sell two of his vehicles.

More, right after this.

Part 2

One day I’m talking on the phone to one of John’s old friends, a clock customer of his in Utah named Bill Mayer, and he starts describing this thing he would watch John do when he’d use to visit John’s property in Woodstock.

Bill Mayer: We’d go out in the woods and he had a tree stump out there, and he could take a BernzOmatic torch and have a pot with mercury…

Silvery, dense, fluid, mercury. Bill would watch John heat the mercury into a slurry. John would take gold and melt the gold into the mercury, mixing the pot out there in the woods, like a witch stirring ingredients in her cauldron. And then Bill says John would take a brush and spread the gold and mercury amalgam onto a clock, and then hold the torch flame to it, vaporizing the mercury, and leaving behind a rich, textured layer of gold. It’s an ancient process that appears to have originated around 300 BC or so in China, called fire gilding, that almost no one does anymore. Bill’s a prolific, lifelong clock collector and he says John is the only person he only found in the united states who would do it. No one does it because inhaling mercury vapor is so ridiculously dangerous.

Bill Mayer: You’ve heard the expression, “Mad as a hatter?”

Yeah, I tell Bill, but I don’t really know where it comes from. He explains that for centuries in Europe milliners, people who made hats, would turn furs into felt for hats by vaporizing mercury, and as a result…

Bill Mayer: They’d go mad. They’d go crazy. That was the outcome of breathing mercury vapor because it does permanent brain damage.

Three days later I’m talking to another one of John’s clock customers, another Bill actually, the one who showed me his clock collection at his house. And he tells me…

Bill 2: He did it to one of my clocks.

Fire gilded it. This Bill says when John did the gilding…

Bill 2: My first inclination was to leave because I didn’t want to breathe in those mercury toxic fumes.

B: Um hum.

Bill 2: But at the same time it was an eye-opening experience and so I stayed.

B: And he just did it out in the woods?

Bill 2: He did it in his shop.

B: Inside the shop he did it?

Bill 2: Inside the shop.

John wore no safety mask, and had no special precautions for ventilation.

Bill 2: And we were both breathing those fumes, and, and I don’t know if his chest hurt the next day but mine sure did. You know, people that fire gild, back in the 1800s, you know what? They didn’t last too long. Cuz they breathed so much mercury they just went crazy and died.

When I sat down after these conversations to Google ‘mad hatters disease,’ which is what people have called mercury poisoning over the years, I saw this list of symptoms: anxiety, irritability, insomnia, emotional instability, depression, suicidal thoughts. I found studies, mostly from years ago since it’s become a much rarer condition these days, where researchers observed and interviewed people who worked in industries where they were exposed to mercury, and they describe, as one 19th century medical textbook called them, “a multitude of evils.” Racing thoughts. Fearful feelings. Feelings of persecution. Feelings of worthlessness. A symptom called anhedonia, which is an inability to feel pleasure. Loss of self-control, and of joy in life.

One German scientist from the 1920s who studied the effects of mercury and then ended up getting poisoned himself, wrote that he began experiencing, quote, “Depression and a vexing inner restless which later also caused restless sleep. By nature companionable and loving life, I withdrew moodily into myself, shied away from the public, stayed away from people and social activity, and unlearned the joy in art and nature. Humor became rusty. Obstacles which formerly I would have overlooked smilingly seemed insurmountable. It was not nice to be aware of these shortcomings, not to know their cause, not to know a way to their elimination, and to have to fear further deterioration.”

I do not have a definitive answer as to whether or not John had mercury poisoning, and if that could have been a force behind some of his behavior, his personality, and even his suicide. John’s autopsy didn’t test for mercury, and even digging up his remains which I can’t and won’t do, wouldn’t tell us as this point because mercury becomes relatively untestable pretty quickly. The best way to get an indication would be to test his property, and in particular his workshop, to see what the mercury levels are there. But I wrote Kendall Burt, the owner of the property now, after he and I met, asking if he’d let me pay for a mercury analysis, and he never responded to my emails or calls about it.

What I do know is this: it seems that John did fire gilding throughout his life. John’s chemistry professor, Tom Moore, says he knows John was fire gilding when he arrived at college as a 17-year-old. Tom says he couldn’t convince him to stop, and it seemed like he was doing it fairly regularly. Tom’s a chemist, and he says he’d be surprised if John hadn’t suffered some poisoning. He had to ingest a lot of mercury, Tom told me. And John’s clock friends have memories of him doing the gilding over the decades, long after college, up to as recently as two years before he died. One friend said at one point John told him he was doing it dozens of times a year. And John also had physical symptoms consistent with mercury poisoning, as well as behavioral ones. He warned me on a couple occasions that he was want to spontaneously vomit now and again. Thankfully it never happened in front of me, but not being able to keep food down is something that can show up in people with mercury poisoning. Other consistent symptoms are an enlarged brain and congestion in the lungs, both of which were noted on John’s autopsy. And John did say to some of his friends over the years that he thought he might be experiencing health problems due to fire gilding or other chemical exposure in his shop. Doctors and scientists who are experienced in dealing with mercury, when my researcher or I have described John’s fire gilding practices, they say judging from that alone its almost inconceivable that he wouldn’t have some level of mercury poisoning. Then when they hear about John’s symptoms, the physical ones, plus the anxiety, the depression, the paranoia, he fact that he committed suicide, that all makes them even more confident that he was suffering mercury poisoning. One expert said, “You’d almost have to prove that he didn’t have it.”

But all that said, there are symptoms of mercury poisoning that I don’t know if John had. One is gingivitis. And another big one is tremors, but sometimes it’s a unique kind of tremor that’s only visible when you’re trying to hold a pose, so it’s possible I or others didn’t notice it, but I haven’t heard anyone talk about him having this. And while John was irritable and anxious and suicidal, those personality traits are found all the time in people who do not have elemental mercury in their brains. John showed signs of depression as far back as when he was a teenager. And plus, John had a lot of normal depressing life shit happen to him in his last decade or so. His falling out with the town clerk, Cheryl Dodson, happened in 2005. At that point, Woodstock was nearly 10 years old, and the exciting days of its youth were over. Not long before his feud with Cheryl, John’s father, Tom McLemore, had fallen in the driveway and died in the hospital afterwards. Also it was right around this time that the man John fell in love with over a summer, the one Olen Long told me about, stopped returning his phone calls and broke his heart. Meanwhile the clock trade had been dwindling and by this point John had mostly shuttered his business. So John found himself entering his 40s with no real job, alone, in the house he’d grown up in with his mother, whose dementia was creeping up on her.

Part 3

One day in the year and half before he died, John called the other town clerk, Faye Gambell, who John would eventually call as he killed himself. Faye picked up.

Faye: And he was very depressed, crying, and said he was so ashamed.

I’ve done something, John told Faye. I’ve done something terrible.

Faye: I thought he had killed somebody the way he had talked, I mean seriously, I thought he had done something really really bad, so I was like, “What have you done?” And he didn’t want to tell me what he had done. It finally, we just kept talking and I just drug it out of him and he says, “I’m so ashamed, I’ve got this horrible tattoo.”

Faye was like, “that’s it?”

Faye: And that was the first time he’d ever said he was ashamed of anything he’d ever done, you know? But he was just so upset about getting that tattoo, and I said, “John, really, how bad could this be, you know?” And I said, “Well do not do any more, I mean you know, just, you know, let that be.” And I did not really realize that he had done more till his death.

Tyler: He got enough tattoos in one year that somebody could get in a lifetime.

Jimmy: Yep! Yessir!

Tyler: All at once, you know?

Jimmy: Once! Yep!

Tyler: He got addicted fast.

Jimmy: Yes!

Tattooing became a big part of John’s life near the end, and Tyler had a firsthand view of it. That’s Tyler’s Uncle Jimmy, by the way, giving affirmations in the background. Tyler’s partner in the tattoo parlor, Bubba, told me John’s motivation for getting so many tattoos was to help Tyler, to give him money and keep his business afloat. He told me that John had sacrificed his skin for this cause. But Tyler says there was a lot more to the tattooing than that. Tattooing had become part of a ritual he and John concocted in the few months before he killed himself.

Tyler: We called it church.

Tyler will go on to explain all about church to me, but before Tyler does that I’m gonna let John describe it, because John told me about church too, shortly before he died, and he painted it pretty differently than Tyler does.

J: You know what, lately, we’ve been having church together. We call it church. Which means we just get in the back room of the shop and get drunk as hell. (laughing a bit)

B: Wild Turkey?

The shop is John’s clock shop, of course. The shop that I now know is possibly riddled with mercury, and is where I first met Tyler actually, on my very first visit to Bibb county, when he was sharpening a chainsaw and John was swigging Wild Turkey from the bottle.

J: Yeah, and I’ve been letting him tattoo on me a little bit more, cuz I ain’t no good-lookin man, I ain’t gonna win no beauty prize, you know. I ain’t gonna be hangin out there naked showing my damned ass, so I’ve been giving him a little bit of practice material, but uh that’s like uh, we call that church. Wild Turkey is the holy water, the little filthy-ass room is the sanctuary, I’m trying to remember all the other names. The tattoo needles are the reliquaries.

A reliquary is a container that holds a holy relic, like the bones or ashes of a saint. To hear John describe church, it was a bonding time for him and Tyler, a nighttime meeting of the minds.

B: What do you guys talk about?

J: You know when you get two drunk guys together that have such a disparity in ages, the wisest thing for the old one to do is to keep his mouth shut and listen to the thoughts that weigh heavy on the head of the younger one. The other night when we had church he asked me some of my damn thoughts about life and death, and you know whether or not I think there’s anything when you die, and you know I probably rattled on and prattled on about a bunch of damn bullshit that makes sense when you’re drunk but probably doesn’t when you’re sober, so.

B: What was the gist of it?

J: Oh the gist, it would be impossible to say, I mean I went all the way down to quarks.

Quarks, the subatomic particle.

J: I mean I was discussing the fact that, you know, in for example P and D orbitals an electron can be in two places at the same time, but not in the middle, and I used that as an analogy to how it is now theorized that quasars which can appear, you know, light years distances across universes can be fed by matter entering a spiraling black hole.

I didn’t understand most of that either. Don’t worry.

J: You know I was explaining Einstein’s theory of time dilation a little bit, as simply as I could.

The theory as to why time passes more quickly or slowly, due to one’s trajectory in space-time.

J: So yeah, so sometimes it gets deep.

And other nights, John said, he and Tyler would just shut up and just sit there together, passing the bourbon back and forth in silence in the shop’s back room.

J: Mostly turn off the damn light and listen to the sound of the tweeting birds and the frogs and the crickets through the open back window. Something he don’t get enough of in his life is goddamned uh, quiet.

Part 4

Jimmy: Lord help me! Yep.

I never talked to Tyler about church before John died. It sounded wholesome enough to me, not that different than Tyler and John spending their afternoons building a big swing set together. But when Tyler fills me in on the ritual it becomes clear that it was not like that.

Tyler: It started off with me coming over and tattooing on him, $100 a hour.

Jimmy: Yep!

Tyler: To tattoo on him.

And that was OK, Tyler says. But then instead of normal tattooing, John started asking him to simply tattoo over his existing tattoos, again and again, and then there was another request from John.

Tyler: He’d have me pierce his nipple just to pierce it.

John’s nipples were already pierced, but he wanted Tyler to re-pierce them anyway.

Tyler: Before each tattoo I’d have to pierce his nipples. He’d get like an endorphin high off of it, you know, like just a pain fix.

John once tried to describe to me what it felt like to be inside his mind. He said you know what it’s like to get a song stuck in your head, where it’s just playing over and over and you just can’t get it out of there, even if it’s a terrible song? That’s what happened to him every day. He’d replay the eventualities of climate change and resource depletion and economic collapse. He couldn’t get them out of his head. So church, according to Tyler, morphed into what was essentially an elaborate form of cutting that helped John to relieve his mental anguish.

Tyler: It might not even be the pain or the piercing itself, it’s just the thought, you know, just the excitement, the thought of it, and it clears his mind of everything, all of his worries. If I’m piercing him or tattooing on him, his mind’s completely blank where he’s not just sitting there thinking about shit, and my company too, so our church sessions was helping all sorts of things, I guess.

Tyler starts to pull up a video on his phone, to show me.

Tyler: This was when he first got into the tattooing on the nipple.

(tattoo needle buzzing, deep breathing)

It’s not just him and John, a couple of his friends are in the video too. They’re tattooing on John’s nipple. Tyler says they were using an empty needle. There was no point to this tattoo except for the pain of it. Tyler tells me to an extent he understands John’s desire for this, because he got into tattoos partially because they gave him a similar kind of distraction from his own tortured thoughts and he was the one who recommended it as therapy to John.

Tyler: He’d say I got him into it because I told him how I could kick back and enjoy a tattoo, you know, like a stress-reliever. And that’s what he, that’s what he done. It was his stress-reliever, and buddy it just kept…

(in background, tattoo needle buzzing, and John moaning, “Oh, Oh lord, oh Jesus,” and deep breathing)

Tyler: You see I kept getting used to the things.

Jimmy: Yes, Yap!

Tyler: It was getting worse, but I was getting so used to it that I wasn’t seeing it.

B: What’s it? What was getting worse?

Tyler: The, the crazy shit he was having me do to him.

Of course the internet and the world are filled with cell phone videos of dudes laughing and groaning as they inflict inventive forms of pain on each other’s bodies. There are entire communities and subcultures that exist for this purpose. Tyler knows that scene, he goes to biker and tattoo rallies, towing a mobile tattoo parlor he built inside a trailer. But Tyler says even for him, what John wanted him to do went way beyond what he was used to.

Tyler: I got a picture right here where John B. is working on my Harley, and he hates motorcycles, he says anybody that has a motorcycle is failure, trash –

Jimmy: Yeah.

Tyler: He hates motorcycles.

B: Same thing he used to say about tattoos.

Jimmy: Yessir!

Tyler: Yeah same, yeah he used to say that.

Jimmy: Goddamn right.

Tyler: But this is him, working on my Harley with his shirt off.

Jimmy: God yes!

Tyler: That’s a bullwhip tattooed around his neck,

B: Wow.

Tyler: Draping across his shoulders, and bloody whips,

Jimmy: whips!

Tyler: Across his entire back all the way down to his ass crack.

Jimmy: Goddamn right.

This picture is really disturbing. Its John’s back, which when I visited John was not tattooed. Like Tyler says there’s a whip that looks as if its laying across his shoulders and neck, apparently attached at the handle on the other side of him. And then all across his back, top to bottom, are dozens of red lash marks, like in a famous historic photo that John included in a collage in the 53-page manifesto he sent me, documenting society’s moral decline. A photo of a slave named Gordon who’s believed to have escaped from a plantation in Louisiana and whose back was photographed and distributed by abolitionists as visual proof of the terrors of slavery.

B: That’s, his whole back is just like, crisscrossed red, bloody.

Tyler: Just blood, whips.

Jimmy: Yep. Goddamn right!

Tyler tells me that in order to create this tattoo, John went into the woods, hand-picked a tree branch, and asked Tyler and his friends to whip him with it. And then had them tattoo over the welts.

Tyler: He acted like he wanted to know the feeling of wanting to know what folks went through back in that time.

B: He would say that?

Tyler: Yeah, I mean, he just wanted to experience the pain I guess.

Which, that’s a twisted explanation to give, for doing something like this. John had a complicated and contradictory relationship to race. Like with women and gay people, he’d express outrage when he heard examples of discrimination, he’d express empathy, and also an understanding for the systemic ways our society is built to be unfair and harmful to these groups of people. But then, sometimes John would say racist things in front of me. He’d acknowledge that he shouldn’t use the n-word, and then use the n-word. People who’ve known him for a long time have told me that, especially years ago, John was quite racist, but that over the years he had changed for the better. Granted these are white people telling me this. Woodstock is about 95% white. Which of course, is not an accident. It’s the result of many decades of laws and violence and day to day racism. Bibb county was the last county in Alabama to comply with a school desegregation order in 1967, long after Brown v. Board of Education. It’s the place that voted for George Wallace four to one, and then in the 50s had a sign appear on main street in one of the towns saying, “The Klan people of Bibb county welcome you.” So much of the stuff John said he hated about Shittown: Harley’s, tattoos, misogyny and homophobia, racism. He said he despised it. But that stuff was part of him too.

Church played a big role in John and Tyler’s relationship by the end. It was one of the main ways they were spending their time. On the front of his body, one of John’s tattoos is of a sundial, and John included a sundial motto there on his chest. The one he chose is, “Omnes vulnerant ultima necat.” Each wounds, the last kills. It refers to time, as in, “each minute wounds. The last minute kills.” Time’s a gift. It’s also a punishment. Tyler says the brutality of what John wanted Tyler to do to him kept intensifying, far beyond tattooing with an empty needle or repeated nipple piercings, or being lashed with a tree branch. And sometimes Tyler was uncomfortable.

Tyler: He fuckin, was addicted to that shit. He wanted me to come over there every fuckin day. Cuz I mean, we’d be over there workin in the shop, he’s be like, “You think we can have a church session real quick?” Like a damn dope fiend or something, wanting me to pierce his nipples! But it was just getting so ridiculous I couldn’t keep up with it.

Part 5

There’s a story that’s taken hold among some locals and people surrounding John’s cousin Rita, and also some of John’s close friends, of what led to John’s demise. That John was desperate for company, and influenceable, and that he started hanging out with unsavory people and drinking, which according to most people he hadn’t done for much of his life, and getting tattoos. As one man told me, “you lay with dogs, you get fleas.” And the dog he was talking about was Tyler.

In the year and a half since John’s death, I’ve watched as that story has slowly ossified into a matter of fact that people now tell each other. But I think this is a more accurate story: if John wanted these things done to his body, as it appears from the videos I’ve seen that he did, or if he needed them, then where else would he have sought them out, besides church? Who else in his life in Bibb county would he feel comfortable enough to go to with these requests, and not feel inconsolably ashamed or judged? Not worry that they might gasp in his face? Tyler was 24 during all of this, with so much going on in his life already. He didn’t know when he started church that it would go as far as it went, and he was wary of doing some of the things John was asking him to do. And yet still he did them. For John.

He did try at one point to stop some of it. He told John that was it for now, no more piercing, and Tyler says he held to that for a couple weeks, but it threw John into a depression and he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and eventually Tyler ended up just doing it again. In fact…

Tyler: I pierced his nipples the night he killed hisself.

After their day together splashing around the river and spray painting their names under the bridge, their Father’s Day, as they called it, Tyler brought John home and John pressured him into doing that. “Just give me a pain fix before you leave,” he told Tyler, and Tyler reluctantly did. And then he went home and was pissed at John about it, and he says that was part of the reason, when John was begging him to come back over, and saying he was gonna commit suicide, that Tyler just said, “Fuck it,” and went to bed instead.

On my last day on my last trip to Alabama, I had some time to kill so I decided to go down to the Cahaba river. It’s a stunning river, a national wildlife refuge that many people in Bibb county consider their local treasure. As I was standing on the bank I saw a bridge in the distance. I thought to myself, “Hmm, I wonder if that’s the bridge Tyler and John tagged their names under that day, the last day of John’s life.” So I drove to the end of it and crawled underneath. There was graffiti everywhere, marks of the people who’d been there. Jason and Misty and Jerry Conway and Ranger Rick and Snake and Tina who loves Danny. There was also a ‘Fuck You,’ and racial epithets, and an upsetting number of KKKs. No John or Tyler though. For a second I wondered if maybe Tyler had made up the fact that they’d done this. But then I found another bridge, over a small tributary of the river, at a spot called Bulldog Bend, and walked underneath past a bunch of garbage. Past a torn-up couch and a pool lining and a rotting deer carcass, and weirdly, the half-burnt medical records of an infant. And there, past all that, on the other side of the giant support of the bridge, in a serene spot, looking out over the bend in the river, there they were. Tyler’s initials on one side, with an ‘established 1991’, John’s initials on the other, ‘established 1966.’ There were no nasty words here. A couple beer cans and cigarette boxes, but other than that not too much trash. Together, Tyler and John found a place that was just a little bit cleaner.

J: The last time you talked to me, I told you I go through these suicidal stages and all that shit, and you know, that kind of worried you, but when I think about the end of my own existence I take the biggest possible picture. I don’t just look at myself as a 49-year-old semi-homosexual atheist living in a Shittown full of Baptists in Buttfucksville, Alabama. I look at myself as a citizen of the world. I try to look at the biggest picture possible.

What did John B. McLemore make of his life at the end? Did he live a worthwhile life, defined? “Ruminations on my life,” John writes in his suicide note, which he left on his computer. “I have not lived a spectacular life, but within my four dozen plus years, I have had many more hours to pursue that which I chose, instead of moiling over that which I detested.”

John’s suicide note is long. It includes versions of the different essays he sent me before, “A Worthwhile Life Defined” and his apocalyptic manifesto, and a bit called “Ass Power versus Gas Power.” But the last several pages, I’ve never seen before, and what’s striking about them is that they’re the part about John’s life. And what he describes in them is a life of happiness and contentment. He describes the life of a man who, for the vast majority of his days, rarely went further than a handful of miles from the spot he was born, and yet still managed to become a citizen of the world. From this one tiny spot in the forest, whose latitude and longitude he’d memorized, he found ways to embrace the world: its history, its beauty, its most thrilling and challenging ideas. “I have coaxed many infirm clocks back to mellifluous life,” he writes. “Studied projective geometry and built astrolabes, sundials. Taught myself 19th century electroplating, bronzing, patination, micromachining, horology. Learned piano. Read Poe, de Maupassant, Boccaccio, O’Connor, Welty, Hugo, Balzac, Kafka, Bataille, Gabron. As well as modern works by Mortimer, Hawking, Kuntzler, Kline, Jacoby, Heinberg, Hedges, Hidgings, and Rhodes.”

But the other thing that’s striking about John’s note is the appreciation he shows for his home. “But the best times of my life,” John goes on, “I realize, were the times I spent in the forest and field. I have walked in solitude, beside my own babbling creek, and wondered at the undulations, meanderings, and tiny atolls that were occasionally swept into its midst. I have spent time in idle palaver with violets, lyreleaf sage, heliopsis, and monkshood, and marveled at the mystery of monotropa uniflora. I have audited the discourse of the hickories, oaks, and pines, even when no wind was present. I have peregrinated the woods in winter under the watchful guard of vigilant dogs, and spent hours entranced by the exquisiteness and delicacy of tiny mosses and molds, entire forests within a few square inches. I have also ran thrashing and flailing from yellow jackets. Before I could commence this discourse, I spent a few hours out under the night sky, reacquainting myself with the constellations like old friends. Sometimes I just spent hours playing my records. Sometimes I took my record players and CD players apart just to peek inside and admire the engineering of their incongruous entrails. Sometimes I watched Laverne and Shirley, or old movies, or Star Trek. Sometimes I sat in the dark and listened to the creaking of the old house. I have lived on this blue orb now for about 17,600 days. And when I look around me and see the leaden dispiritedness that envelops so many persons, both young and old, I know that if I die tonight my life has been inestimably better than that of most of my compatriots. Additionally, my absence makes room and leaves some resources for others who deserve no less than I have enjoyed.”

And then he ends it. “I would hope that all persons reading this can enjoy some of the aspects of life that I have enjoyed, as well as those aspects that I never will, and will take cognizance of the number of waking days he has remaining, and use them prudently. To all that have given so much, much love and respect, John B. McLemore.”

Bibb county, Alabama came into its own as a thriving coal county in the late 1800s. Though the boom times wouldn’t last long, in the 1890s, with the population on the rise, the citizens of Bibb started taking advantage of each other: stealing from each other, murdering each other, burning each other’s houses down. It got so bad a newspaper called the county “Bloody Bibb,” and the name stuck. Bloody Bibb. The 1890s version of Shittown.

In 1891 one of the main perpetrators of this chaos, the most notorious gangster in the county, Jesse Miller, who extorted lots of land for himself and stole his neighbor’s cattle and cotton, and whose gang killed people who knew too much, was finally locked in jail but then escaped and fled Bibb county for good, signing over control of all his land in the county to his son, Brooks. Years later Brooks took 124-acre parcel of the family land and transferred ownership of it to his daughter, Mary Grace. Years after that, in 1965, Mary Grace, pregnant, began a ritual of sitting on that land and rubbing her stomach, and pleading to God, saying, “Please lord, give me a genius. Lord please, just make my child a genius.” On March 15th, 1966, she had a red-haired boy, gave him a middle name after her father, Brooks, and brought him home to the 124 acres. To an old house with three chimneys in the middle of the woods.

S-Town

1. Chapter 1

1. Part 1

2. Part 2

3. Part 3

4. Part 4

5. Part 5

6. Part 6

2. Chapter 2

1. Part 1

2. Part 2

3. Part 3

4. Part 4

3. Chapter 3

1. Part 1

2. Part 2

3. Part 3

4. Part 4

5. Part 5

4. Chapter 4

1. Part 1

2. Part 2

3. Part 3

4. Part 4

5. Part 5

6. Part 6

7. Part 7

5. Chapter 5

1. Part 1

2. Part 2

3. Part 3

4. Part 4

5. Part 5

6. Part 6

6. Chapter 6

1. Part 1

2. Part 2

3. Part 3

7. Chapter 7

1. Part 1

2. Part 2

3. Part 3

4. Part 4

5. Part 5