Requiem for a Friend

It has been five years since the death of Bill Davies, and apart from his obituary, I have not written much about losing the company of the man who was my best friend ever since I was a teenager. Bill lived in York Beach Maine, and I was what the locals called “permanent summer folk.” My Mom had a cottage in York Beach, and we stayed there along with my sister and two brothers during my summer vacations away from St. Paul’s prep school, and later, Yale University. My father had died about the time I met Bill, and he being four years older than me, perhaps I was looking for a male figure of greater experience and wisdom than I then possessed. Bill was brilliant in numerous soft sciences, and perhaps he recognized me as someone who had an intellectual orientation, just like him.


During one’s teenage years, four years is a far vaster chasm than it is now, but he being 20 and me being 16 somehow did not present itself as a dividing component of our relationship. We would sit on the boardwalk of York’s Short Sands Beach, he with his nylon string guitar tuned to open E and me with my knack for melody born of six years of studying trumpet. Both of us were prolific lyricists, and over the course of the first few summers of knowing one another, we compiled a repertoire of catchy, smart, original songs that would be the basis of the material played by the rock band I would later form with my brother and three other York musicians.

I think the main gist of this essay is going to be the reverence in which I held and still hold Bill’s friendship. Friendship, it seems, is viewed by society as taking a back seat to love and to family, but with Bill, at least as far as his effect on my essence as a person, this was not the case. A best friend is the family that you choose, and also the person you talk to when you cannot understand your lover. Love, family and friendship, I believe, should be regarded together as the triumvirate of human relations, each an indispensible aspect of being a person.

Bill became the lighting designer for our band, and we traveled all over New England performing, practicing and trying to make our band as good as it could be. Men traveling together to strange places become close. While not nearly as much is at stake in the case of touring bands, the best metaphor I can think of for the sort of bonding that occurs is that of combat soldiers.

A young band of long-haired men is often met with hostility on the road, in Laundromats, in restaurants, at gas stations, and depending on the potential difference of what the audience wants to hear relative to what the band wants to play, sometimes at the venues themselves. This was especially acute for our group, because when the audience is requesting Bob Seeger covers and we are instead delivering weird original rock songs with titles like Robot Crime, Dancing with the Pygmies, and Winnebego Full of Nuns, there was often great negativity projected toward the band. In those environments, your band mates are your only advocates, and your only source for the moral and sometimes physical support needed to survive.

The band fell apart and I left for San Francisco to see and live in a city, and to become a better trumpet player, and to get the best gigs I could get. We remained in touch over the course of those five years, and every time I returned, I would always seek him out to get my dose of wisdom, humor, and advice from my best friend. I returned in 1990 and quickly rekindled my relationship with Bill.

Having determined that I would not likely make it as a rock star, I began experimenting with more literary projects. Over the next 15 years, we would collaborate on two full length novels and a book length collection of short stories, one of which won second prize in a novella contest held by Francis Ford Coppola’s website, www.zoetrope.com. I remain convinced of the literary quality of both of our novels, one of which generated a pretty hard nibble from Random House, it having been kicked upstairs to the senior literary editor, who wrote me a two page letter praising the book, and explaining why no offer would be made. There have been a lot of close, but no cigar moments in my life, and not only was Bill’s wit, imagination and sense of story responsible for getting me that close, he was also always there to console me in my frustrations.

In the last two years of his life, I was working at a retail music store and he was managing a movie theater in York Beach. Every Tuesday, and I mean every Tuesday, I would drive from my town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire to York Beach, and I would show him what I had written that week, and leave him a copy. We would read it aloud and he would make suggestions for potential plot elements, and he would give me back his red penning of the manuscript I had left him the previous week. It was then that we wrote what I think is the best piece of fiction I have ever been involved with, a book called You Are Now Leaving Sprague City, a sympathetic look at the impoverished and often inbred, abusive and criminal residents of western York County in the 1970s. Tarpaper shacks, outhouses, rusted cars on blocks and piled up broken appliances were the milieu for this story of incest, persecution and eventual redemption. It still holds a special place in my heart, and whenever I read a passage from it, I feel Bill’s kindness and innate understanding of the suffering that is endured by the poorest and most marginalized elements of society.

Bill loved everyone, except maybe rude tourists. There was one celebrated incident in which Bill was crossing the street in a crosswalk that had a Stop for Pedestrians sign, and it became obvious that the motorist had no intention of yielding. Bill calmly flicked his lit cigarette through the open passenger side window and landed the burning missile directly in the driver’s lap. He stopped and began to yell but Bill interrupted him and dressed him down with a vigor and clarity that drew a crowd, each member of which stood in lock step with Bill. The driver got back into his car and Bill’s last words to him were, “Maybe next year stay home.”

He was also a guardian of young people on the beach, and would have harsh words in private with people who were selling hard drugs in town, letting them know that they could either stop, or suffer the consequences. These were scary, intimidating criminal people, often much younger and stronger than Bill, but he would never back down in the face of anything that he thought was harming the young people of York Beach.

One day, I went looking for Bill and couldn’t find him at the theater. I went to the Union Bluff Hotel which is located next door to the theater to inquire around. I was told that Bill had noticed that his urine had started to smell like honey, and that he was undergoing tests at York Hospital. A pack a day smoker, Bill was diagnosed with cancer in his liver that had metastasized from his lungs. I visited him every day as he underwent his first rounds of chemotherapy, but it was becoming evident that the treatments were not going well. One visit, Bill was sleeping as I peered into his room. He was a sickening, pronounced shade of orange, and in that moment I knew with certainty that my best friend was dying. I remember driving to the beach, getting out of my car, and walking down Long Sands with a cruel February wind whipping my face and body, screaming to a God I didn’t know, “Don’t take my friend! Don’t take my friend!”

I visited Bill the next day in the hospital, and he walked me to the hospital solarium in his Johnny, pushing his IV on wheels ahead of him. Stingy winter sunlight daubed the room as he told me that he hadn’t given up, that he would still fight, and that he loved me. He also said something I will never forget: “And if I have to die, I’ll die.”

On the evening of March 8, 2005, I got a call from Karen Mason, a mutual friend, who told me that Bill was actively dying and that if I thought I could handle it, I might want to go see him one more time. I drove to Wells, Maine to where he was staying with his girlfriend. I remember it was snowing that night, big flakes the size of half dollars. I cried all the way up, trying to get it out of my system so I could display some composure when I got there. It turns out that wasn’t necessary, as he was coming in and out of consciousness from the morphine, mostly out, but as I knelt by his bed holding his hand, I kissed his forearm once and he magically returned. He looked into my eyes, smiled and said to me, “You’re the best,” and then drifted back into the morphine’s embrace.

It was Bill’s final kindness to me and a gift that I will always treasure. It would have been easier for him to stay down, to remain behind the wall of opiates he had always fought to keep out of his town, away from the young people over whom he was a voluntary steward, but he clawed his way into consciousness for one reason, to see me one more time and to tell me how much he cherished our 31 years of friendship. I left him to the care of his girlfriend Donna and our friend Mike, and drove home, my tears a rival of precipitation to the swirling snowstorm outside. I got the call from Mike the next day that Bill had died peacefully. He asked me to write Bill’s obituary, which I did. Here it is:

YORK, Maine - William Barrett "Bill" Davies died on Wednesday morning, March 9, 2005, in the care of his friend Donna Lombardo following a brief illness. He was 51.

Bill was born on Sept. 23, 1953, one of twin sons to Virginia Barrett Davies and William Henry Davies. Bill graduated from Sanford High School, and then attended the University of Maine at Orono.

He worked in the hospitality industry in York Beach for many years, in addition to touring with a rock ’n’ roll band as a lighting designer. He was also a guitarist, songwriter and an accomplished entertainer himself.

He later worked as a landscaper and handyman for The Union Bluff Hotel in York Beach and served as general manager and projectionist for the York Beach Cinema, a job he adored. It was his duty to maintain and operate the fussy, arcane, 75-year old movie projectors that were purchased when the York Beach Cinema opened in 1928.

During his weeklong stay at York Hospital before his passing, he had more than 100 visitors, a testament to his fine standing in the town he loved so well.

He is survived by his mother, Virginia; his twin brother, Thom; his older brother and sister, Dick and Janice; a sister, Jen Fulmer; and hundreds of people who knew and loved him as the unofficial mayor of York Beach, Maine.

He loved the sunshine, and he loved the surf, and both were in ample supply on the morning of his death this past Wednesday.