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The Tillerman is gone, but more on that subject
later. I write stories. Some are published. One reward of
publication is meeting new people. Strange people. E-mail people. They tell
me information I’d otherwise not know. For example, after I wrote
that God would come to Earth in June and declare ballroom dancing the One
True Religion, two e-mails informed me that I’d rot in hell forever.
The usual story generates three to four e-mails. Then
I wrote about the revised state ethics test — a tale of state bosses,
chauffeurs, and possible sexual harassment [“Revised ethics
testing,” March 8]. Five weeks later, I’m still getting
“ethics” e-mails — from public folks you know, from
hardworking state employees, from Springfield, from Chicago — from
Wisconsin! I stopped counting at 50. All of the e-mails thanked me; all
said the same thing, using different words: You’ve
found a niche. Keep
the pressure on. Expose “them.”
Don’t let up.
Of course I’ll not “niche,” or
pressure, or expose. That territory belongs to professional reporters who
believe in facts, not a man who believes in old sneakers and strange
e-mails. And so, after a few last observations, I’ll leave the ethics
topic to the experts. • I was reading a book about Warren Buffett when
I wrote the ethics story. Warren Buffet has $52 billion. He could buy the
state of Illinois and give it to a busboy for a tip. Mr. Buffett has no
chauffeur. • The director of the many-chauffeured agency I
cited, not to be outdone by her subordinate’s $70,000 chauffeur,
employed a $84,000 chauffeur of her own, her rationale being that she works
as she travels back and forth from her Chicago home and Springfield. Warren
Buffett lives in Omaha, Neb., because that’s where his job is
located. • Newspapers told us that the $100,000 boss with
the $70,000 chauffeur was reassigned. One e-mail told me that she received
an $8,000 raise in pay — during her sexual-harassment
“deposition time.” Punishment enough! Let her drink wine!
And then we heard no more on the matter, because
Britney Spears flashed her ass and all the professional reporters went to
cover “every angle” of the story. What about the Tillerman? He and I were fellow “ginger-walkers”
— guys with bad backs, we bend over and sometimes stay that way. We
walk gingerly to avoid putting weight on a step as bone rubs bone. And yet
the doctors tell us to walk — and so we do. We ginger-walk a short
distance, we sit down, we rest.
Although the Tillerman and I walked on different
paths, we ended up resting near the same pond. Now and then he’d pick
up the stale bread others had tossed about to feed the ducks, study it,
then put it back from whence it came. “If I had $1,000, I’d buy a
farm.”
“Be a mighty small farm for a grand,” I
said. “Thousand acres,” he said,
“I’d till it, plant bread seeds, be a duck-feed farmer —
it’s what I pray for.” He showed me a trick: He laced string
between his fingers and, with a flick of his wrist, pulled a teabag
attached to the string from his shirt pocket. A child’s trick. He drank his tea from a can. He told me he wanted to
put ducks on his head in the winter. “Don’t we all!” I said. “And
while we’re at it, friend, you here alone? You got somebody to help
you?” He told me that the social-worker lady came on Mondays.
“On Mondays,” I thought, was six days a week too few for the
Tillerman.
The next day, he told me that he lived in a room with
walls! He was very old, quite insane, physically broken, and probably a
drunk before he was bent in half — a life full of rain, a life with
no sunshine. My back pain immediately turned minimal; his pain stayed
maximal. “Sinful,” I think, that the chauffeured
bosses run the state agency charged with caring for folks with every one of
his problems. Where is the everyday social worker? Where is the money to
unbend him? Where is the help for the Tillerman? All used up in chauffeur
salaries and a $70,000 salary increase for the senator’s wife, I
think.
I never saw the Tillerman again. He’s dead, no
doubt; he was only holding on to life by a thin string and a prayer when we
last talked. I’d write an obituary for him, had not Cat
Stevens already written it. I’ll just paraphrase, liberally.
Bring tea for the Tillerman
Bread from the sun Wine for the women who made his rain come. Duck birds sing your heart away While the sinners sin, the child-man prays Oh Lord how he prays and prays
Today’s e-mail: A state employee tells me that
they’ll soon suffer another inapposite ethics test. I picture a
question about Britney Spears’ ass on the test. I do not picture the
Tillerman — I’ve forgotten all about him. Perhaps the way-back e-mail was true: I will rot in hell forever.
I’ll not be alone.
Contact Doug Bybee Sr. at dougbybee@sbcglobal.net.
This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2007.
