S-Town - Chapter III

If you find yourself bewildered by this moment, where there's so much reason for despair, and so much reason to hope, all at the same time, let me say, I hear you. I'm Ezra Klein, from New York Times Opinion, host of The Ezra Klein Show. And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it. There's going to be plenty to talk about.

You can find The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts. Chapter 3. Has anybody called you? Um, no.

Not that I know. I have a few missed calls, but I don't think they're from anybody down there. Oh. Why?

From Serial and This American Life, I'm Brian Reed. This is Shit Down. Well, um, we have some bad news to tell you. Okay.

John D killed himself Monday night. Are you kidding me? No. Oh my gosh.

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.

Oh my god. Yeah. So right now, um, his mother is okay. Oh, it's gonna be...

Oh my gosh. And the way he killed his health is he drank cyanide. Oh my god. Oh, I'm so sorry.

I... 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 evaluations 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 knows what's going on. She understands to a certain point. And she just basically wants to go home. And you know...

I'm sorry. I'm still trying to take all this in. I'm trying to follow what you're saying. But it's just so shocking.

I'm hearing you, but it's not all registering. I'm just talking. You know, he emailed me the other night, like... Hold on one second.

I'm walking out the other way. John. Sitting in the studio in a daze on the phone with Skylar, I searched my inbox for the last message from Herb Rutan Guzzi, the student that John used for his email address. I mean, the last thing he wrote me...

I mean, I didn't even get a chance to totally read all this. He sent it on Sunday, Father's Day, 8.55 p.m. 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 that 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 gets a shit. And I bet you're feeling the same thing that I'm feeling. You probably didn't message back.

You were busy. I just wrote back today, like a couple hours ago. I don't understand how you're feeling. We're all feeling it.

I talked to him Friday night. Me and John stayed on the phone for four hours. No, you know how you can get and talk to him and, like, not talk. We stayed on the phone for four 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 more kids and nobody else should bring any more kids into this world because of how bad it's going to end up getting.

And, like, but he was fine. It was just like a casual conversation about it. It was a giant 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 going to 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 recently sent John a series I produced for This American Life about the frayed relationship between cops and African-Americans. While I was working on it months ago, I had 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's 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 of 1% per year means 50% gone in 70 years, ocean acidification doubles by 2050, triples by 2100, 1 million humans net are added to the earth every four and a half days. 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 a fixation of a person in a deeply depressed mental state. 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 Skyler 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. Macklemore I'd become used to. I saw it as a glass full of piss. All the world was a shit town to John, and he bore every disgrace of that world in his heart.

Skyler 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. Skyler says John called and messaged several people the men 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, Skyler says, but yes, there will likely be a service in a few days. Skyler says it'll probably be small, just the kids and family and John's mom. I mean, I would like to come down and see you guys. I don't know.

I don't know what's appropriate. I mean, 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. Like, who am I to this situation? If he 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 crud-fuck town and county this is. When John was alive, I had trouble seeing the shit town 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 cooks down to Bibb County as their bedtime reading, saying, read this. It'll help you understand this place I've 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 having killed by Cabram Burt.

John hoped if we could expose that murder, uncover the body, so to speak. Finally, everyone would see shit town for what it was. But that dude in the fight with Cabram, his wasn't the body that would expose shit town. John's was.

The day after I learned of John's suicide, I called 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 back from the studio. Hey.

Hey, man. All right, so I'm recording just so you know. Okay. Well, I'm going to start from the beginning, man.

Yeah. From Father's Day, because he wanted to spend Father's Day with me, and we done planned something, because, you know, I ain't never had no daddy worth it down. He's just about the only daddy I've got. They 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.

I was pissed off at him, because I brought my young'un, one of my young'uns over there, to swing in the swing, you know, and John just had me give him a haircut. He wanted me to see him see it, and I did. And my little girl said, That's a woman's prison. 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. Why did he say that? I don't know. And I calmly said, Noel, go get in a truck, baby.

We're going to go on over to the house. And I calmly eased out of 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 kind of been ignoring him, but I finally answered him that evening.

And, hell, I about broke down crying whenever I was telling him, because 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 the shit in front of my girls, I said, I just don't know how to 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 want to do is run you off. He said, 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. Oh, really?

I'm sure he meant it as a joke that went wrong, you know? I guess. That's all I can think of. Well, yeah, it's like I don't discipline my kids enough, so he's thinking that they went up in fucking prison.

I don't know. So did he say he was sorry or what did he say when you told him? Oh, yeah, I mean, we was all right. He brought up sorry to be good on the phone and I did too and he told me he loved me and I told him I loved him and I think 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. I was supposed to, you know, do yard work or something and we decided that we was going to go fishing down here at the Cahabar River. I lied to everybody and told everybody that I was over cutting his grass but we was really out fishing.

And then that day, we had a great day. We had a great day except for the few little spells we had. Tyler says he bought John a small bottle of whiskey and John was sipping it as they drove to the Cahabar River. John was getting nostalgic and blue as they rolled along the back roads where he used to drive with his 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. And he kind of got upset on the ride down there but once we got to the river, he was fine. We had a good time.

And what did you guys talk about? He said, Tom, you just got to learn to just stop taking time for yourself and try to enjoy life and he said, this is the most important day of your life talking about being out there on that river. Hell, you know, John can't swim. I mean, hell, we wouldn't have no deeper water than about ways deep and he wouldn't go nowhere without me holding that damn hand like a kid.

And we waded up and down the river and stuff and I was flipping over rocks hunting some crawfish and healthy mice and stuff, and he'd never done stuff like that before so it was new to him. Did it seem like he was saying goodbye? I don't know. Hell, we spray painted our damn names in front of the damn bridge.

Really? Hell yeah. Oh, Tyler, I'm really sorry, man. I'm really sorry.

That's really hard. I think I'm sure it is. At the end of the day, Tyler dropped John off at his house. When I brought him home, he was just about to live.

He had a pint, a wild turkey 101 in him. A pint of wild turkey you have anybody got one. I mean, I shouldn't have left him that drunk, but I 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 in 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. He texted me a couple times, messages on my phone. He said, it's all I can do is keep from blowing my fucking brains out right here in the driveway. You know, I placed the hallways in my place just worried about them.

I was pretty down concerned, but, you know, he comes head to stuff so many times and my old lady was sitting here on porch with me because I'm like, look, I'm about to just go over there. And she said, Tyler, if you keep running over there every time he doesn't going to kill himself, you're going to go crazy from the shit. He just keeps on telling you that to keep getting you to come down there and you can't just, you know, live your whole life around John because that's the way he's gotten, he's 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 there. Anyway, so I take care of mom, 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 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. There were John's glasses, twisted up with some kind of blood or vomit on the lenses. That's where John died, on the porch.

I don't know, man. I had never sleep. I had never been able to eat. Just cut my fucking body so I kept 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. And I went straight to the hospital looking for mama. He means John's mother, Mary Grace.

I called her mama, so. Well, on my way up to the hospital, I got a phone call. It was from a married couple that I 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. I said, well, I'm trying to go check on Mama after the hospital. I said, y'all haven't been to the hospital yet? They said, no, we was trying to get some clothes out of the house.

And, you know, it sounded crazy from the start. Had you ever heard about them before? No, never. John always told me that he had some distant cousins or kin, and he said they weren't nothing but trash and drunks and 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 in 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 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 going to my house.

She said, do not let them in. I said, yes, ma'am. When we reached the end of the long driveway, Tyler saw a woodstock coppy nose and a middle-aged couple waiting for them in front of the house. So I walked out there just as polite as can be.

I said, I'm sorry, y'all don't know me, but Mom 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 cussing me.

The fellow that was with her said, I don't give a fuck. 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. I swear to God, they was in there trying to squeeze a tear out. Oh, I miss you, Mary Grace. I'm so sorry they were just putting on an act and you couldn't 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 in the house for several years. He says 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 has 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 caseworker said she couldn't because they deemed her mentally unfit to make decisions for herself. And Tyler isn't next of kin. The cousins are.

These damn sort of 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. I'm telling you, man, his mama has got pearls and diamonds and they've got, I know he's got gold.

I mean, he's showed me the gold. I don't know where it's at now. I mean, I know John base worth millions. But I'm worried about mama and them puppies and that property.

I ain't even selling 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.

I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. She sent me a New York Times subscription so I have access to all the games. It has given us a personal connection. We exchange articles.

And so having read the same article, we can discuss it. The coverage, the options, not just news. Such a diversified gift. I was really excited to give him the New York Times cooking subscription so that we could share recipes.

And we even just shared a recipe the other day. The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information on your fingertips. It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons.

It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff. We're making the same food. We're on the same page.

Connect even more with someone you care about. Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift at nytimes.com slash gift. I've been told by Schuyler that John's funeral would be small, probably just the Goodson family and his mother, Mary Grace. But when I arrived at Green Pond Presbyterian Church on this sweltering Monday morning, a week after John died, June 29, 2015, far more people have shut 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's no headstone for John.

People flitter among small clusters, shaking their heads, talking lowly, wondering certain words that I overhear again and again, in particular the words so smart and genius. 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. An older man introduced his brother, Ben, who's in a wheelchair with a door in his lap, begins to speak.

I record on my cell phone. 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 once mentioned to me in passing that his favorite Bible verse was Ezekiel 2320. He didn't recite the verse, but I've since read it.

The choicest line is, quote, There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys, and whose omission was like that of horses. Watch their jaw drop when they read that sweet little bit of information, John told me. 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 would probably echo this. He just 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 or something to take her with. John got that motor and take her 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 will call her 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. It makes me feel good that you thought so much of him, she says.

Enough to put him at peace. 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. Father God, thank you again. With the mind that he can. The good thing going.

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, Anything you want in this house, you can have. Obviously, those communications don't mean much legally without a will. And that seems to be the situation. Tyler and Skyler 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. In 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 take his life without having a will. This is the same guy who kept detailed track of every expenditure he made, who liked 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 confirms it. He didn't do anything that would help this situation, really. No will.

John never finished it, he says. But that didn't go on over here, Johnny. Get stuff in order. You just wouldn't?

Just wouldn't. We talked about it. 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 them to make proper arrangements. For instance, he suggested they find some non-profit or other organization to take care of the property and the maids and the dogs. So we can find some. We can get a historic trust.

There are lots of things. And he didn't have any faith in that. He said, oh, those little bitches will just go sell it, and nobody's going to take care of it anyway, and I've spent too much money, and they'll just sell it out. Smart and thoughtful as he was about so many things.

Why didn't he tell us what he really wanted? At one point, I asked Boozer what we're actually talking about here when it comes to John's State. What assets are there? And so when we get to that, the Boozer becomes kind of cryptic.

There is one thing he asked me not to mention to people. He had an idea of what he wanted to do with his assets. And whether he really did it, I don't know. He told you he had plans for his assets.

Yes. That he wanted you to keep secret. Yes. Yes.

But he didn't tell me where it was and how he was going to do this. He just told me the form that he was going to convert to. Did he talk about being unbanked? 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, who's not a fan of financial institutions.

What happens in the case of someone being unbanked? I've never had that before, so I don't know, but I guess if you think somebody has some valuable asset they've hidden in the walls or in the mattress or something, you go looking. It's literally a treasure hunt? I've never had that before.

I don't know. I guess so. That's my best guess. 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 Gamble. 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 cards in in the mornings. It's a game called Skipbo, but on one Tuesday a month it becomes the municipal courtroom. Faye tells me she met John when she first started as clerk 10 years ago. He'd been friends with a woman who'd been town clerk before her and once Faye took over, he came into her office one day and introduced himself.

It was funny how he introduced yourself because his introduction was, I guess you know who I am. And I said, no, sir. And he said, well, I'm John B. And from that day on, you know, I've always known 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, an 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.

I was eating dinner after a funeral visitation and he called me on the phone and told me, do you want this? Are you comfortable talking about it? Yes. My phone rang at night 15 and it was all again, just like he always answered.

He wanted to know if it was Faye. Gamble and I told him yes and he said, this is John B. McNamore. John knew who it was.

And he said, I just want you to listen to me. I'm going to commit suicide tonight and I just want you to 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 going to work tonight. You're not going to 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 with cash to pay for that. And he was telling me about what he was going to 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 going to drink this and he told me what it was, the potassium cyanide and that it would be quick.

So I listened and I said, John, you do not want to do this. He said, I'm 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.

And then I heard the screen door, and then it just went totally silent, except for dogs barking. I had no idea that that's how it happened. That's horrible. Every night, it's a replay.

I'm still just, there's not a night that I don't think about it, that I don't have to wake up and dream about it or think 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 said it wasn't like that.

She didn't get the feeling that he 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. 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 and 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 in 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 messed 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 still lodged in his brain 22 years later. Anyway, it affects the way Jimmy communicates. He understands what's going on around him. Death.

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

I don't know what folks think of me when they look at me, but they don't have a fucking clue. 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, none of these folks even knows me, really, and they have no idea that I paid for the fucking tip on that old woman's cane out there.

You know what I mean? Simple shit like that. They don't mean hill beans, but it's just none of them have a clue what I might mean for that little old woman. No.

Money. Money. God damn it. Money.

Maybe Tyler's naive 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 nays, take part in his funeral. He didn't get to speak at John's service.

Ask him if he had words in mind that he wished he could have shared in remembrance of his friend. Is there something you would have wanted to say? You could say it now. What would you have wanted to say there?

Well, John B., I mean, he had to know that I cared about his ass. You know, because, I mean, whenever I left him 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.

I said, I know, John B. God damn. Because 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? That's what he would have said?

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 Audre Lorde and Anne 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 Pitt 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'll 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 he'll 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 great 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 base clefts. 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 ahead 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 to 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 with 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 of the people at his funeral surely did not know. But Tyler did. What's the name of the book that you brought to his funeral? 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, because I was just fucking crying my eyes out over that damn book. But it's just a kid book, and it's a kid, you know, he wanted to be a fucking dog, or a tiger, or something like that, and some witch put a spell on him, and if he said he was this, he would be that, but he wouldn't know how to act being that, so everything he wanted to be, he's just John. And, uh, yeah, it just broke me up. I'm trying to read it to him, and the baby knows it's his book, and they'll talk to him and tell me all the time, I know you miss John, Daddy, and we miss him too, and we're not going to color in John's books, Daddy, and stuff like that.

It's just... I miss that old fucker. John once said to me, Tyler embodies everything I hate about this shit town 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 have recently reached a kind of understanding where he wasn't going to charge him anymore for general upkeep of John's property, cutting the grass, pruning the maze. Because it's kind of like a... my responsibility because... like it was going to be mine one day or something.

Yep, thank you. He told us he wasn't going to leave us no bunch of damn cash because he said we wouldn't appreciate it, so he's going to leave us gold and shit like that, but in the property. Yep. He's got 140 acres out there.

Bukus and Bukus of stuff! Bukus and Bukus of stuff! Tyler tells me there's no way he's getting into the cousins so easily. He's already begun fighting back.

He's been going over to John's place, retreating 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 he 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 stockpapers. 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 going to 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. The summer is here at last. The sky is overcast, and no one brings a rose for Emily.

She watches the flowers grow. S-Town is produced by Julie Snyder and me, with editing from Ira Glass, Sarah Koenig, and Neil Drumming. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor. Starley Kine is a story consultant.

Fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan. Seth Lynn is our director of operations. Lyra Smith mixes the show, and Matt Tierney is our technical director. The S-Town staff includes Emily Condon, Elise Ferguson, Julie Whitaker, and Kimberly Henderson.

Music for the show is composed by Daniel Hart, Elato Negro, Trey Pollard, and Matt McGinley. Music supervision by Damien Grafe. Our website is stownpodcast.org. I love our website.

Special thanks to Andrea Morales and Sandy Koenig. S-Town is a production of Serial and This American Life. ince costs Wayne Coenig. Her roses are fading now, she keeps hurt right somehow, she keeps отправ kendi nghició.

She's protecting her from pain, and as the years go by, she will grow old and die. The roses in her garden fade away, not one left for her grave, not the rose for Emily. . .

Thank you.