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Visit SiriusXM.com.com. free, listen for details. SiriusXM, your drive there could be way better. Chapter six.
From cereal in this American life, I'm Brian Reed. This is Chitown. Just think an old car. I am tired of getting another one.
After a long day running around Bibb County together, to the courthouse and the library, and past the Bert family compound, just 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 Caesars to pick up a pizza for his mother. It's getting dark. OK, we're going to take the shortcut through here since the sun's diminishing arc is passing beneath the horizon. Since the sun's changing, I always believe I ride.
A rare moment of quiet with John in the dusk. I'm going to miss you. I hate to tell you to have one of them on a miss YouTube shoot. I'm going to get back down here.
At least come down here once every day on the actual climate change energy, the possibility of playing our dance. John grabs a pepperoni pizza from the Little Caesars 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 all right, I say. We're leaving anyway.
Sorry. Yes. 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. My store. My store.
I love it. My store. I love the fucker. They don't know what a pop to piss in or a winner to sling it out.
He probably lives over at South 40. South 40 trailer park were Tyler led to one point across the street from John. Hey, thanks. He's a top dog.
He runs the Little Caesars and butt folks in Alabama in my store. Is he recording? My store. Like, I'm over this.
But then John busts out this lovely word. He's probably a fact, 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. The column self tops. You know, they shout down the bottom.
That's usually how the type of relationship works. John talking like this, it did make me wonder. This is going to sound like a ridiculous question, but is there a gay scene down here? Oh, my God.
There's no telling how to climb the cases or this time. You turn that off and I'll take you some. Hit the kill button for a second. 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 the 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 warmed up now, unaffected by this. And lastly, what John disclosed and where it led me after he died, it 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 had a sexual relationship not all that long ago.
I'm not going to 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, 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 going to 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 he just drops.
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 isn't around, I asked 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, to have me scared though.
And so it wasn't ever sexual with you guys, I ask. Mm-hmm, he says. Because he said otherwise, I tell him, the man snaps his head towards me with big eyes. Mm, 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. He says again, he pauses. Mm-hmm. And that is all it 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 a new boyfriend, I want a girlfriend. I'm straight, I'm 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 the 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, we're also straight. Tyler says he and John would tell each other, 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. 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, Muscatine wine, Tom Petty track, all night till the sun come back, love.
Or even a quieter, stéor, maybe even longer love. Did John ever have a relationship resembling any of that? Or did he spend the entire day of a lifetime without it? One night in October 2015, I was getting married actually, and email showed up at 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 Olin Long, and I was a friend of John B.
Macklemore for 12 years. I recently learned of his death. Olin Long, I'd never heard that name before, and it was not on John's contact list that he left behind after his suicide. Olin goes on to explain in his email that he had corresponded with a friend of John's who was on the list, who I might have spoken to, and that man told Olin about me that I was doing a story about John.
Can you let me know when the segment will air, Olin writes, I would very much like to listen. Also, I need to know the radio station number, Amr FM, thank you. I write back until all it's nice to hear from him. I'll be under unfortunate circumstances.
I've been talking to all sorts of friends of John's, I explained, 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 him a tell 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 Olin, with shake hands, and head into the room.
Welcome to the digs. The recording studio, all right. Later, when we get to know each other, Olin will ask me how old I think he is, and I will guess John's age, about 50, maybe even younger, but he tells me he's about to turn 60. The years haven't shown him the way they do in 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 mic. 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. 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. I work in the surgical intensive care unit there. Oh, really? Yeah.
So are you getting a good reading here? It sounds great, and also I'm learning about you, which is helpful, because I know you who you are. Oh, gosh. So we're rolling.
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, only takes over the conversation.
He seems eager to talk. That's very similar. When I met John, he 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. Only 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, only says he wondered about John, and finally called him.
But his phone number was disconnected, which only 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. Macklemore obituary into Google, and there it was. 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. Owen 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 a friend of John's who told Owen about me. Owen 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, when someone else knew him too. The singles line, Owen and John met on, was called Megaphone.
This was in 2003, before online dating became ubiquitous. It was essentially grinder for your landline. You dial into the service, listen to short messages, people have recorded describing themselves. If you liked them, you'd beat 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 Owen and John. John beeped Owen, and Owen called him back. One of the first things 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.
But we just started talking. And that talking went on for months, 15 months, as Owen said, before they met in person, usually talking in the middle of the night, because Owen keeps night shift hours, even on his days off, and John would just be finishing up his work in the clock shop, which he didn't in the evening, because it was cooler. And I just remember enjoying talking at night, maybe even sitting in the dark with no lights on, and just talking on the phone with John. They found a lot to discuss.
Books they were reading, only 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. Owen didn't still live in his hometown, like John, but was born and raised in Alabama too, and it lived much of his life there. I have to say, Owen 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. Tom Lachamore had one eye that was straight, and the other one was a little off center. Who Owen recalls only from a photograph he saw hanging on John's wall.
He never met the man, or John's mother. Mary Grace's birthday is November the 29th, or November the 30th, 1926. Who remembers that about their friend's mother? She got married in 1951.
Oh yeah, of course. What about cousin Jimmy on John's father's side? Jimmy was born, and I'll never forget it. 4-4-44, April the 4th, 1944.
Of course, as Owen and John were chatting, they were filling each other out. At one point, before they'd met, John sent Owen a photo of himself standing on a chair alongside a very tall grandfather clock at his house, with the ostensible reason of showing Owen how large the clock was. Owen 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 Owen visited John in Woodstock, he did so with curiosity. I was trying to decide if I was attracted to him, because I'm going to 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.
I mean, I went over there dressed like this one time, and he said, I only dressed that way to go talk to the lawyer. I mean, Owen was dressed in that he was wearing jeans, and a shirt. The difference is mine were clean and untattered. He was wearing a t-shirt with holes in it, paint stains all over it, and the trousers he had on very much the same.
And then, of course, I was down there one evening in his bedroom. And he had a pile of handkerchiefs there in the floor, and I suspected they were used handkerchiefs. And surely enough, he had to blow his nose, and he went over there and 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, Zach E. Bolin paused. But still, night after night, Ian John found themselves talking for hours on the phone. They were getting close.
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, I'll let you get along. That's how John would do it. Say, how are you getting along?
So we did have a close friendship there. As Owen 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 both dealt with a lot of secrecy and repression.
He told me that he had had a relationship at one point with an older man. He called him William. This was John's first relationship, according to Owen. He says John was probably 21 when he met this man.
He called William, which would have been the late 80s. John told him it was a hot summer's day. 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 one other person in the world, which as far as Owen knows, at that point, John had never done.
Owen also had an older, more experienced, but still not publicly outmaned, 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 the county. According to John, I don't think anyone else down there knew.
William was not obviously gay, no effeminate. Manarisms 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.
Owen refers to them as lessons, about sex. I noticed that Owen 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 sexual activity.
Or physical contact, or once in a while, when he lets his hair down a little bit, a sexual interlude. Owen 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. Did you get the sense that he taught him at all about how to be a gay person?
I'm glad you asked that. No, I didn't get that impression. 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 Owen could relate to that, because his experience with his professor was very similar. At 19, Owen admired the man and was grateful to him, but the man was also cheating on his wife, and instead of teaching Owen 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 Owen and John could relate on, they both came out to their families and weren't accepted. Owen 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. Owen 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 Owen says he never heard John use the word gay to describe himself. He always used queer and told Owen he was quote, only 60 to 70% that way.
John and Owen both kept their sexuality hidden from much of their lives. John talked to Owen and to me about how you 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. Owen 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. 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 be honest with you.
I didn't mean to get into all of 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 Owen met on the singles line, megaphone, they're both pretty disillusioned with it.
They each joined naively, Owen now realizes, in the hopes of actually dating people, sitting down, getting to know someone, maybe who knows some romance. Living in Birmingham, Owen 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 Owen, John would invite guys from the line to his house, which seemed to set a certain expectation, or else he'd come up with some other rendezvous point in Bibb County. John told Owen about meeting a guy from the line in the parking lot of a church of Christ near his house on a week day afternoon. A guy called John once he was there, and John freshened up from doing work on the yard, changed his shirt.
But John told Owen we got to the church and saw the guy. He found a repulsive looking, a chain smoker with tobacco steamed 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 Owen says at John's house. He had one guy come over, and John had invited him in and they were in the kitchen. Of course Mary Grace's bedroom is nearby, 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 guy had to expand 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 Owen knows about when John did fall in love. About two years into their knowing each other, Owen says there was a period where he stopped hearing from John as often as usual. 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 Owen 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 Owen 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. He told me what was going on, and then he burst into tears, and he sobbed.
As far as just a few tears, it was sobbing. It was in the kitchen. The only way I would have had a phone in the kitchen. So he was sobbing in there.
Had you ever seen a crime? I had never heard him cry, never heard him. Mostly what I heard from John was humor, disgruntled, disgruntled, turned into humor, a little anger, and I didn't know that he would cry. I knew I could, but I knew he would cry.
And I just listened, and I consoled him. I said, and I said, that's hard, John. I've been there, I've been there. 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. He was desperate.
He said, I'm desperate to have that kind of a relationship. You know, a one-on-one partnership kind of relationship. I want it desperately. He only said that one time, and I heard the word desperate.
More in a minute. Olin 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 Olin outright, but I don't need to, because it gradually becomes clear that it never happened for them, and that for Olin, 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 Bib County, and John had made some remark about Olin thought was unfair, and Olin told John as much. And when I finished, he smiled and he laughed.
He said, you and I could never live together. He said, I 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? He asked me, as long as we've been talking on the phone, do you still consider yourself searching for a partner? And Olin thought for a moment and then said, not really John, he wasn't really talking to anyone else. And there was some silence there, and I said, why do you ask?
I don't know. I don't know. I think he was trying to express an interest. I think it's, I didn't know how.
I didn't, I didn't, I didn't delve any deeper. I didn't delve any deeper. I'm trying to figure out how you feel about this. Like, is this something that you feel is an missed opportunity?
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. Because what was so?
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 make sense?
Olin 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 Olin felt he could sometimes just be thoughtless or mean. They once had a huge fight that was actually over Olin's favorite movie.
I got very angry with him when the movie broke back Mountain came out. Broke Back Mountain, of course, with Jake Joan Hall and Heath Ledger, playing two cowboys who fall in love one summer on a mountain in 1960s Wyoming. When I say this is Olin's favorite movie, he loved this movie. I've noticed during our conversation that a couple times Olin dates life events as being before or after this movie's release.
It was 2005 because it would have been before Broke Back Mountain came out. And he knows a ton about it. The movie was filmed. They wrapped up shooting in August of 2004.
It wasn't released until December 2005, so we've got a year and a half of post-production. Olin, how many times have you seen this movie? 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 Olin. His favorite part is the first 45 minutes when the cowboys are falling in love, alone together on Broke Back 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 in his home. He has to look a cinema to present a special screening of the film. Once I left theaters, he devoured the short story the movie was based on and poured over all the behind the scenes features. 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. He wasn't saying very much. And then he started talking and telling me how 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 get excited about something, something that I find important and I'm trying to make a point and it gets discounted. So I got really irritated. So we got off the phone. 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. Olin saw parts of himself in both the movie's characters. He fledged his character's fear of the world knowing he was gay.
But also the way Jake John Hall's character could feel so hurt by that fear. And he really thought John would get a lot from it too. 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 Olin ordered him a copy of the original short story. 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 interests after falling for each other on the mountain, with their wives and children at home. And how to spike 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 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. 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 Olin and John's relationship eventually settled into. They were confidants and close friends, supporting each other through this experience they were both living, 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. I want to ask you a question by me. Please, how did he take his life and what were the circumstances? I tell Olin how John did it.
He had assumed based on conversations with John that it was a gunshot to the head. He drank cyanide. He drank cyanide. OK.
Yeah, well that's surprising. Cyanide. I'm sorry. No, that's all right.
That's all right. That's all right. I was thinking that, you know, this, I just need to know and I'll work through this. This is poor John.
John. John. What led to John in Olin's not speaking during the last couple years of John's life was a growing preoccupation with several subjects that Olin says John would not stop ranting to him about. I heard a lot about climate change.
Also the economy. Olin 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 Olin actually went out and read several of them, going dark and walking away from Empire by Guy McPherson and Al Gore's book in Inconvenient Truth. He told John, I believe in climate change. I think it's an issue. I try to do my part.
I switch over to energy saving light bulbs. I don't know what else we can do. Besides, everybody do their part. Then there was mostly shit town.
That was mostly it. And these tirades bothered Olin the most because Olin 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 shit town and Olin 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 shit town again. Now, I just couldn't hear anymore of it.
I couldn't hear shit town. Shit town. I couldn't hear anymore. 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, Olin hung up the phone. 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 in his house that had set him off. All in things that had something to do with how a father had disciplined his young son there in public. But Olin says, John also made some indirect jabs at things Olin had expressed in their previous conversation. It wasn't a humorous message.
He says it was angry. And Olin 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.
It was not as scathing as the first one. But it 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 going to send him one back. But mine's going to be honest. So I sent him an email back at LinkedIn when I told him everything that I'd ever appreciated and him as a friend. I thanked him for being a friend.
But I didn't put an end to it. I just said that. So but I just simply can't hear anymore 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. Olin 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 shit town 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 he got to the point where he just couldn't talk about climate change and the dissipation of cheap energy anymore. 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 up 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 Olin 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. McLomorr lives in shit town, Alabama. It sounds like the John I knew was different than the one his friends had known for years.
I got to know John at the beginning of the end, just as he was driving some of the closest people in his life, like Olin away, which ended up leaving him even more isolated there in shit town. Olin not calling John after that final email exchange. He says he wasn't thinking of that as I'm never going to 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, Olin says about 10 years ago, during a short time when John was running a small nursery in Woodstock and Olin 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. Well, John's mother had an appointment inside, John waiting for the doctor to call him in.
And that may have been why he put on a clean navy blue shirt, which I thought really didn't enhance that red hair. And he was wearing a pair of pants. I don't know if they were denim, 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.
Because I'm sitting there in a truck with John B. McLamore outside of doctor's office, picking up my azalea. It's not exactly what I wanted to do. Well, 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 a half 150 pickup truck. But it was just the whole aura. It was the hair, the skin, the intelligence. The job, he was in a jolly mood that day.
And yet instead of doing anything. 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 going to feel about this.
But I really want to kiss you right now. There, I put it out there. That's what I want. F-150 pickup truck love.
Denim, hugging on your thighs love. Azalea love. Doctors 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. The summer is here at last. The sky is overcast and no one brings a rose for Emily.
She watches her flowers grow. Love is come and though she gives each other roses from her tree. Can't you see there's nothing you can do? There's nothing everywhere.
Rose is a fading out. She keeps her pride somehow. That's all she has protecting her from pain. 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. Sarley Kind is a story consultant. Fact checking and research by Ben Phalen. Seth Linde is our director of operations.
Lyra Smith mixes the show. 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, Trey Pollard, Elado Negro, and Matt McKinley, music supervision by Damien Graves.
Our website, stownpodcast.org. Special thanks to Valerie Caesar, Anthony Roman, Ian Bjorkman, and Katie Fuchs, and Kevin Broderick at the Lipin Group. S-Town is production of Serial and This American Life.