Eulogy for a fat man.

Bill Wilson

Say this name around the Fayetteville Square and a look of recognition will cross the faces of people of a certain age.
Bill was a friend of my father. A big man, overweight, usually unkept, her peered at the world through coke bottle glasses. To look at him, you would guess that he was the village idiot…
…but that was far from the truth. I remember him as an unqualified genius in anything he pursued.
He could fix any kind of electronic equipment that was brought to him. In seventies, he rose as the “go to guy” for installation of CB radios and 8-track players (necessities for cruising the seventies streets of Fayetteville). Someone had set him up in a shack behind Ashby Hardware. No windows; no A/C; no heat. You could usually find him there hunched over a crude workshop table, peering into the innards of some kind of electronic gewgaw, sweat dripping on his thick glasses, the smoke and smell of solder mixing in the close, dank air of that shack. In his stubby fingers, anything was fixable. He charged little if anything for his work usually asking his customers what they thought it was worth. Bad thing was, the customer never knew when he’d get it back; Bill was notorious for dropping what he was currently working on to start on something someone just brought in. And he took frequent short strolls down to the pool rooms for lunch, snacks, and long talks with his friends.
But the other side of Bill was the artist. He was a natural musician. Never took a lesson. But he could play the dobro as good as anyone on the Opry. He could play a wicked steel guitar; he’d even built the damn thing himself! He could make it moan when he played his favorites, Hank Williams’ melancholy love songs. And he could sit down at any piano and equal Floyd Cramer on his best day. My father records demos of his songs using Bill as backup either on piano or dobro. Over the years Bill fell in and out of local bands, a lot of them organized by my father. No money ever came of the bands; back then they played for the fun of it.
My first memory of Bill is easy: November 23, 1963. My father, Bill, and I were cruising the streets of Fayetteville looking for a payphone so my father could call his publishing company in Nashville; we still couldn’t afford a phone for our home. Finding an empty booth, my father made his calls while Bill sat in the car with me. Yet another side of the man was revealed---he loved kids and he loved to make them laugh. He started cracking jokes and singing Sheb Woley’s “Purple People Eater”; I was rolling in the back seat cracking up over Bill’s “routine.”
Phone call over, we headed back home, a bag of poolroom burgers for lunch. Inside our house, we turned on the television and there was the tragedy that defined a generation. JFK had been shot and shortly thereafter, pronounced dead. Nothing seemed funny any more.
I can’t remember exactly the year that Bill died. My mother called and told me. Not a lot of people had showed up at his funeral. Bill’s shack had been torn down long ago; he was living on welfare somewhere in Cotton Mill Village. You might see him every now and then driving around in his old Impala station wagon, the rear piled with junk. The ear of CBs and 8 tracks had given way to CDs and computers and I think those devices left Bill behind.
But he left a legacy with me. I can wire up a car stereo from watching him install my many 8-tracks that passed through my Vega. I’m pretty good with home stereo installation too. And every time I hear the moan of moan of Mark Knoffler’s steel slide guitar, I think back to the music that Bill could coax from his dobro….and I just drift away.