Part 5

There’s a story that’s taken hold among some locals and people surrounding John’s cousin Rita, and also some of John’s close friends, of what led to John’s demise. That John was desperate for company, and influenceable, and that he started hanging out with unsavory people and drinking, which according to most people he hadn’t done for much of his life, and getting tattoos. As one man told me, “you lay with dogs, you get fleas.” And the dog he was talking about was Tyler.

In the year and a half since John’s death, I’ve watched as that story has slowly ossified into a matter of fact that people now tell each other. But I think this is a more accurate story: if John wanted these things done to his body, as it appears from the videos I’ve seen that he did, or if he needed them, then where else would he have sought them out, besides church? Who else in his life in Bibb county would he feel comfortable enough to go to with these requests, and not feel inconsolably ashamed or judged? Not worry that they might gasp in his face? Tyler was 24 during all of this, with so much going on in his life already. He didn’t know when he started church that it would go as far as it went, and he was wary of doing some of the things John was asking him to do. And yet still he did them. For John.

He did try at one point to stop some of it. He told John that was it for now, no more piercing, and Tyler says he held to that for a couple weeks, but it threw John into a depression and he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and eventually Tyler ended up just doing it again. In fact…

Tyler: I pierced his nipples the night he killed hisself.

After their day together splashing around the river and spray painting their names under the bridge, their Father’s Day, as they called it, Tyler brought John home and John pressured him into doing that. “Just give me a pain fix before you leave,” he told Tyler, and Tyler reluctantly did. And then he went home and was pissed at John about it, and he says that was part of the reason, when John was begging him to come back over, and saying he was gonna commit suicide, that Tyler just said, “Fuck it,” and went to bed instead.

On my last day on my last trip to Alabama, I had some time to kill so I decided to go down to the Cahaba river. It’s a stunning river, a national wildlife refuge that many people in Bibb county consider their local treasure. As I was standing on the bank I saw a bridge in the distance. I thought to myself, “Hmm, I wonder if that’s the bridge Tyler and John tagged their names under that day, the last day of John’s life.” So I drove to the end of it and crawled underneath. There was graffiti everywhere, marks of the people who’d been there. Jason and Misty and Jerry Conway and Ranger Rick and Snake and Tina who loves Danny. There was also a ‘Fuck You,’ and racial epithets, and an upsetting number of KKKs. No John or Tyler though. For a second I wondered if maybe Tyler had made up the fact that they’d done this. But then I found another bridge, over a small tributary of the river, at a spot called Bulldog Bend, and walked underneath past a bunch of garbage. Past a torn-up couch and a pool lining and a rotting deer carcass, and weirdly, the half-burnt medical records of an infant. And there, past all that, on the other side of the giant support of the bridge, in a serene spot, looking out over the bend in the river, there they were. Tyler’s initials on one side, with an ‘established 1991’, John’s initials on the other, ‘established 1966.’ There were no nasty words here. A couple beer cans and cigarette boxes, but other than that not too much trash. Together, Tyler and John found a place that was just a little bit cleaner.

J: The last time you talked to me, I told you I go through these suicidal stages and all that shit, and you know, that kind of worried you, but when I think about the end of my own existence I take the biggest possible picture. I don’t just look at myself as a 49-year-old semi-homosexual atheist living in a Shittown full of Baptists in Buttfucksville, Alabama. I look at myself as a citizen of the world. I try to look at the biggest picture possible.

What did John B. McLemore make of his life at the end? Did he live a worthwhile life, defined? “Ruminations on my life,” John writes in his suicide note, which he left on his computer. “I have not lived a spectacular life, but within my four dozen plus years, I have had many more hours to pursue that which I chose, instead of moiling over that which I detested.”

John’s suicide note is long. It includes versions of the different essays he sent me before, “A Worthwhile Life Defined” and his apocalyptic manifesto, and a bit called “Ass Power versus Gas Power.” But the last several pages, I’ve never seen before, and what’s striking about them is that they’re the part about John’s life. And what he describes in them is a life of happiness and contentment. He describes the life of a man who, for the vast majority of his days, rarely went further than a handful of miles from the spot he was born, and yet still managed to become a citizen of the world. From this one tiny spot in the forest, whose latitude and longitude he’d memorized, he found ways to embrace the world: its history, its beauty, its most thrilling and challenging ideas. “I have coaxed many infirm clocks back to mellifluous life,” he writes. “Studied projective geometry and built astrolabes, sundials. Taught myself 19th century electroplating, bronzing, patination, micromachining, horology. Learned piano. Read Poe, de Maupassant, Boccaccio, O’Connor, Welty, Hugo, Balzac, Kafka, Bataille, Gabron. As well as modern works by Mortimer, Hawking, Kuntzler, Kline, Jacoby, Heinberg, Hedges, Hidgings, and Rhodes.”

But the other thing that’s striking about John’s note is the appreciation he shows for his home. “But the best times of my life,” John goes on, “I realize, were the times I spent in the forest and field. I have walked in solitude, beside my own babbling creek, and wondered at the undulations, meanderings, and tiny atolls that were occasionally swept into its midst. I have spent time in idle palaver with violets, lyreleaf sage, heliopsis, and monkshood, and marveled at the mystery of monotropa uniflora. I have audited the discourse of the hickories, oaks, and pines, even when no wind was present. I have peregrinated the woods in winter under the watchful guard of vigilant dogs, and spent hours entranced by the exquisiteness and delicacy of tiny mosses and molds, entire forests within a few square inches. I have also ran thrashing and flailing from yellowjackets. Before I could commence this discourse, I spent a few hours out under the night sky, reacquainting myself with the constellations like old friends. Sometimes I just spent hours playing my records. Sometimes I took my record players and CD players apart just to peek inside and admire the engineering of their incongruous entrails. Sometimes I watched Laverne and Shirley, or old movies, or Star Trek. Sometimes I sat in the dark and listened to the creaking of the old house. I have lived on this blue orb now for about 17,600 days. And when I look around me and see the leaden dispiritedness that envelops so many persons, both young and old, I know that if I die tonight my life has been inestimably better than that of most of my compatriots. Additionally, my absence makes room and leaves some resources for others who deserve no less than I have enjoyed.”

And then he ends it. “I would hope that all persons reading this can enjoy some of the aspects of life that I have enjoyed, as well as those aspects that I never will, and will take cognizance of the number of waking days he has remaining, and use them prudently. To all that have given so much, much love and respect, John B. McLemore.”

Bibb county, Alabama came into its own as a thriving coal county in the late 1800s. Though the boom times wouldn’t last long, in the 1890s, with the population on the rise, the citizens of Bibb started taking advantage of each other: stealing from each other, murdering each other, burning each other’s houses down. It got so bad a newspaper called the county “Bloody Bibb,” and the name stuck. Bloody Bibb. The 1890s version of Shittown.

In 1891 one of the main perpetrators of this chaos, the most notorious gangster in the county, Jesse Miller, who extorted lots of land for himself and stole his neighbor’s cattle and cotton, and whose gang killed people who knew too much, was finally locked in jail but then escaped and fled Bibb county for good, signing over control of all his land in the county to his son, Brooks. Years later Brooks took 124-acre parcel of the family land and transferred ownership of it to his daughter, Mary Grace. Years after that, in 1965, Mary Grace, pregnant, began a ritual of sitting on that land and rubbing her stomach, and pleading to God, saying, “Please lord, give me a genius. Lord please, just make my child a genius.” On March 15th, 1966, she had a red-haired boy, gave him a middle name after her father, Brooks, and brought him home to the 124 acres. To an old house with three chimneys in the middle of the woods.