Bill French

Grief finds all of us in life. It arrives without invitation; a rogue thunderstorm that steals a summer day and can flatten a forest or take out a bridge.

Personal pets aside, grief was introduced to me when I was sixteen-years-old. Too young to be witness to a friend’s death, but old enough to recognize being forcibly torn from the naivete of childhood. It would be the first of many loses from my peer group during those formative years.

Bill French was the drummer of The Royals. The band I became associated with in nineth grade and throughout high school. The friendships made during that time continue strong almost sixty years later, we were brothers then and now.

Bill was talented, funny, and showed signs of becoming an architect. He setup his drums like a table setting, parallel to the floor, ergonomics of today were ignored. We had a full-size dummy we called Harlow that sat on top of the amps behind the drums. Bill would entertain the crowd in between songs with stories of Harlow’s unrequited love life.

The band travelled around southeastern Wisconsin in a school bus. I painted ‘The Royals’ on both sides. We shared honest-to-God fun that transcended the clicks and high school social cast rivalries. It was an idyllic time in our lives.

Through the phone earpiece, I heard the words: meningitis, encephalitis, serious, and transfer to the best doctors in Madison. Half that sentence were words I’d never heard.

It was only days. The reports were hopeless, we all felt the need to see him. High school was not a priority. My parents had a station wagon. I approached my mother and said, “The band wants to drive to Madison to see Bill. I want to skip school and use the car tomorrow.” Bless her heart, she said, “I’ll call the school and you can use the gas card.”

Bill’s nurses were angles. They knew about the band and allowed all five of us to surround his bed in the stark-white intensive care unit. His parents had asked that they not cut his long black hair. The ladies had, with great kindness, controlled his hair with a dozen pink tails. He was alive, but his eyes were glazed over, he was in a coma. Helpless is not enough word for our devastation. We all touched him and shared our voices. There was nothing else we could do.

We stopped to eat somewhere on our way back to Sheboygan. One of us made a phone call home or to a girl friend and we would learn that Bill died right after we left the hospital. He had stayed alive long enough for our goodbyes.

We were a little more mature and responsible for sixteen-year-olds because of the band, but all the emotions we felt were new. What do we do with all that rage and frustration?

When we returned to my home. I suggested we all go to the Wilson Dump which was half a mile away. This wasn’t a recycling center, this was the wetlands where the township was dumping all the trash. We spent the next few hours breaking glass bottles, TV screens tubes, and anything else we could smash.

It was an inspired move under the circumstances. It wasn’t vandalism, we were not hurting anybody, just the exorcism of our anger and frustration dealing with an uncontrollable situation and loss. There are now Smash Rooms where you pay to go and break things. I should have thought, franchise, but that was how we handled our grief.

Nonetheless, we were pallbearers before we could vote and witness to Bill’s eldery parents who had lost an only child.

We grew up fast and sometimes it’s cool to break things.