Billy Coffey

storyteller

Patrick’s price

by 1 Comment

image courtesy of photobucket.com

Sit Patrick down beside his senior picture in the yearbook, you’d swear he graduated only a couple weeks ago. If I told you the truth, you’d scrunch your brow in one of those looks that says Huh-uh, no way. Then I’d tell you I wasn’t lying, because I’m not—Patrick graduated fifteen years ago.

Still looks like a kid, though. Still has that longish hair boys seem to want to keep now, still engaged in a war of attrition with patches of acne on his cheeks. It’s almost like Patrick slipped into some kind of crack in time way back and has just now found his way out.

But that’s not the case. He’s been around. I’ve seen him.

He still lives at home, though not with his parents. They’ve passed on. It was rough on Patrick just as it would be rough on any of us. His parents left him the house in their will, he’s the owner now, but he still sleeps in his old room and refuses to claim the master bedroom. Patrick’s momma used to tease him whenever he sat on their bed, saying that was the very spot where he was conceived. That thought has never left Patrick’s mind. He says there’s not enough Tide in the world to clean those sheets enough for him to lie there at night.

I guess you could say he has a good life. Steady job, place to live, food on the table. Patrick says he’s free. I suppose he is in some ways. He comes and goes as he wishes and is beholden to none but the Lord, whom he dutifully greets most mornings and every Sunday. He has friends, and though he’ll blush and shrug when you ask him, I have on good notice that women have called on him. That seems to be the one flaw in Patrick’s life, more or less. He’s say that’s true.

He’s seen thirty years come and go. Some people pay little mind to such things and Patrick would count himself among them, but I’m not sure. Whether we pay attention or not to the ticking of that great clock in us all doesn’t really matter I guess, because it ticks on anyway. This moment is both the oldest we’ve ever been and the youngest we’ll ever be from here on out. I think Patrick understands that, even if he’ll never say it.

He likes to talk about how he’s the only one of his friends who’s never been married and divorced. A smile will always come along behind those words, as though he’s happy to say them. Patrick will say he’s not made for matrimony, just like Paul the missionary. Paul was too busy living to settle down. Patrick reckons he’s the same. Besides, he says, why go through all the trouble of loving if it’s just going to fall apart in the end? Why give that best piece of yourself to someone who’s just going to up and move on without you one day? Doesn’t matter if that person ends up on the other side of town (as his friend’s wives have done) or on the other side of the ground (like his parents).

No, doesn’t make much sense going that far. Safer to keep your heart in your own chest, where it belongs. Patrick says that’s why he still looks so young, because he’s still whole and hasn’t given half of himself away. He says it’s easier to go your own way like that. To be free.

Maybe. And on the surface, I suppose he has some good points. But then again, life is never promised to be a safe thing, is it? We may come into this world unscratched, but we leave it with all manner of scars. Risk is worth the pain, I think. That’s how you grow. Trying and failing is better than not trying at all, whether it’s love or a dream. It can hurt (oh, how it can hurt), but I’d still rather look old and haggard than young and untouched by life’s thistles.

A world worth saving

by 1 Comment

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

Piney Mills may sound like a good enough place to live—one of those neighborhoods that offer a mixture of Cape Cods and ranches and the occasional bricked manor home, all with the stars and bars hanging from a pole, each with mats at the front door that say WELCOME. But it’s not like that at all. Piney Mills is instead a sprawling trailer court just outside of town that borders an expanse of national forest that is largely untrodden save for moonshiners, meth dealers, and love-struck teenagers in search of somewhere private to do some heavy petting.

In other words, every town has that one place where you don’t go unless you absolutely have to. For my town, Piney Mills is that one place.

It was a favor for a friend that took me there a couple weeks ago. He had a sofa that needed to be moved, I had the truck to move it. It was a minor errand that would take no more than an hour, but I still dreaded the trip. Piney Mills is an underbelly. When you go there, it’s best to prepare yourself for the things you’ll likely see—the poverty, the want, the neglect, yes. But mostly it’s the crass, profane attitudes the people there have adopted, either because of the sorry states of their lives or their bleak prospects of their futures.

I wasn’t disappointed in that regard. The decayed (and bullet-ridden, I might add) wooden PINEY MILLS sign at the entrance was guarded by a boy no older than six. He was dressed in jeans that were a size too short and a stained sweatshirt that read AUSTIN 3:16 SAYS I JUST KICKED YOUR ASS that was at least three sizes too big. As I pulled from pavement to gravel, he looked at me and offered a tiny middle finger.

I wound my way along the park’s main avenue. Trailers in various states of disrepair offered clues as to what the inhabitants considered important and not. I saw a bevy of duct-taped windows, porches littered with empty beer cases, and pristine satellite dishes clinging to sagging roofs. What few people that mingled about in the cold stared through dead eyes with a mix of resignation and distrust.

The guilt I felt wasn’t because my life had been offered more, but that I had to go to a place like that to be reminded of it.

The sofa in question was colored in a microfiber lime green and seemed to weigh as much as the truck that would transport it. My friend and I managed to hook it out of the narrow doorway and into the bed without causing further damage to either. He offered me coffee that I eagerly accepted. We spent the next half hour talking on his front stoop.

There is a rhythm to every place, even a place like Piney Mills. As the minutes wore on and the talk drifted from Christmas to work, the neighborhood awoke to a point where I was tolerated if not accepted. A woman across the street came outside long enough to wave and ask if we needed further help with the sofa. The man in the trailer beside us walked out to fetch his morning paper. He wore a threadbare purple bathrobe and nothing more. That didn’t stop him from noticing the errant newspaper that straddled the boundary between his trailer and the next, which he promptly delivered to an expectant and thankful elderly woman next door. Children appeared to play football in the street. For a while, even in that sad place, there was the sound of laughter and fun.

I realized then that I’d been missing something besides that appreciation for my life’s bounty. It was an important lesson, one I think is worth sharing here. It is simply that there is still joy in this world, still beauty. Still good. We might believe those things to be sparse and that might be true, but I don’t think so. Even in Piney Mills, that place the local police know well, you can find glimpses of our better selves. You can be reminded that while we are all fallen, dirty, incorrigible people, we are also capable of good and laughter.

I’m going to remember that the next time I turn on the television or pick up a newspaper. I’m going to hang on to that notion the next time my eyes are drawn heavenward and I’m tempted to say Come now, just come on and put an end to all this mess.

Because this world is still worth saving. It’s still worth our faith. It’s still worth living in.

Going the distance

by Leave a Comment

image courtesy of Google images
image courtesy of Google images

I was four when I saw my first grown-up movie. Dad took me. We stood in line and got popcorn and a big Coke and he let me eat all the M&Ms I wanted so long as I promised to sit still and be quiet. It wasn’t easy.

Looking back now, I understand that I was only a body. My father isn’t the sort of guy who would ever go see a movie alone (nowadays, he’s not the sort of guy who’ll go see a movie at all). Mom wasn’t interested in coming along, my sister only a baby. That left me.

“I want to watch this,” he told me when the lights dimmed. “Okay? You won’t understand it, but that’s okay. Just eat.”

Dad was right—I didn’t understand that movie at all. Just people talking about things I couldn’t follow, punching and exercising and showing off muscles and cussing. The good guy? Boring. The bad guy? Not so bad, unless you count the fact that he had kind of a big mouth and thought he was pretty much the best person in the world.

I was the only one in the entire theater who spent much of the movie counting ceiling tiles and kicking the chair in front of me, though. Everybody else acted like this was the best thing they’d ever seen. The entire two hours came down to a fight between the good guy and the bad guy. They circled around and beat each other senseless. That’s when people started standing up in their seats. Started hollering for the good guy. Started cheering. I was a four-year-old boy whose entire life revolved around supper and baseball and the monster I knew lived under my bed, but even I understood the movie I was watching wasn’t real and the good guy on the screen had no idea people were cheering for him. But they all cheered anyway, standing up and waving their arms, and then I got into the act, too. Dad, he just sat there and looked at me.

I’ll never forget that. To this day, whenever I’m flipping around the channels and see Rocky on, I’ll stop and watch. I’ll remember all those people cheering in the theater and my dad sitting there stone still and silent, but I’ll also remember the way his eyes looked—wide and gleaming—and how I knew that on the inside, he was cheering Rocky on, too. Because Rocky was him. Rocky was all those people. Rocky was me and you and everybody.

I’ve seen the other movies, six of them total. Rocky beating Apollo and Rocky beating Mr. T and Rocky beating a big Russian, but none of them are as good as the first. It took me a while to figure out exactly why, but I have now. I sat down and watched that movie over the weekend, and it hit me in a tiny bit of dialogue between Rocky and his fiancee, the adorably awkward Adrian. Read this:

Rocky: I can’t beat him.

Adrian: Apollo?

Rocky: Yeah. I been out there walkin’ around, thinkin’. I mean, who am I kiddin’? I ain’t even in the guy’s league.

Adrian: What are we gonna do?

Rocky: I don’t know.

Adrian: You worked so hard.

Rocky: Yeah, that don’t matter. ‘Cause I was nobody before.

Adrian: Don’t say that.

Rocky: Ah come on, Adrian, it’s true. I was nobody. But that don’t matter either, you know? ‘Cause I was thinkin’, it really don’t matter if I lose this fight. It really don’t matter if this guy opens my head, either. ‘Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed, and if I can go that distance, you see, and that bell rings and I’m still standin’, I’m gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.

There. Right there. That’s why people loved that movie, why they love it still. Because here’s a guy who knew he couldn’t win, but that was okay. All he wanted was to last, to go the distance with the champ, to hear that last bell and still be standing, because then he would finally knew he wasn’t just another bum. And we all have something like that in our lives, don’t we? We all have that one thing that could prove to us we’re not bums, we’re somebody. Living in that neighborhood or having that job or driving that car, and as long as we don’t have that, we’re nobody.

I know a lot of people who fall for that lie. I’ll raise my own hand and count myself first.

The truth is we all have something to prove, if not to others then at least to ourselves, and I spend a great deal of my time wondering if that’s such a bad thing or not. Sometimes I think it is. Other times, I think it isn’t. But I do know this: Rocky lasted those fifteen rounds. He went the distance with the champ. But I don’t think that happened because of luck. I think it more had to do with the fact that he wasn’t a nobody to begin with. He was somebody, and I think we all are.

Googling me

by Leave a Comment

Screen Shot 2014-09-23 at 9.13.03 AMMy kids have recently become enamored with their height, believing that their upward rather than inward growth gives the best indication of their march toward adulthood. Every person they meet is gauged in terms of how tall they are. Instead of a hug or a handshake, both of my children will stand in front of them and with hand to head make a straight line across to see how much further they have to grow to get even.

I’d call this a phase, but I know it’s not. I’m forty-two and still do the same thing.

By my count there are 122 listings for “Coffey” in the phone book beside me, and 123 if you count Coffey’s Garage (and you should, because they do great work). That’s quite a number considering the fact that we’re all crammed into a relatively small part of a relatively small Virginia county. And though I don’t know each of them personally, I’d bump into all of them if I climbed high enough into my family tree.

Two of those Coffeys are prefaced by the first name of “Billy.” One of them is me. The other has over the years become me, too. Just improved.

Because in a lot of ways, the other me has always gone first. First to have a girlfriend, first to graduate. First to get married and have kids.

The other Billy Coffey was always cool and still is. He walks the fine line between being redneck enough to go bear hunting with the guys and refined enough to know that “loading the dishwasher” doesn’t mean getting his wife drunk. There are Coffeys around here who have yet to get that one straight.

I ran into him yesterday at the gas station (which is always somewhat awkward—“Hey, Billy,” “Hey, Billy”) and took the time to catch up while our vehicles were filling up. It was the normal sort of conversation between acquaintances, the kind where much is said but not necessarily told.

Weather? Cool. Wives? Good. Kids? Rowdy. Work? Horrible.

We topped off our tanks and said our goodbyes before driving off in opposite directions. But I couldn’t help but think we were actually going the same way now. He was no longer first in most things. No longer improved, either. We were just two guys living their lives who just happened to have the same name.

It was all a bit anti-climactic. Here I had for years considered this man to be a sort of mirror for my life, a crude barometer by which I measured the quality of my own highs and lows. But I didn’t have that anymore, and that was a problem.

So I did what any sane person would do. I went home and Googled myself.

Turned out there were a lot of me’s out there. The most famous was a Billy Coffey who raced sprint cars. He even had a nickname—The Kid. Billy “The Kid” Coffey. Awesome. I always wanted a nickname, especially one what was cowboy-ish.

There was another Billy Coffey on Facebook. Relaxing in a chair wearing a pair of sunglasses and a ball cap. It was a nice picture and one I could never have taken. I was seldom relaxed.

A Billy Coffey in Florida was appealing a conviction for cocaine distribution. Finally, someone who held a position in life a little lower than mine. But then I found another Billy Coffey who was a preacher in the next county, a fact that rendered the scales a bit uneven again.

And then I found a Billy Coffey who’s sacrifice was enshrined forever on West Panel 2 of the Vietnam Memorial.

That’s when I quit looking. I realized then exactly what I was doing.

It was human nature for us to judge ourselves against others, to stand toe to toe with their talents or looks or status and move a mental hand from the tops of our heads across to them. Regardless of who we are, we all need to see how we measure up. Often, we come up short. Occasionally we can admit we’re not shorter. But it’s rare when we can honestly say we’re taller.

We are all unique. “Wonderfully made,” according to the Bible. Made alike by our capacity to love and dream and hope, yet set apart by our abilities to express them. Which is why comparing ourselves to others will never work.

And also why comparing ourselves to the people we were yesterday always will.

“We’re all gonna DIE!”

by Leave a Comment

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com
“We’re all gonna die.”
So said my daughter tonight in the sort of operatic voice she normally reserved for when she mistakes the neighbor’s barbeque for a forest fire.

I listened as well as I could, though I’ll admit she nearly scared me to death at first—Die? Why die? What happened?—but then I managed to get the entire story. She’s 12 now, my daughter, an age I’m quickly beginning to see as Not So Young Anymore. The world is opening up to her, and not just the good stuff, either. She’s learning that not all of life is so wonderful and that the future doesn’t always seem rosy.

It was strange at first that what bothered her so much wasn’t something that would happen, but something that already had.

“Do you know how the dinosaurs died?” she asked me.

“No room in Noah’s ark?”

She looked at me like I was the kid and she was the parent. “It was a meteor!” she said.

“So why are we all gonna die?”

“Because there’s more,” she said. She waved her tiny arms around her head as if she were trying to beat them all away. “It like happens all the time.”

“What does?”

“They hit our planet and kill everything.” She slumped down on the sofa beside me and sighed. “One could be coming now.”

“I hope it waits until this ballgame’s over,” I said, “because I really want to know who wins.”

“I’m being serious, Daddy,” she said. “Aren’t you scared?”

I told her I wasn’t, and that seemed to satisfy her enough. Nothing else was said about things falling from the sky. Mission accomplished, I would usually say. But the fact is that I kinda/sorta lied to her when I said I wasn’t scared.

Because I kinda/sorta was when I was her age.

The truth is that the history of our fair world isn’t fair at all. There have been five mass extinctions in our planet’s history, the last of which occurred just over 70,000 years ago after a volcano almost wiped humanity from history before it had even started.

Just weeks ago, two meteorites passed within just a few thousand miles of Earth.

Global warming.

Terrorism.

Solar storms.

Ebola.

You get the picture.

I remember when I was about my daughter’s age hearing a preacher on the radio saying he’d received a vision from God (which, heard through his Southern accent, sounded more like GAWT) that the world would end in exactly seven days and thirteen hours. I can’t recall who the man was, but I remember the panic he caused among the few who actually believed him. Me included, of course.

I sat out on the hood of my father’s truck that night and waited for Armageddon. Didn’t come, of course. And even though predictions of The End will stick on me like a burr from time to time, I learned my lesson that day.

I learned that no matter how hard we all may try, none of us can keep the bad away. We can lessen its impact, we can fight it, we can even turn some of it into good, but the fact remains that it’s still there and it’s still coming. The world’s full of trouble, and whether that trouble comes from earthquakes or madmen doesn’t really matter.

If that sounds submissive, I didn’t mean it to be. My daughter fell into the very trap I’ve found myself in so many times—she was worried about something she couldn’t influence. In the age of twenty-four-hour news channels and the internet, that’s something we can all struggle with sometimes.

But I’m older now. I can let solar storms and the ebola go.

It’s the other, personal forms of destruction I want her to worry about, and that’s what I’ve learned to concern myself with more, too. Because it doesn’t take a meteor or a volcano to ruin our lives, especially when we can do that just fine on our own.

We can give in to pain rather than get through it.

We can surrender to temptation rather than fight it.

We can yield our dreams rather than cling to them.

Those are our choices to make, those small decisions that perhaps have no influence on the world outside but make all the difference in the world inside.

That’s what I want my daughter to know. Because planetary destruction is in God’s hands, but self-destruction is in ours.

The cosmic dance

by 1 Comment

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

What I’ve been thinking lately:

My little town isn’t so little anymore. Its population has boomed in the last twenty years from about three thousand to right around ten thousand people. The old two-lane road is now four. The lone stoplight we used to have has somehow given birth to five more. And there seems to always be a new subdivision being built in an old cornfield.

Ask the business owners, and they’ll say all this growth is a good thing. Ask the old timers, and they’ll tell you that it isn’t so good. The town’s growing, they say, but the community is shrinking. There’s a difference, and it’s a big one. I used to have to drive down Main Street with my hand perpetually stuck in the wave position. Not so much anymore. There are a lot of people I don’t know. Which means you can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely sometimes.

Many have come from the south and west in search of work, but most have come from the north. That fact alone was cause for concern for a lot of people here, those old in both age and ways and who still smart from the last time the Yankees invaded. But those times are over. These new Yankees do not have violence on their minds, but retirement. They’re tired of the cities and the noise. They want the peace and quiet of the country.

So they come. They buy their houses and settle in with the expressed purpose to slow down and take things easier. To force their lives not to be so hectic. “We’re always moving,” one of them told me the other day. “It’s just this constant state of having to do something. We hated it. So we came here. We just wanted to slow down and stop.”

I tried not to smile, but I did anyway.

This once-sleepy town is no Nirvana. It offers much, but not stoppage. Because the fact of life is that it’s busy and we’re always moving.

It doesn’t seem fair, really. As children, all we want is to go. Doesn’t matter to where or for what or how long, just as long as it’s somewhere. But the years wear on us. There are responsibilities. There is work and family and goals and dreams and we’re in the middle of it all, running. Moving. We long to slow down and stop not because we’re lazy, but because we’re tired. And because at some point we begin wondering if this is really all life has to offer, just more moving and more doing and never any rest.

I’ve wondered that myself lately. And I think that maybe the answer to that is no. Maybe that’s all life is. Movement.

I read the other day that the Earth spins on its axis every twenty-four hours at a speed of 1,000 mph. Pretty fast, isn’t it? Not as fast as this planet’s speed around the Sun, though. That’s 66,000 mph. So technically speaking, that means even though you think you’re sitting still and reading this right on the other side of a computer screen, you’ve traveled six hundred miles since you began reading this paragraph.

No wonder we’re always so tired.

I suppose that from the universe’s standpoint, not only is there not much we can do about our constant moving, we should be thankful there isn’t. Moving means life, and life continuing. It means that the Earth spins and the sun shines and all is well. It means that the cosmic dance continues unfettered.

Maybe that’s how we should look at our hectic lives. Because no matter who we are, it’s hard to slow down. Those precious moments of rest and nothingness are precious because they’re so few. I think that’s how it should be.

We can’t help but to move, but we can help how we move.

We can make sure our comings and goings are ordained by God Himself, that our actions, however small, are made as a prayer to Him and a help to others.

Yes. That’s it. That’s what we need.

Not less moving, but better moving.

That the cosmic dance continues unfettered.