An Uncomplicated Life Page 24

  Bezold asked Jillian if she had any questions. Jillian said no. She could handle the job.

  “I’ll give you my phone number, if you think of anything,” Bezold said.

  Jillian took her cell phone from her purse to add the contact. “Okay,” she asked, “what’s your name?”

  Jillian has never lived anywhere but Ohio, but she took the best from people who came from all over. It’s not a stretch to say Jillian was raised in Nancy Croskey’s New York and in the Chicago of Martha Cummings, in the pastoral beauty of a region in southwestern Wisconsin known as the Driftless, and in the suburbs of northern Kentucky, just across the river from Ohio.

  Dave Bezold grew up in northern Kentucky, along with his four brothers, a sister, two parents and anyone needing a place to stay. A knock at the door could mean just about anything. Most often, it meant Dave would be spending the night on the couch in the living room.

  “My dad believed there was good in everyone, and that people need to take care of each other” is Bezold’s explanation.

  Frank Bezold raised six kids in a four-bedroom house. He was a schoolteacher. For many years, he taught in parochial schools that offered neither a pension nor health insurance. The family didn’t have a lot left over. The Bezolds never ran out of money before they ran out of month, though it could be a photo finish. Especially since Frank had an affinity for saving the world. Or at least his tiny piece of it, one temporarily lost soul at a time. “We took in strays,” Dave explained. “It wasn’t a halfway house. But it wasn’t far from it sometimes.”

  Lots of Dave’s stories start, “When I was in (fill in the school grade) a guy (or girl) came to the door with a suitcase and stayed for (days, weeks, months).” Frank’s first stray, as Dave recalls, was a teacher friend who was going through a divorce. “He was living in his car,” Dave says.

  As Frank Bezold recalls it, the conversation went like this:

  “Where’d you stay last night?”

  “In the White Castle parking lot.”

  “Okay. Come on. We’re putting you up.”

  Dave remembers giving up his bed and spending several months after that sleeping on the living room couch. The precedent had been set.

  Actually, Frank and Trudy had warmed it up a few years earlier. Exchange students from Mexico and Germany attended NKU. They arrived to find that all the campus living options had been exhausted. The Bezolds had their first boarders.

  Early on, the German student was puzzled. He asked the Bezolds at dinner, “Aren’t you going to put your feet up on the table?” Trudy Bezold can’t recall if that was before or after the student expressed amazement that the Bezolds actually wore shoes. “He’d made some assumptions about Kentucky,” she explained.

  The strays arrived at a regular pace: Kids who’d left home, kids who’d been thrown out. An uncle who was building a house and needed a place to stay that had a suitable roof. The family was never quite sure who’d be at the breakfast table in the morning or on the couch at night. It could be a friend of their children who’d been over-served the night before and didn’t need to be driving. It could be another kid needing to escape the negative noise of his own house.

  Dave never felt burdened by the way station he called home. He never knew anything else. “We just knew that you take care of people.”

  It was no coincidence that in college Dave became attracted to Lisa Lemley. Her circumstances might have been different; her family narrative was fundamentally similar. In 1971, Lisa’s father, Bud, decided to reinvent himself, along with the life of his family. Bud moved his wife and two daughters from a Chicago suburb to 120 rural acres in southwest Wisconsin, where people lived communally. Their lives depended on interdependence.

  From a restored Victorian in Evanston, Bud led his somewhat bewildered family to a run-down four-room farmhouse without electricity or running water. Bud called the place “Shalom,” Hebrew for “peace.” It was in an area of Wisconsin known as the Driftless, for its lack of glacial activity. The nearest town was Viroqua, population 4,000, 20 minutes away.

  Bud had been a stockbroker in Chicago; in Wisconsin, he became a farmer. Bud knew nothing about farming. He started with a one-acre plot near the farmhouse, where he planted vegetables, including two neat 60-foot rows of lettuce. This was a source of amusement for the local farmers, who knew that to feed a family of four enough lettuce for a year, a man need only plant two rows, two feet each. Bud Lemley had planted enough lettuce for a small nation of rabbits. As Lisa recalled, “People drove by and said, ‘There’s the idiot from Chicago.’”

  Bud was not deterred. He didn’t leave Chicago because he wanted to become a farmer, even though farming was what he would do. He left seeking a more cooperative, less cynical way to live. He heated the house with wood; the walls were insulated with newspapers. The family ate from wooden bowls, with wooden spoons.

  “Subsistence living,” said Bud’s wife, Katie.

  After six months, they moved to a larger piece of land that the Lemleys shared with another family. The parcel had two houses, each with indoor plumbing. “Heaven,” Katie Lemley called it. The idea of fleeing the city for a “simpler” life was not unusual in 1971. “Hundreds of families did it,” Katie said, including the family with whom they shared the second farm.

  The two families started a dairy operation with a herd of cattle and 50 goats. Goat cheese made the families a little money, but it wasn’t enough. Katie Lemley took a job as a nurse at a hospital 30 minutes away. Idealistic notions aside, Shalom was not an idyll. “I just got worn out. The simple life is not simple,” Katie said. Long physical hours, for what amounted to minimum wage, took their toll.

  Seven years after they’d arrived, the Lemleys kept the farm but moved back to the city. The grand experiment was over, with no regrets. The war in Vietnam had ended two years earlier, the country no longer raged within itself. Bud went back to being a broker. The lessons learned at Shalom did not fade though.

  “It’s easy to live well with your neighbor when nobody has anything,” Katie Lemley said. “Everybody lived the same. We shared everything.”

  Or as Kelle Lemley, Lisa’s sister, put it, “We helped each other. Helping each other was the only way we survived.”

  The Driftless has become a booming region for the organic-food movement that started in the late 1960s with families like the Lemleys. The spirit of giving and receiving gracefully lives on. Communal farms are common. So too are formerly suburban families, looking for a different way to be.

  Bud and Katie have moved back to the farm permanently. Bud runs his own brokerage now, from an outbuilding on their property. Whenever Bud has money, he gives a lot of it away. He isn’t specific, nor are his family members, about where the money goes. “When I’ve had money, I’ve shared it. I’ve put some kids through college” is all he says.

  Kelle is an assistant professor in the College of Education at Northern Arizona University, where she remains active in social causes. Lisa married Dave Bezold. Their past lives inform their current lifestyle.

  Dave’s grandparents, his father Frank’s parents, took in two of his elderly aunts when they could no longer live on their own. Dave’s mother, Trudy, was one of eleven children. There were no assisted-living places then, and even if there were, nobody had the money to pay for them. Taking care of one another didn’t come with angel’s wings. “People helped us. We helped them. It’s just what you did,” Trudy said.

  The people fit no mold. Or as Dave puts it, “So you have six earrings in your nose and your hair is blue, we don’t care about that. It took us out of our comfort zone. We were taught to keep our eyes open. There’s something good about everybody. There are no strangers out there.”

  Sometimes now, when the NKU basketball team is on an extended road trip and Lisa isn’t at home, Frank will go to his son’s house to bring in the mail and the newspapers and to see if everything is normal. He’ll walk in and be greeted by people, students usually, whom he’s never s
een. He’ll chuckle then and be proud of how he raised his son.

  Jillian arrived at basketball practice on October 15, 2010, and nearly every day thereafter, for three years. The only expectation Dave had of her was that she do her best and make a contribution. Jillian’s only requirement was that she be accepted and respected as part of the team.

  We’re only as good as the way we treat each other. Kindness is a cumulative act. It builds.

  “Jillian makes me laugh every day,” Bezold said not long ago. “She makes me think every day. She makes me happy every day. I wish I had that in me.”

  As with every meaningful transaction involving Jillian and the world, each side profited. Jillian got the belonging of the basketball team, and the validation taken from being a functioning part of a typical work setting. Dave Bezold didn’t give Jillian a sense of place. He gave her the place itself. The whole room.

  The basketball team got the Jillian Daugherty Show, guileless and mirthful, every last syllable and chorus. Their coach rediscovered how to laugh in a pure way, free of complication, the way young children do. The players discovered that different is good.

  The Bezolds and the Lemleys chose to take part in the human community. Their villages became Jillian’s. All those strays and neighbors and kids needing money for college were better for having known them. No better, though, than their benefactors, who learned that receiving is the happy and often unintended consequence of giving.

  Jillian keeps the circle unbroken. She validates Shalom. Bud Lemley’s lettuce kingdom lives on, paid forward, in the life of a young lady he has never met.

  “I love my team,” Jillian says every once in a while, just because.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Team

  Today is here. Let’s not waste it.

  —DANNY BOEHMKER, NKU

  BASKETBALL MANAGER

  Jillian could negotiate the bus lines. She’d gotten to know the campus well enough that she’d begun helping with tours for prospective students with disabilities. Jillian was comfortable spending the entire day at NKU. All she needed was an outlet for her considerable social ambitions—a broader audience for the Jillian Daugherty Show

  The basketball experiment that began in Jillian’s second year sprang from Dave Bezold’s heart and evolved through Jillian’s personality. It needed more than that. As with all of Jillian’s social endeavors, it required a broader acceptance. Bezold could declare that Jillian would be a manager for his team. He could inform all involved, as he did, some individually. But Bezold couldn’t make his players accept Jillian, or respect her, or even be comfortable in her presence. The Jillian Show was lonely without co-stars.

  The welcoming had to start somewhere other than by decree of the head coach. It started with Danny Boehmker. Boehmker grew up with an uncle who had Down syndrome. Uncle Denny was Danny’s father’s brother, the last of four sons of parents who ran a bar in Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. Denny Boehmker’s disability was severe, and the era in which he grew up was not sympathetic. Denny never spoke.

  As an adult, he split his days between a menial job and his favorite chair at Herb and Thelma’s bar, greeting patrons whether he knew them or not. If a newcomer sat in Denny’s chair, it wasn’t for long. His pleasures were as limited as his world. Denny watched TV and listened to music. He enjoyed playing with a balloon attached to the end of a string. He died on Christmas Day nine years ago, at age 46, never having said a word.

  Communication isn’t just language, though. And dying is just a physical act. Denny endured in the memories and deeds of those who knew him best. “He brought love to our family,” said Danny’s father, Chip. “He kept us together.”

  Danny spent a lot of time with his uncle. There was something about Denny that he couldn’t let go. A feeling, he says. They communicated in a way that both understood. They’d roll a ball back and forth between them. Danny would yank on the string tied to the balloon. Denny would laugh. He had an easy laugh.

  So when Dave Bezold named Danny head manager and informed him that Jillian Daugherty would be his assistant, Danny felt blessed. The way he saw it, he’d teach Jillian how to fold towels and keep water bottles filled. Jillian would further his education on how to be a good human being.

  That’s how Bezold saw it too: “She gets a chance to grow and be part of something. Jillian needs that. That’s part of her personality. She loves an audience. My guys get to experience someone who is different from them.”

  There’s something good about everybody. There are no strangers out there.

  The players didn’t accept Jillian right away. They looked at someone who didn’t look like them, whose words they didn’t always understand and whose disability they’d never experienced, certainly not on a daily basis. They were hesitant, even fearful. It would take time. With Jillian, it always takes time. But for her, the ritual belonging never fades. She is the most people of persons. For Jillian, being “one of the guys” is not an expression. It is a central happiness of her life. The basketball partnership would fortify that happiness yet again.

  “Do you want to learn to Dougie?” Danny asked her.

  This question came after she’d been on the job a few weeks, feeling her way. At first, Jillian’s biggest job was to be at practice on time and to follow Danny around. She could do that. She was also being uncharacteristically shy. “Coach Beez” did not have time during practice to worry about his newest manager. Jillian wasn’t “special” to him. She was the rookie manager, and she’d better have the water bottles filled and the sweat wiped from the practice floor.

  Jillian did not immediately take to the new routine. She was intimidated and overwhelmed, two new emotions for her. “At first, she was afraid to show any feelings at all,” Danny recalled. “She’d walk away, behind the bleachers, if she was mad or sad. She was hesitant to ask questions. The players initially didn’t know what to do with her.”

  But Jillian could dance. She could always dance.

  “I want to do the Dougie,” Jillian said to Danny.

  He showed her the basics. The Dougie is a hip-hop creation named for the rapper Doug E. Fresh. It was first performed in 2007 or so. To the untrained eye—that is, the old-guy eye like mine who knew the Twist and the Jerk, oh so many seasons ago—the Dougie is a modified shimmy-shoulder roll during which you pass your hands by the sides of your head. There is no right or wrong way to Dougie, which made it perfect for Jillian.

  For the next week, when Danny arrived at practice, Jillian was already there, working on her Dougie. She’d be standing at center court with her headphones on, alone in the gym, shoulder-shimmying, running her hands past the sides of her head. She did it at home, too, in the basement, in front of the mirror, the same as she did when she was practicing for her high school dance team.

  She broke it out before practice one day about a month into her managing career. Some players laughed with her; some laughed at her. Jillian thought it was all good. That’s the thing about her particular disability and her personality: Jillian always assumes laughter to be positive.

  She understands outright meanness. Derisive laughter is more subtle. It’s harder for her to process. Jillian thought the players were in total acceptance mode. Danny knew this wasn’t the case and would talk individually to those who had gotten a kick out of his co-worker for the wrong reasons.

  Jillian was undeterred. In fact, she was emboldened. The way she saw it, these new home-dogs were welcoming her. They liked her Dougie.

  From there, it was only a small leap of audacity for Jillian to assume the entire team would enjoy her talents as a rapper. Jillian was an enthusiastic rapper, honing her skills with Eminem and Snoop Dogg CDs she’d liberated from her brother. To put it politely, Jillian wasn’t especially polished with rhymes. Imagine Tupac doing Shakespeare at the Globe. At first, she practiced only in front of Danny. If she came up with a new rap at home, she’d call Danny. Sometimes, if Danny was with his family or girlfriend
, he’d put Jillian on speakerphone so everyone could enjoy her rhymes. Jillian made Danny laugh, every time.

  By January, Jillian apparently felt ready for the footlights. I say apparently because Kerry and I had no idea she’d been plotting her rapping debut until long after it happened. That was probably for the best because if we’d gotten wind of it, we might have stopped it. That’s probably why Jillian never gave us a clue.

  She asked Coach Beez if she could rap for the team. Fortunately, Beez didn’t ask for a sample. If he had, Jillian would never have desecrated a rhyme in public. Instead, Bezold said, “Okay, but it better be good.”

  “Oh, it will be,” Jillian said.

  On the day of her first public rapping appearance, which would occur immediately after practice, Jillian spent most of practice in a luxury box on the second level of the Bank of Kentucky Center, the 9,400-seat arena on the NKU campus. Players heard strange sounds coming from the box and wondered whose cat was being tortured. At the end of practice, at a time Bezold had approved in advance, Jillian yelled, “Yo!Yo!Yo! Listen up, y’all!”

  The players looked up to see their new manager as she edged from the luxury box. Jillian’s basketball shorts rode low on her hips. She wore her ball cap sideways. She danced—the Dougie, perhaps—as she rolled down a very long flight of steps.

  “Give it up for J-Dog!” she said.

  What?

  The players were amused—and some of them were snickering at her. Undeterred, Jillian busted a few Snoop-inspired rhymes. When she was done, the players applauded, sort of.

  After that first excursion, there was no stopping her, and as the days and weeks rolled by, the players bought into this version of the Jillian Daugherty Show. They saw Jillian come to practice every day. They saw her fill their water bottles and keep their court dry as they practiced. They saw her passion during games. They felt her encouragement, no matter how well they played. They started to realize her support for them was unconditional and her work ethic was genuine. Jillian’s aim was true.