The Lizard for Peace

One thing I know is this: the personal is political. This week I have tried to write something for my political column, and all I can think about is the death of my great friend Brad. In a world full of violence and political madness, there was Brad, selling his humble handmade "Just Another Lizard for Peace" t-shirts for twenty years in parking lots and at festivals.

Hunter S. Thompson said this about his character Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing: "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high-powered mutant never even considered for mass production". Nothing truer could be said about Brad.

Six days before Thanksgiving 1996: Brad owed me a hundred dollars, so I picked him up at the Athens house he shared with two roommates. The idea here was to do some of the man-work around my house down in Statesboro in order to pay me back. We also conspired to make art. Brad was a visionary artist who could fill a K-Mart shopping cart with house paint, fishing line, glue, and the kind of poster board used in a million elementary school projects, and turn this into the creatures which lived inside his brain. Little men with short legs and long torsos who drummed and banged on guitars. Fish and weird lizards with mismatched appendages, butterflies with menacing sharp wings. That week we hunkered over his snake stencil, its head triangulated and the long body curling across the cardboard. He painted several snakes that evening. I chose a forest green and royal purple snake for myself. It has sat in a makeshift frame on the mantel in my bedroom ever since.

Brad jumped on my daughters' trampoline that week and managed to sprain his ankle. He needed copious amounts of whiskey and beer for the pain. That painting is the only payment I recall toward the original debt.

It was my ex-husband's turn to have the daughters for Thanksgiving, so Brad and I found ourselves without proper food options by lunchtime. We drove around Statesboro and found nothing open. When we passed Boyd's BBQ, we saw an open door and went in.

There were a group of Baptist men preparing box lunches for the poor. I spotted my ex-brother-in-law among them.

"Robert... do you think that you could spare a couple of meals for us? I'll pay whatever." I was embarrassed, realizing that the World of Brad had rendered me a little hungover and thoughtless, much like him.

Robert appeared to enjoy my helplessness. But he handed me a pair of turkey dinners, and I gave him a ten dollar bill.

Robert died last year unexpectedly, a complication of diabetes. And now Brad is dead too.

When I recently re-read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, almost every description of the character of Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady made me think of Brad. The reckless enthusiasm for what Kerouac calls "kicks"- whether having another adventure on the highway or hearing a great piece of music - was so much like my memories of Brad. Brad loved the desert, good books, the road, making art, taking drugs, and seeing live music. He had traveled with the Flat Duo Jets and kept talking about writing a book about those days. He sat on my porch last year listening to Gram Parsons' Return of the Grievous Angel over and over, crying and whispering along to the music. He called me last winter from a remote desert hot spring, raving about how happy he was and how perfect the stars looked in the open sky. He talked me into buying screenprinting equipment in order to start a sticker business this spring, and then promptly fell behind in paying me back for it. He hated the rise in gasoline prices, which made it difficult for him to afford more adventures. But he had fallen madly in love with a girl we all admired for her calm demeanor and grace a few months ago and the feeling had been mutual. So Brad was trying to reconstruct his life over the past weeks in order to be worthy of this next phase of life: a middle-aged husband with the beautiful woman who had accepted his proposal of marriage which had been blurted out in a wild-eyed state in the dusty field that was the Bonnaroo Music Festival last June.

I last saw Brad in a convenience store parking lot in Lexington, Georgia. He wore crazy yellow sunglasses and lumbered around our vehicles, showing me his latest idea - airbrushed canvas bags with his artwork. He had done well at the Philly Folk Festival with his t-shirts and canvas concert chairs, and was hoping that he could get out of Widespread Panic parking lots and aim for an older, middle-class market. He seemed simultaneously happy in love and worried about money. He gave me one of the bags with a smiling orange sun painted on the front. We hugged and I told him that I would see him down the road. I always counted on that.

But Brad drove to Birmingham in order to make some Widespread money on Friday. And although details are sketchy, I know that his heart stopped while he was parked beneath a highway overpass in his truck.

It is hard to believe that there will be no more stories from Brad - no late night pass-around-the-bottle visitations sharing tales of gathering stones from the sea at Big Sur, sleeping in a hammock in a cabana in Mexico, the transvestite hooker's kitchen near Times Square, the various felonies and misdemeanors committed with rock stars and starlets in bathrooms and back alleys, the constant leaking of transmission fluid, oil, money, and dreams while on the road... Brad was the greatest storyteller I ever got to sit at a campfire with. I miss him so much already, but so does everyone who knew him.

Brad was the son of a Baptist preacher. I used to play piano at the Baptist church. During the week that Brad sprained his ankle and painted snakes, we got to spend an evening at my piano with the Broadman Hymnal. We drank Budweiser and sang every hymn we both knew. He frequently told me that we would have to sing hymns again one day.

I promise, Brad, that I'll get that hymnal out again soon.

NTD