His name was Bill Hunnicutt, but he used to be called Booger Red. That was back in the days when he was a carny barker. But I met him when I joined Alcoholics Anonymous to quit drinking back in the 1980s. A lot of people helped me over the years, but it is Bill Hunnicutt’s voice I most often hear when things are dark.
I was 22 and spent, he was in his late 70s. Short, round, with huge ears like Yoda’s on either side of his bald head, suspenders holding up pants on a waistless body, long-sleeved white shirt with sleeves rolled up, horn-rimmed glasses, strong body odor, and a voice like gravel.
He seemed to be at every meeting I attended. I’d walk into the meeting hall, and he’d growl, “Nancy, what time did you get up this morning?”
“Um, I don’t know. 7:30.”
“Ha! I been sober longer’n’you! I got up at 6:30.”
AA abounds with clichés and everybody wanted to have his own personal quip, but Bill Hunnicutt was the only person who didn’t make it seem like he was trying to pull something off. He didn’t seem like he was angling for center stage. He was simply reminding me that I only have this day.
“This is the only day I have to live right now,” he would say. “None of the past ones, none of the future ones. Just this day.”
Okay, Bill. I wish you’d been with me yesterday to remind me that, in living that day, it would eventually end and I wouldn’t have to live it anymore. But you weren’t with me, so, after a sleepless night, I started this day without any demarcation.
On the previous day, on our way to get coffee, we were assaulted by a parade of cars, uniformly blasting a Trump rap song, American flags, Trump flags, gathering the clouds. The parade wrapped around the block, as far as I could see and just kept coming. My stomach lurched. The rap song, pounded alpha male like an assault rifle, revering their war lord. People walked out onto their porches, shouting, some cheering, some shouting rage.
“Four more years!”
A woman with a Black Lives Matter sign on her front lawn and purple hair, spat into the wind, “Over 220,000 dead!”
In 2016 when he was elected, I thought, he’s going to get us all killed. Surprisingly, Bill Hunnicutt showed up just then, just when the darkness plunged. “If this is the end,” he whispered, “Live it! Live each day.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve attended AA, and even longer since Bill died in a meeting at the age of 87. But there are still times when I see Booger Red. Bill’s round, bald head appears when I least expect it and shakes in front of me, his neck wagging.
When a friend had been brutally raped and stuffed into the trunk of her own car, I remember her mother sobbing and asking, “What kind of a God would allow this to happen?”
Bill softened the gravel in his voice and explained, “This isn’t God’s world. What you’re seeing there is man’s world. God don’t have nothin’ to do with that. God give man free will, and this is what man’s done with it.”
When I was a student in Italy in the late 1980s, I was sober the whole time. No vino for me. Instead, I went to AA meetings in Florence. I attended an English speaking group there that met 3 times a week. But, as my language skills improved, I ventured into the ones where Italian was the spoken language. I lived in terror that they would ask me to share. My skills were getting better, but I had no confidence at the idea of speaking in a meeting in front of 30 people.
The day came, and they called on me. I could say that I don’t know where it came from, but now I do know. In Italian, I told them where I was from and that I knew a man named Bill Hunnicut who had been sober for 38 years. This was wild to them because AA had only been in Italy for about a decade. I apologized for my poor language skills but told them that I believed they would understand me. You see, I went on, Bill always said that Alcoholics Anonymous is a place where we come to speak the language of the heart. It’s where the heart speaks and where the heart listens. I was so amazed by my own speech that I got kind of high off of it. I couldn’t believe I’d said all of that. I still remember the faces of the people in that room, smiling and nodding.
Three weeks later (mail in Italy is much, much, much slower than a snail), I got a letter from my friend, Gloria, who told me that Bill Hunnicut had died in a meeting. He died the day before I was called on to speak. I know that Bill didn’t speak Italian, but whatever powers he had tapped into on the other side extended me the words. I still think of him often with love and gratitude.
