Naked Man, Billboard, Fort Worth
by Ashley Whitaker
First Runner-Up, 2023 Fiction Contest
On Monday morning I dozed off on the couch watching a show about serial killers. Groggy and fatigued from some new mood-stabilizing medication, I fluttered in and out of consciousness. My body felt paralyzed under a Beatles blanket knitted like the cover of Abbey Road. My head rested on a satin pillow embroidered with butterflies and birds. On the television, a girl was bloody, bound, and gagged on blue carpet. Yellow plastic numbers lay scattered around her, marking areas of interest.
My phone rang and I answered. My cousin, Lucy, cried hard on the other end, jarring me out of my haze. Had I heard about Wyatt? she asked. Wyatt was my cousin, her little brother. Wyatt and I were the same age and had grown up together. I sat up on the sofa and muted the television.
“Well, he’s naked on a billboard right now,” Lucy said, sobbing. “I’m on my way there.”
“You mean there’s a picture of him naked?” I said. Knowing Wyatt, this was plausible. He was often doing strange, attention-grabbing things which embarrassed our genteel Southern Baptist family. It was my favorite thing about him. I was nothing like that.
“No, he’s standing on top of it and saying he’s going to jump. It’s all over the news.”
“Oh no,” I said.
She choked on the words, as if she couldn’t believe she was saying them. Her voice, usually strong and commanding, was meek and afraid. “Please,” she begged. “Please get on your knees right now and pray to God and ask Him to get Wyatt off of the billboard.”
I told her that I would pray.
This wasn’t the first time Wyatt had threatened to kill himself. When he was eighteen and living with my brother in Nashville, he tried to stab himself in the neck. It was the middle of the night, and my brother had to hold Wyatt down on the linoleum kitchen floor for hours, wrestling knives out of his hands while Wyatt cried about his dad not loving him. The episode lasted until the sun came up, when my brother finally dragged Wyatt into his SUV and dropped him off at the university hospital, because he needed to take his final exams later that day.
The psych ward in Nashville kept Wyatt for around two weeks, until his mom (my aunt) drove up from Dallas to get him. When I spoke with Wyatt afterward, after I’d been pulled out of college in Miami, he told me that he was afraid of electronics—TVs, computers, car stereos, cell phones, anything that had a screen, he’d said. He asked me if I was afraid of screens too, but I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. He never brought screens up again, and neither did I. Neither did anyone else in the family.
I got off the couch and made my way into my dad’s office. I typed, “naked man billboard fort worth” into Google. It felt weird thinking of Wyatt as a man, but he was twenty-three, so I guess he technically was one. By that logic, I was a grown woman, which was also hard to accept. At twenty-two, I was unemployed, living with my dad, and had no prospects in love or vocation. I had recently been asked to leave college in Miami, where I had what a psychiatrist referred to as a “drug-induced euphoric mania.” The dean called my parents, and suggested I take time off to “figure out my medication situation.”
I looked at a picture of Wyatt on Fox News. The billboard was bright yellow with a cartoon caveman. “We buy ugly houses,” it said. Wyatt was standing upright, looking at the sky. His arms were outstretched like he was worshipping something. His groin was blurred out.
I felt obligated to pray since I’d told Lucy that I would. I decided to make the prayer quick. I opened the blinds and looked at my dad’s new swimming pool, tranquil and blue and glistening in the sun. I kneeled on the Persian rug he’d inherited from my lavish, oil-monied grandparents. I wasn’t really sure what else to do, so I just looked around the room and paid attention to my breathing. I looked at the framed pictures on the wall. My dad with his arm around Elton John, holding him in a headlock. My dad with Stevie Ray Vaughan. My dad’s yacht, which had caught fire and melted during my 21st birthday party in Miami. I closed my eyes. I didn’t know whether I should say anything to God or not, so I just sat there and thought about what I wanted to say—something about Wyatt coming down from the billboard, coming to his senses, staying alive another day. I had a vague sense that I wanted something more than that, something I couldn’t quite identify. I started to cry, and let myself indulge in my pain and fear for a few minutes before I decided it was time to go to the billboard myself.
The drive to Fort Worth from my dad’s gated community was forty minutes, according to the map application on my phone. A big red line showed the gridlock that awaited me in Fort Worth. Presumably because of Wyatt’s charade. I didn’t care. I drove my used BMW 3 series quickly and carelessly.
On the freeway, I called Wyatt’s roommate, Hunter, and asked him what had happened. What did he know?
“Well,” Hunter said. “He’d been crying all morning, you know, having one of his mood swings.
“Right,” I said.
“He was really stressing out about work. You know. They’ve been asking him to play more and more, and he was saying he couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t memorize any more pop songs. I kept trying to get him to relax, to just play Call of Duty with me, but he kept getting worse and worse.”
I found it both irritating and mystifying that Hunter would try to calm Wyatt down with a violent video game, but said nothing. I wanted to hear the rest of the story, not argue with Hunter, who was probably stoned.
“The first thing he did was start stabbing his cell phone with an army knife and screaming at it,” Hunter said. “He stabbed it until it was in a million pieces, until he couldn’t stab it anymore, then he put the knife against his throat. He kept saying that they were coming for him, and that they’d killed his family. He said he wanted to kill himself before they got to him.”
“Who was coming for him?” I asked. “Or, who did he think was coming?”
“The people at Pete’s.”
Wyatt had been working at Pete’s Dueling Piano bar for around six months. It was his first paid music gig, and the family was all proud of him. He was making loads of money playing songs like “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Don’t Stop Believing,” and “Great Balls of Fire” to hundreds of drunk college students every weekend. I had been to the bar a few times to watch him play. It felt weird, seeing him in that environment. I’d squeeze my way through the roaring, sloppy crowd that sent him shot after shot of hard liquor, just to make eye contact with him and smirk when I’d put a dollar in his tip jar.
“What did you do then?” I asked. “What did you say?”
“I got on my knees in front of him and started crying and begging him not to do it. I told him I didn’t want to watch him die. I told him that no one was coming for him but he didn’t believe me, he just kept pressing the knife into his skin. I thought it would break any second, and start spurting blood everywhere. That’s when I tackled him. And he really freaked out then. He started screaming: ‘You’re one of them! Don’t kill me!’”
“Jesus,” I said. I didn’t know what to think.
“I told him that I wasn’t going to kill him and that I loved him,” Hunter continued. “Then something seemed to shift. He started crying, and kissing me on the neck and ears, and this is going to sound weird but I started kissing him back. I just wanted things to be okay. And it seemed like they were, for a minute. Then when I let up on him just a little, he wiggled his way out from under me and ran out onto the balcony with the knife. He jumped over the railing and landed in a bush and ran away. You can still see the imprint where he landed.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
“Look, I know Wyatt is going to be fine,” Hunter said before we ended the call. “He’s a genius. He’s an entertainer. He was put on this earth to entertain the masses. That’s just what he does. You know how geniuses are. He may have some kind of mental problem or something, but I know he’s gonna come out on top. He’ll be the winner of this situation. I just know it.”
“Right,” I said. “I hope so.”
I got off the phone, realizing Hunter was out of his mind. I began to blame him partially for Wyatt’s situation. He’d been the one who talked him into getting the job at Pete’s. He’d been the one feeding him marijuana on an hourly basis.
I called my dad to tell him about Wyatt. He was in his RV in Virginia with his miniature Pomeranian. He was there for a two-week seminar, learning how to develop iPhone apps.
“No. That is too much,” he said. “Ah. That is just too much, man.”
“There are pictures,” I said. “Just type naked man billboard Fort Worth.”
“Oh my God. There he is! I can tell that’s actually him,” he said.
“Of course it’s actually him,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling.”
“Oh my God. What is wrong with him?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“That’s just too much, man…” my dad said again. “What do you think about this, Leo?” He asked his Pomeranian. “Leo says he can’t believe it. I showed him the pictures and everything.”
“Leo must be in denial,” I said. My dad laughed.
“Hey. Guess what,” he said. “I made my first app today. It’s a fraction calculator. It calculates fractions.”
“Impressive,” I said. But what really impressed me was the speed with which my dad could shift gears, and direct any conversation back to himself.
“After I’m done with this thing I’m gonna drive across the entire country, through Wyoming and everything. All the way to California. From sea to shining sea, like in that song. What’s that song? How does it go again?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I need to call Henry.”
Approaching Fort Worth, I called my brother to tell him. He was in a hotel in Philadelphia, where he’d just started an international business program at Wharton. I told him Wyatt was naked on a billboard.
“God,” Henry said. “It’s like his whole life has been nothing but a desperate plea for attention.”
I found the comment harsh, but ignored it. “You can look it up online,” I said. “There are pictures. Just type in naked man billboard Fort Worth.”
“Wow,” Henry said. “I’m impressed. Look at how he’s straddling the two billboards like that. How did he even get up that high?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“The article says the bottom of the ladder is twelve feet off the ground. Seriously, how did he get up that high?”
I exited the freeway a mile early because the entire street was closed off. Frustrated by the gridlock, I parked my BMW illegally on the side of the feeder and headed on foot toward the 2300 block of 7th Street. It was hot and dry, and I began to sweat and pant as I got closer and closer to the sign. I cursed myself for not bringing along a bottle of water, or wearing a sensible pair of shoes.
The billboard was right next to a bar called 7th Haven, where Wyatt and I used to go out and drink together. Wyatt would introduce me to people as his little brother, even though I’m female and his cousin. When we drank we’d make inappropriate, offensive jokes and sing famous romantic duets together. I would smirk and he would laugh out loud, his braces gleaming in the darkness, white rubber bands struggling to hold his jaws together. He was the type of person who could make even me, a dark cloud, feel light. With Wyatt the world felt expansive and open with possibility.
I looked at Wyatt, tiny atop the sign he was standing on. The side facing me was all black with a bright green iguana. It said: “Visit a museum where the art looks at you,” in white letters. It was an ad for the Fort Worth Zoo. I watched Wyatt’s naked, scrawny body pacing back and forth across the top of the billboard, walking it like a tightrope. The warm wind was blowing hard, and I wondered if he’d fall. As I got closer, I noticed that he’d shaved his head since the last time I’d seen him. I could barely make out the small tattoo around his upper bicep—a tattoo he always said he regretted—a black strand of geometric bird-like shapes.
Squad cars were scattered on the grass below with twinkling red and blue lights. The fire department was also there. So was the SWAT team, but I didn’t understand why. I thought their main purpose was busting through metal doors. The various agents of the state were all just standing around, wearing bulletproof vests, talking and pointing at Wyatt, squinting, with their arms crossed. It was as if they were at a garden party and Wyatt was an avant-garde statue they were debating the meaning of.
I joined the crowd of bystanders gathered behind yellow police tape. Several of them held their phones up at Wyatt, aiming them like guns. Some were talking and whispering amongst themselves. Someone made a dick joke and others snickered sheepishly. Some were shaking their heads in disbelief and concern. I noticed the owner of Pete’s pacing back and forth, wearing a tight black t-shirt, but I didn’t approach him. He’d discovered Wyatt on the street corner, where he was busking with his Casio (Hunter’s idea). There were a few professional photographers circulating around, snapping and filming. By the sidewalk, a news van was parked next to a pretty, polished woman holding a microphone. She was made up, her hair puffed, wearing a mauve pencil skirt. We were all there for the same purpose, just waiting for Wyatt to make his final decision.
I approached the yellow tape and asked a cop how far up he was.
“Forty feet,” he said, chewing gum.
“Can I talk to him?” I asked.
“No.”
“He’s my brother,” I lied.
The cop looked at me, eyes squinted, and said, “Hold on.”
As I waited, I watched a middle-aged woman with a megaphone, crouched behind the opened door of a police car, telling Wyatt that she really wanted him to come down. Nothing bad would happen if he would just come down, she said. Come down carefully and slowly, please.
Wyatt screamed back at her that his name was Wyatt West, and that he was born in Breckenridge, Texas, and that his entire family was dead. The woman asked him again to please come down. She told him that he could be getting dehydrated, and she didn’t want to see him fall.
Wyatt stood at the very edge of the billboard, all the way at the corner, leaned over and cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled, “Fuck you!” at the woman.
Breckenridge, Texas was where our grandparents lived, on a 600 acre ranch. I thought briefly of the summers Wyatt and I spent there together, when he would make me follow him around the property with a video camera while he tracked wildlife wearing red lipstick, or shot at hay bales with an assault rifle. I’d found the footage charming then, but now I thought perhaps it had been a warning sign of some kind.
Wyatt raised his arms like he was going to do a swan dive. Everyone inhaled and waited. Several moments passed. Finally, Wyatt brought his arms back into his body, crouched down, and started crawling on all fours like a bear toward the other end of the billboard, where he vomited off the side.
The cop returned, and said, “Come with me.” He led me to a lady with a light gray shirt that said “Fort Worth Emergency Response Team” in shiny black letters. The woman explained that Wyatt’s family members had to stay out of sight. They weren’t sure how he would react if he saw us. “In past situations, it hasn’t turned out pretty,” she said, sweating. I thought about all the things that could mean. Had this happened before? I wanted to ask but didn’t.
I followed her to a white trailer that reminded me of a blood donation van. It was not as big or as nice as my dad’s RV, but inside, the air was cool and everything was beige and clean. Wyatt’s mom, his stepdad, his sister Lucy, and her husband were all sitting in there, and they hugged me gravely when I came in. I sat next to Lucy. They’d been there for two hours, she said. I asked her where her kids were, and she said she’d left them with a girl from her volleyball team. I could tell that my Aunt Charlene wanted a bottle of Chardonnay more than anything in the world. She was looking around and shaking her head.
“What did I do wrong?” she cried, and buried her blonde head into her fourth husband’s scrawny shoulder. He looked down at her and said, “Shhhh. This isn’t your fault.”
Lucy’s husband Craig had a yellow legal pad out on his lap and was scribbling something. I asked him what he was writing, and he said the notes were just in case Wyatt needed to be represented in court. I thought that was probably a good idea, even though everyone knew Craig was a shitty lawyer.
“You cannot joke about this later,” Craig said sternly. He stopped writing and pointed at me with his pen. “We can never laugh about this. Wyatt has to know how serious this is. Okay?”
“Alright,” I said, feeling put on the spot. I couldn’t meet the intensity of Craig’s eyes, and instead looked down at my non-sensible shoes, and started pulling at a thread on the floral sofa. This whole day, I’d been hoping above all else that someday Wyatt and I would laugh about this, that it was just another playful stunt of his. Like when he dove head first into the mall fountain and thrashed violently in the water for several minutes, finally standing up and shouting, “I found my penny!” before the mall cops escorted him out. Or all the times Wyatt wore a red polo shirt and khakis to Target, where he would pretend to be an employee. He would spend the day rearranging products and putting them in the wrong aisles: adult diapers with the kitchen supplies, feminine hygiene products with the office supplies, yard tools with the throw pillows. He would turn on loud country music and two-step with customers in the stereo section. Or the time he wrapped himself completely with toilet paper in the bathroom at a nice restaurant and came back to the table walking and moaning like a mummy.
“How long has he been up there now?” I asked.
“Since noon,” Lucy said. “He keeps saying that his family’s dead and everyone’s gone and that he’s not coming down alive. He told the cops to shoot him.” Her voice broke again and her face crinkled up and tears ran down her cheeks. Craig handed her a Kleenex and she dabbed her eyes.
I picked up my phone and got on the Internet. I typed, “naked man billboard fort worth.” Tons of new results came up. I read threads of comments listed at the bottoms of news articles. People were mad about the traffic jam, about the street being closed, about their tax dollars being wasted on something, someone like this. People thought the worst punishment would be just to ignore him. After all, he was clearly only doing it for the attention. Some people were 100% certain he was on acid. Others were 100% certain he was on meth. Approximately two people felt bad for him, and hoped that he would get help. One person wondered if he was getting sunburned. Many wished he would just jump already. One person asked why they didn’t set up a big net around the billboard, then shoot him down with a tranquilizer gun. Another person told that person that he was an idiot.
I opened Twitter. Nobody could believe that the guy from Pete’s Piano Bar was doing this. “Only in Funky Town,” someone tweeted. “Gots to love white people,” tweeted another.
Aunt Charlene announced that it was time to pray. I put my phone away and we arranged ourselves in a circle and held hands. My palms immediately began to sweat. In those days, I hated praying publicly in a group and found it wildly embarrassing. This was years before I joined AA, and began embarrassing myself daily by praying with strangers, in a circle holding hands. Charlene started talking about Wyatt’s soul being lost and needing redemption.
“Amen,” everyone said.
“Amen,” I whispered.
She asked God to come down from Heaven and to put His hand upon Wyatt and to show him the light. “Amen,” everyone said again. Lucy asked Jesus to expel the demons that had taken over Wyatt’s spirit and tricked him into climbing the billboard. Deliver him, Jesus, she said.
“Amen,” we said.
I didn’t say anything to God. If I were being honest, I figured that God didn’t have much to do with it. If Wyatt really wanted to jump, he’d jump.
Another hour passed, and I began to feel tired again as the shock of the moment wore off. I leaned my head into the countertop next to the sofa and closed my eyes. My Aunt Charlene sat next to me and put her arm around me. A show of uncharacteristic softness. I didn’t bristle. I let her hold me, and I cried. I thought of the previous summer, when Wyatt had briefly lived with my dad and me. I had just been pulled out of school, and Wyatt had just been evicted from his apartment. He was in massive credit card debt and had two warrants out for his arrest.
“Put on your helmets and get on the short bus,” my dad would quip when he drove us around in his suburban.
We spent our days at a warehouse in Dallas that my dad had rented for Wyatt. He’d spent four hundred thousand dollars at guitar center, setting it up. He wanted to help Wyatt become a professional musician, he said. My dad built a stage, hung a professional lighting grid, a disco ball, a fog machine. He bought every guitar pedal and vocal effect available. Every day they would jam together. Wyatt would play the keys of the telecaster and my dad would play the drums. Most of the time, I’d lay on the green felt couch drinking clear tequila out of a Sprite bottle while they played. Sometimes, they made me play the bass.
At night, Wyatt and I would stay up late talking and watching infomercials or televangelists. Our favorite TV evangelist was named Mike Simons. He was constantly asking for money in a room full of fake plants, sitting next to his wife, Hazel. Hazel had sky-high bangs and nodded her head the entire time, saying “Amen,” and “Praise Jesus,” after everything Mike Simons said. We thought it was the funniest thing in the world. One night, I told Wyatt I thought the Jesus story was a bunch of bullshit made up by the patriarchy to retain its oppressive power over me. Wyatt disagreed, which surprised me. He asked me if I’d ever thought, really thought, about what happened to Jesus; if I’d really thought about the nails being driven through his wrists and ankles, piercing his skin and his muscles and his bones. Wyatt held up his arm while he spoke, for dramatic effect. His eyes were bright and excited and blue. I told him I hadn’t really given Jesus much thought, honestly. Not since I was a kid, when I was forced to go to church all the time. “Imagine,” Wyatt said. “Just imagine willingly having something hammered through your skin, and doing it for the good of all of humanity.” I told him I couldn’t imagine it. All I remember feeling after that was envy. I wanted Wyatt’s earnestness and his irrational faith. I had none of my own, and I felt it would have made my life more tolerable day to day.
I wondered then, briefly, if that’s why Wyatt decided to climb the billboard. In his deluded state, perhaps he thought he was doing this for the good of all humanity.
We waited in the trailer for another hour, until an officer came in to give us an update. Outside, the sky had darkened from an impending storm. He told us that Wyatt had come down from the billboard. The rain clouds must’ve scared him off. “Praise God,” everyone in the trailer said. “Hallelujah Lord. Thank you, Jesus.”
They cuffed Wyatt and put him in a squad car and said they were going to drive him to the nearest hospital for medical evaluation. He wouldn’t face any criminal charges, they explained. Charlene looked relieved. The cop suggested we all stand outside together when they drove Wyatt by, so that he could see us, and perhaps come to the realization that we weren’t really dead.
We filed out of the trailer and stepped onto the grass. The sky had turned dark gray and the air had grown thick. I could hear thunder in the distance. “Here he comes,” the cop said, and as the police car slowly drove by, I saw Wyatt through the back window. We made eye contact, but there was no spark of recognition in his gaze. He looked wild, like a caged, trapped animal being transported to some depressing sanctuary. As the car passed us, he craned his skinny neck and continued staring through the back window at us, wide-eyed. Lucy squeezed my hand. His mom started crying again.
They took Wyatt to a local hospital. All the drug tests came back negative, except marijuana, which was no surprise. He ended up staying longer than the standard seventy-two hours, because the doctor said he was still exhibiting psychotic behavior. He’d told one of the nurses that the television was talking to him and telling him upsetting things about his family. He now thought we were all shells of our former selves, our lifeless bodies occupied by murderous imposters. After a week, he was transferred to the state hospital in Wichita Falls for further evaluation.
During this time, I found out I was accepted to college in Austin, and would finally move out on my own again. My life was moving forward, but I couldn’t help thinking about Wyatt. From my new apartment, I looked the place up online. It resembled a college campus, but even more depressing. I mostly followed his progress through Lucy, who created a Facebook messaging thread called “Covering the Bases.” I only called him once while he was in there, which I’ve always regretted, especially now that he’s dead.
When he answered, he said that he never expected to hear from me in the mental hospital. He sounded embarrassed, and I wanted to tell him not to be, but I didn’t. Instead, I tried to keep it light. I asked him if he was bored. He said that he was, that the medication they gave him made him feel robotic, blurred his vision, and made him constipated.
“They won’t even let me have a guitar,” he said. “I can’t even play music.”
“It’s probably considered a weapon,” I said. “You might hang yourself with the strings.”
“Probably,” he said.
“Do they let you have shoelaces?”
“Yeah. They let me keep my shoes.”
“That’s good,” I said. I told him that the 7th Haven bar had changed the letters under their sign. It now said: “Position Available. Now Hiring. Crazy naked person to stand on our sign. No experience req’d. Apply within.”
Wyatt laughed, but not the way that he used to. His laughter used to be so loud and maniacal that it would fill the room and reverberate, and make everyone laugh even harder, just because of how he sounded. But that day he sounded like a person who’d given up on laughing. I figured it was the medication. I turned the conversation toward myself. I told him I was thinking about going to graduate school after I finished at UT. I didn’t know what else to do, I said.
“I was thinking maybe I could go to med school,” I said. “I could become a psychiatrist, and learn how to heal you.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Every family needs a doctor. I wish I was smart enough to go to college.”
“You are smart,” I said. “In your own way.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m the stupidest person alive.”
“Don’t say that.”
He told me he’d been taking a class at the mental hospital called “social interactions,” and another one called “life management,” and he couldn’t even grasp the assignments. He just wanted to get out of there, he said. All he really wanted for his life, he said, more than anything else, was to be normal—to live a normal life, hold down a normal job and start a normal family. I told him that was a good thing to want.
My phone rang and I answered. My cousin, Lucy, cried hard on the other end, jarring me out of my haze. Had I heard about Wyatt? she asked. Wyatt was my cousin, her little brother. Wyatt and I were the same age and had grown up together. I sat up on the sofa and muted the television.
“Well, he’s naked on a billboard right now,” Lucy said, sobbing. “I’m on my way there.”
“You mean there’s a picture of him naked?” I said. Knowing Wyatt, this was plausible. He was often doing strange, attention-grabbing things which embarrassed our genteel Southern Baptist family. It was my favorite thing about him. I was nothing like that.
“No, he’s standing on top of it and saying he’s going to jump. It’s all over the news.”
“Oh no,” I said.
She choked on the words, as if she couldn’t believe she was saying them. Her voice, usually strong and commanding, was meek and afraid. “Please,” she begged. “Please get on your knees right now and pray to God and ask Him to get Wyatt off of the billboard.”
I told her that I would pray.
This wasn’t the first time Wyatt had threatened to kill himself. When he was eighteen and living with my brother in Nashville, he tried to stab himself in the neck. It was the middle of the night, and my brother had to hold Wyatt down on the linoleum kitchen floor for hours, wrestling knives out of his hands while Wyatt cried about his dad not loving him. The episode lasted until the sun came up, when my brother finally dragged Wyatt into his SUV and dropped him off at the university hospital, because he needed to take his final exams later that day.
The psych ward in Nashville kept Wyatt for around two weeks, until his mom (my aunt) drove up from Dallas to get him. When I spoke with Wyatt afterward, after I’d been pulled out of college in Miami, he told me that he was afraid of electronics—TVs, computers, car stereos, cell phones, anything that had a screen, he’d said. He asked me if I was afraid of screens too, but I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. He never brought screens up again, and neither did I. Neither did anyone else in the family.
I got off the couch and made my way into my dad’s office. I typed, “naked man billboard fort worth” into Google. It felt weird thinking of Wyatt as a man, but he was twenty-three, so I guess he technically was one. By that logic, I was a grown woman, which was also hard to accept. At twenty-two, I was unemployed, living with my dad, and had no prospects in love or vocation. I had recently been asked to leave college in Miami, where I had what a psychiatrist referred to as a “drug-induced euphoric mania.” The dean called my parents, and suggested I take time off to “figure out my medication situation.”
I looked at a picture of Wyatt on Fox News. The billboard was bright yellow with a cartoon caveman. “We buy ugly houses,” it said. Wyatt was standing upright, looking at the sky. His arms were outstretched like he was worshipping something. His groin was blurred out.
I felt obligated to pray since I’d told Lucy that I would. I decided to make the prayer quick. I opened the blinds and looked at my dad’s new swimming pool, tranquil and blue and glistening in the sun. I kneeled on the Persian rug he’d inherited from my lavish, oil-monied grandparents. I wasn’t really sure what else to do, so I just looked around the room and paid attention to my breathing. I looked at the framed pictures on the wall. My dad with his arm around Elton John, holding him in a headlock. My dad with Stevie Ray Vaughan. My dad’s yacht, which had caught fire and melted during my 21st birthday party in Miami. I closed my eyes. I didn’t know whether I should say anything to God or not, so I just sat there and thought about what I wanted to say—something about Wyatt coming down from the billboard, coming to his senses, staying alive another day. I had a vague sense that I wanted something more than that, something I couldn’t quite identify. I started to cry, and let myself indulge in my pain and fear for a few minutes before I decided it was time to go to the billboard myself.
The drive to Fort Worth from my dad’s gated community was forty minutes, according to the map application on my phone. A big red line showed the gridlock that awaited me in Fort Worth. Presumably because of Wyatt’s charade. I didn’t care. I drove my used BMW 3 series quickly and carelessly.
On the freeway, I called Wyatt’s roommate, Hunter, and asked him what had happened. What did he know?
“Well,” Hunter said. “He’d been crying all morning, you know, having one of his mood swings.
“Right,” I said.
“He was really stressing out about work. You know. They’ve been asking him to play more and more, and he was saying he couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t memorize any more pop songs. I kept trying to get him to relax, to just play Call of Duty with me, but he kept getting worse and worse.”
I found it both irritating and mystifying that Hunter would try to calm Wyatt down with a violent video game, but said nothing. I wanted to hear the rest of the story, not argue with Hunter, who was probably stoned.
“The first thing he did was start stabbing his cell phone with an army knife and screaming at it,” Hunter said. “He stabbed it until it was in a million pieces, until he couldn’t stab it anymore, then he put the knife against his throat. He kept saying that they were coming for him, and that they’d killed his family. He said he wanted to kill himself before they got to him.”
“Who was coming for him?” I asked. “Or, who did he think was coming?”
“The people at Pete’s.”
Wyatt had been working at Pete’s Dueling Piano bar for around six months. It was his first paid music gig, and the family was all proud of him. He was making loads of money playing songs like “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Don’t Stop Believing,” and “Great Balls of Fire” to hundreds of drunk college students every weekend. I had been to the bar a few times to watch him play. It felt weird, seeing him in that environment. I’d squeeze my way through the roaring, sloppy crowd that sent him shot after shot of hard liquor, just to make eye contact with him and smirk when I’d put a dollar in his tip jar.
“What did you do then?” I asked. “What did you say?”
“I got on my knees in front of him and started crying and begging him not to do it. I told him I didn’t want to watch him die. I told him that no one was coming for him but he didn’t believe me, he just kept pressing the knife into his skin. I thought it would break any second, and start spurting blood everywhere. That’s when I tackled him. And he really freaked out then. He started screaming: ‘You’re one of them! Don’t kill me!’”
“Jesus,” I said. I didn’t know what to think.
“I told him that I wasn’t going to kill him and that I loved him,” Hunter continued. “Then something seemed to shift. He started crying, and kissing me on the neck and ears, and this is going to sound weird but I started kissing him back. I just wanted things to be okay. And it seemed like they were, for a minute. Then when I let up on him just a little, he wiggled his way out from under me and ran out onto the balcony with the knife. He jumped over the railing and landed in a bush and ran away. You can still see the imprint where he landed.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
“Look, I know Wyatt is going to be fine,” Hunter said before we ended the call. “He’s a genius. He’s an entertainer. He was put on this earth to entertain the masses. That’s just what he does. You know how geniuses are. He may have some kind of mental problem or something, but I know he’s gonna come out on top. He’ll be the winner of this situation. I just know it.”
“Right,” I said. “I hope so.”
I got off the phone, realizing Hunter was out of his mind. I began to blame him partially for Wyatt’s situation. He’d been the one who talked him into getting the job at Pete’s. He’d been the one feeding him marijuana on an hourly basis.
I called my dad to tell him about Wyatt. He was in his RV in Virginia with his miniature Pomeranian. He was there for a two-week seminar, learning how to develop iPhone apps.
“No. That is too much,” he said. “Ah. That is just too much, man.”
“There are pictures,” I said. “Just type naked man billboard Fort Worth.”
“Oh my God. There he is! I can tell that’s actually him,” he said.
“Of course it’s actually him,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling.”
“Oh my God. What is wrong with him?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“That’s just too much, man…” my dad said again. “What do you think about this, Leo?” He asked his Pomeranian. “Leo says he can’t believe it. I showed him the pictures and everything.”
“Leo must be in denial,” I said. My dad laughed.
“Hey. Guess what,” he said. “I made my first app today. It’s a fraction calculator. It calculates fractions.”
“Impressive,” I said. But what really impressed me was the speed with which my dad could shift gears, and direct any conversation back to himself.
“After I’m done with this thing I’m gonna drive across the entire country, through Wyoming and everything. All the way to California. From sea to shining sea, like in that song. What’s that song? How does it go again?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I need to call Henry.”
Approaching Fort Worth, I called my brother to tell him. He was in a hotel in Philadelphia, where he’d just started an international business program at Wharton. I told him Wyatt was naked on a billboard.
“God,” Henry said. “It’s like his whole life has been nothing but a desperate plea for attention.”
I found the comment harsh, but ignored it. “You can look it up online,” I said. “There are pictures. Just type in naked man billboard Fort Worth.”
“Wow,” Henry said. “I’m impressed. Look at how he’s straddling the two billboards like that. How did he even get up that high?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“The article says the bottom of the ladder is twelve feet off the ground. Seriously, how did he get up that high?”
I exited the freeway a mile early because the entire street was closed off. Frustrated by the gridlock, I parked my BMW illegally on the side of the feeder and headed on foot toward the 2300 block of 7th Street. It was hot and dry, and I began to sweat and pant as I got closer and closer to the sign. I cursed myself for not bringing along a bottle of water, or wearing a sensible pair of shoes.
The billboard was right next to a bar called 7th Haven, where Wyatt and I used to go out and drink together. Wyatt would introduce me to people as his little brother, even though I’m female and his cousin. When we drank we’d make inappropriate, offensive jokes and sing famous romantic duets together. I would smirk and he would laugh out loud, his braces gleaming in the darkness, white rubber bands struggling to hold his jaws together. He was the type of person who could make even me, a dark cloud, feel light. With Wyatt the world felt expansive and open with possibility.
I looked at Wyatt, tiny atop the sign he was standing on. The side facing me was all black with a bright green iguana. It said: “Visit a museum where the art looks at you,” in white letters. It was an ad for the Fort Worth Zoo. I watched Wyatt’s naked, scrawny body pacing back and forth across the top of the billboard, walking it like a tightrope. The warm wind was blowing hard, and I wondered if he’d fall. As I got closer, I noticed that he’d shaved his head since the last time I’d seen him. I could barely make out the small tattoo around his upper bicep—a tattoo he always said he regretted—a black strand of geometric bird-like shapes.
Squad cars were scattered on the grass below with twinkling red and blue lights. The fire department was also there. So was the SWAT team, but I didn’t understand why. I thought their main purpose was busting through metal doors. The various agents of the state were all just standing around, wearing bulletproof vests, talking and pointing at Wyatt, squinting, with their arms crossed. It was as if they were at a garden party and Wyatt was an avant-garde statue they were debating the meaning of.
I joined the crowd of bystanders gathered behind yellow police tape. Several of them held their phones up at Wyatt, aiming them like guns. Some were talking and whispering amongst themselves. Someone made a dick joke and others snickered sheepishly. Some were shaking their heads in disbelief and concern. I noticed the owner of Pete’s pacing back and forth, wearing a tight black t-shirt, but I didn’t approach him. He’d discovered Wyatt on the street corner, where he was busking with his Casio (Hunter’s idea). There were a few professional photographers circulating around, snapping and filming. By the sidewalk, a news van was parked next to a pretty, polished woman holding a microphone. She was made up, her hair puffed, wearing a mauve pencil skirt. We were all there for the same purpose, just waiting for Wyatt to make his final decision.
I approached the yellow tape and asked a cop how far up he was.
“Forty feet,” he said, chewing gum.
“Can I talk to him?” I asked.
“No.”
“He’s my brother,” I lied.
The cop looked at me, eyes squinted, and said, “Hold on.”
As I waited, I watched a middle-aged woman with a megaphone, crouched behind the opened door of a police car, telling Wyatt that she really wanted him to come down. Nothing bad would happen if he would just come down, she said. Come down carefully and slowly, please.
Wyatt screamed back at her that his name was Wyatt West, and that he was born in Breckenridge, Texas, and that his entire family was dead. The woman asked him again to please come down. She told him that he could be getting dehydrated, and she didn’t want to see him fall.
Wyatt stood at the very edge of the billboard, all the way at the corner, leaned over and cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled, “Fuck you!” at the woman.
Breckenridge, Texas was where our grandparents lived, on a 600 acre ranch. I thought briefly of the summers Wyatt and I spent there together, when he would make me follow him around the property with a video camera while he tracked wildlife wearing red lipstick, or shot at hay bales with an assault rifle. I’d found the footage charming then, but now I thought perhaps it had been a warning sign of some kind.
Wyatt raised his arms like he was going to do a swan dive. Everyone inhaled and waited. Several moments passed. Finally, Wyatt brought his arms back into his body, crouched down, and started crawling on all fours like a bear toward the other end of the billboard, where he vomited off the side.
The cop returned, and said, “Come with me.” He led me to a lady with a light gray shirt that said “Fort Worth Emergency Response Team” in shiny black letters. The woman explained that Wyatt’s family members had to stay out of sight. They weren’t sure how he would react if he saw us. “In past situations, it hasn’t turned out pretty,” she said, sweating. I thought about all the things that could mean. Had this happened before? I wanted to ask but didn’t.
I followed her to a white trailer that reminded me of a blood donation van. It was not as big or as nice as my dad’s RV, but inside, the air was cool and everything was beige and clean. Wyatt’s mom, his stepdad, his sister Lucy, and her husband were all sitting in there, and they hugged me gravely when I came in. I sat next to Lucy. They’d been there for two hours, she said. I asked her where her kids were, and she said she’d left them with a girl from her volleyball team. I could tell that my Aunt Charlene wanted a bottle of Chardonnay more than anything in the world. She was looking around and shaking her head.
“What did I do wrong?” she cried, and buried her blonde head into her fourth husband’s scrawny shoulder. He looked down at her and said, “Shhhh. This isn’t your fault.”
Lucy’s husband Craig had a yellow legal pad out on his lap and was scribbling something. I asked him what he was writing, and he said the notes were just in case Wyatt needed to be represented in court. I thought that was probably a good idea, even though everyone knew Craig was a shitty lawyer.
“You cannot joke about this later,” Craig said sternly. He stopped writing and pointed at me with his pen. “We can never laugh about this. Wyatt has to know how serious this is. Okay?”
“Alright,” I said, feeling put on the spot. I couldn’t meet the intensity of Craig’s eyes, and instead looked down at my non-sensible shoes, and started pulling at a thread on the floral sofa. This whole day, I’d been hoping above all else that someday Wyatt and I would laugh about this, that it was just another playful stunt of his. Like when he dove head first into the mall fountain and thrashed violently in the water for several minutes, finally standing up and shouting, “I found my penny!” before the mall cops escorted him out. Or all the times Wyatt wore a red polo shirt and khakis to Target, where he would pretend to be an employee. He would spend the day rearranging products and putting them in the wrong aisles: adult diapers with the kitchen supplies, feminine hygiene products with the office supplies, yard tools with the throw pillows. He would turn on loud country music and two-step with customers in the stereo section. Or the time he wrapped himself completely with toilet paper in the bathroom at a nice restaurant and came back to the table walking and moaning like a mummy.
“How long has he been up there now?” I asked.
“Since noon,” Lucy said. “He keeps saying that his family’s dead and everyone’s gone and that he’s not coming down alive. He told the cops to shoot him.” Her voice broke again and her face crinkled up and tears ran down her cheeks. Craig handed her a Kleenex and she dabbed her eyes.
I picked up my phone and got on the Internet. I typed, “naked man billboard fort worth.” Tons of new results came up. I read threads of comments listed at the bottoms of news articles. People were mad about the traffic jam, about the street being closed, about their tax dollars being wasted on something, someone like this. People thought the worst punishment would be just to ignore him. After all, he was clearly only doing it for the attention. Some people were 100% certain he was on acid. Others were 100% certain he was on meth. Approximately two people felt bad for him, and hoped that he would get help. One person wondered if he was getting sunburned. Many wished he would just jump already. One person asked why they didn’t set up a big net around the billboard, then shoot him down with a tranquilizer gun. Another person told that person that he was an idiot.
I opened Twitter. Nobody could believe that the guy from Pete’s Piano Bar was doing this. “Only in Funky Town,” someone tweeted. “Gots to love white people,” tweeted another.
Aunt Charlene announced that it was time to pray. I put my phone away and we arranged ourselves in a circle and held hands. My palms immediately began to sweat. In those days, I hated praying publicly in a group and found it wildly embarrassing. This was years before I joined AA, and began embarrassing myself daily by praying with strangers, in a circle holding hands. Charlene started talking about Wyatt’s soul being lost and needing redemption.
“Amen,” everyone said.
“Amen,” I whispered.
She asked God to come down from Heaven and to put His hand upon Wyatt and to show him the light. “Amen,” everyone said again. Lucy asked Jesus to expel the demons that had taken over Wyatt’s spirit and tricked him into climbing the billboard. Deliver him, Jesus, she said.
“Amen,” we said.
I didn’t say anything to God. If I were being honest, I figured that God didn’t have much to do with it. If Wyatt really wanted to jump, he’d jump.
Another hour passed, and I began to feel tired again as the shock of the moment wore off. I leaned my head into the countertop next to the sofa and closed my eyes. My Aunt Charlene sat next to me and put her arm around me. A show of uncharacteristic softness. I didn’t bristle. I let her hold me, and I cried. I thought of the previous summer, when Wyatt had briefly lived with my dad and me. I had just been pulled out of school, and Wyatt had just been evicted from his apartment. He was in massive credit card debt and had two warrants out for his arrest.
“Put on your helmets and get on the short bus,” my dad would quip when he drove us around in his suburban.
We spent our days at a warehouse in Dallas that my dad had rented for Wyatt. He’d spent four hundred thousand dollars at guitar center, setting it up. He wanted to help Wyatt become a professional musician, he said. My dad built a stage, hung a professional lighting grid, a disco ball, a fog machine. He bought every guitar pedal and vocal effect available. Every day they would jam together. Wyatt would play the keys of the telecaster and my dad would play the drums. Most of the time, I’d lay on the green felt couch drinking clear tequila out of a Sprite bottle while they played. Sometimes, they made me play the bass.
At night, Wyatt and I would stay up late talking and watching infomercials or televangelists. Our favorite TV evangelist was named Mike Simons. He was constantly asking for money in a room full of fake plants, sitting next to his wife, Hazel. Hazel had sky-high bangs and nodded her head the entire time, saying “Amen,” and “Praise Jesus,” after everything Mike Simons said. We thought it was the funniest thing in the world. One night, I told Wyatt I thought the Jesus story was a bunch of bullshit made up by the patriarchy to retain its oppressive power over me. Wyatt disagreed, which surprised me. He asked me if I’d ever thought, really thought, about what happened to Jesus; if I’d really thought about the nails being driven through his wrists and ankles, piercing his skin and his muscles and his bones. Wyatt held up his arm while he spoke, for dramatic effect. His eyes were bright and excited and blue. I told him I hadn’t really given Jesus much thought, honestly. Not since I was a kid, when I was forced to go to church all the time. “Imagine,” Wyatt said. “Just imagine willingly having something hammered through your skin, and doing it for the good of all of humanity.” I told him I couldn’t imagine it. All I remember feeling after that was envy. I wanted Wyatt’s earnestness and his irrational faith. I had none of my own, and I felt it would have made my life more tolerable day to day.
I wondered then, briefly, if that’s why Wyatt decided to climb the billboard. In his deluded state, perhaps he thought he was doing this for the good of all humanity.
We waited in the trailer for another hour, until an officer came in to give us an update. Outside, the sky had darkened from an impending storm. He told us that Wyatt had come down from the billboard. The rain clouds must’ve scared him off. “Praise God,” everyone in the trailer said. “Hallelujah Lord. Thank you, Jesus.”
They cuffed Wyatt and put him in a squad car and said they were going to drive him to the nearest hospital for medical evaluation. He wouldn’t face any criminal charges, they explained. Charlene looked relieved. The cop suggested we all stand outside together when they drove Wyatt by, so that he could see us, and perhaps come to the realization that we weren’t really dead.
We filed out of the trailer and stepped onto the grass. The sky had turned dark gray and the air had grown thick. I could hear thunder in the distance. “Here he comes,” the cop said, and as the police car slowly drove by, I saw Wyatt through the back window. We made eye contact, but there was no spark of recognition in his gaze. He looked wild, like a caged, trapped animal being transported to some depressing sanctuary. As the car passed us, he craned his skinny neck and continued staring through the back window at us, wide-eyed. Lucy squeezed my hand. His mom started crying again.
They took Wyatt to a local hospital. All the drug tests came back negative, except marijuana, which was no surprise. He ended up staying longer than the standard seventy-two hours, because the doctor said he was still exhibiting psychotic behavior. He’d told one of the nurses that the television was talking to him and telling him upsetting things about his family. He now thought we were all shells of our former selves, our lifeless bodies occupied by murderous imposters. After a week, he was transferred to the state hospital in Wichita Falls for further evaluation.
During this time, I found out I was accepted to college in Austin, and would finally move out on my own again. My life was moving forward, but I couldn’t help thinking about Wyatt. From my new apartment, I looked the place up online. It resembled a college campus, but even more depressing. I mostly followed his progress through Lucy, who created a Facebook messaging thread called “Covering the Bases.” I only called him once while he was in there, which I’ve always regretted, especially now that he’s dead.
When he answered, he said that he never expected to hear from me in the mental hospital. He sounded embarrassed, and I wanted to tell him not to be, but I didn’t. Instead, I tried to keep it light. I asked him if he was bored. He said that he was, that the medication they gave him made him feel robotic, blurred his vision, and made him constipated.
“They won’t even let me have a guitar,” he said. “I can’t even play music.”
“It’s probably considered a weapon,” I said. “You might hang yourself with the strings.”
“Probably,” he said.
“Do they let you have shoelaces?”
“Yeah. They let me keep my shoes.”
“That’s good,” I said. I told him that the 7th Haven bar had changed the letters under their sign. It now said: “Position Available. Now Hiring. Crazy naked person to stand on our sign. No experience req’d. Apply within.”
Wyatt laughed, but not the way that he used to. His laughter used to be so loud and maniacal that it would fill the room and reverberate, and make everyone laugh even harder, just because of how he sounded. But that day he sounded like a person who’d given up on laughing. I figured it was the medication. I turned the conversation toward myself. I told him I was thinking about going to graduate school after I finished at UT. I didn’t know what else to do, I said.
“I was thinking maybe I could go to med school,” I said. “I could become a psychiatrist, and learn how to heal you.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Every family needs a doctor. I wish I was smart enough to go to college.”
“You are smart,” I said. “In your own way.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m the stupidest person alive.”
“Don’t say that.”
He told me he’d been taking a class at the mental hospital called “social interactions,” and another one called “life management,” and he couldn’t even grasp the assignments. He just wanted to get out of there, he said. All he really wanted for his life, he said, more than anything else, was to be normal—to live a normal life, hold down a normal job and start a normal family. I told him that was a good thing to want.