Death of an icon

Gerald Williamson is dead, at 63, of pancreatic cancer.

Gerald and I went to school together, first at Central Elementary School, at South Third and Peach in Abilene, Texas, and later at Abilene High School, class of 1961.

We were never best, or even good, friends. I would have liked to be his good friend, but I couldn’t get up to his level. In the past 40 years, I had seen him maybe twice, at class reunions. I knew nothing of his life, his family, if he had any children, what he did for a living, what were his successes, and his failures.

Yet his death shocked me. I have lost other childhood friends and classmates, including Dub Galbraith, who was in fact one of my very best friends. Each was heartbreaking, as is Gerald’s, but Gerald’s death is different. It is a shock, because Gerald was an icon.

With his death comes new information, for me, about icons. I realize now that the death of an icon always comes with a unique shock, a puff of unbelievability at the news. Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Princess Diana, Eudora Welty, Jonas Salk. We place a certain stake in icons to live forever. When they don’t, it is a blow. A shock.

Gerald Williamson was an icon. My icon. The first icon I ever knew. Most of us have a private icon in our past, someone we knew who had something we didn’t, but wished we did. We may not realize it, as I didn’t, until the icon dies, and the shock of the news surprises us, as I am surprised.

This world of mine is not the same without Gerald. I am newly vulnerable. Someone whom I tagged for immortality is dead. When death can fell an icon, what chance do the rest of us have?

It doesn’t matter that Gerald never knew what he was to me, or that my terms were so easy. Gerald was a Little League hero. He rode motor scooters, first a Vespa, and later a kind of motorbike called a Simplex. He let me ride, or try to ride, the Simplex one day. I turned the throttle. The engine screamed, and Gerald yelled: “Let out the clutch!” I sat there grinning, immobilized by the specter of doing something wrong.

Even in grade school, Gerald was very handsome and he had a beautiful wide grin. He had a perfect flattop. He was very funny, and made Three Stooges-like sounds and motions with his voice and his hands. He had a certain indifference to the conventional, that to a tentative little Methodist boy looked impossibly worldly. His mother was Dora, and she was funny. His father was Speedy, and he looked like Hank Williams. His address was 790 Ross. I don’t remember his phone number. I would not have taken it on myself to call him. What would I have had to call Gerald Williamson about?

Karen said she had a childhood icon, too. She also said that childhood icons tend to peak early, which I think is right. But for us, they are forever icons. Gerald and I went to different junior high schools and we played each other in football. In a ninth grade game, I ran over him. I was already in the end zone, but I ran over him anyway. Later I learned that he had told someone it was the hardest he had ever been hit. Sixty-three years old now, and I savor that still. I had made a mark, probably my first.