Episode 24: Bill Bruzy

Bill Bruzy: After my dad died, I was 19, I'd started college. It was the final blow that kind of knocked me out. I had a little bit of insurance money, death benefits, and I just started going to the airport and getting on the next plane going anywhere.

Josh Caldwell: Hello, my atypical daydreamers. Welcome to the show. My guest today is Bill Bruzy. He's a therapist, writer, and photographer based in Austin, Texas. Bill has lived one heck of a life and as a result is a well of wisdom. Today, he takes us on a journey known to many of us where we must go through the dark night to find the path back to ourselves.

Bill Bruzy: I grew up in Detroit and I was kind of left in my own lot. I went to Catholic schools, they kept me in private schools, which really helped. We weren't very rich, but my friends were not those kids from the Catholic schools. I hung out with some older guys down on Harper Avenue at the Big Boy, the gas station, and the oddly unnamed pool hall where a lot of Italian guys hung out. And so those guys, we'd go downtown. We'd go to the clubs, go to the blues and jazz clubs, go to a place called Checker Barbecue, which was an after hours place. And somehow it was okay with the cops. You go in there after hours at two o'clock and you didn't have to be an adult or anything. And you'd order tea and you get a little container of vodka. The musicians would go there to play after hours. They had this large ensemble. The music was incredible. They let me sit in once on a hand drum, because I had some percussion stuff. So there was that kind of life that I loved.

But when the riots happened in 1967, boom, it all shut down. I couldn't go there anymore without getting killed. It just flipped. But I loved those neighborhoods. It was a beautiful, rich experience. So my dad was a CPA. He was bright, precocious. He didn't get here until he was 12 from Europe. He'd been kind of damaged by the Bolshevik revolution and stuff, but he was ambitious. He got a CPA and he was a good businessman. And so we were pretty prosperous when I was young.

So probably in 1952, I was little, I was born at 45. He comes and I got the mumps and the doctor said, you got to go to Florida for Christmas vacation. We're going to fly. It was kind of a joke, but I thought, we're going to fly. I'd never been on an airplane. I love airplanes and this is 52. This is rare, you know. So we boarded a Lockheed Constellation. You got dressed up in suits, everybody dressed, you know, a lavish experience. And I remember walking up the steps to the plane.

Bill Bruzy: And the flight attendant calls me sir. I got called sir. I got gold wings for my suit to pin on. And I just remember that experience of that airplane starting, the roaring of the engines and lifting off. It's just an experience of magic. And I've been in love with aviation ever since.

Then my dad had lots of friends that had airplanes. So we got to fly a lot of private airplanes. A few years later, everything crashed and that was the end of that. But it was a great experience for a kid to have.

After my dad died, I was 19. I'd started college. It was the final blow that kind of knocked me out. And then I had to come back from that one. I'd had a few of those. But I had a little bit of insurance money, death benefits, and I just started going to the airport and getting on the next plane going anywhere. So I put on a suit and I went to the airport and got on a plane. It was going to Las Vegas. So I'd gone to Las Vegas a couple of times before. I thought, you know, it's a town you can lose yourself, just go. And it was pretty cheap back then. The drinks were free. And if you didn't gamble, everything was pretty inexpensive.

So I got on the airplane. I was the only passenger on the plane. And I sat way in back and finally a flight attendant came down. I was depressed, you know, and she tried talking to me. I should have been friendlier to her, but it just blew me away that I'm the only person on this entire plane. But that was before deregulation, so they had to fly that route that night, regardless. The crew was obviously very relaxed and just hung out having drinks or something.

Bill Bruzy: I was living in Ann Arbor and I had this woman friend, Janice, she was in the dance department. I hung around the dance department at University of Michigan a lot because I was learning about dance, learning about movement. There were drummers playing music. Everything in Ann Arbor was about art, music, dance, drawing, painting. My life had collapsed in the career way, my health, everything. I'd lost everything. And I thought, fuck it. I didn't think I had learned to live, so I said, I'm just going to do what I want to do. And that's what Ann Arbor was for me. Apparently that made me healthy. I did not die, but I was broke for sure.

One night near Ann Arbor, there's a Frank's Apple concert. Janice wants to go to the concert. And something is telling me, get out of town. It's a full moon. I don't know. I mean, I operated a lot by intuition in those days because I didn't have the wherewithal to make the kind of choices that money gives you. So I just needed to get out of town. I get a bus ticket to Chicago. I'm gonna go to Chicago and back on a bus. And I was really on a philosophical quest at that time too, really trying to reconfigure my relationship to life.

So I got on that bus, got to Chicago, got to the Chicago bus station. So what am I going to do now? I guess I'll just wait and go back in the morning. But that's going to drive me crazy. I can't sit in the Chicago bus station all night. So I went outside to walk around. I'm young and fit and alert and I'm not that vulnerable to attack. And so I walk out and I walk about half a block away from the bus station.

Bill Bruzy: And this woman walks up to me, maybe four feet something tall. She is an African-American woman. She's really interesting looking and she's wearing a crimson cape with a hood. And she smiles, and she has this incredible gold tooth, and she smiles at me. And it's like, okay, I have left the consensus universe.

So I go back to the bus station. I say, okay, I'm just gonna sit here. I'll just meditate all night. But then the cops are beating up some guy in the back room. Chicago cops, they're like that. This guy's screaming, the cop's yelling. And now the woman in the cape comes in the bus station. So she's locked onto me somehow. I'm not interacting. I suppose I could have, but I just didn't.

So I said, let's just have the stamina to make it till morning. So I get on the bus in the morning. I sit down. I just want to be left alone. I've been around all these people and the cops. So a woman walks on the bus, kind of a middle-aged woman. She walks back. There's nobody on this bus. She sits right next to me. What? It turns out she was a nun who lived at the second station of the cross in Jerusalem. We had the most incredible conversation all the way back and we stayed in touch. We wrote postcards and stuff. It was just a mind blowing experience.

You know, Josh, the thing is, years ago, I got kicked out of the box of ordinary life by circumstances, by transformative experiences, by losses. And once you're outside, the world is enchanted. And it doesn't mean it's always easy that way, but it's beautiful.

Josh Caldwell: Hey, Josh here. I love making this podcast and I'd love to make it my full-time gig. Besides telling the stories, I'm basically a one-man band and that takes time. If you're enjoying the podcast, please consider becoming a patron. You'll have access to loads of great bonus stories and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you're supporting a truly independent podcast. Find the Patreon link in the show notes. And thanks.

Bill Bruzy: I'm living in Ann Arbor, I'm poor, and a woman friend is driving out to Boulder and she wants me to go with her because she wants a guy in the car. I hadn't been walking distance of downtown Ann Arbor for probably a couple of years at that point. It was kind of near the end of my stay there. And I'm kind of frustrated knowing I need to make a change, but I can't figure out how to do it. So I ride out with her. It's a nice ride. We share the driving. It's a little VW. We get out to Boulder and clearly I can see that this experience of a few years in Ann Arbor has changed me.

We stopped in this house in Boulder, some students or something, and we started having conversations and it was like, oh, this is different with these guys. It's like they're asking me questions. It's kind of like they're seeing me as their teacher or something. That's strange, but I'll go with it. And then the next day, I thought I'm going to hike into the mountains. You could take a bus to the weather service station out there and hike in from there. So I took my backpack, a little water, a little food.

And I thought, you know, the truth is I don't care if I come back. I do not know what to do to get my life moving. I have no clue and I'm stuck. Everything I've tried to do has not worked. And I've been really earnest and sincere about this, but it's just dead end after dead end. So I walk out. I wasn't trying to kill myself. I was just kind of empty.

So I get out and I climb up into the mountains a little bit. On the way, I start sliding down a rock face and have this realization, I have to respect this mountain. It's not looking out for me. It's got its own life, I have to honor that. So I get to this place and it's getting

Bill Bruzy: late, the sun's coming down. It's warm that night, kind of humid for the mountains. I find there's no flat spot to lay down, but I find a little crevice in a rock that's kind of like a rock hammock. I kind of get in there with my shoulders and I can kind of lie down there. That's my rock hammock for the night. I had a sleeping bag. I didn't need it. It was too warm.

Before I lay down, when I first got there, I stayed in that spot because there was this domed rock, very big, hanging over kind of a precipice. The domed rock felt really good. It was a good place to sit and meditate. It felt really kind of like home or something. It had a nice feel to it, but it was precarious because it was domed and it was down quite a way at the end of the dome. So you really wanted to not slip off.

So I went to sleep that night. Not a good sleep because I was dehydrated and it was warm and I'm sleeping on rocks. So at some point in the night I wake up and something is off. I don't get it. Something's weird. So very mindfully I literally crawl over to the domed rock because I don't want to stand up because tripping could be disastrous. I crawl over to the domed rock, I carefully place myself.

I try to figure out what's off and I look up and the moon is in eclipse. How the heck did I get into the mountains at a time like this? This is incredible. I was just silenced by the whole thing. So I'm sitting on that rock just in awe of the moment and I look off in the distance and there's like a little dot of light, which is some town way off in the distance. And I put my hand out, I put my thumb out, and I can cover the whole town with my thumb.

Bill Bruzy: And then I think of all the life going on in that town. There are people being born, people dying, people in trouble with the law, people winning victories, people making love, people cooking dinner, people watching TV. All of life is going on in this tiny little dot.

And then something happened inside of me. And this is the truth, Josh, that I started crying and I heard words come out of me. I did not think this. I heard these words come out of me.

Bill Bruzy: I heard myself say, okay. I'll go back and help. And that was kind of the start of coming back into the mental health business. I got back to Ann Arbor, I got this crummy job in a mental hospital. That one folded. So we lost our jobs and we got to Texas and I got another direct care job. They started a new program called Community Bound, which was a live-in program. They were getting patients out of state hospitals and long-term care into independent living. Kathy and I came in on our bicycles. Nobody wanted to do this because you have to live with the patients. They had separate apartments, but nobody wanted that job. And they said, we're going to give you some money up front. We're going to buy you furniture. We're giving you an apartment. We said, okay, this is good. A roof, a bed to sleep in. We'll take it.

Josh Caldwell: I want to thank Bill for sharing his experience. Be sure to get a copy of his book, The Prey of Angels, a memoir written in the language of dreams, available on Amazon. You can also check out more of his writings and photography at BillBruzee.com. This podcast was created and produced by me, Josh Caldwell. Music by Visual Aid, my side music project. General support and copywriting by Miranda Caldwell. If you like the show, please follow, subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to financially support the show, check out my Patreon page. You'll have access to loads of great bonus stories. Thank you for listening, and I hope you come back next week.