Afraid of the Dark

It is said that the last words of the writer O. Henry before he died were from the refrain of an old song. He whispered, “I’m afraid to go home in the dark.”

I remember it from a creative writing class I had in college. The discussion was all about death and dying, subjects that have fascinated writers since the first sunrise of prose.

The teacher, who had a knife scar down her right cheek, loved O. Henry and admired his choice of final words. She promised they would someday be her last words too. She never told us what the scar was from, but hinted darkly that she had come this close to death herself on the streets of New York, O. Henry’s beloved “Baghdad on the Subway.”

What brings this to mind now isn’t the thought of anyone dying but the elegance of the phrase itself, “I’m afraid to go home in the dark.”

I think that’s been the problem of Willie James Wilson all these years. His way home has been darkened by massive shadows of guilt and by the terrible feeling that he had let his family down when they needed him most.

He took off one day running from his nightmares and ended up living in a nightmare of his own. That was 10 years ago. Since then, everyone’s been looking for him, and when I heard he was someplace in L.A., I started looking for him too.

Well, there’s no need to look anymore. Willie James has been found, and he’s going home at last.

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Willie was a paramedic with the Tallahassee, Fla., Fire Department in 1985 when he responded to a heart attack case. To his shock, the victim turned out to be his mother. He couldn’t save her despite massive efforts, and that inability sent him into a nose dive.

Theirs was a close family of eight brothers and sisters, and Willie was their hero. He bore that burden heavily and was tortured by the notion that he should have been able to revive someone he loved so much.

Willie was both strong and sensitive, so sensitive that he broke down and cried once when he couldn’t rescue a woman in a burning car. Firefighters had to hold him back to keep him from rushing into the flames.

Increasingly anguished by the death of his mother, Willie quit the Fire Department, and the family began to hear that he was using drugs. That wasn’t like him. He’d always respected his body and spent his spare time building himself up, not tearing himself down.

But drugs and booze have a beguiling effect on a person looking for answers. He was more of a victim than a user and, realizing that, joined the Army in an effort to straighten himself out. It didn’t work.

The last the family heard from him, he’d been discharged from the service and was somewhere in L.A., in and out of drug rehab centers. Then there was no word from him or of him for six years. A sister, Lois Gavin, asked if I could help find him. Their father had just died and they wanted Willie home.

I wrote about their long search and word got to his girlfriend, Linda Lawn. She telephoned one of Willie’s brothers, and the family knew at last where their lost hero was: in the Santa Clara County Jail.

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He gets out later this month after doing almost a year for violating probation on a drug charge. Lawn says he was clean for 15 months, but went back to using coke and was arrested.

In jail in San Jose, he kept telling her about nightmares he was having that his father had died. Seeing how much pain he was in, Lawn decided to call the family and was told his father had indeed passed on. Uncertain what to do, she hung up abruptly, but they retrieved her number through caller ID.

Told of his father’s death, and after days of agonizing, Willie decided to call home. The brothers and sisters gathered and waited at one of their Florida homes. When the appointed time came and went, they almost gave up. Then the phone rang. It was Willie.

“We laughed and cried,” Gavin says. “He kept saying how much he loved us and how much he’d disappointed us. When he joined the Army, he said if that didn’t get him off drugs, we’d never hear from him again. He didn’t want to hurt us anymore.”

“But you’re ours, Willie,” a brother, Fred Jr., assured him. “Did you think we’d ever stop looking for you?”

He will go home again, Willie promised. He’ll shame the family no more. The darkness had lifted, just as it had in O. Henry’s life once. He’d also spent time in prison.

No one can be sure that Willie James will live the rest of his life sober. But this much I do know: He has the kind of support group back in Tallahassee that everyone ought to have.

The lights are on for him. He doesn’t have to be afraid of the dark anymore.

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.