Bill

I went to the First National Bank of Twin Falls just a few months after I graduated from school. I turned eighteen in January and so was well on my way to nineteen, in two more years I could legally buy adult beverages. In Arkansas anyway - I could drive over to Memphis and buy when I was eighteen, seeing as how the drinking age had been lowered there on account of the Vietnam War. Some states lowered the drinking age because they figured a kid could go to Vietnam and get his ass shot off at eighteen but he couldn't drink adult beverages. Buy them anyway. The voting age was lowered to eighteen in '71 on account of it. Women couldn't be conscripted, still can't, but they can vote at eighteen just like men. Just sayin' as they say these days.

Anyway I didn't get drafted thanks to President Nixon. He probably engaged in some shenanigans but they were kiddie mischief compared to what LBJ and some since have done. Later on I figured him shutting down the was was a big reason they wanted to get rid of him. We had to live with Jimmy Carter for four painful years before relief arrived in the person of Ronald Reagan.

That was digression before I got started, so I might as well go ahead and say that right after I went to work at bank I bought a Ford Pinto, 1972, hatchback like most were. The trunk being useless on the ones that had them. I would one or two more, one a station wagon that I put a 10 foot boat in the back of and went fishing out at a lake on the farm. And some other stuff. Cool little car, white with red and blue stripes, the 1600 engine and auto tranny. If I wound it out good on the right surface it would just chirp the tires when it shifted into third. Wouldn't mind having the 2300 in that car. Paid 1200 for it, it was clean as new having been driven by lady who worked at a farm equipment dealer in town. Should have kept it but I coveted a '75 Nova a year or so later, sold the Pinto for 1100 and put it on the Nova. Should have kept it and made bigger payments on the new one. Dad didn't just up and buy us new cars the way Roger and Joey's dad did. Dad lived forty years longer than Joey's pa and sixteen year longer than Roger's dad and Roger's dad was a pretty good guy, our families was friendly from way back.

Now I wish I had kept the Nova, and most of the cars I've owned. Especially the '93 Mustang GT. Now where was I?

So I was working at the bank, Last Nasty as some called it. Including some of the ones who worked there. It didn't take me long to learn why. The bookkeeping department and the tellers were under the supervision of a vice-president - just all about all the officers were some kind of vice-president - but had the official title of cashier. He was a country boy like me, but not as smart. I suppose most people of his type are what I call cop-smart, after that dude in The Choirboys. One of the cops, I forget which, was a bad racist and mean. He liked to beat people and had a trick he'd learned somewhere, pinching some nerves somewhere and making a guy flop around, called it making them 'do the chicken'. Cops are like that, learning tricks from other cops, not really smart. Monkey see monkey do.

So a good many people, from small town banks to billion-dollar corporation boardrooms (I've been there) they don't apply themselves to being good at something and always trying to improve, just pick up tricks, make connections with the right people, get something on other people, climb the ladder and stomp on anyone coming up too close behind you. The fact is it works better career wise than being the best at what you do. I tried that.

I never tried the other way, no matter how well I saw it working. It invariably involved hurting other people at least some of the time. And it's dishonest, deceiving others about your value and probably deceiving yourself in the end. Self-deception is the most effective kind. I'm no saint, and never pretended to be saintly. But hurting people, even when they deserve it, is hard for me to do. Not so much now at least in my attitude - there's plenty of people need to be hurt, deserve it and it would be better for society if they did get hurt when they need it. But I never could, even when a kid wanted to fight and wouldn't stand for me walking away and slugged me. I'm pretty tough, not big but wiry and fast, but I didn't like hitting people. So I'd put my head down and charge, get inside and get him down on the ground, hold him there until he gave up or the faculty intervened.

So Bill wasn't all that smart, but he came up harder than I did and started learning early. It seems Mr. Bryant (the bank president) had a soft spot for him. Maybe something in small town society. So Bill was the cashier and a vice president, and he knew banking fairly well after close to twenty years at it. Not that there was much to know - in those days it was fairly simple at small town bank levels, I took banking courses along with my accounting and it was no big deal. Cut and dried, learn the rules, don't break them. So Bill had a bookkeeping supervisor and a teller supervisor (the head teller - there's a joke in there) and pretty much as long as they knew what to do and did it the operation ran itself.

Bill smoked like a chimney as they say. He was probably doing two packs a day, rarely saw him without a cigarette. Drank like a fish too, preferably on someone else's dime. And free liquor was plentiful what with parties and various supposedly business functions. There was always an open bar. Not that we waited to get to where the bar was. There was a monthly meeting in Memphis for some kind of trade organization, I believe it was mid-southern banks or some such. Had a dinner and speaker somewhere way up in the UP building. That's Union Planters Bank, long gone into the merger mania after Garn-St Germain is it was called (demonstrating that Democrats and Republicans together can do more damage than either can individually) and the madness that followed.

There was a big building in downtown Memphis with a UP sign on top, you could see if for miles. Whether the bank owned it or used or not I don't remember but they had the NABAC meetings there, way up a dozen floors or more. The elevators had touch-sensitive buttons, you just touch the button to select it. More on that in a minute. We'd drive from Twin Falls, about fifty miles, to Memphis (stopping at a county line liquor store for some liquor which we immediately began drinking) and park and ride the elevators up to the meeting. Usually it was four of us, a couple of officers and a couple of regular employees. We drove the bank president's car, a big Olds 98 when 98's and Electras were seriously big. We'd stop at a liqour store and get some liquor and mixers - usually bourbon and Coke - and some cups and ice and start drinking so we'd be lit up a bit when we arrived. Digression coming up.

Some years later a group of people from Twin Falls went to a dog show in Memphis. Actually they began the journey to Memphis but it was interrupted, rudely one might say. It was three married couples, thirties to forties, in a small station wagon, seems it was one of those K-cars. Whether they had imbibed enough for the driver to be impaired is unknown but they met a guy who was seriously impaired. Dude from somewhere in Illinois driving an International Scout. A guy I or man may not more may not talk about later drove a Scout about that time and you didn't want to headonly collide with one in any car but especially a K-car. Three dead in the K-car, Scout driver arrested and charged with vehicular homicide. When it finally got to trial a year or more later he got off cheap on account of both drivers being impaired.

When we arrived at the UP building we'd go in and drink for an hour or so and schmooze with the other small-town bankers, and when it was time for the rubber chicken we'd grab a couple more drinks (except for me) and sit down. The meal dispensed with we listened to a motivational speaker or maybe a retired professional athlete, that sort of thing. And we were pretty well lit for sure by the time it was over. I just didn't drink because I knew someone had to drive, otherwise they'd have a drunk driving them home.

One night one of the gals, a married teller that was screwing one of the loan officers, thought it would be funny to just run her hand down the buttons in the elevator. The elevator stopped at a dozen or so floors before it got to the lobby. Elevator stopped about a dozen times and people in there were needing to piss real bad. Some years later she married the guy, after both had ditched their spouses. His wife seemed nice, and didn't seem to be doing any hanky-panky herself. The teller had a pretty up-and-down marriage, separated a time or two, husband was fooling around too, and finally they called it quits and she married her loan officer boyfriend. He had been banging his secretary the whole time but it didn't seem to bother her.

But back to Bill. He went on a lot of those trips, and others, and always got drunk. Screwed his secretary like most of them did. She was a decent-looking woman, boobs too big for my taste, nice figure of a little on the short side for that much padding. She smoked too, didn't get on with her husband but they wouldn't divorce for quite a few years yet. She palled around with another woman there, not especially good-looking. Nice figure, face just kind of ordinary, plain I guess they call it. Not ugly by any means. She was banging the younger trust officer, but it was an occasional thing for both as each had numerous other partners. Was I ever one of their others? Hell I was twenty years old and they were nowhere near to being undesirable.

Bill's wife apparently never had a clue. She worked as a bookkeeper for a local business, both members of a little Baptist church, not the big one the upper class Baptists went to. The upper class Baptists anyway, the high-dollar Methodists went to an equally big Methodist church and there was a fair number of Catholics. There weren't any prominent Pentecosts that I knew of, a Campbellite or two, and that was about it for big religion. We had a fairly large Jewish population for such a small town. I later learned that it was the result of Twin Falls being settled by Jewish people back in the 19th century. They went to synagogue in Memphis. As my generation and the next grew up most of them moved to Memphis or another big city, and the Jewish families are about gone. There used to be a little Episcopalian church here, tiny thing would only hold maybe a dozen people. Whether it was actually in use I don't remember.

Anyway Bill and his wife were Baptists. She seemed kind of fragile, real nice but seemed insecure. It's hard to believe in a little place like that she didn't find out some of it but you never know. Anyway Bill drank and whored and... oh yeah, gambled. I guess it started small, betting on sports or whatever - I never knew him to play cards. I noticed that when I went back to work there after four years he didn't drive his own car to work. The bank had a little El Camino, one of the late '70s or early '80s ones after they downsized and uglified them. It was a repo, once in a while a repossessed vehicle would be used as a bank vehicle for the employees to run errands in. Bill drove it to work and home after, and during the day if a vehicle was needed we would use it.

I should have figured something weird was up when I used it one day and happened to look behind the seat. The area behind the seat was full of McDonalds coffee cups. Like someone drank a cup of coffee and tossed the empty cup behind the seat. A lot of times. I figured it was Bill since he was the only one that drove it every day. Strange anyway. Word was getting around by then that he had a gambling problem on top of the drinking problem we already knew he had. Whether it had gotten to the point where he couldn't afford a car I don't know but the only car they had was the one his wife drove.

Dunno where this fits in the chronology but it was one of occasional insights I had. Being a VP of the bank Bill was in contact with the bigwigs, some of whom had a lot of money. Mostly it was the older ones that owned business like Western Auto and OTASCO I mentioned somewhere. Once or twice a year they'd come in and get about fifty thousand or so cash (this was before the government got so nosy) and go out to Vegas for a week or so. Guys coming in with all that money and going to lose most or all of it were put up free in fancy suites and ate in fancy restaurants free. What the whores cost I don't know but if that was out of their own pockets they had the dough. Bill got invited to go but had to have a line of credit for ten thousand or so at the hotel/casino they were staying at. So they called the bank to see if he was good for it. Bill comes in and tells the head bookkeeper if they get a call from Vegas to affirm his cash assets. He didn't have any money to speak of but his mother had a bit and he said to consider her deposits as his for the purpose. He didn't have fifty thousand to blow but he got to drink and do whateverall they did. Okey-dokey.

By the time I left there had been a couple of incidents that he might have had something to do with a couple of cash shortages, one of them the mysterious disappearance of a thousand dollars from the vault that couldn't be accounted for by a teller error. His behavior was kind of suspicious but nothing was said. A report to the FBI had to be done because of the amount and a couple of agents came in and interview everyone who had access to the vault. One of the tellers had just bought a new Trans-Am and the agent wanted to know how she paid for it. She showed him the payment book and told him "I haven't, yet." Her daddy was rich and could have bought it out of pocket if he wanted but she didn't want to. Sweet kid, a little wild when she was younger and didn't get old. Died tragically and young through no fault of her own. Anyway they grilled everybody and there was talk of polygraphs but I don't believe they got around to that.

I was glad I was never near the vault. I don't suppose they would have asked me if I was growing weed along the wooded banks of a remote waterway and selling it bulk and filling Miracle Whip jars with money. Bad enough when they changed the bill designs and took all the old bills out of circulation. Hundred a pound (undercutting the suppliers in Memphis - didn't realize then how much trouble that could have been) and nothing else to do with the money. Except dress up the Nova a bit under the hood. Put on aftermarket headers running out to Thrush oval mufflers, Edelbrock manifold with a Holley 390. All off-the-shelf bolt-on stuff, the Cragar SS wheels and wide Goodyears the only visible sign of anything out of the ordinary. Don't know how fast it would go as I never pushed past the 120 where the speedometer ended (it wasn't an SS model, they had different instrument panel with a 140 speedo) and didn't want to break something. The currency was converted to gold and silver long ago now so no problems there.

Anyway there was suspicion around Bill and some of his peers seemed to think he may have had something to do with it but nothing came of it. He continued to deteriorate, missed work a good bit and didn't seem to have his mind on it when he was there. I left the bank after not quite five years, went to work for the software company that provided their computer system. Over twice the pay and the environment was becoming rather unpleasant what with the usual office politics and all. Since the bank was a customer I talked to people there regularly and occasionally visited. About a year after I left I was in there doing a software upgrade and the bookkeeping department head told me Bill was in the hospital and near death.

One of Bill's responsibilities was dealing with personnel matters in the bookkeeping and teller departments. We didn't have many - you pretty much had to be a real misfit and just not be willing or able to adjust to get fired but occasionally we had one. They had one about the time I arrived, a young woman in the bookkeeping department, may have had some personality disorder or maybe just one of those that was going to be a problem and the parents weren't able or willing to deal with it and they grew up wrong. She was married to a guy who had some kind of government job and was an atheist. Her father was quite religious - Pentecost maybe - and her sister was quite normal. Good-looking too, something Melissa (the subject at hand) wasn't. I suspected her marrying him might have been rebelling against her father. She was a problem that was going to have to be dealt with sooner or later and Bill was agonizing over it for a while. Finally one day he buttonholed each of us and told us what was up and wanted to be sure if she tried to sue or something we could testify that she was a bad one. We didn't like her either so no problem there.

Firings, when they happened, were generally done on a Friday afternoon. Last day of the week, call the offender to a private room, generally the Mr. Harris (the chairman)'s office as he was never there, and deliver the bad news. There as an exit nearby that would allow an exit without doing a walk of shame across the lobby back to the operations area. On Fridays the bank was open until 6pm instead of closing at 3pm as in those days a lot of factory workers would be cashing paychecks. So the Friday came. There wasn't much to do during the extra three hours and we'd sit around talking. Bill had told us it was the day, and just before six he called the head bookkeeper and told her to send Melissa over to Mr. Harris' office. So she went, and we sat around waiting for it to be over.

It didn't go smoothly. Melissa and her atheist civil service husband only owned one car and he drove her to and from work. He came to pick he up and learned she had just been fired and wasn't happy, wanted to fight Bill. He was a skinny scrawny dude and Bill was bigger by a bit but no ways near athletic. Anyway former employee Melissa and her husband departed. Bill came in a few minutes later and said "I did it" like he'd been through some kind of ordeal. Maybe he had never had to fire anyone before.

He could act decent at times. We had a young black woman (they always had one black employee) who was having financial trouble. Most of the women who worked there had husbands who made decent money - they were just there for the extra money and insurance - but her husband was a deadbeat and spent any of her money he could get his hands on. Bill loaned her some money a few times, trying to help her out, but she eventually left. We actually had another black employee but he was the janitor's assistant. He was always around at times when the bank was closed and would catch the officers screwing the help, and he'd tell me about it, who and where and the position. He was a good kid.

I had left and was working at the software company that the bank used and visited occasionally. It was just a year or so after I left I was there and the head bookeeper told me Bill was in the hospital near death and wasn't expected to live more than a few days. Cancer. Bill was 47 when he died a week or so later, ten years younger than Joey's daddy. A few weeks later his wife sat in the car with the engine running and garage doors closed. They had left the small Baptist church some years earlier and went to the big fancy one with the hifalutin people. I don't know if it was to be with the high society people or because them little Baptist churches didn't hold with drinking and whoring. Probably gambling too, but even the small ones I've observed plenty of sexual impropriteies among members but drinking was absolutely not tolerated in most of the small ones. They used grape juice in coummunion. Okey-dokey.