Creem Magazine and the Curve at Williams
It’s difficult to convey the connection I feel between my troubled cousin Paul and a magazine I was reading the night he died in a horrific accident. The magazine was Creem, and the place Paul met his end was the long slow curve at the city of Williams on Interstate 5 in Northern California.
Paul’s father abandoned his wife and three children when Paul was four. Early on, Paul found the wrong circle at school, and went on to become a drug-obsessed and functioning alcoholic. Rehabs and drunk driving arrests became the litany of his life—he once nose-dived my mother’s Buick Riviera into a river, and survived.
On the night in question, in June of 1985, at 25, he didn’t survive a drunk-driving accident. No one else was hurt.
I was in bed with my wife in Castro Valley that night, reading by a bedside lamp after she’d fallen asleep. Creem, along with Circus and Hit Parader were my periodicals of choice in the mid-80s; I have a file cabinet full of them in my basement. I was reading an interview with Paul McCartney, who talked about his latest solo album, Give My Regards To Broad Street, a compilation of past hits and a few new songs. The article ran long, and some history of The Beatles was discussed. At one point in the piece, the “Paul is Dead” controversy came up, which Paul laughed off.
Upon reading the phrase, a wave of fatigue came over me, and a feeling of unease. I set the magazine down. Several hours later, around four a.m., the bedside phone rang. It was my father, who asked, “Is everything all right?” It was ominous for him to say that at such an hour, and I knew something was wrong. My wife stirred in the bed beside me.
“I’ve just had a call from Aunt Joan. There was an accident. Paul is dead.”
I hung up, told my wife, who hadn’t met Paul, and turned off the light. I knew Paul well (the eldest son of my mother’s sister Barbara) and worried about him. I’d picked him up after a court-ordered rehab stint at Serenity Lane. The first thing he asked upon release was, “Do you have a joint?”
The Colusa County coroner would later fill in the details. Paul had rolled his Ford Tempo on the curve at Williams. It had landed right side up on the median between the south and northbound lanes. If Paul had stayed in the vehicle, he would’ve survived again, but he got out, and in what is believed to be a confused attempt to get to the highway shoulder, was struck by a northbound sedan. He went through the windshield, missing the couple in the front seat, and landed in the back seat with a ruptured aorta.
The was an empty vodka bottle on the back seat floorboard of the Tempo. Paul’s body was returned to the Bay Area for burial, along with the leather coat he was wearing, with blood splatters on the inside lapel. The coat hung in his mother’s closet until her death in 2015.