Walter & Me

by Eddie Payton

  the air, and he scored one rushing touchdown. Just another day at the office for Sweetness. But that Monday wouldn’t be just another day of any sort for Walter and me. While I was recovering from practice, the phone rang. I ignored my tired legs and got up to answer it. My brother-in-law was on the other end and he wasn’t calling to see if I was doing all right after the Broncos beatdown. “Hey, Eddie,” he said, “I have some bad news for you.”

  That’s not something you ever want to hear when you pick up the phone, but I was curious. “Oh yeah?” I asked. “What’s up?”

  “It’s your father. He…uh…he died.”

  I don’t think I even believed it at first, but I knew my brother-in-law wouldn’t be telling me this if it wasn’t true. Shoot, even Walter—prankster extraordinaire himself—wouldn’t joke about something as serious as this. “Whoa, whoa,” I responded before steadying myself. “What!?!” Then I was silent. I didn’t know what to say after that. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. I was devastated. It felt as though I had died. After all, I was Daddy’s look-alike. Bud even said recently that Daddy looked a lot like I do today. “[You] were even the same size,” Bud added, “and really mirrored each other.” I found myself just holding the phone, wondering what had happened and how I was going to deal with losing Daddy. Then I stopped thinking about myself and started talking again. “How’s Momma?” I asked my brother-in-law.

  “She’s all right, man,” he said, not telling me the truth. Momma was right there with him and snatched the phone. Of course, I expected her to be upset since it had just happened and all, but she was more than upset. Momma was nothing short of hysterical. Even angry. “Eddie,” she yelled into the phone, “they killed your daddy!”

  I didn’t know what to do with what I was hearing. I had no idea how to respond to Momma’s words. What did she mean by that? They killed him? Who killed him? The room was spinning, and then my brother-in-law got the phone back.

  “Hey, man,” he said.

  I pulled myself together and got the room standing still again. “Look, I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said. “Just take care of Momma.”

  I hung up the phone and immediately called my brother. Walter had already gotten the same call from my brother-in-law, so he’d heard the bad news. He was as shocked and unprepared for it as I was. We spent a few moments in stunned silence together on the phone, both standing in the shadow of our fallen father. Walter broke the silence by saying Bud was already making plans to pick us both up. You could always count on Bud, especially in times like that.

  The next 24 hours were sort of crazy for me. They all ran together in a big blur. I got up in the morning and went to the Chiefs’ headquarters to tell coach Marv Levy that my father had died and that I needed to go take care of family business. He said that was fine, of course, and that if I got back before our last game of the season to just let him know, or I could just join the team in Seattle for that final game. He also said if I needed to miss the game altogether, he would understand. It was great to have a coach who understood what was most important in this life. Football is football, and family is family. The two don’t even compare. And we weren’t just talking about family here. We were talking about Daddy.

  I’d had uncles and aunts who’d died before, but Daddy was the first immediate family member I ever lost. My daddy, Peter Payton, was gone. How could it be? He wasn’t more than 52 or 53. That’s just way too young!

  Now, I’m not a drinker and wasn’t back then, either, but I needed a drink to cope with all that was happening. I called a friend of mine because I just needed to be around another human being while I waited for Walter and Bud to pick me up the next day. My friend came right over, and I broke down. She fixed me a drink, and it definitely helped ease the pain a little. I got woozy and fell asleep (that drink was probably the only way I would’ve been able to sleep at all that night), and got up the next morning haunted by Momma’s words once again. I kept hearing her voice over and over in my head. “They killed your daddy.” I was desperate for answers, and soon Bud would give them to me.

  I really can’t say enough nice things about Bud Holmes and how much he cared for all of us Paytons like we were his family. As soon as he found out Daddy had died, he dropped what he was doing and flew his personal plane, at his expense, out on that Tuesday to pick up Walter in Chicago. Then they came to Kansas City to pick me up. During the flight, Walter and I didn’t say much. We just let Bud explain as much as he could about what happened. Bud had already started his investigation and talked to a number of people the night before, finding out as much as he could about what went down. Though he didn’t yet know how Daddy died, he told us what he did know.

  Daddy and Momma had a beautiful little garden about three miles up the street from their house on a small piece of property they’d bought. They called it their “plantation” and simply adored the place. Daddy worked at it real hard and spent as much time as he could tending to that garden. Bud explained to us that on his way to check on the garden on Monday, Daddy stopped by a small service station and got himself some beer. He was planning on going to the garden and drinking a beer or two while he worked. Just like a lot of other normal guys, Daddy’s four favorite things (outside of Momma and us kids) were hunting, gardening, fishing, and, yes, drinking a few beers every now and again. He mainly liked to drink on the weekends with his friends, just sitting in a rocking chair and shootin’ the breeze. But he wasn’t a drunk by any stretch of the imagination. He just had a beer or two every now and then, and that’s what he had that day while he worked that beloved garden of his. Just a beer or two.

  On his way back home from the garden, Daddy must’ve noticed he was low on gas, because he pulled up to that same station to fill up. He’d gone inside to pay and talked to the girl at the counter, who later said he was slurring his words. Everybody knew my daddy, and this girl could tell something was off about him that day. She figured he’d been drinking too much and later said she told him, “Now, Pete, you need to go on home.” From what Bud was telling us, Daddy staggered around a little bit after that, got in his truck, and promptly backed into another vehicle. The people hanging around the station were obviously surprised by that and started asking Daddy things like, “Pete, what’s the matter with you?” Then someone called the police.

  Daddy didn’t know what was going on, and when the police arrived, they immediately thought he was drunk. Some of the folks there that day told Bud that the police said to Daddy, “Pete, you better let us take you down to the station. You don’t need to be hurting anybody or hurting yourself, and you know you’re not capable of driving.” Daddy stumbled around some more before collapsing to the pavement. The cops were convinced at that point that Daddy was stone-cold drunk, so they picked him up, put him in the police car, and took him down to jail. They didn’t give him a sobriety or breathalyzer test or anything like that. They thought they’d seen enough and didn’t think they needed to mess with all that, so they just took Daddy to jail. Well, Bud said once they got him to jail, Daddy had a seizure. Eventually, the police took him to the hospital, and then he died. That was all he knew at that point.

  What he didn’t know was that earlier in the day, Momma was driving home from Chicago where she’d been to watch the Bears play against Green Bay. Daddy had yet to stop by the service station where he’d begin his fatal downward spiral. Pam had previously begged Daddy to go to the game with Momma, because we didn’t like Momma traveling on her own, but he didn’t want to go. Like I said, he simply loved his garden and really just wanted to spend his Sunday out there working it. So, Pam made sure that our close family friends, Bertha Brewer and Johnny Hale, went with Momma to the game.

  On their way home from Chicago, Momma’s main concern was making it back to Jackson by 9:00 pm Monday night. As you know, Walter had a good game, and Momma was hoping to catch the news on WGN (a nationally broadcast Chicago station) so she co
uld watch the highlights from the Bears game. She was getting frustrated because, according to her, Johnny was driving too slowly. He was just kind of taking it easy, not fast enough for Momma’s liking, so she made him pull over so she could take the wheel and get a move on it. Hey, what can I say? That’s our momma! Where do you think Walter and I got all that get-up-and-go? Anyway, thanks to Momma’s NASCAR-worthy driving, they made it to a friend’s house in Jackson in time to watch the news. After she saw her baby boy on TV running all over the Packers again, Momma, Bertha, and Johnny got back in the car and went on to Columbia. As soon as they got home, Daddy’s sister came running out of the house to meet them. It was late, so they knew something was wrong. Daddy’s sister was frantically repeating, “They put Peter in jail!”

  Momma was quite surprised to hear that, to say the least. “Put him in jail?” Momma asked.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” my daddy’s sister said.

  “For what?”

  “They say he was drunk.”

  Momma immediately knew there had to have been a mistake. “Oh no, he couldn’t have been drunk. I know him better than that,” Momma said. “I’ve never seen him drunk. No, no, he wasn’t drunk.”

  Daddy’s sister already knew that about Daddy, but she wasn’t sure what to think about what the police had told her. “Well, they say that he was staggering and couldn’t talk,” she continued. “When they were taking him to the police station…when he went to get out of his truck, they say he fell out onto the ground, and they think he was drunk, so they carried him out and put him in jail. They put him in jail, Alyne!”

  Well, Momma wasn’t convinced. She knew her husband better than anyone, and he wasn’t a drunk. Johnny got out of the car and stayed with Daddy’s sister while Momma and Bertha jumped back in to go downtown to the police station to sort it all out. When Momma Payton showed up, she wanted some answers…and right quick. The police told Momma that Daddy had indeed been staggering and that they just locked him up for his own protection. Momma started right in with them and said, “No, no, no, he wasn’t drunk, he couldn’t have been drunk. He doesn’t drink that much. He might’ve had a beer or two maybe, but that’s all!”

  Just like everyone else in the area, the police all knew and respected Momma and Daddy, so they listened to Momma and went to the cell where Daddy was lying on the bed to see if maybe he was coherent enough at that point to talk. Well, he wasn’t. The police arrived at his cell to discover he’d had a seizure. They came scrambling back out to get a patrol car and see Momma and said they were taking Daddy to the hospital. Momma was floored. The hospital? What was going on? Momma knew at that point that something very wrong was afoot. She said they then loaded Daddy into a patrol car and took him to the hospital. Momma and Bertha got back into their car and actually beat the police to the hospital. I guess Momma was driving. Well, that trip to the hospital would be the last trip Daddy would take alive, and Momma didn’t even get to see him.

  “We got out there,” Momma remembered, “and they wouldn’t even let us sit in the waiting room. They said, ‘He ain’t made it here yet. We’re looking for a sick patient and y’all can’t stay in here.’ So, they moved us to another room. I think it’s because they knew he was already going to be dead when they brought him through there, and didn’t want me seeing him. They never did let me see him.”

  So, after a little while of waiting in the other room, one of the black policemen came in and told Momma that Daddy had passed on. I think that officer knew even back at the station that Daddy was already well on his way to being dead. Momma stayed at the hospital until 2:00 am, waiting and hoping and praying that somehow they’d be able to revive him. The doctor working on Daddy later said he did everything he could but that, in the end, there really was nothing he could do. He told Momma that night that Daddy probably had a heart attack. He was gone.

  The next day, Bud took Walter and me to the hospital, along with a board-certified pathologist he knew. Bud went in to observe the autopsy on Daddy while Walter and I waited outside. Everybody was assuming he’d had a heart attack, because of what that doctor told Momma. There was no indication of any outside trauma or anything, so that’s what they thought it was. Turned out to be a guess, though, and not a very good one. Bud said they opened Daddy’s chest, pulled out all the vital organs, and got into the heart. They started dissecting it and looked closely at all the tissue. “They couldn’t believe how clean his arteries were, like an 18-year-old or something,” Bud said of the doctors’ response to seeing Daddy’s heart. They were just amazed by it. There was no problem with the aorta or the pulmonary arteries going out to the lungs or anything at all. Everything was perfectly clear. Once they realized it couldn’t have been a heart attack, Bud said they were going back and forth with each other, finally agreeing the only things they thought it could be was some kind of a stroke or some issue in his brain. What Bud said happened next is a little on the gross side, so you might want to skip ahead a little if you don’t have a strong stomach for this sort of thing.

  “So, [the coroner] cut the top of the skull,” Bud described, “and lifted off the skull plate and looked at the brain. He started slicing, and sure enough there was a big ol’ thing in there about fist-sized, bigger than a goose egg. It was an aneurysm, which I was told is a weakening of the walls of the artery that enlarge until they basically explode or start leaking. When they got into the aneurysm, there were a bunch of white, wormlike things. They said it was protein. It takes so many hours or days for it to build up like that, and then it just bursts or leaks.”

  The doctor told Bud that Daddy had developed a small leakage deep in his brain. It slowly grew and grew over time and reached its peak on that Monday. I later learned that the symptoms of a brain aneurysm often make it seem like a person is dealing with other problems, such as intoxication or diabetes. For Daddy, it started putting pressure on the sensory nerves that go to the tongue, the mouth, and control a person’s equilibrium. That made it so he couldn’t really talk, and it caused him to lose his balance and stagger around like he did in front of the cops. It gave him the appearance of being drunk. So, Momma was right and the cops were wrong. Daddy wasn’t drunk. It was a brain aneurysm.

  Walter and I were just outside the autopsy room while Bud was in there getting all the info. We didn’t want to see them cutting open our daddy. Once the autopsy was over, though, Bud asked us to come on inside and look at Daddy’s brain so we could see the evidence for ourselves. He didn’t want there to be any question in our minds as to what had happened, about how and why Daddy died. We’d all been hearing rumors, and Bud wanted to put those to rest, at least for us. Neither of us wanted to go inside, so we refused the offer. No way did I want to remember my father that way. We accepted what the professionals had found. It took Momma a little longer to acknowledge it. She was hurting and confused, and people were telling her all sorts of things.

  Some of the people in town were saying things like, “Well, ya know, they let him die in there. They abused him and killed him.” But given what happens with a brain aneurysm, I really don’t think anyone could’ve done anything for him. Daddy could’ve died in the booking cell, in the holding cell, or on the way to the jail. It was entirely up to the progression of the aneurysm and had nothing to do with the cops. Still, as seems to happen a lot, people who didn’t really know anything and who weren’t privy to the facts just speculated about what had happened to Daddy. People were telling Momma they killed him in jail, and she was just clinging to whatever she could. Hell, people to this day still think he died in jail. He was dying in jail, yes, but I’m convinced he actually died on the way to the hospital.

  We had all sorts of people saying we should’ve sued the city. But when Walter and I found out the nuts and bolts of the issue after that autopsy, we knew we weren’t going to be suing anyone. We accepted the facts and moved on to grieving. Of course, that’s not to say little things didn’t
creep into our minds here and there. I mean, even when you know something for sure and you can understand what happened, when you’re talking about losing your daddy or someone close like that, you always have a few what-ifs that come along. You know, what if they’d gotten him to the doctor faster? What if they hadn’t just jumped to thinking he was drunk? What if they’d given him a breathalyzer or something to be sure? I mean, there are a lot of what-ifs that will just drive you crazy if you let them, but I’ve had to just look past them. Listen, Columbia is my hometown, and I grew up with the people there, and I knew most of them, black and white. They’re all good people down there. Walter and I were a source of pride for the folks of Columbia, too, so the feeling was mutual. They all knew our parents. Even the cops did. No one would have killed our daddy.

  Momma wasn’t able to accept the facts as easily as I did, and she still harbors a few what-ifs about the whole thing to this very day. That’s why when she goes back to see some friends, to her, it’s sort of like Columbia’s not her hometown anymore. I moved her out to Jackson in the later part of 1980 so she could be closer to my sister Pam and me, and she eases on down to Columbia every once in a while to visit for a wedding or a funeral. But she doesn’t really like going back. I guess there’s still an edge from what happened with Daddy, and she just can’t kick those what-ifs. But hey, that’s okay. If anyone in this world is allowed to have questions about what happened to my daddy, it’s my momma. I mean, Peter Payton was our father, but he was the love of Momma’s life.

  Momma has certainly been able to deal with it better and better over time. She recently shared: “I had five doctors say that if the police had carried Pete straight to the hospital, he wouldn’t have lived anyway. When that aneurysm hit him, it covered his brain, and that’s what killed him. He had a brain aneurysm, and he had it for a while. It just all of a sudden came on when he was trying to get home. It was just his time. The Lord called him to his real home.”