50 Years, 50 Stories – Richard Lowe

This week’s “50 Years, 50 Stories” installment comes from Richard Lowe, who works for Imagine!’s CORE/Labor Source department. In the piece, Richard shares his memories of Billy Montgomery, who received services from Imagine! and was something of a local celebrity and movie star.

Intrigued? Read more below.

Remembering Billy

By Richard Lowe

 

Billy Montgomery (seated), surrounded by family and friends in 2009.

“HellomynameisBillyMontgomeryhaveyouseenthemovie “Rain Man”? Guess who’s in it? Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, and MEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!”
 
If you were with Imagine! before 2009, chances are good that you heard this many, many times. I first heard it in the Art Room of the Dairy Center when I came to observe CORE classes the week before I was hired in 2007. Billy shuffled over and clobbered me with a barrage of verbiage. I said to him, pointing at my head: “You see this [imaginary] swarm of bees buzzing around me? That’s my brain trying to listen to you!” And he laughed as loud and free as I’ve ever seen a human being laugh. I would hear this laugh and every other emotion at full volume many times over the next two years.
 
One of Billy’s defining life moments came when he acted in “Rain Man.” He had done many shows before: a soap opera, some plays, commercials, and he deeply valued the lessons he learned as an actor. Know your lines. Know your cues. Hit your mark. Be on time. We bonded as performers, for this is what I did for twelve years before joining Imagine!. When he was becoming more frightened due to his rapidly progressing dementia, one of the only things which would calm him was putting my arm around his shoulder and whispering, “Do you know your lines?” “Are you ready for rehearsal?”
 
“YES!” and he pulled it together.
 
There are keys to working well with individual Imagine! consumers, and this was a big one for Billy: He did not respond well (to say the least) to being told “no.” He loved collecting magazines; from every bookstore, newsstand, and convenience store we visited, so I watched him as he did his thing to make sure nobody was getting hurt, then returned them when he fell asleep in the van. I would match eyes with a store employee as he marched out with $100 worth of “Vogue” and “Esquire” and “People” and mouth “I’ll be right back,” and they were always understanding. Billy and I came to love one another like brothers. Towards the end he called me Jay.
 
He changed from loving and charming most of the time to scared and angry. Some staff would try to tell him “no,” and he would punch and yell at them. I learned to take “no” out of the equation and began practicing what I think of as “Behavioral Aikido”, which is offering no resistance to a target behavior, switching the context and praising the new [appropriate] behavior. Affection trumped all in Billy’s world, and he returned it to me a thousand fold.
 
Billy was on a mission: collect magazines, pepper a stranger with questions, ask for Skyline Chili (from Cincinnati), say “Guess what? Guess what? Guess what?”

I wasn’t married then, but he asked me so many times I eventually just said “yes” to stop that train of obsession. Because of that response, many I worked with at CORE didn’t know if I was married or not. So you know, I got married on February 5, 2013, for the first time. Billy would have loved that.

He was at my Louisville morning pick-up. From there I'd drive him and a few others into Boulder, which took about half an hour. Billy hated seatbelts, and was always unclicking his, so he had to sit in the front seat (a sly manipulation?) where he'd hit me with the same questions I'd heard the day before, and the day before and . . .

"Guess what?"

"What?"

"Why don't you, and me, and Jay, and Nathan . . . just the guys . . . go out tonight and drink Pepsi?"

"Well, I already have plans for tonight . . ."

"Let's do it!"

"Let’s look at next week."

"OK."

It was always "next week", and that seemed to satisfy him, or at least get him to change the subject. Now I wish I had called Jay and Nathan and arranged a few Pepsi drinking bashes with Billy. I miss him terribly, but my life is far richer for having shared one leg of my journey with the resplendent soul, the irrepressible, the one and only Billy Montgomery.

Are you interested in sharing your story for “50 Years, 50 Stories?” If so, contact Caroline Siegfried at caroline@imaginecolorado.org or 303-926-6405. We’d love to hear from you!