William Nealy (1953–2001) wasn’t everyone’s idea of a role model. He was a river hippie, high school dropout, long-haired rock-and-roll drummer, subculture cartoonist, and impenitent devotee of alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and narcotics. He lived on the edge of everything. To Daniel Wallace, however, he was flat-out magical. One of Wallace’s earliest glimpses, appropriately, was of Nealy in flight: leaping twenty-five feet into a swimming pool from the roof of Wallace’s Birmingham, Alabama, home. Watching the teenage Nealy surface in the sloshing pool and, a memoir-slash-exegesis-slash-tender, angry elegy. He would come to think of Nealy—his older sister’s boyfriend, when they met; later her husband—as “the child of James Dean, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Keith Richards, Satan, G.I. Joe, and…Clint Eastwood”: a heady DNA combo that the young Wallace—and the adult Wallace too—longed to clone, or at least mimic.
