Tim Hurley, 1954-2016

Almost a year ago, my friend Tim Hurley and I were on Michigan Public Radio. I don’t think I ever posted the story here, chiefly for the very Phil Christman reason that I hate my speaking voice, but secondarily because I felt conflicted about the framing of the story, in which I am presented as a mentor to a man twenty-four years older than me, a man who has lived through things that would grind me like a pestle. I’m not saying this as a criticism of the reporter, Jennifer Guerra; she did a great job with the materials handed to her, and one of those materials was the fact that Tim and I met through an artistic-mentorship program sponsored by the Prison Creative Arts Project. He was a “returning citizen,” as the current jargon has it, who needed someone to help him continue the writing he had begun to practice more seriously during his last prison bit. I was that someone.

Going into the “mentorship,” I think we both had impostor syndrome, I as the MFA grad who hasn’t published a novel (still true, alas) and he as … well, as Tim Hurley; as a man whose most marked characteristic, in the time I knew him, was humility. It is utterly characteristic of Tim that when I told him about some of the misgivings mentioned above, he looked surprised, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a man who taught me as much as Tim did to present himself in public—and he repeatedly uses this language in the interview—as my student. I learned a great deal from Tim, who quickly became a friend and trusted confidant. I could go on for hours about the things I learned from him, and, since his spiritual home in recent years was a Vineyard church in Berkley, MI, I suspect that his funeral will involve—as befits him—a rich and educational and emotional and perhaps not-immaculately-structured outpouring of stories of things people have learned from Tim. (You can read some samples of his Hunter-Thompson-meets-Henri-Nouwen prose over here, and I recommend you do so. He had a great autobiography in him.) He was a living museum of late-’60s Detroit rock, a personal friend of the MC5’s Wayne Kramer, a man with detailed memories of seeing Iggy on stage when that still meant something. He worked in wastewater treatment for the city of Warren for many years, and had fascinating insights into the daily politics that keep a city running. (A good chunk of the autobiography that I wish he were here to edit together would have been the most interesting essay about wastewater treatment ever written. Seriously, what John McPhee did for oranges, he was going to do for water.) He had been in a cult. And he knew the insanity, self-deception, and single-mindedness of addiction, as Holmes knew Moriarty, because he struggled with it and had often lost to it. Which means he knew the human heart. Addiction is a disease, but it’s also a kind of caricature of the human condition, which is to be bored by what saves us and worshipfully abject toward the things that destroy us.

When I try to summarize what I most learned from Tim, though, it’s this: he showed me that humility can be a kind of passion, a militant rather than a passive virtue. We think of humility—at least I do—as something calm; Tim’s humility was jumpy, restless, agitated, a continuous and exhausting struggle to keep pace with and outwit his addict’s ego and capacity for self-delusion. He knew that a relapse would kill him, and he knew that only a constant searching and fearless moral inventory would keep him alive. He monitored himself, his relationships, and—yes—his friends for any signs of the kind of bullshit that would lead him to forget his Higher Power, even for a moment, because a moment was all it would take. He was less afraid of confrontation than anybody I know. If Tim walked up to you and said, “Look, something’s been on my heart,” the next words might be a compliment so sincere and heartfelt that it would sustain you for a day, or it might be him exhaustively and exhaustingly misunderstanding some side comment in an email. He was the type of person who left long, indignant, passionate comments on your Facebook wall that left you more confused than ever about what had upset him. But you always worked it out, because even if Tim picked nits, he didn’t pick fights. He simply wanted no bullshit in his relationship with you. He wanted for those he loved what he wanted for himself—to not be killed by the lies and the self-destructiveness that wait around every corner.

I’ve never seen a person work harder to remember his utter dependence on grace than Tim Hurley. I would be a better person if I could tear away the carapace of self-conscious irony that sustains me most days and be more like him. No luck yet. I love the Stooges, like Tim did, but my cognitive style is a good deal more Bowie than Iggy. Then again, in extreme circumstances, even Bowie could pray. For my dear friend Tim, my prayer flies like a word on a wing.