She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [55]
There were bar fights, and Tracey had one car wreck after another. In the early years, she stayed with a lover briefly and then moved on. “She was like wow, so excited to be out there,” says Odom. The women went skinny dipping at Canyon Rim, a favorite spot in Barton Creek, and rented a cabin where they sunbathed nude. All from prosperous families, they didn’t flaunt or hide their sexuality. “Here were all these women out of the closet,” Tracey remembers. “It was wild, and at the same time family.”
The first of Tracey’s true loves was a beautiful young blonde named Joan, wildly feminine and straight. “It was an unusual thing. Tracey would make friends with straight women and they’d become attracted to her,” says Christie Bourgeois, a San Antonio professor and longtime friend. “They’d pursue her. They could make the leap with Tracey because she had a masculine quality.”
While she never announced her sexuality to her parents, she brought her lovers home. Her father treated them well, going so far as to tell Tracey he particularly liked one woman. “You have good taste,” he said. A few years later he died of leukemia. “He stayed with Mickey right until the end,” she says. “He loved her.”
When Mickey was sober, she was fun and lighthearted with Tracey’s partners. When she was drunk, she became malicious. After Tracey and her lover went to bed, the phone rang in her bedroom. “I know what you’re doing up there, and it’s sick,” her mother whispered in a raspy, drunk voice. “Lesbians,” she hissed. “You’re lesbians.”
When her mother died, Tracey didn’t mention it to anyone, as if nothing had happened. At a party, Odom asked her about Mickey.
“Still drinking?” she said.
“Mickey died,” Tracey answered. “Finally kicked the bucket.”
The official cause of death was pancreatic cancer, but the underlying root was alcoholism. By then Tracey had had an affair with another woman. When Joan found out, she left her. It was a pattern that would reemerge throughout Tracey’s life. She’d fall in love, win the woman, then drink or have an affair, convincing her lover to leave.
If she hurt others, Tracey was never as hard on them as she was on herself. While she may have seemed brash and sure on the outside, she was plagued by doubts, magnified by the voice that came and went inside her.
The first time Tracey tried to kill herself was in Houston in 1981, when she was just twenty-four. After she’d attempted to overdose, a friend checked her into a ten-week treatment program. When she emerged sober, she felt as she had years earlier—as if she didn’t fit in anywhere. Her friends were still drinking, and around them she bristled with self-doubt. AA gave her a home. Attending daily meetings for months, she kept her mind clear. “I was lonely, but I felt like I had my life back,” she says. “I felt lucky to be alive.”
Never having graduated at UT, she returned to college in the mid-eighties, this time to Texas A&M, where she completed a bachelor’s degree in wildlife and fishery science. For three years she worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service as a field biologist, first in Texas, then in Arizona. In November 1988 her old clique reunited, this time in Santa Fe for Thanksgiving. By then many had sobered up. It was a healthy weekend, full of hiking and horseback riding. One night, soaking in the hot tub, they talked about their favorite poems. When it was her turn, Tracey recited the first two lines from Langston Hughes’s “Dream Deferred,” a fierce warning about the danger of unrealized desire: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” she asked.
“It was classic Tracey, intense and bright,” says Odom. “Her friends loved her.”
In 1989, Tracey returned to Austin, where she signed on as a biologist with BCI—Bat Conservation International—a nonprofit