She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [56]
The small, furry, winged mammals became her cause. She worked for BCI for five years. Then, as she had with her lovers, Tracey made a mistake, and she was too stubborn to admit it and go on. “It was typical Tracey, adolescent boy in a woman’s body,” says someone she worked with.
Another woman remembers that Tracey interacted well with the women on the staff, but appeared uncomfortable with men. At the same time, she acted like “one of the boys.” One day, Tracey walked up to two men in a hallway—one of whom was her boss. She grabbed one of them from behind and said, “How’re they hanging?”
Neither man laughed.
In the days that followed, the entire BCI staff was ordered to attend a seminar on sexual harassment. Rather than apologize, Tracey became adamant about not having done anything wrong. She argued with her boss when he criticized her behavior, then circulated a memo he wrote her, detailing her transgressions, to the rest of the staff, asking them to join her in protest. “This was a minor thing, but she just blew it up,” says a coworker. “It wasn’t anything to lose a job over.”
In April 1994, Tracey was fired, the official reason written in her employment record was “for displaying hostile conduct toward upper management.”
It was a comedown for Tracey, who went to work as a receptionist in Alice’s salon. But just a year later opportunity again presented itself. In 1995, BookPeople, Austin’s largest independent bookseller, expanded to a new location, a three-floor store plus offices on Sixth and Lamar, next to another of the city’s institutions, the trendy Whole Foods Market. Tracey hired on as manager of the third floor, which had sections on spirituality, health, philosophy, and men’s and women’s studies. She was dedicated, working long hours, and intensely interested. But not all was well. That year— after fourteen years of sobriety—she suddenly began drinking. She’d say later that it was a form of self-medication for the depression that had stalked her off and on since she’d been a child. Her friends called AA and asked the counselors to conduct an intervention. A petite straight woman, a hairdresser named Zan Ray, responded.
The intervention went off as planned, and Tracey was soon sober again, and determined to remain so. Her relationship with Zan Ray might have ended there, but in July of that year Ray arrived at the Austin airport after attending a trade show, and her husband wasn’t there. Zan called Tracey, who picked her up and gave her a ride home. When the two women walked inside the house, they found his body. Days earlier, he’d overdosed. The coroner ruled it a suicide.
The discovery shook both Ray and Tracey. Months later Becky Odom saw Tracey at a party. “How terrible for Zan,” said Tracey. “Suicide, it’s just unfair to the people left behind.”
At the time, Tracey was in a relationship with a bright, engaging woman. Yet that didn’t stop her from having an affair with Ray. “I think the mutual experience brought us together,” Tracey says. “We were there for each other, and it became more than that.”
In the months that followed, Tracey and Ray lived together. But, again, she couldn’t maintain the relationship. By late 1998 she was drinking again. As it had in the past, the alcohol opened the door where she kept her demons at bay. The voice returned.
“I would try to drown it out with alcohol,” she says. “I just wanted it to stop.”
On the evening of September 16, 1998, Tracey was anxious and lonely. She drove to a convenience store in a rough Austin neighborhood, where men milled around outside and cars drove by without stopping.