I think I can make it, Dick told Darlene. And he did.
The End
Chuck Trickle doesn’t want to talk much more about the suicide. He’s on the phone from a water park.
“It’s not the right thing to do, and I’m upset the way he did it, but you know, I wasn’t in his shoes,” Chuck says.
“Now they’re turning on the music,” he says, changing the subject.
“That’s my story anyway.” The music gets louder.
“The park is closing in 15 minutes,” he says.
“Anyway, that’s about it. Is there anything else you want to know here?”
Tom Roberts says he struggles with Dick Trickle’s suicide. So does Father Grubba. John Close, who partied with Dick Trickle in Stoughton, is saddened by it. Humpy is too. Kenny Wallace put a Dick Trickle sticker in the cockpit of his dirt car in memory of Trickle. But he had to take it off. It bothered him too much. He had a hard time driving.
Kenny Wallace tries to justify it like the others. He doesn’t agree with suicide, but he’s not going to question it. Dick had been through a lot over the last couple of years, he said.
Kenny has been talking about Dick Trickle for about two hours when he stops for a second. “You know, this has been like therapy for me,” he says. His voice sounds tired. “I want to make sure you understand that he was a good man,” he says. “I want to make sure you know the full story.
“Don’t you fuck it up,” he says.
So he tells me what was in the envelope.
There were medical records inside. Computerized forms. Test results. Findings from doctors. Charts. They detailed a day-by-day, doctor-by-doctor struggle with pain.
Dick Trickle chain-smoked for his entire life. But he didn’t have cancer. Aside from some stents, his heart was healthy.
To understand the end, maybe you have to go understand the beginning, way before racing, back to 1949, when Dick was eight years old. He was playing tag with a cousin up in the rafters of the house his uncle was building in Rudolph when he fell and broke his hip. He dragged himself home, and his mother took him to the hospital. He spent six months there, and missed a year of school. Doctors weren’t sure if he’d ever walk again.
Once he got home, he wore a cast on his leg for months before he and his brothers got tired of the thing and cut it off. He’d walk again, but always with a slight limp.
In 2007, 58 years after the fall, that hip needed to be replaced. The limp was becoming too painful. He also had stents put in, doctors put him on blood thinners, and told him he ought to stay off the track. In 2009, he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel he still felt good enough to race, but he admitted to feeling the wear and tear from years of bumping cars and hitting walls. “I’m paying for some of my good times,” he said, “but at the same time, I’m getting better and better with old age.”
But sometime after, only his family knows when, he began feeling a stabbing pain two inches under his left nipple. Dick Trickle didn’t cuss all that often, but when the pain became too much he started to really let the words fly. His phone conversations got shorter because he just couldn’t go on. He went to doctor after doctor, looking for help, for years. We can’t help, they told him, because we can’t find the pain.
The problem with pain is that most doctors need to know what’s causing it before they can treat it. Prescribe the wrong drug, and you might mask the real problem. Prescribe the drug to the wrong person, and they might abuse it. One study found that chronic pain increases the risk of suicide by 32 percent. It can leave people desperate. It can change people.
After the pain started, Dick Trickle stopped smoking. But by that point, he was already dealing with another kind of pain too.
In 2001, Vicky’s daughter Nicole, Trickle’s granddaughter, was on the way home from volleyball practice. She stopped for gas at a minimart and was pulling back onto the road when a pickup truck smashed into her side of the car. She died instantly. Dick never talked about it with Kenny all that much. That wasn’t surprising. “You are never going to get a feeling out of Dick Trickle,” he said. Still, Kenny knew he was grieving. Other friends said he never got over her death.
They buried Nicole at Forest Lawn. Her death came just three years after his nephew, Chuck’s son Chris, died after being shot in Las Vegas. Police there have never solved the crime. Chris was an up-and-coming race car driver. He called Dick for advice all the time.
“You never know what a man is thinking,” Kenny said. Maybe it was grief. Maybe it was pain. Maybe it was a combination of both.
Race car drivers don’t like to talk about pain. It shows vulnerability. And besides, it might keep them off the track. Dick Trickle endured a lifetime of crashes and hard hits. He wasn’t a complainer. But he’d been through a lot of pain. His chest. His hip. His granddaughter. His nephew. Dick Trickle was always a guy who looked ahead. He didn’t dwell on the past. He always raced so he could race again. But there were no more races. Ahead, all Dick saw was suffering.