“The first time I remember seeing Celeste, she was smiling at me,” says Tracey, shaking her head sadly. “It was like instantly there was something between us.”
They may have been drawn together by a similar history, painful childhoods that left scars so deep they could never heal. Or perhaps it was something else Celeste recognized in Tracey that day. Some said Celeste had a talent for understanding the intrinsic traits that defined a person, then using them to her advantage. In Tracey, she’d discovered a woman who was her polar opposite and, in a strange way, her perfect match.
As a child, Tracey had been horribly violated, and someone she should have been able to count on to protect her did nothing to save her. The experience shaped her, leaving her as jagged inside as shards of glass from a shattered mirror. Her pain defined how she saw the world: as a collage of predators and victims. In the parlance of psychiatry, Tracey became what she’d most needed but never had as a child—a caretaker. Celeste had spent her life looking for someone to take care of her. Tracey cared more about those she loved than about herself, and she would do anything, absolutely anything, to protect them.
“I grew up in a beautiful house, and, from the outside, it looked like a good life. My father was successful, and we lived well. I loved my father. He was a kind, gentle person. My mother … my mother was …” she says pausing. “My mother was the problem.”
The road that led Tracey at the age of forty-one to St. David’s Pavilion and Celeste was a long and tortuous one, beginning when she was growing up in what should have been a privileged world, as the only daughter of a successful attorney, who specialized in international tax law, and his sociable and seemingly carefree wife. When Tracey was born, in May 1957, Kenneth and Mickey Tarlton lived in Ridglea, a posh Fort Worth golf course/country club community, and already had two other children, both boys, eight and ten years old. “I was an afterthought,” Tracey says. “A surprise.”
Of her parents, Mickey was the more gregarious, playing cards with friends, often at the country club, where she dangled a Herbert Taryton cigarette from one hand and held a drink in the other. A stocky blonde with a poodle cut and a craggy face, she resembled Rosemarie on the old Dick Van Dyke Show. In some ways, Mickey was like Celeste, a mom who treated the neighborhood teens like friends. She wanted the teenagers to like her and often slipped them cigarettes, a drink, or the keys to her car.
At the country club, she told the bartender, “George, I want some sour mash. My doctor says I can have all the sour mash I want, but only sour mash.”
“Mickey was an alcoholic,” says Tracey. “And a mean drunk.”
Later, Mickey would be diagnosed as manic depressive. Self-medicating with alcohol, she spiraled from euphoria to the deepest of depression. At times she couldn’t lift her head from the pillow, at other times she was giddy with happiness, and in between there were horrific outbursts of anger that cowered not only her children but her husband. “She’d yell and scream, just shriek at us,” says Tracey. “She verbally abused us, telling us we were nothing, that we would never be any good.”
With her daughter, Mickey did something else: She sexually abused her.
“Sometimes, I think the verbal abuse was worse,” says Tracey. “But the other is, just, well, something I still find it difficult to talk about.”
Whether or not her father knew of the sexual abuse, he knew about the constant verbal battering Mickey administered to his children, and he did nothing to stop it. In fact, he, too, was one of Mickey’s favorite targets. “Mickey would be drunk by the time Dad got home,” says Tracey. “She would just lay into him, and instead of making her stop, doing something, he’d go into the den and read.”
With an abusive mother and a vacant father, home became a place Tracey dreaded. She escaped in books, spending every moment she could reading in her room. Mickey cooked dinner early and then was too drunk to manage the stove. Tracey ate it cold and left the house by four-thirty to play with the boys in the neighborhood. When they played baseball, Mickey screamed at her, calling her names in front of her friends. As night fell, the other children went home. Tracey hid in the darkness until she judged she could stay out no longer. When she entered the house, it was always the same. Her father had secluded himself in the den, and her mother was on a rampage. At times she even pounded with her fists on her husband’s chest. Passive, he endured it until she stopped.
Later, Tracey would be unable to find family photos of herself in her mother’s arms, as if even that were a comfort she’d been denied. Most of the time, her care was left to the maid or her father. But he stopped holding Tracey by the time she reached ten, when Mickey falsely accused him of incest. “Even then, he never stood up to her,” says Tracey.
As an adult, she asked her father why he hadn’t stopped Mickey. Her father grew angry and told her that it wasn’t her place to question his actions. But she did. Perhaps it was harder because she truly loved him.
Her best times were spent with her brothers and father in the Texas wilderness, hunting and fishing. Her father taught her to shoot, and in the early 1970s he gifted her with a .20 gauge shotgun, a Franchi, lightweight and easy to shoot. For a few years she shot small animals, squirrels and rabbits. “But I didn’t like killing,” she says. “So I stopped and used it to shoot skeet.”
From early on, Tracey’s life revolved around animals. She had dogs and cats and adored them. They offered her the unconditional love she never received from her mother. “Tracey was dog crazy early on,” says Pat Brooks, a friend whose father was also in the law firm. “She lived and breathed for her animals.”
In many ways Tracey, despite the long brown hair she wore down to her waist, looked like her brothers, stocky and big boned. She idolized them. “They were there with me, I guess, in the trenches,” she says. Once, when she was about ten, she talked to them about taking things into their own hands, by hiring someone to kill her mother. “It was never serious,” she says. “Just one of those things you kick around when you’re with someone else who understands how truly awful it is.”
Tracey went to good schools, did well, and her summers were spent at Camp Longhorn on the Guadalupe River, a prestigious establishment whose campers have included the pampered scions of wealthy Texas families for generations. It was there that as children President George W. Bush and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison swam, played tennis, golfed, and earned “attawaytogos”—kudos for jobs well done. “It’s one of the top camps in the state,” says one ex-camper. “Campers have to have a legacy—a mother or father who attended—to go there.”
By adolescence, Tracey was an athletic tomboy, with shaggy brown hair. “From the beginning, she wasn’t what you would describe as feminine,” says Brooks. “She was always a burly girl.” She became a popular camper, and was asked to be a counselor. “Tracey loved the outdoors, and she was just fun to be around, enthusiastic and good to talk to,” says a former camper. “She loved books and animals, and treated people well. Tracey was the counselor you could count on to stand up for the kids who didn’t fit in.”
Looking back, Tracey would estimate that she took her first drink sometime before she turned fourteen. From that point on she drank nearly every day. It eased her feelings of being separate from the other girls. From early on she felt as if she didn’t belong, not at home and not with the girls who raved about boys and clothes. Later, she’d think about that and believe the other girls saw a masculinity about her that she didn’t yet realize. “I always felt out of place,” she says. “Drinking was a crutch. It took the edge off.”
In high school Tracey dated a football player. “It was what you were supposed to do,” she says. “But my heart was never in it. I never did the boy crazy thing.” That was the year she read Going Down with Janis, a book on Janis Joplin written by her woman lover. Tracey was fascinated with it, especially the love scenes. She read them over and over, until the pages were worn and dog-eared. Yet, she never thought about what that said about her or where her interests lay. “I didn’t see myself in it,” she says.
The “voice” first made its appearance in high school. When she drank, a man’s soft voice belittled her, inside her head. She never thought it was real, always understanding that it was something inside of her that called to her, and from the very beginning it said the things she’d heard from her mother, that she was bad and worthless. “It told me that I should kill myself, that that was my destiny. I think I thought that was what my mother wanted,” she says. Over the years, the voice left, then inexplicably returned.
After she left Fort Worth for Austin and the University of Texas, Tracey began to understand why she felt so distant from other young girls. As a freshman in the mid-seventies, she walked into a salon owned by Alice, a beautiful gay woman. Alice took one look at Tracey and recognized something Tracey hadn’t yet realized about herself—a kinship and a mutual interest.
The next day, Alice sat with a group of friends outside a friend’s rented house near the university. She’d invited Tracey to join them, and when Tracey walked up, it took her a few minutes to realize the attractive, bright women laughing and bantering between each other in lawn chairs were all lesbians. “It was like a light went on,” says Tracey. “It was like suddenly I realized, hey, I’m like they are.”
The other women recognized immediately that Tracey belonged. “She was like a young, handsome Kurt Russell,” says a woman who was part of the clique. “Tracey wasn’t trying to be a boy, it was just the way she was. She seemed to have an overload of testosterone. She had a husky voice, wore khaki pants, Ralph Lauren shirts, and Top-Siders. She carried herself and had the attitude of an adolescent boy, a splash of machismo.” The women soon noticed that Tracey and her mother had a strained relationship. When she talked about her family, Tracey always referred to her mother as Mickey. “It was like she couldn’t bring herself to say the word mother,” says a friend.
Most of the women were UT students, and it was a time in Austin when gay men and women were coming out, acknowledging their sexuality and looking for others who shared their lifestyle. For a while Tracey lived a double life. Sororities ruled at UT, and Tracey belonged to Kappa Alpha Theta—the Thetas—which boasted girls from the wealthiest families in the state. “We called the gay sorority girls the Tah Tah’s,” says a woman who attended UT. “They were flighty and cute with lots of money.”
One friend, Nancy Pierson, brought Tracey onto her team and taught her to be a goalie in the Austin Soccer League. She’d often tell Tracey that she was good because she was just crazy enough not to worry about getting hurt. “She was a star on the team, strong and athletic,” says a friend.
Looking back, Tracey would say she never regretted coming out, but it did cost her dearly. She was drummed out of her sorority for “consorting with undesirables,” which she translated to mean the clique of women she circulated the gay bars with at night. The day after she was kicked out, she saw a friend on the street, a woman she’d known since camp. Tracey said hello, but the woman walked by without acknowledging her. “That’s the way it works,” she says. “People pretend they don’t know you.”
In the rush of coming out, Tracey flitted from one relationship to another. While many of the women preferred to look androgynous, Tracey liked feminine lovers. “Tracey was a cute young thing, butch. She was into girlie girls,” says a friend. “She liked them with curves, hips, and in dresses.”
It was a fluid and lighthearted time in Austin’s gay community, after centuries of living in the shadows and before the devastation of AIDS. “We weren’t coming out making a statement. We didn’t care,” says Becky Odom, an artist and one of the original group. “People experimented, multiple partners, wild scenes. It was just the way it was.”
Despite the new freedom, there was still an undercurrent of pain, of not fitting in, that many within the community didn’t even like to acknowledge. “It’s tough being gay. Most people wouldn’t willingly put themselves outside the norm,” says Odom. “We had a lot of abuse in the community, drugs and alcohol.”
For Tracey, it was alcohol. And when she drank, like her mother, she became aggressive. “Alcohol made her cocky,” says Odom. “We had similar personalities. We’d get loud and alienate people when we were drinking. We’d play pool at the gay bar and tell people to fuck off. Tracey and I were bad news drunks together.”
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 group that works to protect bat colonies and restore their natural habitats. It was a dream job for her, helping to protect a small, vulnerable little animal by working with government agencies and nonprofit groups. She ran educational trips to Africa and South America, where she brought groups into the bats’ lairs. “It was an incredible place to work,” she says, still visibly excited at the memory. “I got to be an advocate for an animal that’s misunderstood and persecuted.”
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. There she met a dissheveled man named Reginald Breaux. For reasons she couldn’t later explain, except that she wanted someone to drink with, Tracey invited Breaux into her truck. Together, they talked and drank a six-pack of beer while she drove around Austin. At one point he directed her to his brother’s house, but then wouldn’t take her inside. “I didn’t want to bring some dyke into their house,” he’d say later. “So we drove to another convenience store.”
In the store parking lot, Tracey ordered Breaux out of her truck. What happened next they’d later explain in very different terms. Stumbling, he climbed down and started to walk away. Then he cursed at her and threw an open can of beer that hit her and splashed on her clothes. “I backed up and pulled forward, to leave,” she says. “He lurched at me. I couldn’t stop, and the truck hit him and he was down.”
The police were called, and Tracey waited until an ambulance arrived to be sure Breaux was all right. Although he was only dazed, he claimed that she’d tried to run him over. Police noticed that she smelled of beer, so they booked her and took her in. Two days later all charges were dropped. Still, the incident haunted her, as if she were never completely clear in her own mind what she’d intended that night.
When Ray discovered that Tracey had been drinking, she told her she’d have to leave. With nowhere to go, Tracey bought one of Ray’s rental properties, a run-down one-story corner house with a carport at 3601 Wilson Street, on the south side of Austin, near St. Edward’s University. She called Pat Brooks, whose father had been her father’s law partner, and asked for her help. Pat, a remodeling consultant, and her partner, Jane, a teacher, lived in a renovated home in one of Austin’s better neighborhoods.
With the backdrop of their shared childhoods, Pat and Tracey renewed their friendship. Evenings, Pat helped with the renovations, while Jane grilled dinner on the back patio. It was easy to see what Tracey loved. All she cared about were her two cats and her dog, Wren, a Corgi and whippet mix, and her collection of first edition children’s and animal books. “Tracey loved animals like they were her children. She talked to them like they were people,” Brooks says. “Jane and I are both animal lovers, and we understood that.”
By 1998, Tracey’s dedication and hard work at BookPeople had paid off with a string of quick promotions. Wearing her plaid shirts and khakis, her nails bitten to the quick, and carrying a backpack, she was a good fit for the bohemian feel of the store. If Austin’s soccer moms and business execs bought their books at Barnes & Noble, its counterculture population, musicians, writers, and computer nerds frequented the aisles at BookPeople.
From floor manager and buyer, Tracey worked her way up to general manager. She had a staff of 150 employees to oversee and responsibility for the entire store. “It was an incredible responsibility, but I loved it,” she says. In her fourth-floor office, Tracey had an open door policy for employees. Working long hours, she pushed hard to make sure schedules were met. As in the past, she sometimes became heavily invested in her decisions. Rick Klaw, a floor manager, at times saw things differently than Tracey and felt the sting of coming up against her. “We could both become confrontational, yelling and screaming,” he’d say. “That was just Tracey. But we were still friends. We’d argue and then go out to dinner together.”
On the surface, Tracey’s life was on track and good, in every way except the alcohol.
Fueled by the run-in with Breaux, in early 1999 the voice grew louder. Soon, nothing drowned it out, not work or booze. Tracey fought to maintain control, but was barely holding on. At BookPeople, her staff noticed she was argumentative, issuing contradictory orders, as if she didn’t remember one day to the next what she’d told them. Inside Tracey’s head, the voice told her she was worthless and taunted her to end her life
At night she drank alone in the house on Wilson, then called Pat and Jane, desperate for help. In those painful conversations she admitted secrets she’d hidden for decades, describing the horrors of her childhood, including what Mickey had done to her behind closed doors. Jane tried to help, but nothing seemed to lessen Tracey’s pain.
At the end of February, Tracey called Jane again, crying. She talked about the voice and said that she wanted to kill herself to make it stop. “I’ve been playing Russian roulette,” she said. “I’ve got one live bullet in the chamber.”
It was a cry for help. Tracey didn’t want to die.
“I’m not equipped to help you,” Jane told her. “We’re going to come for you.”
Minutes later Jane and Pat pulled into Tracey’s driveway. When Tracey opened the door, her eyes were red and her face anxious, reflecting the ache of the battle waging within her. Jane put her arm around her and led her to the car. They drove through Austin’s darkened streets to St. David’s Pavilion, a beacon of hope for Tracey, who wanted nothing more than for the torment to stop.
Inside, they brought Tracey to Admissions, explained the gravity of her situation, and asked for her to be checked into the center’s substance abuse program. They then watched as she was led away to a ward. Tracey, shoulders slumped and head down, looked as if she had no more energy with which to fight. All her reserves drained, she resembled a small child, helpless, vulnerable, and terrified.