There was a time when it was not possible to believe that Bill Hillmann would survive his 20s.
“I was a destructive monster,” he writes. “Alcoholism fueled my furious spirals into darkness. My family hospitalized me for mental illness, and I was jailed for almost killing a man in a fistfight.”
Born in 1982, he may have been a Golden Gloves boxing champion, but he was aimless. He was lost. And then he read a novel.
It was Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” that 1926 book about American and British expatriates in Paris and their trip to the Festival of San Fermin, in Pamplona, Spain, to partake of the running of the bulls and see bullfights. And drink.
He was a sophomore at Columbia College, and this was the first novel he had ever read. He read it in one sitting, sipping coffee in a library. He was 20 and, he says, “the book changed my life.”
“I did not know that literature could be about exciting stuff,” he says. “I thought novels were about and written for rich people, not people who led exciting lives.”
He read Hemingway’s other novels and stories. He started writing. His first story, titled “Scrap,” was centered on a bar fight. He worked construction when he could. He founded the Windy City Story Slam, a monthly storytelling competition. He wrote a novel, “The Old Neighborhood,” set in the rougher, gang-riddled edges of the Edgewater neighborhood in which he grew up.
It received favorable reviews, as this from local writer and artist Dmitry Samarov, who wrote in the Tribune, “It’s about growing up in a place where all the choices seem bad. …. A world where problems are solved with fists and bullets rather than words or compromises.”
He compared Hillmann to some giants: “Like Stuart Dybek’s Douglas Park, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Bronzeville and Nelson Algren’s Division Street, Bill Hillmann’s Edgewater is a unique literary evocation of the city. By writing about the streets and the people he knows by heart, Hillmann shows the contrary and complex forces at work in this city.”
Hillmann’s first trip to Pamplona was in 2005. He slept for a while at the feet of a Hemingway statue that stands in front of the city’s bullfighting arena. And he ran with the bulls a number of times.
In 2014, he was gored by a bull named Brevito. The subsequent hospitalization made Hillmann something of an international sensation, and the object of people’s admiration and derision. It also was the seed for his book, a 2016 memoir titled “Mozos: A Decade Running with the Bulls of Spain,” (mozos loosely translates to English as “guys”). That book too garnered praise.
Such as this from Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer who was the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature: “Bill Hillmann is courageous, I’m grateful there have been many aficionados in the United States like Hemingway and Hillmann.”
This came from Esquire magazine: “Bill Hillmann is one of the few who can articulate the chaotic scramble of runners, the icy chill of being gored, and the healing power of nearly bleeding to death on a filthy street in Spain.”
And this from a Spanish news outlet: Hillmann is one of “the last and most serious Hemingwayites.”
Not everyone felt this way. While in the hospital, he received vicious notes from people who did not appreciate him. One man wrote in an email: “I was so happy to hear that the bull gored you. I hope it was very painful. I hope you die from your wounds.”
What these people and others fail to recognize is the depth of Hillmann’s passion, his respect for the serious and religious nature of the bull running, his almost spiritual connection to the animals: “They have their own language, both audible and physical, and you must learn both if you want to run well. …. They are majestic and noble. …. I have seen, with my own eyes, their most incredible mercy; I’ve seen them grant life to a runner that was on the tip of their horns.”
He is always in a tussle with those who would demonize bull running.
“The people in these towns, large and small, are proud that people come to watch and even participate,” he says. “But they do not appreciate the day-trippers. They want people to respect what is essentially an activity of deep and religious meaning.”
His new book, “The Pueblos,” is published by Tortoise Books, an estimable local outfit founded by in 2012 by Gerald Brennan, who first met Hillmann at a reading he attended for “Mozos.”
“That is a fascinating book,” Brennan says. “And Bill is a fascinating character.”
When Hilmann sent him the manuscript for “The Pueblos,” it was a revelation for Brennan.
“I had thought of bull running as a sort of cheap, ‘bucket list’ sort of experience,” Brennan says. “This book showed me how much more there is so it. I basically only suggested that he change it to the present tense to give it a great immediacy. I’m proud to publish it.”
There is immediacy to it and a tough honesty throughout, notably when Hillmann writes about the sad end of his 14-year-long marriage in the wake of a miscarriage. He frankly admits that “I got tired. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I wasn’t strong enough to keep fighting for us.”
Hillmann lives in New Orleans now. He teaches at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he is one year away from earning a Ph.D. in creative writing.
His plan, even though he has “stopped trying to steer” his life, is to return to Pamplona next summer and get married in this place of what he calls “otherworldy magic.”
He is in love and engaged to a young woman from Pamplona. “She loves me, she loves the bulls and her culture, and she is teaching me things. I am seeing the culture through a whole new set of eyes,” he writes. “She is beautiful, sweet, wise, and so positive. She has that special magic that only people of Pamplona have. She is everything I ever dreamed of.”
To supplement his teaching income, he drives for a couple of ridesharing companies.
Ever curious, he initiates conversations with his clients. He tells them a bit about his life and if he senses they might be sufficiently intrigued, he asks if they’d like to purchase a copy of “The Pueblos,” copies of which he has in the car.
Those who buy will read this: “I’m a bull runner …. I’ve nearly lost my life doing this. And that’s just part of the experience … (knowing) that every time (we) take to the streets could be (our) the last day on the earth. We accept that reality. We embrace it. Because when death runs with you, you feel life in its purest form.”
