Ray Hill, the old hellraiser, decided it was time to die. He'd been hospitalized in July and had heart surgery in August. By mid-October, at 77, he was tired of the forest of IV bags, the gurgling tubes, the shunt in his neck. If his murmuring, malfunctioning heart had decided to give up, then so be it.

"I've had a remarkable run," he said. He'd been a teen evangelist, a quarterback for Galena Park High School, a cat burglar, a radio host, a gay ex-con who somehow managed to crusade for both LGBT causes and prisoners' rights. "We gathered up turds and built a solid structure of imposing character."

In the '70s and '80s, Hill was who you called when police were harassing someone in Montrose — a thing that, by all accounts, happened all the time in Texas' gayest neighborhood. He got in cops' faces, yelling things like, "Why don't you pick on someone your own size?" That quote made it into City of Houston v. Hill, a 1987 Supreme Court decision. In it, the court struck down a Houston ordinance that banned interupting, in any way, "any policeman in the execution of his duty." No longer could Hill be sent to jail for "arguing," "talking," "interfering" or "failing to remain quiet."

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Of course, in the '80s, the police were hardly Montrose's biggest problem. AIDS was. Hill watched sexy young men turn to skeletons; he knew too well the patchy outlines of Kaposi's sarcoma. More than once, at the hospice Omega House, he held a much-too-young man and whispered that it was okay to let go, okay to die.

The prison-activist side of his life was no stranger to death, either. In the years that Harris County led the nation in death-penalty convictions, Hill sat in on a staggering number of execution watches. "The ferryman and I," he said, "we're old friends."

And in August, he figured, it was his own time to let go. "Tear that s— out of me," he said he told the doctors at St. Luke's. They scheduled the procedure.

HILL'S OLD friend Terry Beegle, a retired podiatrist, broke the news to Amy Morales. Morales, a nurse who works with the dying, was working with Hill as a volunteer. Beegle and Morales were both medical professionals. He didn't have to spell out what it meant: Hill, they both knew, was likely to die in the next 24 hours.

They braced themselves when tubes came out. At first, everything went as expected.

Hill, unconscious, gasped and thrashed. His blood pressure dropped to 50 over 30. His breathing slowed.

But then he rallied.

His friends were stunned. "I was dying a few minutes ago," Hill rasped to Morales. "But I decided to live."

LATER, HILL told Beegle that he was still alive because he "had things to do."

He left the hospital for Omega House, where he reigned as the hospice celebrity. In the first few weeks, his room stayed busy. Mayor Sylvester Turner dropped by, flocked by his security detail. Friends and family, reporters and admirers came too, some bearing soup, some bearing his favorite Starbucks concoction, loaded with Splenda.

Hill being Hill, he worked the media shamelessly, using his deathbed to good effect. With his heart functioning at 20 percent of capacity, he happily did an interview with the newspaper reporter preparing his obit, and he invited TV stations to come film B-roll to use as background footage when the time came.

He put his affairs in order, doing interviews with the various filmmakers finishing documentaries on his life. He arranged for his papers to go to the University of Houston archive. He helped a few prisoners with problems at the courthouse. He celebrated news that a screenplay he'd written, about the healings he performed as a teen evangelist, had been optioned. On Facebook, after the midterms, he cheered Democrats' dominance in Harris County.

Jon Buice couldn't visit the hospice. In the early '90s, Buice had pleaded guilty to knifing Paul Broussard, a gay man, outside a Montrose club. Hill had helped Buice get out of prison, but the terms of Buice's parole forbade him from entering Harris County. He called Hill frequently, though, and his dad, Jim, visited in person. That tickled Hill: Jim had progressed from an being ally of convenience to a friend. "A Tea Party libertarian and an old radical queer doesn't sound like a match," Hill said, "but we suited up together."

BY THE week of Thanksgiving, he was slowing down. His heart was pumping at 10 percent of capacity, and the stories he told had grown shorter and more infrequent. Morales recognized the signs, but she didn't want to make predictions: "Those didn't work out so well in August."

A doctor had told Hill that his death will most likely be fast, coming from something Hill described as "junk in the blood stream," clotting caused by the breakdown of an artificial valve. Dying that way takes maybe half an hour. Hill reported the conversation lightly, as if he'd just received a small piece of good news.

Ray Hill once told me:



"You are free and independent the minute you declare you are, not the minute you accomplish it. I know all of this sounds crazy, but frankly, I am."@LisaGray_HouTX captures him perfectly and beautifully here. https://t.co/VTbr9KpG5v #txlege #LGBT — Lauren McGaughy (@lmcgaughy) November 20, 2018

Mentally and emotionally, he said, he's been ready to die since summer. It's his body that's holding out.

Morales, who describes herself as a "veteran end-of-life caregiver," likes to say that Hill has inspired her in the "soul work" she wants to do. But Hill — once a teen evangelist, now an atheist — doesn't talk about souls. To him, death is death; the afterlife is only how you're remembered.

He has, of course, made arrangements for his final platforms. He'll be cremated, his ashes spread at his family's cemetery on a hill in East Texas. His gravestone will bear only his name, his dates of birth and death, and "107.5 S. Ct. 2502," the citation for his Supreme Court case.

The remembrance service, though, will be rowdier. It'll take place on the steps of the City Hall that Hill once fought. The speakers will include some big names in Houston politics, and the affair will end with an open mic that any troublemaker can seize.

A big crowd, an open mic: If Ray Hill weren't going to be dead, he'd make a point of being there.

Lisa Gray, Gray Matters' founding editor, recently wriggled her way back to reporting. Her new beat is gender, race and religion. And she's looking for story ideas.

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