Editor’s note: In July 2014, Chicago native Bill Hillmann was gored during the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain. What follows is an essay he wrote exclusively for RedEye after returning to the run one year after nearly being killed.
July 9, 2014: I fell to the zigzag bricks flat on my back—astonished at how the glory unraveled so quickly.
A mozo (or bull runner) dropped his knee into my chest, and my leg popped up in recoil. The 1,200-pound bull swooped in; his foreleg collapsed as he swung his head, low and graceful. The point of his horn struck my inner thigh. I felt a needle prick, then a vast universe of nothing. He lifted me in a majestic lunge. My leg sailed between the planks of the barricades. No pain. I grabbed my crotch and thought, Thank God it’s not my balls. I want to have kids.
The horn slid out. I fell to the coarse bricks again. On my back I grabbed the barricades, pulled and tried to scuttle under them. Brevito gored my leg again with a short jab. He looked me in the eyes and seethed so ferociously his horn resonated inside me. Then he plucked his horn out and vanished. A paramedic dragged me under the barricades to safety. And for a moment I was alone.
I peered into the baseball-size fleshy wound—half expecting it to not be there. What have you done to yourself? Then a calm voice whispered, Accept it. You knew this day would come.
Blood streamed down my leg from the second wound and filled my shoe. I craned my neck to see the color of the blood. Dark is good, bright blood is the artery. I couldn’t see it. Is this how I die?
Still, even then, I knew that if I survived, I would run again in Pamplona.
Headlines reading “Bull Running Survival Guide Author Gets Gored” spread around the globe. Animal rights activists poured out to claim that I’d gotten what I deserved, and some sent me emails wishing me death. My first instinct was to fight. I lashed out at them. But as my anger broiled, so did the infection in my leg. I remember gazing out my hospital room window at the stormy Pamplona sky. If I keep fighting with these people I’m going to die. I’ve got to forgive them. I took a deep breath as morphine dripped down the clear tube into my arm. I forgive you all.
A warm rush swirled through my leg and my whole being throbbed; wonderful shivers ran through my neck and back. I began to chant my Buddhist mantra for my many Internet trolls, for their happiness. My karma transformed. An hour later I landed op-eds with the Toronto Star, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune. It was the biggest break in my burgeoning writing career.
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” was the first novel I ever read; I was 20 years old and I read it in one sitting, sipping coffee in an empty library. The book changed my life—it made me want to become a writer and run with the bulls. Three years later I traveled to Pamplona for the first time.
I remember drunkenly sleeping on the curved stone slope at the foot of the Hemingway statue outside the bullfight arena. I lay fully clothed and snoring as the sunrise peeked over the red-tiled roofs of Pamplona. Two officers walked out of the nearby police trailer. One took his billy club and smacked my foot. “Es hora del encierro [It’s time for the run],” he said as the two walked off, chuckling. I took a deep breath, clutched my aching head and got up.
I should mention that in those days, I was a destructive monster of a person. 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. But reading Hemingway and setting this goal to come to Pamplona had opened a window for me—something to work toward instead of against.
And so I ran. I could have easily become another “been there, done that” tourist, but a few days after the astonishing adrenaline of my first experience, I chose to watch a run from a balcony above the course. Below me an enormous black bull named Vaporoso rammed his horn into the stomach of a portly runner named Xabier Salillas, picked him up and slammed him against a boarded-up shop. Salillas fell from the horn.
Desire to help flushed through me as I impotently gawked down while Vaporoso swung his horn, puncturing Salillas in the chest, face and thigh. His clothing hung off him in bloody ribbons. A hole gaped below his eye. As hundreds of runners tried and failed to distract Vaporoso, a stoic-faced Spanish runner named Miguel Angel Perez appeared and grabbed Vaporoso’s tail, halting the attack instantly. Perez then waved his newspaper in Vaporoso’s sight. Vaporoso turned, and Perez sprinted in front of his blood-smeared horns, leading Vaporoso up the street. I was in awe of Perez; he’d single-handedly saved Sallilas’s life. But I also felt guilty for not running down to the street to help him. That was the moment I knew I had to become one of them—a mozo.
I saw glimpses of myself in the Spanish fighting bull—my own fury, my own destructive power. The most wrathful bulls on the streets of Pamplona are sueltos, lone bulls separated from the pack. They lose their herding instinct and attack everything in sight. These animals became very precious to me. I longed to calm and direct one up the path to his herd, the same way I wanted to become part of a community, to channel my negative impulses into something positive in society.
I wish I could say that I cleaned up my act right then, but I was still drinking, and at times my anger got the best of me. In winter 2008, back in Chicago, I smashed a nearly full beer bottle over an off-duty cop’s head in the midst of a bar brawl. As he wiped away the copious blood avalanching off his forehead, he raised his gun toward me. I peered into the vast blackness of the barrel, then leaped forward and crashed a left hook into his temple. Blood sprayed out like a geyser and spattered my face, but that image of the gun barrel stayed with me.
In 2010 I encountered a monstrous black suelto named Tramposo peering into his reflection in a dark glass storefront window. I approached him and waved my rolled newspaper in his line of sight. Tramposo’s eye flicked with the motion. He snorted and inhaled deeply. His hooves scraped the damp cobblestones and he charged hard toward me. I sprinted up the street. The rest of the red-and-white-clad runners gave ground like a thick school of fish evading a predator. The beast linked with me, a harmonious connection. As I jogged up the street close to Tramposo’s sharp horns, suddenly Miguel Angel Perez dashed up beside me. We led the bull together.
After that run I met my friends nearby at Bar Txoko, and one placed an ice-cold beer in my hand. I grimaced as the desire to drink clutched me. I closed my eyes and the endless blackness of that cop’s gun barrel sat point-blank before me. I handed it back. “No, thanks.”
Once I’d finally stopped drinking, the medication I’d been prescribed for bipolar disorder began to work better. I focused my energies into the spirituality of the bull run and, when I got home, into my writing. I began to climb the publication ladder—local arts weeklies, Chicago Tribune, NPR. I was mastering the suelto within me, and directing my career forward.
On the run on July 13, 2013, I encountered a catastrophic pile-up blocking the tunnel—people and bulls stacked 10 feet high; a tangle of arms, faces and crying bovine. A blood-soaked horn slid across the throat of a horrified American. That same helplessness I’d felt when Perez saved Salillas clutched me again.
But then the pile broke and the bulls trampled through. I saw others helping and dove in to assist with pulling the people out of the pile. At the bottom, five unconscious men lay with their mouths open, but their crushed chests wouldn’t inflate. Their heads swelled like they’d been beaten with baseball bats. I grabbed the worst off, a thin 19-year-old boy named Jon Jeronimo Mendoza, and dragged him away. His face was bluish-purple. A group of us picked him up and carried him toward the surgery room in the arena. There was no pulse, but this negative charge emitted from his limp body, sending sparks of energy out into my hands. Then suddenly, this hot plasma surged up into his arm and shoulder where I held him; then it disappeared like the life inside him was running scared, trying to escape. We got him into the surgery room, and they saved his life. Doctors later said he’d only had a few seconds left before it would have been too late.
I thought of this often after my goring, while I walked with the aid of a cane for two months, slowly rebuilding the deep hole in the muscle fiber in my thigh. But as the run approached this summer, dreams of my death haunted me: a dark street; a black bull’s horn punctures my chest; I dance along the horns as he rips the life from me. Any time I thought of the run, these deep, irreparable wounds from my dreams pulsed in my chest and I envisioned three zigzag lacerations gouged through my heart and lungs. My dead friend Will came to visit me in a dream. He’d been murdered years ago. He was the love of my sister’s life and the father of my niece. He was family. “Man, Bill, being dead sucks. It makes you watch the ones you love through a window but you can’t touch them. You can’t help them when they need you. You don’t want to die, Bill.”
As I sat with my wife at the airport, I realized this could be the last time I held her in my arms. I squeezed her tight and wept like a baby as I told her I loved her. When I waited in line for the metal detector, I looked back at her across the corridor and saw our future children gathered around her, wondering why Daddy was going away. I wanted to drop my heavy bags and run to her, hold her tight and start a new life without the bulls. But I had to see this through.
As I stepped onto the course July 7, I was surprised there was no fear, just peace and happiness. But when the run began I felt claustrophobic. As the bulls approached, a runner yelled, grabbed my shirt and tugged me. I darted quickly to the side and fell into the oak barricades. The herd rumbled past. I was on the course, but I didn’t truly run in the tradition, the way I’d learned over the years. The only way to truly run with the bulls is to run the exact center of the street and let the bulls find you. My runs the next days descended into cowardly panic attacks. My body had healed, but the fractures in my mind and spirit gaped and grew. I wanted to run, but I just wasn’t capable.
The night before the seventh of eight runs, my friend Dennis Clancey, who was running fantastically this year, offered some advice. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. Just know that if it doesn’t happen tomorrow or the next day, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it will happen whether it’s tomorrow or next year.”
In the morning I was scared as I warmed up in a dark hallway that led to the bull-run course. The familiar wounds formed in my chest. I looked down into the cavernous holes pierced through me by a bull’s horn, squirming black holes stretching to my undulating heart. Why are you doing this? You could die doing this! I closed my eyes as the runners sifted past my doorway, letting me know it was time to enter the street. Am I afraid to quit? Am I too weak to face that? Fine, I’ll quit, then. I opened the door and stepped out onto the brisk street. But I’m gonna run this one last time. Nervously, I thought about the bulls waiting in corrals at the edge of town. Please show me the way?
I jogged in the center of the road as the bulls approached. The claustrophobic pressure closed in around me. A runner grabbed my arm and yanked me downward, trying to keep himself from falling. I breathed steadily and looked down as I ran, watching the center line of the street, and then he let go and vanished. The path opened to me. I was all alone. I sprinted into the emptiness. The animal swooped up smoothly behind me; I could tell by the screams from frightened runners near me, trying to get out of his way. I glided like the bull does, with urgent, long strides. He linked with me. We were one and I was at peace and I led him up the way. Then I looked back and saw him still there, his furry head down, following my stride. I lifted my paper to him and he galloped steadily. Then he passed me slowly along my side. His majestic, jet-black shoulders contorted. His hooves clapped the zigzag bricks in the exact spot where one of his kind nearly took my life a year ago. His mighty coral-colored horns bobbed peacefully. His dark eye acknowledged me as he found his own way along the cobblestone path and disappeared into the arena.
Bill Hillmann is a RedEye contributor and the author of “Mozos: A Decade Running with the Bulls of Spain.”
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