Interviews with Other Voices (Keats part 3)

Interviews with Other Voices




Introduction



I first became interested in JK and his circle of friends when I read a short piece in the Dallas Morning News about the mysterious disappeance in the Mexican state of Chiapas of a man the newspaper referred to as a “local teacher.” The clipping was sent to me by my mother because the “local teacher,” JK, was a relative, the son of my grandmother’s sister, and because she assumed I was interested in anything about Mexico. I’d known JK a little, or at least knew who he was, when I was a girl. That connection and the circumstances of the disappearance were enough to be of interest, but you hear so much of that these days, Westerners of an activist or merely adventurous nature getting themselves into serious trouble in faraway places, that I thought about it for a couple of days, wondering idly what might have happened, and then prompty forgot it. You can’t go chasing after every interesting piece of news that comes your way and expect to stay on course. I was in graduate school at the time and had plenty to do. I didn’t need a distraction, even if it seemed, as my mother thought, related to my scholarly interests. Chiapas is not Michoacan, far from it, and needless to say, the 20th Century is not the 19th. My focus at the time was on a woman who lived and wrote in Patzquaro at around the same time that Charlotte Bronte was living and writing in Haworth, Yorkshire, and my task was to find some meaningful connection between the two. I won’t go into that now (search the Internet for my disseration if you are really interested), but you understand why I was in no position or frame of mind to make further inquiries about the fate of my cousin. That despite the fact that the scanty information in the newspaper article did arouse in me some curiosity. It seems that JK was on a pilgrimage of sorts, a trip in honor of Graham Greene, a writer whose novels have always seemed to me a bit dreary, not to mention stuffy, but whose life, or perhaps I mean image, persona, is another matter. That information came from his wife a month or so after he was last heard from, and it is offered by the reporter alongside a brief summary of the recent troubles in Chiapas, but no explicit suggestion is made that the two might be related. Steeped though I was in I couldn’t help but note with some wonder that a second cousin of mine, someone I hardly knew, apparently had a similar interest. Still, that alone was not what led me to return to the subject years later.



I became friends with his daughter on Facebook and she told me that her father’s writing was on the Internet and how to find it. Not my purpose here to offer analysis or evaluation. Will do that elsewhere when I have the time. Academically no value for me. May seem impossible that I spoke to all: took some liberties.



*****



I don’t know why he wanted to hitchhike across the country except that it had to do with something he’d read. That’s how it always was with him, wanting to do things he’d read about, and that’s what always made him a little different. I agree with his mother on that, but I’d never tell him so. I don’t think she’s ever said that to him either. Of course she’s never had to say anything to anybody to get how she feels across, least of all to me. I knew, for example, that she’d be worried sick if she knew he was hitchhiking, so I asked him if he’d take a bus as far as Chicago, that’s where he wanted to go first, and then decide from there whether to go to New York or San Francisco, and he said okay, he didn’t mind. Maybe he was a little nervous about it himself. I have to hand it to him. It takes guts to stand out there on the highway with your thumb out. I know kids never think anything bad will ever happen to them, but he can be shy at times, too shy, and I was proud of him for having the nerve to do it. I told his mother, after she knew he’d done it, that I thought he knew what he was doing, and that’s one thing I could always say about him, even if I didn’t always know why, or like it much, that he knew what he was doing.



I hoped he’d be a doctor or a lawyer. As far as my own career is concerned, I got lucky. Worked my way up the ladder, stayed with it, kept my head down and my nose clean, and managed to be in the right place at the right time, but you can’t count on that, and of course these days a high school education gets you nowhere. I couldn’t even get hired now for a sales job. A college degree is just like a high school diploma used to be, but like I told him, and my other boys, a professional degree is even better. It’s almost a guarantee of a certain standard of living, and once I saw which way he was heading, I mean the kind of thing that interested him, I thought he’d be a lawyer. You can write your books in your spare time, I told him, and being a lawyer will give you experiences to write about, and at the same time earn enough money to enjoy the finer things in life. That’s what I wanted for him. All I wanted. I didn’t care what he did. I never thought he’d have any trouble supporting a wife and kids, and he didn’t. Not really. I know exactly, I can tell you down to the dollar, what he borrowed from me and his mother, and he paid most of it back. Paid it back or else I told him not to worry about it. As long as I knew his intentions were good, I didn’t care, even though by then I knew he’d never be a lawyer and had different ideas about the finer things in life. I never gave up on that, and of course he never turned down a chance to drive one of my Lincolns or eat one of the steaks I barbecued for him and his wife when they came to visit. And he was ready enough to drink my bourbon, although I didn’t splurge on that, I admit. Even after I quit smoking, after my heart attack, I could never tell much difference in bourbon, it’s more what you’re used to I think, and I figure people drink because it makes them feel good, not because of how it tastes. Someone told me once that if whiskey tasted like a malted milk, he’d be drunk all the time.



He had different ideas, but I thought maybe he’d found his niche when he got that job with the publishing company. Like I told him, how could it be any better? All summer off, the same holidays as a teacher, which would give him plenty of time to write his books. It was a good job. Didn’t pay much, but it was a good company and had all the side benefits you’d expect, not even counting all that time off. Company car, expense account, trips to sales meetings all over the country. “A bird nest on the ground,” I told him. “Don’t fuck it up.” I didn’t actually say that last part. I thought it, but didn’t say it, and whether he did or not is a matter of opinion. I don’t think he got fired. He said he didn’t, and he doesn’t lie to us, as far as I know. He quit, and he and his wife were going to California, where he said everything was happening. I didn’t ask what. I know what he meant, no reason to be an ass about it, but I did get a little hot under the collar when he told me he’d just as soon eat beans as steak. I don’t mind if he wants to give up steak for a different way of life, that’s what makes the world go around, different strokes, but nobody can tell me he likes beans as well as steak. That’s just pure horseshit and he knows it. I don’t remember now what I said to him about that, but he got the message.



*****



I never forgave him for cheating on me with my best friend. We got back together for a while, but things were never the same after that. I was hurt so bad I could never look at him or think about him again without seeing him in a different way. It was as if someone had come along and vandalized him, changed his face so that it no longer had any character, never mind charm. He’d turned into a weakling, an untrustworhy, sniveling little shit, and where I’d thought before that everything he said was either brilliant or at least showed promise, excusable because he was so sweet, innocent, now he just sounded stupid and ignorant. He has a good nose, you know, at least in profile, Roman, but a weak chin, and that should have warned me off right away. I’m a year older, I went off to college and that was it, except for letters and a few late night, drunk inspired telegrams, all of them so ridiculous and sentimental that I blush for him even to this day. We’d had something special, you see, and he’d fucked it up, and it took him a while to accept it and move on.



Well, it was pretty romantic to begin with, in an anti-romantic sort of way, if you know what I mean. We were at this coffee shop where everybody hung out, and he and his friends were in a different part of the place, a different room actually, and I was on my way to the rest room, and he was looking for somebody else, not my best friend, by the way, but another friend of mine, to ask her out, and we sort of ran into each other, almost literally, and then, when I tell him she’s not there, he looks at me and says, “Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask you out. What are you doing Saturday night?” I admit it excited me. Not because he was anything special, I hardly knew him from Adam, but I didn’t date much. I had a circle of friends, including a couple of guys, but nobody was really sweet on me, at least nobody I really cared about, thought of as serious boyfriend material. So yes, I was free on Saturday night.



We knew by Sunday afternoon that we liked each other more than either of us had counted on. He came over and we sat in my room and played records. It’s been a while, so I may have some of the details confused, or I can’t remember all of them, but what we were doing was testing each other’s taste. This is good. This isn’t. This could be good, but for such and such. He doesn’t quite have it. She does. That sort of thing. I told him right away that I’d read Battle Cry in the third grade, and he didn’t try to top it, which I liked. He didn’t care about being smarter than me. He was sensitive. He thought I was cool and pretty and that was plenty. I think for those first few months I’d have done anything for him. I know I did whatever I could think of. It was the sweetest time of my life up until then. No question about it, he was my first love, so of course, after all this time, even after what he did, I still have a tender spot for him.



He took it badly, though, and I should have known he would, given that all along I had the edge. In taste, I mean. Not only was I smarter, I knew more, and I had a surer sense for what was good. We both knew that, from that first Sunday on. I told him I couldn’t agree with him about Della Reese. She was just too hokey. Billie, Ella, Lena and Sarah, that was actually the name of the album he brought over, were great, and I’ll always give him credit for exposing me to that. I already knew who Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn were, of course, but I’d never heard old stuff like that before, from the thirties. He frowned when I nixed Della Reese, and I could tell he was hurt, but here’s the thing: I knew he was going to think about it. What’s more, I was sure he could already hear the difference, and it was mostly pride that kept him from saying so right away. He couldn’t admit to flipping so easy.



I really did love him, in my way, and it pains me to tell you what he did, even now, not just for my own sake, since it’s still humiliating, but because, believe it or not, I’m still embarrassed for him. As to Linda Kay, she was a good friend, but rotten to the core, no backbone at all, the self-restraint of I don’t know what. No self-restraint. An interesting girl, or so it seemed at first, a little lame, limped in a way very similar to Piper Laurie in The Hustler, but Linda Kay was a very pretty blonde and not as smart as she seemed at first. She sang. She performed at school assemblies, in a sweet voice that capped off that tragic, or pitiful, quality he so admired. Not just Piper Laurie, but Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, and later on he probably liked Mia Farrow. Maybe even Joanne Woodward. She had that vulnerable, airy, little sing-songy voice that was so fashionable back then, but don’t get the wrong idea. I’ll stick up for him on that. He wasn’t looking for a toy, not in a vulgar sense. It’s just that that sort of woman fit into his cosmos of the moment, as one of several desirable types. It was strictly literary, a type immortalized by poets, and his role was not to dominate, but to admire. So why, then, you have every right to ask, did he try to fuck her? And I would say, that’s what writers do, isn’t it? Try to fuck what they admire? Isn’t that what appreciating art is all about? What good is it if you can’t fuck it, metaphorically speaking, I mean, in most cases. I fancy myself with some measure of artistic sensibility, or at least understanding of it, and that much of how his brain worked I can see.



But back to Linda Kay. I’m sure he would have fucked her if she’d let him, but according to her, she wouldn’t. She might be lying, I know, and I also know that her telling me about it at all, the near fuck, or whatever it was, is questionable in itself. Why would she? I mean, what sort of woman lets a man get as far as she says he got and then tells his girlfriend, who also happens to be her best friend? A bitch, plain and simple. It hardly matters, though, because that’s not what pissed me off, knocked the props out from under me, made me want to kill the bastard. First, though, let me explain the conditions of our relationship. We didn’t call it a romance. Too fanciful for those days and in that place. Going together. That’s what we were doing, but from the first there were rules, which we both liked. This sounds bad, but it wasn’t really: this friend of his, who by the way later became a good friend of mine, long after we broke up (was that cruel of me? I suppose it was, though I never thought of it, I don’t think), this friend and he had this contest to see how many different girls they could date. That’s why he asked me out. I don’t mean it’s the only reason, or at least that was never an issue, and they had to change the rules after our first date because it would be like cheating. We had a standing Saturday night date, but for a long time, he took out other girls on Friday night. We both liked that, for a while. It put the brakes on. We didn’t want to spoil things, take it too fast. It seemed sensible, and it was fun to be sensible, or try to be, when at the same time we were so head over heels infatuated with each other. We said, and this is embarrassing, it’s so silly, we said were in “in like.” I’d give him cards saying “I like you.” Kind of sweet, I guess, or would be if he hadn’t spoiled it, and it should be clear by now that the problem wasn’t that he took Linda Kay out. I knew he was going to. By that time, the other girls on Friday nights had long been abandoned, as much his idea as mine, for the record, but I had to go out of town, and she was my best friend, and we were trying to be sophisticated, and I didn’t mind them going to the movies together. But I didn’t think he’d take her parking and listen to a ball game and feel her tits, such as they were. But even that’s not all of it, not what really pissed me off beyond repair. Sometimes I think he didn’t have an original bone in his body. I wanted to like his writing, but to be honest it was mostly shit. Derivative shit. He’d read Tennessee Williams and then write his shitty version of The Glass Menagerie, all painfully sentimental. Oblique dialogue between sensitive young lovers. Drivel.



He gave Linda Kay the same baseball rap he’d given me, how radio is better than TV, nothing like it on a hot summer night, that crap, and then he plays with one of her tits and after a while says, “I can’t be partial,” and starts on the other one. Where’d he get that? The truth is, despite all I just said, I think it was original. That’s how he was. He didn’t mind using the same line God knows how many times on God knows how many girls, including best friends, and he might write crap, but he’d never steal a line. He’d have told me the first time he said it, given credit, a footnote, and I remember very clearly the first time he said it to me. I wonder now if he said it to every one of those Friday night dates he had, the ones who let him play with their tits, and I’m sure he tried with every single one of them. He’d come by to see me, by the way, after those Friday dates. We couldn’t stay away from each other. I know he loved me. For a short time we were crazy about each other.



*****



No, I don’t know anything about that hitchiking trip, or the high school girlfriend, before my time, but I went to Mexico with him once, which turned into a disaster, even though we were only there for three days. I just wasn’t into it. I mean, it really is a second rate country, and what isn’t second rate is a cliché, and that pretty much sums it up, the country and our differences about it, why the trip and ultimately our friendship, was a disaster. He insisted that I like everything, and if I didn’t, which was mostly the case, then I wasn’t worthy to be his friend. I put up with that for a long time but finally just said fuck it. I don’t know if he treats his wife that way, but if he does, I feel sorry for her. It’s no wonder he had no friends that lasted.



What he liked to do most in the world, maybe even more than have sex for all I know, was drink whiskey and talk. He’d get off on solos, you know, improvised monologues, and I know its sounds pretty grand for what was essentially a drunken rant, but I have to give him some credit because I can’t say honestly that I ever got tired of listening to him. He could be idiotic at times, of course, incoherent, like all drunks, and overbearing, obnoxious, belligerant, the whole list, but when he was good, he was really good. He thought he was a political liberal, but he’d pose these questions or come up with theories that were loaded against whatever happened to be fashionably liberal at the time, often I’m sure just to see how I’d react. He loved baiting people. He hated Joyce, for example, and anything even remotely Irish, because he thought there was some academic—or as he put it “graduate school”—conspiracy to elevate all that beyond all reason above everything else. It’s complicated, but I guess you could say Mexico was his answer to Ireland, to the graduate school English departments version of Ireland at any rate. There are parallels when you think about it. Two poor, downtrodden, violent Catholic countries in the shadow of more powerful overlords, except of course one produced literary genuises and the other didn’t. I guess you have to count Paz for Mexico, and maybe Fuentes, but that hardly makes things even, plus one is prosperous now and the other one is more or less the same. Or if not the same, certainly not yet out of that “developing” stage.



He was absolutely obsessed with Mexico’s local color. He’d be pissed if he heard me call it that, but I’ve got worse. He was obsessed with anything tacky, and believe me, that’s not hard to find in Mexico. Anything he defined as such was worth his attention and praise. He took us to this French restaurant one night in a strip mall in Dallas, which was Johnny to a tee, although to be fair, it had gotten good reviews and did have decent food, as it turned out. We had a good time, drank a very fresh and tasty merlot that was quite respectable, I thought, but later he tried to tell me that the view through the windows of that place, a parking lot, was better than what he called, and I quote, “some bullshit postcard/travel magazine ocean or mountains, quaint harbor, cobblestone streets, medieval gargoyles.” And he was serious and dead sober when he said it.



That was his whole point about Mexico. It was one big strip mall parking lot and therefore cool. Not fair, I admit, and not accurate, since I guess you’d have to include the restaurant in the picture. The two combined, but even if we say the restaurant was okay, the parking lot is still ugly, and just ugly. He couldn’t leave anything alone, though. He had to push it. It was like saying something sensible, even inspired, wasn’t enough. Never satisfied. Even when he was sober he could be like that. He probably should have taken up smoking dope. I actually recommended it to him, and I always had some handy, but he didn’t like it. Made him paranoid, he said. And sleepy.



I could name several, probably dozens, of other things just like that, but I don’t see the point. Suffice it to say I eventually got tired of it. And I think he was beating up on me more often towards the end, for not agreeing with him about everything. Like I said, fuck that.

*****



The last time I saw him was in the bus station in Cuernavaca. We were both leaving town, but my bus left later than his and from a different station. So I was seeing him off, and I promised to retrieve a shirt that he’d left at the hotel and mail it to him. A woman named Sally sent me an e-mail about him, telling me what happened, and I meant to ask her if she wanted it, but I kept forgetting, and now it’s been so long.



He was a true friend. Muy amable. Muy simpatico. The truth is that I wouldn’t have been catching that bus if it hadn’t been for him. He loaned me enough for the ticket and a little extra, about $20 total, 200 pesos, and the funny thing is that just that morning I’d stolen 200 pesos from him. While he was sleeping. I snuck into the room we shared and took it off the table where it was lying just plain as day, almost as if he’d left it out for me. Here it is, Ivan, practically gift wrapped so that you can show this gringo how trustworthy a Mexican really is, so make him happy and take his money and go fuck your whore. He’ll thank you for it. The worst that can happen is that you’ll get a stern lecture before he gives you the money to get home. He won’t leave you stranded, which is what you deserve, and if he does, well worse things have happened in my life than that.



That’s how I was thinking at four in the morning, but by eight I was beginning to regret it. I confessed right away, no more than ten minutes after he noticed it was missing, but I’m not asking for any applause for that. Mexicans always confess. It’s in our blood. It’s our national pastime, like baseball for gringos. Gringos are different, I know, even the Catholic ones. They keep their guilt in a safe place, or at least that’s what this gringa I knew for a while told me. They save it up and use it, very practical, whereas Mexicans squander it, like they do everything else. That’s why I was broke. I’ve never tried to make any excuses. I have a good education, the valuable skill in Mexico of speaking very respectable English, and enough brothers and sisters to make up a futbol team, all of them, by the way, doing far better than I ever have. In fact, all of them have it made in one way or another, as much as poor Mexicans ever do, and they used to help me out, probably still would if I was really desperate, like stuck in Cuernavaca, hungry on the street, left behind by some heartless gringo just because I wanted to have a little fun, but in general their patience with me ran out a long time ago.



I don’t mean that about the heartless gringo, wouldn’t mean it even if he left me stranded. I know I deserved it. I could be a prick about it, and some are, and say something like, well, you stole California, what’s 200 pesos, cabron? But I’m not like that. Let bygones be bygones, and besides, we’d have fucked up California anyway. I’ve never been there, but my brother says it’s like Mexico with order. Same architecture, more or less, lots of Spanish speakers and dark skin, but roads without potholes, traffic lights that work and that people pay attention to. Drivers even stop at stop signs in California, even the taxis, even Mexicans driving taxis, or so he said. Must be a wonderful place. Mexicans love order, but for us its like that woman that lives only in your dreams.



What was I saying? Oh yes, I deserved it. I’d been on a two day binge, starting at a fichera bar in Taxco. A fichera bar is basically a whorehouse, although it depends. In the old days you’d give a “ficha,” a ticket, to a girl for a dance, and maybe only a dance, and buy her a drink, you know, and more only if you wanted it, but nowadays they expect you to always want more, at least sooner or later. Maybe they always did. I don’t know. Or it depended on where it was. But in Taxco they’re not really happy, the girls, until you pay to fuck them, and they have a place for it on the premises. It’s tailor-made for spending all of your money.



I actually started drinking earlier, in the middle of the afternoon, and I couldn’t take Taxco. It’s my hometown and it was depressing me. I owe people money there and we kept running into people I knew when I was a kid, all of them married now with kids and making a decent living. I couldn’t take it, and I was feeling no pain even before we got to the fichera bar, which I thought of, by the way, as just another part of the tour, or its climax, the finale. I’m not totally fucked up, even when I’m fucked up. I wanted to show him a good time. He likes the culture, you know, not the churches and forts and all that tourist stuff. Local color, he called it, the thing he likes, only half-joking I think. He wants to meet people, eat the food, hang out in places. I showed him the restaurant that the Italian started. He came here broke back in the seventies, broke except for having a rich father, who he talked into buying the restaurant for him. We sat on the balcony of that place and had our first drinks and watched the taxis below negotiate their way around the fountain. He likes that sort of thing. We spent five minutes in the church and the rest of the day doing “local color.”



That’s why he put up with the fichera bar. He didn’t want to get laid. It’s why he put up with it and with me. I got a little carried away, I admit, but this girl there, even now when I’m sober, as I have been more or less for two years, this girl was really beautiful. My brother was with us, and he practically went to sleep right at the table, but not Johnny. He stayed with us nearly to the end, and even tho his Spanish is terrible and I don’t know how much he understood, he listened as if he understood all of it. And I laid it on pretty thick. I was inspired that night and when I get that way I don’t like to shut up, and I like to put off fucking as long as possible, in fact I almost don’t want to fuck, I’m enjoying my own poetry so much, or what sounds like poetry to me, and I think that girl that night really appreciated it, up to a point. When you’re that drunk, I know, you don’t know when to stop. My brother finally went out to sleep in his pickup, and Johnny left too not long after. They waited for me outside, which never occurred to me until the next morning, and that I might have kept them up.



I didn’t care. In fact, I was pissed off about it at first, when we got up, at them for being such lightweights, which is why we went out and got some beer right away, so I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. All I wanted to do, as soon as the beer kicked in and I got rid of my hangover, was drink, talk to women, preferably, although anybody would do, and maybe fuck them when I couldn’t talk anymore, or maybe just go to sleep. I admit he annoyed me that day, and that it was all my fault. Like a typical gringo, though, he kept worrying about the details. My brother’s wife was working too hard, he said, even though she didn’t cook for us and she sent out the clothes he gave her to wash. Believe me, my brother’s wife has never worked too hard. And he wanted to know, should he leave them money or would they be insulted. He even wanted to take the combi back to Taxco, even tho my brother was perfectly willing to drive us. I told him my all purpose answer, to not worry, that I’d take care of it. Just to get him off my back.

I was a prick that day, I know. I felt rotten even after a few beers, and I’d spent most of my money, which was a lot. I’d just cashed a big lottery ticket and he’d already paid me what we’d agreed on for the trip. When we got to Cuernavaca, he just wanted to sleep, which was fine with me. When you get on a binge, you don’t want anyone around to drag you down, so he crashed and I went out and drank up the rest of my money, what little I had left, and then came back at four in the morning and stole 200 pesos from him in order to get laid.



*****



I know he liked Greene. One night he spent two hours telling me the plot of The Ministry of Fear. Basically, he told me the whole novel. I don’t have to read it now. And I vaguely remember some scheme about going to Chiapas, following in Greene’s footsteps, which was just like him. Ignore the Zapatistas. Never mind what’s happening now. Go down and look for traces of some Englishman who hit his peak more than fifty years ago and wrote, I have to say, pretty boring and straight-laced run of the mill novels. But see, that’s what he liked about him, which is the opposite of the reasons for any popularity he has now. I was listening to an interview the other day on NPR of the director of the latest film version of The Quiet American, and the guy said he wasn’t particularly interested in the conflict between the Church and communism, that it was a dead controversy now, current in Greene’s time. So he’d updated Greene, which would have infuriated Johnny, and even though I’m no big Greene fan, I can see why. It’s pretty bad when you assume that people can’t get symbols that are only half a century or less old, symbols of things that are in fact still relevant, always will be, what was behind them. Are we that illiterate?



Chandler. Simenon. LeCarre. Greene. See a pattern there? I read LeCarre on his recommendation and liked him. He was right. It’s a cut above, at least the Smiley novels, that trilogy, and at first LeCarre seems to be an exception to Johnny’s reactionary tastes. But not really. Am I saying Johnny was a reactionary? A sympathizer at least, just like LeCarre, even though LeCarre doesn’t know it. I haven’t read all of his books, but I understand that they tend to be centered around a liberal cause, cause celebre a la mode, Palestinians, Chechens, Big Pharma, Big Finance, etc., and I might not have noticed the reactionary streak if it hadn’t been for the fact that Johnny’s way of thinking was so close. Moral dilemmas. That’s the key. Any writer primarily interested in moral dilemmas is a reactionary. Let me explain. If you’re truly political, left or right, you don’t really see a dilemma, even if you pretend to. These guys, the ones Johnny picked out, all on his own, actually do see dilemmas, or that’s how their work turns out, even if they think they’re fudging. Tough ones. Impossible really. God or someone you love, Greene wants to know. Who comes first? In Chandler, it’s the stoic’s code versus pleasure, which may be harmless except that its not right, and we can’t of course play willy-nilly with a code. Simenon? A known Nazi suck up if not sympathizer, by the way, whose enduring hero, Maigret, certainly sympathizes with the criminal element. It’s how he manages to catch them, by getting into their heads. So it’s not a dilemma for Simenon. It’s a duality, which is probably the French version of a dilemma. A dialectic. Accept both. Don’t deny one or the other. Just put yourself in a position where you can be a voyeur of the other side. Anyway, no, I admit, Simenon doesn’t fit so well into my little theory, but only because he was the most reactionary of all. The point is that they all preferred beauty to good, to what was right, beauty to ethics. That’s the bottom line. LeCarre? I’ve heard that his later stuff seems to be a little arch, so maybe he’s reformed, but in that trilogy I read it was how the game worked that he loved the most, its intricacies, it’s rules. So I guess its not moral dilemmas at all, not even that, that distinguish those writers. It’s a love of life as it is, no matter how fucked up. Its dilemmas, rules, complexities, shades of color, smells, etc. Maybe its enough to say that at heart none of them are political.



I know I’m betraying far too much sympathy for that point of view. I’m getting old I guess, sentimental, but I fight it, and I still think that, in my heart of hearts, I believe that just knocking everything down and starting over is the only way. Clear cut civilization. A clean burn.



*****



I guess if he came up to me at some reunion, say, and stuck out his hand and said, “Hello Steve,” I’d be polite. I wouldn’t refuse to shake his hand. No point in that, but I’ll never forgive him for asking Diane on a date. It may sound petty, and it was a long time ago, and my mother would give me a lecture about forgiveness and going to heaven and all that, not to mention that Diane and I have been happily married for forty years, but the fact is I don’t like him, and I wonder now if I ever did, even though we were best friends for a couple of years. I’ve known him since the third grade.



But I don’t like him, plain and simple, because he thinks he’s better than me, and he always did. In fact, my first memory of him is him giving me a hard time because I didn’t know who some baseball player was, or give a shit. He seemed to think that was some sort of crime. He took it seriously, and so did I, because I knew what he was really telling me. He was telling me I was stupid, and it was clear as day, and that stays with you. You don’t forget it when someone thinks you’re stupid.



Our heyday was in junior high. He’d still get on my nerves, and I probably got on his, but for a while we both wanted to be juvenile delinquents, and we both had just about the same amount of nerve, which wasn’t much. The funniest thing that happened was when we were going to break into this concession stand at the new park. It was really out in the middle of nowhere. Flood plane I realized later. Land that nobody would build a house on, so the city got it. The nearest house was more than a mile away, woods all around, it’s where people got pecans in the winter, we thought it would be a cinch, but when we got up to about two feet away, this old man’s voice comes from inside it and says “You boys get out of here before I shoot you full of buckshot.” I swear to God that happened, just like that, and we about ran our legs off getting out of there. Later on, I wondered about it. Bad luck we thought at the time, but it was pretty weird having a nightwatchman at a concession stand, especially that one. We both heard it tho, the same thing, and I’m thinking now it might have been just some old bum or drunk, what you call a homeless person nowdays, in there to get warm or away from the bugs. Don’t really know, though, to this day.



That’s about as serious as it got, our career in crime, although our mothers thought the switch blade knives we bought were pretty serious. I had a good one. It practically jumped out of my hand when I opened it. Good spring. I bought it, Johnny was with me, at a pawn shop on 10th Street. He bought one too, but it wasn’t near as good as mine, and he never got a black leather jacket either. I didn’t wear it much anywhere, except at night. At one point, before I could get my parents’ car, we’d just walk around town at night with our switchblades and me in my black leather jacket. I’d let Johnny wear it for a little while, but that really sounds stupid now doesn’t it. What was the point? Nobody ever saw us. The town at night in those days was like a graveyard.



Things started to go downhill between us when he started liking jazz, which he had to think was better than any other type of music. He couldn’t just like it and leave it there. Around the same time he started to talk about all the books he’d read, and it made me uncomfortable. The ideas he came up with. I know my mother was a little crazy, she never shut up for one thing, but she was a good person, a really good person, and raised four kids on a barber’s pay. She was big on a literal reading of the Bible and for a while had me convinced that I should pluck out an eye that offended me, until I finally realized that was going too far. On my own I realized it, without any help from anybody, especially Johnny, since what he did was go too far in the other direction. He couldn’t think like everybody else. He had to be different, which he thought made him better. The middle road wasn’t for him. Like my mother, he couldn’t just say that all it meant was that you had to control yourself and treat girls with respect and stick by your word to them, as best you can anyway. We’re all sinners. My mother was dead right about that, like a lot of other things. It wouldn’t be normal if you could look at a pretty girl and not have some bad thoughts, but that doesn’t mean you have to maim yourself or, on the other extreme, go after everything in a skirt. He told me, and he wasn’t joking, that he thought he had an obligation to do it with every woman he met who was willing. An obligation. That’s what got me, and we had an argument about it. A big argument. I laughed at him, and he got so red in the face that I thought he might explode. You might want to, I told him, and I don’t know if you’d go to hell for that or not, that’s up to God to decide, but you sure don’t have any obligation to do it. I laughed, but it kind of made me mad too, because that’s how he always was. I don’t know, something about it being natural, and of course I said something like it’s natural to fart at the dinner table, but that don’t mean you ought to do it. You’re not obligated to let out a big one just because you feel the urge. I think I did say “don’t” as a matter of fact. Used bad English on purpose. Just to piss him off, and to show him he wasn’t going to drag me off into that way of thinking. You’ve got to have a little common sense. That’s all it takes, really.



*****



I met him one night in Townes Van Zandt’s room at the Oxford Hotel in Denver. It was the night, or maybe one of the nights, when Townes stomped on his fiddle, on stage, which I interpreted in an article as being the hillbilly equivalent of smashing guitars, but that of course was just a journalistic flourish. Truth is there were only five people in the audience, me and Johnny and three drunk girls at a table, and that’s probably why he did it, pissed off at playing to a near empty house, and maybe frustrated too at trying to tune it. It was cold in there. I don’t think you ever knew for sure with Townes, why he did anything. That’s the legend at any rate, as we all know, which is about all I have to go on, that night being the only time I ever met him. I’m not much of an authority on his music either, or any music. My inspirations were Hunter Thompson and Thomas Pynchon. I wanted to find all the weird stuff in the world, all the fall out from what I saw then as a rotten system, and still do, and all the amazing and wonderful things that, as a result of the system, people ignore. I was on speed in those days just about twenty-four hours a day, except for time enough to sleep, to stay alive. I was that smart at least, and it was tricky business, but I’m here, still here, to tell you about it, but the speed may be why I said to him, “Johnny Keats. Are you the Johnny Keats?” I was always a good bullshitter, speed or no speed, which a good reporter has to be. Push, probe, look for that angle. That’s ninety percent of it, the writing part is just the result, tip of the iceberg, last phase, so when he looked surprised, then pleased, as if he’d just thought, “Shit, what is this? Am I famous now?” I knew it hadn’t been a mistake.



The truth is that even though we were both small potatoes, my excuse for being there was that a little underground weekly in Boulder would publish anything I took to them and actually pay me for it, usually, sooner or later, he was, although I didn’t know it then, even smaller. Smaller potatoes, but more important than that was that I could write circles around him. The stuff he had in that magazine of theirs, which I’ll tell you more about in a minute, was pretty pitiful, either straight like a newspaper feature and not all that well-written, or a very lame attempt to sound hip. It was pretty bad. He didn’t have a gonzo bone in his body. Like somebody with no sense of rhythm trying to dance.



But the magazine was pretty interesting, and I wanted to meet the people who were behind it. It was clear from what I’d read that they weren’t just interested in the music, certainly not just country music, that there was some literary mind or minds behind it. There were all sorts of references to Beatniks, Faulkner, Richard Brautigan, a piece on Leonard Cohen, and they didn’t seem to make any distinction between someone like Cohen or Dylan and say Ernest Tubb or Hank Snow. That may have been the theme of the magazine, in fact, and its important contribution, if that is anyone had gotten it. Most of my Boulder cohorts didn’t get it. For the less literary ones, that part just went right over their heads, and I’m not blaming them for it. A case can be made that the Boulder crowd was really more into the music part, harmonies and whatever, and that the crowd I think of as Texas was pretty indifferent to the music, more interested in the words. So naturally I was drawn to the Texas crowd, fancying myself a literary type. At the time, no matter what your preference, you couldn’t ignore the music. Everyone believed in that singer songwriter propaganda, that that’s where the real poetry of the age was being written. More than a few radicals even believed that prose, at least the fictional type, was going the way of baseball and horse racing and eight track tapes, and good riddance, and I guess I was a sympathizer of that view, and maybe it happened and we just haven’t noticed yet.



It turned out that the genius behind the magazine, and I’m totally convinced he was a genius, was a guy named W, totally ignored now, as then, which only supports my opinion. An original he was, which is why only a few people got him. You can still find his CD’s here and there, prose poems with country folk musical accompaniment, at independent record stores, if you can find one of those. Tower Records carried them until they went bust, but the only sure way of getting them, or his books, is to write his widow. She sells them out of her house and I’ll tell you the address and website later. He was a Texan, of course, like all the others who did the magazine, but at the time, the mid 70’s, he was living in Albuquerque, which is important. In fact, it’s the key to getting him, if you’re going to at all, that he lived in Albuquerque and not Taos. I won’t explain it, except to quote him on it: “Yeah, it might have been okay when Lawrence lived there.” And: “You can get better french fries in Albuquerque.”



By comparison, Johnny is a totally minor figure. Insignificant. He was important to me only because he introduced me to W, and really, I don’t think you can know Johnny Keats without knowing what W was all about. They were friends for a long time, and Johnny, who didn’t have an original bone in his body, and negligible talent, would hardly even have existed without W. On top of which, he was a prick. I thought he was going to kill his wife one night outside my trailer. I don’t think he touched her, or I didn’t see it if he did, but he lost control. No doubt about that, and I can’t even remember what it was about, what got him started, but their daughter was with them, and I think she was as scared of him as we were. That’s not good. She was only about five and sobbing, but he didn’t care. Screamed his head off, said some horrible things. He was a hanger on and knew it and took it out on his wife and kid. That’s the best I can say about him.



*****



He was famous for his headaches and for falling asleep at parties. Migraines, I think, and he got up at three in the morning and worked on his novel until seven, when he had to take the bus to the city to work. They lived in Oakland then, because it was cheaper, and I think too he liked to tell people he lived in East Oakland, near the Hell’s Angels and Black Panthers. It took him an hour on the bus to get to work and an hour back and he’d brag in those days about never reading the paper. He told me once he got the news from the screaming headlines of the Examiner, which he could read in the machines as he passed them on his way to the bus stop. I owed him and B a lot. They put me up for over a month when I first came out here from Austin, with no job and no money. I supported myself with substitute teaching while I studied for the bar exam. Passed it on the 1st try, by the way.



We met through MB in Austin, who had a kind of soiree thing going for a while. M’s wife was getting her PhD, so we never saw her except when she came into the kitchen for a snack or a soda, but several times a week a group of us would get together, it was a modern apartment complex, and sit at M’s bar, the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room, on the floor of which, by the way, Johnny was known for seducing women, a fact I know only because of how horny M was, or else why would he mention it? He told me heard it, but I wonder sometimes if that’s the whole story. Anyway, M’s place wasn’t a crash pad. It was a place where you could just show up and expect to be welcome and offered a drink. And you could stay as long as you liked, since M’s wife never ventured out of the back anyway, and M was always in the mood to drink.

I was in law school then so I couldn’t go there as often as some of the others, but I knew all the regulars. Besides Johnny, there was JF, who I think also thought of himself as a writer and wound up I heard as a city planner. And RK, a poli sci major who was destined I’m sure for a job with the State Dept., a big guy mathematician who was a high school buddy of Johnny’s and liked to play poker, and DE, the only woman regular, though a lot of us would bring girls by at times. She was a sort of flighty English major type, wound up married to an Englishman who had an antique shop, think Diane Keaton. That was her all over. Real good at being just friends with guys, not butch by any stretch, but one of the boys.



I think how M wound up eventually really got to Johnny. It got to all of us, since he might as well have died, but maybe it got to Johnny more. He took it hard, wouldn’t let it go. Live and let live has always been my philosophy, even when I was a diehard liberal (I’ve since become a staunch libertarian), but Johnny was probably always more of a real liberal, in that he thought he could and should help people not be who they were. You know what I mean. Not fucked up, which is all it ever amounts to, but I’ll tell you, two years working in legal aid cured me of that mistaken notion. I went in there thinking it was my dream job, my life’s work, and soon had to admit that when it comes right down to it, you really can’t help most people. Yes, there are innocent victims, of course, and those people I am still more than willing to help, but they are few and far between.



M was an alcoholic, which he might could have lived with for a while longer, but his wife all of a sudden had a good job at UC Berkeley, we were all out there by then, and he was unemployed and unable, apparently, to find anything that suited him. I’m not sure how that went, why he got so discouraged so fast, but he did and before any of us knew how bad it had gotten, he told us he’d joined Synanon and just disappeared. Gave up his Porsche. Gave it to Synanon. Can you beat that? He started out with them standing on a corner in San Francisco, asking for donations. I learned all that later. None of us saw him, but Johnny got drunk one night and went to a Synanon event where he thought M would be and got kicked out without finding him. He’d lost a friend, took it personally, blamed himself. That’s how I figure it. He also talked to M’s wife about it, so did I, but that got us nowhere. I never could figure her out, whether there was nothing there or she just kept herself well hidden.



Johnny said after they moved out here M would call him at ten or eleven at night and want to come over and drink scotch and play chess, and if Johnny let him, he’d drink and talk and play chess all night, and of course Johnny usually had to work the next morning, so that couldn’t go on for long. Here was the thing, or what had to be big, both for M and those of us who saw him fall apart in California. Back in Austin M had a reputation as a political player. He’d worked for various Democrats in Austin, and I think if he’d stayed there, where he knew people, had contacts, he could have made a good aide or advisor of some sort. Latched on to someone, worked on campaigns maybe. But sometimes, considering his dismal failure in California, I wondered how much political work he’d really done in Austin, how many contacts he really had, but then Johnny told me this story.



They went downtown to drink one night. This was before 6th Street became what it is now, so they wound up in a regular little beer joint, a bar bar, except of course in Texas at the time they couldn’t buy whiskey there. Anyway, time got away from M, it was close to midnight all of a sudden, closing time, and for some reason he had nothing at home. Drank it all? Careless? Don’t know, but the bartendar told him a six pack of beer would cost him $3, which seemed outrageous. You could get Hamms then at 7-11 for 99 cents, three-fifty a case. It was ten to twelve, bar time, but M thought he could make it to the nearest 7-11. He drove fast but with reasonable sanity, and there would have been no problem, but there were big signs on the outside saying they’d just had their beer license suspended. Rotten luck. M panicked. They were in the Porsch, white with black leather interior, a classic, and Lamar at that time was a fairly busy but not packed four lane thoroughfare. Especially that late, not a whole lot of traffic. The next nearest 7-11, with normal driving, was 5 or 10 minutes away, depending on the lights etc. The road curves a lot, a park on one side. M drove like a maniac. Never mind speed limits, red lights or other cars. Johnny says it was like being in a car chase movie. White knuckles all the way, would have crossed himself a dozen times if he was Catholic, and by the time they pulled into the 7-11, two cop cars with lights flashing were right behind them. M showed considerable aplomb. He handed Johnny a five, told him to get 2 six packs, he’d handle the cops. Out of the corner of his eye, as he approached the entrance to the store, Johnny saw him get out of the car, smiling, hand out, and said to himself, he doesn’t have a prayer. But when Johnny came out, M was chatting with a plainsclothes detective who’d pulled up in an unmarked car, and the uniformed cops were standing back. Turns out the detective was an old buddy, a political crony of some sort, the only liberal democrat on the police force, and M got off with nothing, not even a warning ticket. The only thing that was bothering him when he got back in the car was whether Johnny had the beer.



So M fell. I don’t think he had a degree, but he should have sold cars or encyclopedias or vacuum cleaners. Anything but Synanon. He’d have cleaned up, been a natural, and maybe that’s eventually how it worked out with Synanon. Nobody seems to know. I don’t know how he could afford the Porsche in the first place, but it must have been from his parents, whom he never mentioned. I have no idea what his father did, and I know where they lived only because there was a whole group of them in Austin from the same neighborhood in Dallas, a few who showed up for M’s soirees regularly, and a couple of others who popped up through the years.



*****



M is why they called me as soon as they got into town, and I’ll never forget Johnny saying on the phone, “You live on the Washington and Taylor?” That’s how green they were. The Washington and Taylor? We laughed about that for a long time, my wife and I, but we were already in the last throes of an agonizing breakup and just to piss me off, to make things more difficult, she decided she didn’t like them. They were too enthusiastic, which must be the parts of “On the Road” she skipped, but she didn’t like Kerouac anyway. Of course not many did at that time, since he’d transformed into a raving belligerent reactionary, but she was always strictly the Alan Watts type. Zen. Cool cool, you know, quiet and laid back, which Johnny actually was most of the time, but she was never one to be interested in how people really were. She’d pegged them as rubes from Texas, fresh off the boat, an embarrassment, and that was that.



However, yes, I shouldn’t dwell on Elizabeth. She was a bitch and everyone knew it, and I don’t even know what happened to her. I’m not sure I could even guess, or want to, but anyway, and this seems fantastic now, like something you’d make up, but that first night, their first night in the big city, we went to the Haight, yeah, the Haight, to see the Magical Mysery Tour at the Straight theater, and Johnny fell asleep, but it was no reflection on the Beatles, I don’t think. It didn’t play until four in the morning. The deal was that it was supposed to show at midnight, after showing in LA earlier. It had never been seen anywhere, this was 1968, the summer after the summer of love, and the line went around the block and we waited for hours. The whole scene was a circus. All the Haight characters were out, in costume, entertaining us while we waited. Jugglers, clowns, poets. It must have been quite an introduction to the city for them, but as I learned later, Johnny wasn’t much interested in hippies or smoking dope or anything else that was going on at the time. Strictly a retro guy, even back then. He’d come out here because of the Beatniks, who were long gone by then, for all practical purposes, replaced by rich kids who hung out in the coffee houses. Or maybe it was always like that. That’s all that was left of it, though.



What Johnny liked to do was sit in his kitchen and drink with someone who would talk to him all night, and I was his man for that. We’d also arm wrestle, sometimes the whole night, neither of us getting the advantage, not even once, that’s how evenly matched we were. What did we talk about? I know what I talked about, what I always talk about, my favorite topic, the end of the world. After years of therapy and medication, it continues to be. The only thing that’s changed is how it will end, although that may be coming back full circle now. We’re not going to dodge the nuclear holocaust are we? It’s actually worse now, more likely, than it was when I first started worrying about it, predicting it. It nigh, brother, you better believe it. It’s nigh. We invented the means of our own destruction, how sweet is that. Instead of just annihilating the barbarians when we had the chance, or at least pounding them into submission, we dicked around until now we can’t do it, although I wouldn’t be against trying. How many bombs did it take to bring the Japanese to their knees? Only two. Probably one, but they just took their time letting us know. Yeah, it might take more than that for the Arabs, they’re crazier even than the Japs, but it wouldn’t take more than one for China and India. They’re both sensible people and essentially cowards. I thought about building a bunker out in the woods where nobody could find it or think even to look, and you can get stuff nowadays that would last you twenty or thirty years, which is all I’d need. Fuck posterity. Water might be a problem, I grant you. You could set up a system for collecting it, but it would have to be from some underground reservoir that wasn’t contaminated, so I don’t know. I haven’t taken it that far yet, and probably won’t, because the one good thing I’d be missing for sure is a woman. I wouldn’t even try to recruit one. Can you imagine living in an underground bunker with anybody, never mind a woman, for twenty or thirty years? I’d probably wind up killing her and then, for sanitation’s sake, have to eat her. No. I’d sooner go out in a blaze of glory. I’ve got some acid hidden away. I haven’t done acid in a very long time. It’s not good for my head, but when the end comes, it will be perfect. I’m going to the top of the tallest building I can find, already have one in mind, where I’ll have a wraparound view that will stretch for miles and miles, and I’ll stand there naked, my arms stretched out and welcome that flash of light, like lightning, only better.



I did acid with Johnny and B in LA once. We went down on Sunset and watched the billboards bleed. Johnny claimed that in Baskin Robbins he could see people’s skulls. I really, really wanted to fuck B that night. I would have given my left nut to have done it, maybe even told her that. Johnny went to bed. No, I don’t think it was one of his famous headaches, but he could sleep anywhere, anytime, even on acid, but maybe that night he wanted to dream on acid. I don’t know. I was on a Dr. John fixation at the time. Dr. John, I thought then and still do to some extent, knew the truth about everything and everyone, told it like it was, while everyone else just jerked off. Everyone else I thought was a shallow asshole, so while Johnny slept with his acid dreams, we had Dr. John cranked up on the stereo in their living room, they rented a little house near but not in Venice, which sounds cooler than wherever it actually was, I forget, but anyway, I took my clothes off and started dancing. I’m a good dancer. I know how to take full advantage of being tall and lean and can actually convince myself at times that I’m black, and I know for damn sure I’m moving as if I were, and of course I figured that would turn B on, but after a while I noticed that she wasn’t paying any attention. She was just sitting on the couch in her own little world, eyes gleaming, shining, she was always kind of bugeyed anyway, totally spaced out. I probably could have fucked her. She might have gone along with anything at that point, but when I realized she wasn’t getting into my dancing, all the fun went out of it. I didn’t want to just climb on her for nothing. I wanted to show her who Dr. John was, make her understand, and in a way be fucking Dr. John, or have her be fucking him, but she wasn’t interested. Might as well have been hypnotized, and once I saw that, I had a hard time even keeping a hard on.



*****



I haven’t seen or heard from Johnny in over thirty years. Was going to say forty, but then I remembered I saw him and B in Denver once. I was just passing through on my way back to Winnipeg, where I was doing medical research. Nothing earthshaking. My speciality is nerves, and beyond that I’d probably start boring you. I’m one of those people in white lab coats you see on TV when they do a medical story, the ones that pick up a test tube, shake it a little, then hold it up to the light. Yeah, nerves. Wouldn’t it be great if when you got your hand chopped off you could just grow a new one? Like a lizard grows his tail back? We don’t talk like that among ourselves, too far fetched, but something like that is at the heart of what we do. You’re probably too young to have heard of Roy Campanella, but he was a catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and he was paralyzed from the waist down, that’s how we use to always say it, in a car accident. I was eleven when it happened, and it was like it happened to one of the family. Well almost. I was a white kid in Texas, but I loved Campanella. A lot of us did. Not just me. We were all racists in those days, just how it was, I won’t kid you about that, but almost all my friends were also Dodger fans, and Campanella was every bit as popular as Duke Snyder, maybe even more so. Anyway, one of these days we might come up with something that would cure an injury like that. Not me. The human race I mean, scientists in general, and when that happens, what I do for a living will probably have contributed to it.



Johnny was my roommate in college, and through him I met David, and through me he met his first college girlfriend, and after that it gets too confusing to keep track of, but also among the main cast of characters there was the girlfriend’s friend Carol, who wound up marrying David, though it didn’t last long, and Margaret, my first wife, and that didn’t last long either, and N.A., speaking of paraplegics, who Johnny got pretty close to at one point. It all started with me meeting M. in the Methodist church choir. Before that, the weekends and our social scene in general were pretty bleak. Johnny and David had done some political things. Picketed against segregation, went to Young Socialists meetings, that was even before SDS, but they both struck out in the woman department and didn’t even make any friends. They weren’t really all that political when it came right down to it. Yeah, they believed in all the liberal causes, and even teased me about issuing me a Volkswagen beetle when I became a doctor, wanted to know what color I wanted, assuming I had a choice, but mostly they were into music and books and movies. More so than I was. Especially Johnny. I had my biology, D had math, but all Johnny ever wanted to talk about was the arts, and mostly literature. Even more than women, believe it or not.



Isn’t there a Faulkner book about two guys talking in a dorm room? That’s the whole book? Just them talking, only it’s really about just the one from the South, and not even so much him as the South itself. Well we talked like that, but neither of us thought we were telling the story of a whole place, we were too damn narcisisstic, and neither of us was Faulkner to boot. The most important thing in our lives, all we wanted to talk about, was ourselves, our roots, who our parents were, what it was like growing up, in my case in deep East Texas and in Johnny’s near Dallas. My mother taught first grade and my dad managed farms for rich people and did odd jobs that came up. He was a real handyman, a little bit of a carpenter, welder, mechanic, but maybe thought he was better at those things than he really was. A little guy complex, like me, and my mother was I think half a kid from being around all those first graders her whole adult life. She talked in a high pitched whine that I know other people thought was strange. We weren’t poor, and there was just me and my sister, but we never had any extra money. I didn’t have to work even part time in college, but I worked my butt off in the summer, a highway crew, and would help Daddy sometimes on weekends, mending fence, feeding the boss’s cows, and I used what I could save for spending money during the school year and my tuition and room and board was paid for by a scholarship set up by one of the old families in town. It was a pretty good deal and I liked working outside in the summer. I guess I was a little like my dad. Small enough to think I had to prove to people how tough I could be.



Johnny wasn’t like that at all. He was hard to pin down that way. He wasn’t like a fairy or anything and was good at sports, and I don’t think he cared if people thought he was smart, or if he did, it was only because he knew that the people he hung out with valued that. No. I think he wanted to be thought of as sensitive, more like an artist, someone who sees things other people don’t or who sees them in a different way. That was Johnny for sure, and he was always working on something, none of it to my taste particularly, but what do I know? I like a good story, and I don’t think that’s what he was after. I was really into Michener back then. You could learn a lot reading those books, a lot of history, and let’s see, I also like James Clavell, but that was later. Now? I like Anne Rice. Always science fiction, the old guys, Asimov, Heinlein. I liked Dune too. And 2001 A Space Odyssey, and yeah, later, late sixties, we got stoned like everybody else, my friends and I, but I was going to medical school in Dallas by then and Jack and B were in California, so I didn’t see them much, and when we did, we had less in common. The beginning of the end.



Too bad really. We had some good times, went through a lot together. There was this older guy, probably mid-thirties, from up north somewhere, Michigan or Minnesota, trying to get his Phd in poli sci, and he’d come in our room sometimes and tell us that Dean Burdine, he liked that name and drew it out, Dean Burdine was lining up rail cars for shipping freshmen home after the fall semester. “Better hit the books, boys, or you’ll be on that train. They ship half of you home every year.” He’d been in the service in Japan, and a few times when he got drunk he would come into our room uninvited after we’d gone to bed, stand in the middle of the room and yell “Sakahachi!!” I have no idea what it means, I’ve always meant to look it up, but it scared the shit out of us, I don’t know why. We never turned on the lights or said a word, just let him stand there until he finally left. I mean it sounds weird now, but he was like a grown up, wasn’t supposed to behave that way, and we still thought of ourselves as kids.



The other guy with a single room was Kent Smith, a Spanish major, and I think he and Jack went to Mexico one summer. Maybe that’s where he got the Mexico bug. I don’t know. That was past my time. Kent was one of those guys, kind of nerdy, who’d talk to anybody at the drop of a hat. He’d hold up the line at the dining hall across from the dorm because he was talking to one of the servers. About what, I don’t know. Nothing, really. He always seemed to think of something, and of course he never missed the chance to speak Spanish. He’d talk to anybody, anytime. His father sold shoes, a sales rep, traveller, not retail, drove all over the state. I remember that because he gave them a ride to the border when they went to Mexico.



And then there were the two pharmacy majors who read the National Enquirer, actually had a subscription to it. That was back in the days when they had pictures of people who’d had acid thrown in their faces on the cover, or some such atrocity. They were kind of creepy, those two, like twins, with personalities like accountants, the sterotype, pill counters. When the Enquirer came, however often it was, the whole floor would go to their room and look at the freaks, the maimed, the aliens from outer space. And let’s see, oh yeah, the two dentists, we’d swapped roommates because it was clear that those two weren’t going to study, and sure enough Dean Burdine sent them packing after the first semester. And there was Rick, a pretty serious guy actually, played guitar, his father a professional musician in Houston. Listened to jazz all the time on the UT station and stayed up one night all night reading Catch 22. He lasted 2 semesters. Couldn’t get up for class. Took all 8 o’clocks in the spring, his way of curing himself of sleeping in, but it didn’t work. I remember hearing him across the hall, yelling at himself, I’m not kidding, to get up, but not doing it, and finally cursing, not really himself, fate I guess, saying “goddammit, fuck shit piss, I hate this” and then rolling over and falling back to sleep.



*****



Most of the time I knew him he was talking about writing a detective novel trilogy, the first one being Keats and the General’s Wife, which he finished right after he left Texas, no more than a year later, and it’s the one that almost won that contest and got him an agent. It was pretty good, I have to admit. Not as good maybe as the stories. Those were good stories, 3 or 4 of them were, and all were good enough to be published but he didn’t know the right people and probably couldn’t have gotten along with them if he had. I’ve never known such a pure contrarian. You say black, he says white. Sometimes it was funny. Sometimes silly. Sometimes infuriating. And yes, why not admit it, sometimes brilliant, but not often, not often enough.



The idea of the trilogoy was Keats, that was the detective’s name, John Keats, too risky, I think, could easily be ridiculed, Johnny being pretty much a nobody in that world. Why take the chance? But anyway, the idea was for the novels to be about Keats at different ages, 20’s, 40’s, 60’s. I don’t know why, I don’t think he did either, beyond the obvious, which I guess could be enough if done right. It’s a legitimate point of departure: life from those three pivotal perspectives. And then too you’ve got the detective as the searcher. That’s what he liked about the form I think. Keats is looking for something, always, a picareque sort of adventure, not really mysteries. I owe that insight, by the way, to him. I don’t know if he thought of it himself or borrowed it.



So there it was, his life’s work, as he saw it in the eighties and early nineties, when I knew him. A guy who moves through the world looking for answers and meanwhile, in order to find them, pushes aside all the bullshit, looking really in the end for the authentic, that’s the big overriding issue, question, what is authentic, and that’s where Mexico came in. But he had trouble with the 2nd one. He was working on it the last I saw of him, still working on it, and it wasn’t going well, and he blamed New England. He hated it. I wanted to say, well, ok, then maybe you should move, but his wife was from there, that’s what they were doing there in the first place, and I’ll have to give that to him. How he felt about her. He knew how lucky he was and didn’t want to fuck it up.



*****



He was such a good friend, so helpful and important to me in so many ways, that I wish now, I regret, that we didn’t have sex that night in his pickup. Or any other time, but especially that night. I was willing. More. I was ready, but he had his wife to think about and of course I can’t blame him for that. Plus, I was coming off this terrible time, that I may or may not tell you about. Maybe it was for the best, how it turned out, but like I said, sometimes I regret that we didn’t go all the way that night. The main thing is he was such a sweet guy, and it would be a good memory. I know it would still be, even if we’d done it right there in the front seat of his pickup. I don’t think we’d have had a romance, but you never know.



I was a Southern Baptist, pretty hard core. I danced, it wasn’t that bad, but I didn’t drink, and it never occurred to me to let a boy do more than kiss me, and I wouldn’t go out with anyone who let me know he was thinking about more. More important, tho, is that I really believed all that stuff. I was a serious girl. Jesus was my personal savior. I went to church, Sunday school, Wednesday night prayer meeting, fellowship, summer retreats, and anything else they had, and I was convinced that life was just one long fight against sin and the danger of going to hell, and what shocked and intrigued me about Jack was that he just came right out and said he didn’t believe any of it. Just like that. Everything I’d ever been taught, and took seriously, he said wasn’t true. I’d never met anyone who said that, who actually didn’t believe and said so, and at first, for quite a while actually, I wanted to save him. It was my duty as a Christian, and besides, I liked him, knew he was good at heart, and would feel terribly guilty if I didn’t try to save him. He sat behind me in class. He was two years older than me, and I can’t remember now why we were in the same class or what it was, but we passed notes to each other. I’d tell him about Jesus and he’d tell me about some writer he liked.



It wasn’t him, though, that saved me from being saved. The credit for that goes to the Baptists themselves, not the ones I was used to, but a church in southern Ohio where I went one summer for a kind of internship, and they all turned out to be holy rollers. It was the summer after I graduated from high school, and I went up there to help them win souls for Christ, but I was mortified by how they all carried on during the services, getting up in the aisles, literally rolling around, speaking in tongues, it scared me, and I thought, No, this isn’t for me. I admit it was a style issue. We didn’t roll in the aisles at home. Our preacher at home of course made it clear that anyone in the congregation would go to hell if he wasn’t saved, we weren’t Quakers or Unitarians, we weren’t even Episcopalian, but Dr. Hope preached in a more restrained, civilized manner and we all sat there and listened politely. He didn’t scream at the top of his lungs. All that screaming in Ohio made me literally sick. I started throwing up and couldn’t stop and had to come home. Easily the worst time in my life, and it changed my life completely. I know I could have taken a middle road. Come home and picked up where I left off, but I guess Jack did have an influence. I remembered everything he said, and one day I just thought, why do I need any of it? Those Ohians are clearly worshipping some voodoo version of God, but really, when it comes down to it, is Dr. Hope any different? I tried for a while. I gave it a chance, but my heart wasn’t in it. Everytime someone told me to pray for something, I thought about what Jack had said about the Aztecs. They prayed for the corn to grow. We pray for rain. What’s the difference?



He had nothing to do with me going to San Francisco. That was a total coincidence. I came out with some girl friends one summer when I was still a Christian, just a fun trip, and fell in love with it. So when I got my degree, I just came out here, and of course I couldn’t find a counseling job, but I soon found a good secretary’s job, or administrative assistant, if you prefer, what they used to call an executive or private secretary, at a college for a high level administrator. Before that, though, when I was still getting my bearings, flailing around really, I decided to volunteer as a counselor at the Y. I had the credentials for it, and the experience, and that’s where I met Thomas. I’m sure now, in retrospect, that he came to counseling just to pick up girls, and it worked. Totally forbidden, of course, to go out with a patient, but at that point I didn’t care. I was lonely. Jack and his wife were out there, of course, but across the bay and besides, you can go only so far as the tagalong third wheel, not really like having friends. The real reason, though, when I think about it, is that I wanted to be alone, isolated from everyone I’d ever known before, that whole life. It was exciting. A clean slate, a fresh start, and I liked Thomas. He was funny and good-looking and so sensitive, and although it’s embarrassing to admit, and racist, I know, the fact that he was black made it even better. God, if my parents had known, I’d have been disowned. Flat out. No discussion. And by the way, Mom, did I tell you I knew he’d been in prison? That was some weekend. We hardly got out of bed until Monday morning, never mind leaving my apartment. I was sore for a week, and not just where you might think, but all over, like after the first day of gym. It was heavenly. I’d never had so much fun in my life, and I couldn’t wait until Thursday. Friday was a holiday, and he’d promised to take me to Reno for the long weekend, but meanwhile he had some business to take care of first. Said he’d check in with me Thursday, but he didn’t. I didn’t hear anything until Friday, when he called from jail. Turns out his business was robbing a bank, to get the money to take me to Reno, but an FBI agent saw him walking down the street the next day, not a block from where he’d committed the crime. I went to see him, and it was horrible. Totally humiliating. The cops were jerks, and I had to talk to him on a phone through glass. I felt so sorry for him. I knew how sweet he really was, but they treated him like shit. They didn’t care about him or me. They were robots. For a long time after that, I really did think cops were pigs. It totally radicalized me.



At first I was going to stick by him all the way, thick or thin, better or worse, do whatever was necessary to get him free and then reform him, bring out that sweet good nature of his, I’d be his guardian angel, and so on, but it wasn’t long before I came to my senses. I visited him a few more times, and the more we talked, the more I understood how different we were. Just think about what he did. From our perspective, law-abiding citizens with jobs, it was completely, utterly nuts. And stupid. The stupid part is what eventually really got to me, and after a while pissed me off at him, more than anything else. Robbing the bank was bad, but it was hard to even believe that he would then walk around the same neighborhood, carefree as a bird, as if nothing had happened. Yes, I’m a psychologist. I even have a license now, and if he was my patient, and only that, I could give you a dozen or more ways to treat him for what was clearly a personality disorder, but as his girl friend, however briefly, I could see nothing but that divide, the huge chasm, between us, and it broke my heart.



In the long run, though, that wasn’t the worst part, not the deepest wound. That came when I started looking at myself. If he was stupid, what was I? I’d counseled him only 2 or 3 times, but talk about a rookie mistake, that one takes the cake. It was all my fault. It really was. I’ve never changed my mind about that, to this day. The only difference is it doesn’t hurt as much to face it. I never thought about suicide. I’m not turned that way, but I did think I deserved a good beating. I’d have welcomed one. Please make me black and blue, to ease the pain. I cried myself silly. I actually banged my head against the wall. Not too hard. I whispered I hate myself over and over again, until I was hoarse, and but for neighbors, I’d have screamed it. Maybe. Actually, I may not be that type either, but I was plenty miserable, sitting on the floor, whispering, I hate myself, I hate myself, over and over again, a chant that after a while became almost comforting. I felt so guilty. I was a total failure. A fuck up, at everything. Just shoot me. Put me out of my misery.



Jack helped. They were having a party, no more than a couple of weeks after the fiasco, and I got nearly falling down drunk and went along with Jack to go buy more beer. I’d already told him the whole story, and of course he tried to make me feel better, said what you’d expect: in the end, you’re not responsible for his actions, and screw the rules, you’re entitled to the experience. He even said he wouldn’t like me as much if I weren’t the kind of person who’d get carried away occasionally and act on impulse. Jack, of course, could justify anything. I already knew that. For him, nothing trumped experience, certainly not morality, or at least that’s what he preached, which of course makes his reluctance to screw me when he had the chance a tad ironic. I was ready. I didn’t see him all that much, but that night in my sodden mania I saw him as the only rock in my life, or the only friendly one, simpatico, and I wanted him to take me in his arms and protect me from everything. He did that, actually. We cuddled for a long time. We kissed a little, but he stopped there even though I didn’t want him to. I told him, flat out, we’ll do whatever you want, and after thinking about it for a minute, he took me back to the party. Good old Jack. There when I needed him. I still felt like an idiot, but it was nice to know there was someone who still liked me, despite what I’d done, and maybe, after all, it did help too that he didn’t just want to get in my pants.



*****



One way of explaining who they were is to tell you who they didn’t like, and it may be the best way to start. It’s not all writers. It couldn’t be, considering the times, and the fact that most of them were Texans. Music was an essential part of it, popular music, which to this day most academics can’t accept, not that any of them but me and a few others care one way or the other about any of them. I’ve had to do this on the side, if I cared about making a living, which I did, and even so I’m not doing myself any favors. Just admitting I’m interested would be a mistake. Nothing is worse for your reputation than taking seriously what your colleagues don’t.



But let’s start with literature, and with the most obvious example, McMurtry. Keep in mind that Gordon was a the center of the group, the guiding light, and the opinions I’m attributing to them were mostly his. The rest didn’t always agree with him, but it’s safe to say that his opinions represented the spirit of the group as a whole, their general editorial stance, you might say. Their reason for being, what defined them.



Gordon’s favorites of the McMurtry novels, the only ones in fact he admitted to liking without reservation, were the first three: Horseman, Leaving Cheyenne, and Picture Show. Once McM left contemporary small town West Texas, he had no use for him, which was just about everything, except for those lame Duane sequels, including Lonesome Dove. Gordon was cagey about LD. I remember sitting on his front porch in Dallas, where he liked to hold court, asking him what he thought of LD, and he never really gave me a straight answer, but I can tell you what I think he thought. The West Lite. And I think I know why he didn’t say that, since he was normally not one to pull punches. I think he liked it too much, in spite of himself. G was honest to a fault, or just said nothing, and he often said nothing when he couldn’t say something about his own taste that he thought was flattering, that enhanced how he wanted you think about him. Really. How could he possibly admit to liking LD? The whole world liked it.



Other contemporaries, Shrake and that crowd, The Texas Monthly crowd, he mostly ignored, but if he had said anything, I think he would have called them local color whores. Heirs of Dobie, with sex, drugs and rock and roll. Dobie by that time was totally irrelevant, which is why Gordon defended him. Or part of it. I’m not saying that’s why he liked him. He owed him a lot and knew it. Some of Dobie’s stuff, the best of it, when he forgets to be Will Rogers, is pretty good.



Here’s the musicians they didn’t like: Michael Murphy, Jerry Jeff Walker, but I’m starting to bore myself. Maybe this is the wrong angle to take. Let’s talk instead about who they were, starting with the periphery, the outer fringes, at least geographically, and probably the most important in that category is Art C, the son of a well to do farmer in the San Joaquin Valley in California, who thought he was the reincarnation of Walt Whitman. Western 20th C version, and he would have said that Whitman was western in his soul, maybe did say it. Soul is a word that appears often in C’s writing. C was also a heterosexual version, by the way, no small detail there, who saw his duty to the world or maybe the gods of poetry to have a string of wives and and a bountiful harvest therefrom, as he might put it himself. For C, anything having to do with farms, prairies, hobos, drunks, whores, outlaws, railroads, and so on, you get the idea, was good, as was any writer who could write long sentences, except maybe Hemingway, anything that rambled was good. Thomas Wolfe. For a long time he lived in a trailer near the Crow reservation in eastern Montana (western Montana was for rich sissies). And kept whatever kids were around while his wife of the moment worked as a waitress or in some discount store, and when he could he’d leave his novels and poetry and painting and self-publishing projects behind and go off and fight fires. He published a little magazine for a long time and a lot of J and G’s stuff. He was a big guy, always full of energy, ready to drink, screw or fight at the drop of a hat, or that’s how he liked to present himself back in those days.



*****



I met Jack through Hugh Gardner, who was one of those Dallas people he met in Austin. I didn’t know any of those people except Hugh. I’d never been to Texas, and the few times I’ve been there since I haven’t found much of interest, despite Jack touting it all he could. And I feel pretty much the same about California and New York too for that matter. I guess I’m a homebody, or a homeboy. My roots are in Denver and South Dakota, where I grew up and where my family had some land, respectively. I remember trying to talk once to Jimmy Buffet about Pierre, when I was helping J and B with the magazine, but got rebuffed. I knew he didn’t like to talk to anybody, no interviews, thought that connection might help, but it didn’t.



I helped them all I could. They didn’t know anybody, and I’d had a play produced here and had been around forever. I wouldn’t say everyone knew me, or knew who I was, but I had a certain reputation. From the play, which got good local reviews, and from the fact that I knew a folk singer who helped me get a New York agent, a circumstance I fucked up in a pretty classic way. I didn’t want to settle for anything less than a major publishing house, so I fired him, which is something throughout life you never quite get over. How many ways can you call yourself stupid? I don’t know. I lost count.



Jack and I liked each other and had a lot in common, but in some ways we were entirely different. The longest I’ve been able to stay married, for example, is three days, and I’ve actually done that twice. Yeah, two three day marriages. Also, I went to a Catholic high school, which I thought scarred and twisted me in a pretty unique way, but actually it was probably just the marriage thing that was the big difference. I’m not sure there’s a lot of difference between conservative Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists. Both are primarily interested in scaring the holy shit out of you and beating you into submission. At least that was our common experience. The marriage thing, and this has been a lifelong problem of mine with women, is that I don’t like people telling me what to do. Believe me, a lot of people, not just J, have tried to tell me about compromise, but I guess I just don’t get it. The funny thing is, all my best friends are good at it. My longest friend has been married to the same woman since high school, and even Jack’s, twelve years, seems like quite a while to me. Course a week would be long by my standards.



The reason we hit it off so well and so fast was that we’d both worked construction and both had novels nobody wanted to publish. Five novels in my case, and you don’t want to know how many by now, all of them in hat boxes in my closet. Yeah, construction. We were laborers, the lowest of the low, so don’t let anyone who was a carpenter tell you he knows what working construction is like. Those guys have it easy. In Denver at the time you could go down to the union hall and get a job if one came up and no one was around who didn’t have a card already. So it was just a matter of patience and getting up early, maybe for nothing. Sticking it out. Why couldn’t I do that with a woman? Don’t know. Anyway, it was just like Manpower, only it paid seven bucks an hour, good money back then. Plenty for me, single and at times living at home with my parents, and it wasn’t even hard to save it up and take a lot of time off in between jobs. A perfect setup, except of course the job itself could be really shitty, usually was. I turned Hugh on to the deal and he lasted 2 hours, not getting that you had to do what you were told and keep your mouth shut and keep working or they’d just get rid of you. Unlike Jack, I always liked Hugh, but he could be pretty infuriating at times, or funny, depending on how you took it. I mean you have to laugh at how clueless he was about being a worker, considering he had a Phd in Sociology, and his espousal of left wing causes.



Jack had less of a sense of humor about it, and finally one night threw him out of his house and told him never to come back. It had nothing to do with sex, by the way, which you might be wondering if you know Hugh’s reputation for going after the sisters and wives of his friends. That’s another thing he was clueless about, and you have to believe it was willful. Actually, I guess it did have something to do with sex. There was this Cuban woman staying with Jack and B, an ex-girlfriend of a mutual friend, and she was pretty good looking, a Latin type figure, big breasts and little hips, so H took her out one night. I don’t know if J and B fixed them up, or if H just happened by and latched on, or what, but they had no problem with them dating. J even said he thought it might be good for her. For her mind, since apparently she was nutty as a fruitcake. I mean really crazy. She thought the FBI was watching her through the TV screen, which fascinated J up to a point. He said he could reason with her about it until he was blue in the face, and she’d nod as if she agreed with him, but then say something that made no sense at all. It was weird, Jack said. You could actually see why she thinking what she did. The power would go off at just the right time, or wrong time, or something a news announcer said seemed to mean something else, or the reception would get bad. He said it was a long time before he could watch TV himself without reading things into it the way she did, not of course believing it, but still, there it was.



So H takes her out, having received all this background, and when they come back after a few hours, she goes to bed and H stays up with J and B and announces to them that she isn’t crazy at all. She’s just politically aware and sensitive, which just flew all over Jack, who’d been putting up with her and trying to help for over a week. He told Hugh that he couldn’t see I anymore, as if he were her father or something, and if he wasn’t out of the house in one minute, he’d throw him out, and Hugh leaves, totally confused and protesting the whole way. An overreaction on J’s part? You had to know Hugh. B supported J all way on this one. Jack said it “took the cake,” one of his favorite expressions. He couldn’t have imagined a more perfect example of Hughness, of letting politics make you blind to reality, which in this case should have been as plain as the nose on your face. It bordered on the criminal, in J’s opinion.



I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it sounds just like H, and there’s another incident, coincidentally, involving H and S’s sister. I guess H screwed her in a swimming pool one night and Steve never forgave him for it, but I’m a little vague on exactly what the problem was. Was it just that it was more or less in his view? Or that S’s sister was too fucked up at the time to know what she was doing? The reason I thought of it is that she did have problems apparently. Mental problems. Drug problems. You name it. I don’t know, but H was good at making enemies, so whatever it was, I’m sure he was not tactful and probably thoughtless on top of that. And I’m sure he acted innocent throughout. What’s the big deal? What did I do? And he never learned and was always convinced he was right. Through the years I’ve stopped being his friend three times, for various and similar things, though never over a woman.



*****



I can see now that I was in denial from almost the first time we met, about his ability, even his intention, to stay faithful. I had to pull him away from some Italian woman he had eyes for on practically our first date. At a party. He didn’t want to stop talking to her. I went away for a few minutes. We’d just gotten there, I wanted to see who all was there, and when I came back, he was still hitting on her. I pretty much got between them, physically I mean, and verbally. I made it very uncomfortable for him, kept interrupting him, not letting her answer his questions, and made it very clear to her that I was with him. I thought he was worth fighting for, and I don’t mind doing that when necessary. I’ve never been a shrinking violet. No one has ever called me shy or reticent. I’m very attuned to what’s going on, or so I thought. I attribute my blindness later to my complete trust in him. Two things. One, he seemed, at least when he was sober, to be kind of a prude. And two, after twelve years, I kind of thought of us as one person, right up until he blindsided me.



He had a temper, but he had me half convinced that it was my fault, and it wasn’t until after that I realized how manipulative he could be. He almost maneuvered me into being unfaithful to him. That’s how good he was. Whether it was to justify his own actions, or because it turned him on, I couldn’t say. Maybe a little of both. I’m not, in all fairness, saying he always knew what he was doing, but I was the victim either way. And yes, I know exactly what he’d say: experience trumps everything. It’s a sin to turn down a piece of ass, which I think he got from Zorba the Greek. Oh, I know him. Probably better than anybody. Knew him. Amending it to past tense is essential. Lots of water under the bridge since then. It was mostly Molly we talked about for, I guess, oh Lord, it’s been thirty years now, hasn’t it? Time flies when you’re having fun, and I’ve had my share, yes, I won’t deny that, and although I’m not sure it’s wise to dredge any of this up, I feel a little silly not doing it. I’ve got a whole other life now. What do I care?



This sounds silly, and it was, but what good is getting older if it’s not to mind sounding silly: we went to San Blas that summer, a trip I planned totally, as I did all our trips, and the rest of our lives for that matter. It’s how he wanted it. I planned that trip because I wanted to see, we wanted to see, the Mexico of Night of the Iguana, and from that standpoint, it was a complete success, even though the mosquitoes ran us out of town. And the heat. Both of us from Texas, we thought we knew what heat was, but we were wrong. You wouldn’t believe San Blas in the summer. Ever been there? My advice is don’t go, even if now they have air conditioning, I’m sure they do, but doesn’t matter. You couldn’t go outside, so what’s the point? I’ve never been so miserable in my life. Gobs of those mosquitoes, and they have a special kind there, a unique species, big fuckers, almost like flies. They would land on my leg and try to eat me alive, literally, and me with fair skin. They didn’t bother Jack so much, but they loved me. We lasted 3 days, then caught a ride with some girls from Berkeley in a VW bus to Guadalajara, which was lovely. If it weren’t for the inevitable association with him, I would always have said it was one of my favorite cities. And we got along great. We’d only been married a year or so and were still madly in love, or at least I was, I can’t speak for him about that. Not anymore. I don’t trust a word he ever said to me. Never will again, and that’s just how I feel.



Like I said, though, even though we were miserable, San Blas was a success as far as our being able to think we were in the tropics, like Greene in Africa, like Malcolm Lowry. Those were writers he liked, and therefore I did too then, or said I did. Actually, I really did, and still do. I get it, the whole thing, and you can only take this guilt by association thing so far. We sat in the bar every one of those 3 days and played gin rummy. That was when I finally had a breakthrough about gin and started beating him. I don’t know why it took me so long. A mental block or something. I just didn’t understand the game, but when it finally clicked, he couldn’t beat me. Never. That was pretty funny. I was always smarter than him about that sort of thing. Math. I could do figures in my head while he was still trying to figure it out. Remembering details of movies and books. But of course he had me convinced that he was the one who really understood things, the one with soul. The prick. I was just the smart one, and those kind are a dime a dozen. My soul needed tutoring, and he was just the guy to do it.



The first morning we tried to walk into town. It was only a mile or so, and it nearly killed us, might have if this guy in a VW hadn’t come by. A Californian. He took us to a place on the square, which was nothing but little dead palm trees and broken down concrete benches, where we got something cold to drink and recovered from walking a hundred yards or so. It was murder, I tell you. And then he took us out to an old fort that overlooks the ocean, ruins, part of a wall and gun turrets, and really jungle on the way. Up that high, or maybe it was because it was morning, the mosquitoes didn’t bother me. I don’t remember much about the guy. I don’t think we saw him after that. Just a California guy hanging out in Mexico, as Jack probably would have put it. That reminds me: a couple came up to us in Mazatlan, the first Californians we ran into, and the guy asks us to tell his wife that it was okay to drink the cokes. I’ll never forget that. How long, we wondered, had she gone without liquids?



That was particularly noteworthy to us that morning because we were recovering from our first baptism by fire in Mexico, the train ride from Monterrey to Durango. That was something. The sand on the seats, on our faces, in our food. We saw people living in box cars out in the middle of nowhere. We stared at them and they stared back. Ten hours on that train. The wind through the windows hot as a furnace, but you had to leave them open or you’d suffocate. And then after all that a nice little hotel just a block or two from the train station, a place probably old enough to have been around during Pancho Villa’s day, a really beautiful marble staircase, huge lobby, great food in the restaurant. Jack made friends with our waiter, which was fine, I enjoyed talking with him in the lobby after the restaurant closed, we drank beer, us with a little Spanish, him with a little English, but then I went to bed and Jack went across the street with him to a cantina. That was fine, I was beat after the train ride, we’d been up since 5 that morning, but the next thing I know the waiter is sitting next to me on the bed and Jack is standing behind him, swaying, no clue as to what is happening. I’ve never seen him so drunk, before or since. I don’t know how he stood up. Well, I showed that horny waiter out of there pronto. Told him thanks, for all the compliments, if that’s what they were, all in Spanish, but adios. Jack was useless. I had to get rid of the waiter. Me. Then, when he was gone, I had to position Jack just right so that he fell on the bed and not the floor, and then, get this, he throws up in the middle of the night without even knowing it, doesn’t wake up, said he thought he was sneezing. I had to explain it to him in the morning.



And there was more, even before we got to San Blas. No rooms in Tepic. A teachers convention and I couldn’t remember the word for luggage. Equipaje. But as soon as they understood me, they were so happy and produced our suitcases immediately, which taught me that to mistrust Mexicans out of hand is foolish and ridiculous. The people at the bus station even helped us find a room. Not much of one. I guess we still had some lingering mistrust. There was a moment or two when I thought we’d been taken into an alley to be murdered. But it’s just that the motel had only a light bulb over the door. Fifty cents for the night to stay there, but no water that we trusted to brush our teeth with in the morning.



Guadalajara was romantic, there’s no denying, as much as I’d like to sometimes, and I guess that was part of the point of the trip. When you’re young, though, the main thing is to do something cool, something that approximates, for people like us, this is true, what people you admire have done. This was a writer’s trip, really, for both of us, but I wish it had been with someone I was just having a fling with and never saw again, so I would remember it without regret. He came up to me one day not long after we broke up, he’d just stopped by to get some things, and kissed me as he was leaving, and I said, “What are you doing?” “Sorry,” he said, “Habit. I wasn’t thinking.” He got that way when he was nervous. He turned red as a beet when he realized what he’d done, guess I did too. Like then, like that incident, I mean, I don’t know what to do exactly with our trip to San Blas.



*****



He was always asking questions. I’m not sure there was anything he wasn’t interested in, and I guess I told him all I knew about Mother and Daddy and all the rest of the family, even me and his father, what I thought I ought to tell him, being his mother. I told him how I met his father one night at a party, and how his father asked if he could take me home, and I said okay, but he had a flat tire, and I had to get a ride from someone else. I thought that was it, especially since I had to have an operation on my back. I should say, I did have one, since I don’t know to this day for sure that I had to have it. The doctor said if I didn’t I’d be walking around like a monkey, one hand scraping along the ground without bending over, which of course scared everybody to death. I’ve been told since that it might not have been true. They know more these days than they did back then, and they don’t do what they did to me anymore. They took a bone out of my leg and put it in my back so that I wouldn’t stoop more than I already was. I had to stay in a body cast flat on my back for six months. I was sixteen, and it was bad in just about every way you can imagine, bed sores, helpless, but he came to see me. More than once, a lot more, and brought me flowers. We’d just met that once, and yet he came to see me.



So did Bill, his rival, and when I told Little Jack about Bill and that for a long time I couldn’t make up my mind between them, I think it floored him. It intrigued him that if I’d chosen Bill, and I darned near did, he wouldn’t have been born. Half born, maybe. That’s what he said, and he couldn’t get over it. I’d have been only half me and half somebody else, he said. He loved brain teasers like that. I never told him why I picked his father, but I admitted it was a hard choice. Bill turned out all right, about like you’d expect. Good job. Nice family. I’d ask Mother what she knew about him occasionally, and my sister. They were right there and kept up on him. I told Little Jack that I never regretted my choice, and he knew it was true. I don’t know this for a fact, but I doubt if Bill would have loved me the way Jack did. Nothing against Bill. I just can’t imagine anyone else loving me that much.



I was lucky, lucky in love, unlike my mother, and Little Jack got that out of me. He was so curious that sometimes it worried me. But I guess I could just as well say unlike my father, since it was her who didn’t love him, or at least that’s how I always saw it. I don’t know how my sister thought of it. She was ten years younger than me. Nor my big brother, closer to my age, just two years between us, but no one ever knew what he thought about anything, or even if he ever had a thought. So I concluded it on my own, but it was as plain as the nose on your face that Mother didn’t love Daddy. She was so mean to him. “Earnest, I told you we should have done such and such.” “Never mind him,” she’d say to one of us right in front of him. “He don’t like anyone to have any fun.” Not that she didn’t have a point about that, but still. I told Little Jack this true story that sounds like a movie, but I swear it’s true. My sister was born on Christmas Day in the middle of the Depression, and there’d been so much going on about having the baby that they’d forgotten to buy me anything for Christmas. My brother too, I guess. And besides, even though Daddy worked for the post office, we never had much money. They didn’t know how to handle it, but anyway, I’m sure I thought of it, but not much, too much commotion, and then Daddy came home with a little doll for me. I named her Katrina. She had black hair, looked kind of like a gypsy, and Mother belittled it. “Is that all you could find?” I felt so sorry for Daddy, and I really liked the doll. I can’t remember where I got that name from, but I’ve always liked it, and if I’d had a little girl, I’d have named her that.



The funny thing is that everyone thought of Mother as fun loving and devil may care, life of the party, and she was, and Daddy as stiff and stern, never with anything to say, and he was. That’s exactly how they were. My Daddy got up at three in the morning every day because of his job and he got home about 3 in the afternoon and listened to the radio, later the TV, until dinner at five sharp, which he called supper, and then he’d get ready for bed. Church every Sunday, never missed a one, always without Mother or any of us. Her side of the family never went to church, and his was full of preachers. Pretty near all his brothers were preachers. Sunday dinner promptly at half past twelve, and only that late because it took him that long to get home from church and get cleaned up. And then radio or TV, maybe a nap, until supper. That was Daddy’s life. He must have done some errands, Mother never drove, and work around the house, although the whole time I was growing up, we rented, so maybe not, and not on Sunday, the Lord’s day.



Mother was always ready to go anywhere, do anything, at the drop of a hat. She’d dance, go to movies, even drank spiked egg nog once a year at Christmas, once Jack started bringing it. Sit down, Addie,” Daddy would say, “that whiskey made you drunk.” And everyone would laugh, and she’d just clap her hands and never pay him any attention, like always. Your father was a troublemaker, I told Little Jack, spiking that egg nog for her, but he’d do anything to get Daddy’s goat. Daddy’s life bothered him, how he didn’t do anything but work, eat, sleep and watch TV, and go to church, of course, as if how Daddy lived was a personal insult, and he never could leave him alone. He would tease him about being in France during the first war, ask him how many “mademoiselles” he met, if they were pretty, that sort of thing. I think what infuriated Jack was that Daddy was probably telling the truth. He probably never did do anything, just read his Bible every night in the trenches, if that’s where he was. I never asked him about that, and he never talked about it, anymore than he did anything else.



I don’t know why she married him. Maybe he was the only one who asked her. She was pretty, judging from the old photographs I have, but skinny, and that didn’t go over too good in those days. She claims that his father, the first time he saw her, said, “Where’d you find that long-necked thing?” I never liked his side of the family. They were hard people, which I guess explains how he was. Dirt poor, nothing but rules and going to church. They’d as soon whip you, for nothing really, as look at you, whereas the Funderburks, Mother’s side, was completely different. Like night and day. I’ll never forget how Mama would tell Papa and the boys they were going to hell for fishing on Sunday morning, which they did every Sunday, but she was just saying that. I guess she thought she had to, to keep up appearances, and then she’d go back to whatever she’d been doing in the kitchen, always something, and there was always something good for the kids on the counter, that we could help ourselves to. I never ate so good in my life as I did at Mama’s, and the boys, even though they were big teasers,and I guess they did make me cry a few times, were always full of fun, always up to something. Aub taught me how to swim, and at the right time of year, we’d go out and pick peaches to put in the ice cream, or cut up a watermelon right in the field. I milked cows. I sure did. I wasn’t too good at it, and I didn’t do it often, it was a business, and I was too slow. But they let me try it. And let’s see, mostly I guess I was in the kitchen with Mama, helped her when I could, but mostly she just liked the company and I had to stay out of her way. It smelled so good in there. I think Papa was almost rich, compared to the other farmers around there. He was the first to buy a car. He had a big mustache and was always nice to me. “Addie’s little Mary,” he’d always say when he wanted me to come up to him.

“Do you slumber in your sleep, little Mary?” And then he’d just laugh.



I liked being there more than I did being home, I’m ashamed to admit. Daddy didn’t know what we were doing most of the time, but when he was forced to pay attention, like when Vernon got drunk on his graduation night and passed out under the flagpole at the high school, he was too hard on us. It was like Vernon had commited murder, Daddy took it so bad. Vernon’s life was ruined. The whole family was in disgrace. We thought we’d never hear the end of it, but Mother let us do anything. She couldn’t say no, and when she did, we didn’t pay any attention to her. We knew she wouldn’t tell Daddy. She didn’t want him to get the belt after us. He could really lose his temper, get carried away. God knows what he’d have done to Vernon that time if he hadn’t been practically grown. He was too big to whip by then, but I’m sure Daddy wanted to.



No movies on Sunday. That was a big one that we all thought was silly. What would Jesus think if he came back on his day and you were in a movie? So we had to lie and say we were going somewhere else, and it’s never good to lie, especially to your parents. You lose respect for them. And of course Mother knew where we were, and that’s not good either. She didn’t respect him, and that makes me sad every time I think about it. If I’d ever lost respect for Jack, I don’t know what I’d done. That’s the worst thing that can happen, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the husband or the wife. You can’t love someone you don’t respect. I thank my lucky stars that it never happened to us.



It happened to my sister, or she made it happen. She met H the week before Thanksgiving, on a Friday, and they announced that they were married on Thanksgiving Day. Can you beat that? Ran off to Rockwall, where they’ll marry anybody anytime, or at least that’s how it used to be. By a JP in his living room. My sister said they could smell the turkey cooking when they said I do. I knew some other girls who did that, ran off like that to get married, and I guess I wasn’t too surprised when M did it. She was pretty, prettier than me, and boy crazy. Doak Walker, the football player, asked her for a date once, but she turned him down, didn’t know who he was, and regretted it for the rest of her life. I think she regretted a lot, especially H, but I don’t know why. I do know, of course, but what I mean is, the whole family liked him and we couldn’t understand why she couldn’t be happy. You had to like him. He was always in a good mood, always joking and with stories to tell. Little Jack told me he still remembered some of the puzzles H came up with. One of them, let’s see if I can remember, was about 3 men who checked into a hotel, they just wanted one room, and it was 24 dollars. Oh, I can’t remember, something about a dollar being missing. The funniest, though, was when he drew a circle on a piece of paper and said it was a cow pen with so many cows, some left and some came back, and meanwhile he’d put a little dot in the circle as well as x’s for the cows, and Jack bit, he pointed at the little dot and said whats that, and H grabbed his hand and said, Oh no, don’t touch that!! We laughed and laughed at that one.



The problem was, and it’s a real shame, H never made enough money for M, not as much Jack, and M never forgave him for it. That’s the sad truth. She was jealous, which just hurt me to the core. It took all the fun out of wearing and showing off the nice things Jack bought for me. The furs, diamonds, cars. I don’t mean we were rich, but there came a time when we could afford those things, on a modest scale, and you only live once and Jack enjoyed giving them to me as much or more than I enjoyed getting them. He even went overboard a few times. I made him take back a ring he bought me once. It was too much. On the whole, though, I appreciated it, and it made him happy, and I don’t see why she had to be such a, I’m sorry to say it, such a bitch about it. I mean if you can’t show off things to your own sister, something’s wrong. But she never forgave me, and for something I couldn’t help, so we barely even spoke for the last twenty years or so. I hated to lose my sister, but I wasn’t going to act poor just because she was so jealous.



Little Jack liked Henry as much as anybody, but when he was little he preferred staying with Jack’s side of the family, on account of he was left alone over there, whereas on the Castle side, Katy bar the door! He had all the kids to deal with, all his cousins, and it wasn’t just them. My mother-in-law, D, short for Dema, was just like him. She had her own little world and was happy when nobody bothered her, like peas in a pod they were. She said he’d lie on the floor under the evaporative cooler, swamp coolers I think they call them in West Texas, all day reading, and she’d never hear a peep out of him, except now and then he’d go to the ice box and get some ice cream or a Dr. Pepper, which she always had for him. My side already thought he was a little strange, and if he’d read all day over there and wanted to be alone, they’d be after me to call a doctor. Something’s wrong with that boy, Mother would say. I can hear her now, but actually I did worry about it some, because he was that way at home too. I asked his father if we ought to do something, and he said, “Leave him alone,” so we did. I guess we did right. Sometimes I wonder though if he wouldn’t have been happier if he’d been more like the other boys. Not that I could have forced him to be, and I don’t mean he was unhappy, or a total bookworm. He had friends, and girlfriends, played sports. He was a real boy. Don’t get me wrong on that. I just wished sometime he’d get out and play more. You’re only young once, but he was always so serious. Too serious if you ask me.



He asked me about girls when he was six years old, I’m not kidding you. It just floored me, and I didn’t know what to say. He started reading those girly magazines when he was 12, maybe even before that for all I know, and I didn’t stop him because I was just so thankful that he liked girls. All I did was make it clear to him that real life wasn’t like you might think from reading those magazines, that real girls weren’t like that, or else he might ruin his reputation and never get a nice girl to date him. We actually did talk about girls a lot, and I don’t know why I said that about being worried about him. It was what my family said about him reading so much, I guess, and he was strange in other ways too, like how he liked to play by himself. The only exception to that was catch. He’d play catch with anybody at the drop of a hat, but his favorite was shooting baskets, which like to have drove me nuts. Got to where at one point if I couldn’t hear that basketball thumping on the driveway, I’d have thought I was in somebody else’s kitchen. Every afternoon for a while. Thump thump thump. But I didn’t say anything to him. Let him have his fun, I thought.



I tried to tell him how to treat girls so that they’d like him, and he was all ears on that topic, but he did tease me about it when he got grown, one night, he and his father had one too many drinks, that’s what it was, saying I was always telling hiim if he did such and such it would “rurn” him, you know, as if I pronounced it like some country person, and it hurt my feelings, which he saw immediately, I think he just got carried away and was maybe thinking about someone else’s mother saying it that way, and apologized right away, and I got over it. Sometimes, though, just like his father, when he was drinking, he wouldn’t always think about my feelings before he said something.



The main thing with girls I told him was two things, to always be polite and clean. You don’t have to overdo it. There’s nothing worse than a man who’s just falling all over himself to please you and pretties himself up so much he smells like a woman, a man shouldn’t primp, but girls expect certain things, or ought to, at least I did, so I told him about opening doors and that he’d have to pay for everything and to never, ever, just pull up in front of a girl’s house and honk the horn. I can’t think of anything worse. It happened to a girl I knew and she said her father went out and gave the boy a talking to, and he never did it again. Embarrassed her to death, but she was glad her father did it, and imagine how the boy felt. I never wanted anything like that to happen to him. And we talked about more private things as well. I left the main thing to his father, of course, but I told him never to ask a girl why she couldn’t go swimming, for example, because she might be having her period, and you don’t want to embarrass her. That happened to me once, and I really liked the boy and felt terrible, but I couldn’t very well tell him why I turned him down. He just wouldn’t give up, though, until it finally made me mad. I also told him I thought it was up to the girl whether a good night kiss was okay on the first date and there was nothing wrong with putting your arm around a girl at the movies, if she didn’t mind, and I gave him some advice about that, which I think was good. I told him not to ask for a kiss, or if he could put his arm around her. In the first place, he ought to know, and if he didn’t, he would soon enough, and to be honest, it seemed kind of weak to me. It took all the fun out of it to be asked. I liked boys who’d take a chance, but maybe that’s just me.



No, I didn’t tell him that when a girl says no, she means it. That’s just common sense, isn’t it? But that doesn’t mean you can’t try again later, does it? A girl can always change her mind, and that’s another one of those things where, if you have any sense, you know when you’re going too far. A man knows, unless he’s just plain sorry or stupid, just like a woman knows certain things.



*****



I told him what I knew, which wasn’t much, about his grandfather. He showed up one day at Mama’s boarding house, must have been 1917, and wound up marrying my mother. I know where he came from, I even met some of my cousins. They were originally Pennsylvania Dutch, Dad still knew a little German, but somehow his mother wound up in Minnesota, and I guess at some point she found herself with more kids than she could handle. I never heard of a husband, but I got the impression that there was more than one, a lot more, and where my Dad fit into it all I couldn’t tell you. I just know he was farmed out to another family when he was in his teens, then ran off at some point and showed up in his late twenties in Mabank and married my mother. I don’t know what he was selling then, if anything. Maybe they just said he was a salesman, a drummer it was called back then, because it sounded better than out of work, and people might get the impression that that’s why he stayed. I know my mother wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with.



Mama would move the boarding house according to where the oil fields were, but later on there was no boarding house, just Dad and my uncle working in the oil fields, and for a while (Jack liked this), we lived in a tent. At different times, with and without the boarding house, we were as far east as Kilgore and as far west as Brady, but about all I remember of the boarding house was seeing Al Jolsen in “The Jazz Singer,” that was something, and emptying the bed pans. That was my job and one you’re not likely to forget. I drove out to Brady not long ago, delivered a piece of equipment to the dealer out there, and it hadn’t changed much since the twenties. Just your typical West Texas town. Lots of dust and vacant buildings. I think I found where Mama had her boarding house. The lot. The building’s long gone, of course. It can be fun driving out there, but it’s no place to live, not to my way of thinking. I much prefer the piney woods, maybe because I grew up in them. Near Tyler. That was the big city for me and my cousin Harold, where we first took girls out and could drive. I remember telling Jack that our main priorities when it came to money was gas and cigarettes. As long as you had plenty of both, there seemed to be no problem finding girls. Dad worked for Sears then, on the floor. Appliances, I think, and considering it was the Depression, we had plenty of money. It was in the twenties, when I was little, that we were broke, when Dad and my uncle would take anything they could get, and more often than not didn’t get anything. I don’t know exactly what the problem was, why it was such hard times, but I know my uncle was a real horse’s ass. I remember one night we were down to gravy for supper, and pretty thin gravy at that, because Dad and my uncle had gone into town to sell some chickens. We were somewhere out in the boonies, probably because it was cheap rent, and the point was to sell the last chickens we had and buy groceries. I think that’s how it went. I was only a kid and it was a long time ago, but I know I was hungry and the gravy was all we had because the men hadn’t got back yet. I don’t think Mother and my aunt ate anything at all. Where were the others? Maedelle, my other aunt, had already gone off to Dallas to be a dancer, and maybe Bob, Mother’s brother, was there too. Don’t know, but Mama and Papa had to still be around, and I couldn’t say if they ate or not. I think it was just me and Harold at the table, the rest waiting, and later on Dad told us my uncle had insisted on stopping at a café, that’s why they were late, but my Dad said he didn’t eat. He just sat there at the table and watched my uncle.



Everybody looked up to my Dad, everybody but Thurman, I guess, and he was out of the picture before too long. I don’t know what happened to him. He wasn’t Harold’s father. He was my aunt’s second husband, and nobody missed him when he was gone. My dad was the one they counted on, especially since Papa never worked a day in his life. His only job ever was as a nightwatchman, and he didn’t do that for long, whereas Mama ran the boarding house, she was always the boss and did most of the work, and she taught school before that. So I guess Dad was needed, and my uncle Bob used to break down and cry every time he talked about him. They cried a lot, that side of the family. They never talked much, but they cried a lot.



In the late twenties, Dad got a job selling groceries to farmers, and that’s why I went to so many schools. In those days you could go out almost any county road and practically walk from farm house to farm house, there were so many little farms, and in some cases it was easier for them to order staples and canned goods from a door to door salesman than to go into town. A lot of farmers didn’t even have a car in those days, and the little country stores had to order a lot of things they wanted anyway. So we made our way north, up through the midwest all the way to Minnesota. Did you know they used to drive on the lakes up there in the winter? Maybe still do. That was something, but I don’t remember my relatives much. What I remember more is going to 65 different schools in two years, sometimes for only a few days. It wasn’t so bad. Seemed normal to me, and Dad had to make a living.



I had a pretty good childhood, but Dad could lose his temper, and there was one time I definitely didn’t deserve the spanking I got. He turned me over his knee before I could explain anything to him. Mother had told me to go get him out of the pool room, she couldn’t go in there and she’d been shopping, so the job fell to me, but he’d told me I couldn’t go in there with him, and when he saw me, he just yanked me up by the collar, hauled me out of there, and let me have it. It hurt too, and then Mother got after him, and at least I was proved innocent, but he wasn’t big on admitting he was wrong. He knew he was, but he never said so.



The one time he was right for losing his temper wasn’t with me but at some stranger who said something bad about my aunt, the one that became a dancer. I’m sure she looked like a floozie compared to the other women in town, can’t remember where it was, but it had to be a little place because they still had those high board sidewalks, like you see in westerns, and Dad knocked the guy off the sidewalk with one punch. My aunt was always a real live wire, God knows what she was wearing or how she had her hair done, even after she got older, she’d ham it up on the holidays, and whenever I took home movies, she’d strike a pose. She was something.



I never said this to Jack or anybody, but chances are Dad was drunk the night of his accident. He was drunk most nights, so I don’t know why that night would be any different, and not long before that, I’d had to go bail him out of jail. He’d passed out in the wrong place, he told me. That was no fun, would never be, but at 16 it embarrassed me to death. It could have been a heart attack. Or maybe he just got careless. We’ll never know for sure. What he did was hit a telephone pole dead on and so hard that the steering column crushed his chest. That’s how those old cars were. Not as safe as they are now.



*****



Strictly speaking, neither RG nor JS nor any of the others in that crowd were baby boomers, which explains their particular type of obsession with authenticity, and I’m choosing those two to compare because they represent two very common strains of the pre-boomer obsession. The difference between them and those born after 1945 is that they were old enough to remember what it was like in this country before the late sixties, so their nostalgia was in a sense genuine--authentic, if you will--as opposed to a retro fad. They thought of it as a loss, felt it personally, and were bitter, while at the same time, as serious people, they tried to keep up with the times and avoid sentimentality.



RG thought he was authentic, honestly believed it, whereas JS spent his whole life looking for it. That’s why RG never set food in a foreign country and lived most of his life in Texas, after youthful and fairly short adventures in Montana, New Mexico and California, and JS lived for long periods in other states and when he could afford it, travelled to Mexico and other places that seemed, in serious ways, to be living in a pre-60’s world. One night RG told me in the strictest confidence that he lived in the athletic dorm when he first went to Austin, because he was there on a tennis scholarship, and I think I believe him. Not like him to make something like that up out of whole cloth, and why should he? Funny, but that was the night he got arrested for having a handgun in his truck. Instead of driving drunk, he and his wife crashed in the back of the truck, it had one of those covers over it, and the cops rousted them for no good reason and found the gun. The night he confesses to a very un-outlaw background, he establishes his outlaw credibility by becoming one, by getting thrown in jail. He wanted to be an outlaw as much as he wanted to be an Indian. In fact, I don’t think being an Indian would have been any fun to him if he couldn’t have been one in an outlaw sort of way. Leonard Peltier was a real hero to him. And he also wanted to be a rock star, more than he wanted to be a writer it turned out, the kind of rock star who tells us what it’s like to be an outlaw and an Indian in America. That was RG, and his problem was, maybe even his tragedy (though that might be too grand) was that he was a far better writer than he was any of those other things.



His detractors say that the title of his only book, published by a respectable Texana house in Austin, “Some Things I Did,” says it all, meaning the size of his ego. I think that’s unfair. There’s nothing wrong anymore with writing journalism in the first person, lots of people were doing it then, nor is it a literary crime to make yourself, or your alter ego, the hero of a first person novel, which of course goes back at least two centuries. In fact, most people have no problem with the idea that the whole world can be found in one person, any one person, so why not the writer himself? Clearly, then, something else irritates people about RG, and I think I know what it is. He’s a little too in love with style. And something else, closely related. He fails to reject or tone down those aspects of our culture that now shock us. For example, he obviously touts the idea of a man having more than one wife, in all seriousness, both as a matter of style and a sensible way to live, and manages therefore to not so much outrage his detractors—they are far too sophisticated for that—as make it impossible for them to take him seriously. He might as well say we should sacrifice young virgins to the sun god. Not outrageous. Ridiculous.



That’s always the crux of the matter in regard to anyone. Do we take him seriously? After that, either way, it hardly matters what he says, or we say about him, and another irony is that so many thought him a phony, a fake touting authenticity, claiming as he did, insisting, if not in so many words, that the only authentic Americans were Native Americans. Everything else was bogus, alien, unreal, an insipid copy of Europe. I’ll agree that he was inconsistent, if you only see it politically. He was fond of the old ranchers, like his grandfather, and even the old lawmen, the Texas Rangers, on the dubious grounds (clearly aware then of his inconsistency) that they were somehow closer to the Indians, having co-existed with them in a way, even if it was to murder or be murdered. I’d argue, actually, that he had a point, and he probably stole it from John Graves, who makes close to the same one about the Rangers and the first settlers. RG saw himself as a half-breed, and he did have some Choctaw blood, maybe a quarter, and that really was his main point. He knew we couldn’t be Indians now in the 19th C sense, but they were still with us, are still with us, whether we know it or not, and our goal should be to nurture and encourage that spirit however we can.



All of which seems totally irrelevant to his detractors, and it is kind of new-agey, but with an edge, which no matter how much of an edge they gave him, wouldn’t be enough. The fashion these days, haute fashion, true even when Indians are included, is to focus on the miniature, the minutae of relationships, in families especially, even in serious literature, at least in this country, actually in English. Epiphanies involving fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, wives and children are all the rage among baby boomers, and that demonstrates my point about boomers and authenticity. Haute middle-brow some might say. Pre-60’s America doesn’t exist for them, it was never real, so nothing real has been lost, and life is an incipient revelation, but getting by as best we can with what is given. RG and JS too in his way weren’t buying that. They believed in an Eden.



RG found his first Eden in Montana, among the Assiniboine, where he and J had to pack all of their belongings in their car whenever they left the house to go to town, or else it would all be gone, stolen, when they returned. And yet he loved it. Here was a place even harsher than his native West Texas. It still had Indians, for one thing, and the winters could kill you, and it made him feel, perhaps for the first time in his life, or at least more intensely than ever before, that he was really alive, living, had found an authentic place in which to breathe, and there he was right in the middle of it, and he spent the rest of his life trying recreate or recapture that.



*****



It’s painful in some ways to recount, remember, that first trip out west, and yet we thought of it as a great adventure, and of course California as a kind of Valhalla, the promised land, milk and honey, streets paved with gold. I remember Jack referring to Kerouac, saying that even the cops in California looked like movie stars. And oranges. A land of oranges and grapefruit. I guess we thought we’d have breakfast every morning on a patio and go pick the grapefruit we wanted right off the tree. We were so young then, it seems like now, that I wonder how we survived. So innocent it seems like a miracle that we didn’t get wiped off the face of the earth. You hear about young people disappearing all the time, read about it in the newspapers, see their pictures on milk cartons. I wonder now how we escaped that, and the answer has to be pure luck. We were little tadpoles and just happened to be among the lucky ones who survived to be frogs.



On the other hand, it’s true that many who didn’t survive were a lot crazier than we were. We had our problems. When you head out to California with only five hundred dollars, even back then that wasn’t that much money, you’re going to have problems. That truck. You wouldn’t believe. We hadn’t even got to Fort Worth yet, from Dallas, when we hit a thunderstorm and found out the windshield wipers didn’t work. We were on the freeway, and it’s a miracle we didn’t get killed right then and there. Couldn’t see anything for what seemed like an eternity, and I don’t know how he stayed in the same lane. Luckily, it came and went pretty fast, but then in Weatherford the truck just stalled. We had to get towed to a mechanic, and he said we needed a new coil, so I guess it’s open to interpretation whether we started to California with even five hundred. After that, though, it was pretty smooth sailing until we got to New Mexico, as far as the truck goes, but we had other difficulties. The park ranger in West Texas took pity on us and brought us some firewood the night we stayed in a state park. We didn’t get there until after dark, and I guess we looked helpless. I don’t know. In a way we were, but considering that neither of us had camped out much, we did okay, in part because I’m such a good organizer. I had a checklist of things we would always need, and I made sure we had them. We never ran out of matches or water or fuel for the stove, and I thought we had some pretty good meals on the way out there. It’s nothing really to fry up some bacon and scramble eggs. I even made French toast a couple of mornings. And we’d have tuna fish or bologna and cheese sandwiches on the road, and at dinner we’d often make a kind of goulash, hamburger meat, the cheapest we could find, and canned tomatoes and whatever else we had that sounded good. One night we had this dried lentil soup. It was good. We ate pretty well, if I do say so myself, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, taking care of things, but Jack got frustrated at times, there was so much to do. Camping out is hard work, and you have to pay attention to every little detail or you can have a disaster. I also think he got lonely, even with me and Gretta, our dog, along. That didn’t occur to me at the time. But some nights, and only at night, something was wrong. I just didn’t know what. I think now it was being outdoors, out in the middle of nowhere, late at night. Actually, he told me that at the time, and later, but he was careful not to make it sound like I wasn’t enough to make him happy, and I didn’t take it that way. That was back when he could do no wrong in my eyes, so I took it as a sort of existential thing. The wide open spaces, you know, feeling lost in it. Insignificant. I never felt that way myself, never felt insignificant a day in my life, ha, but he was the writer, and it seemed right.



I don’t think I knew how big the west really is until that trip, and I sure didn’t know how cold it still was in April. We had a camper shell on the back of the pickup, and a couple of times we had to eat inside, and it was still cold. We drove across the west a lot of times, and it was always either colder than I thought it was going to be, or hotter. I could never do that again. It would kill me. But I’m glad we did it, and like that. Like we did. We roughed it, and each time for a good reason. A good practical reason. That first time it was because we couldn’t afford anything else. That early you could stay in any campground for nothing, as opposed to six or eight dollars for a motel, and since nobody was ever there, they had more sense than we did, we could just let Gretta go. One time I was afraid she’d fallen into the Grand Canyon. That was a mistake, to let her go there. Too many people, and that dog, once you let her loose, would go anywhere. We almost lost her in Oakland like that. Let her run one night and she didn’t come back. Turns out she was in heat. We didn’t know it. How stupid can you be? But she’d just pull on that leash with such passion, such frustration, that it just broke my heart. Jack’s the one who let her go, though, and you should have seen her run. At first we were as excited as she was, but then we were frantic. We’d about resigned ourselves to losing her, we both felt terrible, when three days later a woman called and said she was lying on her front porch. Her daughter had gotten close enough to read the tag. When we went to pick her up, we just slowed down and waved to those kind people, and Gretta came running off that porch like I don’t know what and jumped right in with us. We should have stopped and thanked them, but we were so embarrassed, the trouble we’d caused.



Don’t ever get a German Shepherd unless you plan to let it run. It’s a sin otherwise, it really is. We finally shipped her back to my parents, and they let her roam the neighborhood. A small town, she never got hit or run over. Not so dumb, I guess, when she wasn’t up for lost time. Lived to be eight years old. Hip displasia. A story, I’ll say, with a happy ending, though I still sometimes wince at what we put her through. She lived through a hurricane, a bad one, and with puppies to take care of, and we weren’t even there. Had gone to Mexico with my parents. The hurricane nearly wiped out Corpus Christi. Those puppies were half coyote, I’m not kidding, and all but one made it through the storm. Four left and found a home for every one of them. That was her second litter. The first one I gave away one at a time on the UC Berkeley campus. Oh aren’t they cute? Yes, I said, and free. Didn’t take me long.



But back to our first trip out west. We had three flats, two in New Mexico and one in Arizona. The first one is when we discovered that the jack we had wouldn’t do. It was a homemade camper on the back, higher than the cab, so when we jacked up the left rear tire, we were on the right side of the road of course, the whole thing seemed about to tip over. First we tried parking on the road itself, and I stood behind and waved traffic around. There wasn’t much traffic. Can you believe that? Not even a freeway across New Mexico then, and not many cars on the highway, in April. They were steady, but it’s not like we cause a big backup. Anyway, before Jack could get it high enough to change the tire, the jack started to bend. We had all our worldly possessions in the back, and it just wasn’t strong enough. So finally, we drove it on the rim, ten miles to the next town, and needless to say the rim was shot by then. We pulled into the gas station and for some reason he didn’t have a rim for us but he knew a guy who was selling an old Chevy like ours for parts. He called the guy, we settled on a price, and after the gas station guy put our spare on for us, Jack and I drove over there. So there we were, in a strange little New Mexico town, in the middle of the day, taking a wheel off this pickup that was parked on the street. Jack knocked on the door of the house, a little stucco shotgun, tiny, but no one answered. Finally, though, while he was jacking up the pickup, an old lady came up the sidewalk and walked right by us into the house. To be safe, Jack went to the door and explained what we were doing and who’d sent us. She said, “Oh that’s okay. I didn’t think you’d be stealing nothin’ in broad daylight.” We laughed about that for years.



The second flat we had was outside of Santa Fe, right next to the entrance to the opera, and luckily this one was on a front tire. Jack had been too cheap to buy a different jack. How many flats can you have on one trip? We found out. The funny thing about that one was that there was apparently a performance about to start, because we had people driving by us in Cadillacs and Lincolns, dressed to the nines. Tuxes and diamonds and furs, while Jack was on his knees, grimey and sweaty, fighting that damn jack. At first we thought we were in a Bunuel movie, but then we saw the Opera sign. It still seemed pretty strange, all those fancy cars and clothes in the middle of the desert. We compared it to Bunuel, and not just because we’d recently seen The Discreet Charm of the B, but the strangest thing happened while we were watching it. The sound went off but the movie kept running, and at first I was tempted to think it was just part of the movie, you never know with Bunuel, but then someone started complaining, and when we looked back, we could see through the glass that the projectionist was asleep, so a guy at the back got up and banged on the glass, he had to hit on it pretty hard, and you should have seen the projectionists face when he finally woke up. Scared the daylights out of him. He acted at first like he was being attacked. Anyway, he finally got the message and fixed it, but we thought, how weird, of all the movies that could have happened in. It was like we were in a scene from the movie we were watching.



Also, I think we’d just come back from Taos, just been to the Pueblo, which back then was kind of eerie as well, must have been before it was an official tourist attraction, because all I remember is driving through these big chain link gates, like for a prison, and parking in the middle of a dirt area, actually mud, it had been raining and was overcast that day, with all these Indians around, staring at us. We didn’t even get out of the pickup. They didn’t look particularly glad to see us. We just sat there for a few minutes, then turned around and drove back out. And Taos itself was just full of tents with hippies, really grungy hippies, hard core, not too appealing, and art galleries where of course we couldn’t afford anything, and the art we saw was just that southwestern Georgia O’Keefe wannabe stuff. Also, big eyes on Indian girls were the vogue back then, if you recall. We didn’t like Taos much. Mud. Bad art. Hippies. Unfriendly Indians.



We might have had four flats, actually. The last one we had I swear to God was in the parking lot where we bought the hydraulic jack. Jack came out with it in his hand, still in the package, and he opened the door and said, “You’re not going to believe this. We have a flat.” He said it was almost a pleasure, though, fixing it with that new jack. The last car trouble we had on that trip was a loose spark plug wire, and Jack said he was embarrassed by that, because he didn’t even look under the hood. He said he’d had it by then. He didn’t care how much it cost. He was like that. That’s just like him. One extreme or the other. Too cheap to buy a decent jack until we’re all the way to Arizona, 3 flats later, and then when the truck runs a little rough, he pulls into the first gas station and says, “Fix it.” The guy didn’t charge us anything. He just stuck the wire back on and laughed. Those days are probably gone forever. I remember Jack telling me about another flat he had in Texas, an old German guy helped him, a gas station owner, he’d rousted him out of his house, woke him up from a nap, but he wouldn’t take any money because it was Sunday. Can you imagine that happening these days?



That was in the spring of 1968, and what I remember most besides all the car trouble was being cold. Once we got out of Texas, we were cold all the time, even in April, and even after we got to California, though it wasn’t quite as bad there. But the Bay Area is not what you’d call warm, even in the summer, or especially then, see Mark Twain on that, and to make it worse, we lived in Albany, just north of Berkeley, and the fog just sits there most days. It was so bad that one summer vacation we went to Fresno, just to get warm, but that was later, after at least a couple of more trips across the west, all eventful in their own way. That’s what I think we sometimes did our whole married life, the whole twelve years we were together, move and have car trouble. We’d get all settled somewhere, and comfortable, and he’d get the heebie jeebies, usually after about a year and a half, and he’d get it in his head that someplace else was where it was all happening, or where he could really be himself. It would all be good in the next place. People there were more interesting, more real, the food was better, the weather was always fine. And I put up with it for 12 years, and of course we wound up no better than when we started, and no place, in the end, was any better than the one before. Guess it could have been worse. He could have had a different lover every year and a half. I think that would have been worse. Maybe. In any case, he did me a favor when he left me. I just didn’t know it at the time.



*****



If R’s vision wasn’t totally coherent, it was more so than J’s, by a longshot. R evolved from West Texas to a kind of mix of Indians and outlaws and W Texas, but Jack kept changing his mind, and he was eclectic to a fault. When he got drunk and in a record playing mood, you know, you got to hear this and turn it up loud, he might go from Jimmy Rodgers to Frank Sinatra without blinking an eye, and that might be fun when you’re drunk and having a good time, you might see no contradiction in it, it might all harmonize in some way that’s perfectly clear to you with several shots of tequila in you, but there’s always the next morning to contend with. Like he said himself: that’s maybe the most brutal fact of life. The next morning. That’s when nothing fits together, and even if it did, even if you could make it fit, why should you give a shit? Those two extremes, though, country and city, was what he couldn’t reconcile, and to make it worse, he didn’t know all that much about either one. He was a suburban kid, never lived on a farm and never in a real city. Even in SF they lived in Albany and Oakland. Couldn’t afford the city and they had a dog. So, as a result, I think he saw himself as a fraud. He saw the whole boomer generation as a fraud, which was no consolation, even though he knew he wasn’t really a part of it. He was too old, even in 68, to be a hippy. He was stranded between generations. He told me his family got their first TV when he was six. In 1950. So he had radio, was conscious of it, for 2 or three years at the most, and then it was taken away. Cruel, he said, and it just kept coming. He’d just get used to something, and they’d replace it with something else. Is that any way to live? It’s how we all live now, of course, what we want, crave even. Constant change. But it wasn’t until he was nearly 40 years old that he realized he’d grown up in a small town in Texas that was also taken away. He hadn’t been back, hadn’t seen it change, and slowly but surely it started, “it” as it had been from when he was a kid, to seem authentic, more real than when he’d grown up there, each place and person clearer and more well-defined than when he’d lived it, lived there. A normal place, he said, and how can normal not be authentic? But normal in a mid-century sort of way, pre-1966, before Blonde on Blonde and Sgt. Pepper, before the big change, the earthquake. Before TV even, though not technically so, but when it was still black and white and everybody watched the same thing, in the living room, and never had it on at suppertime.



I’m too young to have experienced that first hand, and since fewer and fewer people have experienced it, I think it’s legitimate to wonder how useful it is to make it an object of veneration, or, that’s not really it, an art object, that’s better, since how do you do that without nostalgia, and Jack was serious enough, at least in intent, to want to avoid that. Or does that lead to an absurdity? The proposition that writers can only write about the present. That’s idiotic. What about War and Peace? No reason to even start listing. It’s idiotic. How did I get myself into this corner? It’s like something he would have done. He had a very undisciplined mind, and he was lazy, which led him into all sorts of difficulties.



But back to the beginning. How do you reconcile R and J? You get to a point in life, he told me, when you realize that the difference makes no difference. And of course he really got pissed off when I suggested that he was a reductionist, and pretty close to saying, in a pseudo-Zen sort of way, that everything was the same. All one big happy family, join hands and celebrate. No, no, he insisted, that’s not what I mean at all, and although he didn’t do a very good job of explaining, I began after a while to understand, and not just because I was afraid he was going to hit me. He could be violent you know. He claimed that he hadn’t thrown a punch since the 7th grade, except when boxing at school, and except for one time, maybe, that he couldn’t remember. He met a guy in SF, a guy from Texas who lived in the Haight and that J says he didn’t remember ever seeing before in his life, but the guy claimed Jack had hit him in the face once. He’d been a Christian in college, the guy, not Jack, a member of Campus Crusade for Christ, and he’d come into Jack’s dorm room to try to get them to come to some crusade, and they’d gotten into an argument about Jesus. J says he remembers the argument but not hitting the guy. He remembers telling him to get out, but not hitting him. He told him to leave when the guy said, “Just think, if you believe, you have nothing to lose, even if I’m wrong. But if I’m right, you have everything to lose.” Jack thought that was the most disgustingly practical reason for faith he’d ever heard. Maybe he threatened to hit him, he said.



What he meant about it making no difference, even though he never said this in so many words, was that it was a matter of broadening one’s outlook or taste. Like learning to like raw oysters or raisins or licorice or spinach. It was not political with him. He tried to make nothing political. That was a cardinal rule, a basic principle. It was self-improvement, though he would wince at that. Cultivation? He might not mind that so much, since it’s vaguely anti-democratic, elitist connotation might actually appeal to him. The older he got the less faith he had in democracy, and in general, tho he faded in and out on this, he worked at being indifferent to such things which I guess, ironically, is the same way a politician has to view such things. I mean, if you really cared, you’d just slit your wrists, wouldn’t you? I took a couple of political science courses in college, almost majored in it, and it appalled me there how irrational and wrong-headed, even when it wasn’t just plain greedy, most public policy is. I got over it, though, and of course, the most rational way isn’t always the best. It’s all give and take, compromise, getting along. He couldn’t accept that. An idealist, which of course is why he was a writer. Just sit alone in your room and make your own little world. Fuck the real one.



So, I think it’s all related. Once he got past the idea that JR and FS were irreconcilable, it was only natural that he could make his peace with his hometown, at least as he remembered it. What it had become since then is another story, back to square one. But the hometown of his memory he could value for all its varied parts, rather than view it, as many still do, as just another insipid little cliché.



*****



He was easily the most intolerant person I’ve ever known. He even got impatient with me because I couldn’t drive a stick shift. He didn’t say anything, but I could tell. I got demerits on my self-reliance score for that. And of course I squandered money on taking my car in to get the oil changed and hiring someone to mow the lawn. I never told him we had a maid once a week. My parents paid for it. I can see the expression on his face now. Sort of a puzzled frown, which meant how can you be so fucking useless and pampered? How can you be such a pussy? Can’t you do anything for yourself? If you’re going to be a poor writer, you have to pay some dues. As long as you take money from your parents, you’re beholden to them, and even worse, you isolate yourself from real life. And he had a point of course. I am pampered, and I’m more fucked up than I ever let on to him, that’s for sure, but it’s not hard to guess, and I’m sure he did. I smoke dope all day, for one thing, a pretty significant sign, I’d say, and I’m fat. Strike two.



That’s one reason it really pissed him off when I started beating him at tennis. Here’s the thing: I’m well-coordinated and quick, despite my weight, and I know how to concentrate. He was surprised when I told him how good I was at golf, scholarship offers, but that was okay, he accepted it, because it was no threat to him, but tennis was a different story, especially since he was a lot better than me, I’d never played, when we started. I have to hand it to him tho. He kept at it, and now and then he’d be on enough to beat me, but not very often. He hated losing to me so much that he never admitted that the balance had changed. He kept calling us evenly matched. And too, the way I beat him was particularly infuriating. He could pound the ball pretty hard, and I still got to it. I could get to anything. He just wasn’t quite good enough to overcome that, except on those rare days, to both hit it hard and put it where he wanted it, so even if I lobbed it back, he had trouble putting me away, and I just wore him down. It was great fun. Sometimes his excuses, and he always had one, rubbed me the wrong way, but mostly I just enjoyed listening to him, as it were, squirm.



He wasn’t so bad about being intolerant at first, which is how it always is with friendships, and romance too. I didn’t have to agree that 81/2 was the best movie ever made, that Chandler and Greene and LeCarre were all great writers, of equal stature (just the sort of broad pronouncement he loved to make), that Billie Holiday was better than Ella Fitzgerald (if you liked pretty voices, you were immediately an inferior person, which by the way he didn’t steal from Byron. I had to tell him Byron thought more or less the same thing). He even cut me some slack on my favorites. He tried to read Pynchon and Barth, not very successfully but I appreciated the effort, and he tried to think of something positive to say about Altman. He even went with me once to see Richard Thompson. He said he liked Randy Newman, but it was clear he was throwing me a bone. I think for a while he saw me as a project. He had me pegged. I liked satire, which in his mind made my taste automatically suspect, second rate, and he took it upon himself to nudge me into a more “authentic” direction. Here’s the thing. I’m a full-fledged right in the middle of it baby boomer, and to me satire is the only authenticity. Nothing’s sacred and shouldn’t be, and if you think it is, you are fooling yourself. You know who likes Billie Holiday? Smug, self-righteous old fashioned New York liberals, our fathers basically, and you know why they like her? For “Strange Fruit,” just about exclusively. She’s a poor, downtrodden black victim of oppression and prejudice. Sure, they might like the sound okay, some even might like her better than Ella, but for the most part it’s her pain, not her beauty, that makes them feel good. I know because I’m just like them, but a generation later, with less faith that I can change the world. Jazz isn’t my music. I didn’t grow up with it. Not even the blues, really, despite being from Texas. White rock blues is what I know about. I didn’t know any black people growing up, not as friends and equals, and never went to a blues club with black people in it. That would have scared me to death, maybe for good reason, so for me to adopt it, even if I learned to like it, seemed to me a bit phony. Actually, it seems completely false if I say it touches my soul. I grew up with the Beatles and all their progeny, which is damn near everybody after them. The closest I come to Billie Holiday is the Allman Brothers, or Clapton, or Van Morrison. And yes, in a sense, all of it, including the Beatles, are ersatz, once or twice removed, diluted with prettiness, near beer, but that’s what we are now, isn’t it? Let me ask you something. If I said I didn’t like Robert Johnson because he wasn’t as authentic as his father and grandfather who did “field hollers” in cotton fields or on chain gangs, you’d think I was nuts, wouldn’t you? And I would be.



To be fair he never tried to hide that he was as much a suburban kid as I was. He grew up in a brick, air-conditioned home in a quiet neighborhood with lawns and trees and no sidewalks, had a reasonably stable and happy childhood in a family that was no more nor less disfunctional than most, and just like me was torn between the expectations of his parents, to make good grades, be good at sports, date girls and have friends, and an interest in things nobody had ever heard of or would approve of if they had. The difference, and I grant you it was a big one, is that everybody was a rebel when I was a teenager and by then all the really subversive literature and music and movies were either all mixed in with or buried under the avalanche of what was acceptable and seemed subversive and had to be at least tolerated unless you wanted to be laughed at. To most people, though, it was all the same, even if they’d been savvy enough to be suspicious. By then it wasn’t even like looking for a needle in a haystack. It was more like being able to tell a black widow from other kinds of spiders. This isn’t exactly the same, but remember that famous Dick Tracy strip, how to tell a man from a woman now that everyone had long hair? The Adam’s apple. A dead giveaway, or so it said.



*****



I’ll admit we met some interesting characters that trip, people I would never in a million years have met if he hadn’t been along. I went to the balletfolklorico, but he wasn’t interested. I had to drag him to the Basilica, even the Zocalo. We stayed in a place called the Hotel Calvin, cheap and clean according to the guidebook, and it was. He got a laugh as soon as we walked in the door. The desk clerk asked him if he spoke Spanish too, and Jack said, “No, yo no hablo espanol.” That cracked them up. I looked for the place a few years ago. It was right across from the House of Tiles and Sanborns. We had breakfast at Sanborns every morning. The lot where the hotel was is now a hole in the ground.



One night we went to this bar about a block away from the hotel, just off the Reforma. It was packed, a tiny place, and we both had an easy time finding someone to talk to. Mexicans, even to this day, like to strike up conversations with foreigners in bars. I got to talking to some guys, just regular guys in their twenties, out for a night on the town, but Jack started talking to this woman, a real beauty in a dark full-bodied sort of way. His type all the way, and I didn’t hear the conversation, but Jack told me later that he had a great time talking to her half in Spanish, half in English, and of course he was hitting on her, doing whatever he did in those days when he got drunk and was talking to a beautiful woman, but then he said that at one point, maybe he brought it on himself by pushing things a little, she referred to her husband and glanced over his shoulder as if to point him out and mentioned oh so casually that he was a professional wrestler. “That cooled me down some,” he said, “Took some of the fun out of it, but not completely. She was still beautiful, after all, and sophisticated.” I wasn’t like that at all. I could talk to anybody, make friends with anybody, but not like that. On our way to Mexico City, we met up with a couple of girls I went to school with in Saltillo, had a beer with them, and it was nice seeing them, I had a good time, but I think it frustrated Jack. He always had to push, make a connection, with male or female, whoever he met, or he wasn’t interested. He got bored immediately. He was no good at small talk, hated it, whereas I was all small talk. Loved it and still do. I guess I’m a little uptight. I know I am. Square. But that’s just how I am. The guys at the bar wanted to take me to a whorehouse, but I declined, and when I told Jack about it later, he almost got mad at me. Not because I lost the chance for him, although I’m sure he would have gone. He said, “Kent, you should have gone. What a great experience it would have been! How could you turn it down?” He was disappointed in me, and for me too. I could tell.



I practically had to put him on a leash to keep him out of the real cantinas, the ones with swinging doors, where we would not have fit in, but I did agree to go to a coffee house with him, which turned out to be a very nice place, too nice for him I think, but they had a young saxophonist there, a black American, and of course Jack had to talk to him. I’m not sure how he approached him. Something direct and naïve, I’m sure, like “Do you like Charlie Parker?” But whatever it was, it worked, and Eddie, that was his name, came and had a drink with us, and then his friend, I forget his name but also an American, joined us too, a skinny not very healthy looking middle-aged guy. He wore an Hawiaan shirt and needed a haircut, really a shabby looking person and aggressive, and with a thick Chicago accent that made him sound like a hoodlum. He took us back to the hotel in his convertible, that was something, I have to admit, driving around Mexico City late at night in an American convertible, after Jack bought a pint of scotch. He and Jack drank it as he showed us the sights, all around the Zona Rosa and up the length of the Reforma to Alameda Park. When he pulled up in front of our hotel, Jack reached for the bottle, there was only a little left in it, but the guy grabbed his hand and said, in a nice way, almost pleading, not threatening at all, “Do you mind, amigo?”



The next day, as arranged, the guy came by the hotel to take us over to Eddie’s apartment. We got to see him bargain for a chicken at the market. He just lived in an ordinary place, cheap if anything, interesting, but I’m not sure what the guy and Eddie got out of meeting up with us, or what they expected. Neither of them hit us up for any money. Maybe they were just being nice, or were lonely to see Americans. I don’t know, but that inch or so of scotch was all either of them ever asked for. When we walked into the hotel lobby later that day the desk clerk pulled me aside and warned me about Eddie’s friend. He didn’t like his looks. He told me we should be careful. They took care of gringos at the Hotel Calvin. There was nothing to it, but I appreciated the thought.



*****





We drove the MG, a 1953 TD, from Denver to San Francisco in 1971. I forget which month, but it was near the end of the year, late fall, and when we left Denver it was beautiful, warm, sun shining, and I remember his mother pressing gloves on both of us. We didn’t literally roll our eyes, but we might as well have. Thank God we took them. It was snowing only a little by the time we got to Steamboat Springs, but it was cold. The TD’s didn’t have heaters, which wasn’t a bad problem in normally cold weather, but in really cold weather you started thinking about the pioneers in covered wagons. I remember overhearing a conversation in a café in Utah. Two men in the next booth, one said that the prairie was full of Mormon graves, settlers who’d died in blizzards. “Those dead Mormons are all over the place,” he said, and I always wondered if he’d seen us pull up, or if it was just coincidence.



That first night it got to 40 below in Steamboat Springs. Yes. 40 below zero, I kid you not. The car was frozen solid the next morning. Jack had to pour hot water on the side curtains to get them off, and we had to climb over the door to get in. Of course the battery was dead. Everybody’s battery was dead. Normally, you can push an MG to get it started, but there was too much against it this time. The parking lot was too slick to get any traction, either for your feet or the tires. That was obvious. We didn’t even try it. But just as important was that it was too darn cold. It just wouldn’t do, so we got in line to be pulled, and in this case also pushed. We had to wait our turn, and what the guy would do is pull you out on the highway, where it had been sanded, then just push until you got it started. It was nice long stretch, and we had to get going pretty fast. It bucked like a horse when Jack let out the clutch. Whiplash. Took two or three tries as I recall, but we finally got it going.



We thought at the time that that had to be the worse, but a real blizzard caught up with us in Nevada. At least there were no other cars on the road to bump into, but there were moments when I wondered if we weren’t going to wind up like those Mormons. I drove a lot and we drank whiskey to keep warm, straight from the bottle, which really had no effect at all except that we worried and fought less. A pint of bourbon fit just right in the glove compartment, and we bought canned heat, a mistake. I put it up on what passes for a dashboard in those cars, and it cracked the windshield. I admit it. Jack told me not to put it so close to the glass, and I ignored him. You can’t be right all the time. It wasn’t serious, though, as far as the weather went. Just a little crack. Didn’t get any bigger, thank God. The real problem was where we were going to spend the night. We’d made reservations at a place where they took Texaco cards, the only credit card we had, and we didn’t have much cash left. So when it became clear that we weren’t going to make it to that place, we had a problem because only that chain took that card. Luckily, though, this was before all motels required a credit card or payment in advance. Things were changing, but at that time, as a rule, a lot of nicer places wouldn’t expect payment until you checked out. So when we got into Elko, or Winnemucka, I forget which, we picked the nicest motel we could find, and sure enough, they just gave me the key and said, “Welcome to Elko.” We thought we’d died and gone to heaven. It was fun just to be warm, and the color TV and 2 queen sized beds were just icing on the cake. It was heaven, it really was, and we got a free paper and free coffee and sweet rolls the next morning. I was a little worried about having to write them a check when we checked out, but I don’t guess I should have been. No signs, and they never said anything when I checked in, and sure enough they took my check like it was pure gold and told me to have a safe journey. The check was good, of course. We sure felt proud of ourselves that morning. A warm comfortable night and we still had enough money on us to eat until we got to San Francisco. And it was sunny that morning. We had a little trouble with the grade crossing the Sierras, but that was nothing, and we got to Oakland all in one piece.



*****



It might seem odd, considering that we were both writers and that’s what brought us together, how much we talked about food, but he was obsessed with it, especially after he moved to New England. Not like a foodie, or not like the usual kind. He had his own eccentric agenda and priorities and tastes, and a lot of it was centered on comparing Texas food to everything else. He said for example that he couldn’t get a good hamburger, a bought one, not homemade, anywhere else. A good hamburger he defined this way: everything on it, by which he meant lettuce (iceberg, preferably shredded), tomatoes (sliced thin), onions, pickles (dill slices) and mustard. Cheese was optional, and mayo instead of mustard was allowed on a cheeseburger, but only a cheeseburger, and never catsup, which he once referred to as an “eastern deviancy.” Catsup was for french fries, not hamburgers. It should go without saying that the burger should be juicy, a condition that must be illegal in New England. Juicy anything. White and dry, he said, characterized New England cuisine. It was okay, he added, if you were a woman or a kid to get a “sissy” burger in Texas, cut the onions and pickles, mayo instead of mustard, but that’s the only slack he would cut. About other things, in regard to bashing New England, it was more a question of availability: chicken fried steak, breakfast tacos, banana pudding, pimiento cheese, pecan pie, Mexican food in general, raw peanuts, okra, cornbread that wasn’t sweet, sweet rolls instead of those awful muffins, blackeyed peas, and the list goes on. He had a rap about Mexican restaurants. He said he got up and walked out of a place on Cape Cod that wanted to charge him for chips and hot sauce. He said he couldn’t get it off his mind for days, the pettiness of it, and ignorance too, maybe, who knows, but the fact that they didn’t take it for granted and therefore had no concept of what a Mexican restaurant was, how could he eat their food, how could he not be depressed that he lived in such a place, like another planet, a place where only you know how things are supposed to be, which of course makes you crazy, not them, which is the really depressing part, since then you’re undeniably alone, a fucking alien, that it’s you who will have to change, fundamentally, right down to one of, if not the most basic urge you have and joy you receive.



The food thing was just one example of a pattern that he saw himself: wanting things to stay the same, but was even more extreme than that, and he saw that too. He wanted things to be as they had been when he’d received the most pleasure from them. He was like that about sports too, especially baseball. Eight teams to a league, no play offs, no dh, etc., but he went even further. No over the fence home runs. He had this idea that a ball knocked over the fence in fair territory should be an out, which would bring back the pre-Ruth era. That was long before his time, of course, by 50 years, but it still fits the pattern because he’d read a biography of Ty Cobb when he was ten or eleven, the pinnacle of his baseball fandom, so even though he’d never seen them, lived through them, he wanted to return to the dead ball days, hit’em where they ain’t and stealing bases. Ruth ruined baseball, he said, but then of course he’d turn right around and praise the Yankee teams of the fifties. He heard them play the World Series in school. He heard Don Larsen pitch the perfect game in ’56.



I had to correct him a lot on the facts. He called me a sports encyclopedia. I think he liked that about me. He got me involved one year in the NCAA basketball tournament, one of those pools, and he was impressed, pleased too, that I knew so much about all the teams. Never mind that at times I felt a little like a mascot. Most of the time it was flattering. He’d do the same with his girl friend at the time. Show off her knowledge of pop music. I knew about that too, or thought I did until I met her. If I was a sports encylodpedia, she was the same with pop music, and he was proud of her. Justly so, I guess.



*****



The problem with working for Manpower was the low pay and the tedium. Minimum wage, which back then was $1.95 an hour. Most of the jobs weren’t that hard, not like construction. Warehouse work is relatively easy, but there’s always something to do that takes a lot of time and is very repetitious, and that’s always what they want the temps for. Jack told me he spent three weeks once repairing pallets at the Safeway warehouse. It was always nice weather in that part of Oakland, not much if any fog, and he was outside on a loading dock, and he said at first it was kind of fun. He used an air hammer and driving those nails was a kick, but it wasn’t too long before it got old. Those pallets get heavy by the end of the day, and they all look alike. Three weeks. I’ve had jobs like that, and the worst part is that you have nobody to talk to and time slows down to a crawl. You have to have a watch, or a clock you can see, even if you take your cue about breaks from the other workers. It’s frustrating to see how slow that minute hand moves, but it drives you nuts not knowing how close to a break or quitting time it is. The trick is to resist looking at the clock for as long as you can, and then try to be pleasantly surprised by how much more time has passed than you thought. Of course the real trick is to think of something constructive, or at least diverting, forget you care, but that’s hard to keep up for any length of time. At least it is for me.



The good thing is the people you meet. Jack said he had a guy give him a whole case of ricotta cheese once, for no particular reason that he could see, and they were hard pressed to figure out what to do with it. They were living with Roxy and Judy at the time, all Texans, and none of them had ever heard of ricotta cheese before, never mind used it. I don’t know how that turned out. He also said there were two guys who gave him a hard time, two proud Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa fans, who bragged every day about how much money they’d made, to throw it up to him, you know, that he wasn’t in the union and making minimum wage. They also told him a memorable World War II story, which I’ve never looked up, to see if it was true. He said they told him that the GI’s who captured Tojo’s son buried him alive, stuck a straw in his mouth, and took turns pissing in it. Jack said he thought they had him pegged as a hippy who’d be horrified and outraged, and it might have surprised them that he wasn’t, or at least didn’t show it, except for the fact that they were the kind of guys who never noticed anything they weren’t expecting. Some of those guys, young and old, in warehouses could be pretty hard cases. I saw a group of them spear a rabbit once, caught him in the eye with a metal stake, just for the fun of it. What was really blood-curdling was how much fun they were having, and at the same time, strange combination I know, but trust me, at the same time it was as if they’d convinced themselves that the rabbit deserved it. For being stupid, I guess. There was some high grass on the other side of the railroad tracks that ran behind the warehouse, and something or other had made that rabbit come across the tracks and up on the dock. His mistake.



I worked two jobs in those days, for Manpower during the day and the swing shift at a Del Monte cannery, six months at a stretch, sleeping on a friend’s couch in Berkeley, then went to Europe for six months. A good life, and I still do it more or less, except I’ve figured out how not to work for so little an hour. It’s one thing when you’re in your twenties to bust your butt for half the year to enjoy yourself the other half, but it’s not the same after a certain age. You’re not going to live forever, so it’s not worth it to be miserable half the time. That’s how I look at it, but since I never got married, never even got close to it, that’s easy for me to say. No one to worry about but myself, and yes, of course, I’d be lying if I said I never doubted whether that was the way to go, but on the whole I think it was for the best. I don’t trust women, if you want the truth. I don’t mean because they’re women. Men are no better, maybe worse. I mean I don’t trust them not to hurt me if I put myself in a position where they could. That may make me a chicken shit, I know, but that’s how it is.



Jack wasn’t like that. He had a wife and as I recall, a kid on the way. He was also a writer, and although I’ve kept a diary all these years, that’s all I ever had the urge to write, and I can’t imagine showing it to anyone. I’m more interested in how people lead their lives and helping them, like a teacher. I mean to find a healthy and sane way, both on an individual and society level. I remember telling Jack how if I saw something unsafe in a place where I worked, I’d tell the foreman. I’d complain, and if they tried to fire me, I’d go to the state and complain to them, and although he agreed with me on principal, it was something he’d never do. Just be careful, he’d say. Why cause trouble?



We worked together in a warehouse on the docks in Oakland, loading and unloading trucks, stocking and filling orders for shirts imported from Taiwan, all of them headed for different Sears stores around the country. An easy job, shirts aren’t very heavy, even boxes of them, and it was clean work with some variety, but it was still tedious and good to have Jack to talk to. He’d recommend novels to me, and I’d tell him about my European trips, how to live there cheap and meet girls. I look sort of like Richard Boone, the guy from Have Gun Will Travel, so I usually have to work at getting a girl to like me. I take care of my body, work out, lift weights, so I have pretty big arms and shoulders, and some girls like that. We’d also debate the relative merits of capitalism and socialism. I guess we were both socialists, in theory at least. Workers really get treated like shit in this country, even those in a union, and most of them just take it, and some are even proud of how much they can take. Some guys think you’re soft, that’s how brainwashed they are, if you worry about safety. Not me. I’m not going to wind up in a wheelchair or dead just because some foreman might think I’m a chicken shit for refusing to do something that’s too risky, but you’d be surprised how many guys will. Guys who owe their lives to OSHA will complain about it being a government bureaucracy full of busybodies.



That place, though, wasn’t a bad place to work, and we sure met some characters. The foreman was a young guy, even younger than me and Jack, whose whole life already was devoted to getting ahead. He’d rag us a little, but we’d just laugh at him, and he couldn’t do anything but get a little huffy about it. Puffed up. That’s the guy he was, and I guess he could have let us go, but he didn’t have the nerve. Self-important, and he fancied himself a hustler. Back in those days, they had these land promotions in Nevada, maybe still do, or even some remote desert part of California. They’d give you free bus rides to the place and sometimes even take you to Reno and put you up, give you a meal, and all you had to do was say you were interested in an acre of land for a dollar down and fifty a month. Something like that. Of course no one in his right mind would buy the land and most people wouldn’t want to endure the pressure they put on you to sign the papers, just for a bus ride and a free meal, but this guy made a hobby of it, of seeing what free stuff he could get from the promotions. It was his idea of a fun weekend, something to do, and he acted like we were fools for not taking advantage of it. He was a little cracked. He had these elaborate stories about how well they got fed and free booze and how he’d play the salesmen to get all he could, when they thought they were playing him. Boy, you wouldn’t want to trust that guy with anything, would you? I remember Jack asked him once if he ever felt bad about the dishonesty of it, lying to the salesmen, and he looked at Jack like he was crazy, like he couldn’t believe his ears. He said, “They’re lying to me. They’re trying to take advantage of me.” And when Jack pointed out to him, just to needle him I think, that two wrongs don’t make a right, then believe it or not, that’s when the truth came out. Jack was good at that. Getting you to talk about yourself and saying things you didn’t often say to people. The foreman admitted, not like he was ashamed of it, mind you, but still, he admitted that it wasn’t the food or whatever else they gave you, but the thrill of fooling those people. It was a game, of getting something for nothing, and of proving to himself that he wasn’t the sucker.



The other guy there that we got to know was Roger, a tall guy, built kind of like a rope, lots of hard knots breaking up the lean lines. He was from New Jersey and his main complaint about California was that you couldn’t buy a good twenty dollar car. There’s nothing out there that will run for less than a hundred bucks, he said. Back home I could lay down twenty bucks and have good wheels for several months, maybe even a year. He was married to a tall plump blonde, big all over, Jack said, a kind of Amazon, had a kid about a year old, and a charge account at the neighborhood pizza parlor, something Jack and I had never heard of, pizza on credit, or even thought about. But Roger was the kind of guy who could bring that off. Not a con man. Likeable, I’d say, and not too bright. Easy going, everybody was his friend and thought just like him. He and the world understood each other, or at least that’s what he always assumed until someone turned up different. Roger was the opposite of a guy with a chip on his shoulder. He chided Jack for only half smoking a cigarette during one of our breaks. You must be rich, he said, if you can waste tobacco like that. But there was no question of getting annoyed at him. He wasn’t calling you a fool. He was just amazed when someone didn’t look at things and behave the way he did. Amazed and puzzled. You don’t really want to waste that do you? Innocent. That’s how he seemed, but there had to be another side. For one thing he had TROUBLE tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand, and for another he said he had to leave New Jersey for starting a race riot, a slight exaggeration as it turned out. It was a drive by shooting that apparently got the community riled up. Nobody got hurt, he said, and they hadn’t intended to hurt anybody. Just busted out a window, no harm done, they just wanted to scare a guy, and it shouldn’t have been such a big deal, but it so happened that the guy in the house was black, so everyone got excited. Still, they wouldn’t have got caught but for the testimony of one witness, a known whore, as Roger put it, and he explained that to the police, but it didn’t seem to matter. They left New Jersey before the trial, and since by then it was clear that Roger was a bonafide dyed in the wool easterner, Jack asked him about driving across the country, but Roger hadn’t seemed to notice most of it. Jack would ask him if they’d passed through a certain state, Iowa say, and Roger didn’t know.



That fascinated Jack. He’s so dumb, Jack said, it’s like he’s walking through the world half-blind, but so far at least, he’s doing fine. I think Jack couldn’t get over how satisfied, even happy, Roger seemed. He and his wife and kid spent a lot of time at the beach in Alameda, a rocky, cold, and unattractive place if there ever was one, but Roger was fine as long as his car ran, even if it did cost a hundred bucks, and he could get pizza on credit, and go to the beach, no matter how rocky and cold. That amazed Jack, and made him envious too, just like he probably was of me, because I kind of had it made too. Not that Jack had it hard, and he knew he didn’t. I had dinner with him and his wife a couple of times, and they lived in a neat little duplex in East Oakland, roomy and comfortable, a quiet neighborhood. He had nothing to complain about and he didn’t. He didn’t complain, but you could tell he wasn’t satisfied. He was restless. This might be good, but what is there around the corner? He couldn’t not look



*****



I’ve got a whole book about it, if you want to read it. A manuscript, that is. The publishers I sent it to didn’t want it. One of them told me outright it was too old-fashioned. Sounded too much like J. Frank Dobie, he told me, or Grantland Rice or Damon Runyon, who I doubt he’d ever read, but I got the message, and it’s true I cut my teeth on fellows like that. O’Henry. Jack London. It’s in my blood, I guess, and I couldn’t do anything about it if I wanted to. Comes naturally, so to speak. But yes, I’m an expert on the The Duke of Duval, which is what we liked to call ol’George, and in case you didn’t know, he lived over there behind the “mesquite curtain,” which is what we called the county line, a phrase that if I didn’t coin, I’d like to know who did. And yes, I remember Homer Dean’s son-in-law, a good writer, won some sort of prize or other soon after he left here, so I heard, and he could have been a good reporter, only his heart wasn’t in it. I could tell. Plain as the nose on your face, but still, he might have stayed here a while longer than he did, at the paper I mean, but he got maneuvered out by a misunderstanding over a Mexican wrestling match, and I’m as sure as can be that that little weasel of a sports reporter we had then did it on purpose. Had it in his head that the kid had been hired to replace him and then got him into a position where his pride made him quit. I don’t mean it was all planned that way from the start, I’ve never been much on conspiracy theories, and anyway the weasel wasn’t that smart, but he knew how to seize an opportunity when it came along. He asked Jack a week or so, maybe longer, in advance if he wanted to go to a wrestling match. Said he had a couple of tickets, and if he did go, he should write it up. That’s Jack’s version. But according to the weasel, it was an out and out assignment, and when Jack came in the morning after the match, the weasel asked him for the story, and Jack said he didn’t have it, didn’t go, so the weasel complained to the editor, and the editor backed him up, basically saying that Jack was a liar, and Jack quit. Simple as that, and although there were no witnesses to the conversation in question, so there’s no real evidence, I don’t make a habit of trusting weasels.



There was bad feeling already, no denying it, because everyone knew, including Jack, that the only reason he got hired was that he was Homer Dean’s son-in-law, but in my personal opinion, I think it was unfair to assume that he was looking for any special treatment. Of course I got to know him better than anyone else. It was my job to show him around, show him the ropes, and I knew he wasn’t a bad kid. A good writer, not a bad kid, but no reporter. He was interested in people and in this area down here, a good listener, and it was good to have someone to talk to, someone who appreciated the culture. He’d go with me to check out something and I’d fill him in on things, the big murders and fires, who the important people were, who to talk to about this or that, and local color stuff, like the time near Falfurrias when two little girls said they saw the Virgin and about every Mexican in South Texas had to go there and get cured of something. The landowners tried to charge admission, which naturally raised a big fuss. Jack ate that up, and he also knew how to ask questions, but the thing was, he liked to put it down in his own way. Wouldn’t follow the rules. Wouldn’t just take orders and figure he had to get along to get ahead. A lot of young people are like that, and I guess I had some of it in me too, but I always had to put bread on the table, I didn’t have a rich father-in-law to bail me out if I got in trouble, and that’ll make you toe the line real quick, especially once you have a wife and kid. When he told me he was moving away, I told him I’d been just like him in one respect, when it was just me I had to worry about, and even for a while after, namely that I always thought the grass was greener on the other side of the fence, and I kept moving around from job to job to find something better, and on top of that I started drinking too much, and I just flat out told him, the sooner you get all that out of your system, the better off you’re going to be.



He didn’t listen, of course. Young people never do, and besides, why should he listen to me, a washed up old geezer, now at the bottom of the barrel as far as reporters go, a small town daily out in the middle of nowhere, although if you’ve got the talent and the drive (which I didn’t, either one) you can climb up the ladder even from a place like this. One woman did it, right from this paper, in the late fifties when they were trying to get ol’ George for income tax evasion. She came through here like lightening, that girl did, got nominated for a Pulitzer prize, and then of course she was gone. Back East now, I think, maybe even Washington. Her stories about George got picked up by all the big dailies in the state and even AP and UPI. She was a marvel. Smart and tenacious, that’s what it takes, and since she was new in town, she owed nobody nothing. She could do what she damned well pleased, but I was worried about her for a while. George can play rough, and I wouldn’t have put it past him. When he gets mad, there’s no telling what he’ll do, as he’s proved time and again.



Two things got George in trouble in the late fifties. One was the murder of Buddy Floyd, and the other was Eisenhower, although he still might have been okay . In other words, he didn’t have a Democrat to save him, to put a leash on the feds. This was a solid Democratic state then, but even they were fed up. He had a falling out with Allen Shivers, which was not a good idea. Let’s just say he thought that since he could guarantee nearly 100 percent of the vote for whoever he wanted in Duval county and strongly influence the vote in the surrounding counties, he could get away with murder. Literally in Buddy Floyd’s case, and in the end I guess he did, but he sure brought a lot of trouble on himself in the meantime and helped that woman get nominated for the Pulitzer.



I’ve had my own problems. It got so bad once I had to dry out in the state hospital, not a cure though I’d recommend to anyone. And I know all about Huey P. Long, All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren, a fine book, wish I’d written it, and Daley there in Chicago and that Boston fellow, the one The Last Hurrah was based on. George was cut from the same cloth, and like them he let his power go to his head and started thinking he had a right to it, like it was owed to him, and like those others he could be stubborn beyond reason to his own disadvantage, and with that kind of man, it’s like he knows he’s going too far, he has to know, or maybe, and I put his in my book, as speculation, they live for the risk. They know it’s a risk, but they aren’t happy any other way, like race car drivers or mountain climbers or those nuts that jump out of airplanes just for the fun of it. Why should George want Jake Floyd dead? There was no sense to it. Floyd may have been a thorn in his side, but he wasn’t going to bring George down single-handed. George just got mad at him, lost his temper, and it turned out like breaking a window just to swat a fly.



Jake was not unusual in his beliefs. We have a lot of straight-laced Baptists in this town. It was his actions that made him the exception. You’ve got to realize that even though San Diego is in a different county, it’s only ten miles away from Alice, which makes it almost like a suburb, and since there’s always been a lot going on in both counties in the way of oil and gas, if you’re a lawyer or a banker in Jim Wells County, you’re pretty much one in Duval county too. You can’t help it. So Jake knew what was going on over there, and he didn’t like it, and not just for business reasons. That had something to do with it. It’s kind of hard to separate. Corruption is bad for business, especially when there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Unpredictable corruption. George just did whatever he took a mind to, and if you got on his bad side, you were sunk, and if he decided he wanted a little bigger piece of the pie, there wasn’t much you could do about it except pull out.



It should tell you something that it was someone who didn’t live in Duval county who started up the opposition, and he was a white man. I’m not saying anything against Mexicans. I never would, and there were plenty of them who didn’t like George, but most of them just left, had been leaving for a long time, especially after the war. The men went to different places, here in this country and overseas both, saw different things and came back with the realization that they didn’t have to scrape by in Duval county their whole lives, their hands out to the patron, breaking their backs for next to nothing, a few “favors” if he liked you and you toed the line, a slap on the wrist or worse if you showed any independence. The smart ones left. Came here to Alice, or went to Corpus or San Antonio and found better jobs, which, I hate to say it, left a pretty pitiful crew. By the time Jake Floyd came along, you were either George’s friend and had a job where you didn’t have to do much, or you’d just come across the river not that long ago and were glad for work at any pay. Those fellows couldn’t read or write or speak English, so they just kept their heads down and did what the boss said. And too, there were the older people of those who’d left, grandparents and parents, aunts and uncles, who for one reason or another couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Poor, ignorant people, no matter what race they are, especially when they’re old, get attached to a place, even when it’s not much to brag about.



I think Jake Floyd genuinely felt sorry for those people, even George’s friends, since they were being taken advantage of too, even if they didn’t know it. They had to kowtow like everybody else, and compared to other places, they weren’t paid much. And the worst, Jake thought, and I agree with him, was that George stole from the schools. That’s documented. When the feds finally forced them to do an audit, there was over a hundred thousand dollars missing from the school district in just that one year. You’d think he’d just take kickbacks, that would be safer, but maybe he couldn’t get enough that way, plus he really thought he owned the place. George’s favorite M.O. was this: you give a big absentee landowner a huge tax break, then you dip into what he does pay as if it’s your own private bank account. Who’s going to complain? The landowner you just gave the break to? The county commisioners who rely on George for their livelihood? The poor Mexicans who can’t read or write?



Jake was a true Christian, there’s no doubt in my mind about it, and he treated everybody fair and equal, even Mexicans, which it wasn’t necessary or even approved of to do in those days. Not over here anyway, on this side of the mesquite curtain, where we still had a big white population, lots of them mean as shit and hate Mexicans like the Alamo happened yesterday. He called his party the Freedom Party and made no bones about the fact that its only purpose was to bring George Parr down. An idealist, Jake was, but he had to know that nearly all of George’s enemies, and a man like that always has plenty of those, were his rivals, not reformers. They were all Mexicans, yes, but do you think they cared any more for “freedom” than George did? Hell no. Like George they’d be happy to do anybody a favor for a vote, but don’t ask for a raise. And don’t wonder out loud why those new classrooms at the grade school have been half-finished for three years. Don’t wonder anything. Just take the favor and vote how you’re told. It was all politics, practical to the bone. Like Homer Dean told me once, something that happened to him when he was young, had just started down here in the DA’s office, still wet behind the ears, and he spoke up at a barbecue for some visiting bigwig in the Democratic Party, showing off something he’d read in a political science course, about how inefficient it was to have a governor’s election every two years. He waxed eloquent on all the good government reasons to have a longer term, and when he was done, all the bigwig said was, “Homer, two years is too damn long if it ain’t your man.” Homer said that taught him more about politics than all his years in college and law school, and he never forgot it, but Jake Floyd evidently did.



Jake thought he could change things, and I think that more than anything he actually did is what caused his son’s murder. Maybe he’d turned some people against George, maybe he’d caused the old fart some trouble, but you don’t hire two killers for that. It was pride. Jake Floyd was impudent. An upstart. Showed no respect. He pissed George off, plain and simple. It’s never been proved that George had anything to do with it. He was never even charged with anything, but no one doubted it. That’s bitter. You do what you think is right and someone kills your son over it. That’s like a Greek tragedy, isn’t it? I guess Jake had his share of pride or he’d never have started the Freedom Party, and he sure paid for it. His son was a student at Baylor. Had a girlfriend. His mother came home and found him bleeding to death in the driveway. That’s bitter. I guess if I’d been Jake Floyd I’d have wanted to go right to George’s house and shoot him in the head. And maybe his wife too. And burn down his house. And display his balls on a stick in front the courthouse. But Jake Floyd was a real Christian, and I’m sure he needed it after that, all the faith he could get.



It was a botched job. Some people say they went for Buddy on purpose, as a warning, but I don’t believe it. That’s thinking too hard. You could make a case for it, I guess, but I think those two Mexicans were just screw ups. Incompetent. And both of them were real Mexicans, and both got caught and served time. Still in prison, for all I know. What they did, here are the known facts, was stake out Jake’s house, and that night, this is the first strange part of it, one of George’s compadres, a lawyer named Nago Alaniz, called Jake and told him he needed to talk to him, and it had to be at this place out on the edge of town, Jewel’s Drive In, and he had to take a taxi. Jake did it, God knows why, just as he was told, maybe he thought Nago was going to turn on George, but when he got to the café, Nago told him there was contract out on him, but he wouldn’t say who’d initiated it, or why or how he himself was involved. He just said he wanted to warn Jake. So Jake says, Okay, thanks, and goes home. Meanwhile, the two killers are sitting in a car down the block from Jake’s house, saw Jake get in the taxi, had to, and then one of them, the one with a gun, went around to the back of the house and peeked in a window. At the same time, Buddy decided he had to go check on his dad. He was worried about the call, so he goes out to get in his car and the killer comes around the back of the house and shoots him, and when Jake gets home, he finds out his son has been murdered.



I think they just wanted to scare Jake, and that Mexican was all hopped up on something and lost it when Buddy came running out of the house. I don’t think they ever meant to kill anybody, or at least Nago didn’t. George might have told him to hire somebody to kill Jake, and he did, he went that far, but then he was going to try to get out of it. You know. Not say no to George, that was never wise, but you get what he wanted done, scare the daylights out of Jake, without actually getting anyone killed. Nago got off. A jury aquitted him in Waco, and he became a pretty respected lawyer here, and he’s not a bad guy. The Floyd’s moved soon after, and we never heard from them again. I don’t blame them.



*****



I’m always looking for a way to get ahead, which is why I speak English so well. It pays. I lost my job, though, over at Mullen’s Lumberyard on account of pride, which doesn’t pay. I’d been yard foreman over there for ten years and thought I was due a raise, but the boss disagreed. I thought we were all due a raise, my men as well, and that’s what got me fired. I could ask for myself from now until doomsday and all he’d ever do is shake his head, but as soon as I asked for the whole crew, he showed me the door. All of a sudden I was a labor organizer, and they decided to nip that in the bud, and it sure taught me a lesson. It’s the last time I’ll ever stand up for anybody, unless I’ve got some clout and my ass is covered. I should have known. What could we do? Nobody wanted to lose his job. I can see now I was crazy. Stupid. But I’d worked for that man for ten years. I did a lot of things for him, things that had nothing to do with my job as foreman, like keep his cars clean and kept up, send somebody on errands for him or his wife during the day, do his yard work, and make sure he had plenty of wetbacks at his ranch. That last one sort of went to my head, I think. It was the hardest and took the most time, and I even thought it took a special kind of person to do it. You drive around down here and you see plenty of wetbacks, but you have to know how to approach them without scaring them off, and then you have to know which ones will work out for you. They stand out like a sore thumb, so if I didn’t pick them up, they’d probably get nabbed by the Border Patrol. They’re usually pretty dirty and wear a different kind of clothes, old-fashioned looking, but the dead giveaway is how they carry their things, in straw bags or even just a tied up bandana. They’re always hungry. I’m doing them a favor, really. I take them, or used to, out to the boss’s ranch and give them something to eat, let them clean up, rest a little, and put them to work.



I still have some use for them. It pays to have a few wetbacks handy. You never know when somebody might have a job to do, and I can help them and at the same time pick up a little spare change for myself. Meanwhile, I’m able to give them a place to stay and keep them busy at one of my houses I’m fixing up. It’s good to have them occupied, so nobody breaks in. They’re a good investment, I think, and too, I always have a place to take a woman, a convenience I can also offer my friends. It pays to do things for people, help them out here and there when they need it. You never know when you might need a hand yourself.



I had it made. I had a good wife and four kids, mostly good, a good job, and owned three houses free and clear. Plus I knew everybody in town and they either knew me or who I was, and then like a fool I had to go ask for a raise for my workers. I can’t believe I let them talk me into it, but I guess I wanted to show them what a big shot I was. That’s funny. Instead of a hero, I was unemployed, and I only got the job with Alamo because of a cousin who owed me a favor. Before that I’d worked at that chain in Corpus, not a real lumberyard, and they treat you like shit if they don’t know you. It was also a long drive to make every day. So, the pay’s shitty here, and I’m low man on the totem pole, but at least it’s only five minutes to work and I can keep a close eye on my houses and get some work done on them, or could if I had any spare money anymore. Technically, I’m in charge of the yard the way I was over at Mullen, but the other workers are mainly cement drivers and they’ve all been here forever, and I can’t really tell them anything. They wouldn’t listen if I did.



Jack was an outsider in the yard too, being Anglo, and those cement drivers don’t trust anybody unless he’s Mexican and they’ve known him their whole lives. Narrow-minded and uneducated people they are, and most of them barely speak enough English to get by, even though they were born and raised here. My son doesn’t want to learn English. Of course he knows it, he went to school, but he doesn’t like to speak it unless he has to, so he avoids those situations, and that’s not good for getting ahead. Which I’ve told him, over and over, but he has a thick skull. I get by okay, he says. Why push it? If that’s what you want, fine, I tell him, but you’ll never get anywhere that way. I don’t want to go anywhere, he says. I’m happy where I am, and you can’t tell a kid he’ll regret it later. He won’t listen. I didn’t. Wish I had a nickel for every time my father was right.



Jack was interested in my stories because he writes stories. He gave me a few of his to read, which I never got around to, but I told him they were good. I do read, it helps my English and it pays to know what’s going on in the world, and I meant to look at the stories, but I put them in a dresser drawer and kept putting it off. You know how that goes. Anyway, nobody else in the yard liked either one of us, especially me. They thought I was stuck up and kissed ass too much, which, I have new for you, assholes, is how you get ahead, in case you haven’t noticed. I liked Jack, muy amable, and of course I knew who his father-in-law was, and it never hurts to have connections. So I took him around, showed him a few beer joints, ones he wouldn’t have gone into by himself, and my houses, and introduced him all around as a “good Anglo.” I just came out and told people he was a friend of mine and to always be nice to him even I wasn’t with him, which didn’t mean anything, but it made him feel good. We went out to see him and his family once at his father-in-law’s ranch, him and his wife and baby daughter, and cooked tripas we’d brought, outside on a grill, and he showed me around the ranch. We shot a couple of rabbits and added them to the tripas and had a good meal. I’m not sure Jack and his wife really liked the tripas, although they tried to eat them. I told him about my colored friend from east Texas. I don’t know why he moved down here. Not many colored people around, so maybe he had some trouble back home, but he was a good mechanic. Had an A frame in his yard, so he could work on engines. A good guy, but he couldn’t convince me to eat squirrel. He was always talking about how good it was and the different ways to cook it, and complaining about how they were in short supply down here, but I said, No, sorry, I don’t eat that. And then he laughed at me when I told him he ought to try armadillo. Plenty of them down here, I told him, but those colored people are different. A good guy, but different.



Jack paid me for a day’s work helping him make honey. He’d collected it all from the hives and needed me to help him get it off the trays and into bottles to sell. He was still working at the lumber yard then and wanted to do it all in one weekend and get it over with, so he collected it by himself on a Saturday and I went over and spent all day Sunday in a shed with him and got it all done. I think he sold almost all of it, just to people around town, and then soon after that they moved away, and I lost contact. He called me once when he was in town visiting his in-laws, but I was pretty busy that day and didn’t have time to see him. I know this sounds cold, but what really, when you think about it, would we have to say to each other? And I don’t know, I guess when I thought about it, I couldn’t really understand what he was doing, why he lived like he did. His father-in-law was rich, he was Anglo, and he had a college education. He could have it made without really trying, if he’d wanted to.

*****



What we hoped was that she would go to Baylor and meet a nice boy from a good family, a lawyer or a doctor, and settle down not too far away, close enough so that we could drive to see our grandchildren, and all be together on holidays, but I started to have my doubts about that ever happening long before she met him. She was too smart, on the one hand, and not quite pretty enough on the other, a dangerous combination in a woman. I should know. I married one just like her, a woman who spends half her time shopping (she’d spend every penny I have if I’d let her), and the other half in bed reading. I’m not exaggerating. I think the shopping gets her excited and the reading calms her down, relaxes that insatiable brain she has. It’s been suggested to me, by an old friend we play bridge with every week, and the only other man I know in this town with any degree of cultivation, that it might be the other way around. That’s possible, but regardless, the result at the end of the day is the same.



I wanted a son, of course. What man doesn’t? The idea for me, like most people, was to pave the way for better things, and that’s exactly what I did, and if she’d just played by the rules, everything would have been fine. That’s what so many young people don’t understand, and it was worse than ever in her generation. It can be pretty easy to get established and even make a name for yourself if you just pay attention to how things are done and then do them that way. I thought I knew everything when I was in college. I knew what was wrong with the world and how to fix it, and I was just the person to help with the fixing, but you learn pretty quick, especially once you have a family to support, that nobody cares about that. Can you do what you’re told? Can you help us? Will you not screw up? That’s what the powers that be look for in a man, and it didn’t take me long to figure it out. I never wanted to be a rich man. That just never interested me. Or build an empire, however modest. What I wanted was for people to pay attention when I said something, and maybe, if I was smart and lucky enough, I could do some good along the way. And I knew almost immediately that the best way to achieve that goal was to work hard, say what people wanted me to say, and mind my own business. I was always a hard worker, but those last two gave me fits. I did it, but sometimes I didn’t sleep all that well at night.



She didn’t mind working hard either, as long as she thought it was something people would appreciate, but she never paid attention to those last two, except maybe with her teachers and a few boys. She made excellent grades, too good, and I almost didn’t talk her out of going to that school back east. We finally compromised on Rice. I know it’s supposed to be better than Baylor, and I suppose it is on strictly academic grounds, but she was our first child, and we wanted to protect her, and I knew already she had a wild streak. Being smart isn’t everything, and she proved that almost right out of the chute, if you’ll excuse the colloquial expression. She went to Rice and got herself pregnant, and I thought for a while we were going to have to send her mother away for a rest. Those were dark days around here. This is a small town and my reputation is my livelihood. I don’t know how much it got around. For all I know, everyone knew about it, and I kept myself under control only by reckoning that my daughter wasn’t the first girl to have this problem, even among the prominent citizens of the town. Actually, I knew that for a fact. And by praying. I taught a Sunday School class, always have, and I’m a deacon in our church, and I’ve helped out the church in other ways too, not just money, and I knew God wouldn’t want me to lose control. He wanted me to be a man about it. Sensible and discreet, but it was one of those times that try men’s souls. Mine was sorely tried, and I did my best to have the intestinal fortitude to keep things together.



That was bad enough. I don’t know to this day what happened to my first grandchild, and I rarely think of her that way. It’s a weakness to do so, since I don’t plan, have never even been tempted, to find out. It’s in the past, an unfortunate incident, and you’d have thought that my daughter would have profited from it, learned something. That was my hope, but not more than a year later, we get a call from her that she’s quit school and moved to California, and she didn’t have to say, of course, that it was because of a boy. There’s not a sensible bone in that girl’s body, I thought at the time, and not much has happened since to change my opinion. And the boy, him, Jack, wasn’t much different. I’d hoped someone who was going places with a good head on his shoulders had roped her in, someone who could control her and set her on the right path. I never expected her to be just a housewife, even if she’d met that lawyer or doctor at Baylor. I wanted my first child to have a degree, even a graduate degree, and a career if she wanted it. Well, he had her under control, at first he did, and for quite a while. That much was obvious, but he had no interest in getting her on the right path. He had no interest in her at all, if you want the truth. I don’t think he ever loved her. His interests were strictly confined to himself, and I knew not ten minutes after I met him that he was a complete fool. What bothered me, and always did, was how much she loved him. Think about that. A girl who isn’t sensible to start with falls madly in love with a complete fool. I knew trouble was ahead.



After a short time in California, they come here, then Austin, then back to California, where it all came to an end. The marriage, I mean, and I can’t say I was sorry to see him go. My second daughter married a musician, and I can’t say strongly enough that while artists and writers and musicians have my utmost respect, even my admiration, and some of them have hard lives and are misunderstood, tortured souls, I pity them, but I’d just as soon not have them in the family. Jack never amounted to anything, but you’d have thought when he won that little grant, National Endowment I think, to hear her tell it (he never said anything), he’d won the Nobel Prize, and that alone justified, in her mind, all the moving around and rent houses in questionable neighborhoods and cars that were always breaking down, most of them gifts from me to start with. I could hear it in her voice. He has talent. He’s going to get a book published. He’s the real thing. And then six months later he leaves her.



I never understood him. I tried, but I never could figure him out. They lived in what amounted to a slum in Oakland. That was true everywhere, but Oakland was the first I saw and shocked her mother and me more than the others. They were proud of it. It’s colorful, I said, trying to understand and be tactful, but they acted like I was a total idiot, as if I didn’t get something. It took me, though, to notice the stakeout down the street. I noticed the unmarked police car on my walks, and I was praying that Jack wasn’t dealing drugs. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want them to think I’d ever think of such a thing about either of them, but it did worry me, so I was relieved when another house was raided Sunday morning. It was their turn to be shocked. Didn’t you see the stakeout? I asked. Didn’t you know that Sunday morning is the favorite time for a raid, on the assumption that they’ll all be asleep and hungover? No, they were both just babes in the woods in a lot of ways. But I suppose their immediate neighbors are respectable enough. The old couple across the street goes to church. The Greek family on one side has a beautiful garden, and on the other side, it’s a mother and daughter, both overweight, not beauties, but they seem nice enough, in a rough sort of way. It’s just that it’s all so close, tiny lots, and it feels run down in spite of how well kept up some of the houses are. It’s working class, and the lower end of that, not what her mother and I had in mind when we sent her off to Rice. I don’t mean to sound snobbish. I’m not. I’m just puzzled. She seemed happy, and I kept telling myself that if I were a good father, nothing else would matter. But it does, did, probably because I knew it wouldn’t last. I hoped it would when they had the baby, that she would help keep them together even if he didn’t love her, and he didn’t, I always knew it.



I’m sure he felt guilty. He wasn’t that sorry, even I’ll admit that. I hope he still feels guilty. I hope it tortures him, gives him nightmares for the rest of his life. It shows the lack of character, no, the lack of intestinal fortitude, guts, that I knew about him from the start. He would never look at me. He was uneasy around me from the start, and I doubt if he liked me any more than I liked him. We’re different people. I’m not perfect, and I can be selfish, and I’ve done things I’m not proud of, but I would never leave my family, and that’s what counts, what separates the sheep from the goats. But he did it, and we all know why. I said at the beginning that she wasn’t pretty enough, and it damned near ruined her life. Maybe did ruin it, and she should have known it would. I could have told her. Her mother did tell her, but of course she didn’t listen. It’s a hard thing for a woman to face.



*****



Jack wasn’t much of a football player. A second team guard even his senior year, and they always tried to find a place for all the seniors. I was much better, in fact I was the starting guard on the other side of the line, even though he was smarter and better coordinated. I could never beat him at chess, not even one game, even though he played by the seat of his pants and my father had shown me a few opening moves. He started by moving his rooks out. Said he just liked how they moved. I also never won a game of HORSE against him. He never missed a jump shot, I mean never, or a hook under the basket, which he could do from either side with either hand. He didn’t care. No. More than that. He hated it, football, and I have to respect him for not quitting. I also respect him, and a have soft spot for him, because he’d hang out with me. Nobody else liked me. I had, and still do I guess, a kind of overbearing personality, and what they call these days an anger management problem. In other words, I’d get pissed off easy, really pissed off, and not care what I did. I put my hand through a door once at home. Cheap door, sprained my wrist. Got kicked out of A&M. Threw a senior down a flight of stairs and broke a chair over his head. Thank God the chair broke and not the guy’s head. That’s the time I hitchiked to Austin and borrowed $20 from him. I was afraid to call home for money. My dad had anger management problems too. I never paid Jack back. Would have, meant to, but the Vietnam thing came along, and we didn’t see eye to eye on that. It’s one thing to shirk at football, even though it can make a man of you, but shirking your duty to your country is going too far. Jack always went too far, but I put up with it until Vietnam. I respected him for all the reading he did, how smart he was, a loyal friend. He’d listen to my tantrums and stay cool, better probably than if he were a brother. I’m not saying he was a coward. I’m saying he didn’t do his duty to his country, and that’s pretty bad in my book. Almost the worst. I could never forgive him for that.



Not that his attitude about football didn’t bother me. I never sat with him on the bus. He’d sit with the other second stringers, and they’d talk all the way, but I had to get ready, mentally prepared, for 48 minutes of high school football, an intense experience. I couldn’t be talking movies or books or music or sports, always his favorite thing to do. Every time we played HORSE his mind seemed to be more on those things than the game, which made it all the more infuriating to lose to him. I think I did go off in a huff a couple of times. He’d just do that silly hook endlessly, and I’d say, Don’t you think that’s cheating? And he’d say, How’s that? It’s cheating to never miss? Variety, I’d say. It’s monotonous. Don’t you ever get bored? But see, his mind was on something else, telling me about From Here to Eternity, for example. He loved that movie, and the book too, but especially the movie, and it seemed to make him happy just talking about that scene where Burt Lancaster breaks the beer bottle on the bar and gestures to Ernest Borgnine with his fingers to come on, that toothy grin of Lancaster’s, and meanwhile I was getting more and more pissed off as he made one hook shot after another, a fucking machine, and looking back I see now that it wasn’t losing those silly games to him that was so bad, but that he wasn’t beating me like a man. That’s what I meant by unfair. I just couldn’t articulate it then. But a real man would challenge himself, try something new, see how hard a shot he could make. What do most boys do when they get a basketball in their hands? They see how far back they can stand and still make it. Not Jack. He’d find his spot and keep at it until he didn’t miss. A kind of pussy way of doing things, don’t you think?



Our coach said he didn’t like to hit people, which was why he wasn’t starting. Said it to his face in front of the whole team. I’d have been depressed for a year, maybe my whole life, if he’d done that to me, might have slashed my wrists, but it didn’t seem to phase Jack. Maybe it did, and he just didn’t show it. He didn’t get any better, I know that, and he told me he didn’t mind hitting when there was a reason for it, which I know to be true. He got into two fights during practice. Nobody got hurt. Too many pads, but they were slugging away at each other until the coaches broke it up. He wasn’t a pussy that way. He just didn’t care enough, which I guess was true too of the other things, even Vietnam. But how can you not care about Vietnam? I don’t get it. Either you’re a man or not, and if you are a man, you care and you go out there and give it all you’ve got, prove to yourself and everyone else that you’ve got guts, won’t take shit off of anybody, don’t mind pain. Inertia is the enemy. I stole that from our coach. Inertia drags us down, and that’s what life is, a constant battle against it.



*****



I never forgave him for not making me the boss when he left. He chose some punk who lasted about a month, but it’s been a long time now, the wound has healed, and I’ll admit he was a pretty decent guy. I’ve been here since before rock and roll, and that’s no joke. The old Jews who ran the place back then knew nothing except how to make money, and not even that in the late sixties, or wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for me. They knew how to fill the orders of the old dudes, the old record store owners who were into the big bands and Vic Damone, or how to tell the ones without a clue what to stock based on some form, but when the guys with long hair started coming in with their own ideas about what and how to buy, all of them in a hurry, keeping odd hours, doped up half the time, young Jews for the most part, come to think of it, it scared the old guys, and it took me, a Mexican, to help them understand each other, not get too much on each other’s nerves. Now ain’t that something, but I’m cool, always have been. Nothing gets to me. Everything is fine. I had my little spot here, same as now, my place at the pricing table, and I’d be the go-between. I always liked that. There’s no sense in getting upset. It doesn’t pay. Some hippy dude might get really pissed off because we had to back order a couple of things, he’d lose the sales, but I’d just grin and sneak him a little real fine hash and tell him to go way to the back to light up and cool off. Don’t rock the boat. I don’t know, sometimes I’d need a favor, sometimes not. Didn’t matter. You take care of people and they’ll take care of you. Always been my motto.



He was an outsider and a lot of people were worried that he’d come in and start throwing his weight around, and maybe he did a little, but he wasn’t too bad, and he left me alone, which was all I cared about. And I helped that along a little because by then I had some side businesses, a little cocaine here and there, and I’d collect bets for a bookie friend of mine, and it was worth it to me to give him a snort or two when we went for lunch, or even a pick me up mid-morning, and maybe even on special occasions, holidays, pass him a gram to stay on his good side. It makes things easier to grease the wheels a little, and I don’t want any trouble. Every day counts, and you should make the most of it. He wasn’t interested in the football bets, but he never turned down any coke. We’d go to this little café nearby and snort a little before we went in, then drink beer for lunch while we played pinball. Or sometimes we’d go down the street to the topless joint and either watch the girls or play space invaders, that game that was hot back then. He liked it, and I thought I had him on my side. He was too white, though, as it turned out. Too square. Said he wanted to pick the best man for the job, or some shit like that, and thought I’d be happier without so much responsibility.



I knew he was a writer and he may have given me something to read, but I don’t do that shit too much. When I’m home I like to roll up a joint and either watch TV or put on Joe Pass, something like that, and sit back and relax. I never liked rock and roll any more than the old Jews did. Joe Pass, Chet Baker, the cool jazz, that’s my style, but you have to keep up with the times. I don’t do much coke either, never did, but I couldn’t get up in the morning without a joint and a cup of coffee. Takes the edge off. I’ve got a family to support, plenty to worry about, plenty to get pissed off about, but I don’t let myself. One day at a time, and I like everybody. No reason to get on anybody’s bad side. Those young Jews with their record stores and dope business on the side made a pile, got set up for life, but how many ulcers and heart attacks did it bring them? And they never stop working. That’s not for me. Life is too short. I got my place at the pricing table, so maybe he thought, like he said, that I didn’t want to be the boss. He was wrong about that.



He didn’t like rock and roll either. Hillbilly music was his thing, which I don’t dig, but that’s okay. I told him I did, and what’s the harm in that? Didn’t get me anywhere in the end, but you never know. He was a little dense about some things, I think.



*****



I’ll tell you what kind of guy he was. By the book, maybe to a fault. You be the judge. He told me this story about a bicycle race he had with his nephew, who was eleven or twelve at the time, and that would make Jack nearly 40. The point he was making was about getting old, but I couldn’t help but be surprised, not so much that he beat the nephew in the race, but that it never seemed to occur to him that a lot of adults, maybe even most these days, would have let the boy win. I didn’t challenge him on it, but I know what he would say. Dishonest. And he’d be adamant about it. It’s dishonest to let a kid win, and condescending to boot. He had strong opinions about that sort of thing, ironic of course, since he had little contact with his own kid, and like I said, those opinions tended to be by the book. Not the new book either. The old one.



Jack was visiting his brother, and they were in a park in Arlington, Texas, which if you don’t know, is not much of a place. A poster child for dreary North Texas suburbs, bedroom communities that used to be real towns but now are endless developments of tract houses, strip malls, and indoor air-conditioned malls, mostly white, very conservative. Arlington doesn’t even have a bus service, too socialist, but with more and more Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants streaming in every day, the blue collar Ford plant workers and the white collar accountants and engineers are getting even more paranoid and mean than they were to start with. A shit hole, in other words, an armpit. And on top of that, it’s the plains, so the only decent trees you’ll find are along the old creek beds, and they hardly get taller than a good-sized bush back east. That’s an exaggeration, but sometimes, especially when you’re on a freeway and get a little elevation, that’s how it looks, just hot, humid, and not much to see but yellow grass and trailer parks and billboards. You have to be an odd duck to like the plains, I think. It’s like a dry, ugly ocean to my way of thinking, the swells just high enough to make you feel hemmed in. That’s where they were, in a little city park, and God knows why park’s aren’t socialist, but it was probably worthless land that flooded too often, and there may have been an old graveyard nearby as well. Even mean Texas conservatives sometimes have respect for the dead, as long as it’s not too expensive. A Sunday outing in the park, among the stunted trees, no doubt sweating like pigs.



Jack said his plan was to let his nephew get ahead, then just barely catch him in the end. He thought that was generous. Of course that wouldn’t be totally honest either, but he’d make the one concession, and he figured it would make the boy feel better, give him confidence. You’re getting good, but you can’t beat me yet, you little whippersnapper. Something along those lines, but Jack let him get too far ahead for comfort. The kid was faster than he thought, and by the time Jack caught up with him, he was worn out, gasping for air, soaked in sweat, his legs hurting bad. He told me he almost gave up, and almost didn’t pass him. The damn kid wouldn’t quit, Jack said, and I beat him at the last minute, and then just collapsed on the grass. Screw the chiggers, I was just hoping I wouldn’t die. You damn near really beat me, he told his nephew, but he didn’t say how the boy took it, if that was any consolation. He just said he, Jack, recognized the event for what it was, a turning point, or a sign, clear proof, that time was passing. His nephew was growing up, and pretty soon, what really bothered him was, the boy was going to win.



*****



He told me once that his favorite scene from Palm Beach Story was when Rudy Vallee serenades Claudia Colbert with Goodnight Sweetheart while she and Joel McCrae make love. Not literally make love, of course. They’d been fighting, trying to resist each other, and when they find themselves alone in the same room, the mood overtakes them. The great thing about the scene, he said, and I agree, is that Rudy Vallee is a good guy and you feel bad for him. In fact, that’s the genius of the whole plot. Rudy Vallee is rich, weird and clueless, but likeable, and there he is with his ukelele, standing outside the window, so sweet and sincere, and Joel McCrae and Claudia Colbert are in a hot embrace behind the curtain. Of course Jack stressed the irony, and I don’t doubt that he liked that, but do you think it would be his favorite scene if it weren’t for the romance? He was sentimental to a fault. A sucker for it. There’s more to that scene. JM and CC are married, but pretending to be brother and sister. He’s broke and RV is one of the richest men in the world, all of it inherited. The movie is brimming with irony, but Jack, and you can’t convince me otherwise, fell for its sentiment. Its poignancy. Poor little rich boy ardently wooing the love of his life, while, through no fault of his, but there’s no controlling the human heart, Cupid’s dart, etc., while behind the curtain, out of his sight, his one true love makes love to the real true love of her life.



Tellingly, his favorite scene in 81/2 is when Marcello whips his harem back into shape, especially the part where he brushes the brim of his hat, a kind of victory salute, like a bullfighter after a particularly brilliant maneuver. Male dominance is always a complement of romantic sentimentality. I think he would really have liked a harem, and one very similar to the one in 81/2. All types, the house run by an attractive mother figure, still handsome in spite of her years, even beautiful when she wipes the sweat off her brow, in charge of the cooking and of drawing his bath, heavily burdened but content and happy with the responsibility of taking care of her man. The others are spirited but submissive, eager to please, always dreading the possibility of being replaced or relegated to the upstairs, where the more mature women have to spend their long days and nights, lonely, their useful life over, pining for his attention. There’s a type for every mood: whores, virgins, housewives, career women, intellectuals, dumb blondes, sophisticated brunettes, ditsy, mean, hard, sweet. You name it, or dream it up, and there’s a place for them in his harem, and his role is to enforce the rules, keep order, no exceptions, but with that shrug Marcello is famous for, the one that says too bad, but that’s how it goes. And the girls respect him for it. For being a despot with a heart.



Of course he identified with Marcello, or Guido, his name in the film, and who wouldn’t want to be married to Anouk Aimee? And now that I think of her, I realize that I spoke too soon, and it makes my point to say that his favorite scene was the harem, but it’s not true. He talked more about the first appearance of Anouk Aimee, another romantic scene. Romance. Too interested in that for a real man? That never seemed to phase him. He’d tell that scene, the “Blue Moon” scene he called it, to anybody at the drop of a hat, and it never, I mean never, went over. Nobody ever got it, even people who’d seen the movie, which wasn’t very many, but that didn’t stop him. Maybe I should have thought of it as a performance art, the goal being to make your audience uncomfortable by telling them something they don’t undertand. Or, even better, they do understand but think it’s stupid. What they don’t understand is the important thing, and it’s how he feels about it, how it makes him feel good, the importance of it to him, and I understood myself only after hearing him tell it, performing it, a half a dozen times or more, and after I got to know him well enough. It’s corny and it’s not, which was a big part of its appeal. Nothing corny about Guido descending into the depths of the mineral baths, the steam getting thicker at each level, like dense white fog, or finding the cardinal, an emaciated old man, with whom he has a pre-arranged audience, there in the lowest level of the baths, where the fog is thickest, sitting on a wooden bench, covered only with a towel, saying in Latin, What’s not in the City of God is in the City of the Devil. He repeats that over and over again, a chant, and slowly, very slowly, the camera pulls back and a window opens, one of those rectangular cellar windows that are hinged in the middle, and as it opens the camera seems to literally pass, glide, through it, and you hear, suddenly but also at first very low, the volume turned up slowly, a dance band playing a light and airy but sophisticated, in a minor key perhaps, and you are transported to an outdoor pavillion, lots of twinkling lights and dancers in summer suits and dresses, and Guido walking by them and onto a street of shops, and he sees his wife, who has just arrived, and it’s a chance encounter, and he looks at her over his sunglasses and catches her eye, and she smiles and does a little twirl. Something like that. That’s the corny part. Does he love her? Why is he unfaithful? It was close to real life, by the way, Fellini’s, but that’s another story.



Not Jack’s life, but I began to realize after a while how intensely he identified with Guido, and why. The point of the film, if there is one, sounds, when you just come right out and say it, like a self-help book. That final scene, and Guido realizes that he’s the director of his own life. Or does he? Maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe he realizes he’s not, that he has no control, and all he can do is join all the people he knows up there on the carousel (that does sound corny), people who come and go, the cast is always changing, etc, etc, blah blah. In any case, there’s an epihany, which amounts to an acceptance of something: life as it is? We can’t forget that the cast is dancing, or going round and round, in the shadow of a huge, failed, expensive, project for a film. A spaceship, a fake one, that will be torn down, never to be filmed. A failure. A good place therefore for Guido’s shrug. I think that shrug is what he wanted. Wanted to master. Its spirit: too bad, but that’s how it goes.



*****



When I was growing up, a nigger was a nigger and that was that. It’s different now, I know, and I’ve been partly converted, which was just gradual. I don’t know what it was exactly, but it doesn’t phase me a bit to see them in restaurants now, or anywhere else, as long as it’s not too many of them. An individual black person may be just fine, clean, well-mannered, well-spoken, nicely dressed, and so on, but you get too many of them together in one place, and before you know it, it’ll happen every time, they’ve turned back into niggers. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is, and maybe that’s what converted me, come to think of it, integration as a way of diluting them. Just have them sprinkled here and there, like pepper, variety being the spice of life, and the truth is, even back when they were niggers, I had nothing against them. I liked, for example, Fats Domino and Louis Armstrong. I even liked Cab Calloway, who thought he was white, and even though this happened before I was converted, or partly converted, I had mixed feelings about him being turned away from the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas. Where did they expect him to stay? He had the money. He was famous. It was hard to think of him as a nigger, but I can see their side too. Where would it stop? If they let him in, they couldn’t very well say no to any other black man with the money.



But as I was saying, I had nothing against niggers as niggers. It’s what made some of the entertainers good. It’s even made Elvis Presley as good as he was, although I wasn’t his biggest fan. All those guys like Elvis owe black people a lot, and even before that. Jack told me once that a fiddle player from Bob Wills’ band told him that Bob Wills would hang out in black night clubs and beer joints just so he could steal songs from them. And Jack of course was outraged about that, especially the attitude of the fiddler, who acted like the black man was a fool for accepting a few beers for a song, and Bob Wills was just being smart, and besides, Bob had to change it up some so white people would like it. I mostly agreed with Jack about that, but I didn’t act like it. That boy was too much of an idealist to start with, and it was no use encouraging him. Of course it was wrong, and wrong for the fiddler to look down on the black man, but that’s how things are, and you’re better off knowing it.



Speaking of Bob Wills, it was about the time Merle Haggard came out with that album when I was able to afford a new Buick 225, metallic blue with everything on it, loaded, a beautiful car, brown leather interior, I was proud of it, and one night I was coming out of a parking lot in downtown Dallas, and the black parking lot attendant came out of his booth saying, “Is that a deuce and a quarter? Mighty fine. I wish I had me one of those.” That tickled me. I had to tell everbody about that. The reason I thought of it was that it had a great stereo system and that Bob Wills tribute by Merle Haggard really sounded great in it.



I hired two black guys as collectors, they had territories in the Northwest, but it didn’t work out, which was a big disappointment to me, since I thought I was actually doing some good. But, and Jack frowned when I told him this, but it’s true: they had no initiative. What I mean is, they did what was required, but that’s all. In a job like that, there’s things you have to figure out for yourself, as you go along. You can’t just always go by the book. Things aren’t that cut and dried. You have to know the situation, when to be extra tough and when to be a litle lenient, but neither of them was any good at that. They just did what by the rules they were supposed to do, nothing more, and since they were both black and so similar, it’s hard not to draw some conclusions, and I couldn’t afford to take a chance on a third one, after I let those two go. Reluctantly, I might add. I liked both of them.



Tell me something, though: how can there be a Black Rodeo Cowboy Association? That’s discrimination, isn’t it? Jack never had a good answer for that. Something about making up for historical injustices, but he sort of mumbled when he said it, and changed the subject, so I don’t think his heart was in the argument. Another thing that annoyed him was when I’d say every smart black man had a lot of white blood in him, and I’m sorry, but look at the evidence if you don’t believe me. Okay, not every, but most, from Booker T Washington on down the line. But all that was just teasing. I believed what I said, but it wasn’t that important to me. I was just trying to get his goat. The only thing that really pissed me off was when he defended the riots. They burned their own stores, or at least the ones they had to shop in. That’s just stupid. How can you condone that, excuse it, have any respect for anyone who’d do that? I did get hot under the collar when he starting talking about injustice that time, and right on TV, you could see it, buildings burning.



*****



The worse time was when we visited them in Los Angeles. He had a good job then with that publishing company but they were living like white trash. Hippies, I guess, would be a nicer way of saying it, but it looked all the same to me. He did everything. Cooked the meals, cleaned the house, fed and took out the dog, and all she did was lie in bed and read all day, and talk about how tired she was. I helped while I was there, with the meals, dusted a little, and I told him his homemade bread was good, even though it wasn’t. I don’t care for whole wheat, for one thing, but it just didn’t have much flavor. Not enough salt maybe. I made him a banana pudding, which she ate but never lifted a finger to help me with. To be fair, she said she had to study, she was going to UCLA at the time, but you would think you could spare a little time for your in-laws when they don’t come to visit that often, and at least make a show of keeping house, not to mention the money we loaned them, and what it was for. I never got over that. I was against it, but I gave in to his father, like I always do when something is that important to him. I didn’t say, It’s our grandchild we’re killing, I didn’t have to, and I knew it would just make him mad and hurt him even more. If I’d put my foot down, he’d have done what I wanted, but I didn’t, and I never could decide if we were right or not. If they didn’t want it, maybe it was for the best. On the other hand, well, no use worrying it to death. I just know it put a cloud over the whole visit, and on top of that, they were so busy that his dad and I had to go see the sights by ourselves, except Disneyland, and you should have seen what she wore. I was worried the whole day that her boobs were going to fall out of it, no bra of course, and since they were already half out, his poor father was embarrassed, red in the face, the whole time and couldn’t concentrate on anything else. Hard to have fun and think about Mickey Mouse when your daughter-in-law’s boobs are staring you in the face. I was worried too about the murders. That Manson thing. They didn’t even lock their doors, and that dog, a police dog, wouldn’t have helped much. She acted like she was going to bite your head off until you were inside,then you never saw such whining and groveling and peeing on the floor, and we weren’t used to having a dog in the house at all. I would never allow it, and there she was on their bed, on the couch, hair everywhere. What a mess. I guess she would scare most people away, though, before they got in.



I don’t know how they lived there. I never thought there were that many cars in the world until I went to Los Angeles, and we tried to go to the beach one day, but we couldn’t even see it from the road, the smog was so bad. Might have been partly fog, but Jack said it was smog. Said he’d lived there for over a year before he realized there were mountains around Los Angeles. I don’t think we ever saw them. I told his dad: What is it that makes them want to live here? There’s too many people already, too much smog, and I’d be afraid of getting murdered in my bed. He said he didn’t know.



Our last night there, I cooked them a good meal, instead of just helping. We didn’t much care for the kind of food they were eating. Mostly things I’d never heard of that they said was healthy. That last night I sent his father to the store. Told him to get some round steak and a head of real lettuce, not that leafy kind, and a jar of mayonaisse. Hellman’s. That’s all you can do. Make the best of it. You can’t tell your kids how to lead their lives once they get a certain age. They won’t listen, but it’s also really none of your business. I know that. Of course when they borrow money from you, it gives you an excuse to at least grumble about it I guess, but I’ve already said my mind about that. No use rubbing it in.



*****



The summer I met him I took this physics course at UT, for liberal arts majors, or some say, for dummies. But not really. It was a good course, and I remember the teacher saying anything is possible. A lot of things may be unlikely, but it’s possible, for example, that you could walk on air. Just step out of a second floor window and not fall. What he was talking about was theoretical physics, how people were just making stuff up that might be true, then testing it, like those biologists who draw theoretical fish and then go look for them. I read that once. It’s some government agency that does that, and the same thing happens in physics with particles and energy, what exists and how it behaves, in strange ways, apparently, that no one ever imagined because it goes against what we thought were the laws of physics, nature, like say, quarks, something that changes its nature depending upon how you look at it, so you can see how you might get from there to walking on air. Besides, even if you don’t believe it, it sounds nice, doesn’t it? Not a bad thing to think about, walking on air.



I thought I’d never see him again after that summer. We more or less lived together for a couple of weeks, maybe it was a month, but I had to go back to Rice and he thought he might get drafted, and it was fun. I was only taking that one easy physics course, and he was working part time in a liquor store, so we had plenty of time, but that’s all it seemed like. I really liked him, and I know he liked me, but not enough to change our plans, so I just assumed I’d never see him again, and I was very surprised when he called me in the fall from California and said he wanted me to come visit him. All the way to California. He’d pay for the ticket. I was flattered. With hindsight I can see he was just lonely, horny, to be blunt about it, and I was the one girl he knew who would, first, go that far to see him, and two, not present any complications. There was another girl, and she’d have gone there in a minute, but only if he made a commitment, or at least she’d be hoping he would, it would be like he was leading her on, and he knew that wasn’t the case with me. It wasn’t. I won’t say I didn’t have romantic fantasies in the back of my mind. I did. But I wasn’t counting on it. It just sounded like fun. Exciting. An adventure, and a naughty one at that, since my parents, if they’d known, would have thrown a fit. I forget now what I told them. I think I had to call them at some point that weekend and pretend to be somewhere else. I didn’t like lying to them, but it was necessary.



You know, the more I think of it, maybe I knew all along that he was just horny, and I didn’t care. He did have to go to a lot of trouble to get me. Called home, talked to my sister, got the college I was in, and then, since we didn’t have phones in our rooms, he had to ask for me and wait for me to come to the phone. That impressed me at the time, but even more later, when I found out how much he hates to talk on the phone. Just the opposite of me. I can find anybody, even now when information is not what it used to be. Sometimes I can still get the operator to talk to me like a person. It’s fun, to see how far you can go, and I can be persuasive, or at least persistent, but he hated all that. I should have been in charge of finding people for our high school reunions, but nobody asked me. I guess you should actually live there, and I never did, not for long. But anyway, one thing led to another, from a weekend to me moving up there, and more lies to my parents, telling them we were living together would have been like saying I’d become a stripper or a whore. Impossible. Things were different back then. I went with him on a road trip once, up to San Luis Obispo, where he had to be for a week at that college up there, and we ran into this guy who had the same job, selling textbooks, but for a much smaller company, and he was travelling all over the country. We told him we were married and then agreed to meet up again in Los Angeles, but meanwhile Jack proposed, so when he got to Los Angeles, we had to confess and tell him we were going to get married. Jack’s boss was going to be the best man and he lived in Orange County, so that next weekend, we got married by a JP in Anaheim, with the boss, his wife, and our new friend the only guests. I can’t remember his name. I never saw him again, but exchanged letters with him for a while. He married a Canadian woman with five kids.



In a JP’s living room, with no parents, which we both regretted later, and I blame Jack. I didn’t have to go along, but I never said no to him in those first years, and he had definite ideas about how things should be done. About everything, from martinis to steaks to movies and books and music. Always serve from the left and pick up from the right. Nobody does that anymore, if they ever did. He might have made it up, but he’d judge a restaurant on silly shit like that. He sent a steak back twice one time when we first started dating. I fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Everything he said for a while was gold. I wanted to please him more than I ever wanted anything in my life, and yes, I was a sucker, an idiot, I’m the first to admit it, but you have to agree, or maybe you don’t, but it’s true for me, that if I’d been right about him, if he’d been all I thought he was, I’d have found, as I thought I had, heaven on earth. And maybe, just maybe, having that feeling for a while, even if you wind up neck high in a pile of shit later, is worth it. At least once.



I found out later that during that time, when I worshipped him, and that’s no exaggeration, he made a pass at one of my girl friends. She wouldn’t tell me when we were married, but after the divorce, she thought it was okay. Which it was. I’m glad she told me. It helped. We hadn’t been married even a year when it happened. That’s the sort of person he really was, if you want to know.



Sgt. Pepper. That’s why he quit his job, which is added proof what an idiot he was, and a sleazy one to boot. Slimy? Why not? He claimed later that he’d never liked the Beatles that much. But it was Sgt. Pepper, not John Wesley Harding, as he claimed later, which Roxy literally wore out playing. Roxy was also an asshole in his own way, a worse philanderer, or maybe, probably, just more successful, better with women, and smarter with more character. Sgt. Pepper made Jack antsy enough to finally decide, after wasting two years with that publishing company, to quit and move to San Francisco, but still, as much as I hate to admit it, he wasn’t so dumb that he thought he was a hippie. We were too old. He didn’t like smoking dope, or most of the music, or even the politics. We tried for a while, especially on the politics, but it never quite made sense to us, why anyone had to be that radical. I know what he wanted, even though neither of us quite realized it at the time. Or stuck to it. So much was going on. He wanted to write things that New Directions or Paris Review would publish. We could have gone out there in fifty-five, or forty-five, or thirty-five, and he’d have wanted the same thing, so really, the hippie thing just got in the way, which we didn’t always know. At least at first. It was 1968. How could you be in San Francisco in your twenties and not get swept up in it?



What saved us was Roxy, who never forgot he was from West Texas and never tried to hide it. I remember when Dylan’s Self-Portrait album came out, and Roxy and Jack listened to it over and over again, and I think they really liked it, but even more because no one else did. Jack’s favortie song on it was Blue Moon, because of 81/2, which he explained to Roxy, who was polite, he liked Jack, but Roxy never got Fellini. That was one problem with him. A very limited esthetic. If it didn’t involve the west, cowboys or Indians, or the Civil War, he wasn’t interested, and there was no way to get him interested, unless, and I know this is really bitchy, but it’s true, unless someone he looked up to, and, well, needed, thought it was cool. Like Richard Brautigan. Roxy watered Richard Brautigan’s plants one fall, while Brautigan was on a book tour. And he drove him around for a while. Brautigan didn’t drive. Bitchy, I know, but Roxy really sucked up to him, and he wasn’t above making us feel like nobodies at times. Just at times, though, and to be fair, maybe unintentionally. In the end and on the whole, he knew who his real friends were. I liked him back then, and admired him. I didn’t agree with how he treated his wife, and they were mostly Jack’s friends later, after the divorce, but I have to admit I liked him.



*****



Probably the meanest thing I ever said to him about something he showed me was that it “seemed like an attempt at Paul Bowles.” I didn’t have to say second or third rate Paul Bowles. He got it, and what I said was mean only in that it was painful and I knew it would be. Merciless, then, might be a better word, and I guess mean came to mind first because I experienced some pleasure from saying it. We were very competitive. So much so that I think we hated each other a little, and I couldn’t help but enjoy finding a weakness. Let me tell you about the story and you’ll see what I mean. It was about these three people: an old blind man, a young woman, and a young man. In the first scene they are all on a train in Mexico, the old man and young girl are together, but their relationship is ambiguous, or at least the young man, let’s just call him Jack, I don’t think he has a name in the story, can’t determine what it is, and the story is told from his point of view. It’s a rundown train, going through the desert, full of local color, I think he even threw in a blind accordian player, which is obviously one blind person too many for such a short story, not to mention the confined space of a train, but I did like the detail of the bellows being patched with duct tape. Anyway, they all get out at this little town, and Jack gets the last room at the hotel near the train station, and the desk clerk announces that there are no more rooms, not just in the hotel but the whole town, a convention or something, but he has no solution and doesn’t seem at all worried that the blind man and young woman have no place to spend the night. Jack of course offers to give them his room. He says he can sleep in the train station, but they just laugh at him and suggest that they all share the room. What follows, full of local color, Pancho Villa once stayed at the hotel, etcetera, is tension about whether or not Jack is going to screw the young woman. The old blind man is gruff and enigmatic and keeps falling asleep, and the woman is very solicitous of him. She keeps him from drowning in his soup, wipes sherbet off his chin, that sort of thing. She tells Jack, as they are having drinks in the lobby after putting the old man to bed, that the two of them have been travelling around the world on trains, and all the old man wants to do is listen to her read while they ride. Reminded me at that point of the Evelyn Waugh story. The guy condemned in the end to reading Dickens for the rest of his life. But in this story, beyond that one fact, her reading to him on trains, their life together is very mysterious. Does she like it? Is she the old man’s lover? How did either of them get to this point? And by the way, who is Jack? Where’s he going and why? None of that is addressed. What happens is that Jack screws her outside the room, standing up against a wall, and that’s it. That’s the whole thing. You see, Jack, the writer of the story, not the character, just wanted to live in a Paul Bowles world for a while, which means he couldn’t really tell us about these people. It would spoil it if he tried, given his lack of talent, given that he’s not Paul Bowles and never will be. So we don’t care about them, or feel like anything has happened, even in the most minimalist sense.



It just didn’t work, and of course it could have, not a bad setup at all, promising, but he had no idea what he wanted to say beyond putting the characters into a romantic situation. It reminds me of Antonioni at his worst. All show and no go. But at least Antonion had a political agenda and all that existential stuff, even if it was pretentious. I don’t know what Jack, the writer, had. Who were these people? The woman is a void. We don’t know what she looks like beyond pale, dark hair and slight. She wears glasses. Does he say she is pretty? I don’t think so, and I guess you could argue that he wants the reader to draw his own conclusions, make his own picture, so to speak, from the bare bones. Would we prefer pretty to plain? To beautiful? Pretty might suggest a sweetness and passivity. Not exceptional in any way. Just nice, pleasant, easy on the eyes, but in a fairly common sort of way. I suppose, given that she must be smart, having done all that reading, he does say that her reading includes all the great 19th Century novelists and even a bit of poetry, her eyes would be interesting. Bright with intelligence? Or would they be bored? It’s not much of a life, is it? All day on trains, many not so comfortable, reading endlessly to someone who could be her grandfather, and not the jolly sort. Taciturn. Irritable. He smokes cheap Mexican cigarettes, drinks bourbon neat and claims to have written over a hundred westerns in the twenties and thirties for the pulp magazines. What could induce this pretty, smart, educated young woman to be the companion of such a man? When Jack and the old man are alone together, the woman in the shower before they go down to dinner, the old man says she will leave him when he runs out of money, which will be soon unless he’s lucky enough to die first. He shows no fondness for her, says nothing to suggest they are related. The impression is left that she’s a hired companion and a gold digger, but still, surely she could do better, regardless of her motives. How did she get mixed up in such an unpleasant situation? Did she answer an ad in the paper? Is he the friend of a relative or an acquaintance? Maybe she yearned for adventure, or needed to escape from some horrible circumstance. A lost baby? Drugs? A tragic car wreck? Maybe just a broken heart, or a bad marriage. We don’t know. We never find out. And when, in the huge stone lobby of the hotel, the lobby Jack imagines Pancho Villa strutting across, spurs jangling, she tells him only about the old man’s obsession, the train rides through Europe, India, Africa, now down to South America, and the reading of Trollope, Thackery, the Brontes, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski. Actually, come to think of it, we do learn that he doesn’t like George Eliot, and when he’s depressed, she has to stop whatever she’s reading and pick up Dickens. Anything by Dickens. It cheeers him up. Jack never tells her anything. He hardly exists except as a voice, or at times an eye, with a 20th Century romantic vision of angst and melancholy, back to Antonioni, and not even when he gets his dick in her does he come alive. The copulation itself is perfunctory. For him, since she’s in her late twenties or early thirties, she’s an older woman, desperate and weary, passive to the point of hardly existing herself, and she hardly seem to notice that he fucks her. When he’s on his cot in the room, kindly provided by the otherwise indifferent desk clerk, and listening to the old man snore, he quite irrelevantly thinks of a great uncle who fell off a horse during Pancho Villa’s raid of Columbus, New Mexico. The poor man was permanently brain damaged and spent the rest of his long life in a VA hospital in Waco, Texas, and apparently did little more for nearly fifty years than draw fish, which he proudly showed off to the few vistors he received.



I’ve made it sound better than it is. I might even have added a few things on my own, got carried away in the telling, but even so, I don’t see the point. I think he just had this thing about screwing married women, and the more under the nose of their husbands, the better. And travelling like Paul Bowles, out in the middle of nowhere on the fringes of civilization, and the two seem to go together, unfaithful wives and shit hole places, in Bowles. Anything goes. Anything might happen, it doesn’t have to make sense or be likely, especially things that speed up and dramatize what you are really after: self-destruction. Maybe the old blind man should have got up and put a bullet through Jack’s head. That’s what that story really was, and all those trips to Mexico as well, especially that last one, the so-called Greene trip. Flirting with death, suicide by travel, plain and simple, and as such the story was an indulgent piece of fluff, a kind of pornography, as I think a lot of Bowles is, if you want the truth, or at least his inspiration comes from the same source. It’s the ultimate withdrawal, distancing. It makes you feel alive, sort of, a reasonable facsimile, without the emotional risk of real life.



*****



I met Roxy during the famous Billy Joe Shaver visit to Jack’s house in Los Angeles. Billy Joe had just come out with When I Get My Wings, his first LP on a major label, on Warners I think, and he thought it was going to make him a rock star. It didn’t. It sank like a rock. Dickie Betts played on it, Dylan’s old producer produced it, Billy Joe’s never lacked insider support, but neither of those things helped. He’s a songwriter’s songwriter, but he can’t sing worth a damn, or play. He can’t keep up with a rock and roll beat, which you have with Dickie Betts whether you like it or not. Anyway, it had just come out and he had high hopes, and he was throwing money and pills around pretty freely. Jack said he kept finding twenty dollar bills under his phones for long distance calls, and even found one in a record sleeve long after Billy Joe had gone. He only stayed a couple of days. My mind was always altered chemically in those days, so I don’t know what if anything I got from Billy Joe, but I do know they were prescription pills he got from some Nashville doctor, music doctors, they called them. I had my own sources and preferences, and neither Roxy nor Jack were heavy users, so I think they indulged, took advantage of Billy Joe’s generosity, mostly to be sociable. He was there for the reason he always seemed in those days to be anywhere, a fight with Brenda, his long time and long suffering wife, but in LA specifically because of Mike Burton, whose main claim to fame was one song Waylon Jennings almost recorded. Guy Clark did, and so did a lot of other people. It was a good song. He was living at the time with Jack and Barbara, and he’d known Billy Joe in Nashville, so he talked him into coming out to LA when he needed to go somewhere.



Those couple of days went on forever, and I’m not sure where to start, or if I should start at all. For about five years, maybe ten, God only knows why I’m still alive, my late twenties and early thirties, the whole 1970’s, my skin glistened as if I’d bathed in Crisco. And it felt that way too. Speed. As soon as I quit that shit, it went away. Sweat, I guess, but not exactly. If you’d thrown me in a skillet, I wouldn’t have stuck, and I’d have turned out golden brown. I just didn’t want to quit. Anything. Nor was I interested in sleep or sex or food, for ten years I’m saying, although Jack told me once, he was kidding, I think, that he thought I had a crush on Roxy. I’ve never done it with boys, at least not unless girls were around too, which doesn’t count in my opinion, and while it’s true that I was more interested in Roxy than Billy Joe, that’s not why, or if it was, it was so subliminal that I can neither confirm nor deny it. I did see him as something special. He was without question the best writer on the magazine, and he had a vision that I thought was going to make him famous. He was unique. I couldn’t really place him, I mean in regard to origin, which makes him almost godlike doesn’t it, mythologically speaking. He was on the tall side, lean, and had a hawk like face, a hooked nose and high cheek bones, and although he professed to be Indian, or at least part, he was too pale to really look Indian. He looked more punk than anything, but a Western punk, like someone you might find in one of those semi-lost desert communities of squatters, bikers, and polygamists, people living in old concrete bunkers or packing crates, naked kids and dogs and scrap metal all around the yard. That’s what he looked like, but the more you talked to him, the more you realized he’d read too much, seen too many movies, and listened to too much music to really be like that, and Jack confirmed that later. He said he and Judy lived a pretty conventional life, kids, both worked, got up every morning and took the kids to school, showed up for work at 8, picked up their kids from the day care center, cooked supper, watched TV, went to bed. Like everybody else, which if true could you to think that the western punk thing, actually “outlaw” hadn’t become a cliché yet, but it has now, which is why I’m avoiding it, was a sham, no different from an accountant, say, or a banker, dressing up like a Hells Angel on the weekend, a generational phenomenon, as everyone knows, all those flower children in Monterrey and Woodstock were, we know now, playing dress up, play acting, because if even half of them, or even a quarter, had been serious, had lived the way they said they wanted to, the whole country would have collapsed. Jack didn’t take it that far. He approved of Roxy’s straight life style and lived a version of it himself. Neither of them ever OD’d on anything, or spent time in mental hospitals, or left a string of wives and kids behind. They had to work for a living and pay the rent and buy cars. They cleaned house, bought groceries, renewed drivers licenses, got their cars inspected.



Compared to musicians and artists, writers tend to be conservative. And sane. Many exceptions, I know, but it’s hard to be crazy, or even just really fucked up, and write anything that makes sense. My hero, Hunter Thompson, was an exception, or wanted to be, but I’m not sure he really was, given that he finally had to shoot himself, the other way being too slow, or not working, maybe, because he wasn’t quite fucked up enough. I don’t know. That’s all speculation. What I’m getting around to is that I was hipper than Jack, which, from the perspective of impending old age, means more fucked up, more self-destructive.



*****



A more successful story, also unpublished, was about the breakup of a marriage. A couple in their mid-30’s, still living a more or less bohemian life, the issue being how long that could or should continue. The setting was Austin, an old student ghetto, and the guy was a singer songwriter who just wanted to keep on doing what he’d always done, which was to play small clubs, try to get somebody famous to record his songs, and put out albums that no one bought on independent labels. The woman taught music at an exclusive private school and was tired of the bohemian life. She’d just announced that she wasn’t going with him to LA that summer, a yearly event, appparently, during which he would try to make connections and pitch his songs. Instead, as we find out near the end of the story, she leaves the guy for a doctor whose passion is classical music. She’s classier in general than her husband. Her family is wealthy and has helped them financially over the years, especially after their child, now 7, was born. So they have and haven’t lived poor. They’ve taken gifts that have helped them live a more middle-class lifestyle. Cars, appliances, even trips to Europe, but he draws the line at going to work for his father-in-law. So there’s a duplicity, an hypocrisy about his position. He wants to have his cake and eat it too.



The story is called Two Fantasies, which alludes to the fact that their conversation takes the shape of exchanging fantasies, as a way of putting what each wants in the hope that it will help them reconcile, but all it does is make it even clearer that there’s no hope. He wants to be the master of young women who have proved too independent, literally whip them into shape in a sort of finishing school, whereas she tells him of a dream about being the best violinist in the world as a result of screwing ape-like men. And here’s the problem with the story: the fantasies don’t work as a set. I suppose we’re to think that his fantasy suggests that he doesn’t want to grow up, but what about hers? Isn’t the ambition to the be the best violinist in the world childish? Isn’t he, in contrast to her, ape-like, so maybe she’s saying she tried that, but it’s failed. She dreamed it, acted on the dream, and it didn’t work. So, to be parallel to his, to complement it, it would have to be not about what’s failed, but what she wants. To make sense, wouldn’t the fantasy have to be about screwing doctors to get what she wants? Or maybe he meant for her fantasy to be about what failed, but he doesn’t say that.



So, the story fails ultimately, but along the way he makes the most of his strong suit, local color. The father who cares about only business, cars and poker, the do-gooder culturally pretentious mother. And he’s good at Austin student ghetto life, at least as it was in the seventies. The friend who had a straight job and had to sneak away from his wife to come over for a joint. Foreign graduate students on racing bikes. A pudgy English fairy who doesn’t seem to do much of anything but take walks. An Hispanic family on the corner who always have two pickups parked on the street with giant plastic termites on the roof. An old friend of Roxy’s who is still working on his PhD, in folklore. But just like the main character, the story goes nowhere, which sounds like something an agent or an editor would say, doesn’t it?



*****



Like me, he was a fish out of water in the world of academia, so that naturally brought us together, but it wasn’t just that. I think we were both trapped more or less in the same place between caring and not caring, though perhaps for different reasons. No. Let me correct that. At bottom it was the same reason. Other things were more important to us. For him it was writing. For me it was designing furniture. I’d make anything people would buy. Paying my bills, or not, has taken up more hours of my life than I care to contemplate. Or rather, I’d design it and have real craftsmen, all from Michoacan, make it. I can do certain things, I’m not bad with my hands, but I don’t have the skill or talent to do what those guys can do. I haven’t been doing it my whole life, for one thing. They can make anything I can think up. Most of my stuff is early Victorian, dark stains, lots of grapes and curlicues. I’m an Anglophile, no reason to deny it. We lived in England for fifteen years. I should have been an Oxford don, and if I could teach like that, just share what I know with smart, interested students, and have my workshop on the side, I’d be happy as a clam. Amateurism is lost on Americans. It’s a concept we either don’t understand or disregard as mediocre. Results, results. That’s all we care about over here, and meanwhile life passes by unnoticed.



Educationalists. We’re cursed with educationalists here in the States because of that insane obsession with results. People have made careers, I’m sure you know, out of trying to figure out how to get students to like writing, the assumption being that liking something is the first step, always essential to success. Whole departments, whole buildings, have been devoted to that endeavor, which is a lost cause, and if the educationalists were aware of it, if they were more cynical, as some are, it would be nothing more than a con game. They’re like diet gurus, or evangelical preachers, except that most writing teachers and researchers have no charisma, which makes the whole enterprise a total mess, a disaster that everyone hates except those few who fool themselves into thinking they are actually accomplishing something. Do you know what it takes to make a good class? It’s quite simple. Teachers who know the subject and students who want to learn it. That’s all. Fire all the educationalists. They aren’t needed.



That should be taken for granted, especially at the college level, but it isn’t because everyone goes to college now. They go to get qualified for jobs, and to get laid and meet future wives and husbands and business associates, not to really learn anything beyond social skills. I know it’s always been like that everywhere to some extent, even the hallowed Cambridge and Oxford, but not like it is now in the community colleges and diploma mills, which is where people like Jack and I have to teach, not having the right degrees and any academic publications. That’s fine, it’s a paycheck, and might actually be workable even if the students are half-literate and working at full time jobs and carrying a full load, if only the educationalists would leave us alone. Most of the students would still hate us, no matter what, or find us boring beyond belief, but it would be nice to have the freedom to do whatever you’re best at and think is important. I do it anyway, of course, and I think Jack did too, and after a while you learn how to handle the educationalists. Dodge and weave; flatter and appease. Or not, and they stop calling you and you find something else. Life goes on. Long before I had my first car repossessed, I learned the value of not taking any setback too seriously. Something always comes up before you actually starve to death or wind up on the street. That’s been the case for us anyway.



My wife and I both went to SMU, where Jack and I both taught freshman English for a few years. My wife was Highland Park, money, and I was there on an athletic scholarship. I was a long distance runner. The funny thing was that during the time I taught there, we lived on a street that made perfect sense, given our backgrounds. Swiss Avenue. A classy address in Dallas, several blocks of restored turn of the century mansions, but we lived a couple of blocks too close to downtown, where sirens and alley cats and gunshots made up the late night serenade, which after a while you get used to. When I saw Jack the most, we’d only lived there a couple of years, having been imprisoned in the suburbs before that because of the schools. But both my kids got into magnet high schools, so it didn’t matter where we lived, and this place was cheap and convenient and more colorful. The weekends were great there, especially on hot summer nights. We’d sit out on the screened second floor porch and eat pizza and drink cheap wine, listen to Robert Earl Keene and watch drug deals.



The last time I saw Jack, long after we’d done our time at SMU, was in a little cowboy beer joint out in the middle of nowhere east of Austin. Nowhere. Not west in the now toney foothills. The subject of kids came up, since that’s why he was there, to see his daughter, and because she and my son were amazingly similar, or at least started out to be. Almost weirdly so. Both were fluent in Spanish and economics majors and both, get this, got scholarships to the University of Chicago. But that’s where they took different paths. My son went to graduate school at some hippie place in Arizona and wound up making tons of dough in Chile, doing something in finance I don’t really understand. Jack’s daughter, on the other hand, went nuts while at Chicago and dropped out. Officially crazy, or as we used to say, certifiably, mild schizophrenia, Jack said, treatable, but of course she was resisting and meanwhile not doing too well at supporting herself. No jail. No serious drug habit. Just always needing money, and unable to keep a job or get along with anybody for very long. The main question in Jack’s mind was how tough to be about it, which is tied to the question of whether he should think of his daughter as crazy or just no good, or how much of each. I couldn’t help him. Both of my kids are more ambitious and successful than I ever was. I suppose I could have said he was lucky to simply envy me for having successful kids, as opposed to my lot of envying my kids, but I hadn’t had that much to drink. Instead I said, Look at us. Neither of us did what our fathers would have wanted, and we were happy enough, and even I can’t tell how happy my kids are, and I certainly can’t predict how they’ll be when they’re my age. Actually, I didn’t say the last part. The point was that we didn’t want that kind of success. Of course that doesn’t really quite work for his daughter.



*****



He and Barbara came up here just once, and just for a couple of days, when I was married to Suzy 1, but we made a lot happen in that short time and knowing Jack, he probably remembered most of it. I was painting a lot then and like everything else I do of an artistic nature I did each painting as fast as I could and with as little thought, rationality kills inspiration, as possible, so I had canvasses all over the trailer, and Eli was a year old, about, so we had to make them a pallet on the floor not more than a few feet from our bed and Eli’s crib, but nobody cared about that in those days. The important thing was to get drunk and inspired, which we did, the drunk part anyway, on a batch of chokecherry wine that me and a buddy made up from chokecherries off the reservation. Tasted like shit but it did the trick, and for nothing. You can’t even call it a cheap drunk. It was a free drunk, and making it wasn’t any trouble. Nature does all the work.



My best friends back then were Crows, and our trailer park was only about ten or fifteen minutes away from the reservation, so we went over there and got Dennis, one my buddy’s sons, to take us out to hunt sage hens. It’s okay to hunt anytime on the reservation as long as you’re with a Crow, so we were legal, but that didn’t make it smart, and it was already the middle of the afternoon when we got started. The idea was to get a couple of birds for supper, and we found them right away, they aren’t any sport to find or to kill, just run off a few feet and stop, make themselves a good target. That part was easy, but instead of turning back, we still had some daylight and decided to explore the reservation a little, but nearly right off the bat Jack’s pickup god high-centered in a creekbed. Jack was pretty pissed, and I knew even then, though I didn’t admit it, that he had reason to be. In the first place, Dennis was lost. Lost on his own reservation! And in the second place, Dennis had told Jack that he could make it across that dry creek, egged him on. Of course Jack didn’t have to do it, but Dennis got out of the pickup beforehand and waved him on, kept waving him on, right up to the minute he got it stuck.



We didn’t know what to do exactly because Dennis had no idea where we were, how far away any place was, and Jack didn’t say anything, but his face told the story. He was thinking that Dennis was one worthless Indian, and when it was all over we had a pretty good laugh about that. Anyway, it was finally decided that I’d go get help and they’d stay with the pickup. By then it was near dark and that seemed like the safest way to do it, since we weren’t sure where we were and besides Jack wasn’t keen on leaving the pickup. Everything he and Barbara owned was in it, and neither Dennis nor I could guarantee that it would be safe. Crows sometimes figure that if they find something, it’s theres. So I took the flashlight and headed out alone, and it wasn’t too long after dark that I found my friend’s house, had some supper and went to bed. There wasn’t another car, my buddy was gone, just his wife was there, and no way to go get Jack and Dennis or go anywhere else, and besides I was worn out from all that walking. Jack took it pretty well. He wanted an explanation, but he didn’t get really mad. Or stay that way, it didn’t seem.



What they did was finally start walking, but with no flashlight. Luckily it was a clear night and the moon was up, or, Jack says, they might have wandered off the road and have been walking all night. As it was, they could barely see the wheel tracks, and I’m glad I was asleep when they got in because I think Jack needed the time and some sleep to cool off. Mary told me he didn’t seem too happy with me when she told him I was crashed in the bedroom. She gave them supper, government peas and round steak. No, he didn’t go to bed happy that night, I’m sure, and he was worried about Barbara too, not knowing where we were. No phone, but I knew Suzy 1 would calm her down if she was upset. Suzy was used to it. She said she told Barbara that we were probably out hunting two-legged deer. Suzy’s not a Crow, but she learned that expression from the Crow women.



We got the truck out the next morning with a chain and John’s car, and later we cooked the sage hens back at the trailer, but they were too gamey. We couldn’t eat them, so we went into town and got a hamburger, after which I stopped at the library to take a shit. I don’t know what it was, but every time I get close to the library in Billings, my bowels relax, and I practically have to run to the toilet. I first read Lawrence on that toilet, and it changed my life. Whitman too. Those were men who understood the poetry of flesh and blood, the romance of rolling prairies, the saving graces of hard work with your hands, and the heartbreaking beauty of rivers of sweat. I used to take a lot of Polaroids. It was the only way to know what you had immediately in those days, and I never stopped to think anything through. Something caught my eye and I’d snap it, and that’s how it should be, has to be, like riding a big elephant or a wave, you just hang on for dear life the best you can, and Lawrence and Whitman and Melville knew that and lived it.



I don’t think Jack ever trusted himself enough to do that. I published a couple of his stories. They were okay, but you could just tell he hadn’t climbed up on that big bull. It wasn’t life or death for him, like it was for me.



*****



We made our last big move in December of ’72, from Austin to the Bay Area, and Jack, it turned out, had hepatitis the whole time. I flew with Kate from Dallas, my parents offered to pay for it, and Jack drove by himself, knowing he was sick as a dog of course but having no idea what it was, how serious. His mother made the diagnosis, they came out to help us get settled, the minute she saw him. “You’ve got yellow jaundice,” she said, not a doubt in her mind, and she was right. I hate to give her credit for anything, but in that case, she knew what she was talking about. He got okay. The doctor said don’t drink and don’t do anything else, or as little as possible, which suited Jack right down to the ground, the good and the bad news, Jack said, and sure enough, after a few weeks, he was fine.



We’d been living in Austin because I couldn’t take South Texas, my sister and my mother specifically. Already my sister was getting more conservative and I couldn’t talk to her for more than two minutes without getting into an argument, and my mother wouldn’t leave me alone about going to church. She never said a word when Jack was in the room, but as soon as we were alone, she’d start in on me, and I got sick of it. Plus, it disappointed me that she seemed as concerned with how it looked as with getting us right with God. My mother is a wonderful woman, she’s done a lot of good in the world, especially with kids, but on the subject of religion, there’s no way to discuss anything with her, and I just couldn’t take the pressure. What really cinched it, though, was that her position made me realize how different we were from everybody there, especially after where we’d lived and what we’d done for the past few years. I think Jack was ready to go too, but as much as I’d like to, I can’t blame that move on him. He was pretty well set. We were living at the ranch, and he had his bees and he was building a fence for the cattle Daddy was going to buy, and he’d go out nearly every day with his rifle and bring back quail or rabbits. I think he could have stayed. Neither Mother or Daddy were going to say anything to him about going to church, or anything else. I don’t think they ever quite figured him out.



I might have been a little restless besides, I admit. I had plenty to do. Kate was still a baby, and I helped get the honey, sold all of it actually, using my old contacts and some of Daddy’s, took care of the house, and we had to go all the way into town to buy groceries and anything else we needed, and that took a half hour just to get there. But that sort of thing goes only so far. I could read practically all day if I wanted to, which was good, but that has its limits too, if you don’t have anyone to talk to, friends I mean, I’m a social type. Jack and I could always talk about anything. We never really shut up the whole time we were married, neither of us, but I still got lonely. I like to be in the middle of things, put myself out there and see what happens, stir things up, and of course when I did that with my family, all hell broke loose. It got to where we couldn’t finish a meal, and we only all ate together on holidays, without a fight, usually a casual hick or parochial remark that set me off, and meanwhile Jack just sat there, red in the face, looking like he wanted to disappear. No. That’s not fair. If I appealed to him, he’d back me up, and one time he almost got into a fight over me. I’ll never forget that. We went to dinner at this yahoo’s house, husband of an old school friend of mine, a Cadillac dealer’s son, and he said something outrageous about shooting drug dealers on sight, and I started arguing with him, and well Jack knew I could take care of myself, and usually I could, but this guy was apparently not used to anyone disagreeing with him, and he flew off the handle. I forget what he said, some personal insult, he went too far, and Jack stood up at that point and started yelling at him, and I thought for a minute they would come to blows, but I cooled them off. I acted like it didn’t matter that much. I didn’t want a fist fight right there at the dinner table, but I did appreciate it. I’m old-fashioned enough to have felt pretty good about having my honor defended like that.



The woods, actually the brush, was full of those people down there, so we hightailed it up to Austin with the rest of the counter-culture liberals. 1972. We saw Willie Nelson at a dance hall in Round Rock. Some people were dancing the two-step, but most were just gathered around the bandstand, just like you hear about happening in the old swing days. We saw Alvin Crow there too, and Asleep at the Wheel. That was the year after Dripping Springs, the first 4th of July picnic, and it was a good time be in Austin, except for being dirt poor. Jack found work right away, nearly the same job he’d had in the Bay Area, but he was making less than half the money. Texas has always sucked in that regard. Right to work law, and sure, things were cheaper in Austin, but not by that much. We’d been pretty well off by comparison in California. Comfortable, and we weren’t used to living that poor anymore. All we could afford was this terrible place, a tiny little house, although I didn’t mind it that much at the time. Just looking back, I wonder how I ever lived there. We got the roaches under control. Jack said when he rented the place, before Kate and I came up, the first night he had to sleep on the floor on a sleeping bag, and he sprayed a whole can of Raid all the way around it to keep the roaches off of him. Sounds like something the Druids would do, or Alistair Crowley. And after we moved in, we had a rat problem. Just one rat, as far as I know, but a stubborn little devil. There was a hole in the bathroom floor, and as soon as we turned out the light at night, the little bugger would scamper into the kitchen and rummage through the trash. That was creepy. I can’t remember now why we couldn’t just stop up the hole, maybe we did eventually, but at first we tried to shut the bathroom door and it got even creepier. The rat scratched on the door. The little bastard wouldn’t stop until Jack finally got up and opened it for him. Can you beat that? Having to get up in the middle of the night to let the rat out of the bathroom?



Jack thought it was pretty funny, but when he told the story to my parents, they didn’t laugh. Sometimes he could really be dense. He said maybe he didn’t tell it right, and I said, More likely, they didn’t like the idea of their daughter and grandchild living in a house with a rat. He said, Oh. They’d come to see us off. We were moving because we just couldn’t take the low wages. Actually, we should have just stayed in the Bay Area. If we had, we might still be married. We lived in a very comfortable little duplex in Oakland, Jack had a secure union job, good benefits, and we had lots of friends, but he got this bug up his ass about going home. Sorry about the vulgar expression, but it’s apt. He was reading Faulkner. It’s always like that with him. He says the final straw was having to make a camping reservation at Sears. Whoever heard of that, he wanted to know. Too many people in California. Got to get back to Texas, the wide open spaces, where, unless you’re working for your father-in-law, they don’t pay worth a shit.



We should never have left. Jack liked his job, and we both liked the house and the neighborhood. It scared my sister, but what else is new. It never gets hot enough in the Bay Area, not even in Oakland, but that was the only gripe we had with it. Freeze to death sitting on your porch at night. And too, it was hard to find decent Mexican food back then. Possible, but you had to look for it, and of course it’s never the same from one region to another. It’s beautiful though, it really is, gorgeous the year around, even during the rainy winter months in my opinion, and Jack liked going to the race track, and we often went to this really good fifty cent movie not two minutes away. It seemed to always be showing Sandy Dennis double features. We saw Papillon there and Two Lane Blacktop and a Cassavettes movie called Machine Gun McCain. I think Peter Faulk was in that too. I’ve got a funny story about that. We went to see whatever was showing as the other part of a double feature with Summer of ’42, and we got there near the end, during this sex scene that is totally silent and seemed to last forever. You could have heard a pin drop in the theater. Actually, we got there right before it started, that scene, and things were really informal at movies in those days. You didn’t think anything about going into the middle of a movie and stepping over people to get to a vacant seat, which we had to do that night because the balcony was packed. Summer of ’42 was a big movie, but we got settled finally and we had Kate with us, the plan being for her to sleep through the whole thing. She had other plans. Just as that sex scene started, she got hungry, and I was still breast feeding, and she was a noisy eater. Jack and I both wanted to disappear. Kate I’m sure spoiled that scene for everyone in the balcony that night, just sucking away in that dead silence. I thought how long is this scene going to last? Let me tell you. A long time, and Kate never let up.



But despite all that, we, and yes, we, not just him, we never felt at home. The light is so beautiful out there, but it seemed foreign. Obviously, we were homesick, but then home let us down, or we couldn’t deal with it, so we came back, and of all times for Jack to get hepatitis. We stopped in Dallas not just for me to catch the plane, but for all his relatives to see Kate. Show off the new baby. New enough, about a year old, and I’m not kidding, a dozen or more aunts and uncles and cousins drove in from East Texas to see her, just to see “Addie’s great-grandbaby,” or “Mary’s grandbaby.” We had a full house, and every last one of those people had to get a hepatitis shot. I knew he was really sick, but we just thought it was the flu at the most.



It’s about a 20 hour drive, but it was longer that time because he ran into a snowstorm. He was pulling a Uhaul trailer and nearly slid off the road in New Mexico when traffic backed up and he had to stop in a precarious position. But he was able to move ahead just in time to pull it back up. The roads were bad all the way through the Sierras in California, but he didn’t have any more trouble. The blizzard had come in on him while he was still on the plains, so he stopped at a motel in a little town on the Texas New Mexico border before the snow got too bad, and he said the next morning on his way back to the truck, the wind nearly knocked him off his feet. He ate three or four spoonfuls of chili the whole trip. That’s what amazed him most about the hepatitis, how he lost his appetite, which had never happened before. He ordered chili because he thought the strong flavor might get his interest up, but when it was served, he just sat there and stared at it. The only time in his life, he said, that he left any chili in a bowl.



Before it was over, what with him not able to work for several weeks, we had to borrow money from his parents to get by, which he hated, and we were just about to run out of that when he got lucky. He’d been going down to the hiring hall for construction laborers, every morning at seven a.m. when they opened, and the deal was that they’d sign you up for the union if a job came in and no union members were there. He went down there every day for over a week and stayed until they closed at noon, but no luck, and we were just about down to our last dime. We’d already agreed to ask my parents to wire us a little, but then the next day he didn’t get home until about eight at night, and I was keeping my fingers crossed all day that he’d found work. Sure enough, he came in the house with a $65 check, grinning from ear to ear, and boy did we celebrate. Cashed the check, bought some beer at the grocery store and ordered a pizza. It was smooth sailing after that. He made good money at construction.



*****



It was a minimalist house when they bought it, flat tar paper roof and all, and right next door to a crazy woman with two wild kids who kept stealing Jack’s chickens. The Easter chickens that wouldn’t die, that he built a cage for. God knows what they wanted the chickens for. Just to have, I guess. Jack said he cornered the kids once in their garage and they gave up the chickens more or less good-naturedly. They seemed like good kids, he said. Thieves, yes. Surly at times. Always dirty. The girl’s hair was never combed. The boy’s looked like it was cut with a butcher knife. Clothes out of Huck Finn. Their mother would yell at them and take his side whenever Jack complained about anything, but nothing ever came of it.



But about Jack’s house. The good part of a flat roof is that it’s easy to fix. Just patch it and it was good as new. Anyway, besides that, they had an old gas stove in the living room for heat, vintage to say the least, and a huge country style kitchen, a screened in back porch, and a little house in the back that they rented out. Two bedrooms, one bath, and a half cellar. They had it made. They really did. Got an almost no interest poor people’s loan and painted the stucco exterior yellow, put a fence around the whole lot, new tile over the old linoleum in the kitchen, carpeted the cellar. Got it looking real nice.



I can’t say much. I mean it’s easy to look at someone else’s life and say it’s perfect, or perfect enough, as perfect as you could decently expect it to be, so why fuck it up? I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just plain boredom, not some wild devil that gets hold of you, or innate restlessness. A match, you say. One creates the necessary condition for the other. Fallow ground, so to speak. Vulnerability, too. Yes, I suppose so, but I keep thinking about that boredom. What is it exactly? Why do some people, like Jack, like me too, run away from it. Or do we all have it? I think so. None of us is ever satisfied, not as long as we have a heartbeat. Always wanting and grasping, which is of course what all those eastern religions are all about. Getting rid of all of that. Doing nothing and liking it. Bliss. Wanting for nothing because you want nothing.



The big room, the nerve center of the house, was sort of a combination den and kitchen. Big color posters of country music singers on one wall, an easy chair under that, TV across from it. In between a kitchen table along one wall and cabinets and counter and sink and stove on the other. Where was the refrigerator? I forget. It was cozy, though. A stand up of Dolly Parton. Their little girl was about five at the time, cute as a button, blonde, and they took her to meet Dolly Parton on the little girl’s birthday. Took some pictures, Dolly Parton holding her. By that time, they didn’t need me. They’d met a lot of people on their own. The insiders of the music scene, at least country music insiders, record company types, record store owners, DJ’s. Jack would work construction all day and then go out to a honky tonk at night to make and keep up his contacts, maybe sell an ad, get an interview, up til all hours, and be at work the next morning at eight sharp. Young men we were in those days. Couldn’t do that now. Can’t imagine why I’d want to.



No, I was never a big country music fan, or of any kind of music, to tell you the truth. I’ve always been pretty tightly focused on my own scene. Family and friends. Places I know. Denver and South Dakota. Drinking establishments up and down East Colfax. The Bluebird was my hangout, all my buddies there semi-alcoholics, semi-working stiffs, semi-petty crooks. I was quite a drinker myself back then. I remember Jack couldn’t believe it when I showed him how I could down a beer in about a second flat. We’d have contests at the Bluebird, and I always won. It just disappears, he said. Like magic. The whole contents of the glass, presto. It’s kind of the same principle as deep throating, I think. Never tried that, of course, but you just take it in one gulp, kind of like inhaling. Just slide the whole thing down your throat. Nothing to it when you know how.



*****



I was in love with him, the first guy I ever fell for that way, and I knew all along he didn’t feel the same way, but I didn’t care. I was living in a co-op then, and I met him through one of the girls who lived there and helped out N.A. Brookshire, the guy in the wheelchair. He had to be pushed everywhere. N.A. was real little and all shriveled up except for his head. He was real smart. Made all A’s, wrote poetry. He had a whole squad of people who pushed him around campus and did things for him. Some he paid and others just volunteered. And there were still others who really liked him and happened to be around a lot when he needed something. Jack was in that last category. More like a friend. Jack and his friends would always be around N.A. in the cafeteria, N.A.’s table, Jack called it N.A. holding court, and they’d talk about books and movies and such like. They were all smart, a lot smarter than me. I’m sure Jack just thought I was attractive. I mean, looking back on it, we didn’t have anything in common. Not really. I was just an ordinary girl from Arlington, Texas. I really did fall for him, though. I don’t know why, except I liked the way he smiled. His eyes, around them, the lines, made him look real sweet. And cute.



I was a virgin when I met him, and a good Catholic, which created a problem for me, since I couldn’t go to confession. Or I wouldn’t. I’d never tell a priest that, and I didn’t want to lie, or keep silent, same thing. I also wasn’t on the pill, so we had to be really careful. I wonder now why I did it, I really do, given those obstacles, and I didn’t right away. I guess nobody’s all that smart when you’re a kid, that age. I just wanted him to like me so bad, and I knew it was important to him, and to tell you the truth, I kind of agreed with him. Everybody I knew was doing it, and it was just like, you know, you weren’t really a couple if you didn’t. Did I like it? Of course I did. At least I think I did. It’s been so long. To tell you the truth, as far as the sex itself goes, all I remember is lying next to him in the bed in that house he rented on Speedway. I don’t remember the sex itself, just the general impression that there was nothing special about it. Wouldn’t I remember if it had been? Now that I’ve had more experience, I think so.



The one exception is when he practically raped me. That really hurt me. Not physically. He was drunker than I’d ever seen him, and he banged on the door at 2 am loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood. I was living then in an apartment with 3 roommates, my space just a little alcove with a mattress on the floor. I hadn’t seen him for a while. We hadn’t broken up. We just weren’t seeing each other a lot. He called me, why not admit it, when he was horny, and yes, I put up with it, I don’t know why. I was just a doormat, I guess, certainly that night. Almost literally. When I opened the door, he pretty much pushed me into the alcove and onto the mattress and just did it, all the while saying “This is great, this is so good,” meaning that he could show up at that hour, unannounced, and have sex with me. He was thanking me the whole time, but of course I had no choice in the matter, unless I wanted to create a bigger scene than he’d already created. He woke up all my roommates, who heard everything and stayed safely hidden in their beds. It was so humiliating, and I let him know the next morning, and for a while after. It took me some time to get over it. At first he tried to defend himself, say it was all good and persuade me by telling me how much it meant to him. Not me. It. But in any case, no matter he’d said, I was too mad and hurt for him to keep that up for long. He finally apologized, which helped a little but not much, and then, in the end, I finally forgave him, but for several days I just couldn’t, and now I’m not sure he ever really meant the apology. I think deep down he thought he had the right to do what he did, and that I should have understood, which should have done it. Should have finished it between us. I should have never felt the same towards him.



He stayed around Austin the summer after he graduated, waiting to get drafted, working part time in a liquor store. That was the summer of Charles Whitman and thank god I was in California. I went out there in part to get away from him, stayed with a relative, worked as a waitress, met a few boys, one in particular really nice, but nothing ever came of it. Might have if I’d stayed out there, but I had another year of school. I got back to Austin a couple of weeks before school started and Jack was still there. He’d just gotten a deferment and would be there another two weeks before moving to Dallas to look for a job. He was living then in a garage apartment, and I moved in with him. I was crazy to do it. I know. He made it clear that he was leaving. He made it clear that we would probably never see each other again, but I just wanted to. I was still in love with him. It was worth it. Those two weeks. I’d bought him a ceramic elephant in California. I don’t know why. I just liked it. And that was my excuse for going to see him and of course we wound up in bed and I just stayed until he left. Put off moving into the place I’d rented for the school year.



He had a little sports car, an MG I think, a two seater, real cute, and he was able to get all his stuff in it. He left late one morning. I went out to the car, we kissed goodbye, and that was it. He drove off and I never saw him again.



*****



I liked him. I can’t say he was particularly smart or talented, but I liked him, and I’ll tell you why. His enthusiasm and his vulnerability. Those two qualities together make an irresistable combination, especially to someone like me with a disability. But to say I have a disability is an understatement. I am a disability. I have the use of my right arm, and I can make facial expressions, and I can talk fairly well, people can usually understand me, but that’s about it. I have to have everything personal done for me. I can’t even take a shit in private. I have to be dressed and undressed, put to bed, put back in my wheelchair. All of me but my head is shriveled. So, I know a little about enthusiasm, or rather what it’s like to not have any, and vulnerability should be my middle name. I live with it every day of my life. Everyone does, of course. We’re all vulnerable to something all the time, but most people aren’t confronted with it every waking minute as I am. You could throw me in a ditch on a lonely road, and I’d just stay there. I’d lie there helpless, hope for a while for a good samaritan, but sooner or later, I’d simply pray for the moment of unconsciousness. My intelligence, my wit, not even my poetry, could save me. So I know vulnerability pretty well, my friend, and it’s why, of course, I’m extremely callous about enthusiasm, and yet, at the same time, admire its courage.



I think Jack was the only person, certainly the only one I knew, who’d read Kerouac and taken from it enthusiasm as the main message. “Digging everything,” he’d say after a few beers. And he liked talking about the passage in On the Road when they see George Shearing and Dean says, “Yes, yes, yes.” Digging everything, a philosophy that couldn’t have been more different from my heroes, the new critics, about whom we immediately agreed to disagree. We had a lot of fun arguing about all that. I think he learned from me to appreciate the new critics, if not actually like them, and I guess it was the same for me with Kerouac. I had to make myself read On the Road, and to be honest, I skimmed a lot of it. No structure. No discipline. Whatever came off the top of his head, which would be okay if it was the least bit interesting. But enough of that. You get the idea. I liked Wallace Stevens, Donne, Eliot. I liked that one just right image given to us in a clear and cool light. Jack liked it hot and sentimental. Fuzzy and emotional. Guts not intellect. We couldn’t have been more different.



The writers’ group was my idea, and I needed Jack literally, which may be part of why I didn’t care that his views were so different, opposed really, from mine. I got the idea from the The Fugitives, and the plan was for us to get a faculty sponser and meet every week. People would read and discuss. Simple. And what happened, how it turned out, was better than anything either of us had imagined. Few if any, though, showed up who knew anything or cared about modern poetry, or any of my heroes. They were more Jack’s kind of writers. Heart on sleeve. First person confessionals or testimonials. Easy morality tales. Simple craftsmen not appreciated. I’ll have to admit that Jack, even though most of what he read was embarrassing, stuck his neck out more than anyone. At least he tried to bare his soul. Not that I approve of that, I don’t, but he was young and passionate, and you have to cut him some slack for that. See? I have a soft spot, like I told you.



Let me tell you about something else he liked, to give you a better idea of who he was, what he wanted. The introduction to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, called the Diapsalmata, starts with this definition of a poet: “An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music.” He would actually tell people that, and of course it would invariably embarrass everyone. Fashion was on my side, even back then. And even the hipsters played it cool. You couldn’t just come out and tell people you were suffering, never mind the immodest implication that what came from his own lips was therefore music. If anyone knew that it was me. To put it plainly, who gave a shit how we felt? Feeling is motive and motive is intent, and any declaration of intent merely serves to point out a deficiency, and in my case, a dedicated disciple of the new critics, it was my duty to scorn any reference to intent as totally irrelevant. But I liked Jack. He was a friend, and I was easy on him. I could have made him feel like a fool. He really did expose himself. But I didn’t have the heart to do it. Instead, I simply let him know when I liked something, which was rare, and kept silent the rest of the time.



The best writer by far to show up at our meetings was Roxy, and Jack and I exchanged knowing glances after hearing the first paragraph of the first story he read. We both knew immediately. That’s how it is with writing, isn’t it? You have it or you don’t, and you know it when you see it. Roxy was a natural. He didn’t have to think about style or what a story was, and that turned out, interestingly enough, to be his greatest advantage and greatest obstacle. He just wouldn’t change. Wouldn’t grow. Either it came easy or it didn’t come at all, and he also stuck stubbornly to the one them he was comfortable with, how we should view the old West. The relationship, you might say, of the old ways to how we live now. Not a bad theme, I know, and really enough to last anyone a lifetime. Even enough to make you a great writer, but Roxy refused to not be didactic about it, epistolatory almost, and that held him back. You can’t not be ironic in the 20th Century and expect anyone to take you seriously. At worst, his stuff read like sermons; at best, I hate to say this, they were above average local color. Local color with an edge.



But that’s what Jack and Roxy had in common and probably why they became such good friends, that dedication to a cause, to sincerity, at the expense of irony. Their subject wasn’t the same, not even the cause was really, but it all overlapped enough to give them plenty of common ground. And this is interesting: both loved how certain “scenes” felt. That probably more than anything held them together. It’s what they could both understand. How a certain place, or moment, could in and of itself mean something, and not have an intellectual or political significance, but just its own, which is not so much different, if at all, from Eliot’s point. I guess all poets understand that. All poets, good and bad. And that was Jack’s cause, to make the world feel that significance of its own that things have, or could have, in the hands of a good poet.



*****



I can thank Jack for showing me in no uncertain terms what a traitor is. That’s what he was. He grew up just like I did, same town, same school, same grade, and even the same neighborhood, and there he was walking in that picket line to make Roy serve niggers. Yes. I still say nigger when I feel like it, which is most of the time, unless I know it’ll get me shit-canned or thrown out of some place. It’s just like smoking and not spanking your kids and wearing a helmet on a goddamn bicycle, and a million other things that they’ve come up with to fuck up a white man’s life. That’s the only purpose I can see. They hate us, and just for being smarter and richer than everybody else. Better looking too, in most cases. I’m not kidding. Laugh all you want. It’s serious business and you know it. I’d never go to extremes. That Oklahoma City bombing was terrible. That guy got what he deserved, and the other one who wanted to secede from Texas was just a nut case. And no, I ain’t putting on no white robe, not burning no crosses (and yes, I know better than to use double negatives, you caught me, but sometimes I think it makes the point better, especially after I’ve had couple of these), but I understand where those boys are coming from, how they might feel trapped, hemmed in, because they are forced to live in ways that don’t feel natural.



I have to go outside to smoke at work. I have to say African-American, or is it Afro-American, when nigger comes more natural, and I think, honest, that colored is more polite. But whatever. I have to earn a living, and I learn pretty quick. For example, leaving the nigger thing aside for a minute, you have to be careful who you tell funny stories to not just about giving spankings but even about getting them. I swear to God. I know because I’ve got a good one about me and Jack almost getting one, but the one time I tried to tell it, it didn’t go over too well. No one thinks kids being scared is funny anymore. Tell that to Mark Twain, goddamnit. And hunting stories? Forget it. I even got a dirty look once for a fishing story, but anyway, I haven’t seen Jack since that night, and that’s fine with me. He’s one of them. A traitor to who he is, was, how he grew up, his family and friends, and if you want to know how I really feel, his country. This is, was, a white man’s country and better for it. Period.



Believe it or not, that night I saw Jack in that picket line was the one and only time I ever did anything like that. I pretty much go to work, come home, eat supper, watch TV and go to bed these days, and there’s just too much to do on the weekends, house repairs, cars, kids, shopping with my wife, and so on. I see what’s going on on TV, and that’s plenty close to the action for me. And the main thing I have to worry about these days, on that subject, is keeping the Mexicans out of my neighborhood. They’re only two blocks away now as it is, and closing in fast, and neither my wife nor I want to move, which would be the smart thing, before the value of my house goes down even more than it already has. Once they get on the block, and it’s only a matter of time, I know that, I’ll have to give it away. A shame. We’ve put a lot of work into this house.



Yeah, I knew he was a writer, which I guess explains it. Showed me some stuff in high school I didn’t understand. I told him I liked how he made it clear who was saying what. All I could think of, since I had no idea what the point of it was. So yeah, it makes sense, I guess, that he’d be thinking things no normal person would ever think, have crazy ideas, live in his own little world, but I never thought he’d be a traitor. A person who goes against everything he is. That’s pretty bad, you know, and it’s especially bad when I think how for a long time we were best friends and had some really good times together, when we were kids. Since seven years old. Second grade. Yeah, I lived on the next block over, but there was a hole in the hedge that went around my backyard, and it let out in the driveway of his house. So one day in the late summer, before school started, I was just wandering around, nothing much to do, and I happened to wander up his driveway and saw him playing in his front yard, a new kid, just moved to town, so I asked him over to my backyard, where we had a fox hole. Some piled up dirt actually that we used as a fox hole, so we got in it that very first day and killed all the Japs we could see.



We weren’t always best friends in grade school. Alliances come and go at that age, but we were best friends a lot. “True blue” friends at one point, which was Jack’s idea, something to do with a blue notepad we both had. I forget. Anyway, he had all the ideas, I have to admit. He came up with the rules of all the games we played. How you scored, penalties, how you killed people, what was out of bounds. I went along with it. Some of his ideas did make it more fun, but mainly all I cared about was winning. Or it was the main thing, that goes without saying (except for Jack, he had to be different), but I also liked having cool equipment, now that I think of it, so I guess I did care about winning in style. When I was into shooting pool, or bowling, or later on, skiing with family and playing golf, nothing suited me if it wasn’t the best. Just the way I am. I had my own pool stick and bowling ball when no one else did, not even most grownups. Clothes the same way. I think I was the only kid in the high school with prescription sunglasses. Most of them probably never even heard of such a thing. I know I was the only one in Little League with a batting glove. If you can’t go first class, you shouldn’t go at all.



I’m not a good loser. I admit it. Vain and not a good loser. I can see that pretty clearly now that I’m not a kid anymore. Mellowed out some, I guess, and I’m not proud of how I acted the last time Jack and I played All-Star Baseball. He was so into it, it was his game, he showed me how to play it, but I always beat him. It was all offense back then, at least the way we played it. Jack knew that as well as I did, but he was kind of a fool. He was. I’m not so mellow as to take that back. He’d pick players he liked. Solly Hemus, a shortstop who was just an average hitter at best, but he picked him because he thought he had a cool name. Preacher Roe, a pitcher, who had a strikeout that took up half the damn card. And he had to keep score and do the play by play. That was the fun part for him. He didn’t care about winning, or not like I did, and then one day, I guess it had to happen sooner or later, he beat me in a series, 4-0, and by a very wide margin in the last game. It was already like ten to nothing in the third inning, and then, like he was rubbing it in, some puny little infielder, maybe Solly Hemus for all I know, with a home run about as thin as a cunt hair, hit a grand slam, and I lost it. I picked up that damn game and broke it across my knee. It was just cardboard and a thin metal spinner.



His dad fixed it for him with a piece of tin can. Somehow got it riveted so it would spin almost like the original. Yeah, at first he wouldn’t even talk to me, but eventually he wanted to play again. That’s how he was. He just wanted to play. Like I said, a fool. And a traitor. Maybe his being a fool should have warned me how he’d turn out.



*****



If you’re not obsessed with winning, then you might as well go off in a corner and play with yourself. Or die. Amounts to about the same thing, doesn’t it? I’m not a hard man. I’m not. I love my wife and kids. I go to church. I help stock the food pantry. I get along with my neighbors, and I really did love some of the boys, most of them, that played for me. Yeah, love, because you have to, but it came natural. Nothing made me feel better than to see some kid perform well and know that I had something to do with it. I know I’m bragging, but it’s true that I’ve taken some very mediocre athletes and turned them into excellent high school players. A few even got scholarships. One of my quarterbacks, a kid with average physical ability, and on the small side, but lots of brains and heart, started for a Southwest Conference team. I know how to get the best out of kids. I never lost a district championship in fifteen years of coaching high school. Won State twice. And you’d never get me to believe that all of them, every boy I ever coached, wasn’t better off for it, even the ones like Jack.



Truth is, there may have been only one like him. I’ve seen boys squander their talent, happens all the time, but it’s usually because of drugs or girls, that sort of thing. I never had one except Jack squander it because he thought he was a poet. Not that I know of anyway. That boy had his finger up his ass more than any other boy I’ve ever coached. At first I thought he was lazy, but then I realized he was just bored. You had to yell at him at drills to keep him awake, and I finally just gave up, left him alone unless he did something really stupid, which he did a couple of times. I demoted him to the B team one day for turning the wrong way on a punt return drill. How do you do that? Four other guys were turned facing the field, of course, and he had his back to it! I wanted to shoot him. I’m not kidding. Lucky I didn’t have a gun on me or I might have. I still think about it now and then, going over to him, putting a bullet in his temple. Out of his misery. Instead, I told him to go practice with the B team, and to stay there.



I started figuring him out when I realized he was the only one who actually liked our meetings and watching game films. Asleep in practice. Wide awake when I re-run a busted play fifteen times, and he’s not even in it. What kind of kid is that? An odd duck, to say the least. A real weirdo. And when I told my wife about him, she said, He’s probably a writer. And I said, What do you mean? And she said, Writers are different. They like stuff no one else likes. And they often get bored with what other people like. I don’t know where she got that, but she did read a lot and was going to be an English teacher before she met me, so I guess that was it. And I may be a jock, but I went to college back when even OU, my alma mater, wouldn’t take you if you couldn’t read or write. And they made us study, so I know something besides football. I read the paper. I watch 60 Minutes. I even thought about going to law school at one point. So I know enough to have known, or had some idea, about what she meant.



There’s nothing like winning though. I love my wife and my kids, and so on, but there’s nothing like winning. No such thing as a bad win. And when you win, you win. Just look at the scoreboard. That’s the whole story.



*****



Lots of kids came in here and they were all alike, the ones that played at the shit tables, so if you say he did, I believe you. Yeah, all alike. All played eight ball, none of them worth a shit, none ever tipped me a nickel, probably never even thought about it. Their games lasted forever, so not even Mr. Levy made much on them, though I guess it was better than nothing. They was ok kids, I guess, never caused no trouble, but I never had much to do with them. Just racked the balls and went back to my spot by the first table, where all the real action was. The guys played nine ball for five bucks a game, big money in those days, especially when you figure how fast they played each game. A tall skinny guy in khakis and a short fat one in a cowboy shirt were the two best. They had some moves. Played quick. Never choked. Sometimes the kids would come up and watch. I wasn’t too bad in my day, least when I was sober, but I was never as good as either of those two. The fat one was probably the best. Had more patience. Saw things the tall one missed. More interested in winning than putting on a show. Funny how people are different that way, and they never learn. Just how they are.



Sometimes I had to shoo the kids back some. It was tight in there. Barely enough room to draw a stick back. I coulda kicked’em out if I’d wanted to, if they’d given me any trouble. Sign outside said Members Only, No One Under 18 Allowed, but nobody was a member, there weren’t no club, and all those kids were under 18. Some started coming in here, I’m sure, when they wasn’t no more than 13 or 14. None of ‘em ever got any good though. The gang that couldn’t shoot straight, Mr Levy called them, but they put up their nickels, it was five cents a cue for each rack, so he let’em play. It was pretty smelly back there. Right near the toilet, which I hardly ever cleaned. Waited til the smell got up front and Mr. Levy complained. I may be a good for nothing old wino, but that didn’t mean I like cleaning toilets. I told Mr. Levy once he ought to get a nigger to do it, but he said he might look for another racker, so I did it. He’d been fair to me, but being what he is, I suspect he means business.



*****



He admired Raymond Chandler, and when I knew him, his main idea was to write a private eye novel with literary merit. He thought that the form, a picaresque adventure in a modern setting, was perfect for our times, in that it portrayed a man of intelligence, high moral character and sensitivity, yet also very human in his weaknesses, confronting and engaging with all different levels and types of the contemporary scene. The man in Jack’s novel might even be a poet, or a stand in for one, and thus the novel would be a narrative of the poet’s relationship to the modern world, more specifically, the creative mind engaging the capitalist utopia or distopia, as the case may be. Doing battle with it. Giving into its temptations. Being repulsed or enchanted, the seducer and the seduced in turn, and of course we mustn’t forget the murder, a solver of mysteries. Or perhaps a discoverer of mysteries. Maybe even an inventer of them.



His first attempt, while in no way achieving his ambition, was I think, nevertheless, not a bad novel. The protagonist was a young law school dropout who was innocent and romantic, ironic, and just tenacious enough to ruffle the feathers of the antagonist, a tough cynical old man, selfish and immoral, who thought of the young man as a troublesome fool. Our hero solves the mystery and falls in love, but nothing ever comes of his solution, and he doesn’t get the girl, which no doubt explains why, despite admiration from many circles, it was never published. Yes, explained in that way, it approaches his ambition, or has the potential for it, but, good as it might be, it obviously didn’t soar enough to get anyone really behind it. And that’s the turning point of Jack’s story. He was unable in his second attempt to even match the first, never mind surpass it. He had his chance. He didn’t take it. Or couldn’t, an important distinction only to himself.



More interesting to me than his personal failure was what he was trying to do, and how that might have played a part in his failure. The first novel was clearly about growing up and not liking it, the world seen from adult eyes. A good theme. Always relevant. But done and done and done, and did Jack deal with it in a way that might be original? An artist must make us look at the world with new eyes. Everyone knows that.



Second rate Chandler might be an unkind verdict. Or a kind one, depending upon how well you liked it. Keats falls in love with a blonde. Why? Near as I can tell, because she’s a blonde. Nothing particularly smart or unique about her. A familiar type. As is the villain, an old general, arch-conservative, read MacArthur or Edwin Walker, the guy Oswald shot and missed before Kennedy. Or even George C. Scott in Patton or Dr. Strangelove. So, as you see, also familiar. You might say that the lawyer, our hero’s mentor, and his smart and jaded wife are good characters with a degree of originality, but we can see Spencer Tracy, say, and the older Lauren Bacall in those roles, or even Barbara Stanwyck, clearly and immediately, and that counts against them, I think. Of course it’s the mix that counts, you might say, so what does it, in fact, add up to in the end? A young man finds out that his mentor has feet of clay and that there’s nothing he can do to bring justice to the world when powerful forces stand in his way.



Not bad, but again, it’s the delivery, not the intent, that counts, and the follow through, or follow up. It was Jack’s idea to have as the protagonist in his second novel the same young man at middle age. And so what then? He would return to his home town and find it changed, the downtown empty, a new mall, etc. This time the antagonist would be an old politician cut from the same cloth as the old general, and the love interest is a woman for whom he has carried a torch for twenty years. She’s sort of his female twin. The problem was several things: how to deal with the town without sappy nostalgia; getting bogged down in anti-Walmart crap; what happens between the lovers? Isn’t he fucking himself? And oh yes, his best friend, the lover’s brother, our hero’s opposite, a family man, a professional, civic minded, etc. Actually, the best friend is the villain. Perhaps a recurring motif was opposites, dualities, but again, and especially here, intent is irrelevant. The result was without magic. That’s the bottom line.



I think he had a trilogy in mind, the final one presenting Keats in old age, or in his sixties rather. Don’t know about that one, whether he got anywhere with that. Lost contact so long ago. In the end, I have to say he was just another guy who thought he had something to say something new that the world ought to hear, but never managed to do it. Not unlike me I guess, which is probably what sustained our friendship for as long as it lasted. Or one thing.



*****





My first husband was Johnny’s best friend, D, and I’m not going to get into my relationship with D, too complicated, too private, whatever, but I’ll tell you what I know, what I can remember, about J and D. I knew N and R too, and yeah, I even saw some of the issues of that magazine they put out,which was cool, except I never really liked country that much. I mean, I guess the outlaw business was interesting for a while, but by then I’d even gone past the folkie thing and was more into an R&B pop sound. And songwriting instead of perfoming. I’d given up singing by then, except here and there, and no longer for the money. Not that I ever made much. I do though like to sing for people, but I finally faced the fact that I was just an average singer. Imitate cover songs well was about my limit. Writing is where it is for me, and yeah I even got a couple of my songs recorded, but by people nobody’s ever heard of outside of New York. It’s luck. Knowing the right people. Being in the right place at the right time. Anyway, I met J through my roommate at UT in Austin. She was dating him, and I knew through her that he was a really sensitive guy, the artistic type, and I felt right away that we had a rapport. I still think that, because it was kind of proven when I met and fell for his best friend, D, who was so much like him. Both quiet and painfully shy, very polite and reticent, considerate, but, and of course I didn’t see this at first, capable of so much anger, of flying into such a rage, it practically scared the pants off me. I never saw it in J. Just heard about it, but I’m here to tell you, you haven’t seen a dark mood until you’ve seen D’s. His face gets scary. You can practically see the dark cloud over his head. And he won’t talk. He’s not much on talking anyway, but in a dark mood it’s like he sucks up allthe talk there ever might be, from him and everybody else.



They liked Dylan. That’s where we came together culturally. Beyond that, I could appreciate the old blues guys, but I much preferred Rondstadt and Baez and Buffy St. Marie, pretty voices, even to Dylan, and certainly the old country guys. Everyone knows Hank Williams is a genius, but I have to admit, I just can’t get into that much of a hillbilly sound. Now the Carter Family, that’s something else. I know, they’re the real hillbillies, technically speaking, not Hank Williams, but I prefer to think of them as Appalachian, singing old English ballads. The harmonies are amazing, don’t you think? Hank Williams is beer hall, honky tonk music, and sure in a certain mood it’s okay, but it doesn’t really touch me in that special place the way the Carter family does.



*****



I found pieces of the third part of the trilogy











































































































































































































































“The majority always prefer skill to brilliance.”—overheard in conversation.



“Well, these people like it. They’re happy. So what’s the big deal?” James Patterson



“I’d rather be a doper than a roper.”—common hippie-era bumper sticker in Austin, Tx.

“Obamamos” --current bumper sticker, seen in Austin, Tx.



I looked down the line and I wondered. Kerouac



No foundation, all the way down the line, Saroyan, Time of Your Life