Facing West

FACING WEST

Interviews about Roy Geddes and friends,

conducted, transcribed and edited by Rachael Westerly

Introduction

     I first became interested in this man and his circle of friends when I read a short piece in the Dallas Morning News about the mysterious disappearance in Mexico of a man the newspaper referred to as a “local teacher.”  The clipping was sent to me by my mother because the “local teacher,” Roy Geddes, was a relative, the son of my grandmother’s sister, and because she assumed, mistakenly, that I would be interested in anything about relatives and Mexico.       

     I’d known him 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 get my attention, but you hear so much of that these days, travelers 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, wondered idly what might have happened and if indeed I had a more interesting cousin than I knew, and then promptly 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, which this clearly would be.  Chiapas is not Michoacan, far from it, and needless to say, the 21st Century is not the 19^th.  My focus at the time was on a Mexican woman who lived and wrote in Patzquaro at around the same time that Charlotte Bronte was living and writing in Haworth, and my self-appointed task was to find some meaningful connection between the two. 

     I won’t go into that now (search the internet for my dissertation if you are really interested), but you understand why I was in no position or frame of mind at the time to make further inquiries about the fate of my cousin.  Nevertheless, one particular detail of the article, apparently supplied by his wife, did stand out enough to get my attention and lodge in my memory.  It seems that he 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 book about Mexico, The Lawless Roads, was one of the first I ever read about that country, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it strongly influenced my decision to study Spanish and Mexican literature in particular.  Steeped though I was then in my research, I couldn’t help but be surprised, even amazed, that a distant cousin of mine, someone I hardly knew, apparently had an interest in a book that had played such an important role in my life.  Still, that alone was not what led me to return to the subject years later.                     

     I became friends with his daughter, from his first marriage, on Facebook, through her initiative and perhaps solely to tell me that her father’s writing was on the internet and how to find it.  It may be that when she learned of my university position, she thought I might be in a position to call some attention to her father’s work.  I did in fact read it, every word, but it is not my purpose here to offer an analysis or evaluation of it.  I might possibly take that on as a project later, even though academically, as things stand now, it is out of my field and would have no value for me.  For now let’s just say that what I found on the internet, the fiction itself, when combined with the mysterious circumstances of his death or disappearance (ten years later, a body has yet to be found), interested me enough to conceive of and eventually take on the current project.  As with a critical analysis of the fiction, this project has no academic value to me, but once I’d secured tenure, I had some breathing room, and I knew that I shouldn’t wait much longer if I expected everyone I wanted to talk with to still be alive.  It took about a year to track everyone down and do the interviews, and then nearly that long to get what I had in its present form, edited down that is from all the tapes and notes I’d accumulated.     

     Originally, I’d planned to arrange what I had in some sort of predictable order, either chronologically or thematically, or a little of both, but after struggling with that for a couple of months, I gave up.  What follows is the result of nothing more than putting numbers in a hat and drawing them out one at a time.  The result is quite random, which is why I decided to add a date and place after each name, in the hope that it will help the reader stay oriented, or at least not feel quite so lost in a maze.  Unavoidably, however, even the dates and places are somewhat arbitrary, sometimes referring specifically to the times and locations talked about in that section, sometimes more generally to when and where the speaker knew Roy Geddes.  Confusing though it may be, there is something I like about the randomness.  It seems to fit with how most of the people I talked to think and talk about Roy and those times.

     As you will soon see, the interviews are less about Roy Geddes himself than about his world, his friends and family and how they all lived, roughly from his childhood in the fifties to the end of his first marriage in the mid-70’s.  I’ve repeatedly asked his second wife to talk to me, and even had his daughter speak to her on my behalf, but so far I’ve been met with nothing but silence.  I also encouraged everyone I met to talk about Roy’s life after the seventies, but without much success, except possibly for Lewis, who in the interviews talks a lot about the fiction Roy produced in the eighties and nineties, but little else.  In fact, I got the impression from Lewis that he’s thinking of doing a critical analysis of the fiction himself, and if that’s the case and he publishes before I do, I might decide to abandon my own project.  That will depend entirely upon what Lewis has to say. 

     As to friends like Lewis whom Roy met after his first marriage, Lewis himself and another teacher friend, James Y, were the only two who seemed to know him as well as his earlier friends, and the only “scene” left by then was centered around Billy T and Joanne, but Roy was no longer really an integral part of it, as he had been earlier.  There may be a story to tell about those later decades, perhaps one as interesting as the earlier years, but I don’t know it, not yet, and may never know it, unless I can get his second wife to talk to me.  My impression is that he became more of a recluse during that period, and she may be the only person who knew him well from the eighties on. 

     Meanwhile, all we have is what follows, and while I can only speak for myself, I can say that in the process of gathering the information, I began to sense a certain cohesion among those who knew Roy, a force that not only pulled them together, but began to work on me as well, coaxing me into the past, enabling me to live in those times and hear those voices when and as if they were younger.              

                                                                   RW, Santa Barbara, CA, January 2008.

The Interviews

JK’s Father (1965) Dallas

     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, certainly not the senior executive position I had when I retired.  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 you’ll 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 part of it, on what you’d call lifestyle these days, 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, which I thought was pretty funny.

     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, free 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 went 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.

Lewis ( 1985-95) Dallas

     No, I don’t know anything about a hitchhiking trip, well before my time and I don’t recall him ever telling me about it, 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 about Mexico, and if I didn’t, which was mostly the case, then I wasn’t worthy to be his friend.  I put up with that kind of thing for a long time, his tendency to be that way about everything, 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, belligerent, 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 geniuses 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, and it didn’t have to have anything to do with Mexico.  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.  With him, saying something sensible, even inspired, wasn’t enough.  He was never satisfied, and 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 French restaurant, 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.    

Ernesto R. (2003) Cuernavaca

     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.  His wife sent me an e-mail about him, telling me what happened, and I meant to ask her if she wanted the shirt, 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 sneaked 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, Ernesto, 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’d 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 these days 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 Roy.  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 the next day, 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 women, 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 in her life.  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.

Danny B. (1975) Denver

     I met him one night in Townes Van Zandt’s room at the Oxford Hotel in Denver.  It was the night, or maybe just 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 way in the back, 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, just enough sleep to stay alive, no more and no less.  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, “ Roy Geddes.  Are you the Roy Geddes?”  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, 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 the Beatniks and to writers like 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 Billy T.  He’s totally ignored now, as then, which only supports my opinion.  He was an original, the real thing, 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, Taos might have been okay when Lawrence lived there.”  And:  “You can get better french fries in Albuquerque.”

     By comparison, Roy is a totally minor figure.  Insignificant.  He was important to me only because he introduced me to Billy T, and really, I don’t think you can know Roy Geddes without knowing what Billy was all about.  They were friends for a long time, and Roy, who didn’t have an original bone in his body, and negligible talent, would hardly even have existed without Billy.  On top of which, he was a prick.  Roy, I mean.  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.  It’s what we’d call verbal abuse these days, some serious shit, and 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.

Peter S. (1966-69) Austin and Northern California

     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 Clair 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 first try, by the way.

     We met through Basil M. in Austin, who had a kind of soiree thing going for a while.  Basil’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 Basil’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 Basil was, or else why would he mention it?  He told me heard it, actually heard the action I mean, but I wonder sometimes if that’s the whole story.  Anyway, Basil’s place wasn’t a crash pad.  We weren’t hippies.  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 Basil’s wife never ventured out of the back anyway, and Basil 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 Roy, there was Jan F, who I think also thought of himself as a writer and wound up I heard as a city planner.  And Rich K, 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 Roy’s and liked to play poker, and Pam E., the only woman regular, though a lot of us would bring girls by at times.  Pam 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 Basil wound up eventually really got to Roy.  It got to all of us, since he might as well have died, but maybe it got to Roy more.  He took it hard, wouldn’t let it go.  Live and let live has always been my philosophy, even when I was a die-hard liberal (I’ve since become a staunch libertarian), but Roy was probably always more of a real liberal, in that he thought he could and should help people not be who they were.  Betraying my new prejudices there, but you know what I mean.  Not fucked up, help them not be 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.  That you could really do anything about it.  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.

     Basil 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 Roy got drunk one night and went to a Synanon event where he thought Basil 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 Basil’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.

     Roy said after they moved out here Basil would call him at ten or eleven at night and want to come over and drink scotch and play chess, and if Roy let him, he’d drink and talk and play chess all night, and of course Roy 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 Basil and those of us who saw him fall apart in California.  Back in Austin Basil 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 adviser 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 Roy told me this story.

     They went downtown to drink one night.  This was before 6^th 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 Basil, 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 bartender 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 Basil 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 and Basil 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.  Basil drove like a maniac.  Never mind speed limits, red lights or other cars.  Roy 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.  Basil showed considerable aplomb. He handed Roy a five, told him to get two six packs, he’d handle the cops.  Out of the corner of his eye, as he approached the entrance to the store, Roy saw him get out of the car, smiling, hand out, and said to himself, he doesn’t have a prayer.  But when Roy came out, Basil was chatting with a plain clothes 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 Basil 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 Roy had the beer.

     So Basil fell, as if he’d died.  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 Basil’s soirees regularly, and a couple of others who popped up through the years.

Mark O. (1968-71) San Francisco

     Basil is why they called me as soon as they got into town, and I’ll never forget Roy 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 Roy 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 Margaret.  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 Magical Mystery Tour at the Straight theater, and Roy 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, Roy 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 what, when push comes to shove, I’m really interested in.  The only thing that’s changed is how I think 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, and they’re spread out more, 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.  It will be like being struck by lightning, only better.

     I did acid with Roy and Clair in LA once.  We went down on Sunset and watched the billboards bleed.  Roy claimed that in Baskin Robbins he could see people’s skulls.  I really, really wanted to fuck Clair that night.  I would have given my left nut to have done it, maybe even told her that.  Roy 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 Roy 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 Clair on, it did me, had a hard on that wouldn’t quit, 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 bug-eyed 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, something like that, but she wasn’t interested.  Might as well have been hypnotized, and once I saw that, I had a hard time even keeping that hard on.

Matt M. (1962-66) Austin

     I haven’t seen or heard from Roy in over thirty years.  Was going to say forty, but then I remembered I saw him and Clair in Denver once.  I was just passing through on my way back to Winnipeg, where I was doing medical research.  Nothing earthshaking.  My specialty is nerves, and beyond that I’d probably start boring you.  But okay, since you ask, 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.

     Roy was my roommate in college, and through him I met Doug Q, they were high school buddies, and through me he met his first college girlfriend.  After that it gets too confusing to keep track of, but also among the main cast of characters in those days there was the girlfriend’s friend, Jessie D, who wound up marrying Doug, though it didn’t last long, and Elizabeth, my first wife, and that didn’t last long either, and N.A., the smart guy in the wheelchair, both a poet and a scholar everyone said.  It all that started with me meeting Elizabeth in the Methodist church choir.  Before that, the weekends and our social scene in general were pretty bleak.  Roy and Doug 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 female department and didn’t even make any guy 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 Roy.  I had my biology, Doug had math and was taking a lot of the same kick ass chemistry courses I had to take, but all Roy 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 narcissistic, 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, on a highway crew, and I’d help Daddy sometimes on weekends, mending fence, feeding the boss’s cows, and I used what I could save for my ‘spending money’ during the school year.  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, the whole set up I mean, 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.

     Roy 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 Roy 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 Roy and Clair 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 Bur-dine, 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 dark 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 Clark M., a Spanish major, and I think he and Johnny went to Mexico one summer.  Maybe that’s where he got the Mexico bug.  I don’t know.  That was past my time.  Clark 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, traveler, 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 stereotype, pill counters.  Heckel and Jeckel.  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 with them the first week because it was clear that those two weren’t going to study, and sure enough Dean Burdine sent them packing after the first semester.  Guess they were on that train for sure.  And there was Randy W, 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 two 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.

Lewis (1985-95) Dallas

     I know he liked Greene.  That’s old news to me.  One night he spent two hours telling me the plot of The Ministry of Fear.  I’m not exaggerating.  Basically, he told me the whole novel.  I don’t have to read it now.  And yes, I vaguely remember hearing about some proposed trip to Chiapas, following in Greene’s footsteps, which was just like him.  Roy all over:  ignore the Zapatistas.  Never mind what’s happening there 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, the opposite of the reasons for any popularity he has now.  Always the contrarian. 

     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 only in Greene’s time.  So he’d updated Greene, the director had, that’s what it amounted to, which would have infuriated Roy, and even though I’m no big Greene fan, I can see why.  It’s pretty arrogant, for one thing, to think you can update a world class author, no matter what you might think of him, but even worse really is to assume that people can’t get symbols that are only half a century or less old, symbols of things that are in fact still quite relevant today and always will be.  Tell me, please, when will the tension between materialism and spiritualism not be relevant?  So, what does that say about the director?  Is he stupid?  Or just cynical?  And either way, was he right about his audience?  Essentially, he was saying that we live in a world of illiterate morons, that he had to treat us like infants.  Here sweet but ignorant little babies, take this and chew it ever so slowly, and maybe, just maybe, before too long you’ll understand it.

     Sorry, I’m starting to sound like him.  Didn’t mean to get off on a rant.  Most of the time I knew Roy, as far as his own projects are concerned, 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, three or four 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.  As I said, 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 trilogy was that Keats, that was the detective’s name, John Keats, too risky, I think, could easily be ridiculed, Roy being pretty much a nobody in that world.  Why take the chance?  But anyway, never mind all that, 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 picaresque 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 second 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 New England.  I wanted to say, well, okay, 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.

Linda W. (1962, 1970) hometown and  San Francisco

     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, though, than what I did or didn’t do, 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 dangers of going to hell, and what shocked and intrigued me about Roy 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.  I mean we weren’t Quakers or Unitarians, we weren’t even Episcopalian, but Dr. Hope back home 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 Roy 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 worshiping 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.  Every time someone told me to pray for something, I thought about what Roy 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.  A good job, but before that, 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.  Roy 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.  Get out whore and don’t come back!  And by the way, Mom, did I tell you I knew he’d been in prison?  I saw the humor in it even then, and boy I’m telling you, 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 a rough workout in the 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, through thick or thin, for 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, helped me get my head back on straight, and after a while really pissed me off at him.  Robbing the bank was bad, stupid enough, 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 two or three times, but talk about a rookie mistake, that one takes the cake.  It was all my fault.  It really was.  He robbed a bank for me.  For me.  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.

     Roy 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 Roy 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, that in the end I’m not responsible for his actions, and besides that, screw the rules you broke, 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.  Roy, 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 Roy.  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.

Bob R .(1975-1978) Denver

     I met Roy through Henry G, who was one of those Dallas people he met in Austin.  I didn’t know any of those people except Henry.  I’d never been to Texas, and the few times I’ve been there since I haven’t found much to interest me, despite Roy touting it all he could.  I feel pretty much the same about California and New York for that matter.  I guess I’m a homebody, or a homeboy is how you’d put it these days.  My roots are in Denver and South Dakota, Denver being where I grew up and South Dakota being where my family had some land.  I remember trying to talk once to Jimmy Buffet about Pierre, when I was helping Roy and Clair with the magazine, but got rebuffed.  I knew he didn’t like to talk to anybody, no interviews, but I thought that connection might help.  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 you never quite get over.  Or I never did.  How many ways can you call yourself stupid?  I don’t know.  I lost count.

     Roy 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, I’m not lying, 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 between us.  After getting to know Roy, I’m not sure now that 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 Roy, have tried to tell me about compromise, but I guess I just don’t get it.  Not with a woman anyway.  I don’t like to think that’s true, that I’m just that way with women, but it probably is.  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 Roy’s marriage to Clair, twelve years, seems like quite a while to me.  Course a week would be long by my standards.

     One 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 shirt 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 while you were there, 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?  I don’t know.  I honestly don’t.  Anyway, the union hall there was just like Manpower, only it paid seven bucks an hour instead of the minimum wage, good money back then.  Plenty for me, single and mostly living at home with my parents.  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 Henry on to the deal and he lasted two hours, I’m not kidding.  He couldn’t get that you had to do what you were told and keep your mouth shut and keep working, or else they’d just get rid of you.  Fire your ass on the spot.  Unlike Johnny, I always liked Henry, but he could be pretty infuriating at times, I admit, 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.

     Roy 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 Henry’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 Roy and Clair, an ex-girlfriend of a mutual friend, and she was pretty good looking, a Latin type figure, big breasts and little hips, so Henry took her out one night.  I don’t know if Roy and Clair fixed them up, or if Henry just happened by and latched on, or what, but they had no problem with them dating.  Roy 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 Roy 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, Roy said.  You could actually see why she was thinking what she did, like her delusions were infectious.  The power would go off at just the right time, or wrong time, or something a news announcer said seemed to mean something else.  Roy said he started seeing double and triple meanings in everything anyone on TV said, or the reception would get bad at a crucial point.  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, plain as the nose on your face.

     So Henry takes her out, having received all this background from Roy and Clair, he knows the score, or should have, and when they come back after a few hours, she goes to bed and Henry stays up with Roy and Clair and announces to them that she isn’t crazy at all.  She’s just politically aware and sensitive, which just flew all over Roy, who, remember, had been putting up with her and trying to help for over a week.  He told Henry that he couldn’t see her 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 Henry leaves, totally confused and protesting the whole way.  An overreaction on Roy’s part?  You had to know Henry.  Clair supported Roy all way on this one, and believe me, that was never automatic.  Roy said it “took the cake,” one of his favorite expressions.  He couldn’t have imagined a more perfect example of Henryness, of letting politics make you blind to reality, which in this case should have been obvious.  It didn’t take a genius to see that the poor Cuban girl was crazy, and it bordered on the criminal to deny it, in Roy’s opinion.

     I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it sounds just like Henry, and there’s another incident, coincidentally, involving Henry and Mark O’s sister.  I guess Henry screwed her in a swimming pool one night and Mark never forgave him for it, but I’m a little vague on exactly what the problem was.  The details.  Was it just that it was more or less that they did it in his view?  Or that Mark’s sister was too fucked up at the time to know what she was doing?  The reason I thought of it, link the two, is that she did have problems apparently.  Mental problems.  Drug problems.  You name it.  I don’t know, but Henry 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?  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.

Father (on his side of the family)

     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 Texas 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, my grandmother, 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 (Roy 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 Roy that our main priorities when it came to money were gas and cigarettes.  As long as you had plenty of both of those, 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 for some reason the boarding house was a thing of the past and 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, and we must have just had chickens, no other supplies, or else we could have just eaten them.  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 that uncle, Thurman was his name, 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, the boss of the whole family, and did most of the work, and she taught school before that.  So I guess Dad was needed, the man of the family, 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 mid-west 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.  I’m not lying.  Mother had it all written down somewhere, places and dates.  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 Roy 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 under any circumstances, but at sixteen it embarrassed me to death.  Of course, it could have been a heart attack, or maybe he just got careless, a polecat crossed the road and made him swerve.  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.

Lewis (1985-95) Dallas

     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 (I mean when they were at their peak, not later when I knew Roy), 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 as serious, but that’s not why, or not the only reason why very few if any scholars but me care one way or the other about any of them.  I’ve had to do my research about them on the side, if I cared about making a living that is, 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 Billy T was at 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.

     Billy’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 McMurtry left contemporary small town West Texas, Billy had no use for him, which means just about everything else McMurtry did, except for those lame Duane sequels.  About Lonesome Dove Billy was cagey.  I remember sitting on his front porch in Dallas, that’s where he liked to hold court in the eighties and nineties, asking him what he thought of it, 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.  Billy 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 to himself, that enhanced how he wanted you think about him.  So how could he possibly admit to liking Lonesome Dove?  The whole world liked it.

     Other contemporaries, Shrake and that crowd, The Texas Monthly crowd, he mostly ignored, or as I’m sure they’d say, they ignored him, 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 thrown in so that some people, the ones who ignore everything that’s not current and ‘relevant,’ might think it was important.  Dobie by that time was totally irrelevant, which is why Billy defended him.  Or part of it.  I’m not saying that’s why he liked him.  Billy, like Johnny, could be an exasperating contrarian at times, but never a dishonest one.  He owed Dobie a lot and knew it.  Every Texas writer does, and 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, Willis Alan Ramsay.  But wait, hold on a minute.  Maybe this is the wrong angle to take.  No reason to be so negative.  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 Larry C, the son of a well to do farmer in the San Joaquin Valley in California.  Larry thought he was the reincarnation of Walt Whitman, western 20^th C heterosexual version, and he would have said that Whitman was western in his soul, maybe did say it.  Probably he did say it.  Soul is a word that appears often in Larry’s writing.  Larry was definitely the 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 Larry, anything having to do with farms, prairies, hobos, drunks, whores, outlaws, railroads, and so on, you get the idea I’m sure, was good, as was any writer who could write long sentences (but I think he did like 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 whenever he could, he’d leave his novels and poetry and painting and self-publishing projects behind and go off and fight forest fires.  He published a little magazine for a long time, and a lot of Roy and Billy’s stuff first appeared there.  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 guess they all did back then.  The Barnum and Bailey writers, see them live and in person on stage:  the drinking, screwing and fighting poets of the west.  Yeah, sometimes it was hard to take them seriously.  All that self-promotion, all that ego. 

     There were more periphery characters, but Larry C was really the only major one of that time, the really early days, before they drifted into an almost exclusive emphasis on music and a whole other set of characters popped up.  To do Larry C justice, I should make it clear that at the time he was as important as Doug Q and Porter D., the two main insiders besides Roy and Billy T himself, those four being the only ones who always seemed to be around, who hung in for the whole trip.    

Porter D (1970-1978)  Austin

     I didn’t dislike Roy.  I just never thought he was very interesting.  I know what he’d say.  He’d say that he bored me only because I didn’t want to fuck his wife.  He’d probably even add my wife Ginger to that scenario and say that we ditched them as a couple because she didn’t have the hots for him.  No sex appeal equals boring, and to be honest, there’s probably some truth to that.  I won’t deny it, but Ginger was always worse than me.  We’d meet some new guy and she’d be all over him for a week or two, and then all of a sudden it was over, like he’d never existed.  I don’t mean she fucked them, at least not all of them, not even most, but she sure acted like she wanted to.  It’s a wonder none of them raped her, or if they did, I never heard about it.  She wouldn’t have told me anyway, though, because she’d have been afraid of what I might do.  I had a gun in those days, a Saturday night special, and I carried it around in the glove compartment, and yeah, I might have killed some guy with it if she ever told me he’d raped her.  That would have been kind of cool.  Putting a bullet into some guy that raped your wife.

     What they were doing in Denver was embarrassing.  It was all happening in Austin.  Course we were a bit prejudiced, I admit, and even got to thinking that if it didn’t happen in Austin, it couldn’t possibly be cool.  But really, the Denver thing wasn’t cool.  All centered around this no talent bimbo who did truck commercials.  Even if I’d liked straight country, I wouldn’t have liked her.  But she and her father were about the only people up there they could con any money out of for ads.  Actually, they got some record company ads, quite a few, but nothing like we did, and then they expected us to split it with them even.  Dream on.  You know, for the good of the magazine, Roy said, we have to put it all in one big pot and use it for expenses before we dip into it personally.  Yeah, yeah.  From a business standpoint, he was right of course, but who gave a shit about a business standpoint back in those days?  Or being right?  Finding good dope and getting laid was all I cared about.  Fuck the rest of it.  I mean, what’s the point of not having a regular job, of doing a music magazine and hanging out with musicians, if you’re just going to live like everybody else?  No point I could ever figure out.

     Yeah, I couldn’t believe it when he won that grant.  I’d never thought much of anything he ever did, still don’t, and he and Clair were certainly the straightest of the bunch.  They’d both read a lot, I’ll give them that, but they knew nothing about music and had no sense of how to dress at all.  Joanne told us once that she’d taught Johnny how to use a hair dryer, and that was like ten years after everybody else in the world was using them.  I guess they started looking okay once that western fad started, the cowboy look, at least it gave them a focus, but even then you didn’t get the feeling that they put much time into finding things.  Billy and Joanne would hit the flea markets every weekend, looking for just that right detail for their look, and Ginger and I did a lot of that too, although we liked spending money, didn’t mind having a more upscale look and knew where to find things in the high end places as well.  It was fun, but I guess Roy and Clair spent that time reading instead of shopping, and it showed.  I guess I wouldn’t have kicked Clair out of bed, no matter how tacky she looked at times, but there was just something about her that turned me off.  She was too butch.  God knows I don’t mind aggressive, and if you knew Ginger, you’d know what I’m saying.  You’ve never met an aggressive bitch until you’ve met Ginger, she beat Clair hands down, but Clair just didn’t do it in a sexy way.  It was more like she was a schoolteacher, or a librarian.  Not that I couldn’t get into that, I’m pretty open-minded that way, but the bottom line was she just wasn’t very feminine.  It would have been like fucking a boy, which I’m just not into at all.                                                      

  Clair (1966-78) San Blas

   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 arrived, 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, 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 got in my way.  One, he seemed, at least when he was sober, to be kind of a prude.  And two, after twelve years, I thought of us as one person, I really did, right up until the day he blindsided me.

     He had a temper, but he had me half-convinced that it was my fault, and it wasn’t until afterwards, when it was all over between us, 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 in response:  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.  Why should it bother me?  I’ve got a whole other life now.  What do I care?

     This sounds silly, and it was, but what’s the good of getting older if it’s not to not 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, if I do say so myself, 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, and I’m sure they do, but it 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, I’m not exaggerating, and me with fair skin.  They didn’t bother Johnny so much, but they loved me.  We lasted three 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 three 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 drawing numbers in the air with a finger.  I was good at remembering details of movies and books, much better than him, 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 real 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 Roy 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.  Johnny 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 Roy went across the street with him to a cantina.  That was fine, I was beat after the train ride, we’d been up since five that morning, but the next thing I know the waiter is sitting next to me on the bed and Roy is standing behind him, swaying, no clue as to what’s 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.  Roy was useless.  I had to get rid of the waiter.  Me.  Then, when he was gone, I had to position Roy 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 was 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 he left me, 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 don’t know what to do exactly with our trip to San Blas.

Mother (1970) Los Angeles

     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.  And he did everything, all the housework.  Cooked the meals, cleaned up, fed and took out the dog, and all she did was lie in bed all day and read, putting that book down only to talk about how tired she was.  I helped while I was there, with the meals, even 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 her share of 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.  That’s what really took the cake.  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, deep down I think it’s wrong to get rid of something God gives you, and there can’t really be no good reason for it.  Or actually, maybe there can be, rape for one, the health of the mother for another, but I’m not so sure even about that, so you can imagine how I felt about their reason, which was just that they weren’t ready to have a kid.  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, the one exception being Disneyland, and you should have seen what she wore that day.  I was worried the whole time that her boobs were going to fall out of that dress, what they call a peasant dress, no bra of course, and since they were already half out, his poor father was embarrassed all day, literally red in the face and couldn’t concentrate on anything else.  It’s 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.  Roy and Clair didn’t even lock their doors, and that dog, a police dog, wouldn’t have helped much.  When you walked up to the door, she acted like she was going to bite your head off, but once you were inside you never saw such whining and groveling and peeing on the floor.  We weren’t used to having a dog in the house at all.  His father and I would never allow it, and there that dog was, everywhere, on their bed, the couch, dog hair all over everything.  What a mess.  To be fair, though, I guess that dog would scare most people away before they ever got inside.

     As far as California goes, I honestly don’t know how they lived there.  I never dreamed there were that many cars in the world until I went to Los Angeles, and everyone drove like a maniac, following so close on those freeways.  We tried to go to the beach one day, but we couldn’t even see it from the road, I kid you not, the smog was so bad.  Might have been partly fog, but Johnny said it was smog.  Said he’d lived there for over a year before he even realized there were mountains around Los Angeles.  We never 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.  It was mostly stuff I’d never heard of that they claimed was healthy, so 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 bitter leafy kind, and a jar of mayonnaise,  Hellman’s, and that’s all you can do, I think, try to make the best of it.  You can’t tell your kids how to live, not once they get to be a certain age.  They won’t listen for one thing, but it’s also really none of your business.  I know that.  It can hurt, but I know it’s true.  Of course when they borrow money from you, it gives you an excuse to at least grumble a little, but that never helps anything.  Best just to keep your mouth shut and go home, which is just what we did.

Lewis (1985-95) Dallas

     Strictly speaking, neither Billy T nor Roy 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.

     Billy thought he was authentic, honestly believed it, whereas Roy spent his whole life looking for it.  That’s why Billy never set foot in a foreign country and lived most of his life in Texas, after youthful and fairly short adventures in Montana, New Mexico and California, whereas Billy lived for long periods in other states, and when he could afford it, traveled to Mexico and other places that seemed, in serious ways, to be living in a pre-60’s world.  One night Billy T 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.  Ironically, 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, a tennis player of all things, 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 Billy T in a nutshell, 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, the word “I” being very prominent, says it all.  I think that’s unfair.  There’s nothing wrong anymore with writing journalism in the first person, nor was there then, lots of people were doing it, 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 several centuries.  In fact, most serious 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?  Who does the writer know better?  Who does he know as well?  Mark Twain said a man couldn’t write honestly about himself, but few can write honestly about anything at all, so I’m not sure that means much.  Clearly, something else irritates people about Billy and I think I know what it is.  He’s a little too in love with style, and something else, closely related, is that he fails to reject or tone down those aspects of our culture that now shock us.  Too in love with style, but unwilling to pander to fashion.  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 on the altar of the sun god.  Not just outrageous.  Ridiculous.

     That’s always the crux of the matter in regard to anyone.  Do we take him or her 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, if not in so many words, that the only authentic Americans were Native Americans, whom of course, just to confuse the squares, he insisted upon calling Indians.  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 of the apparent 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.  Billy 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 19^th Century sense, but they were still with us, are still with us, in our blood literally in many cases, those ghosts, 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.  Too new-agey some say, and any edge he might give it seems forced.  In some circles these days violence always seems forced.  The literary fashion, true even when Indians are included, is to focus on the miniature, the minutiae of relationships, in families especially, even in serious literature, at least in this country, and probably most literature written in English around the world.  Epiphanies involving fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, wives and children are all the rage among baby boomers, even those who are into really serious literature, and that demonstrates my point about boomers and authenticity.  Haute middle-brow some might call the boomer literary crowd.  Pre-60’s America doesn’t exist for them, it was never real, so nothing real has been lost, and life is thought of as a series of modest  revelations about ourselves and others, and as getting by as best we can with what we learn from them.  Billy, and Johnny too in his way, weren’t buying that.  Relatively speaking, they were extremists.  Wild men.  They believed in utopias and dystopias and fancied themselves seekers of an Eden.

     Billy found his first Eden in Montana, among the Assiniboine, where he and his wife 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, even wild Indians, in a sense, and the winters up there could kill you, and it all 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.

Clark M. (1964) Mexico City

     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 Ballet Folklorico, 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 Roy 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 Roy 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 Roy 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 Roy.  Too tame.  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 Roy 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.  But that’s not why he was mad at me.  He said, “Clark, you should have gone.  What a great experience it would have been!  How could you turn it down?”  He was disappointed in me, but for me.  For my sake, not his.  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 Roy 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 Roy bought a pint of scotch.  He and Roy drank it right from the bottle 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, Roy 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 Eddie 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 watched out for young gringos at the Hotel Calvin.  There was nothing to it, but I appreciated the thought.

Don T. (1971) San Francisco

     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.  Roy told me he spent three weeks one time repairing pallets at the Safeway warehouse.  All day every day for three solid weeks.  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 can 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.  Roy said he had a guy who made deliveries to the Safeway warehouse 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 Billy T and Joanne 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 there in the warehouse 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 was instead 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.  Roy said he thought they had him pegged as a hippie 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 already expecting to see.  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.  That’s what was really blood-curdling, 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 loading dock.  His mistake.

     I always worked two jobs in those days, for Manpower during the day and then the swing shift at a Del Monte cannery, six months at a stretch, sleeping on a friend’s couch in Berkeley, then I went to Europe for six months.  A good life, and I still do it more or less, except I’ve figured out now how not to work so hard and 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.  I save up the same, taking inflation into account, but I don’t work as long, just smarter, and those days of two jobs, two shifts a day, are long gone.  Life is too short. 

     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.  I don’t like getting that close in that way to anybody, male or female.  That may make me a chicken shit, I know, but that’s how it is.

     Roy 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 in helping them out when I can, like a teacher.  I mean to help them find a healthy and sane way, both on an individual and society level.  I remember telling Roy 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 principle, 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 for the most part and good to have Roy 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, so I do okay often enough.  Roy and I also debated 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, believe it or not, are even proud of how much shit 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 Roy, wet behind the ears, not long out of high school, whose whole life was already devoted to getting ahead.  He’d rag us a little, just to remind us who was boss, but we’d mostly laugh at him, and he couldn’t do anything but get a little huffy about it.  Puffed up.  That’s kind of guy he was, all full of himself, and I guess he could have let us go for not taking him seriously, but he knew we were good workers and didn’t have the nerve.  Self-important, that’s what he was, and on top of that, he fancied himself a hustler.  Back in those days, they had these land promotions in Nevada, maybe still do, or even some remote desert parts 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, he’d even take his girlfriend with him, like it was a date, and he acted like we were fools for not taking advantage of it.  He was a little cracked we started to realize, the more he told us.  He had these elaborate stories about how well they got fed and the free booze and how he’d play the salesmen to get all he could free for him and his girl friend, when all along the salesmen thought they were playing him.  Boy, Roy and I started thinking, this guy is nuts and you wouldn’t want to trust him with anything, would you?  I remember Roy asked him once if he ever felt bad about the dishonesty of it, lying to the salesmen, and he looked at Roy 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, selling me useless land.  At least I’m not asking them to sign anything, put themselves in debt for nothing.”  And when Roy 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.  Roy was good at that.  Getting you to talk about yourself and say things you didn’t often if ever 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, putting one over on them, that made him take those trips.  It was a game, not just of getting something for nothing, or even of proving to himself that he wasn’t a sucker, but of getting the best of another guy.  Making himself superior.

     Another 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 blond, big all over, Roy said, a kind of Amazon, had a kid about a year old, and a charge account at the neighborhood pizza parlor, something Roy 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.  Likable, 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 Roy 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.  Truly 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, just chance, Roger claimed, didn’t matter what race he was to them, but everyone got excited and called them racists.  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, Roy asked him about driving across the country, how it was, but Roger hadn’t seemed to notice most of it.  Roy would ask him if they’d passed through a certain state, Iowa say, and Roger didn’t know.

     That fascinated Roy.  He’s so ignorant, Roy said, it’s like he’s walking through the world half-blind, but so far at least, he’s doing fine.  I think Roy 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 Roy, and made him envious too, just like he probably was of me, because I kind of had it made too.  Not that Roy had anything to complain about, 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, but you could tell he wasn’t satisfied.  He was restless.  This might be good, he was thinking, but what is there around the corner?  He couldn’t not look.

Clair (1966-78) Driving West

     It’s painful in some ways to recount, to 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 Roy 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, I see that 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, the storm came and went pretty fast, the worst of it, 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 dollars.  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, and Roy said it was the best soup he’d ever eaten.  We ate pretty well, if I do say so myself, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, taking care of things, but Roy 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 is 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.  Before it was over between us for good, 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 it, roughing 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 in the year 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.  Roy’s the one who let her go, though, men and their soft hearts, 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 about 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 making 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.  We’d gone to Mexico with my parents.  That 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 were left and I 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, since 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, right in the middle of it, and I stood behind and waved traffic around.  There weren’t many cars.  Can you believe that?  There might have been a freeway further north, but not even a freeway across the middle of New Mexico then, and not many cars on the highway in April.  They were steady, but just one at a time, and it’s not like we caused a backup of any kind.  Anyway, before Johnny 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 in on the rim, ten miles into the next town, and needless to say the wheel was shot by then.  We pulled into the gas station with sparks flying, but for some reason, something to do with the number of holes in the wheel, he didn’t have a rim for us but 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, Roy 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.  Roy 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, Roy 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.  Roy 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 Roy was on his knees, grimy 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 had happened while we were watching that film in Austin.  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 projectionist’s face when he finally woke up.  Scared the daylights out of him.  He acted at first like he was being attacked, jumped up like he’d been goosed in the rear.  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.  It was almost like one of those zombie movies.  They had us surrounded and seemed to be closing in very slowly.  We just sat there for a few minutes, then turned around and drove back out.  And Taos itself was nearly as bad, full of tents with hippies, really grungy hippies, hard core, not too appealing, and then the other extreme, art galleries where of course we couldn’t afford anything, and the art we saw was just that southwestern Georgia O’Keefe wannabe stuff.  And worse.  Those paintings with big eyes on Indian girls that were all the rage 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.  Roy 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.”  He was actually laughing and said it was almost a pleasure, fixing the flat with that new jack.  The last car trouble we had on that trip was a loose spark plug wire, and Roy 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, three 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 Roy telling me about another flat he had in Texas, an old German guy helped him, another old-fashioned 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 trip, the one I’m telling you about, 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 for one summer vacation we went to Fresno, just to get warm, although Roy was also looking for Armenians, on account of Saroyan, 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.  I put up with it for twelve 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.

Ed C (1960-62) hometown

     Roy wasn’t much of a football player.  A second team guard even his senior year, and they always tried to find a place on the first team for all the seniors.  I was much better and a starter in the same position he played, 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, total intuition, and my father had shown me a few opening moves.  He always started by moving his rooks out.  Said he just liked how they moved, the only explanation he ever came up with, but he still beat me.  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 I mean, 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 but strong enough to sprain my wrist.  I 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 or I might have been sent to jail.  That’s the time I hitchhiked 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 Roy 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.  Roy always went too far, about damn near everything, but I put up with it until Vietnam.  I respected him for all the reading he did, how smart he was, and 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 Roy.  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 Roy 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 Roy.  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 to do it consistently, when he wasn’t mad, 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.

Lewis (1985-95) Dallas

     If Billy T’s vision wasn’t totally coherent, it was more so than Roy’s, by a long shot.  Billy’s focus evolved from strictly West Texas lore, Elmer Kelton variety (McMurtry is a more complex issue, best saved for another time), into a kind of mix of Indians and outlaws and West Texas, a good measure of Dylan, let’s say, mixed in with the Elmer Kelton, but Roy kept changing his mind, and he was eclectic to a fault.  When he got drunk and in a record playing mood, you know the sort of mood I mean, “you got to hear this!” and turn it up loud, he might go from Jimmie 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, never mind your audience at the time.  Like he said himself:  that’s maybe the most brutal fact of life.  The next morning, and a bad audience was about the same thing as a next morning.  It’s when nothing ever fits together, and even if it did, even if you could make it fit, why should you give a shit?  I may be relatively square but I know about hangovers.  Those two extremes, though, country and city, were what in the end, sober, he couldn’t reconcile, and to make it worse, he didn’t know all that much about either one.  Not really.  He was a suburban kid, never lived on a farm and never in a real city.  Even in San Francisco they actually lived in Albany and Oakland.  Couldn’t afford the city itself, and they had a dog, which made it even harder.  So, as a result, I think he saw himself as a fraud.  He saw the whole boomer generation as a fraud, himself included, even though he knew he wasn’t a full-fledged member of it.  He was too old to be a hippy, 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 two 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 Johnny was never like that, which may be the key to finding some coherence in how he saw things. 

     It wasn’t until he was nearly 40 years old, he told me, 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, the town as it was or had been when he was a kid, started to seem authentic to him, more real than when he’d grown up there, in the sense of meaningful, worth something, but also each place and person became clearer and more well-defined than when he’d lived 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, all of it, I mean, in its purest form, and since fewer and fewer people have, I think it’s legitimate to wonder how useful it is to make it an object of veneration, or, I should say, an art object, since how do you do that without nostalgia, and Jack was serious enough, at least in intent, to want to avoid sentimentality.  Or does that lead to an absurdity?  The idiotic proposition that writers can only write about the present, or the time they’ve lived in?  No reason to even start listing names on that one, though War and Peace does come readily to mind.  How did I get myself into this corner?  It’s like something he would have done.  He had a very undisciplined mind, always getting muddled, and he was lazy, which led him into all sorts of difficulties.

     But back to the beginning.  How was Roy unique?  Not at all like the boomers but not like Billy either?  And yet, in a sense, cut from the same cloth as Billy?  You get to a point in life, Roy told me once, when you realize that the differences makes no difference, and of course he really got pissed off when I suggested, that pronouncements like that were reductionist, pretty close to saying, in a pseudo-Zen sort of way, that everything was the same.  We’re all one big happy family, so let’s 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, never his strong suit, I began after a while to understand, and not just because I was afraid he was going to punch me.  He could be violent you know.  He claimed that he hadn’t thrown a punch since the 7^th grade, except when boxing at school, and except for one other time, maybe, that he couldn’t remember.  He met a guy in San Francisco, a guy from Texas who lived in the Haight and that Roy says he didn’t remember ever seeing before in his life, but the guy claimed Roy had punched him in the face once.  He’d been a Christian in college, the guy, not Roy, a member of Campus Crusade for Christ, and he’d come into Roy’s dorm room to try to get them, Roy and his room mate, to come to some Jesus crusade, and they’d gotten into an argument.  Roy 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 and take Jesus as your personal savior, you have nothing to lose, even if I’m wrong.  Nothing bad will happen after you die.  But if I’m right, you have everything to lose.  You’ll go straight to hell.”  Roy thought that was the most disgustingly practical reason for faith he’d ever heard.  Maybe he threatened to hit him, he conceded, if the guy didn’t leave.

     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.  Throwing off childish things, you might say.  It was not political with him.  He tried to make nothing political.  That was a cardinal rule, a basic principle, Roy’s rule number one.  And if it was self-improvement, he’d wince at that, too:  rule number two, no self-improvement.  But what about cultivation?  He might not mind that so much, since its vaguely anti-democratic, elitist connotation might actually appeal to him.  The older he got the less faith he had in democracy, and in general, although he faded in and out on this, he worked at being indifferent to how the wind was blowing among the masses, which, 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 to learn 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 you have to remember that the most rational way isn’t always the best.  It’s all give and take, compromise, getting along.  He couldn’t accept that.  He was 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 accepted the idea that Jimmie Rodgers and Frank Sinatra were irreconcilable, that things in general, even things you liked, didn’t have to mix or even make sense together, it was only natural that he could make his peace with his hometown, at least as he remembered it, which is the only way it still existed for him.  What it had really become since then is another story, 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.

     Nevertheless, despite all that, 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 that, 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, focus.  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 though.  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 watching him squirm and listening to those ever more creative reasons he had for losing.

     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 knowingly 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.  The truth was more that he had no objection to Randy Newman, not that he actually liked him.  How could he really like any of those California boys who made a big deal out of their Okie roots?  Phonies by definition in his book, but 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.  I guess he liked me, but here’s the thing.  I’m a full-fledged right in the middle of it baby boomer, and to me, it only follows, 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, all white by the way, 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 by the time I was old enough to get into those places, 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?  As a culture?  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 dysfunctional than most, and just like me he was torn between, on the one hand, the expectations of his parents, to make good grades, be good at sports, date girls and have friends, and on the other, his own 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, or maybe fashionable is more the word.  All of a sudden what was fashionable was anything that seemed subversive, and it all had to be at least tolerated unless you wanted to be laughed at as old-fashioned and uptight.  And to most people it was all the same, even the truly subversive stuff.  They couldn’t see the jewels lying there alongside all that fake subversive stuff, or rather, see how they were different.  By then, by the time I was old enough to know how to pay attention and make distinctions, it wasn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack, or a diamond in the rough.  Everyone wanted to be dangerous, or at least look like it.  It was more like being able to tell a black widow from all the other kinds of spiders. 

 

Clair (1966-78) West Again

     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 were in the next booth behind me, and I heard one say 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 in that little MG, or if it was just coincidence.

     That first night it got to 40 below in Steamboat Springs.  Yes.  40 below zero F., I kid you not.  The car was frozen solid the next morning.  Roy had to pour hot water on the side curtains to get them off, and we had to climb over the doors 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, and then with hard cases like ours, where he had to get up some speed, just push until you got it started.  It was a nice long stretch, and we had to get going really fast, and that poor little car bucked like a horse when Roy let out the clutch.  We could have got 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 worst, 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.  My fault.  Roy 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, most nicer places wouldn’t expect payment until you checked out.  It kind of set them apart, as catering to the sort of clientele who wouldn’t cheat you, 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 two queen sized beds were 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 weren’t deadbeats.  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.  No sign of the storm.  We had a little trouble with the grade crossing the Sierras, a little steep for that little car, slow going and it heated up on us some, but it was nothing really, not compared to what all we’d been through already, and when we got to Oakland, we were all in one piece and happy as clams.

Coach A (1962) hometown

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 just like with your own kids, you have to to put up with some of their mischief, but it came natural to me.  Nothing made me feel better than to see some kid perform well and know that I’d 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 college 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 Roy.

     But the 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 Roy 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, that’s just common sense, but he had his back to it!  Like some tackler was going to come off the sideline, from out of bounds!  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.

Lewis (1985-95) Dallas

     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, he said.  Juicy anything.  White and dry, he said, characterized New England cuisine.  It was okay, he added, sort of as a footnote, 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. 

     In addition to the white and dry indictment, the availability of things he liked seemed to be a major issue.  No 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 “god-awful” muffins, black-eyed 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 given 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? And how could he not be depressed that he lived in such a place, like on another planet, a place where only you know how things are supposed to be, which of course makes you the crazy one, not them, and that’s the really depressing part, since then you’re undeniably alone, an alien, it’s you who will have to change, fundamentally change one of the most basic urges you have and joys you receive.

     The food thing was just one example of a pattern that he recognized in himself:  wanting things to stay the same, but it was even more extreme than that in Roy, and he saw that too, his own extremism, for what it was.  He wanted things to be as they’d been when he’d received the most pleasure from them.  And not just food.  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 Johnny’s 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 would turn right around and praise the Yankee teams of the fifties.  He heard them play the World Series on the radio in school.  He just the right age for it to seem always like the Dodgers and Yankees in the World Series, and he heard Don Larsen pitch the perfect game in ’56, every inning of it, the whole class, right there deep in the heart of Texas, hanging on every pitch.

     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 the old high school girl friend that he’d hooked back up with by then.  The one some people thought he married, but that’s not true.  They were just good friends, maybe more, I’m not sure about that, but I do know he loved showing off her knowledge of pop music.  I knew about that too, or thought I did until I met her.  If I was a sports encyclopedia, she was the same with pop music, and he was proud of her.  Justly so.

Ricardo S. (1978) Denver

     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?  Kind of funny, but I’m cool about it, 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 hippie 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.

     Roy 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 Roy 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 whole 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 up 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, I think that was the name, that game that was hot back then.  He liked it, all of it, the way we did lunch, the way I worked, 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 bullshit like that, and said he 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, denser than I thought.

Leonard G. (1984) Arlington, Tx.

     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 Roy 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 kid 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.

     Roy was visiting one of his brothers, and they were in a park in Arlington, 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, and 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, as if to rub it in, 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.  I think you have to be a really odd duck to like the plains.  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 the good citizens of Arlington even allow public parks, why they aren’t socialist, but it was probably worthless land that flooded too often, the answer to all contradiction is money, I’ve found, 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, then, that’s what it was for Johnny and that kid, among the stunted trees, no doubt sweating like pigs.

     Johnny said his plan was to let his nephew get ahead, then just barely catch him in the end.  He thought that was generous, would make him feel good.  He could brag about it later.  “Hey, Dad, I almost beat Uncle Roy!!”  Of course that wouldn’t be totally honest either, but he’d make the one small concession to 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 Roy miscalculated and let him get too far ahead.  Underestimated the boy, and it’s pretty funny when you think about it.  The kid was faster than he thought, and by the time Roy 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,” Roy said, “and I beat him at the last minute, just by a hair, almost a photo finish, 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 Roy’s concession was any consolation, or even if he realized that Roy had just implicitly confessed to letting him get ahead at the start of the race.  Roy just said he 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, head start or not.

Lewis (1985-95) Dallas

     He told me once that his favorite scene from Palm Beach Story was when Rudy Vallee serenades Claudette Colbert with “Goodnight Sweetheart” while she and Joel McCrae make love.  Not literally make love, of course, at least not on screen.  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 likable, and there he is with his ukulele, standing outside the window, so sweet and sincere, and Joel McCrae and Claudette Colbert are in a hot embrace behind the curtain.  Of course Johnny 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, just to refresh your memory, if you need it.  Joel McCrae and Claudette Colbert are married, but pretending to be brother and sister.  He’s broke and Rudy Vallee is one of the richest men in the world, all of it inherited.  The movie is brimming with irony, chock full of opposites, both real and fake, like a Shakespeare comedy, but Roy, 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 or hers (but there’s no controlling the human heart, Cupid’s dart, etc.), 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 as 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 blonds, sophisticated brunettes, ditsy, mean, hard, sweet.  You name it, or dream it up, and there’s a place for them in his harem, and Guido’s role is to enforce the rules, keep order, no exceptions, but with that shrug Mastroianni is famous for, the one that says too bad, but that’s how it goes.  And the girls respect him for it.  Even love 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 about romance and male dominance 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 performance art, the way he told that story, the goal being to make the audience uncomfortable by telling them something they don’t understand.  Or even better, that they do understand but think is stupid.  What they don’t understand, most of them, even if they get the story, is what’s important about telling it:  the importance of failing to communicate, of being humiliated, and of thereby proving to himself over and over again that the power of the scene, the pleasure it gives is worth the humiliation of telling it to deaf ears.  I eventually understood why he liked the scene, but only after hearing him tell it, perform the telling of it, rather, a half a dozen times or more.  It’s corny and it’s not, which was a big part of its appeal for Johnny.  Corny and not.  Maybe that’s how Fellini was in general.  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 ever so slowly, a dance band playing a light and airy but sophisticated version of “Blue Moon,” at a leisurely tempo and in a minor key perhaps, and you are transported to an outdoor pavilion, lots of twinkling lights and dancers in light summer suits and dresses, and Guido is walking by them and onto a street of shops, the sidewalk crowded, and all of a sudden he sees his wife, she’s just arrived in town, he knew she was coming, but it’s still a chance encounter, and he looks at her over his sunglasses and catches her eye, and she sees him, smiles and does a little self-conscious twirl.  That last part, their eyes meeting, both smiling, their obvious pleasure at seeing each other, is the corny part.  Does he love her?  He must, that one scene alone tells us that, the genius of Fellini, but why then is he so unfaithful?  It was close to real life, by the way, Fellini’s real life, but that’s another story.

     Not Roy’s real life, he never had women lining up for the privilege of fucking him, 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 when Guido suddenly, almost miraculously, realizes that he’s the director of his own life.  Or does he?  Maybe it’s just 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 really does sound corny), people who come and go, the cast always changing.  In any case, there’s an epiphany, 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.  It is Guido’s life work in the form of a spaceship, a fake one, that will be torn down, never to be filmed.  A failure.  A good place then for Guido’s famous shrug.  I think that shrug is what Johnny wanted.  Wanted to master.  Its spirit:  too bad, the shrug says, but that’s how it goes.

Mother (on her side of the family)

     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 Roy 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, I’d never thought of it that way, but 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 Johnny 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 John 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 Roy got that out of me too.  He was so curious that sometimes it worried me.  But I guess, about being lucky in love, I could just as well or better say, lucky 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.”  Or “Never mind him,” she’d say to one of us right in front of him.  Or “He don’t like anyone to have any fun.”  Hateful, that’s what she was, not that she didn’t have a point about the fun, but still.  I told Little Roy 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 the kids anything for Christmas.  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, wondered that year what Christmas would be like, but not much, too much commotion around there, and back in those days you didn’t start thinking about Christmas a month in advance like now, but then, Christmas Eve, I’ll never forget this, 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 besides, it wasn’t fair because 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, except for how mean she could be to him.  My daddy got up at three in the morning every day because of his job and he got home about three in the afternoon and listened to the radio, later the TV, until dinner at five sharp, which we all called supper back then, and then he’d get ready for bed.  Church every Sunday, never missed a one, always without Mother or any of us.  He’d go by himself.  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 had work around the house to do, although maybe not too much, since the whole time I was growing up, we rented.  I never saw him do much, though, and no work of any kind on Sunday, of course, 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 eggnog once a year at Christmas, once John 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, dance a little jig maybe, and never pay him any attention, like always.  Your father was a troublemaker, I told Little Roy, spiking that eggnog 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 John 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 rain or shine, but she was just saying that.  I guess she thought she had to, just to keep up appearances, and then she’d go back to whatever she’d been doing in the kitchen, and there was always something good for the kids on the counter that we could help ourselves to whenever we wanted.  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, part of how they made their money, and I was too slow, but they let me try it.  And let’s see what else.  Mostly I guess I was in the kitchen with Mama, helped her when I could, but I really didn’t help much, she just liked the company and I had to stay out of her way.  She complained about us kids always being “under foot,” but she never kicked us out.  It smelled so good in there.  I think Papa was almost rich, compared to the other farmers.  He was the first to buy a car.  He had a big mustache and was always nice to me.  “Addie’s little Cathy,” he’d always say when he wanted me to come up to him. 

“Do you slumber in your sleep, little Cathy?”  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 committed 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.  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 John, 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, though, or she made it happen.  She met Harvey 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 Sis 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 Harvey, 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 Roy told me he still remembered some of the puzzles Harvey came up with.  One of them, let’s see if I can remember, was about three men who checked into a hotel, they just wanted one room, and it was thirty dollars.  Oh, I can’t remember, I’m sorry, but it was something about a dollar being missing after they all pitched in a certain amount and got change.  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, then he said some left and some came back, this long drawn out thing about the cows, he was good at that, telling a story even when there wasn’t much of one to tell, and meanwhile he’d put a little dot in the circle as well as x’s for the cows, and Little Roy bit.  He pointed at the little dot and said, “What’s that?” and Harvey grabbed his hand and said, “No no, don’t touch it!!”  We laughed and laughed at that one.

     The problem was, and it’s a real shame, Harvey never made enough money for Sis, not as much as John, not by a long shot, and Sis 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 John 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 John 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, I really did, and it made him happy, so I don’t see why my sister 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 Roy liked Harvey as much as anybody, but when he was little he preferred staying with his father’s side of the family, on account of he was left alone over there, whereas on my side, Katy bar the door!  He had all the kids to deal with, all his cousins, and it wasn’t just them.  No one on my side could understand why he wanted to be left alone, but my mother-in-law, 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.  “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, or would have wanted to, I don’t believe in that, it always backfires, 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 girlie magazines when he was twelve, 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.  I got used to it though.  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.  Kind of kept me company.  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 when he and his father had one too many drinks, that’s what it was, saying I was always telling him 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 he apologized right away, soon as he saw what he’d done, 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, just because he didn’t know any better.  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 her 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, even a boy knows, unless he’s just plain sorry or stupid, just like a woman knows certain things.

Father (1985) East Texas

     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, partly and gradually.  I don’t know what it was exactly that changed me, 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 all at once in one place.  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, trust me on this, they turn back into niggers.  I’m sorry, I know how that sounds these days, but that’s how it is, and maybe, even though it sounds like a contradiction, that’s what converted me, when I realized that integration was 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 mean being niggers, I had nothing against them individually.  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 the other 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 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 a lot guys before Elvis too.  Roy 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 Roy 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 Roy 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 tribute to him when I was able to afford a new Buick 225, metallic blue with everything on it, loaded to the hilt, a truly beautiful car, light brown leather interior, tan, I was proud of it, and one night as I was coming out of a parking lot in downtown Denver, the black attendant came out of his booth and said, “Is that a deuce and a quarter?  Mighty fine.  Mighty fine.  I sure wish I had me one of those.”  That tickled me.  I had to tell everybody I knew about that.  The reason I thought of it just now was that it had a great stereo system, the best I ever had in a car, and that Bob Wills tribute by Merle Haggard really sounded great on it.

     I hired two black men 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 Roy 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 little 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.  On a personal level, I liked both of them.

     Tell me something, though:  how can there be a Black Rodeo Cowboy Association?  That’s discrimination, isn’t it?  Roy never had a good answer for that one.  Something about making up for historical injustices, I think he said, but he sort of mumbled it and quickly changed the subject, so I don’t think his heart was in that 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 really that important to me.  I was just trying to get his goat.  Make trouble for the fun of it.  The only thing that really pissed me off in a serious way was when he defended the race 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 would do that?  I did get pretty hot under the collar when he started talking about injustice that time, and there we were watching it right on TV, you could see it plain as day, niggers, and that’s what those particular people were, make no mistake, looting the stores and putting buildings on fire.

Clair (1967) Nashville

     The summer I met him I took this physics course at UT for liberal arts majors, or as some called it, physics for dummies.  But that’s a little unfair.  It was a good course for someone like me, gave me an appreciation for what real physics people do, what it is, and what I remember the most, what really impressed me, got me excited even, was the teacher saying that anything is possible.  A lot of things may be unlikely, very unlikely, but that’s not the same as impossible.  For example, you might could walk on air, just step out of a second floor window and not fall.  What he was trying to explain was theoretical physics, how people at that very moment were just thinking stuff up that might or might not be true, then testing it out, and when I told Roy that, he said he’d read once that certain biologists who work for the government draw these theoretical fish and then go look for them, and quite often, maybe more often than not, they find them.  A whole new fish no one had ever known about before.  Isn’t that wild?  And the same sort of thing happens in physics with matter and energy, they think up types that may or may not exist and how it might behave, often in very strange ways, apparently, ways that no one ever imagined before because it goes against what we thought, according to Newton, were the laws of nature. Quarks do that I think, or something like quarks, don’t just act weird but change their nature and how they behave, now get this, depending upon how you look at them, so you can see, or at least I can, how you might get from there to walking on air.  Besides, even if you don’t believe it, it sounds nice.  In my book, my philosophy of life, it’s never a bad thing to think about walking on air.

     Physics was not of course our main topic that summer, not even close, but when it was over, when September rolled around and I had to go back to Rice, I thought I’d never see him again.  We more or less lived together for a couple of weeks in August, maybe the whole month, can’t remember for sure now, but not only did I have to go back to school in Houston, he thought he might get drafted.  I was taking just that one summer course in Austin, mostly to get away from my parents, and he was working part time in a liquor store until the Army called, so everything was temporary.  And easy going.  Laid back.  We had very little pressure on us and lots of free time, but that’s all it seemed like to both of us.  A great situation for having a good time.  A lark.  A vacation almost.  I really liked him, and I know he liked me, but not enough to even think about changing our plans, so I just assumed I’d never see him again, and I was shocked, really floored, when he called me in the fall from Nashville, Tennessee and said he wanted me to come visit.  He’d pay for the plane ticket, and believe  you me, I felt flattered down to my toes.  Not only did I like him and want to see him, but that was by far the most money any guy had ever offered to spend on me.  With hindsight, of course, I can see he was just lonely and 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.  I know now that there was another girl in his life at the time, and she’d have left Austin to go there in a minute, but only if he made a commitment, or at least she’d be hoping he would, so even if she agreed to go with no strings attached, it would be like he was leading her on, and he knew that wasn’t the case with me.  It really wasn’t.  I won’t say I didn’t have romantic fantasies in the back of my mind.  Of course 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.  Not the truth, that’s for sure.  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 from her, 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.  Unthinkable.  Things were different back then.  I went with him on a road trip once to Knoxville, he had to be there for a week to call on professors at the U. of Tenn, and we ran into this guy who had the same job, selling textbooks, but for a much smaller company, and he was traveling all over the country from east to west.  We told him we were married and then agreed to meet up again in Nashville, but meanwhile Roy proposed, so when the guy got to Nashville, we had to confess and tell him we weren’t really married, but guess what!  We were going to be!  We already had it all planned.  Roy’s boss was going to be the best man, and he lived in Memphis, so that next weekend, we got married by a JP in Memphis, with the boss, the boss’s wife and our new friend the only guests.  I can’t remember his name, our new friend.  I never saw him again, but we exchanged letters and Christmas cards with him for a while.  Or I did, since I handled all that.  Last I heard he was married to a Canadian woman who already had five kids.

     So we got married in a JP’s living room, no parents, a fact we both regretted later, the no parents part, and I blame Roy.  I didn’t have to go along with it, but I never said no to him in those first years, and he had very 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 for all I know, 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, especially when you’re young, 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 the time I worshiped the ground he walked on, and that’s no exaggeration, he made a pass at one of my girl friends.  She never said a word, not when we were still married, but after the divorce, she thought it was okay to spill the beans.  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.”  The album.  That’s why he quit his job and dragged me to California, which is added proof of what an idiot he was, and a sleazy one to boot.  Slimy?  Why not?  Not for liking the Beatles, of course, but for claiming later that he’d never liked them that much, but it was “Sgt. Pepper,” I’m not lying on this one, that tilted the scale, not John Wesley Harding, as he claimed later.  Billy, his best friend, literally wore out his John Wesley Harding record, he played it so much.  Billy was an asshole too in his own way, a worse philanderer, or maybe just more successful, better with women, smarter, more character.  But back to “Sgt. Pepper.”  It made Roy antsy enough and ultimately gave him the courage 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 anything good about him, he wasn’t dumb enough to think we were hippies.  We were too old, or too smart, or a little of both.  Not by much in regard to age, a year or so, but we 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 else was going on and what he really wanted, if you can believe it, wasn’t all that fashionable at the time.  He wanted to write things that New Directions or the “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 notice.  At least not at first.  It was 1968.  How could you be in San Francisco in your twenties and not get swept up in hippiedom?

     What saved us was Billy T, who never forgot he was from West Texas and never tried to hide it.  I remember when Dylan’s “Self-Portrait” album came out, Billy and Roy listened to it over and over again, and I think they really liked it, but even more so because no one else did.  Roy’s favorite song on it was “Blue Moon,” because of 81/2, which he explained to Billy, who was polite about it, he liked Roy, but Billy never got Fellini.  That was one problem with him.  A very limited aesthetic.  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 also true, unless someone he looked up to, and, well, needed, thought it was cool.  Like Richard Brautigan.  Billy 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 Billy 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 later on, and they were mostly Johnny’s friends later, after the divorce, but I have to admit I liked him.

David C (1957-58) hometown

     I guess if he came up to me at some reunion, say, and stuck out his hand and said, “Hello Dave,” I’d be polite.  I wouldn’t refuse to shake his hand.  No point in that, but I’ll never forgive him for asking Debbie out 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 Debbie 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 nowadays, 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, Roy was with me, at a pawn shop on 10^th 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.  It really was going too far to wear it to school.  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 Roy 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.  It was like knowing about baseball players.  He couldn’t just like jazz 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 Roy, 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.

William (1968) Alice, Tx.

     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 Paul Gordon’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 Roy 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 Roy’s version.  But according to the weasel, it was an out and out assignment, and when Roy came in the morning after the match, the weasel asked him for the story, and Roy said he didn’t have it, didn’t go, so the shit hit the fan, the weasel complained to the editor, and the editor backed him up, basically saying that Roy was a liar, and Roy 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 Roy, that the only reason he got hired was that he was Paul Gordon’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, such as it is.  He’d go with me to check out something, and I’d fill him in on things from the past, the big murders and historic 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 just 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.  Roy 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 when I was a kid, 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 that time.  When he gets mad, there’s no telling what he’ll do, as he’s proved time and again.

Tony (1968) South Texas.

     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 Travis’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, cheap and 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, the houses and the wetbacks, 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 Travis, 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.      

     Roy 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 when I was his age.  Wish I had a nickel for every time my father was right.

     Roy 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 news for you, assholes, is how you get ahead, in case you haven’t noticed.  I liked Roy, 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 if 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 Roy 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.

     Roy 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.

Paul G (1978) SouthTexas

     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 my children 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 Tennessee, Nashville of all places, 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, Roy, 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 Tennessee, they came here, then Austin, then out to California, and finally to Colorado, 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.  Roy 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 Roy 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 were respectable enough.  The old couple across the street went to church.  The Greek family on one side had a beautiful garden, and on the other side, it’s a mother and daughter, both overweight, not beauties, but they seemed nice enough, friendly 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 in that place, 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 the kid would help keep them together even if he didn’t love her, and he didn’t, which I always knew.

     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 Clair 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.

William (1968) South Texas

     This ain’t exactly on him, but I’ll tell you if you want.  He was definitely interested in the whole story.  Two things got George in trouble in the late fifties.  One was the murder of Buddy Floyd, and the other was Eisenhower, just the fact of him being a Republican, although George still might have been okay if he hadn’t been so cocky.  What he didn’t admit to himself, why I say he was so cocky, was that he needed a Democrat to save him, to put a leash on the Feds.  This was a solid Democratic state then, but that only goes so far if the Feds decide to get you, especially if a Republican is in the White House, and the truth is, even the state Democrats were fed up by that time.  George had a falling out with Allen Shivers, which was not a good idea.  Let’s just say he thought that since he could guarantee a 100 percent of the vote, or even more, for whoever he wanted in Duval county, and on top of that, 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, took a blow from which he never fully recovered, and helped that woman get nominated for a Pulitzer.

     I’ve had my own problems.  It got so bad once I had to dry out in the state hospital, not a cure 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 this 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, or a poor relation, 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 had been to different places, here in this country and overseas both, they’d seen the world, 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 any work at any pay.  Those fellows couldn’t read or write or speak English, the new ones, so they just kept their heads down and did what the boss said.  And too, also left were the older people of those who’d left the county, 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 commissioners who rely on George for their livelihood and might even get a cut?  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 hated Mexicans like the Alamo happened yesterday.  Jake 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, and there’s a big difference between those two breeds.  By then all those rivals were 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 Paul Gordon told me once, something that happened to him when he was young, he’d 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, “Paul, I’m sure you mean well, but there’s just one thing you need to know about that topic, and it’s this:  if it ain’t your man in office, two years is too damn long.”  Homer said that taught him more about politics in two seconds 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, not even if you’re George.  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 one day 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, Mexican citizens, and both got caught and served time.  Still in prison, for all I know.  I hope so.  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 a contract out on him, on Jake, 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, while all that was going on at Jewel’s Drive-In, the two killers were 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, God knows why, but when Jake gets home, he finds out that 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 acquitted him in Waco, and he became a respected lawyer here, a good citizen, and he’s really not a bad guy.  The Floyd’s moved soon after, and we never heard from them again. 

Lewis (1985-95) Dallas

     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, he and I, 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 Johnny, I don’t think he has a name in the story, can’t determine what it is.  Father and daughter?  Married couple?  Lovers?  Rich old guy and nurse or keeper?  It’s a rundown train, going through the desert, full of local color.  I think he even threw in a blind accordion 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 Johnny gets the last room at the hotel near the train station.  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.  Johnny of course offers to give them his room.  He says he can sleep in the train station, but they laugh at him, at such over the top chivalry, and suggest that they all share the room.  What follows, always full of local color--Pancho Villa once stayed at the hotel, etcetera--is tension about whether or not Johnny 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.  Whatever her job is, she does it well.  She keeps him from drowning in his soup, wipes sherbet off his chin, that sort of thing.  She tells Johnny, as they are having drinks in the lobby after putting the old man to bed, that the two of them have been traveling around the world on trains, and all the old man wants to do these days is listen to her read while they ride, which 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 Roy’s story, beyond that one fact, her reading to him on trains, their life together is totally 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 Johnny?  Where’s he going and why?  None of that is addressed.  What happens is that Johnny screws her outside the room, standing up against a wall, and that’s it.  That’s the whole thing.  You see don’t you that Roy just wanted to live in a Paul Bowles world for a while, which is why 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.  Nor could he make us not care and yet care about them, which is always the trick, the sleight of hand of every good short story. Therefore, we couldn’t we 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 what he thought of as a romantic situation.  It reminds me of Antonioni at his worst.  All show and no go.  But at least Antonioni had a political agenda and all that existential stuff, even if it was pretentious.  I don’t know what Roy 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 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 19^th 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 Johnny and the old man are alone together, the woman in the shower before they go down to dinner, the old fart 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, basically calls her a whore, implies it, and 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, no matter what her motives are.  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, and jumped at the first thing that came along.  Had she lost a baby?  Been on drugs?  Suffered a tragic car wreck?  Maybe just a broken heart, or a bad marriage.  We don’t know.  We never find out.  And when they are finally alone, in the huge stone lobby of the hotel, the lobby Johnny 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 the old fart 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 cheers him up.  Johnny never tells her anything.  He hardly exists except as a voice, or at times an eye, with a 20^th 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 seems 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 from the fall and spent the rest of his long life in a VA hospital in Waco, Texas, doing little more for the next fifty years than draw fish, which he proudly showed off to the few visitors 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 Roy just had this thing about screwing married women, and the more under the nose of their husbands, the better.  And traveling 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, at least in Bowles.  Anything goes.  In a Bowles story anything at all might happen, it doesn’t have to make sense or be likely, especially things that speed up and dramatize what you are really after, what Bowles really likes, craves:  self-destruction.  Maybe the old blind man should have got up and put a bullet through Johnny’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, the one he never came back from.  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, but it’s a cheap thrill, without the emotional risk of real life.

Danny B (1975) Denver

I met Billy T during the famous Billy Joe Shaver visit to Roy’s house in Denver.  Billy Joe had just come out with When I Get My Wings, his first LP on a major label, Warners I think, and he thought it was going to make him a rock star.  It didn’t.  It sank like a rock, even though Dickie Betts played on it, was all over it, driving it, and he had Dylan’s old producer—Bob Johnson, was that his name?  Billy Joe has never lacked insider support, but neither of those things helped.  He’s a songwriter’s songwriter, but he can’t sing worth a lick 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, and which Billy Joe’s son had later, but that’s a whole other story.  Back to the mid-seventies.  The Warners album had just come out and he had high hopes, throwing money and pills around pretty freely.  Roy 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.  It seemed like a long visit at the time, but he only stayed a couple of days.  Maybe just one night, two at the most.  My mind was always altered chemically in those days, so I didn’t keep a close eye on the time, nor do I know what if anything in the way of pills I got from Billy Joe, but I do know he had a prescription from a Nashville doctor, “music doctors” is what they called them.  I had my own sources and preferences, crystal meth was my drug of choice at the time, and neither Billy nor Roy were heavy users of anything, so I think they indulged, took advantage of Billy Joe’s generosity with his pills, mostly just 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 Denver specifically because of Mike Burton, whose main claim to fame was one song everyone liked and Waylon Jennings almost recorded.  Guy Clark did record it, and so did a lot of other people.  It was a good song.  Mike was living at the time with Roy and Clair, and he’d known Billy Joe in Nashville, so he talked him into coming out to Denver when Brenda kicked him out of the house.

     As I said, those couple of days seemed to go 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—all through my late twenties and early thirties, the whole 1970’s, my skin glistened as if I bathed in Crisco.  Chalky white, then swathed in Seran wrap.  It felt that way too.  All that speed, of course, a 24-7 speed trip for God knows how long, and as soon as I quit that shit, tapered off was more like it, it went away.  It was sweat, I guess, but not exactly.  If you’d thrown me in a skillet, I wouldn’t have stuck, I’d have sizzled and turned out a nice golden brown.  I got tired of it eventually, no big life crisis, I just lost interest in being that way, but at the time I needed it.  And it was all I needed, a condition it brought on itself and that I liked.  I had no interest in sleep or sex or food, for ten years I’m saying, although Roy told me once, he was kidding, that he thought I had a crush on Billy.  I think he was kidding.  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 Billy 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 Billy as something special.  He was without question the best writer on the magazine they started, and he had a vision that I thought was going to make him famous.  He was unique, an original, one of a kind.  I couldn’t really place him, where he’d come from in the big scheme of things, which made him almost godlike to me, a mythological figure.  He was on the tall side, lean, a hawk-like face, hooked nose and high cheek bones, and although he claimed to be an American Indian, Choctaw I think, or at least part Indian, his skin was too light really to look the part, despite his face.  He looked more punk than anything, a Western punk, Richard Avedon, 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 Johnny confirmed that for me later.  Roy said Billy and Joanne lived a pretty conventional life, had two kids, boys, both got up every morning and took the kids to school, showed up for work at 8, put in a full day, picked up their kids from the day care center at five, cooked supper together, ate at the table together and then watched TV before going to bed.  Like everybody else but even more so by then, cause by then everybody else was eating schlock shit from Pizza Hut and eating it alone in bedrooms.  Retro conventional, they were, you might say, which if true could lead you to think that the Western punk thing, “outlaw,” which hadn’t become a cliché yet, was a sham, no different from an accountant, say, or a banker, dressing up like a Hell’s Angel on the weekend, a generational phenomenon, extremely common, 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. 

     Roy didn’t put Billy in that camp.  He thought of it more like two sides of a coin, neither one more real than the other.  He not only approved of Billy’s straight life style, he even lived a version of it himself.  Neither of them ever OD’d on anything, unless you count getting very very drunk, 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 had to clean house, buy groceries, renew driver’s licenses, get their cars inspected.  Compared to musicians and artists, of course, more writers tend to be conservative in that way.  Life style.  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, since the other way, a natural death from recklessness, being too slow, or just too unlikely to work because he wasn’t quite fucked up enough.  I don’t know.  That’s all speculation about Hunter Thompson.  What I’m getting around to, the point of all this rambling, is that I was hipper than Roy, which, from the perspective of imminent old age, or maybe just from my own particular and peculiar perspective, means more fucked up, more self-destructive.  But not Billy T.  I agree with Roy on the two sides of the same coin thing, about both of them and me, it wasn’t just dress up for any of us, but Billy’s wild side, his hip side, was a lot brighter than Roy’s, more interesting and well-developed, and than mine too.

Lewis (1985-95) Dallas

     A more successful story, also unpublished, was about the breakup of a marriage.  A couple in their mid-30’s, still living a mostly bohemian life, face off about how long that type of life could or should continue.  The setting is Austin, an old student ghetto gone even further to seed, and the guy is a singer songwriter who just wants to keep on doing what he’s always done, which is play small clubs, try to get somebody famous to record his songs, and put out totally ignored albums on independent labels.  The woman teaches music at the private school, and she has just announced to her husband that she isn’t going with him to LA that summer, heretofore a yearly event during which he would try to make connections and pitch his songs.  Instead, as we find out along the way, she plans to leave her husband for a doctor with a passion for classical music.  She’s classier in general than her husband, no question about it.  Her family is rich and has helped them financially over the years, especially after their child, now 7, was born.  So they have and have not lived poor.  They’ve taken gifts that helped them live a more middle-class lifestyle, bordering even on the upper middle class, and the opportunity for more had always been there.  Cars, appliances, even trips to Europe were accepted, but the singer songwriter, the aging bohemian musician, draws the line at working for his father-in-law.  There’s a duplicity, an hypocrisy about his position, of which he is well aware.  He knows that in certain ways he wants to have his cake and eat it too, but so far, although at times restless, he has managed to preserve enough integrity to not yet really want to rock the boat.

     The story is called “Two Fantasies,” a title that refers to the fact that the conversation between husband and wife soon turns to an exchange of fantasies, which they hope will express what they want and bring them in the end to an understanding that will save the marriage.  All it does, however, is make it even more clear that the situation between them is hopeless.  He wants to be the master of wealthy young women who have proved to be too independent.  He wants to literally whip them into shape in a sort of finishing school, and he’s convincing when he insists that discipline not sadism is the point.  Her fantasy has come to her as a dream about being the best violinist in the world, a result, she is absolutely certain of this, of screwing ape-like men.  The fantasies are clearly intended as a complementary set.  We’re to think that his fantasy suggests that he doesn’t want to grow up, a corollary to his songwriting occupation, and to her childish ambition to the be the best violinist in the world  He is, in contrast to her, according to Roy’s descriptions, both in regard to appearance and taste, ape-like, so maybe she’s saying she’s tried that, he’s living proof, but it failed, she’s not even the best violinist at her school, and now she’s ready to move on, give it up and find a more mature goal.  In contrast, he’s stubbornly sticking to his youthful guns.  He’s stubbornly immature, which leaves her with no choice but to move away in a different direction, in this case Switzerland, with a doctor who shares her interest in classical music.

     So the story works just fine on that level, thematically, and along the way he makes the most of his strong suit, local color through character.  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 has two pickups parked on the street with giant plastic termites on the roof.  An old friend who is still working on his PhD in folklore.  Actually, now that I think about it, I see nothing wrong with the story.      

James Y (1985-95) Dallas

     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 both of us.  For him it was writing.  For me it was designing furniture, and I’d make anything people would buy.  Or rather, I’d design it and have real craftsmen, all from Michoacan, make it.  I can do certain things, I’m not too 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, and 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, in that manner, 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, results.  That’s all we care about over here, the end not the means, and meanwhile life passes by unnoticed.

     Educationalists are the enablers in the academic world.  We’re cursed with educationalists here in the States because of that insane and wicked obsession with results.  People have made careers out of trying to figure out how to get students to like writing, the assumption being that liking something is essential to success.  Whole departments, whole buildings, have been devoted to that endeavor, which is a lost cause, sadly enough, and if the educationalists were aware of that fact, if they were totally cynical, as some are, and plowed ahead in order to get more grants and tenure, it would be nothing more than a con game.  As it is, they’re like diet gurus, or evangelical preachers, people who often believe their own bullshit, except that most writing teachers and researchers have no charisma, which makes the whole enterprise a depressing, unmitigated disaster that everyone hates, except maybe a few fools who think they’re actually accomplishing something. 

     Know what it takes to make a good class?  It’s quite simple, too simple for educationalists to understand or even want to understand.  All you need are teachers who know the subject and students who want to learn it.  That’s all.  No more and no less, which is something we all knew and took for granted until about a hundred years ago, then for some reason forgot.  Fire all the educationalists, I say.  They aren’t needed.

     All that should be taken for granted, especially at the college level, but it isn’t because everyone goes to college now.  Not to learn anything.  Heaven forbid.  They go to get qualified for jobs, and to get laid and meet future wives and husbands and business associates, not to learn anything, unless you count social skills.  I know it’s always been that way everywhere to some extent, even hallowed Cambridge and Oxford, but not to the extreme we encounter now in the community colleges and diploma mills, which is where people like Roy and I have to teach, not having the right degrees or any academic publications.  That’s fine, it’s a paycheck, and something might actually be teachable, even to students who are at best half-literate, who carry full course loads despite working at full time jobs, if only the fucking 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, be hated or boring in your own unique way.  I do it anyway, actually, even at the risk of getting fired, and I think Roy did too once he shed his initial idealism.  After a while, unless you’re a troublemaker, you learn how to handle the educationalists.  How to dodge and weave, flatter and appease.  Or not, and then 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.  Too much to heart.  Something always comes up before you actually starve to death or wind up on the street.  At least that’s been the case for us.

     My wife and I both went to SMU, which is where Roy and I taught freshman comp for a few years.  My wife was Highland Park money, and I was on scholarship, the athletic kind, 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 our house was a couple of blocks too close to downtown, not among the restored mansions, but where sirens and alley cats and gunshots made up the late night serenade, which after a while you get used to.  At the time I saw Roy the most, we’d only lived there a couple of years, having been imprisoned in the suburbs before that because of the schools, but then, thank God, 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, drink cheap red wine, listen to Robert Earl Keene and watch drug deals.

     The last time I saw Roy, 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.  I mean nowhere.  Seriously nowhere.  Not even close to west of Austin in the now toney foothills.  The subject of kids soon came up, since that’s why he was there, to see his daughter, who was teaching at a middle school in the middle of nowhere.  She and my son were amazingly similar in the way they started out.  Almost weirdly so.  Both were fluent in Spanish, both majored in economics, and both, get this, received full academic scholarships to the University of Chicago.  But that’s where they took different paths, once they got to Chicago.  My son went to graduate school at some hippie business school in Arizona, I think it’s famous in certain circles I know nothing about, and he wound up making tons of dough in Chile, something in finance I don’t really understand.  I’m very proud of him, of course.  Roy’s daughter, on the other hand, a few years younger than my son, went nuts while at Chicago, almost immediately, didn’t even finish her freshman year, and dropped out.  Officially crazy, or as we used to say, certifiably, the diagnosis was mild schizophrenia, Roy said, treatable, but of course she was resisting any treatment and meanwhile not doing well at supporting herself.  No jail.  No serious drug habit.  Just always broke and unable to keep a job or get along with anybody for very long, and the main question in Roy’s mind was how tough to be about it, which is linked to the question of whether he should think of his daughter as crazy or just no good, ‘sorry’ as my mother would have said, or, if both, crazy and no good, then how much of each? 

     I couldn’t help him, at least not from experience.  I didn’t know what to say, since both of my kids are more ambitious and successful than I ever was.  I suppose I could have said he was lucky to be able to envy me, you know, for having successful kids, as opposed to what I had to deal with, envying my kids, and I wouldn’t have been totally joking, but I hadn’t had that much to drink.  Too candid.  Too easy to take the wrong way, like I was being a smart ass.  Instead I said, “Look at us, Roy.  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.  We didn’t want that kind of success, so we were fine.”  My kids did want it, so they’re fine, but of course that doesn’t really quite work for his daughter, assuming she really was crazy.

Larry C (1971) Billings, Montana

     He and Clair 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 Roy, he probably remembered most of it his whole life.  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 about a year old, so we had to make a pallet for them on the floor not more than a few feet from our bed and Eli’s crib, no other place for it, 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 we got on the Crow reservation.  Tasted like shit of course, but it did the trick, and for nothing.  You can’t even call it a cheap drunk.  Better.  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 of 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 a Crow or with one, so we were perfectly legal, but that didn’t make it smart, especially since it was already the middle of the afternoon by the time we got started.  The idea was to get a couple of birds for supper that night, and we found them right away, they aren’t any sport at all to find or to kill, they just run off a few feet and stop, sometimes even look back at you, as if to say, ‘Hey, shoot me!’  That part was easy, but instead of turning back, since we still had some daylight left, we decided to explore the reservation a little, which was not to be, since nearly right off the bat Roy’s pickup got high-centered in a creek bed.  He was really pissed off, and I knew even then, though I didn’t admit it, that he had good reason to be.  In the first place, Dennis was lost.  Lost on his own reservation!  And in the second place, Dennis had told Roy that he could make it across that dry creek, egged him on.  Of course Roy didn’t have to do it, no one held a gun to his head, but Dennis got out of the pickup as we approached the creek and waved him on, kept waving him on, right up to the minute he got it stuck.  Needless to say, we’d been a lot better off without our trusty Indian guide.

     We didn’t know what to do exactly because Dennis had no idea where we were, how far away any place was, nothing.  Dumb as a post that boy was, and Roy didn’t say anything, but his face told the story.  He was thinking that Dennis was one worthless piece of Indian shit, 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 Roy wasn’t too keen on leaving the pickup.  Everything he and Clair owned was in it, locked up in the shell on the back, but neither Dennis nor I could guarantee that it would be safe.  Crows sometimes figure that if they find something, it belongs to them.  Kind of like that with most Indians in my experience, so I took the flashlight and headed out just me, leaving them to guard the pickup, and it wasn’t too long after dark that I found my friend’s house, had a good supper and went to bed.  There wasn’t another car, you see, my buddy was gone to town in it, just his wife was there at the house, and there was no way to go get Roy and Dennis, or go anywhere else, and besides, I was pretty darn worn out from all that walking. 

     Roy took it pretty well, in the long run.  He didn’t throw a punch or try to spit or piss on me.  He wanted an explanation, naturally, but he didn’t get really mad, blow up or anything.  At least not for long.  He didn’t stay pissed off, it didn’t seem like.

     What they did was finally start walking, after it got dark and with no flashlight.  Luckily it was a clear night and the moon was up, or, Roy says, they might have wandered off the road and have been walking all night, or never been seen or heard from again, which is going a little too far.  The Crow reservation ain’t no fucking Amazon.  As it was, though, they could barely see the wheel tracks that essentially were the road, and I’m glad I was asleep when they got in because I think Roy needed the time and some sleep to cool off.  Mary, my buddy’s wife, told me he didn’t seem too happy with me when she told him I was crashed in the bedroom, and like any Crow you’ll ever meet, she didn’t figure it was up to her to cheer him up.  She gave them supper, though, government peas and round steak.  But no, he didn’t go to bed happy that night, I’m sure, and he was worried about Clair too, not knowing where we were.  No one had a phone, but I knew Suzy 1 would calm her down if she got too upset.  Suzy was used to it, me not coming home.  She said she told Clair that we were probably out hunting two-legged deer.  Suzy’s not a Crow, but she learned that expression from the Crow women, and I guess Clair figured that was better than being hurt or in jail.   

     We got the truck out the next morning with a chain and my buddy’s car, and later that afternoon we cooked the sage hens back at the trailer, but they were too gamy.  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 got close to the library in Billings, my bowels relaxed, and I practically had 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 in those days to know what you had immediately, and I never stopped to think anything through.  Something caught my eye, I’d snap it, and that’s how it should be, has to be, like riding a big elephant or a wave, a whale or a woman’s thighs, 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 Roy ever trusted himself enough to do that.  I don’t want to be too harsh.  I liked Roy and published a couple of his stories, and not from pity or for friendship.  They were okay, those stories, but still, you could tell he hadn’t climbed up on that big bull.  It wasn’t life or death for him, like it was for me.

Clair (1972) Heading West Yet Again

     We made our last big move in December of ’72, from Austin to Denver, and Roy, it turned out, had hepatitis the whole time.  I flew with our daughter from Dallas, my parents offered to pay for it, and Roy drove all the way by himself, both of us knowing he was sick as a dog but having no idea what it was, how serious.  His mother made the diagnosis 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 any alcohol and do as little physically as possible, go to bed and stay there if you can, which suited Roy, the second part, resting, right down to the ground, bad news and good news, Roy said, couldn’t drink being the bad, but mostly good because 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 Roy 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, don’t get me wrong, 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 not so much the direct confrontations, I never minded a fight, even with my mother, but that her position made me realize how different Roy and I were from everybody else around there, especially after where we’d lived and what we’d done for the past few years.  I think Roy 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 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 a few quail or rabbits.  I think he could have stayed and loved it.  Neither Mother nor 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 too, in general I mean.  Not bored exactly.  I had plenty to do.  Molly was still a baby, and I helped get in the honey, sold all of it myself 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, which took half an hour just to get there.  But that sort of thing goes only so far.  Even if I could have read all day, and some days I could, that has its limits too if you don’t have anyone to talk to, friends I mean.  Friends on the same level , and Roy, at least back in those days, up to a point, was usually plenty.  Because of him, most of the time I didn’t really need friends.  He and I could always talk about anything.  We never really shut up the whole time we were married, neither of us, but I’d still get 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.  They don’t understand things like that.  It got to where we couldn’t finish a meal without a fight, and we only all ate together on holidays, the fight usually brought on by a casual hick remark from some stupid relative of mine, my sister for example, that always set me off, got me agitated, and meanwhile, Johnny was no help.  He just sat there, red in the face, looking like he wanted to disappear.  No.  That’s not completely fair.  If I appealed to him, he’d back me up, and one time he almost got into a fight over me.  A real one, fists and all.  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, I was never one to just leave something like that out on the table, and even though Johnny knew I could take care of myself, and usually did, 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, but he went too far, and Roy 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.  Might have been one of the few times in my life when I used real tact, on account of I didn’t want Roy to lose face either.  That took a little tightrope walking, but I really didn’t want a fist fight right there at the dinner table, blood on the silverware on my account.  I did appreciate it, though.  I’m old-fashioned enough to have felt pretty good about having my honor defended.

     People like that were everywhere down there, probably still are, 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, 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 4^th of July picnic, and it was a good time be in Austin, except for being dirt poor.  Roy 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 big in that regard.  The right to work law, also known as how to create a class of indentured servants.  Yeah, things were cheaper in Austin, but not by that much.  Not enough to make up for the shit wages.  We’d been pretty well off in California.  Comfortable, and we weren’t in the mood to go backwards and live that poor anymore.  All we could afford, though, was this terrible place, a tiny little house, although, to be truthful, I didn’t mind it all that much at the time.  Ain’t youth grand?  What you’ll put up with, but looking back on it, I wonder how I ever lived there, especially before we got the roaches under control.  Roy said when he rented the place, unfurnished, before Molly 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.  A magic circle.  Then 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 in the floor, maybe we did eventually, but at first we tried to shut the bathroom door, that was easier, and it got even creepier.  The rat scratched on the door. I kid you not.  And the little bastard wouldn’t stop scratching until Roy 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?

     Roy 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.”  And he said, “Oh.”  As if that hadn’t occurred to him, but you know what?  I think he sometimes made himself dense on purpose, as an excuse for seeing how far he could push people, what he could get away with, how much he could shock and then feign surprise. 

     They’d come to see us off, my parents.  We were moving because we just couldn’t take the low wages.  Our model was for me to stay home with Molly and for Roy to do just brainless shit he could forget the minute he left work, so that he could write or make films or paint or whatever it was he wanted to do, but we’d have really suffered doing that in Austin.  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, Johnny 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 the best one for this case.  He was reading Faulkner at the time.  “The Bear” in particular I think.  It’s always like that with him.  Inspired by some art he sees or reads to do something crazy.  He says the final straw that time was having to make a camping reservation at Sears.  Whoever heard of that, he wanted to know.  It was like a crime against nature, having to reserve a campsite.  Bottom line:  too many people in California.  Got to get back to Texas, the wide open spaces, where (we forgot to remember), unless you’re working for your father-in-law, they don’t pay worth a shit.

     We should never have left California.  Roy liked his job, and we both liked the house and the neighborhood.  It scared my sister, but that’s no news flash.  Everything more than a hundred miles from downtown Alice, Texas scares my sister.  Anyway, it never gets hot enough in the Bay Area, not even in Oakland, but that was the only gripe we had with it.  You could 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, and our palates weren’t so educated back then, and we were used to a certain type of Texas Mexican food that’s really impossible to find outside of Texas, even now.  It’s beautiful out there though, it really is, gorgeous the year around, even during the rainy winter months, and Johnny 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.  Those were a hoot, but we also saw Papillion there, a great movie I thought, and Two Lane Blacktop, and a Cassavettes potboiler called Machine Gun McCain.  I think Peter Faulk was in that one too. 

     I’ve got a funny story about that movie theater.  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 that 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 the scene started, and you have to remember, things were really informal at movies in those days.  You didn’t think anything about walking in right in 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 Molly with us.  Usually we had the balcony almost all to ourselves, and the plan was for me to breast feed her there and get her to sleep before our movie started, the one we’d come to see.  And that’s exactly how it happened, the plan worked to perfection, but we hadn’t counted on that silent sex scene and the packed balcony.  She was so loud it felt like the people downstairs in the front row could hear her sucking my tit, and Johnny and I both wanted nothing more in the world but to disappear.  Molly I’m sure spoiled that scene for everyone in the balcony that night, maybe everyone in the whole theater.  I thought, how long is this fucking scene going to last?  Molly actually fell asleep before it was over, that’s how long.

     But despite all that, all the good stuff, we never felt at home.  The light is so beautiful out there, so bright yet so gentle, but it seemed foreign.  We were homesick, me too, not just Roy, I admit it, but then home let us down, or we couldn’t deal with it, so we retreated as far as Denver, where Roy’s parents had moved to, which could have been out of the frying pan into the fire, but they were relatively benign, I mean as far as meddling is concerned.  His mother was always a thorn in my side, but that’s another story for later. 

     Of all times for Roy to get hepatitis.  On the way up we stopped in Dallas, not just for me to catch the plane, but for all of his relatives to see Molly.  Show off the new baby, or 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.  One of those ‘glabu-gobolins’ or whatever they’re called.  I knew he was really sick, but we just thought it was just the flu, at the most.

     It’s about a 12 or 14 hour drive from Dallas to Denver, 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 the Oklahoma panhandle when traffic backed up and forced him to a full stop in a precarious position.  Lucky for him, he was able to move ahead just in time to pull it back up.  The roads were bad all across the plains, the fields all white with snow, but he didn’t have any more trouble.  The blizzard and nightfall had come in on him about the same time, just in time for him to stop in Amarillo, and he said the next morning on his way to breakfast, when he turned the corner of the building his room was in, the north wind nearly knocked him down.  Literally, nearly knocked him flat like a block of ice, a block of ice traveling at a high speed.  He ate three or four spoonfuls of chili for breakfast, and that was all he ate the whole trip.  Just wasn’t hungry.  That’s what amazed him most about the hepatitis, how he lost his appetite, cause that had never happened to him 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.  He forced himself to eat the two or three spoonfuls.  The only time in his life, he said, that he ever 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 money when he got lucky.  The time was up for when he couldn’t do anything strenuous, and he’d been going down to the hiring hall for construction laborers, every morning at seven a.m. when they opened, the deal being that they’d sign you up for the union if a job came in and no union members were there in the hall at the time.  He went down there every day for over a week, got there at seven sharp, and stayed until they closed at noon, but no luck, and we were just about down to our last borrowed dime.  We’d already agreed to ask my parents to wire us a little, spread our begging around a little, but then the next day he didn’t get home until about eight that 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 in his hand, grinning from ear to ear, and boy did we celebrate!  Cashed the check at the grocery store, bought some beer and ordered a pizza.  It was smooth sailing after that.  He worked a lot and made good money at construction.

Bob R (1975) Denver

     It was a minimalist house when they bought it, to be kind.  Stucco, a flat tar paper roof, right next door to a crazy woman with two wild kids who kept stealing Roy’s chickens.  The Easter chickens that wouldn’t die, he called them, so he built a cage for them.  God knows what those neighbor kids wanted the chickens for.  Just to have, I guess.  Roy said he cornered them 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 hair looked cut with a butcher knife.  Clothes out of Huck Finn, and their mother would yell at them and take Roy’s side whenever he complained about anything, but nothing ever came of complaining.  Nothing permanent.

     But about their house.  The good part of a flat roof is that it’s easy to fix.  Just patch it right and it’s good as new.  Besides that roof, in the vintage oddities department I mean, they had an old gas stove in the living room for heat (vintage to say the least, no doubt totally forbidden everywhere these days), 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, and I’m not being sarcastic.  They really did.  To top it off, icing on the cake, Clair found an almost no interest poor people’s loan that enabled them to paint the stucco exterior (they tried to imitate the faded orange walls they’d seen in Italy, but without much success), put a fence around the whole lot, new tile over the old linoleum in the kitchen, carpet in the cellar.  All in all, they got it looking real nice.

     I’m hardly in a position to pass judgment, but 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, and then ask, so why the hell did you fuck it up?  I don’t think we ever really know why, whether it’s ourselves or other people we’re looking at, but people do it every day, don’t they?  Sometimes I wonder if it’s just plain boredom, not some wild devil that gets hold of you, some innate restless devil.  Both maybe?  You could say that one creates the necessary condition for the other, that boredom is fallow ground for wild devils.  Idleness and the devil’s workshop, yes, okay, but I keep thinking about that boredom.  What is it exactly?  Why do some people, like Roy, like me too, seem to be more vulnerable to it than others?  Or are we simply really bad at dealing with it?  Lazy?  Impulsive?  I think that’s it, our relative incompetence at dealing with it, because I think we all have it in some measure.  None of us is ever satisfied, not as long as we have a heartbeat.  Always wanting and grasping, the human condition, which is of course what all those eastern religions are all about.  Getting rid of all of that.  Suppressing or repressing it so that you do nothing and like it.  Add a lotus position and bliss follows.  Wanting for nothing because you want nothing.

     Back to the house.  The nerve center was the big country kitchen.  Color posters of country music singers covered most of one wall, an easy chair underneath them, a TV on the opposite wall facing the chair.  In between, along the wall to the right of the chair, a kitchen table, and along the left wall the sink, lots of cabinets and counter space, and a gas stove.  The refrigerator was next to the arm chair, between it and the door out to the screen porch.  All in all, that was a great room, spacious but cozy.  For a while they had a stand up cut out of Dolly Parton kind of in the center of it, like an official greeter

     Their little girl was about five at the time, cute as a button, blond curls, and they took her to meet Dolly Parton on the little girl’s birthday.  Backstage at where Dolly was performing, a small club downtown.  They took some pictures of Dolly holding her.  Meant the world to that little girl.  Clair tells me that Molly worshiped Dolly Parton for the longest time after that. 

     By then, they already didn’t need me.  They’d met a lot of people on their own, the insiders of the music scene in Denver, or at least country music scene, the record company types, record store owners, DJ’s.  Roy worked construction all day and then went out to a honky-tonk at night to make and keep up his contacts, maybe sell an ad, get an interview.  He’d be up til all hours, and then be at work the next morning at eight sharp.  Young men we were in those days.  Couldn’t do that now, nor even imagine why I’d want to.

     I was never a big country music fan, or a fan of any other 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, which in my case is Denver and South Dakota.  I’m a homeboy, or have a mighty big streak of that in me.  Even more specifically, at least for a while, my scenes were the drinking establishments up and down East Colfax in Denver.  The Bluebird was my main hangout, all my buddies there semi-alcoholics, semi-working stiffs, semi-petty crooks.  I was quite a drinker myself back then.  I remember Roy 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,” Roy said.  “Like magic.  The whole contents of the glass, presto.”  It’s the same principle as deep-throating, I think, although, I hasten to add, I never tried that.  But what you do is take it in one gulp, you inhale it, and the whole thing just slides down your throat.  Nothing to it when you know how.

Carolyn O. (1965) Austin

     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, not exactly a dorm but we still had rules, and I met him through one of the girls who lived there and helped out N.A. Brookshire, a guy in a wheelchair who had to be pushed everywhere.  I don’t know what he had exactly, but N.A. was real little and all shriveled up except for his head.  He was also real smart.  Made all A’s, wrote poetry, and he had a whole squad of people who pushed him around campus and did things for him.  Some he paid, some volunteered, and there were still others who really liked him and happened to be around a lot when he needed something.  Roy was in that last category.  More like a friend.  Roy and his friends would always be around N.A. in the cafeteria, N.A.’s table, Roy called it, with N.A. holding court, and they’d talk about books and movies and such like as that.  They were all smart, a lot smarter than me.  I’m sure Roy just thought I was attractive.  I mean, looking back on it, we didn’t really 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, which is same as lying to my way of thinking.  I also wasn’t on the pill, so we had to be really 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 and feeling pretty good.  I don’t remember the sex itself, just the general impression that while it was pleasant, made me feel good, there was nothing super special about it.  Wouldn’t I remember if it had been?  Now that I’ve had more experience and know what it feels like when you can’t keep your hands off of somebody, I think so.

     The one exception to feeling good about it is when he practically raped me.  That really hurt me.  Not physically.  Hurt my feelings.  He was drunker than I’d ever seen him, and he banged on the door at two am loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood.  I was living by then in an apartment with three 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 officially.  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 it 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.  That choice of pronouns really burned my ass, but in any case, no matter what he said, I was too mad and hurt for him to keep up defending himself for long.  Not if he ever wanted to see me again.  He finally apologized, and meant it, started to see how serious things were, but I’m still not sure he ever really understood why it bothered me so much.  The apology helped a little, even if he didn’t really know quite how much he’d hurt me, and in the end, I finally forgave him.  Or got over it enough to act like I did, which I sometimes regret.  I think deep down he thought he had the right to do what he did, and that I should have understood, which really should have done it, put an end to us, 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 Roy, 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 classes started and Roy 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.  Most people thought it was ugly as sin, purple and yellow I think, with big warts all over it, like modern art, but I just liked it.  And that was my excuse for going to see him, to make sure he got it, 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.

N.A.B (1965) Austin

     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 irresistible 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, have it in their face, 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, like a dog with four broken legs, 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, if it’s expressed in the right way, admire its courage.

     I think Roy was the only person, certainly the only one I knew, who’d read Kerouac and taken enthusiasm from it 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 is 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 perfect image, flawless clarity, given to us in a clear and cool light.  Roy 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 Roy literally, which may be part of why I didn’t care that his views were so different, opposed really, from mine.  Given my condition, I had to be a little manipulative and ready to compromise to get anywhere at all.  I got the writers’ group idea from the The Fugitives, the group of poets at Vanderbilt, and the plan was for us to get a faculty sponsor and meet every week.  People would read and discuss original work they brought in.  A simple plan, and what happened, how it turned out, was better than anything either of us had imagined.  Just one issue for me, which I learned to live with.  Few if any showed up who knew anything or cared about modern poetry, or any of my heroes.  They were more Roy’s kind of writers.  Heart on sleeve.  First person confessionals, testimonials.  Easy morality tales.  Simple craftsmen were not appreciated, or if they were, it was all in the service of some simple-minded morality tale.  I’ll have to admit that Roy, even though most of what he read was embarrassing, stuck his neck out more than anyone, and if for no other reason than that, was a cut above those others.  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 do have a soft spot.

     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.  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 in the poetry, it shouldn’t be needed, and in my case, as a dedicated disciple of the new critics, it was my duty to scorn any reference to intent as totally irrelevant.  But I liked Roy.  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 Billy T, and Johnny 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.  Billy was a natural prose writer.  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 theme he was comfortable with, how we should view the Old West.  The relationship, you might say, of the old ways, both in myth and in reality, to how we live now.  Not a bad theme, I know, and really enough, if handled properly, to last anyone a lifetime.  Even enough to make you a great writer, but Billy refused to not be didactic about it, and that held him back.  You can’t not be ironic in the 20^th Century and expect anyone to take you seriously.  He didn’t always do this, but at worst, his stuff read like a sermon; at best, and I hate to say this, we expected more, they were above average local color.  Local color with an edge.

     But that’s what Roy and Billy T 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, its own meaning, which is not so much different, if at all, from Eliot’s point about the objective correlative.  I guess all poets understand that.  All poets, good and bad, and that was Roy’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.

Richard P (1965) hometown, Austin

     I can thank Roy for showing me in no uncertain terms what a traitor is.  That’s what he was, a traitor.  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 Jeff serve niggers.  Yes.  I still say nigger when I feel like it, which is most of the time, so get used to it, 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 a couple of beers), 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, some such shit, when nigger comes more natural, and I think, honest to God, 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 that’s true.  I know because I’ve got a good one about me and Roy almost getting a good 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.  Before it’s over, they’re going to start banning both Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer  in schools, not on account of Nigger Jim, but cause of how it damages the kids tender little brains.  And hunting stories?  Forget it.  I even got a dirty look once for a fishing story, but anyway, enough of that, I haven’t seen Roy since that night in front of Jeff’s Bar, and that’s fine with me.  He’s one of them.  And worse, because he has to be a convert.  A traitor in other words, to who he really 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 Roy 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 how I was even back then in college.  The main thing I have to worry about these days 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, been here thirty years.

     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.  Just some piled up dirt to be honest, but we called it a fox hole, and 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 Roy’s idea, something to do with a blue notepad we both had.  I forget the details.  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 Roy; 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 having some style, 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.  That’s always been my philosophy.

     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, what a little brat I could be.  Mellowed out some now, I guess, since I’m not proud of how I acted the last time Johnny 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.  Roy knew that as well as I did, smart as a whip, I’ll give him that, but he was also kind of a fool.  He was.  I’m not so mellow as to take that back.  He’d pick players he liked, just because he liked something about them, usually weird stuff that had nothing to do with how good they were.  I mean, they weren’t even pictures, just white cards with writing on them, but Solly Hemus, a shortstop who was just an average hitter at best, Roy picked him because he thought he had a cool name.  Same with Preacher Roe, a pitcher who had a strikeout that took up half the damn card.  To pick him is like trying to get the Old Maid.  And of course on top of that 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 seven game series, shut me out in fact, 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, the home run on his card 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.

Wally (1960) hometown

     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.  And they was ok kids, 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 men 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.  Boy did they have some moves.  Played quick.  Never choked.  Sometimes the kids would come up and watch.  I wasn’t too bad a player 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 liked cleaning toilets.  I told Mr. Levy once he ought to get a nigger to do it, but he said he might in that case look for another racker, so I did it.  He’d been fair to me, but being what he is, you know what I mean, I suspect he means business.

Lewis (1985-95) Dallas

     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 Roy’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 in to 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, not even the non-commercial publishers who didn’t care about the ambiguous ending, and that was the turning point of Johnny’s story as a writer.  He was unable in his second attempt to even match the first, never mind surpass it.  He had his chance and 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.  Maybe it was doomed from the start, a bad idea.  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 Roy 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 and he happens to take a picture of her when she’s in the middle of an orgasm.  Nothing particularly smart or unique about her.  Anyone can have an orgasm and all women look beautiful in the middle of one.  A familiar type, then, 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, the similarities are obvious, and that counts against them.  But no, it’s really the mix that counts, you might say, both the characters and the plot, how it all fits together.  Okay.  What does it, in fact, add up to in the end?  Quite simple.  A young man finds out that his mentor has feet of clay and that there’s nothing he can do about it, nothing he can do to bring justice to the world when powerful forces stand in his way.

     Familiar but not bad, something people have always been and always will be writing about, but again, it’s the delivery, not the intent, that counts, and the follow through, or follow up.  It was Roy’s idea to have as the protagonist in his second novel the same young man at middle age.  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, but now Roy in his maturity would have a more ambivalent attitude towards him, 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, i.e., getting bogged down in anti-Walmart crap better suited for op-ed pages.  Then there’s what happens between the lovers.  Isn’t he by definition fucking himself if she’s the female him?  Or would it be some sort of sick incest?  And oh yes, his best friend, the lover’s brother, our hero’s opposite, a family man, a professional, civic-minded.  Come to think of it, the best friend may the villain, not the old politician.  Victim as villain, interesting, and perhaps another 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.  Guess that’s not old age any more.  Hope not.  Don’t know about that third one, though, whether he got anywhere at all with it.  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, and then never managed to deliver the goods.  Not unlike me I guess, which is probably what sustained our friendship for as long as it lasted.  Or one thing.

Jessie D (1966) Austin       

     My first husband was Roy’s best friend at the time, Doug, and I’m not going to get into my relationship with Doug, don’t worry, far too complicated, too private, whatever, but I’ll tell you what I know, what I can remember, about Roy and Doug.  I knew N.A. and Billy 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 like to sing for people, but I finally faced the fact that I was just an average singer.  I imitate cover songs well.  I was pretty damn good at some of them, but that 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 Roy 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, Daniel, 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 rages, when I finally saw it close up, it practically scared the pants off me.  I never actually saw it in Roy.  Just heard about it, but I’m here to tell you, you haven’t seen a dark mood until you’ve seen Doug’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 all the talk there ever might be, from him and everybody else.

     They liked Dylan.  That’s where we all came together culturally.  Beyond that, I could appreciate the old blues guys, like Roy and Doug did, but I much preferred Rondstadt and Baez and Buffy St. Marie, pretty voices, preferred them even to Dylan, and certainly to 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, even from him.  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, more like those old blues guys and Dylan, 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.

Molly (1974-     )Southern California

     He put all of his writing and links to his films on a web page, and I looked at it, more than once I looked at it, but I can’t honestly say I got into any of it.  I don’t think I understand it, nor can I say I ever really knew him.  Or understood him, I guess is what I’m trying to say.  I was six years old when he left, and he’s said he felt guilty about it, died feeling guilty I guess, but that doesn’t help me any does it?  Not that I blame him for not wanting to live with my mother, who would, but that doesn’t help either.  I don’t mean to sound harsh.  I even think we loved each other before it was over, in a way, and I did see him a lot those last few years, but you have to understand, he just didn’t care about family, and that’s all I care about, a gap that’s kinda hard to bridge.  He didn’t even like my kids, his own grandkids, and really only liked me and my husband when he’d been drinking.  And maybe not my husband much even then.

     Yes, he sent money regularly when I was a kid, which was good since we were always broke.  More than broke.  Mother always had a job, often a good one, but no matter how much she made, she spent more.  I know she was always calling him and asking him to send it early, or telling him I needed this or that, essentially begging for us.  It’s one reason I never wanted to talk to him.  She’d just pester me to ask him for money.  She’d even make me answer the phone, in case it was a bill collector.  I had a little rap for them, all rehearsed, which, to be honest, I kind of enjoyed doing.  Always the actress, the drama queen, you know.  “Oh, I’m sorry, my mother can’t come to the phone right now, doctor’s orders, no stress, bad for her heart.”  Or, “We can’t pay you because we’ll lose the house if we don’t make the mortgage payment this month.  I’m sure you understand, sir.  We’d be out on the street.”  With my little girl voice, I tried to break their hearts, and believe it or not, it often worked.  Or at least I got what I wanted, which was all that counted.

     Dad actually gave me a lot of money when I was in college.  I was nearby then, and we’d meet up once a month or so.  That’s also when we got to know each other.  He bought my first car for me, a clunker but I sure appreciated it.  Paid my airfare to go home a couple of times, when Mother was really sick.  That sort of thing.  We’d have lunch, sometimes even drinks and dinner.  It was fun, showing off you might say, for my dad.  I’d tell him about my friends, even my boyfriends, which usually embarrassed him.  I guess I get that from my mother, saying anything that pops into my head, and often it’s definitely TMI.  My husband has talked to me about that.  I embarrass him too, and I know he’s right, but I can’t help it, not when I really get going, or any time really, if you want the truth.  Some sort of “what’s appropriate” thing is missing in me, like it was with Mom.

     I kind of take after her about my money too, or did until I had kids.  I’m better now, but you want to hear about him, don’t you?  I kept wanting him to rescue me, not just from Mother, from everything, which I finally realized.  I guess that’s why I unburdened myself so much to him every time I saw him.  Poor pitiful me.  Help me, Daddy.  And he’d talk, give me advice, most of it good, and give me money, but he had a limit, and what it was, what he wouldn’t talk about, was basically his whole life.  You’ll probably get less about him out of me than anybody.  He never let me in, ever, and yes, I tried.  I wasn’t always talking about myself, believe it or not.  I knew he wasn’t really a teacher or a landlord , even though that’s how he made his living.  I know his writing and films were all the really cared about, including me.  No, I’m not bitter about that.  Just the way he was.  And he had his whole day, every day, arranged around one or the other of those activities, and woe to anyone who tried to get him to change, including me.  Especially me, since I was just a kid.  Yes, actually I did see him once after he left and before college.  I was eleven, and it was a total disaster.  No wonder he never told anyone.  Might even have willed himself to forget it.  Mom forced me on him.  She wanted to go to some summer retreat, workshop or something, new age or photography, maybe both, that sort of thing, something she just had to do or she’d die, her life would be ruined without it, and there might have been a boyfriend involved as well, come to think of it.  I don’t know, but she called Daddy from the airport, said it was all arranged with the airline, and that I’d be stranded if he didn’t meet me.  He could have called her bluff, I know, said no, but you didn’t know my mother.  It’s so much easier to give in, she counts on that, and I know now that he also had a conscience, so it was a done deal once she made that phone call.  I swear to God, though, we hardly said two words to each other the whole week.  I was both petrified and put out.  I didn’t know this man.  I didn’t want to leave my friends.  He had no summer classes, so he had plenty of time, but he had to “work,” code for writing and making those films, so I couldn’t watch TV in the mornings because it disturbed him.  And I hated his food.  No white bread and this weird cheese that stank like old socks.  He didn’t like to go out to eat, but he finally bought me a bag of Cheetos and white bread and peanut butter, and some shredded wheat, which I love to this day, but he grumbled about me wanting the peanut butter smooth and insisiting on grape jelly.  And we did order pizza once, but we had to get two because he wouldn’t eat salami and Canadian bacon.  Told me I was going to go into nitrate shock, whatever that is.  Anyway, here’s the funny part.  We went to this party given by these weird friends of his, who had cow and goat skulls all over their house.  She was nice, though, Joanne, really sweet to me, and they had a boy about my age and we watched TV while all the grown-ups got drunk.  That was nothing new to me, but at one point the weird but nice lady, Joanne, decided she wanted to dress me up, so she combed my hair a different way and put make-up on me, lots of lipstick, and took me into the  party to show me off.  I really liked it.  I was having a ball, the center of attention, just my thing.  Dad was sitting in a chair, only about half-conscious by that time, a silly grin on his face, nodding to everything the weird lady said, not caring that she’d made up his eleven year old daughter to look like a whore.  Course, like I said, I didn’t either, I was loving it, but then she went too far and decided I needed different earrings, only she needed to pierce my ears first, and she was going to do it herself, right then and there.  Thank God there was at least one sober woman there, or at least one with some sense, and she talked Joanne out of it.  It wasn’t easy, but they both knew my mother, and Mom and Joanne were still friends, so drunk as she was, she finally saw the light.

     That couple, the weird friends, Billy and Joanne, even though most of his friends weren’t like that, are still a good example of why he and I don’t really have anything to talk about, except my life, and his too, if he would.  You know, his real life, not the writing and stuff.  How he felt about my mother and me.  His parents and so on.  Anyway, we went to see Billy and Joanne once when I was in college, and they served this goat stew, made mostly from intestines I think, and I swear to God, just the smell of it made me gag.  I came close, too close to actually throwing up, and of course the whole time Joanne raved about it, tried to force it on me, but thank God my father was sober that day and managed to smooth it over before I had to eat it.  I know he really liked them, but I’m sorry, they were strange people.  No two ways about it.  Of course he knew they were different, but he was close to them, could really talk to them about things, you know, books and movies and music, stuff they cared about and that I didn’t really have a clue about, and that’s what he lived for.  I know it is.  Doing his writing, making those movies, and talking to his friends about all that.  Billy had an old record player that he had to wind up, I’m not making this up, and he used mesquite thorns for needles, which actually worked pretty well on the records he had.  All 78’s, and the only name I remember, since Dad talked about him a lot, is Jimmie Rodgers.  Didn’t matter to them how hot it was that day.  Dad and Billy would sit outside at a picnic table, drink shots of tequila, and listen to Jimmie Rodgers on that wind up record player.  That was living for my dad.

Barry L. (1960-62, 1985-95) hometown, Dallas

     He told people that he lived off teaching and the duplexes, and mostly he did, but he didn’t have to.  His aunt had money, some of which, a good chunk, found its way to his mother and then to him.  That’s how he paid for his travelling, and he sent a lot to his kid, who got it all when he died.  He could have not worked, but he didn’t want to touch the principal, I guess for his kid’s sake, although he told me once he needed the structure.  He knew that, he said, from the summers when he didn’t travel.  Said it depressed him, the idleness, and since he never made any money from his artistic endeavors, he felt like he was wasting his time.  “No foundation,” he said.  “Even though I know it’s bullshit, I can’t shake that bourgeous notion that money is the only thing of real value, that gives value, and that I’m wasting my time if I don’t get paid, that I need to think of everything in regard to how it pays off.”  We had that in common, I think.  I don’t mean I’m artistic at all, but I never bought into the money making thing whole hog or I wouldn’t have become a family attorney.  I’d be out chasing ambulances.  Actually, when I was younger, I did get involved in a few class action suits, all good causes, and a f ew paid off handsomely, but nothing really that set me up for life.  Of course, these days there’s all different levels of that.  I read somewhere not long ago that ten million is the new million, that you need at least that to go first class all the time with no worries, and it’s probably more now, but even so, lifestyles are so diverse these days, that even what’s first class is debateable.  I could have retired a long time ago if just getting away was my goal, but I don’t care about that.  I like what I do, and I probably won’t retire until I have to.  My body will retire me, and I think Roy was the same way, about the teaching and the houses both.  No matter how much he grumbled about it, he needed those things to keep him grounded.

     I knew Billy because I defended him that time he got into trouble over the gun.  Nothing ever came of it.  Juries in Texas don’t care if you have a gun, at least not if you haven’t shot any nice people with it.  He had no criminal record.  All a waste of time, and I never even sent him a bill.  So yeah, I knew Billy and went to a few parties over there, but the person Johnny and I really had in common was Skip, the guy who got shot by a jealous husband.  “Got himself shot,” is how Roy always put it.  It was important to him to think that Skip brought it on himself, and I’m afraid I can’t really argue with that.  I warned him, and he should have known anyway.  Did know, the facts.  I was involved in legal aid in those days, and the woman he got killed over did some filing work for us, came to parties, around a lot and never with her husband, but I knew who he was, a drug dealer with a used car lot on the side, and very clearly not someone you want to mess with.  He might have done it himself.  I don’t know.  My guess is that the police knew but didn’t have enough evidence, or just didn’t want to prosecute for their own reasons.  As long as there’s not a lot of publicity, they can pretty much pick and choose, even on murder cases, and Skip just wasn’t important enough for the story to have any legs, though the paper did play it up for a few days, since he was after all a reporter.  Then it just went away.  No one with clout cared enough to pursue it, so it died the way it started:  Reporter Slain in Apartment Parking Lot.  He’d just gotten out of his car.  Two bullets to the chest at close range with a handgun.  Probably dead when he hit the ground.

     I had no reason to dislike Skip, but he was too cocky for his own good, no doubt about that.  I think Roy, though, had reasons of his own for looking at what happened the way he did, for actually disliking Skip.  There was a girl, ain’t there always, and I’m not sure that she and Skip were ever even an item, but I got the impression that Roy thought they ganged up on him after he and girl broke up.  You know how young people are.  They take what’s cool or not very seriously.  It’s easy to feel threatened, and I think there were rifts about literature, especially Salinger, and schools, colleges, which one was the most “artsy” and had fewer Greeks, and then there was Skip’s decision to join the army.  This was before Viet Nam, so he wound up in Europe, worked on Stars and Stripes, and there’s no question that Roy was jealous of all that, adventure and experiences he didn’t have, but he might have had a point too.  Skip was a journalist, not Johnny’s kind of writer at all.  Craft versus art is how Roy saw it as a kid, though he mellowed out on that some, the two being irreconcilable, later in life.

     The last time Roy saw Skip was in Oakland, a couple of years before he died, and since Roy had to some extent lived through the hippie thing, by that time he didn’t feel outclassed in regard to experiences, or not as.  Skip had a blonde with him who I met, she made it to Dallas with him, but she was soon out of the picture.  He’d been working for a small paper in the Bay Area.  I know most reporters bounce around a lot, but I think Skip did even more than most.  Hard to get along with is my guess.  Totally self-absorbed, blind to hurting or even annoying other people, or maybe he liked it.  Anyway, I’m sure it helped make him a good reporter.  By accident they wound up in this lesbian bar in Oakland, a hole in the wall, and Roy’s ex, a talker from all I’ve heard, chatted up the bartender, so there was no tension after the first few minutes.  Roy said he couldn’t take his eyes off the blonde, a looker, but not the least bit interesting.  So again:  Roy is jealous, but the point is made about Skip.  A player, a bottom line sort of guy, a blonde on his arm, so not a totally serious person.

     Sour grapes?  Hard not to think so, and hard for me at least to see the value of his art.  Some of it’s okay, but no, I can’t see devoting your whole life to it, the way he did.  All else was a distraction.  Yes, he wanted to do the right thing.  No, he didn’t want to squander his money.  But he hurried through all that, or ignored it as much as he could, to get to the other.  The thing is, though, he’s not Faulkner.  Not even what’s his name, the best seller guy.  Still, it’s good we have people around like Roy.  I’m sure of that, and not because of what they might produce.  That too, but when it came right down to it, Johnny was not a practical man.  He would talk about how things felt, which he meant literally, the texture of an experience.  It could be any time.  Past, present or future.  Any place or person, all were the same, had the same potential.  That’s what he lived for, that texture, and I think people like that not only create it but actually add to it themselves.  I know I like being around them, and I ask you, so what if he never got it on paper?

Doug Q (1962-1995)

     Yeah, I knew Skip, but I didn’t know Carol A, just who she was, so I don’t know anything about the three of them.  He never talked about it, even when we’d been drinking, which may say something.  I don’t know.  I was never one to poke my nose into that sort of thing.

     Let’s start with the first time we heard Bob Dylan, not just on account of how important he was in our lives, but also because it happened during the time we were probably the closest as friends, saw eye to eye on most things, saw each other every day.  It was in Brackenridge Hall, which I think is still there.  At that time they had these big desks in every room by the windows, a divider six or eight inches high in the middle.  A great setup.  Roommates could sit there like bookends and study and look out the window.  Neither side was better than the other.  We were sitting at one of those desks, in his room I think, listening to the radio, and it must have been winter because the windows were closed.  It was before they air-conditioned the dorms.  Actually, Moore-Hill, the jock dorm, was probably air-conditioned, but Brackenridge wasn’t.  I was dirt poor in those days.  Roy wasn’t, but he never had a lot more money than I did.  It was just that he could always ask his dad for some if he got in a tight spot, but I couldn’t.  The only person I could rely on was me.  Always been that way and might have been the main difference between us, and the source of whatever friction we had.  It’s why we never roomed together.  He was no spendthrift, don’t get me wrong, but he was always pushing his budget some, living right on the edge of it, and that made me nervous.  If I got broke before payday, that was it.  I just had to wait.

     You couldn’t drink or have women in the dorms in those days.  We never had women up there, that was far too risky, but we’d sneak a bottle up nearly every weekend, usually in a laundry bag full of clothes.  The cheapest vodka we could find, which was about $2.99 a fifth.  Mixed it with 7-Up.  Got a bag of ice from the 7-11, put it in a styrofoam cooler.  Used paper cups.  Never even came close to getting caught.  We didn’t party.  We’d just sit there at opposite ends of that desk and drink and talk and listen to the radio.  Usually, the university station, KUT, which played jazz and folk music most of the time.  It was the early sixties, so folk music was big.  Roy didn’t listen to the radio much and neither of us could afford to buy records, but from high school we knew about two old black guys, Jimmy Reed and Josh White.  WRR in Dallas had a blues show we could get late in the evening, and they’d play those two a lot, so they became popular with all the high school kids.  We even had Jimmy Reed play at one of the proms.  I’m not saying crap like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary weren’t popular too.  Don’t want to make the high school scene we had sound cooler than it was, but starting with Jimmy Reed and Josh White, Roy and I had an appreciation for those old blues guys, and I followed up on it some, more than he did.  Learned from the radio and from looking for discount records about Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins and Leadbelly.  I never did hear about that record people from the east talk about, the one they say started the folk music craze.  Down around Dallas/Ft. Worth and Austin, the blues was just around, on the radio and in clubs and in the record stores.  You could find it if you looked.

     When Dylan came on we both shut up and just looked at each other.  To be honest, we thought it was some old blues guy, we confessed that later, but at the time you could have heard a pin drop.  “Don’t Think Twice.”  We’d heard about Dylan, but hadn’t heard even one song from the albums, so when the dj said it was Bob Dylan, when we knew this guy was a young white dude just like us, it was hard to believe.  In a good way.  It was like magic, one of those moments you never forget, charmed, and I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and I think the reason for it is that even though he sounded like an old blues guy, even before the song was over, we both kind of knew it wasn’t.  I mean, we knew it was not like any old blues guy we’d ever heard before.  Too easy to understand the lyrics, for one thing, and they were too clever.  Real, as real as any blues we’d ever heard, but with that added element.  Clever.  And I should probably add, pretty too, and in a unique way.  We’d never heard a melody like that before.

     Later on it was Highway 61 and Bringing It All Back Home, and later still, John Wesley Harding.  When I think of Roy and Dylan, and Billy too, it’s those albums that come to mind.  We never had any problem with the electric thing.  In fact we saw him in Austin when he was touring with The Band and would do a first set acoustic and then come back out after an intermission with The Band.  People booed him in Austin like in the other places.  A lot walked out.  But see, we weren’t coming to Dylan from folk music.  We were coming to him from the blues, and from Lightin’ Hopkins and Jimmy Reed kind of blues, so why should we care if he plugged in his guitar?  And as far as country goes, we weren’t coming to him from Appalachia, the way a lot of those eastern dudes were.  It was honky tonk music we liked, which was more the like the blues.  Hank Williams, of course, but also Lefty Frizzell and Earnest Tubb.  And I can’t forget Jack Elliott.  Ramblin’ Jack.  Can’t put him anywhere, can you?  His own thing, but more honky tonk than mountain I think.  Billy T is the one who found him for us.  He always managed to buy records somehow, even though he never had any more money to throw around than the rest of us.  Music was always high on Billy’s list, even before we started that magazine.

     Yeah, I liked a few of Roy’s stories, but he could come up with some stinkers too.  I don’t know, I guess if I had to compare him with anybody, it would be Ramblin’ Jack.  Not that he’s as talented as Jack Elliott, but he’s just as unconcerned about pleasing anybody, about being cool.  I don’t see why else so many of his stories would have no point, and why he didn’t mind sounding sappy, or why he’d write about things nobody else cared about.  Like right in the middle of all that hippie shit, he’d want to talk about baseball or horse racing, two things nobody knew or cared about at the time.  Or Russian novelists!  I still don’t get the Russian novelists thing.  Faulkner, yes.  The Snopes are hilarious and As I Lay Dying may be the best book ever written, but Dostoyevski?  And I guess it bothered me a little that he didn’t know much about cars but really liked musicals.  Get him drunk and he could go on forever about South Pacific, and then there was Billie Holiday.  I’m not saying I ever thought he was queer.  Sorry.  Gay.  I never thought he was that, but sometimes what he wanted to talk about could be a little embarrassing.

     Unlike Billy, though, and Porter too, I didn’t mind the Frank Sinatra angle.  I’m not a Sinatra fan, bores me to tears, but I mean that whole urban sophistication thing.  I’ve had suits made for me in Hong Kong.  I cook a lot.  I drive a European sports car.  I’m no hick, nor a diehard hippie, nor whatever you’d call Billy.  Now there was a guy who didn’t much believe in expanding his horizons.  Billy I mean.  I never saw him drink anything except iced tea.  He didn’t care where it came from or what it had in it, as long as it was iced tea.  Didn’t even have to have ice in it.  Never really saw him eat much of anything except french fries and salt.  Yeah, he’d pour salt on the back of his hand and lick it off, even when he wasn’t drinking tequila.  Judging though from the kinds of places they went to, he liked Mexican food and chicken fried steak and that was about it.  Or maybe that’s what Joanne liked, and Billy just went to please her.  Same way about music.  Dylan and Dylan type guys was about all that interested him.  He probably thought of Jimmie Rodgers as being like Dylan.  And Hank Williams.  No jazz.  No classical.  Maybe some rock and roll but not much.  I liked a lot more rock and roll than either he or Roy did.  Bob Seger.  I even liked Meatloaf for a while.  Billy did like Jim Morrison and the Rolling Stones.  They fit into his world view, the outlaw thing.  But I guess Dylan was the biggest thing, for all of us.  That’s why I’ll never forget that first time we heard him.  And it was the perfect song, know what I mean?  “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”

  

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