Rick Perry, that wiley old coyote shooter, Bible thumper and latter-day seccessionist, came home to Texas from South Carolina (where seccession is a religion and Rick's faith obviously was found lacking) this week after his presidential aspirations turned into a well-financed Texas-sized flop. Apparently South Carolinia Republicans (and Iowa Republicans and New Hampshire Republicans) prefer Latter-Day Saint Romney or nefarious Newt or stealthy Santorum to the stumbling, bumbling son of Texas. I guess there's one thing Texans can say about him: "Well he's no George W. Bush now is he?" Nope. He's not George W. Bush. W. came home a winner - no smarter than when he went away, that was too much to hope for, but a winner nonetheless. Rick Perry -- The Not George Bush. Who wants to be Not George W. Bush? It's a role Gov. Oops should get used to. As a friend of mine said, "Now Rick can come back to Texas and stare at his racist rock."
My wife told me the other day that I should not say things like, "I hate Texas." She said I partucularly should not say them in front of real Texas-loving Texans (like some of the people we know here). She reminded me that we had just spent a couple of days enjoying a friend's farm near Tarpley, Texas, and that the friend is one of those real Texans. She said I should say, "I am not a Texan" or maybe, "I will never be a Texan" and let it go at that. And while those things are true, after a decade here I am not a Texan and never will be because I really don't like Texas. But in deference to her I will not say I hate it. The truth is that she doesn't like it any more than I do, but she is nicer about it. We need to leave. We have known that for a long time. And plans were in place.
In fact, we figured we would be back in New Mexico by now. We were moving forward. The Austin house was on the market. It was ready for viewing (and some people came to see it). We had begun to pack. But things happened the way things do. My wife's mother had a heart valve replaced along with some unanticipated bypass surgery and never recovered. Sometimes she seemed a little better, but mostly she seemed worse day after day. Pneumonia, kidney failure, liver problems, circulation problems. She spent two months in intensive care in Kansas, a few days at a rehab center a long ambulance ride away in Nebraska and, after a long ambulance ride back to Kansas, one night in a hospice center where she died. My wife spent much of that time with her mother and was there when she drew her final quiet breath. It was a difficult time for Dauna, her siblings, her family, all of us. When we returned to Texas in October, grief and exhaustion filled our days and left little time or energy to prepare for the future - or for moving. We took the house off the market. We needed a place to call home and the way we see it our house and Texas are two different things. We settled in.
October became November became Thanksgiving became Christmas became the New Year. Even the happiest days were freighted with sadness of one sort or another. Living near tears is an exhausting thing. We decided a trip west might help. We put it off at the last minute. A little later we decided again to take a long drive west, but a blizzard between here and where we were going forced us to cancel our plans and sit tight (at least that is what we told ourselves). Entropy threatened to complicate inertia. Dauna still hesitated; I insisted. I reserved a motel room in Lubbock. We drove west on a Wednesday morning and arrived in Santa Fe two days - and 698.9 miles - later. That is where our old friends are and where our life should be. It helped to visit. We felt better when we drove 509.2 miles to Tucson to visit our son Nick and meet his girlfriend a few days after that. A couple of days later we left Tucson and spent two days driving 900 miles to Austin. We covered lots of bare and beautiful western miles. It felt good.
So we remain in Texas for now. And of course it is impossible to drive far enough or fast enough to outrun grief. But we have traveled 2,100 miles toward recovering the exhilarating momentum that carried us through last summer. We are not sure exactly how far we have to go to get there and get away from here. But we are back on the road again, 2,100 miles farther along than we were 10 days ago. That is a good sign.
Dauna visits Dauna's in Harper, TX.
"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish...." James Joyce, Ulysses
Fruitcake was part of what Christmas tasted like when I was a boy. Dense, dark, full of nuts and candied fruit. To be more specific: Claxton fruitcake was part of what Christmas tasted like. We lived in North Carolina. The fruitcake came from Claxton, Georgia and I loved anything that came from anyplace else, even Georgia. My fruitcake dreams turned Georgia into an exotic place and I'd wanted to run to exotic places for as long as I could remember. I had maps and plans. But when I grew up and the time came to run I hesitated. Perhaps it was fear of going. Perhaps it was unfinished family business (there was lots of that and some remains as unfinished as I finally left it). Perhaps it was fear of coming back. Perhaps I knew that once I began to run I would never stop again (and I haven't, not really). Whatever the reason I delayed my departure until staying was unbearable and leaving was preferable to suicide or some slower more painful form of death. Finally I could stay no longer. By then I was a man in my 20s and hoping for someplace more exotic than Georgia, but Atlanta was the only place I could run to from the middle of North Carolina with $80 in cash, no job, a briefcase full of clean underwear and a bus ticket. Georgia never lived up to my exotic fruitcake dreams - and I never went to Claxton - but I stayed anyway. Until a few years later when I left for someplace else - this time without so much hesitation. And after that for someplace else - with even less hesitation. And after that - with none. And. And. And. And here I am, for now anyway (there is always someplace else), with another birthday a week behind me, another Christmas a week ahead and a couple of Claxton fruitcakes chilling in the refrigerator. I like to eat it it sliced thin accompanied by a good cup of coffee. But I no longer have fruitcake dreams of exotic places (I've been to some and Georgia isn't one). And the fruitcakes no longer taste like part of Christmas. I lost my taste for that long ago. But I've never quit eating fruitcake at this time of year. Dark, dense, crammed full of nuts and candied fruit. I particularly enjoy the bright red candied cherries. Nowadays it tastes a little like the dimming past and a few bright dreams of the future, but mostly it tastes like life right now and I eat it without hesitation, pause, and prepare to move on.
Recently there was a family emergency and we spent a week at a motel beside Interstate-70 in Salina, KS. The motel was nice enough. The desk clerk said musician turned geezer-rocker Kenny Loggins once stayed there, ordered out for food from IHOP (he explained it was a hassle for a star like him to be recognized in places like IHOP) then stiffed the delivery guy; she said the funny part was the next morning when Loggins became angry because no one recognized him at the motel's complimentary breakfast buffet and stormed back up to his room. Kenny Loggins slept here. So what. But it was an okay room. We had a suite with two rooms, a wet bar, a microwave and a refrigerator. There was also a large hot tub in the living room and we used it at night to soak away some of the stresses of hospitals and heart surgery and its tentative and increasingly troubling aftermath. The motel was near one of those freeway interchanges devoted to the care and feeding of trucks and truck drivers. Big rigs rolled off and on I-70 day and night; some refueled and moved on; others parked and idled in the lots nearby. The smell of diesel fuel was in the air 24 hours a day. A couple of times we crossed the highway to eat fried food at a diner called Grandma Max's. The portions were huge, the service friendly, the salad bar a little limp, the smell of diesel and hot grease pervasive. I felt right at home.
Once upon a time I was a graduate student at a famous fiction writing workshop. Actually I was at the MOST FAMOUS FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP. It was a place where the language-gifted and the word-cursed - at least those of us who were chosen to be there - gathered as they had for decades to take each other seriously and eye each other warily. We were happy to be there. But we were not particularly comfortable because it was also a place where the truly gifted and the truly cursed separated themselves from the merely talented and the not-quite cursed enough. We were hungry, predatory and stalked the classrooms, the parties and the visiting authors' hotel rooms seeking sex (well, if we had to), money (everybody needed some), an agent (everybody wanted one of those) and, best of all, publication (better than sex and money combined). It didn't pay to get comfortable. Jayne Anne Phillips loomed, Michael Cunningham demured, Bill Kinsella posed, Sandra Cisneros was still a girl from Chicago not a Latina from San Antonio, T.C Boyle and Jane Smiley were leaving and Louise Erdrich hadn't arrived yet. I flourished. I published. I once angrily threatened to throw the director of the program out of his office window when the money was handed out and I felt I didn't get my fair share. It was that kind of place. Eventually I received what I figured I deserved (good), then I had a Michener Fellowship when I graduated (even better). The director was glad to see me go. He congratulated me on my Michener Fellowship, shook my hand and said he hoped never to have to read anything I wrote again - ever. But that is how it was supposed to be. It was a heady time, a fairytale time.
But the rest of the time the money was tight because that's how it is for graduate students no matter how many fellowships they win. So there were odd jobs, summer jobs, part-time jobs. I ended up as a cook at the Hawkeye Truck Stop out on Interstate 80 in Coralville, IA. Back then it was the largest truck stop in Iowa.
Officially I was a breakfast cook - eggs over easy (over hard, scrambled, poached) with bacon or sausage (or both) and hashbrowns, perhaps an omelet (for someone to ruin with ketchup), French toast, pancakes - but truckers live and eat on highway time. Sometimes they really need a Reuben sandwich at 6 a.m. (do you know what dripping sauerkraut does to a sizzling grill top in the middle of the breakfast rush?) or a roast beef sandwich with instant mashed potatoes and gravy. Or a pork chop. Or fried chicken. Whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, I cooked it. The whole menu all the time. Trucker time.
The jukebox played.
Crystal Gayle, Eddie Rabbit, The Oakridge Boys, Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rogers, Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, even The Eagles ("New Kid in Town," "Lyin' Eyes" and "Tequila Sunrise" were big favorites). There were some "trucker" hits by Red Sovine: "Teddy Bear" with its maudlin lyrics, do-gooder truckers, crippled kid and CB radios; "Phantom 309" with its equally maudlin lyrics and heroic trucker named Big Joe who "lost control, went into a skid/ and gave his life to save that buncha kids." C.W. McCall's "Convoy," CB radios and truckers bullying their way across the U.S.A. ("Well we shot the line/and we went for broke/with a thousand screamin' trucks/and eleven long haired friends of Jesus/in a chartreuse microbus"). Cheating women, tequila sunrises, heroic truckers, kids and CB radios. They loved 'em all.
And they had a particular soft spot for one by Tanya Tucker called "Delta Dawn." I don't know what the truckers liked about it (romance? misery? mystery? insanity? the fact that a 14-year-old girl sang it?) but my favorite verse is: "She's forty-one and her daddy still calls her 'baby'/All the folks around Brownsville say she's crazy/'Cause she walks around town with a suitcase in her hand/Looking for a mysterious dark-haired man." I've seen overgrown truck-driving men pause and grow misty-eyed over a plate of eggs and hashbrowns while listening to Tanya sing that song. I never really understood why. But why does any song bring anyone to tears? I cooked. I listened. I watched. I inhaled the smell of diesel fuel and the greasy stink of the kitchen, and ingested a jukebox full of bad country music laced with mysteriously magical words that could reduce a grown man to tears.
Over at the Most Famous Fiction Writing Workshop people kept trying to make words do magical things too. And most of us would have given just about anything to write something good enough to make a grown man almost cry. But we weren't very successful at it most of the time. Looking back, we could have learned something from Delta Dawn.
Delta Dawn was a truckstop regular. She wasn't 41 and it's unlikely anyone ever called her baby. But she loved country music and she knew things. That was clear when she pushed through the front door, waddled through the restaurant and wriggled into a booth by the window. I could see her out there from my spot in the kitchen.
Delta Dawn was her CB "handle." It wasn't her real name. But CB handles were part of trucker reality and folklore so Delta Dawn had one. "Teddy Bear" is the crippled kid's CB handle in the Red Sovine weeper ("The old CB was blaring away on channel one-nine/When there came a little boy's voice on the radio line./And he said, 'Breaker, one-nine, is anyone there?/ Come on back, truckers, and talk to Teddy Bear./Well, I keyed the mike and I said, 'Well, you got it,Teddy Bear.'/And the little boy's voice came back on the air./'Preciate the break. Who we got on that end?'/I told him my handle, and then he began"). And "Convoy" begins with CB talk ("Yeah, breaker one nine/This here's the Rubber Duck/You got a copy on me Pig Pen, c'mon/Uh, yeah, Ten-Four Pig Pen, fer sure, fer sure/By golly it's clean clear to Flag Town, c'mon/Yeah, its a big Ten-Four there Pig Pen/Yeah, we definitely got the front door, good buddy/Mercy sakes alive, looks like we've got us a convoy"). In a world of Pig Pens, Rubber Ducks and Teddy Bears, she was Delta Dawn. Real names weren't necessary.
Delta Dawn wasn't going to win any beauty contests. She was plain and fat. She had a round face, plump cheeks and short, curly hair, too-blue eye shadow and too-red (or too-pink or too-whatever) lipstick. She was short, thick-thighed, wore tight jeans. It was the late 1970s and she favored tube tops with her jeans. Tube tops made skinny girls look gift wrapped. Delta Dawn wasn't one of those. Her tube tops rode low across her breasts, cut into the flab under her arms and stretched tightly across her back. Looking at Delta Dawn's bare shouldners and back was like gazing across several acres of pale, drought-stricken ground in the harshest light of day; from the front she looked like all of those acres had gathered themselves into a shivering heap that might collapse at any moment. None of that seemed to bother her in the slightest.
And it didn't bother the truckers either. Maybe they didn't know it when they heard her voice on the CB radio. Or maybe they didn't care. "Breaker, breaker. Delta Dawn here. Any truckers out there? Come on." They knew she was talking to them. They responded. They negotiated. They met her at the rest areas east or west of town. Then they paid Delta Dawn to do what she did, did it, and drove away. Her full-time job was cleaning motel rooms, but truckers were her business and business was steady along that stretch of I-80. Out there she was Delta Dawn - all mystery, misery, romance and country music - and nothing else mattered. She took breaks at the truckstop.
Delta Dawn understood the magic of language, the power of country music, the romance of the road, the loneliness that could make a truck driver weep - and how to use a CB radio. She knew what her customers liked and she understood how to sell it. It was the story of her life.
Meanwhile, over at the Most Famous Fiction Writing Workshop, we were all trying to figure out how to do the same thing. We stumbled and mumbled, raged and ranted, courted and seduced and stirred up a huge cloud of words, but mostly there was no magic in them. No response. No negotiation. No money. We desperately wanted someone to pay us to do what we did, just like Delta Dawn. We couldn't admit it, but we were whores without a clue, a clientele or a CB radio.
We should have hired Delta Dawn to come over to the university and teach us how it was done. But we didn't. Instead, we pretended not to care. It was a heady time, a fairytale time. We were chosen. And we knew that was how it was supposed to be. We all believed the Most Famous Fiction Writing Workshop was the true story of our lives. And Delta Dawn wasn't part of it.
I've never found Texas, Texans or Texas-ness very amusing. So in my increasingly desperate search for something to take my mind off being stuck here, I bought a boat a few years ago. It is a classic 1966 O'Day Daysailer with teak trim. I bought it with high hopes and the best of intentions. I have a passion for wind and water and I have sailed a great deal in my life. But this is my first boat. I've never had it in the water.
I bought it from an old guy whose bald head still showed the scars of recent brain surgery intended to help calm some of his Parkinson's symptoms. His wife told me the surgery helped, but it would never help enough for him to sail again. Selling the boat wasn't easy for him. He clearly loved it and had sailed it everywhere he ever lived, from the bay at Corpus Christi when the boat was new, to lakes in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, then back here to the lakes around Austin when it was old, having it hauled by truck to the places his job took him. He lived a well-traveled life and it is a well-traveled boat. And the trip was nearly over. I could see it in his face. He was sad to sell it.
I understand his sadness. It's not easy for me to sell it either and I've never sailed it anywhere. The older a man gets the more things he is forced to abandon by health and circumstance in the full knowledge that he will never do them again. I could see it in him. And it's happening to me already and I am nowhere near the age of the man who sold be the boat. Still, I know there are trails I won't hike again, mountaintops I won't set foot on again, places I won't visit again, people I won't see again. And waters I won't sail again. The trails, mountains, places, lakes, oceans, and many of the people are still there, but I am beginning to fade and "again" has begun to lose its meaning.
It is hot in Texas. It has been 100+ degrees for more than 54 days here this summer. There is a drought. The lakes are low. I still am not amused. I am parched from the long effort of being here all these years. Soon I am going back to New Mexico to live. Again. For the last time. Before the meaning is lost completely.
The boat is for sale in the driveway.
"The key to success is taking shit."
When I saw that quote from the new movie Horrible Bosses, I couldn't help but think about the people who still work where I used to. It's been more than a year since I lost my job and things are working out just fine for me now. I don't have to take shit (or write weekly reports about it) any longer. That's good. But the best part is that my wife and I are free to go. We will be leaving Texas soon.
Before we go, I feel like I should do something nice for the people where I used to work -- send them a sympathy card, recommend a good therapist, a good lawyer, send them a gift membership to the Hemlock Society, a hazmat suit for those days when things are especially toxic, something appropriate, practical, useful. Not the people I worked for. They have what they deserve: my utter contempt and undying enmity. But I miss my former co-workers sometimes. For the most part I feel sorry for them simply because they're still there and I'm out here (and life is so much better out here). And I want to remember them fondly, but I can't. I still have hurt feelings over the fact that more than a year has passed and almost no one has bothered to give me a call, drop me an email, see how things are going, have a drink, dinner, a chat, express their churchy compassion or offer to keep me in their prayers (not even in Korean), anything.
These are people with whom I did more than work for seven years. We lived our jobs day and night (and weekends and holidays). I was in their houses and they were in mine. We discussed work the way co-workers do; we fretted, fussed, gossiped, politicked, cursed our fate and our bosses. We also discussed art, books, photography, history, sports, gardening, food, music, movies, everything, the way friends do. We seemed to be more than co-workers. Much more.
But we weren't. It turns out we were not friends, not really, not ever. I am mostly disappointed in myself for not seeing them sooner for what they were and no doubt always will be: jobbists, fakes, scaredy-cats, hypocrites, shit-takers. We all know that in the tiny hothouse world of work, anybody's work, lies are so commonplace that real deceit is difficult to see and even more difficult to measure. It can catch you by surprise. I can swear to that. And maybe if it catches any of them (SURPRISE!), they can give me a call, leave a message, drop me an email, and maybe I will do something nice for them - like I said before: sympathy, therapy, a lawyer, hemlock, whatever they need most - but I probably won't. I wouldn't want them to get the wrong idea and think I actually care. Besides, what's done is done and they've already done it - or not
As for me, it's taken time and therapy but I've quit beating myself up about it. Now I am saying goodbye to all that. As I said, soon I will be moving on. Our house is for sale. In a few months Mr. and Mrs. UnTexan are going back to New Mexico where we belong. But I'm not through with Texas yet.
