The UnTexan

DIESEL FUEL, TRUCKSTOP FOOD, DELTA DAWN AND THE MOST FAMOUS FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP

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.

THE TEA PARTY, THE N-WORD AND TIPTOEING THROUGH THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

They read the Constitution on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday the same way Ann Coulter colors her hair -- making sure the dark roots don't show.

They left out the part about how one slave = three-fifths of a man (it was called the "three-fifths compromise," an article of the Constitution, not and amendment), which gave slave-holding southerners congressional clout by allowing them to count people they didn't really consider to be people, three-fifths or otherwise, as people for the purposes of setting up congressional districts. Slaves were property, which white southerners argued well into the 20th century was the reason they couldn't treat black people as their equals (or even as human beings) long after the 13th amendment set them free. The other amendment House members chose not to read ordered that slaves, even those who escaped to free states, had to be returned to their rightful owners. Both were crucial to the ratification of the Constitution. Leave out slavery? As we begin to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, no time seems more approapriate for including it.

The tea partiers (and their brethren the "birther" blowhards) -- who were meant to be appeased by the reading -- apparently like their United States uncomplicated by the messy realities of history (and the messiness of the Constitution). And my guess is that African Americans are a reality lots of tea partiers wish would retreat quietly back across the tracks to what southerners routinely called (offensive word warning) "niggertown" when I was growing up. It is a word I always hated, a place I always wanted to go as a child, but I was raised around white people who remained terrified of those freed three-fifths people living over there 100 years after the Civil War. Happily my southern family has become more integrated and colorful in recent years, becoming more and more a family I could be proud to belong to (I fled the south and the family a long time ago. I had my reasons but interestingly not one relative has asked me why. Ever.)

Which brings us to the N-word. And the upcoming publication of versions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer without it. The books are being bowdlerized in pretty much the same way the Constitution was bowdlerized yesterday in Washington. I suppose everything becomes easier to understand with the dark parts left out. The N-word will be replaced in many instances in the books with the word "slave" (which ignores the message of "Oh, Freedom," the old spiritual that says: "Before I'd be a slave I'd be buried in my grave").

I don't use the N-word. Never use it in convsersation. Never have used it in conversation. Never was allowed to use it (my grandmother used it with impunity). Cringe when I hear people say it. But there is using it and then there is using it. When Mark Twain used it he had his reasons and they were good ones. I am not Mark Twain, but I am a writer and, as a writer, I would use it (and have used it) in my writing if the situation calls for it. I will use any word the situation calls for. That is what writers do, use the word that's called for, even the uncomfortable words. And they should not be removed, not even for children, especially not from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Huckleberry Finn is not a book for children and it should not be taught to children or anyone else not prepared to deal with its darkness and complexities -- and its language, all of it. It is an adult book, an important book. Every word of it. How important? Ernest Hemingway said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Why mess with a good thing?

HUD: A MINOR CHARACTER HE WRIT LARGE

Screenwriter Irving Ravetch is dead. He was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay, written with his wife Harriet Frank, for Hud.

Ravetch is the man who looked at Larry McMurtry's novel Horseman, Pass By, saw Texas coming down the road and tried to warn the rest of us what was headed our way. He found a relatively minor character in the book named Hud Bannon, recognized him for what he was, pumped him full of bullshit and hot air and turned him into the unprincipaled, greedy, Bible-thumpin', money-grubbin', land-grabbin', stripmall-buildin', queer-baitin', Mexican-cheatin', black man-draggin', prisoner-executin', sleaze-baggin', fuel-suckin', George W. Bush-electin' (a minor character writ large if ever there was one), aw-shucks-dumbass-from-Dumas shit kickin' good ol' boy we all have come to recognize as the charming Texan next door. Ravetch saw Texas for what it was and called it Hud.

Here's what Hud's old daddy Homer Bannon says in the movie: "You don't care about people Hud. You don't give a damn about 'em. Oh, you got all that charm goin' for ya. And it makes the youngsters want to be like ya. That's the shame of it because you don't value anything. You don't respect nothing. You keep no check on your appetites at all. You live just for yourself. And that makes you not fit to live with."

Or as Hud himself puts it: "This country is run on epidemics, where you been? Price fixing, crooked TV shows, inflated expense accounts. How many honest men you know? Why you separate the saints from the sinners, you're lucky to wind up with Abraham Lincoln....I say let us dip our bread into some of that gravy while it is still hot." To which Hud's daddy replies: "You're an unprincipled young man Hud." To which Hud answers: "Don't let that worry you none. You got enough for both of us."

It's "The Hud-ite Creed." It's as American as Obama and apple pie. And it's a pretty good description of the Republicans (Official motto: "We don't care about you") and the way they do their business in Texas and everywhere else. In fact, it's a pretty good description of the world we've let ourselves get cozy with whether we're Republicans or not.

Give me an amen somebody.

Ravetch warned us what was coming and instead of thanking him for it we went out and elected George W. Bush. Twice. And now Ravetch is dead. But because of him I sure knew where I was when I got to Texas. Hud thrives. His offspring litter their shit in McMansion-sized heaps across the landscape. They're everywhere and they go by various names. I once worked with a West Texas guy so slippery and slimey (but always well dressed) he might as well have been called Hud Jr. Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a hardcore Hud-ite and Democratic candidate for governor Bill White shows definite Hud-ite tendencies as well. And wasn't Jesse Jackson (takes-one-to-know-one longtime Hud-ite) just warning President Obama to beware of Hud-ism and its many charms?

Now Texas is all over the place. Hud's world is our world. It's the world of the minor character writ large. That makes it a scary place.

See the movie. It's a good movie. Think about Irving Ravetch, the man who saw Hud coming down the road.

Let the script speak for itself.

 

HOSTAGE SITUATION

So. I left Texas (where I do not, cannot, will not feel at home) and went to North Carolina (where I grew up, didn't, couldn't, wouldn't feel at home and fled 40 years ago) for a vacation. In other words: I sought refuge in the place from which I once desperately sought refuge. Life gets complicated for the homeless who live long enough, but on this trip I met a waitress who seemed to understand my dilemma and simplify things.

She was at Bowman's Seafood Restaurant in Carolina Beach. She wasn't one of those summer-job-at-the-beach waitresses. She was a grownup waitress with a bit of a dye-job and years of experience. I  ordered a hamburger all the way and a glass of sweet tea. In North Carolina, a hamburger or a hot dog "all the way" means one thing: mustard, chili, slaw and chopped onions. She knew what I wanted. I told her it was good to be back in North Carolina (never thought I would say that) where somebody knew what "all the way" means. "People where I live now don't understand 'all the way'," I said. She gave me one of those looks that stops just short of pity and asked, "Where are you being held hostage by people like that?" I told her I was being held hostage in Texas and had been for some time. "Texas," she said with a knowing shake of her head. And we all laughed. Then, after we devoured the big basket of hushpuppies she brought to the table (something else Texans have no appreciation for), my wife ate her sandwich and I ate my hamburger and we were happy all the way back to Topsail Beach.

My wife and I stayed in Topsail Beach, NC, for a couple of weeks. A house on the beach. Long days in the sun. Seafood. Swimming. Reading (some Paul Auster, James Lee Burke and Robert Ruark), Guiltless TV watching. Guiltless eating (there was lots of fried seafood, another hamburger or two and a couple of deep-fried hot dogs all the way). Shameless hours bobbing in the waves. Late afternoons/early evenings  spent sitting in a beach chair at the edge of the ocean, drinking a few beers and helping the sun set. By the end I felt good about feeling good again. My wife and I agreed it was one of our best vacations ever. Then it ended.

But I have been thinking about what that waitress said about being held hostage. Sometimes I feel like lots of my life has been a long string of hostage situations I have gotten myself into. I know that's how I felt growing up and once I left North Carolina the first time I figured it would be for the last time. But it turns out I like North Carolina just fine as long as I don't feel like a hostage (it's an old feeling) and don't stay very long. I particularly like it when there is a beach involved. I would like to develop a similar relationship with Texas as soon as possible, either that or come down with a crippling case of Stockholm Syndrome (and I have tried to identify with my Texas captors, honest I have, but I just can't make myself do it. I can't even imagine it). It would make life tolerable.

Because nothing says "Your vacation is over" like coming back to Texas.

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I found the sign on U.S. 17 just north of Wilmington. The sad part is that it replaced a sign that read "Looser's Use Drugs." I am sure getting rid of that apostrophe was seen as a big improvement by somebody.

THE TRIP: DAY 2, 3, 4 AND 5

I wrote the previous entry a couple of days after my trip to Nashville and back. It wasn't meant to be a trip to Nashville and back. It was intended to be a long drive and it was, probably more than 2,000 miles by the time it was over. At the end of Day 1, I was in Natchez, Mississippi, where I intended to start my 440-mile journey up the Natchez Trace Parkway. I didn't go that way. Instead I went north to Vicksburg then east to Jackson, Mississippi. I wanted to visit the place where Medgar Evers was shot because his shooting by a sneak of a white guy hiding in the bushes had such a profound effect on me when I was in high school. Evers' death turned me against the darkest parts of my Southern heritage and actually made me hate the  South, hate my accent (I worked to get rid of it) and hate white people (myself included) for a long time. Medgar Evers set me in motion. I left the South and have spent most of my life living elsewhere. I consider New Mexico, not North Carolina where I grew up, my home. More than 40 years later I remain uncomfortable in the South. Mississippi makes me particularly nervous.

But I didn't visit Medgar Evers' house on Day 2 of my trip. I visited the grave of Eudora Welty instead. From her perch in Mississippi she helped me understand things in my life. I needed to thank her for that. It was her birthday, but I didn't know that until I found her grave. The cemetery was empty. I sat on a bench and envied her luck to have come to rest in such a beautiful, shady spot (she loved cemeteries, too). I told her so. One of the quotations on her tombstone talks about her sheltered life and how a "sheltered life can be a daring life as well, for all serious daring starts from within." Not far from her grave, hidden in the dark leaves of a bush, I found a beautiful white flower, a gardenia I think. It was so tucked away that it looked embarrassed to be seen. But it wasn't. It seemed appropriate that it was so bold and sheltered and so near Welty's grave.

"Serious daring." I like that.

I left Greenwood Cemetery and spent the next several hours driving north to Oxford where, in an unplanned two-in-one-day pilgrimage, I visited the grave of William Faulkner, where there were no quotations about sheltered lives, only the inscription, "Beloved Go With God." One word led Faulkner to another, and another, etc., until he had said more than any other American writer. He has spoken to me for years, kept me going, made me want to write one word, then another, etc. The least I could do was stop by to say hello. Later that evening, I visited Faulkner's home, walked on Faulkner's ground and, in a bit of a twist that he might well have appreciated, had myself photographed at Faulkner's front door by a young black woman wearing a basketball uniform.

The next morning, Day 3, I finally hit the Natchez Trace Parkway at Tupelo and headed north toward Nashville, where I spent what was left of Day 3 and all of Day 4 with my oldest friend in the hills north of town. We talked. We ate, We hiked. We ate some more and talked some more and it felt like the visit had just begun when I knew it was time to leave.

Day 5, Friday, I drove from Nashville to Austin. I did not leave Nashville intending to drive that far. But as I drove along I-40 just outside Nashville, I heard a song from the 1930s or 1940s. It was about love. And it was about death. And it was about until-death-do-us part love, real and powerful. I know the feeling. And a line in the song went something like: "I may not love you as long as I want to, but I will love you for as long as I can." I know there will never be enough time to love my wife as much as I need to, no matter how long that is. And I need to love her for as long as I can. So why was I in Tennessee? She was in Texas. Suddenly it felt necessary to be home. And I've always loved a long drive. So, 880 miles and 14 hours later, there I was. And there she was. And it feels good to be home.

A few days later I woke up thinking about Paul Klee, Herman Melville and going places (see previous post).

INK: WORDS, ROCKS, TIME

Here's how Norman Maclean ended A River Runs Through It, one of the finest books I ever read:

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

"I am haunted by waters."

I figure all old men are haunted by one thing or another. My father has his war. Norman Maclean had his water. I am haunted by ink. Words. Words on paper. I like the way printed words look. I like the way they smell. Printed words swimming in a murky river of ink. I spent years as a journalist. That was easy because the words most always drifted downstream with the current. But I have written other things too, stories of my own making, words that have ended up in books and those words often seemed to be pushing upstream against the current. They are difficult words to catch. Someone suggested to me recently that I have used my natural ease with journalism to escape the tough writing I should have been doing all these years. And maybe he is right. But Norman Maclean was a lucky man, finding words under rocks like that; it doesn't work that way for me. When I reach into the inky depths and turn over the rocks I know I must turn over, the words often swim away from me, upstream, into the murk. But I wade after them because I cannot stop. It is the fate and the vocation of a man obsessed with turning over rocks and looking for words. Sometimes I catch some of them and sometimes I have nothing to show for it. Either way it is very hard work. But I am haunted by ink.

Perhaps that helps explain my new tattoo. Perhaps not.

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Speaking of ink, Rhonda, my friend of more than a decade whom I have never met in person, wrote about my tattoo and other things on her blog today. Ours is a virtual friendship built entirely out of words over time. There is probably a pretty good book hidden away in the reams of emails we have exchanged over the years.

JOHN UPDIKE DIES

John Updike died today. It took me by surprise (and I am not easy to surprise). John Updike? I never considered the fact that he might die. It's not that I thought Updike was immortal. I met him once, shook his hand, had a chat with him and he said good things about something I wrote), attended a party in his honor. It was a good party that lasted far longer than the host intended. He groused because it seemed the party would end early because the host had not provided enough beer and wine, So I know he was as mortal as the next guy. But years ago, just when I decided to read seriously, Updike had begun to write seriously. There he was, something serious on my reading landscape. And he has been there for me for more than 50 years, book after book, year after year. He wrote and I read. Of course, there came a time when he wrote things I didn't read, but he remained there for me, waiting to be read. I suppose it seemed that he would always be there simply because he has always been there. Updike. Death? Nah! Not until I catch up on my reading.