Mockingbird repeated his note.
Pussycat repeated hers.
He repeated his.
She repeated hers.
Oblivious to me, they sang their two-note antiphony on and on. Then, as suddenly as he had arrived, Mockingbird fluttered away, and Pussycat asked to be let into the house.
Has she tired already of being human? Does she aspire now to birdhood? Has she finally found her lover, and is he teaching her to sing?
I wish I understood, so I could explain.
September, 1979
A Sad Little Note
KEN KESEY WAS LATE for his appearance at North Lake Community College, and the house was packed, and the audience was beginning to squirm. So Kesey’s co-star for the evening, Larry McMurtry, stood up and offered to answer questions. Any question about literature or writers or writing, any question at all.
One student asked him if he thought literature and writers and writing were becoming obsolete, I mean, with movies and TV and all. And McMurtry said he didn’t think so. Maybe books were “out” for a generation or two because of the wretched way literature was being taught, with the teachers making students dissect a book for symbols and whatnot so that reading was no fun and turned a lot of kids off. But teaching has improved during the past fifteen years or so, and reading is “in” again because more people are discovering that reading is a pleasure that can’t be had any other way, and it’s also one of the less expensive pleasures these days.
The row in front of me was full of students busily taking notes on everything McMurtry said, including the fact that McMurtry and Kesey had met in a writing class at Stanford University many years ago and had become friends but hadn’t seen each other in a long time because Kesey lives on the West Coast and McMurtry on the East Coast.
I became interested in the things the students were writing down and wondered why they were writing down such things. Were they expecting a pop quiz after Kesey arrived and he and McMurtry had finished doing whatever they were going to do? “Where and when did Kesey and McMurtry meet, and why don’t they get together more often now?” I imagined one of the new, improved English teachers asking. And those students, having memorized their notes, would all make A’s.
The note that really made me nervous, though, and tortured my mind the rest of the night, was carefully penned by the young man sitting directly in front of me. He held his note pad in exactly the same position on his lap throughout Kesey’s long reading and McMurtry’s second, final, question-and-answer session, and my eyes kept wandering down over his shoulder and sticking at the same place.
“Reading,” the young man had written, “is pleasure.”
McMurtry had said that, all right, and I agreed with him. Having grown up in that primitive “linear” time when print was king, I never became a resident of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” of TV and cinema, although I enjoy visiting it from time to time. I still remember the joy of reading Treasure Island, the first “real” book I attempted, and the feeling of regret that came over me when I finished it. I wished the adventures of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver could go on and on. But soon I discovered that other books were filled with other people’s adventures and thoughts and love and beauty, and I was hooked on reading forever.
I’ve known so long and so surely that reading is pleasure that to write it down seemed as absurd to me as writing “Fire is hot” or “Ice is cold.” There are some things that we know so naturally that we don’t have to think about them, much less commit them to paper. (“Things to Remember Today: (1) Fire is hot; (2) Ice is cold; (3) Reading is pleasure.”)
And I felt an aching sadness for the young man who had written that note. He was eighteen or nineteen years old, I guessed, and I assumed he had been in school for some time and was at that moment a college student. If his educational experience has borne any resemblance to mine so long ago, he has been exposed to a book or two during his twelve or thirteen or fourteen years in school and maybe has even read some. And I grieved that, having read, he had written such a note.
Granted, all books aren’t pleasant to everyone, especially in school, where our minds are often forced into fields that don’t interest us. The only way I could cope with some teachers and courses and textbooks during my own school career was to regurgitate my notes, as a baby’s only way of coping with mashed carrots is to refuse to swallow them and let them ooze down his chin.
In school, of course, you hope the undigested puddles that you disguise as test answers and term papers will be mistaken for knowledge and you will be liberated from the course. And maybe the young man was trying to become an engineer or an accountant and regarded Kesey and McMurtry and Dickens and Twain and Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Flaubert and Yeats and all the other compulsive scribblers as just so many mashed carrots. Maybe “Reading is pleasure” was only a spoonful of mashed carrots to be regurgitated when the new, improved teacher asks, “What does McMurtry say reading is?” or “What gives McMurtry pleasure?”
But engineers and accountants are human beings first, as all of us are before we attach titles and professions and trades to our biographies, and it is that common essence in us that responds to food, sex, music, cinema, books, and everything else that gives us pleasure.
I hope the young man will know someday that “Reading is pleasure” without referring to his notes. I wish I had taken along a copy of Treasure Island to give him.
September, 1979
An Ode to Firewood
THREE WEEKS INTO an October that was the twin of August, you had begun to despair. Autumn in Texas is always brief, you knew—only a wink of Mother Nature’s eye between the long, hot summer and the short, cold winter. And no one expects frost on local pumpkins until well after Halloween. But this was too much. When could you safely send the seersucker to the cleaners? When could you order firewood without seeming a fool?
The prudents had ordered their firewood during the summer, you supposed, when the vendors of oak and hickory may have offered bargains. You refused to look for their ads, for you’re a hard-shell believer in Ecclesiastes, where the Preacher instructs, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” and sweaty July and blazing August aren’t the season for firewood at any price.
Firewood, after all, is no mere commodity, no mere fuel. It’s one of the few ways that city people have left to obey an instinct that has been a part of us at least since lightning struck that tree in China, or wherever the cavemen lived, and gave our struggling species light and warmth when we needed them most.
Something in the bear still tells his hair to grow shaggier when the air gets nippy. Something tells the birds to go south and the squirrels to gather acorns. Something told our grandfathers and great-grandfathers to bury potatoes in mounds and butcher hogs. But we don’t even drain the car radiator and put in antifreeze anymore, and sending the seersucker to the cleaners and switching the thermostat from “Cool” to “Heat” aren’t heart-gladdening ways to deal with our urge to burrow, to snuggle, to be quiet and thoughtful and listen to the wind.
Contemplating the cubic feet of gas the furnace will consume during the winter is no more pleasant than reviewing the kilowatt-hours that the air-conditioner has whiled away during the summer. Both are invisible, and we have to take the utility companies’ word that they were ever really there.
But firewood isn’t measured by meters and billed by computers. It’s sold by the cord (a stack of two-foot-long logs four feet high and sixteen feet long) and the rick (half a cord) just as it was during the numberless generations before the meters and their readers. It’s cut in the country by Jimmie McGraw and his brother and seasoned where it fell and hauled to the city by Jimmie and Rene, his wife, and stacked against the fence, and you can measure it yourself if you like, for it’s there, binding you to all your past, creating nostalgia of warmth remembered and anticipation of warmth to come.
So you stand in the backyard with your cup of coffee on
the first perfect October morning and watch Jimmie toss the heavy logs out of the trailer, over the fence, into the yard, and you’re glad you don’t have to do it because it would make you tired, but it doesn’t seem to make him tired.
It doesn’t matter that Jimmie works in a factory in Sulphur Springs that makes valves and doesn’t bury potatoes in mounds or butcher hogs any more often than you do and is wearing a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders T-shirt. He lives in Cooper and is surprised that you know where that is, for you’re from Dallas, and the implication of his surprise is that Dallas people don’t know where anything is in the country. You’re glad you drove through Cooper once or twice a long time ago, when the pastor of the Christian Church there was a friend of yours. You don’t mention the pastor to the McGraws, because they’re only twenty-one, and he left years ago when they were small children, and you haven’t heard from him in such a long time that you don’t even know where he is.
You chat with Rene about their children, who are two years old and seven months old and are probably running their grandmother ragged while Rene and Jimmie are stacking your wood. Her talk reminds you of your own children, who used to run you ragged, too, begging you to build fires in the fireplace when they weren’t much older than the little McGraws. You remember how long the building of those fires took when the boys insisted on carrying the smaller logs themselves and laying the kindling and wadding the newspaper for you, and how brightly the fire burned when all was finally ready. But you don’t mention these things.
The wood the McGraws have brought is all good oak, well seasoned, just as they promised on the phone. They get it from the land behind the natural gas plant where Jimmies daddy works. The company owns the land and considers the oaks a fire hazard and offers the wood free to those who want to cut it and haul it away. Jimmie and his brother and twelve or thirteen other sons and brothers and nephews of gas plant employees attack it with chain saws and stack it to season there and then haul it to whoever wants it.
The firewood business is pretty good, Jimmie says. He and his brother didn’t get into it until late in the season last year and sold thirty cords. They’ve sold fifteen already this year, despite August lingering until late October.
You’re glad they’re prospering. On such a morning, with so many fires to come, you’re glad about everything.
October, 1979
Jimmy’s Smooch and His Reasons
JACQUELINE BOUVIER KENNEDY ONASSIS (a.k.a. Jackie O.) may be the only woman in the history of the United States to be offended because the president kissed her.
It happened at the dedication of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and the pictures of the event are pretty funny. President Carter looks like he’s kissing Jackie O. and smiling at the same time—a facial feat that not many can manage even in their looser, more cheerful moments. But Jackie O., whose cheek is the target of the presidential peck, looks like she just chomped down on a green persimmon.
The natural assumption from the photographic evidence would be that the president had tucked a pinch of Copenhagen between cheek and gum just prior to osculating, or had a string of lunchtime spinach wedged between his famous incisors. But Arthur Schlesinger, a chronicler of Kennedys who now writes a newspaper column, has stepped forth with the official explanation. Jackie O. was annoyed, he said, because “in the North, gentlemen do not kiss ladies on such brief acquaintance.”
Well, now.
I don’t know how long Jimmy and Jackie O. have known each other, but it’s hardly as if she were an anonymous little receptionist jiving down the sidewalk and he were a drooling masher who came up and gave her a smack. Jimmy is a fairly well known public figure around the country, involved in a game with which Jackie O. has more than a passing acquaintance—politics. And the scene of the allegedly offensive buss was a ceremonial/political event on the grounds of Camelot-in-exile at which the president of the United States was a principal speaker and honored guest. And Jackie O. was there in the capacity of widow of the late president in whose memory the library was built and, secondarily, as sister-in-law of Camelot’s surviving heir and aspiring challenger to Jimmy himself.
Public pecking is practically required of famous people on occasions like that, and much less important occasions, too. When’s the last time you saw some actress or songstress waltz onto the set of the “Tonight” show and not kiss Johnny and Ed and Doc and everybody else in the vicinity? Hell, even Don Rickles kisses Johnny.
When’s the last time you went to a Jet Set party where the Beautiful People were consulting calendars to determine whom they could kiss hello and whom they couldn’t?
Okay, so that’s social kissing, equivalent to shaking hands, and maybe Jackie O. didn’t want to shake hands that day, either, even with a president. To Jackie O., after all, presidents are no big deal.
On the other hand, Jimmy’s kiss may not have been social. It may have been ceremonial. Those folks were, after all, dedicating a library honoring a beloved president who had been slain, and Jackie O. is his widow, and Jimmy is the present president. That adds up to a state occasion, and, furthermore, one fraught with considerable emotion. The present president giving the late president’s widow a light kiss on the cheek could be construed as a gesture expressing Jimmy’s regard—and the regard of the nation he leads—for the memory of the man they were honoring.
But Jackie O. doesn’t see it that way. “In the North,” she sniffed, “gentlemen do not kiss ladies on such brief acquaintance.” It’s as if Jimmy had just met her on the dance floor of a Jacksboro Highway honky-tonk and was trying to lure her into the back seat of his ’53 Merc.
I don’t think that was the case. I don’t believe Jimmy was lusting in his heart at all. It’s just that in the South, gentlemen do kiss ladies (including some they would rather not kiss)—and vice versa—on brief acquaintance.
It’s a rare child of the South who doesn’t carry the memory of some stranger he was commanded to smooch. “Now don’t be shy, honey. Come give your Aunt Bessie a big hug-kiss,” the fat lady dressed in big flowers and smelling of lavender would say. “Hey, little lady, how about a kiss for your Cousin Willie. You remember Cousin Willie, don’t you?
Maybe you didn’t remember Aunt Bessie and Cousin Willie. Maybe you didn’t particularly like them. Maybe you hoped you would never see them again. But you kissed them anyway, because Mama would rawhide you after they went home if you didn’t, informing you with every whack that it was time you learned some manners.
I think Jimmy kissed Jackie O. because he grew up in the South and Miz Lillian taught him some manners when he was young. And although he may not have enjoyed it much, he didn’t want to offend, so he tried to smile while he was doing it.
On the other hand, Jackie O. may not understand that in the South, ladies don’t complain to the press when the president of the United States kisses them on the cheek.
It might be construed as bad manners, you see.
November, 1979
A Texas Gothic Horror Story Ends at Last
HOW WILL WE GET ALONG without them? I wonder. They have been with us for so long. Their comings and goings, their complaints and denials have been as continuous as our own children’s for…how long? More than three years?
Their faces are as familiar to us as our dogs and cats and the ferns in our living rooms. And is there a home in Texas—in America, in the world—where their names haven’t crept into the household vocabulary?
Cullen Davis. Priscilla Davis. Andrea. Stan. Karen. Racehorse. David. Names that the finest soap opera scriptwriter would be proud to have invented, and we didn’t even have to stay at home in the daytime to follow their story. It was on the Ten O’Clock News and the Nine O’Clock Update and Action News and all the lesser newses, on TV and the newses on radio, both AM and FM, and in the newspapers, magazines, and books. Even a song.
And such a plot. A child and her mama’s lover, slain in Cowtown’s most opulent mansion, and Mama, a blonde, wounded. Rich, wavy-haired
, estranged Daddy arrested and charged with the deed. Richest man in the world ever to be tried for murder. A Houston lawyer who looks like Senator Howard Baker’s brother and fights for justice, by durn, no matter what the cost. Trials and testimony up and down the vast length of Texas, from Fort Worth to Amarillo to Houston to Fort Worth again. Trials for murder and for divorce and for hiring to murder. Child custody suits. Sex. Dope. Creeps and weirdos coming and going, to the mansion, to courthouses, selling T-shirts. A former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, also blonde and the stand-by-your-man lover of Cullen. Wedding bells between trials. FBI agents. Guns with silencers. Tape recorders and cameras concealed on persons, in vans. Live judges pretending death in car trunks. Jurors breaking legs; jurors breaking arms. Brides falling down staircases. Surprise witnesses, new ones at every trial, saying different things. Wavy-haired Daddy saying different things. Changes of venue, hung juries, acquittals. Cross, double-cross, triple-cross. Plot, counterplot, counter-counterplot. A cast of thousands. Prosecutors, jurors, spectators, cops, jailers, courtroom artists, reporters, cameramen, bartenders for the post-trial parties. Cullen groupies. Priscilla groupies. And, behind the scenes, Tarrant County taxpayers, writing checks for more than six hundred thousand dollars— seventy-five cents for each man, woman, and child in the county—to keep the show going.
Dashiell Hammett couldn’t have written it, nor Raymond Chandler, nor Mickey Spillane. Perry Mason would have bogged down in the 16,638 pages of court transcript, the fifty witnesses, the 270 pieces of evidence. Cecil B. DeMille couldn’t have cast it. Had it been sold as fiction, the public would have rejected it as preposterous, overblown, too laden with stereotype characters and outworn gimmicks, too lathered with blood, lust, and corruption for even the most insatiable addicts of Texas Gothic.
Now, suddenly, it’s over.
Andrea, the child, and Stan, the basketball playing lover, dead; Priscilla, the blonde Mama, divorced and not as rich as she once was and hoped to be; David, the star witness, discredited; Racehorse, the lawyer, triumphant, and richer, probably, than he ever dared dream; Cullen, the wavy-haired Daddy, still rich and married to Karen, the cheerleader. They live in the biggest mansion in Cowtown, perhaps happily ever after. The Tarrant County taxpayers are poorer, and Justice remains blind.
The Time of My Life Page 10
