The Time of My Life

by Bryan Woolley

  The red rubber ball never gets boring.

  The red rubber ball is the perfect toy.

  The Greeks probably were looking at a red rubber ball when they were thinking about a perfect world.

  March, 1980

  Missing a Few Stops on Memory Lane

  NONE OF MY REGULAR correspondents—the phone company, the gas company, the electric company, various insurance firms and credit card companies—indulges in nostalgia. Even at Christmas and Easter, the news they write me doesn’t tug at the heartstrings.

  But the other day I received a postcard that evokes melancholy sighs whenever I look at it. It was from the Baskin-Robbins ice cream people and was addressed to “Resident,” which is one of my aliases. Mr. Baskin and Mr. Robbins were announcing the grand opening of a new ice cream joint in my neighborhood and wanted Resident to drop in for a free balloon, a free puzzle, and a clown. Their card also asked:

  Remember when you could buy

  an ice cream cone for 19¢??

  I tried to remember.

  I remembered when I could buy an ice cream cone for a nickel. I remembered when I could buy a candy bar for a nickel, too, and it was twice as big as the one I bought for a quarter today. I remembered when I could buy a gallon of regular for the same price I paid for today’s tiny, rip-off candy bar. I remembered when I could get into a movie for twelve cents, pay a dime for a sack of popcorn, and buy three pieces of Dubble-Bubble with the rest of the change from the quarter my mother gave me. I remembered when a nickel would play a game of pinball or a record on a jukebox, when a postcard was a penny and a letter was three cents, when a hamburger—a real hamburger with tomato, lettuce, onion, and real meat—was a quarter, a hardcover best-seller was two dollars and the paperback edition was a quarter, and a three-bedroom brick house in Richardson was twenty thousand dollars. I remembered when I could take a full semester’s course at any state college or university in Texas for twenty-five dollars tuition.

  This isn’t the Dark Ages I’m talking about, or even the Depression. There are probably at least a dozen of us old geezers left who can still remember such things. So it seemed kind of weird of Mr. Baskin and Mr. Robbins to write to Resident about nineteen-cent ice cream cones as if they were harking back to the Gay Nineties.

  But everything is relative, and it wouldn’t be fair to reminisce about the bargains of the good old days without also remembering a thing or two about wages.

  When I was paying twelve cents for the movies, I was scooping nickel ice cream at the Fort Davis Drugstore both before and after school and all day Saturday for one dollar a week. When my neighborhood pump jockey was pouring twenty-five-cent regular into the family car—and washing the windshield and all the windows and checking the tires, battery, radiator, oil, and fan belt—I was mowing old ladies’ lawns with a sweat-powered mower for fifty cents an hour. While I was attending my twenty-five-dollar college semester, I was paid forty dollars a week for my first full-time, honest-to-God job in journalism. The minimum wage in those days was a dollar an hour.

  Although I’m still not getting rich as fast as I would like, I don’t want to return to yesteryear’s prices if I have to accept yesteryear’s wages along with them.

  What has been strumming nostalgic chords in my memory isn’t the money so much as the length of time a price used to hang around without changing. Nickel candy bars and three-cent postage stamps, for instance, were the usual thing for years and years. And still vivid in my mind is the furor in Fort Davis when the Brazilians got greedy and the drugstore had to raise its price for coffee from a nickel to a dime a cup. “But coffee has always been a nickel!” everybody hollered.

  Nobody hollers that anymore. Even if you’ve given up drugstore coffee and, for economy’s sake, brew your own, the supermarket has slapped two or three new price tags on the coffee cans since they were put on the shelf, and each price is higher than the one it covers up.

  And a few weeks ago I went to a neighborhood ice cream joint—not the new establishment where Mr. Baskin and Mr. Robbins wanted to give Resident a balloon—to buy a half-pound of hand-packed Burgundy cherry to take home. Since I had made the same purchase in the same joint several times before, I handed the ice cream girl what I thought was the correct change.

  “The price has changed,” the young lady said, quoting me the new—higher, of course—price.

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “Since right now.”

  She pointed over her shoulder with her Burgundy-cherry-colored thumb, calling my attention to a boy on a ladder. Sure enough, he was changing all the prices on the flavor board. In the five minutes that the girl had been scooping my Burgundy cherry, it had become more valuable.

  I’ve become accustomed to such experiences, and I didn’t holler. But in closing, Mr. Baskins and Mr. Robbins, the answer is no. I don’t remember when I could buy an ice cream cone for nineteen cents. I guess I didn’t eat one that day.

  April, 1980

  A Couple of Days Away From It All

  SEVEN MONTHS had passed since I had traveled beyond the borders of Dallas County. The city was getting to me. Its hurly-burly, its traffic, its demands, its routines had me on edge. I needed a change of scene. Just for a couple of days. Something entirely different. Something promising no excitement or adventure whatsoever. Something small and slow and quiet and quaint.

  I had never been to Jefferson, in the northeastern corner of Texas, but I had heard and read of it for years. It’s a small town on Cypress Bayou, which connects it with the Red River. Around the time of the Civil War it had been the second-largest port city of Texas, after Galveston, but its real claim to fame was for making Jay Gould angry.

  Gould had wanted to build his Texas & Pacific Railroad through Jefferson, but the city wouldn’t grant him the right-of-way. So on January 2, 1882, Gould pronounced a curse on the town. “Jefferson,” he said, “will see the day when bats will roost in its church belfries and grass will grow in its streets.” On the guest register of the Excelsior House he wrote: “End of Jefferson, Texas.”

  Well, the town didn’t die, but it stopped growing, yielding its prominence to more far-sighted villages that saw possibilities in railroads and treated Gould and other robber barons more kindly. Not much in Jefferson got torn down to be replaced by something newer and bigger, so over the years it got a lot of publicity for being old. And small and slow and quiet and quaint. The opposite of Dallas. The perfect place to go for a change of scene.

  My lady and I arrived shortly after noon on a Sunday to check into the Excelsior House, which has been in continuous operation since the 1850s and is now owned and operated by a garden club that seems to operate almost everything in Jefferson. We had been looking forward to the old hotel. We had read of it in newspapers and magazines. One travel writer had called it one of the thirteen great hotels in the entire world. Gould had stayed there. So had U. S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes and Oscar Wilde. Maybe we would get a room where somebody famous had slept.

  We didn’t. Our room was inhabited by ghosts of salesmen of corsets and spats, but its high headboard and marble-topped table and chest and velvet-cushioned chairs were reassuringly quaint. We unpacked and found the ice machine and retired to the quiet courtyard to relax beside the quaint Victorian fountain among the statuary and the garden club’s geraniums, but the afternoon was too hot to sit on the iron benches on the brick pavement for long.

  So we got back into the car and drove around the town looking at the exteriors of old and stately houses. The interiors had been open to the public a week before, during the garden club’s famous annual pilgrimage, and thousands had stood in line for up to two hours to see some of them. We rejoiced that we didn’t have to do that. We parked the car at the Excelsior and decided to take a leisurely stroll along a quiet, quaint historic street and get a snack to tide us over until dinner, when we could gorge ourselves on good old-fashioned Southern cooking.

  The Excelsior House serves only breakfast. Ru
th-mary’s restaurant, across the street, serves only lunch. The Mint Tulip Ice Cream Parlour was closed. The Gallery Pub was closed. The barbecue place down by the river was closed. The big OPEN sign in front of the Markos Sandwich Shop was the most beautiful sight we had seen so far. We had read that the hamburgers served there are really something. The OPEN sign is attached securely to a pole. It can’t be taken down or changed to CLOSED. The shop, however, was closed. The only remaining sign of hope was on the other quiet, quaint, old hotel, the New Jefferson Inn, which promised that dinner would be served at 5:30.

  Only the antique shops were open. There are so many of them in Jefferson that I began to think Jay Gould’s prophecy was coming true, that the town was having a gigantic close-out sale. We browsed among the relics of the past, our stomachs growling, awaiting the blessed hour of 5:30, at which time we joined forces with two more famished tourists and assaulted the New Jefferson Inn, where we were notified that the sign lied. No dinner would be served that night.

  “I bet I know why it is!” said the garden club lady at the Excelsior desk. “It’s Mother’s Day!”

  “Isn’t that a good time for a restaurant to be open?” I asked.

  Finally, someone at the Gallery Pub deigned to open the door and feed us. Although nothing there was Southern or old-fashioned except the Confederate flags hanging from the ceiling, I was beginning to feel better.

  That was before I learned that the Victorians must have been midgets. The double bed in our room was about two inches shorter than me. Its devilish footboard was too high to permit my feet to dangle over the end. If I bent my legs, the bed was too narrow to accommodate two sleepers.

  After a fitful night, we were joined at breakfast by a couple from Shreveport who had been in Jefferson for three days. The man said they had learned to eat antiques. “But you have to get to the shops early,” he said. “They close around 3.”

  This day was better, though. First, it rained. Second, we got to return to big, fast, noisy, new Dallas, where everything had become wonderful while we were gone.

  Maybe that’s why we need a change of scene now and then. It makes home look so good.

  May, 1980

  Youthful Fantasies and the Sands of Time

  HE DOESN’T LOOK like any oil driller I’ve ever seen. His nose has never been broken. He has both his eyes. There are no visible scars. He’s standing erect, so I assume no drill stem or monkey wrenches have fallen on his vertebrae. He may still have all his fingers, too, but his hands are in his pockets, so I can’t tell. He hasn’t been burned by the sun and the wind. He looks like a fashion model or a TV actor who spends a lot of time indoors.

  But the full-page ad in the business section of the New York Times says he’s an offshore oil driller who makes forty-two thousand dollars, and I have no real reason to call that a lie. Maybe he hasn’t worked on the rigs very long. That would account for his prettiness.

  He isn’t just a driller, either.

  He’s the New Achiever, the man who can make things work. And today, as never before, he commands a paycheck that keeps pace with his lifestyle. So he can afford to entertain, travel, own his own home and more.

  He’s involved in the physical world and how it works. Whether he’s sinking a new shaft on the rig, restoring his prized ’59 Corvette or reading about home computers.

  The impact of these New Achievers is growing every day. In numbers. In income. They’re an essential part of any broad-reach magazine buy. And Popular Mechanics reaches over 5,000,000 of them. Men who work hard. Spend big. Depend on themselves and Popular Mechanics.

  The ad wasn’t aimed at the New Achievers themselves but at other advertisers who are after a few of the New Achievers’ hard-earned bucks. If an ad in Popular Mechanics reeled in only one dollar from each of the five million New Achievers who read Popular Mechanics, that ad would pay for itself in no time. I think that was the ad’s message, but since I have nothing I want to advertise in Popular Mechanics, I shouldn’t have been reading it, much less thinking about it.

  One Christmas when I was about ten, my old Aunt Daisy gave my little sister a subscription to Playmate magazine and me a subscription to Popular Mechanics. I don’t remember reading any of the articles, but I looked at the pictures and the ads, and ten is an age when a boy’s mind tends to dwell on impossible schemes and adventures.

  My imagination was fueled by the tools, plans, and projects portrayed there. Someday I would build that sailboat and somehow haul it to one of the oceans and sail around the world alone. Someday I would buy a rusty Model T and transform it into the most wonderful dragster in creation, and when I got old enough to learn to drive, I would load the dragster on the terrific trailer I had fashioned from an old hog trough and pull it around the country, winning all the drag races. The guy who built the fancy dragster portrayed in Popular Mechanics would pale when he saw me coming. Someday I would save up my money, if I ever got any, and buy hundreds of wonderful tools and build a shop to keep them in, and whenever some part of the house or family car needed fixing, well, I would fix it.

  The only project in Popular Mechanics that I actually tried was a birdhouse, which was a flop. Aunt Daisy didn’t renew my subscription the following Christmas, and I didn’t grow up handy, and I had never bought another copy of Popular Mechanics.

  I had assumed that the magazine’s readers were old men in overalls who made coffee tables in the garage and adolescent motor freaks who were flunking out of high school because they spent all their time souping up their old Fords instead of studying their algebra. But here was this pretty oil driller pulling down forty-two grand a year and spending his off-duty hours on his drilling platform in the Gulf or the North Sea combing Popular Mechanics for the latest wrinkle in Corvette restoration. If Aunt Daisy had renewed my subscription, that might have been me.

  If I were working hard, spending big, depending on myself and Popular Mechanics, as this driller and the other New Achievers do, what would I be doing with my time these days? Hoping it wasn’t yet too late to become a New Achiever, I loped down to the Commerce Street Newsstand and picked up a copy.

  I would be building a 188-m.p.h. sports plane from plans and kits. I would be creating fancy graphics for my own videotape extravaganzas. I would be commuting to the office on a bicycle. I would be erecting lattices around the patio and a colonial cupola on the roof. I would be weaving a hammock out of cotton rope. I would be building a chain-driven replica of a classic touring car that would draw crowds when my kids pedaled it down the sidewalk.

  Popular Mechanics hasn’t changed much. The New Achievers are doing pretty much what the Old Achievers were doing when my subscription ran out and I lost track of them.

  But I’ve learned too much about myself during all those years to even fantasize about such projects now. I know I’ll never be “the man who can make things work.”

  I’ll never see a pretty offshore oil driller, either.

  May, 1980

  Seeing Butch Again

  SOMEWHERE IN MY ARCHIVES is a photograph of Butch Mikel that I took in a college dormitory in 1955. He’s wearing a cowboy hat and strumming a guitar. The set of his mouth suggests that he was singing, which he often did.

  It’s the sort of picture you run into while rummaging in a file cabinet or a box of papers, looking for something else, and every time I would come across it I would wonder whatever happened to old Butch. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in twenty-four years.

  Well, he phoned the other day and asked if I was the same guy he used to know. I said yes, and we agreed to meet at a bar after work a few days later and tell each other what we had done with the years.

  In the interim, I began to wonder whether I was the same guy he knew. I was a skinny, crew-cut kid back then, only a few weeks out of the hills. I was living the lives of a Big City newcomer and a collegian and a cub reporter all rolled into one. I was still wet behind the ears in all departments and dating a baton twirler.

  Twenty-four is
a lot of years. I had taken a couple of turns around the block during that time. I couldn’t think of much I still had in common with the kid Butch knew, except the skinniness.

  And I wondered how much Butch had changed.

  He was a New Mexico “kicker” who refused to give up his boots and hat when he came to the city, and I remembered him as hot-tempered and something of a hell-raiser. My most vivid memory of him was the time he drank a fifth of yellow tequila all by himself and the monumental case of stomach cramps he got from the experience. I’ve always thought Manuel Palacios and I should have been awarded some sort of life-saving merit badge for walking Butch up and down the dirt road behind the dorm most of that night, trying to straighten out his kinks, but the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross never contacted us.

  Butch left school about a year later and went back up to Jal to work for El Paso Natural Gas. I saw him on TV several months later, pickin’ and singin’, and so far as I knew, he was still out in the desert somewhere, working on a rig or whatever he did for EPNG.

  That’s the way memory is. It freezes people the way they were when we last saw them, and we expect them to be the same when we run into them again eons later, like that mammoth the Russians found under the ice. I’ve had that experience often enough to know that nobody remains the same, though, and I expected to have to sit at the bar a few minutes, wondering which of the other customers was my good buddy of yesteryear.

  But I recognized Butch as soon as I walked in, even though the place was fairly dark. He was still as short and stocky as he was in that old photograph. He wasn’t wearing the hat, but he had a pair of sunglasses pushed back on his head and still wore the boots. He hadn’t run to fat and still had all his hair. The gray in it looked pretty distinguished. So did the few wrinkles around his eyes. “Hey,” I thought, “maybe I ain’t as old as I feel like.”

  We ordered a couple of beers and sat down at a table. “I don’t drink the hard stuff anymore,” he said. “It still makes me crazy.” And right away, we started remembering that night with the tequila.