by J. R. Helton
“Okay, tough guy—”
“No, no, you’re the tough guy.”
“You two really think you’re hot shit now, don’t you? You think I don’t see you guys snorting coke on my fucking bed, in my master bedroom in Cypress?”
“What are you, spying on us?”
“You and Susan are just the new hot couple now, aren’t you? You both think you are so fucking clever. So fucking cute. And you, you just insulted me as a father, you insulted me pretty much more than any potential son-in-law ever could.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“By not asking me for my daughter’s hand in marriage.”
“Is this before or after you threatened to knock all of her teeth out that you paid for?”
“I never said that. Susan just made that up.”
“No, it sounds exactly like something you would say.”
“And not only did you not ask me for my permission, my approval to let you marry my daughter, then you go and marry her in Martin’s house, my best fucking friend, and you have the balls to rub it in by putting my son in your wedding. Was that Betty Sue’s idea? Or was it Susan’s? You can at least tell me that, because I know it wasn’t your idea to have Jason walk her down the aisle. There’s no way you thought of that.”
“Dean, I gotta go.”
“You know I’m living in a nice La Quinta Inn off I-35 now. This little place, it has a kitchenette, so I can cook food for Jason when he comes by. I’m watching Apocalypse Now again. I got it on tape. Remember when we all saw it together in San Marcos? Man, that movie blew me away. I gave you that book, Dispatches, by Michael Herr. Anyway, they got a nice big TV and VCR in this place. These divorce lawyers are bloodsucking parasites. The legal fees are killing me, so I’m renting it by the week.”
“Oh yeah?” Once again he’d thrown me. He sounded stoned, lonely, and desperate.
“Yeah, it’s not quite as nice as Martin’s big house up in Westlake. Hey, just tell me this, Jake, is Betty Sue fucking Martin now also? My former best friend? And has Martin really just so completely attached himself to the Willie money train as it seems?”
“Seriously—”
“Okay, just tell me this, just tell me this: Does Martin carry a gun now? ’Cuz I know he didn’t use to. Just tell me that, Jake.”
“Man, I don’t know. I don’t think so, Dean. I doubt it. But really, we have to go.”
“Where are you guys going? Are you going on your honeymoon?”
“Uh . . .,” I paused, confused. “We . . . uh, yeah, we’re going to the beach.”
“What beach?”
“That’s it!” Susan said and tried to grab the phone out of my hand. “Hang it up. Now!”
“I gotta go, Dean.”
“Tell Susan I said hello, okay?”
“I will,” I said, and hung up the phone.
* * *
By the time we got back to Austin, the custody battle for Jason had grown so intense that Betty Sue was almost collapsing from exhaustion. She was also having difficulty getting anyone in the Hill Country town of Cypress to testify on her behalf in the divorce proceedings. Dean had called up one of their best friends who was about to appear in court on Betty Sue’s behalf, a young man named Bruce whom everyone, including my own family, knew as a gentle and almost stereotypically friendly country doctor. Days before Bruce was due to testify, Dean called him and begged him not to. When that didn’t work, he showed up at Bruce’s office one day and told him that he was going to kill him, “and then I will eat your guts out in front of your fucking children.” Bruce backed out, and Betty Sue lost another witness as Dean’s lawyers were going after her character for him to have sole custody of the boy.
Dean was soon scaring off his old friends in LA while pissing away his money on blow, legal fees, and limousines during the increasingly bitter divorce. I was at the ranch house in Cypress the day Bruce, the country doctor, came by to reluctantly tell Betty Sue he would not appear in court and that Dean had genuinely shaken him to his core. Losing her best witness seemed to be the last straw for Betty Sue, and she just stopped fighting.
Dean had run off most everyone in Texas as well, all their old friends, and though he was losing the house in Cypress and everything else in the divorce, he was not going to give up Jason, no matter what. One day he just took the boy, put him in his big, jacked-up ’77 Blazer, and fled back to live again in his depressed and dying Rust Belt home town up in Ohio. And Betty Sue let them both go. Dean moved back in with his old mother, and the last I heard, Dean and Jason were both sleeping in the same small childhood room in the same little house that Dean had grown up in.
* * *
With the money Susan and I received from wedding gifts, our little bit of savings, my short-story check and the prize money, and even selling one of our cars, Susan’s Toyota Celica, we proceeded to do nothing but drink and get high for months, well into 1984. We were mostly doing cocaine or, when the money got low, crank, crystal meth. We were still screwing every single day while crashing on friends’ floors, moving back and forth from towns and cities all over Texas, but we always came back to Austin in the end.
I was writing feverishly, short stories and three-act plays, typing up page after page on my portable Smith Corona manual that came in its own carrying case that allowed me to write anywhere as long as I had some light, cigarettes, paper, and a bottle of whiteout. I sent out those stories and plays in SASEs every week. For some reason, anytime an editor, agent, or theater director accepted my work but then asked for the slightest change, I immediately pulled out of the magazine, or mainly it was the popular theater in downtown Austin, the Capitol City Playhouse, where I repeatedly fought with their main director over any form of compromise—or success.
Maybe part of me felt that success was, in some way, selling out. Or maybe it was because Susan and I really did feel we were just so smart and young, so clever and cute, that we needed no one and nobody could touch us. She signed her own typed letters to our friends with the line “Zelda and her husband,” the fact that both writers, their marriage and careers, had come to such grim ends funny to us both.
It wasn’t so funny when we found ourselves unable to pay the electric bill or the rent on a cheap one-bedroom apartment in the El Madrid, where we finally came down hard, on the edge of Travis Heights off South Congress and Riverside. I’d stopped talking to my parents, who hated Susan even more once I dropped out of college and married her. They were out as to hitting them up for any money. Betty Sue, her acting days over, was struggling to get on her feet working nonstop for Martin in Austin while trying to pay the mortgage on the old Hampton ranch house back in Cypress that she had won from Dean in the divorce. Dean was a bankrupt, well-armed, and still-pissed-off giant mess up in Ohio. Susan and I found ourselves then, one sad cold day, in the real world of adults—where no one gives a shit about you for the most part, no matter how cute you are—with no one else to rely on, certainly financially, but ourselves.
So yeah, I had to get a job. I decided on painting as I thought it would be much less noisy than some of the other industrial trades and seemed like the least work for the most money. With carpentry you actually had to make something and listen to hammering and loud saws at seven in the morning. Painting would be quiet, I thought.
Susan had found a grim job in a cubicle selling classified ads over the phone all day at the Austin Times-Tribune, which was just around the corner from our apartment in the El Madrid. The apartment complex had been built in the seventies but was already falling apart; stained green shag carpeting covered our floors, with lime-green, chipped, and speckled linoleum in the tiny kitchen, poorly patched thin Sheetrock walls, and an acoustic ceiling so thick and oversprayed it looked like yellow popcorn above our heads. All we had in there was a fold-out card table in the kitchen, a cheap Goodwill couch with two cardboard boxes in front of it that Susan had duct-taped together and put Con-Tact paper on to make a coffee table. We had a large S
ony though, that her mother had given us, Dean’s old TV, and his heavy VCR. In the bedroom we had a box spring and mattress sitting on the floor, surrounded by all our clothes, shoes, papers, books, magazines, and whatever clutter of crap we had left after our months of nonstop traveling and drinking and drugging.
We only had the one car now, mine, a battered, light-blue, two-door ’72 LTD with a ripped blue vinyl roof and no side windows. I’d gotten the car along with some cash by trading, cutting, and selling more than an ounce of good coke through a dealer friend of mine. I had to drive Susan to work every morning. I remember her first day, that first morning, dropping her off. She didn’t want to get out of the car, so we sat and talked for half an hour. Then, just before eight:
“I have to go in now.”
I gave her a light kiss. “I’m sorry, babe.”
“Me too.”
She got out of the car and started walking toward the big white building. She stopped on the steps and turned and waved good-bye. I waved back and felt like I was abandoning her.
* * *
I picked the biggest paint contractor in town out of the phone book and called them for a week from a pay phone near our apartment. It said in the yellow pages they painted cars, residential, custom homes, commercial buildings, everything. They finally let me come down and fill out an application. I made up three years of experience at three imaginary paint companies in Houston. The owner of Austin Paint and Spray Company, Tim Wilson, called me into his office. He was from Alabama, in his thirties, short, with a huge gut and an old-fashioned flattop head of hair that had already turned solid gray. I’d cut my own hair and was very clean-cut and shaven, lying rapidly about how much I wanted to work for him. Tim mentioned the Austin real-estate boom and that Austin Paint and Spray, or APS, as everyone called it, would soon have more work than they could handle. He didn’t seem to believe my experience, but he hired me at $7.50 an hour.
* * *
We met in North Austin in an industrial area above Highway 183 covered with giant chain-link-fenced parking and storage lots, the fence tops lined with curls of razor wire, the lots filled with work trucks, manufacturing materials, stacks of sheet metal and silver conduit, walls of metal pipes and fittings, and back-to-back metal prefab buildings and warehouses. All the APS painters sat in our little tin building every morning from seven to eight, waiting for Tim to give us our assignments. All of us smoked, so the room was always hazy and smelled of tobacco and paint thinner. I usually read the paper, the front page, first section, and sat in the corner trying not to talk to anybody.
There were two men who were the most vocal in the room: Jesse and Tyler. Tyler was a tall curly-headed guy from West Texas. He was missing his two front teeth and covered in scars and tattoos, Bugs Bunny on his left forearm and the Tasmanian Devil on the right, flipping you the bird. I guess because I was the youngest and quietest person in the room, Tyler picked me to listen to his exploits first thing every morning.
“I had this bitch last night I met down at Antone’s. She was married an’ I got ’er inerested in me when I got up onstage with Robert Earl an’ I started playing my banjo. She wanted me, man. She liked my pickin’. She said she also saw me down at the Kerrville Folk Festival. Anyway, I got ’er out t’ the truck an’ this bitch was fine, I mean she was good-lookin’ an’ ready to fuck an’ just when we was gettin’ in my truck she starts pukin’, just pukin’ all over the place. I pushed her outta the truck an’ said, ‘Bitch, if you’re gonna get sick, please do it in the parkin’ lot an’ not in my truck.’ So she pukes it all up an’ says, ‘Okay, let’s go,’ an’ I told her, ‘You know, I think I’m ouyta the mood now, but get on in here an’ we’ll go on to my house.’ ”
I never even looked at him. I kept reading the front section, turning the pages.
“An’ so—come on, man, listen! So I got her home an’ fucked her an’ she was all right but she just kinda laid there, I think she was out, but I fucked her anyway. She had all these blue ducks on her panties an’ I took her panties off an’ added ’em to my panty collection. You still haven’t seen my panty collection, you gotta see it. You wanna see it?”
“What are you collecting panties for?” I asked him.
Tyler looked at me, confused.
“He wears them,” somebody said.
“I have to collect ’em to remind me of each bitch I’ve fucked. Now listen. So I finally passed out an’ I wake up in the night ’cuz I’m gettin’ all wet. I look over at that woman an’ she’s wettin’ the goddamn bed! I pushed her out an’ said, ‘Shit honey, the bathroom’s right there.’ She just stood up, though, and pissed herself right there on the floor.”
“She sounds like a nice girl.”
“Oh yeah, she was fine lookin’.”
Jesse was the other talker. He’d fought in Vietnam and discovered heroin there. He had long black hair, a beard, and a giant tiger tattoo running down his right arm. Jesse would mix a large amount of methadone into his coffee every morning, and it really got him going. He was intelligent, but over the years a number of things had twisted his mind.
“Now look,” he said. “I’m a liberal man, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just that the Vietnamese have no place in this country. I’m sorry, but I know ’em, and they’re fucking scum. My landlord, who is this fucking schizophrenic nut-ball who can’t decide how she wants to deal with our relationship, rents part of my duplex out to a fucking half-Vietnamese, half-American family. Right next door. They have two little Vietnamese girls so, shit, I try to be nice to them. They come by all the time and want to talk, they’re about nine and twelve, and so they’re bothering me and I give them some coins as a present; my father was a numismatist and I have this very valuable coin collection, and I give them two silver, real silver, dollars that are very fucking old that my goddamn father’s father gave him, which he gave to me, and the two little sweeties run off and they come back and say, ‘Look, Uncle Jesse, we bought four candy bars.’ And I just froze and I said, ‘You didn’t use your very special silver dollars, did you?’ and the oldest one says, ‘Yes, and I got a Hershey’s with almonds,’ and I wanted to say, How would you like a foot rammed up your cunt, you stupid fucking kid?! That was very valuable, worth much more than a Hershey bar, worth much more than you, so how would you like me to ram my fist into your little twelve-year-old cunt? Huh? Do you see what I’m talking about now? The Vietnamese are fucking idiots.”
I didn’t really want to work with these guys, but of course Tim sent me with them. Since I didn’t have much experience, they were putting me in a commercial building downtown with the hard-ass foreman, Big Jim.
Big Jim was a tall and big person from Alabama who’d gone to high school with Tim and thus was his right-hand painter. Jim was a nice-enough guy, though extremely dull. Every morning he would sit in the shop reading nothing but the food ads in the paper, or stacks of food circulars he’d received in the mail, marking down all the prices, adding up the discounts, talking with open anticipation of an upcoming sale on pork chops, Wonder Bread, or salami.
* * *
That first day, that first year, was terrible. Big Jim got in his old El Camino and told me to follow him to a new building going up at 301 Congress. I got into my ’72 LTD with no side windows. Tyler got in his beat-up truck covered in bumper stickers: “I’m a Picker,” “Honk if you love Banjos,” “Follow me to the Kerrville Folk Festival.” Jesse got in his old van, and we followed Big Jim downtown.
Big Jim wanted a lot of paint put up on those walls, and there were many walls and many floors in that building. It was fairly easy for me to learn how to slap it on by watching the other painters, and eventually I knew what I was doing. The main problem was time slowing to a muddy, sandy, wheel-halting, mind-numbing standstill. Jesse and Tyler talked to me all day, both men that certain type of talker-worker, a person who gabs constantly to divert your attention from their mediocre abilities. I preferred to work silently, letting my mind wander to some story or a pla
y I’d been working on the night before, or to dreams of fame, practicing my visit to a TV talk show or my acceptance speech for the Oscar for my original screenplay, thanking the academy and pretending I wasn’t where I really was.
Tyler sang country songs all morning. Or he explained his tattoos and scars: “I got this one after I got outta Huntsville. See, I shot my brother, the cocksucker—but he shot me through the neck.” He pointed to a white round scar over his trachea and another wide scar on the back of his neck. “I didn’t kill him, though. I got this one from a knife fight. Somebody shot me right here. . . .”
I soon realized that Tyler saw himself primarily as a country outlaw, and I had no doubt that, drunk on a Saturday night in an East Texas bar—or any bar—he was dangerous. But during the day he was a lazy painter and scared of his boss, his girlfriends broke up with him regularly, and he had no money. Tim and many others at APS thought he was a fool. And now, though he was only forty, he was developing some sort of Parkinson’s disease, and his head was starting to shake back and forth all the time as were his hands, a bad condition for painting as well as banjo picking. Tyler’s favorite saying was, “I’m a man, goddammit! I told her ‘I’m a man.’ ” Or “Tim can’t talk to me that way, I’m a grown man!” There was nothing I could do but listen. I was trapped for nine hours a day.
Jesse, flying on methadone, explained his life to me, though he could never get his stories straight. One day he was a paratrooper with two hundred jumps, the next he was an explosives expert or a tunnel rat. Some days he was a sniper. More than half the men in the shop were vets from a variety of wars, though few spoke of their experiences. Jesse was never shy. He, too, showed me his scars, two long white worms on his back.
“Those were from a VC sniper. I killed two guys from the front, and this fucker was hiding somewhere and shot me in the back twice. The bullets missed my spine by a fraction of an inch.”
