by Bryan Mealer
He hired an actual secretary to answer his telephones, one of middle age who chain-smoked cigarettes and swore like a floor hand. And over a game of golf one afternoon at the Big Spring Country Club, where Grady was now a member, he met Hugh Porter. Hugh was fresh out of Texas Tech, where he’d majored in biology and chemistry. Not only was he sharp and good-looking, he also came across as steady and self-possessed. Right away Grady offered him a salary of thirty thousand dollars to come sell oil investments, then dispatched him to Midland for a seminar on how to do it.
Next, Grady sought legitimacy. Using his father-in-law’s name, he managed to convince one of the Permian Basin’s most respected geologist-and-engineer teams to come aboard. Orville Phelps and Bob Wilson had been finding oil since the fifties and had employed just about every method to get it. They were shrewd, sober men who spoke a language of origin and deep time. After listening to them explain porosities, anticlinal structures, and stratigraphic traps, Grady threw up his hands, said, “Hell, just go find me some!” and gave the men whatever they asked for.
It was early 1980. Ronald Reagan would soon campaign for president on a platform of rescuing the sluggish economy, and part of that plan involved further decontrol of oil and gas. But in West Texas, the boom was already in full swing. Oil prices would soon reach their highest level yet, forty dollars a barrel, thanks again to the kingmakers half a planet away, whose names most Texans wouldn’t know how to pronounce.
In early 1979, revolutionaries in Iran had ended the dynasty of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and installed their supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. A second global panic ensued that drove crude prices even higher than OPEC’s embargo ever had. The gas lines returned, forcing President Carter—after delivering his soul-searching “malaise speech” on television—to finally start lifting price controls to spur domestic drilling. Suddenly all the abandoned “stripper wells” that produced less than thirty-five barrels a day—most of them remnants from the old booms—were worth bringing back online. Texas had thousands of those wells, which were soon producing millions of barrels of oil.
Farmers and ranchers who’d come to ignore the pump jacks on their land now saw royalties for the first time in years. In January 1980, deposits into Midland banks surpassed $1 billion for the first time ever—despite one of the worst droughts in twenty years that decimated the season’s cotton crop. Banks across the state whose foundations had been built on cattle and agriculture made quick decisions to diversify into energy loans. They dispatched officers to the oil and gas seminars, then sent them running after tomorrow men short on equipment and cash.
By then Grady’s company, Cunningham Oil, was officially in the race. Two of the Adkins wells near Sweetwater came in strong. In April 1980, Bob Wilson and Orville Phelps zeroed in on some acreage a hundred miles east of Big Spring, near San Angelo, where they wanted to drill. Hugh then drove out and charmed the rancher to secure the lease. While the team pitched investors and waited for drilling permits, Grady—by another stroke of fortune—acquired yet another piece of his kingdom.
On April 9, Ike Robb, his old mentor at the Ritz Theater, collapsed while exercising at the YMCA and died of a massive heart attack. He was forty-nine. Just four months earlier, Robb had sold off his movie theaters to focus on real estate—in particular, to finish Highland South and realize his father’s vision. Now, with father and son both dead, Robb’s wife Betty put the undeveloped land up for sale. By year’s end, Grady had snatched up seventy-three acres at the foot of South Mountain.
It was right after buying Highland South that Grady called Dad, offering a seat beside the throne.
Grady was typically drunk when he called the house, but that night Dad heard something different. Grady carefully laid out what sounded like an actual business plan. And it was impressive. He told Dad about Adkins and the wildcat wells, about hiring Wilson and Phelps, and his excitement about landing their first lease.
“Bob Wilson says each well on that ranch is worth twenty thousand barrels,” Grady said, quoting the engineer’s review, while not precisely. “And we’re gonna drill forty, fifty of those wells. With prices how they are, you’re gonna be stuffing pillows with all the money we make.”
But what sounded most appealing to Dad was what Grady called the Cunningham Development Corporation, which would carry on Ike Robb’s legacy at Highland South. Back when we lived in Midland, Dad had actually taken real estate courses, mainly on a lark, and gotten his license. Grady asked if it was still valid. Dad told him yes.
“Then I can’t let you pass up this kind of opportunity,” he said, then lowered his voice. “Bobby, I’m asking you to come back to Big Spring and be my vice president.”
“Well…” Dad replied.
“You’ll be my right-hand man—just the two of us.”
Dad’s job would be to sell investments in the oil wells, and with each deal he closed, Grady would give him a percentage of the royalties. He’d also be in charge of selling the luxury home sites to all the people getting rich in the boom. “And if you’re gonna sell ’em, you might as well live on one,” Grady said. “First thing we’ll do is pick out your own lot.” Grady then offered Dad a salary of thirty-five thousand dollars plus perks, which was a lot more than he was making.
The next morning, when Dad got home from his night shift, he and Mom talked it over. They agreed that if even half of what Grady said was true, it was still a heck of a deal. The boom was making millionaires out of fools left and right, no one could deny that.
“This is that one chance of a lifetime,” he concluded, “that chance that you’ll kick yourself later for turning down.” The next day, he called Grady and said he’d take the job—as soon as we could sell our house in Alvin.
Yet when Dad broke the news to the family, he was surprised by their disappointment. Preston, especially, seemed hurt.
“You got a great job down at the plant,” his brother argued. “All the guys love you. Your family is happy here, and besides, what about the homes we were gonna build? You were gonna be my AC man.”
“Sorry, Pres,” Dad said. “I’m going to get rich.”
Preston begged him not to go. He knew all about Grady Cunningham, and the whole enterprise Dad described made him feel sick to his stomach. But Dad wouldn’t listen. Even Zelda couldn’t talk sense into him. And it was no use appealing to Opal, whose only thought was having us grandkids back home.
Bob was even less help. “I never had that kind of opportunity,” he told his son. “I say go for it. It’s about time one of us made money off them dat-burn rigs.”
11
Dad returns home, enters the fast lane … Grady’s world … an accident and a choice …
While Dad and Grady worked out the details for our lot in Highland South, we needed a place to live. Dad had heard stories about all the empty houses left over from the base closure and assumed we’d have easy pickings. But once we arrived in Big Spring, we discovered the boom had devoured everything. No rentals, not even mobile homes. Every hotel was full and charging double rates. People blamed the Yankees from Ohio and Michigan who’d driven down to work on the rigs, but many of them were sleeping in their cars out at the truck stop.
After two days of looking, we found only one house that was available. It was a tiny three-bedroom on West Seventeenth Street with peeling yellow paint, ratty carpet, and no air-conditioning. We took it right away. Mom managed to fix it up as nice as possible while Dad used what he’d learned in HVAC classes to install central air and heat. Weeds and sticker burrs covered the tiny backyard, but near the porch was a dead pecan tree with a wooden fort in it. All that remained was its rickety platform, which my sister Marci and I quickly claimed as our lookout. Not long after we arrived, we sat eating popsicles and watched a sandstorm roll off the distant Caprock. It approached quietly, like a brown fog, before the wind grew dirty and stung our bare skin. We dropped our ice cream and raced inside, our mouths full of grit.
At work, Dad was getting h
is own taste of the landscape, and it was more crowded than he’d pictured. In all of their conversations about the company, Grady never said anything about Hugh Porter. The day Dad arrived, Hugh joined him and Grady at the Branding Iron for a welcome lunch that stretched long into the afternoon and left Dad overwhelmed. From the start, it was clear that Hugh, not Dad, was in charge of putting together oil deals, and Grady treated him like a second in command. Grady even introduced Hugh as “operations manager.”
Grady had also failed to mention anything about the half dozen other guys who joined them at the table, each one resembling a Tiger Beat model. They didn’t seem old enough to drink the liquor they ordered, and in fact, most of them were still in high school. There was Jacques, a farm kid from Indiana whose family had recently arrived in town. He’d been working as a waiter at the Branding Iron when Grady flagged him down one night and offered him a job.
“A job doing what?” Jacques asked.
“Oh, hell,” Grady said, “we’ll find something!”
Grady put Jacques in charge of the company’s new IBM and gave him the title of assistant comptroller. But his job mostly entailed driving Grady to the country club. The same went for David, and Kenny, who was Grady’s nephew. Another guy, Buddy, seemed to be in charge of this group and held special sway with the boss. Buddy was basically an orphan—his father dead, his mother absent—when he’d first come to work for Grady. Like Hugh, he was bright but also streetwise and shrewd. When Grady learned that Buddy was living alone in the Barcelona Apartments, unable to pay rent and trying to go to school, he asked Ann if Buddy could live with them. Buddy now had his own bedroom on Glenwick Cove and a rack of nice suits in the closet.
There was also the company pilot, a twenty-three-year-old Norwegian named Torstein. He and his fiancée, who was from Michigan, had found their way to Big Spring when the municipal airport needed a safety instructor. They later got married in one of the big hangars, and for the reception, one of the crop-duster pilots filled a wooden coffin full of ice and Coors.
Coincidentally, Torstein had served as assistant pilot the night Grady chartered a Cessna 206 to fly to Dallas for a convention. Grady was so drunk by the time he returned to the plane that he promptly passed out while Torstein and the pilot headed back to Big Spring. Halfway home, they ran into a fog that paralyzed the western half of the state. Every airport within a hundred miles was closed and wouldn’t let them land, forcing them to circle five hours in a panic as the fuel gauge dropped to red. Grady happened to wake up just as Torstein found a way to get them to Roswell, where they landed on vapors. The following week, to express his gratitude, Grady invited Torstein to dinner at his home.
“I told Ann, ‘This is the young man who saved my life,’” Grady said, and raised his whiskey glass to duplicate the moment. “And that’s when I asked him to be my company pilot. You know what he said? He said, ‘But Grady, you don’t even have a plane.’ I told him, ‘What the hell, Torstein, I’ll just buy one!’ And damn it, I did, too.”
Grady bought a Piper Seneca II, which he painted in Dallas Cowboys colors—even though he hated football—before upgrading to a ten-seater Navajo. When Torstein wasn’t flying Grady and his crew to the “company cabin” in Ruidoso or the ski slopes in Taos, he helped Hugh knock on farmers’ doors and pitch oil investments. Grady even gave Torstein his own desk and a company car, a slick Ford Thunderbird, which Torstein posed with for photos he sent back to Norway—proof of the jumbo Texas dream.
Not long after Torstein joined the company, Grady asked him if he spoke any foreign languages. When Torstein replied that he knew a little French, Grady invited him and his wife on a grand tour of Europe. A whole group from Big Spring went, making stops in Amsterdam, Paris, Austria, and Switzerland. It was in Switzerland that Grady bought a floor-length fur coat made from a wolf. In fact, he bought two.
Torstein’s wife, Linda, worked at a new bookstore that Grady opened called The Book Inn: An Overnight Home for Books. It was located in the Highland Shopping Center, next to where Grady had sold women’s shoes. Grady had even paid a local decorator twenty thousand dollars to design the store’s interior.
Upon hearing this along with everything else, Dad’s head was swimming. “What are you doing buying a bookstore, Grady?”
“Well, Bobby, Ann likes books. She needs something to keep her busy while I work all the time.”
“Is it making any money?”
“It will, it will,” he said, and patted Dad on the back. “That ain’t for you to worry about anyway, sugar, not on your first day.” He lit one of his long Carlton 100s, then motioned the waitress for another tray of drinks.
It turned out that Grady really was hard at work, mainly trying to fashion himself after Ike Robb and Raymond Tollett. A couple of days later, Dad was shocked when he opened the Herald and saw that Grady was running for the school board.
He’d taken out a campaign ad that stated: “As a businessman, I have learned about necessity of sound management, and of conserving and wisely using our resources.” A photo showed Grady in his new suit sitting behind his desk with a pen in hand, ready to sign a stack of documents. “My door is always open to you,” he added.
The election was held that week, and it was a slaughter. Out of six candidates, Grady came in second to last in the polls, garnering little more than four hundred votes. Ann was secretly relieved. “You’ll never be like Daddy,” she told him, and the comment made Grady furious. He never spoke of the election again.
Ann was the real owner of the bookstore—it was her money that bought it, anyway—but she let Grady’s sister Nancy manage the place, with help from Torstein’s wife. After Grady won his oil well, Ann and Nancy had gone up to Portland, Oregon, for a seminar on how to succeed in the book business. And ever since opening the place, Nancy had done a fine job of stocking the latest bestselling novels, romance and mystery paperbacks, plus a wide variety of Bibles—which was their bread and butter. No one got rich off selling books—that’s what they told them up in Portland. The store had to be a labor of love, and theirs would survive as long as Nancy could keep Grady’s hands out of it.
Ann visited the store nearly every day, usually in the mornings when it was quiet. She complained to Nancy and Linda how Grady was never home, how he and the boys would leave and be gone for two or three days, never telling her where, and spending money on God knows what. One day, a woman named Bobbi Joe showed up at the door and said she was the new cook. Another time, after a trip to Houston, Grady had come home with a stretch limousine and a chauffeur, who now waited outside their house to drive Ann to the grocery store. “I don’t need somebody driving me around Big Spring. Not unless I’m sick!” she said. Already she refused to get in that silly car.
Grady had started leaving Buddy at the house when he went away, along with another high school kid named Kirby who’d also moved in. “Buddy can look after you,” Grady told Ann. “Just tell Buddy if you need anything.” Most nights it was just her, Buddy, and Kirby, and sometimes Buddy’s girlfriend, playing cards at the kitchen table. For supper they endured whatever concoction Bobbi Joe pulled out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “That woman can’t cook worth a plugged nickel,” she complained to Grady. It was clear to Ann what Buddy had been hired for, and Bobbi Joe, too—to be her guardians.
What Ann really wanted was a family. She wanted to raise kids and give them the grand happy childhood she never had. What she wanted was to love someone and to be loved in return. She told Nancy and Linda how she and Grady had tried to get pregnant but hadn’t been successful. The doctor said it might be her thyroid. She was also taking diet pills to keep down her weight, hoping that being thinner might keep Grady at home. The truth was that Ann couldn’t care less about her money. She would trade every dollar her father had ever made to have a happy family of her own.
“Why don’t you just cut him off?” Nancy would say. But for reasons she didn’t know, perhaps loneliness, Ann enabled her husband, which she wo
uld regret for the rest of her days. She enabled him with the money she had no use for herself. And under its influence, she was watching him turn into a monster.
* * *
The shock of Grady’s spending propelled Dad into overdrive during his first weeks on the job. There was plenty of work to get done: forty-five lots out in Highland South needed to be supplied with water, sewage, and electricity for the first phases of development. Permits needed getting, streets needed paving, and most of all, the lots needed to sell.
On the oil side, despite feeling sidestepped by Hugh (and having to share his royalties), Dad realized they made a good pair. Hugh was a real go-getter, plus he had a head for numbers when it came to drafting promotional deals for investors. In fact, for their first well, he structured the deal so the company wouldn’t pay a dime until after the hole was completed, which in turn freed up capital to put them in what Hugh described as “a multiple-well position.”
It was Dad’s job to find the people who might have ten or twenty thousand dollars to play with. He called bankers and car dealers in town, doctors and lawyers in Midland and Odessa, a dentist in Dallas, people who might be eager to drop an oil well into their cocktail conversation (a 70 percent tax bracket for high earners meant that people were investing for the write-off, which only fueled the reckless speculation). Others were just hoping for one lucky strike that would guarantee some go-to-hell money when they grew old.
Sitting in his office, with his own brass pump jack on the desk, Dad was never sure if it was Ike Robb, Tollett, or J. R. Ewing whom Grady saw each time he looked in the mirror. That seemed to change by the hour. But like Tollett, he spent the morning greeting visitors who came seeking favors.
