by Bryan Mealer
Buddy’s role as Ann’s watchman, and his place under their roof, meant that he was the one Grady awoke at 2 a.m. when he needed to score. But that was the extent of Buddy’s involvement, as Grady was careful to keep the cocaine from the boys. Like his affairs with men, the habit remained separate and tidy, contained in its own little world, and each little world had its own landscape and cast of players. The world of Cunningham Oil was Grady’s most carefully designed, with an all-star ensemble. He’d even tapped the only friend he’d ever had, the only person he ever trusted, to be its true-north leader. And for a while, these worlds remained exclusive to their own orbits. But the more cocaine Grady put up his nose, the more he upset the gravity, until the bodies in this delicate balance spun out of their paths and came barreling toward each other.
The cocaine moved into the Petroleum Building, along the conference room table and in smudged powder traces atop the liquor-tray glass, and it moved into his home. As luck would have it, Ike Robb’s widow went up north to be with her kids and put the dream house in Highland South up for sale. Grady bought it for cash, plus the house next door. He put his office in the old upstairs theater where, as an usher, he’d once sat at the foot of the master, screening Love Story and The Hawaiians, and said to the boys, “Can you believe it? Can you believe I own Ike Robb’s house?” He then hired a butler named Riggins, a tall black man he’d met on the north side, to wait on Ann, Buddy, and Kirby while upstairs he got high with town trash who congregated like pilot fish. Every man a king! Every man a millionaire! The next week, those same people were filing past the secretary, asking Grady for money.
When mixed with Seagram’s, the cocaine turned him into a beast, out to devour all that passed by. That included waitresses, whom he tormented on a nightly basis to try and impress the boys, making them all but bleed for their tips while fetching his VO and water. Some had seen much worse and were game, rolling their eyes at his weird misogyny, while a few—to everyone’s relief—even gave it back. He loved them the most. But then one night his hand would find a thigh or an ass. When the women twirled around, eyes sparking with rage, it usually fell on Dad to make the peace and get everyone out. Ann would yell at Grady in the parking lot, and Mom would get quiet and upset, and once home, she’d vow never to go out in public with him again. “But of course,” she’d say, “he did leave that girl a three-hundred-dollar tip.”
Even the boys learned to watch their backs when Grady was on a binge. They’d surrendered a piece of themselves already to his appetites, back when they first came aboard, gold struck and eager to impress. Grady had taken a few of them down to Melba’s on Third Street for prostitutes and let them pick out a girl. And while they were going at it, one of the gals pointed to a peephole in the wall and said, “He likes to watch, you know,” and the boys had had to live with that information.
Over time, though, they learned they could still draw honey from the hive without getting stung. In Vegas, when the knock on the door came at three in the morning, they pretended to be asleep. Or in the limo, if his wandering hand brushed their thigh, they could scold him like a naughty child and that would be the end of it. And if necessary, they could go even further. One bleary night in a shared hotel room in Dallas, Grady’s desire boiled over on Jacques, who put a finger in his eye.
“Try that again,” he warned, “and I’ll kill you.”
With Grady, each person had to ask himself the same question: How much were the good times really worth?
13
The unraveling … Dad finds his wings …
In July 1981 Congress approved President Reagan’s Economic Recovery Tax Act. The legislation sought to boost the economy by slashing corporate and personal taxes along with government spending. While the wealthy benefited most from an across-the-board tax cut, the poor took a hit on programs and social services. And when the Federal Reserve jacked the interest rates to drive down inflation, the economy plunged into the worst slump since the Great Depression. Over seventeen thousand businesses across the country failed, unemployment spiked to 10 percent, and homelessness surged as families who’d lost jobs in the mills and factories now saw their safety net disappear.
By the summer of 1982, the recession caught the Texas miracle and gave it a hammering. People stopped buying as much gasoline, which resulted in a surplus of oil, and OPEC couldn’t keep the prices from tumbling. Before anyone knew it, the rig count had fallen by half and jobs began to follow. All the Yankees from Pennsylvania and Ohio found themselves out of work and with nowhere to live. In Houston, they stood with their wives and children at soup kitchens while police pulled over cars with northern plates and pointed them out of town. Many left on trains, just like in the old days, headed west, where they heard there were jobs and the dream was still alive. Fort Worth alone had fifty hobo jungles full of hundreds of men.
In Big Spring, unemployment that summer reached its highest level since the air base left town. Meanwhile, the banks were reporting a sharp increase in loans from the previous year, while deposits were spiraling down.
For Dad and the boys, it was difficult to determine their true coordinates. They still had their jobs, which could only mean they were safe in that privileged patch of airspace. The company still had plans to drill seven more wells in the coming months, plus they’d partnered again with the wildcatter Adkins for a deep well out in Haskell County—a potential gusher if the geology proved legitimate. And the sagging market hadn’t spooked investors, not yet, anyway. Dad and Hugh had little trouble raising the money for the drilling expense.
But there was indeed trouble. One morning, a service company rep called the office asking to be paid for a well they’d drilled months ago. Someone alerted Grady, who pulled out his big checkbook and settled up, then apologized for the oversight. But a few weeks later, the same thing happened again.
For every dollar Cunningham Oil earned, Grady turned around and spent fifty. The burn rate was alarming, yet Grady always assured Dad, “The trust is covering it.” The Tollett trust paid the seven-thousand-dollar bills for charter planes and covered the payments on the bookstore and cotton farm. It paid cash for Ike Robb’s house and the house next door (“I liked the swimming pool,” Grady said), and the twenty-seven thousand dollars’ worth of carpeting, not to mention all the cars, jewelry, and whatever hedonistic whimsy crossed his mind. And so Dad suspended all logic and took Grady at his word, assuming that it was Ann’s money also buying his cocaine.
But after examining the books, Dad discovered that Grady had nearly cleaned out the company. The investment capital, which was supposed to sit in escrow until it came time to drill, was all gone—used to cover payroll and past debts, as well as expenses. As it stood, they were behind in payments on three wells.
Dad found Grady in his office. “The heck are you doing?” he said. “You’ve nearly bled us dry.”
“I got overextended, Bobby. It’s normal in this business.”
“We’ve got seven wells to drill and no way to pay for them. When these companies find out we’re broke, nobody’s gonna work with us.”
“Don’t worry,” Grady said. “Bill Read will take care of it.”
Bill Read was president of Coahoma State Bank, ten miles east of Big Spring. Coahoma was a tiny oil-patch town, but Read and his senior loan officer gambled like the big boys in Midland and Dallas when it came to chasing deals.
Read took care of the problem, and then some. The huge loan he gave Grady not only got the company out of trouble, but kept the circus on the move. The next thing Dad and the boys knew, Grady was donating twenty thousand dollars to the Catholic Church, and he wasn’t even Catholic. “It’s what Mister Tollett would have done,” he explained.
At the same time, Grady started a scholarship fund at Howard College for local high school students. This was in addition to already covering the tuition for dozens of other kids, including a niece he was putting through medical school. As Dad and Hugh tried to make sense of it all, Grady announced he
was buying the Brass Nail restaurant.
Furthermore, he’d also bought a football team which he named the Cunningham Oilers. It was part of the semi-professional Dixie League, which included teams from Houston, Oklahoma City, and as far north as Wichita, Kansas. Most of the players had high school or college experience and now worked in the oil fields. For their road games, Grady gave them first-class treatment, chartered fancy buses so they could ride like Nashville stars and fed them prime rib. He even hired local girls to be cheerleaders. At their first home game, in mid-November 1982, held at Memorial Stadium, we all watched as Grady descended onto the fifty-yard line in a helicopter. The door flung open and out he jumped in his wolf coat, arms raised in victory, a cigarette in one hand and a tumbler of VO in the other.
* * *
That fall, oil prices continued to drop. Investors started getting spooked and stopped returning calls. The phone rang instead with contractors asking about their money, which Grady moved around with such mystery it merited its own Vegas act. Worse, the company had just drilled three consecutive dry wells on the Jones and Guinn leases. Sixty grand down the tube. And there was Grady leaping out of a helicopter. The check he gave the referee after the game—for $150—bounced at the bank on Monday.
“Grady,” Dad told him, “you got no business being in business.”
But somehow Grady found the cash to stay airborne, the whole operation hovering just above the rocks. A month later, he threw a Christmas party at the Brass Nail club that people still talk about, with music and dancing and thousands of dollars’ worth of food and booze. Inside, a parade of oil chic bounced along as Hoyle Nix and His West Texas Cowboys fiddled down on “Big Ball’s in Cowtown” and “Comin’ Down the Pecos.” Snapshots of that night show Opal wrapped in a fabulous mink shawl and scanning the crowd through a pair of huge tinted glasses. Dad posed with Ann, who wore a big smile and a wine-colored muumuu, the kind of dress Grady insisted she wear lest her figure attract a man who’d treat her better. Dad himself wore a mustache and a sharp black suit. And like most local men, his expensive leather shoes were covered in dust.
On Christmas Day, over at Bob and Opal’s, our family had just finished lunch when Grady and Ann stopped by for dessert. Halfway through his pecan pie, Grady declared a fishing trip to Florida to celebrate New Year’s.
“Just the men,” he insisted. “I’ll call a plane. We’ll leave tomorrow.”
Ann said, “Well, if the men are going fishing, the women are going to the Bahamas.”
By that evening, nearly twenty people were booked on two chartered jets, including Mom, most of the boys, and our local state representative. Even Zelda and Charles, who were visiting from Albuquerque, got invited. The group stopped first in New Orleans, where Grady tipped two hundred dollars to a carriage driver, who danced a jig in the street, before splitting off to Fort Lauderdale and Nassau. While Dad, Grady, and the boys went fishing, the others enjoyed scuba diving, shopping, caviar and champagne. The planes alone cost forty thousand dollars.
As 1983 got under way and the sky continued to fall, Grady doubled down and aimed even higher. In January, he reopened the Brass Nail restaurant, which he’d remodeled into a five-star establishment, hiring the maître d’ from Il Sorrento in Dallas, along with a top-flight chef and manager.
“It Began with One Man and a Dream,” the announcement in the Herald read. “Grady Cunningham Founded a Restaurant Where Dining Equals an Art Form.”
A selection of menu items followed: oysters Rockefeller, escargot in mushroom caps, consommé Celestine, prime rib, milk-fed baby veal, Dover sole, and a dish called “Poulet Ann.”
A few weeks later, Dad’s coworker Hugh got married. He told his bride to expect something extravagant from Grady—a trip to Hawaii, a new car. But after the wedding Grady summoned Hugh to the house, ripped a brass lamp from the wall, handed it to him, and told him congratulations. When Hugh returned from his honeymoon, his paycheck bounced, along with everyone else’s.
* * *
Meanwhile, we’d moved into a new house. It was not in Highland South, as Grady had promised; that commitment, like many others, had long been forgotten. Mom and Dad bought this house on their own, and it was special: the very three-bedroom ranch that Zelda and Charles had built back in 1966. The red bricks had come straight from the old T&P station after they’d torn it down. There were towering pines in the front and back yards and a long covered porch painted with a shuffleboard court. The day we moved in, I stood on the flagstone steps of the big sunken living room and knew it meant one thing: we were finally rich like Uncle Grady.
But the very sight of the house filled my father with terror. He was now saddled with a fat mortgage, and his paychecks were worthless. He began considering other careers, escape routes. He enrolled in a fourteen-week Dale Carnegie course at the junior college, which he attended at night, convinced his speaking skills were lacking. But really, it was just his old reliable confidence that was battered.
Mornings, I’d go into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal and find him at the table, hunched over a three-ring binder of Carnegie’s boiled-down principles for self-improvement. How to become a leader. How to gain influence and overcome worry. The last part seemed particularly poignant. “Ask yourself, ‘What is the worst that could possibly happen?’” Carnegie advised. “Prepare to accept the worst … Remind yourself of the exorbitant price you can pay for worry in terms of your health.”
So Dad tried doing as instructed. But each morning he pulled out of the driveway, he had to wonder which method of slow suicide Grady would attempt next.
It was around that time that Grady walked into his office.
“We have a situation,” he said.
He explained they still owed money for the casing they’d used in the deep well out in Haskell County, back in November. This was the partnership with Adkins, where Grady had agreed to cover half the operating costs. He’d held off the pipe company as long as he could, but their lawyer had telephoned that morning, threatening legal action if they didn’t get paid. The bust was squeezing everybody.
“They need thirty thousand dollars,” Grady said.
Dad was indignant. “We already raised that money, Grady. Where’d it go?”
“You know where it went, Bobby!” he shouted. “The fact is, it’s gone now and if we don’t pay these people, they’re gonna file a lien on that well or else take us to court—you, me, Adkins, and anyone else who invested with us. Then we’ll really be in trouble.”
Grady had temporarily exhausted the trust. Most of the bankers in Big Spring and Midland no longer took his calls. Even Bill Read in Coahoma had turned him down, Grady said.
“But State National says they can arrange something with you.”
He was looking straight at Dad. Out of options, Grady had come to the only person who could save him.
“I can pay you back in a month.”
So Dad climbed into the Rolls-Royce and they drove up to Ninth and Main, where inside he scribbled his signature that gave Grady the money, an amount that nearly equaled his own salary. As he put down the pen, the awareness of everything he’d just signed away, plus all he’d given up, bored in deep like steel against stone. They were down in that hole together.
Grady missed the first payment on the loan. When the ninety-day period was up, he kicked State National some interest money, persuaded them to give Dad another extension, then missed that payment, too.
Finally, in August 1983, so stressed he could hardly sleep, Dad walked into Grady’s office and quit.
* * *
If the catalyst to change his life hadn’t come the previous year, on the top floor of the Petroleum Building, filthy with his own blood and covered in broken glass, it came now at the dawn of the great Texas oil bust, when Dad found himself suddenly jobless and thirty grand in debt. The loan, not the car crash, finally forced Dad to find his way back. But this time, the road was too narrow for Mom or Zelda to guide him home as they’d done so many tim
es before. There was only room for him and God, and so Dad accepted who he was as a man, acknowledged the choices he’d made, then followed that road.
He went deep into the Word. Mornings, I’d find him at the kitchen table reading his Bible, still in his pajamas, and know that he’d been sitting there for hours. If I was quiet, I could listen from the hallway and hear him praying. It was during these moments that I understood that something had changed. No longer was my father the honky-tonk hero with the Rolex watch and alligator boots, but a man sitting in his underwear in the dark, humbling himself and admitting weakness. Big Bucks Bob was nowhere to be found. In fact, I never saw that belt again.
We started attending church regularly—not First Assembly, but First Baptist, where Dad’s cousin Homer and his family went. It carried none of the baggage of Dad’s youth, and unlike the Assemblies of God, the Baptists believed that once saved, always saved. “This way I can still sin and get into heaven,” Dad said with a wink.
The church had a much wealthier congregation than First Assembly, comprised of retired airmen and Cosden executives, doctors, lawyers, and ranchers who’d invested generously in the church building. First Baptist had a real bowling alley, plus a skating rink in the gymnasium. But best of all, it had a small library where volumes of classic literature shared shelves with the Christian books and study Bibles. While the rest of the family went bowling, Mom let me roam the stacks under the supervision of the librarian, Ms. Edna Ames, who I’m sure regarded me as a curiosity, since what eight-year-old kid would rather read books than bowl or roller-skate?
“What kind of books are you looking for?” Ms. Ames asked.
“Adventures,” I told her, and she went to work, introducing me to the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown series, Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson, and the novels of C. S. Lewis. There in the confines of a Southern Baptist church, my love of reading began.
