by Bryan Mealer
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As for Grady and the boys, the bottom appeared closer each day. The Brass Nail, with its inflated payroll, turned out to be the extra weight that finally sank the ship. Not only was Grady’s timing spectacularly wrong, but so was his audience. Now that life was returning to normal, Big Spring was again the dominion of tight-fisted cotton farmers and cattlemen who preferred chicken-fried steaks at Herman’s or enchiladas at the Spanish Inn. Out-of-work roughnecks scraped by on cheap groceries and Taco Villa, and all the Yankees had driven home. Each night, Jacques and the boys watched the kitchen staff fill the dumpster behind the Brass Nail with crates of red snapper and Maine lobsters that arrived by air and went unsold. In February 1984, Grady placed an ad in the Herald that read like an obituary: “Cunningham Oil Company and Grady L. Cunningham has [sic] sold the Brass Nail Restaurant. We would like to thank the public for their past Patronage and Support.”
The boys hovered a bit longer, thanks to Ann’s trust and shuffled oil investments. While Grady was trying to sell plates of veal Oscar to an empty dining room, the company actually drilled one of its finest producers to date, the O. O. Baker out in Haskell County, which would have paid for itself in a year.
But by then, the district attorney was calling about a list of bounced checks. One of the investors had filed a lawsuit, and a costly exploration out in Yokum County resulted in a dry hole. Through it all, Grady numbed himself with a diet of VO, diet pills, and more cocaine. One night, in a paranoid rage, he chased Hugh’s car down Gregg Street, waving a .38 revolver out the window of his Lincoln.
The crash finally occurred on August 31, 1984, when Grady and Ann petitioned for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Federal Court in Fort Worth. According to the Herald, Grady’s debts totaled $3,790,000, while assets were listed at just over a million. He owed money to more than twenty different creditors, including State National Bank in Big Spring, Coahoma State Bank, and First National in Midland, now under control of the federal government. The FDIC was also listed as a major creditor.
To begin satisfying Grady’s debts, the banks and FDIC seized thirty-one cars, including the Excalibur, several Rolls-Royces, the Cadillacs, and a hangarful of vintage Mustangs. They also took Grady’s floor-length wolf coats and the gold Rolexes. Grady was forced to sell the cotton farm back to his uncle Alvie and disband the football team. After one season of existence, the Cunningham Oilers actually finished with a record of 4–2 and went down in history as one of Grady’s most successful ventures. In the end, all that Grady and Ann had left was Ike Robb’s house in Highland South and one vehicle—a decidedly modest two-door Lincoln Continental Mark VII.
As for Grady’s entourage, they vanished as quickly as they’d arrived, happy to walk away with a clean record and a decent story. Buddy moved to Lubbock to attend Texas Tech, but remained loyal to Grady and Ann until the end. Jacques wound up in Midland working at a hospital. For a while, Hugh joined another local firm to sell oil deals until it too went bankrupt. He later moved to Dallas and enrolled in grad school.
Somehow, amid all of this, Grady managed to pay off Dad’s bank loan with State National. What he couldn’t repay in interest he made up for in furniture. One afternoon, a truck pulled up the drive carrying a plush Henredon living room set that he’d salvaged from the creditors. A few of those pieces still sit in my parents’ home today.
As 1984 came to a close, “Stay Alive till ’85” became the new rallying cry throughout the oil patch. But as the new year dawned, prices continued to drop, and few people were hiring. As work with the FDIC began to taper off, and as retirement beckoned, Dad’s boss Jeff Brown and his wife sold the real estate firm in Big Spring and moved to Central Texas. Rather than leave Dad in the lurch, Jeff arranged an interview for him with a large appraisal firm in San Antonio, where, coincidentally, Zelda and Charles had recently moved. After driving down and speaking with the firm, Dad landed the job. In April, he moved in with his sister while we finished school and Mom sold the house. The first week of June, I climbed into the cab of another U-Haul with Dad, and with Mom and the girls following behind in the station wagon, we struck out for another beginning.
The way I like to remember it, we pulled out of town just as a red sandstorm rolled off the Caprock and strangled the sun, and we did not look back. But when I checked the weather logs from that month, I wasn’t surprised to find that my memory had deceived me. The day we left, the sky was clear blue with hardly any wind. We’d even gotten some rain, meaning the land was green and fragrant, the very best version of itself.
It was on this kind of day when the cattlemen used to ride out to a high place and forget all of yesterday’s trials, when tomorrow men heading west would halt their fevered pace, look around, and put down roots. It’s where, from the top of South Mountain, or a window in the Settles, you could look out and see the refinery sparkle like a jewel, see the land rise from an old prehistoric sea and bend north into the blue yonder. All of nature under heaven was in its proper order, and if you squinted just right, you might be able to see what it had in store for you next.
Epilogue
San Antonio was huge and terrifying, a separate planet altogether made of concrete and traffic. Big Spring held our family’s history, but our new home was in a treeless, newly built subdivision where the houses all looked the same. No familiar landmarks or funny stories to accompany them, no hills or arroyos, and no big sky. When the sun went down in the suburbs, it just got dark.
Dad’s job at the appraisal firm only paid ten dollars an hour, meaning we were broke a lot of the time, so much that Mom made my sisters’ clothes until she went back to work. The good thing about our neighborhood was there were a lot of kids our age. Many of them were Hispanic, and loved to tease me about my thick West Texas accent.
“Hey, man, what’s your name again?” they asked.
“Brine,” I answered.
But my big-city friends introduced me to wonderful things I’d never experienced, such as Run-D.M.C. and Metallica. That first summer, our neighborhood threw a huge block party, puro San Antonio, with loud conjunto music and lots of keg beer. My buddies blasted Grandmaster Flash from a boom box, spread out a piece of cardboard, and did backspins in the street.
In San Antonio, Dad sought to distance himself even further from his past and push closer to God. For a while we attended Aunt Zelda’s church until Mom and Dad found something they liked better. The new church was located on the west side, in a building that had once been a grocery store, next door to a giant Mexican flea market.
The church was spawned from a neo-charismatic movement called the Third Wave that started in California. It wasn’t rooted in doctrine, really, but in “signs and wonders” that the Holy Spirit performed through modern-day prophets and apostles. These included the head pastor, who had fronted a sixties rock band and fancied Armani suits, and his assistant, a former street fighter from England whose arms were covered in ink. It attracted people from all walks: black, white, and Hispanic, reformed Catholics and disillusioned Baptists, burned-out hippies and seekers such as Dad. One of the weekly Bible groups was led by a former coke dealer who’d served a stint in prison.
When the preachers channeled signs and wonders, it was like the Holy Spirit on steroids. I’d grown accustomed to hearing a few people speak in tongues back in Big Spring. But here half the congregation was doing it. Once a visiting evangelist called down a “spirit of laughter” and before I could blink, people sitting around me were rolling on the floor. The preachers foretold prophecies, prayed over the sick, and even cast out demons. One evening a “spirit of benevolence” swept the congregation and people began emptying their pockets. When the pastor announced the collection would help a set of twins in our church who had leukemia, Dad stripped off his gold-plated Rolex, the last remnant of the boom, and dropped it into the plate.
Mom and Dad attended that church for ten more years, until after my sisters and I moved out of the house. Then, after a period of not going an
ywhere, Dad started following a local Lutheran pastor on the radio and telling Mom about his sermons. They soon joined his church, which was nothing like the Assemblies of God or the one in the grocery store. There, for the first time in his life, Dad finally felt true peace with the Lord.
* * *
We saw Grady only a handful of times after leaving Big Spring. Every so often, we got reports about him going into rehab, or his sister taking him to court for stealing money. Ann somehow managed to keep a few of their oil wells, so whenever the price of crude went up, they kicked off some royalties and gave Grady new life. He blew through town in a rented limo and took everyone for steaks, and for one long evening he was king again. But within a few months he was calling Dad late at night, asking for money. Sometimes he just called to cry. After all those years and everything that had happened, Dad remained Grady’s only true friend.
One of the last times I saw him was in 1998, just before my senior year at the University of Texas. Oil prices must have been up again because Grady telephoned saying he was putting me “on scholarship.” I didn’t believe a word until a few days later, when a check arrived that actually cleared the bank. He also sent money for a new computer, along with airline tickets for Dad and me to join him fishing in Mexico.
In Cabo San Lucas, Grady was in old form. He rented a six-bedroom villa overlooking the beach and employed a team of baby-faced cabana boys to deliver food and drinks throughout the day. They also brought his cocaine, which came neatly wrapped in cellophane bags and placed in a cabinet drawer. He left the taxi drivers and housecleaners fifty-dollar tips.
I moved to New York City not long after that to work in magazines, and Grady would threaten to visit. “I’ve got a suite at the Marriott Marquis,” he told me over the phone. “All the people there, they know who I am.” But he never showed, although a souvenir of Grady and my father’s time in the oil business had come with me. Before moving to New York, I didn’t own a proper winter coat, nor did I have any money to buy one. So one weekend while visiting my parents in San Antonio, I went into Dad’s closet and found the black rabbit fur that Grady had given him for Christmas. After nearly twenty years, the coat fit me perfectly. With a few safety pins, I fastened it to the inside of a cheap brown rain jacket as a liner. That’s how I survived my first East Coast winter until I found a job and could buy better clothes. The following year, in the midst of a snowstorm, I dropped the coat next to a homeless man sleeping outside the Christopher Street subway station and never thought twice about it.
After that I lost touch with Grady and Ann. An invitation to my wedding in 2006 went unanswered, then in March of the following year, Dad called and told me Grady was dead. All the years of drinking and drugs had finally worn down his heart. He was fifty-four years old.
The funeral was held in a small Pentecostal church in Big Spring where Grady found Jesus in the months before he died. When we arrived his body lay in an open casket, his pinkish skin now waxy and gray. His favorite Elvis songs played over the PA system. Ann sat crying in the front row beside Buddy, who’d been the one to drag Grady to rehab each time, kicking and screaming, to no avail. Buddy was now an oilman and restaurateur in Lubbock, married with a houseful of kids.
In the weeks before his death, Grady had sensed what was coming and apologized to Ann, begging forgiveness for all the years of emotional anguish. Now that he was gone she was finally free, and no longer would he embarrass her in the town her father had built. Within a year she was remarried and starting over again, never happier.
* * *
Four years later, in March 2011, I received another call from Dad. My grandmother Opal was dying in a nursing home. I caught a flight to San Antonio the next morning and met my parents and sisters. Together we squeezed into the car like we did when we were young and drove six hours toward the Caprock, the wooded Hill Country thinning into dry, open pasture.
My grandmother had come to the nursing home after a particularly bad year: she’d broken her hip after slipping on some ice, then suffered seizures from a botched prescription. But she’d handled it all relatively well, repeating the Bette Davis line that “gettin’ old ain’t for sissies.” She was asleep when we arrived, her breathing deep and troubled. A hospice nurse sat by her bed, then explained to us what to expect.
A few years earlier, when Opal turned eighty-five, my wife and I had brought our one-year-old son for her birthday celebration. My wife grew up in Minnesota and had never seen Big Spring, so it was only fitting that as soon as we hit town we were met by a swirling wall of red sand. The storm darkened the sun and stalled traffic, and then it rained mud.
Inside the banquet hall that day, my grandmother was relaxed, center stage. Back surgery had left her dependent on a walker, so Zelda and Norma placed a gold-lacquered chair in the middle of the room where she received her guests. She’d come straight from the beauty shop, and her hair was freshly colored and set. She wore a long silk dress and her fingers bore the gold and emerald rings that every little girl in the family had posed with before her giant vanity mirror.
Now, in her hospice room, I saw that the ornaments were gone. She wore nothing but a simple cotton gown, and her hair flowed gray against her pillow. There was no makeup or jewelry, and the deep creases from age had relaxed in her face. Everyone agreed she looked twenty years younger.
The room was full of her children: Preston and Linda; Norma Lou and her two boys, Randy and Rodney; Zelda and Charles; Dad and Mom. Homer was there, too. Out of all the family who’d settled in Big Spring over the generations, only he and his sister Evelyn remained. Back when their father fell sick in 1983, Homer had quit his job at American Petrofina and took over the family restaurant, which he ran for nearly thirty years. Evelyn’s dress shop, Miss Royale, sat across the street, its façade painted bright pink.
During those decades, not much good had come to Big Spring. The refinery remained but hadn’t expanded; rust and filth covered the columns and tank batteries that Raymond Tollett had once kept spotless. Oil never experienced a comeback quite like in the beginning of the eighties, and the population hadn’t recovered from losing the air base. Blight crept in. The busy downtown streets that Frances once strolled through were ghostly empty now, the shop windows caked with red dirt. Buildings crumbled onto the sidewalk or remained as burned-out husks. The Petroleum Building where Tollett had steered his empire, and where Dad and Grady chased their own, sat vacant, its top-floor suite trashed by vandals and a leaky roof. Several blocks away, the Hotel Settles, the original beacon of progress, loomed over the skyline with boarded windows and its rooms full of pigeons. There was even talk of persuading a Hollywood production company to come blow it up for a movie.
These were my impressions of Big Spring during the years when we’d visit my grandmother. But coming back now to bid her good-bye, I noticed a dramatic change. All across the Permian Basin and elsewhere, new advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing had opened up hard-to-reach shale formations for oil and gas exploration. The Wolfcamp and Cline shales, which ran beneath the Permian Basin, were believed to hold over 20 billion barrels of unrecovered crude. The result was a boom like none Texas had ever seen. Once again the roads were crawling with service trucks and the restaurants were full of strangers. At our hotel by the interstate, we were forced to pay double rates.
The boom had breathed new oxygen into downtown. Driving up Third Street, I noticed scaffolding around the Settles. It turned out a Big Spring native named Brint Ryan had purchased the hotel and was spending $30 million to restore it to its original grandeur. Crews were rebuilding the wrought-iron staircase, reinstalling the brass elevators, even excavating the walls in order to match the 1929 paint color. Ryan had also bought the Ritz Theater and the Petroleum Building, which he planned to refurbish.
But sadly, Opal wouldn’t be around to see any of that happen. With her family gathered around her bed, she opened her eyes and made one last request. She asked us to sing her home. And just as she ha
d done for Uncle Bud back in 1936, we sang the old songs that brought her comfort: “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Love Lifted Me,” “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” Although those hymns hadn’t crossed my lips in twenty-five years, the words came flooding back, and as our voices wove together in the family singing, I felt a sudden presence in the room, something both familiar and ancient. For two days we sang. Finally, around six in the morning after everyone except Preston and Zelda had gone to bed, Opal breathed her last. At ninety years old, she joined the big family reunion, as her father Clem used to say, while here among the living she left behind ten grandchildren, twenty-one great-grandchildren, and ten great-great-grandchildren.
The experience at her bedside left a profound impression and sent me in search of that presence I had felt. And the journey toward its roots would lead me through our history and culture and toward my own greater understanding of God.
One of my first trips was to the very hollow where my great-grandfather John Lewis was raised. Knowing nothing about our Georgia kin, I had to search online. I discovered that his brother Daniel had had a son named Clarence Mealer who still lived outside of Atlanta. He was eighty years old, recently widowed, and eager to meet one of the “Texas Mealers.”
The following summer I drove out to meet him. When he opened the door, I took one look—wide forehead, bulbous nose—and knew instantly he was one of my own. Together we headed north into the Blue Ridge, past the town of Jasper, until we reached the place where we were from, where John Lewis, Bud, Bertha, and the kids had found refuge that winter during the Great Depression. A luxury estate had swallowed the old homestead, so Clarence and I crawled under a fence and pushed our way into the brambles. After ten minutes we stopped in a place that looked no different from the surrounding thicket.
