George Thompson; Don Couser

George Thompson

          After New Year’s, at the start 1975, the company that owned the swank restaurant where I was working put me on at another restaurant it owned, a steak house located next to the big Hilton on San Antonio’s touristy riverwalk. The work at the steak house wasn’t interesting, although several of the other waiters were. Some were in the business of doctoring the credit-card dockets of their more intoxicated customers to boost their tips significantly. There was a queen named Bob Bush (“a vulgar name, but what can I do?”) who was the black sheep of some prominent family in Virginia and was at times one of the funniest people I’ve known. And there was George Thompson, an odd dude I’d keep running into on and off for about a dozen years.

          His father was a professor of something at Trinity University in San Antonio. He himself was committed to being a waiter. He was also a union trouble-maker. For some time there, he always tried to organise his workplace for the waiters’ union, always failed, and always got fired soon after management’s inevitable triumph. He’d come to work at the steak house after just such an episode at the revolving restaurant at the top of the Tower of the Americas. He was a very handsome man, with a strong, dimpled jaw and a mellow voice. He wore either wire-rimmed or rimless glasses sometimes. He was then on his second marriage.

          Over the next few years, I hung a bit at a scene that developed at chez Thompson. George and his wife Cynthia moved into a rundown three-storey Victorian or Edwardian mansion at the corner of McCullough Avenue and Craig Place in Laurel Heights. It had a ballroom-sized living room, a fine old kitchen and several tricky staircases. They were fixing it up in an arty way. Cynthia had been an interior designer once, and would be again. It looked real cool. Sometimes I would help out. There was a scene there, with both George’s and Cynthia’s friends. It was a good place to socialise. George made a pot of chili for my second wedding in 1976.

          They also had a couple of kids. First a boy, then a girl. They hadn’t been able to agree on a name for the boy, so they finally decided to let him choose his own when he was old enough to do so. So, on his birth certificate it was “Boy Thompson,”, and when he was two he started calling himself Pepper. Cool.

          When the girl had been born they still hadn’t agreed on a name for her, either. But George was, he told me, determined not to go through the same process again. So when confronted by the nurse with the clipboard, asking for a name, George looked at his newborn daughter, and then at the nurse, and just said, “Cookie.” And Cookie she was to be.

          George had a bit of trouble keeping his dick out of other women, though, and eventually the scene in the big house became Cynthia’s. Early in 1978, a few months after I broke up with my second wife, I commissioned Cynthia to do the interior of my little two-bedroom duplex in Mahnke Park. She sewed the curtains and supervised her “assistant”, a genial fellow named Angel, in covering the walls with burlap, what we in New Zealand call hessian. Good job.

          I ran into George from time to time. It seemed he was always working at a different restaurant. Once he had a brief fling with one of my neighbours. She complained to me that George had, as she put it, “treated me like a cunt!” When I told George about this he shrugged, smiled his charming smile, and, in that Bing Crosby voice, said something like, “Well?” Another shrug. “I’d say that was appropriate.”

          He took the photos when I got married for the third time, in 1985. I don’t know what happened to them. Or him.

Don Couser

          In January 1975, at about the time I was buying into Truckers, I started taking a couple of courses in radio and TV production and programming and so forth at San Antonio College, aka SAC, the junior college where John Kuehne and Mike Nesmith had won the talent contest 14 years earlier.

          One of my teachers at SAC was Don Couser, a disc jockey who had risen to being the partner in an ad agency. He taught radio programming. He spoke in that well-modulated radio voice, and he could also talk like Donald Duck. He did his radio show with a sidekick named George The Duck. George was a somewhat irascible and sarcastic, but vulnerable and lovable, character. Talking with himself in two voices and personalities. Cool. He had a jolly face with a thick moustache.

          His father had been a foreman on the King Ranch, that South Texas empire that was, at the time at least, the largest working ranch in the US. Big, Bubba. He said his dad, a clean-freak ethnic German, taught him to shave his armpits, because there wasn’t deodorant always available out on the ranch in the old days.

          Don had made a name for himself doing the morning drive time slot, along with George, on one of the Top-40 stations. Then he’d picked up as a client a regional fizzy pop called Big Red, and had parlayed that into a partnership in an ad agency. Karcher Couser.

          He had all sorts of cynical stories to tell of the advertising world, but seemed to want to revel in being a part of that cynicism. Immersed in the business of creating demand for things people don’t really need and wouldn’t otherwise miss not having, he referred to people who respond to advertisements as “victims”. His job was to turn people into victims, and to try his best to avoid being victimised himself. I noticed no moral doubts — that’s the way things are, and a person has to make the most of it for better or worse. He told us a lot about his house in the country and about his trips to Acapulco. He also philosophised in front of the class about the benefits of him and his wife taking separate vacations. Thanks, Don.

          He tended to be a bit palsy with me. He frequently made a show of telling me he was going to come by Truckers “to buy some incense and other stuff”, but he never did.

          One time in class he went off on a somewhat hippie-fascist tangent about these immutable cosmic laws, which I challenged with some fairly standard academic scepticism. And he got all huffy and aggrieved about my challenge, and ordered me to back off. Anyway, what he was going on about was a New-Age-y Texas thing called Concept Therapy, in which my third wife, whom I met for real many years later, was also immersed.

          After the course ended I don’t recall running into Don more than maybe once, even when I became an advertising jerk myself. Then, in about 1982 I got an invitation from a fellow I’d known from Truckers and from SAC, who had become involved in the luxury waterbed frame business. I’d written a story about him for the business section of the Express-News. He was having a brain-storming session on a new marketing arrangement and wanted me to be a part of it. It was at an Italian restaurant, dinner and wine included. Well, hell ...

          So I went, and during dinner this guy I didn’t recognise started talking to me. It was Don. He’d gained a lot of weight (“My new wife feeds me well”) and shaved off his moustache, but seemed content. During the brainstorm he didn’t have much to say.

          I read that he died in 2013.

Carl Johnston & Louis Parra

Carl Johnston

          A Trailways bus deposited me in San Antonio in July, 1974. It was hellishly hot everywhere that wasn’t air conditioned. I didn’t have a car. I took a city bus from near my furnished room off St Mary’s Street out to the On Stage office just off the Loop 410 beltway.

          The owner of On Stage was an extremely likeable young blonde hustler named Carl Johnston, from the local upper-middle class. He had bushy blonde eyebrows and a blonde wife and two blonde children.

          He’d been selling outdoor advertising for a big corporation, making, he said, an easy $50,000 a year doing basically jack shit (that’s almost $250,000 in 2016 dollars adjusted for inflation). And I thought, Why the fuck haven’t I ever fallen into a deal like that? But he’d had some contact with Star Attractions and had become acquainted with John Kuehne whilst buying ads at the newspaper. And he’d been bitten by the show-biz bug. So good-bye, billboards; hello show-biz.

          Anyway, On Stage wasn’t happening, and Carl was losing a bundle. He put up a good, cheerful, optimistic front, but it was soon clear to me that the reality wasn’t there. He put me on the phone to try to sell some acts to clubs in the Southeast. One of them was Rufus Thomas. The Funky Chicken, however, had been off the charts for a while, and so on, and nobody was buying. By the time I showed up, On Stage only had a few weeks to go.

          A year or so later, Carl decided to go about trying to save his big suburban house and blonde family by selling — with the assistance of his blonde wife Joanne and a dark-haired associate named Margie — potted house plants on the party plan. Suburban plant parties. I tried to picture it then and I couldn’t. I try to picture it now and I can’t. He called his operation The Plant People. He asked me to help with some of their promotions. “The Plant People Are Coming!” Heavy stuff, eh?

          After a fairly short while it became apparent that this wasn’t $50,000 per annum stuff, and he decided to open a shop, also to be called The Plant People. He got in with some other semi-artsy Upper-Middle-Class entrepreneurs and started developing a several-cutesy-shoppe complex in an old house way out San Pedro, in what was then the country. The place, now in mid-suburbia, has since been bulldozed as part of a road-widening project. They called it Country Concepts. Carl did most of the carpentry work on the conversion of the place. He seemed happy whilst hammering away in the sun.

          For the grand opening Carl envisaged something rather ambitious. He set about organising a small-scale hippie craft fair, with entertainment and so on. Pony rides for the kids. He had me help out a bit. I did a radio ad for him, but the would-be mainstream radio station wouldn’t run it, preferring instead to produce a dj-over-country-banjo bore-ass. No comedy allowed.

          The Cosmic Apple was there. The Cosmic Apple sold fresh fruit out of a bathtub at concerts and craft fairs and similar outdoor entertainments. The wife of the principal fruiterer sold home-made lemonade. I don’t remember seeing her at Carl’s extravaganza, and she doesn’t remember seeing me, but she was there, and so was I. She and I met again nine years later and got married and had kids.

          Country Concepts didn’t last out the year. The next move involved The Plant People moving into a flashy new retail location south of Alamo Heights along with a half-dozen or so other upmarket shoppes. For this purpose Carl took the business upmarket, with tall exotics and so forth. I went over to visit him there from time to time, but I didn’t feel particularly comfortable in that setting. I remember Carl asking me what “promotions” I was involved in, but all I was after then was survival. Then other concerns intervened. We lost touch. The Plant People disappeared from that location. I heard that Carl was selling off his inventory on the party plan.

          Four or five years later I ran into Joanne Johnston in an Italian restaurant. She introduced me to her new man. She and Carl had broken up. Carl was living in the Hill Country, building decks for people.

Louis Parra

          A week or two after Helena took Naomi back with her to New Orleans in July 1974, I discovered that around the corner from my garage apartment, and down Hildebrand Avenue a long half-block, was a hippie leather-crafts and headshop called Truckers General Store. Being a neighbour, I dropped in from time to time, and I got to know some of the heads that worked there, particularly the owner, Louis Parra.

          Louie was a shortish, nattily-dressed (in a hippie sort of way), relatively anglicised Chicano with thick glasses and longish, almost kinky black hair. I really admired the way he could wear flowered or paisley cowboy shirts and pull it off. I knew that I never could. He had a whiney nasal voice and a habit of pushing his glasses back up his nose with his forefinger. Young women tended to find him very attractive.

          He was about my age, I guess, and cool enough. He played the piano and knew everybody at the hipper live-music clubs. He was a concretely creative dude. He also knew where to get all kinds of dope, and all that. We got to know each other a bit. He started teaching me leather craft, and by November I was working there on and off. It was a good place to meet people.

          By February or March 1975 I borrowed $1500 from my mother and Howard and bought into Truckers as a minority partner. Fuck being a waiter and having to suck up to rich people in expensive restaurants. Fuck rich people and fuck expensive restaurants.

          Louie, like most proprietors of small businesses, tended to sail pretty close to the wind financially, taking draws as needed against an ocean of debt, and my infusion of capital helped revive the place.

          Truckers taught me a large amount about various drug paraphernalia (“Sold as novelties only. Not intended for use with any illegal substance.”), cheap hippie jewellery, fancy belt-buckles, and brands of incense. Truckers also carried magazines (High Times), how-to books (growing your own, and such), and underground comix. Mr Natural forever!

          I moved into the spare bedroom at the house Louie was buying in a nice, working-class neighbourhood off Blanco Road north of Hildebrand but well inside Loop 410. He had a cool record collection and had the money to buy hip new releases. I hadn’t bought music for a while, and anything recent I had wasn’t anything that had made the mainstream. I even first heard Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe (’) when Louie played it for me.

          Louie and I worked together, often side by side, for more than a year. I spent most of my days and evenings at Truckers, waiting on people and doing leather craft. I could never escape the idea that if I’d been in India I’d’ve been so unclean as to be beneath the untouchables, working all day with cowhide.

          Controlled substances were, of course, integral to the scene at Truckers. I remember in particular one guy in a dusty old Dodge who stopped off on his way back to New York from a vacation in Arizona. He’d filled the trunk of his full-sized sedan with peyote buttons he’d picked himself. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of those suckers in there. And would we accept some in trade for some merchandise? Louie and I looked at each other. We would.

          Back before Xmas 1974 Louie had, in exchange for some advertising time, made a shitload of leather key fobs with the call letters of radio stations KMAC & KISS on them. At that time KMAC/KISS was a funky little operation that broadcast an odd playlist that was moving toward what would become alternative, and eventually would become hard rock/heavy metal. They broadcast Spurs games live back before the Spurs joined the NBA.

          Anyway, Louie thought it’d be a good idea if I would make the commercials Truckers had coming, me being the class clown and all, so I wrote up a couple that I thought’d be funny and went down to their studios in an old art deco apartment building facing a park at the north edge of downtown. And I did them, using extreme character voices, and they sounded okay, and people came into the shop talking about them.

          Louie and I worked out a wholesale price list and made up a more or less complete line of sample leather belts, bags, hats, sun visors, key fobs, and so on. I stowed my gear at Truckers, loaded the samples and Naomi into my 1959 Karmann-Ghia, and headed for the coast. I found it fairly easy to take orders from surf shops and craft shops and souvenir shops and so on in Rockport and Port Aransas and Corpus Christi. I came back to help Louie and the craftspeople he had helping us from time to time fill the orders. It took a little longer than I had hoped, but we got them done, and Naomi and I returned to the coast to make a little more hay while the summer season lasted.

          This time it took Louie longer to fill the orders than before, what with his own adventures with drugs and women and suppliers reluctant to extend his credit further. I was pretty perturbed by the delays — I’d given my word to some of these people about delivery dates — but, really, I can see in retrospect that I was in no moral position to be critical about delays caused by dope and pussy and general human weakness. Still, it seemed to me that I’d done an awful lot of selling without noticeably increasing my supply of pocket money.

          When I got back off the road from selling I took to sleeping in Truckers’s main workroom in back. Then, in early 1976, I moved out of the workroom at Truckers — and into another garage apartment. This place was one of a line of garages and garage apartments in a long, low structure facing an alley off Huisache Avenue in Laurel Heights. It made my first garage apartment seem cool. The plumbing tended to back up, spilling turds onto the floor around the toilet, so I had some contact with the landlord, a chiropractor who spent his evenings as the Ring Physician at professional wrestling exhibitions. He gave me a good bone-cracking once, on the house.

          Anyway, it started to seem unfair to me that I was busting butt and living in a hole while Louie seemed to just swan around, sleeping late and going to nightclubs, and making payments on a two-bedroom house. To make ends meet I got a job as a waiter, which made me resent Louie more. And so things built up, and by February we were going through a nasty business divorce. I took off with a bunch of the jewellery and belt-buckles and other small, easily transportable items, just so I didn’t come out of it with nothing. Louie followed me to my girlfriend’s mother’s house, so he knew where I was holding it, but he agreed to let me keep it. We got somebody to take inventories, and went through a division of assets. My girlfriend and I ended up taking the shit I took from Truckers to a flea market or two, where most of it was shoplifted.

          Louie and I didn’t see each other again for about six years. Then we ran into each other in a bar across Broadway from Brackenridge Park, near where I was living at the time. He’d gained some weight, but he was still sharply dressed. For a moment we didn’t know whether to start scrapping right there or what. Then we both shrugged our shoulders. I bought him a beer. He bought me a beer. We talked about nothing in particular. We haven’t seen each other since.

Bill Marsh; Brenda & Tyrone

Bill Marsh

          Tall and lean, a long-drink-of-water of a man, Bill Marsh was a Marsh of the Marshville Marshes from Marshville, North Carolina (pronounced Nokaleina), a rural settlement of about two thousand immortal souls near the South Carolina state line, about 30 miles (50 km) from Charlotte. The nearest town of any size is Monroe, which is about ten miles (16 km) away, and is where the residents of Marshville have to go to buy beer, because Marshville’s dry.

          Bill’s horizons stretched a bit further, however, and at the appropriate age he took off on his beloved Indian motorcycle to travel the country and see what he could see and do what he could do. After a few years he wound up in New Orleans and got a job as a pressman with New Orleans’s daily Times-Picayune. He bought himself a nice little house in a quiet neighbourhood in the Mid-City district, commuted by bicycle, grew a beard, read books, and found outlets for his need to express love and caring by acquiring dachshunds and a wife. None of this is in any particular order, but by some time in the 1950s or early 60s he had accomplished all these accomplishments. I consider having a beard and commuting by bicycle in the context of the era to be accomplishments.

          His wife, a seamstress, was named María, a mestiza from Honduras. She already had three children by her first husband, Martínez (divorced), and one by her second husband, Gatto (widowed). Her second husband, who was an Italian Lombard from France, had been some kind of a big-shot manager with the United Fruit Company, and after his premature death by drowning, whilst surfing, I believe, Chiquita had gone to the trouble to relocate his widow and her children to New Orleans as US citizens. How they managed this I don’t know. Anyway, she and Bill went crazy in love and remained so. They had two children of their own. Bill learnt Spanish.

          And so life settled down in the warm glow of steady work, family, bicycles – he and María got a tandem bike – books, and dachshunds. Of the three Martínez children, Raúl went off to university and became a research chemical engineer with the DuPont Company, Eliseo (“Just call me Joe”) got into sales, because he was like that, and Graciela got married and moved off into the middle-class Midwest somewhere.

          The problems, other than María’s occasional grog binges, tended to be associated with the banana-boss’s daughter, Helena Gatto, my first wife. Ignoring high-school academics in favour of dope, sex, and the fast life in the French Quarter, she kept life from becoming too settled. When I fell in love with her in Biloxi, for example, she was fighting two felony raps for selling weed. I helped to keep her out of the slammer, something that helps to make me feel good about myself.

          Bill and I got along real well. He had a laid-back way of talking, as if he’d modelled his speech on Bing Crosby and Dean Martin, with just the murmuring ruffle of down-home Marshville around the edges. He appreciated ideas and Latin American food and my little dog Naomi. He let Helena and me borrow the tandem bike to tour the city. He didn’t seem to have any liking at all for the sort of flamboyantly loud and drunken bullshit that characterises tourist New Orleans, and although not religiously inclined he was disposed kindly toward María’s extravagant Latin Catholicism.

          Bill wasn’t along the one time I visited Marshville. I was travelling with Bill and María’s two kids: Larry, who was in his mid-teens, and Annamaria, who was just barely pubescent. Our hostess at the old family home with multiple verandas was Bill’s elderly great aunt – I’m sorry to say I forget her first name – who was mostly blind and a relic of an earlier era. She gave the impression of being old enough to remember owning slaves, but that couldn’t have been right.

          She was most pleased to see the young people named Marsh, but I apparently bewildered her. ‘Ah declayuh, Honeychile’ (She actually said that to me in her almost-another-language rural Carolina drawl), ‘but I don’t believe we’ve ever had a Jewish person in Marshville before.’ (I’m sparing you the dialectical transliteration.) ‘All we’ve ever had in Marshville is Baptists and Methodists and backsliders.’

          I assured her that I fit right in, being a backslider, at which point she informed me about the need, mentioned above, to drive to Monroe if I wanted to buy beer.

          Soybean prices were up that year, which meant that everybody in that neck of country was eating off the highest part of the hog, and the first oil shock was just breaking. We went fishing on her farm’s stocked pond. It was a hot, humid, uncomfortable day swarming with various insects. Everybody, especially the old great-aunt and little Annamaria, caught plenty of fish – except me. I caught none. Then we drove on.

          The last time I saw Bill was on Christmas day 1974. Helena and I’d separated about a half a year earlier and I’d been living alone in San Antonio. She had moved back to New Orleans, had Naomi, and I wanted my little dirtball back. Having the holiday off work, I’d driven through the night to New Orleans in my 15-year-old Karmann-Ghia and had tracked Helena down to Bill and María’s house. After some acrimonious phone calls, during which I did myself no credit, I drove up to the kerb in front.

          María, apparently drunk, was shouting in Spanish out one of the front windows. Bill came out of the front door, Naomi initially at his heels, and then running full tilt to me once she saw-and-smelled me.

          Once he got to me Bill drawled in his lazy voice, ‘What are you fucking up our Christmas for?’

          I replied something like, ‘Well, it wouldn’t even be a fucked-up Christmas for me without Naomi.’

          He considered this for a moment, and then, dachshund lover that he was, said, ‘Yeah, it aint right to keep a man away from his dog.’

          It was all over except for some loud and vigorous theatrics from María, who brought out a basket containing some puppies to whom Naomi had given birth a few weeks before, and me writing Bill a cheque to reimburse him for their veterinary bills, and I was off back to San Antonio, leaving Bill to recover his Christmas.

          I wonder if digitalisation eliminated the need for Bill’s job and, if it did, if he’d been able to retire first.

Brenda & Tyrone

          One day Helena and I were sitting on our front porch on Adams Street and this little kid came over from a front porch across the street and a few houses down with a note for Helena. The note said, “Hi, Let’s be friends,” and the skinny woman sitting on the other porch waved over at us. And so we got to know Brenda and Tyrone.

          Tyrone and Brenda were coon-assed to the marrow, and not your better sort of coon-ass, either. White trash, some might say. Anyway, Tyrone was by trade a house-painter, and by legal definition a prison escapee. I’m not sure what he’d been in for. Stealing stuff off building sites, I’d imagine. It doesn’t matter. The police wanted him. They came by looking for him from time to time.

          Once they came zooming up in police cars, sealing off our block at both cross-streets. Then they came down our street from both directions, as Helena and I watched from our porch, and converged on Tyrone and Brenda’s house. They surrounded it and went in by both the front and back doors. They searched that little two-bedroom shotgun house for the better part of an hour, then they came out, packed away their stuff, and drifted off. The street returned to its normally sleepy-quiet state.

          Then Tyrone came out onto the porch, stretched, and sat down on the porch swing to drink a beer. I was fucken amazed. Later, Helena got their secret out of Brenda: he’d hid in the fridge.

          Tyrone was a friendly sort, about my age. We got high together a few times. After I split from the French restaurant, he took me with him to a couple of building sites while he bid on painting jobs, but being Tyrone’s painter’s helper seemed much less attractive to me than being Murray’s apprentice trucker had been, and I hadn’t done that. And Murray hadn’t been wanted by the cops and acting real cocky about it.

          But they were friendly folks, and Brenda wasn’t nearly as crazy as Helena. They eventually disappeared, and a pleasant, friendly, unexciting working-class African American family took their place.