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.