Crazy Becky

Crazy Becky

          Her name wasn’t Becky. Still, I hesitate to invade her privacy, even without her real name, by posting this.

          Whenever I could, from 1968 to 1984, I generally took my little dog Naomi on two walks a day. Some time after my second wife moved into a tipi with her friend Alyn’s estranged husband George, I became aware of two women who were living in a duplex a few houses up the hill. One was skinny and dark, with pale eyes; the other was blonde and buxom. On warm days they dressed lightly. I was attracted to the blonde one. She worked at the zoo, which was a relatively short walk from Claremont Avenue. I watched her go by in her zookeeper’s uniform, and dreamed.

          When I finally met her I learned that her name was Julie, that she and her housemate, Becky, had been speculating about me, and had named me Doug, for Doug-And-His-Dog. She told me that she had just been divorced from an extremely boring accountant. And I was so ill-at-ease I just blew it. Not long afterward Julie went off to veterinary school somewhere in West Texas, but Becky and I had become friends, and over the next six years or so, we were bizarrely close friends indeed.

          This situation was sealed, more or less, one evening not long after Julie went West. It must have been in late 1978 or early 1979. Becky showed up at my door stoned to the gills, wearing a diaphanous nightie of some sort. Depending on the direction of the light it was as see-through as a racist’s lies. She had some crisis cooking — she always had some crisis cooking — and wanted some kind of support from me. Her body when the light was right looked good to me, and I made some effort at physical contact. She asked me how important it was to me that we get it on, and I said something like, “Not as important as keeping our friendship.”

          She chose friendship.

          Becky was — is — the product of a prominent San Antonio family. She came about as the result of a teenage indiscretion. Her mother’s parents adopted her, making her prominent grandfather her dad, her grandmother her mom, and her mother her big sister. She went to school from time to time, mostly in science, but didn’t always finish what she started. She was stoned most of the time on a variety of different stuff.

          Like my first wife, Helena, she always had to have a crisis and she always had to have at least one enemy. She had stories that were probably hallucinations, but which could very well have been true. Who am I to say that it would be impossible for Becky, a reasonably attractive, usually-stoned daughter of money, to have been a Rolling Stones groupie on their swings through Texas, and to have anecdotes to tell? Or it could have been fantasies that seemed real to her. I have no way of knowing.

          She got a job as a mud logger. Mud loggers work in the oil fields taking periodic readings of the composition of the mud being brought up by the drills. She took to this job with enthusiasm, both for the justifications it gave her for staying up all night on amphetamines, and for its ample opportunities for exposure to various gasses and chemicals that could be injurious to her health. Her health, however, remained surprisingly robust.

          She retrieved her two large, pedigreed Chows — black tongues and all — from her parents’ house and moved frequently from place to place. Every neighbourhood and apartment complex into which she moved provided her with at least one enemy and a generous supply of grievances. After she met my lawyer friend Randy she started peppering him with requests for legal representation in various vexatious litigations. How he handled her was his problem. He-he.

          Then she moved in with Monty and got pregnant. Monty was an artist or an artsy poseur from Becky’s well-moneyed background. He of course freaked when he realised the implications of his situation with her and their foetus and made himself scarce. I took over the role of pregnant-woman’s support person. This was in 1983, and I’d gone back to school at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) to get a teacher’s certificate. Both UTSA and the regional medical centre and hospital cluster were in the more or less far northwest sprawl of the San Antonio urb, far from Mahnke Park, so I was able to pop over after classes and be of whatever help I could. At the time she went into labour, Becky was living in a place off the Austin Highway, a couple miles more north and east than Mahnke Park. I got her to the hospital all right.

          It was a long and difficult delivery, and Becky was hospitalised for some time afterward. I was in sort of a dilemma in regard to my responsibilities and so forth, as I was her only support person, but I was just a friend — not the father, or any relative at all, for that matter. Monty, however, was nowhere to be seen. Neither, as I recall, were Becky's nuclear family, although they may have visited sometimes when I wasn’t there.

          My main contribution, apart from the standard stiff-upper-lip-old-girl visits, was to feed the Chows. The Chows were defensive and territorial. I had no chance of approaching them, let alone walking them, so Debbie’s bungalow began to fill up with dog shit. What with the snarling canines and the dog shit, I thought that my feeding those beasts was damned heroic. I drove Becky and her baby boy, whose name wasn’t Arlo, home from the hospital when the time came. I let her deal with the dog shit.

          Becky’s parents made sure that Arlo had acceptable places to live after that, and he grew up into a kid like most kids. Becky continued to drift in her quasi-hippie way, taking courses and getting into crises with enemies. While remaining neurotic as hell, she did seem to start mellowing out a bit over time. Even after I got married again she felt confident about coming to me for emotional support from time to time.

          We kept in touch on and off after I left San Antonio, the last time around the turn of the century, when I first got email. She’d taken her concerns about the pollution of the Edwards Aquifer into some manner of environmental activism; she even ran for some public office once. Arlo, she wrote me, came to excel at golf.

Chris Champlin & Florence Bunten

 Chris Champlin & Florence Bunten

         After Mojo moved on in 1979, a teenaged Chicana moved into the other side of the old duplex on Claremont Avenue. She was married to a soldier who was stationed in Germany, but she’d come back to San Antonio, she said, because her husband had been a drag: “He didn’t want me to go out with no dudes, or nothin’!” Still, I was under the impression that he (or the Army?) was paying her rent.    

          For me the principal consequence of this arrangement was that, at any one time, anywhere from three to ten of her adolescent relatives and runaway/truant friends were crashing next door to me. It made me feel old and straight, driving off to the newspaper in the mornings wearing a suit and tie, and one or two things I’d left lying around disappeared. They didn’t share their dope with me and I sure as shit didn’t share my dope with them.

          The situation turned out to be inherently unstable, and she — and they — moved out after a few months. Bill, my landlord, started looking for a new tenant, and I had the idea that I’d like to have someone I could get along with next door.

          After acting in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Ft. Sam Playhouse I’d been in another couple more plays: a supporting part in an artsy-fartsy production of a Harold Pinter opus at a junior-college auditorium on the East Side, and a tiny bit part in a comedy at the Harlequin Dinner Theatre on Fort Sam Houston. Kept me occupied whilst breaking up with my second wife.

          A couple whom I knew from theatre lived in the upstairs half of a house a couple of blocks from me. I’d often see them when I was walking my little dog Naomi. Chris Champlin and Florence Bunten. There were other people living in the flat with them, and the two of them were pretty much still in the process of finalising their conception of themselves as a couple. I’d been invited up a few times when walking by, and we’d generally enjoyed getting high together. Plenty of shared laughs and shared cynicism.

          Their situation at this upstairs place having passed its use-by date (Florence told me it “became unliveable as the Georgia boy downstairs used to beat his girlfriend and we got tired of being drawn into their soap opera”), I steered them toward Bill, and they moved in next door.

          Chris had known me since he’d been a high school pothead and had come into Truckers to sell hash pipes he’d carved out of bone. I barely remembered him from that, though. He’d gone on to finish all but the final semester of a drama degree at Incarnate Word College, quitting just barely shy of the finish line as a way of making a point.

          At about the time that he and Florence moved in next door Chris got a job as an assistant manager at Half-Price Books & Records, just a few blocks away down on Broadway. He had something of a flair as a curator. Their house’s spare bedroom filled with LPs. The rest of their house filled with other stuff. He steered me to a $75 tenor sax, which I still have even though it won’t play without a complete re-padding I can’t afford.

           Florence had a permanent, full-time job with the theatre as its administrator of sorts. Did for decades. The theatre was under the morale budget of the U.S. Army, which made her a far tendril of the octopus that is the military-industrial complex. A government bureaucrat, sorta. Chris did contract work at the theatre, building sets and directing plays. He did this more or less full-time for years, and has continued on with various theatres ever since.

          Chris was five-foot-two (160 cm) and slightly built. He told me recently that a steady supply of Mexican food and beer over the years has had an effect on the ‘slightly built’ part of that. He had wispy fair hair then, but most of it’s gone in his more recent photos on facebook. Despite his size, or maybe because of it, he refused to be anybody’s pushover and displayed an affinity for makeshift weapons. Garden tools, for instance.

          Florence was maybe five-seven (171 cm) and an example of what is called statuesque — which is kind of like voluptuous. She had long, straw-coloured hair (greying now, I see from the photos) and a dramatic attitude. She has in recent years taken up Scottish Country Dancing in a serious way, which does seem to keep her looking fit. I tried to get Chris to call her ‘The Little Woman,’ but she ended up calling him ‘The Little Man.’ They had a faux wedding every year for close to 20 years — I served as celebrant once or twice in our shared back yard — and finally became legally married a few years ago. For pension reasons, they told me.

          Chris and Florence were fine, sociable neighbours — educated, artso-culturally on top of what was going on, attuned to the humour in things. Being theatre folk, they entertained frequently — opening nights, closing nights, Halloween, for the hell of it — which certainly increased my social opportunities. Our front balconies became as one. Years passed.

          In 1985 their theatre put on a production of The Sound of Music, and after its season ended they were up to their eyeballs in nuns’ habits. When Halloween came around my first daughter Ruth was a week past due in regard to her exiting the womb, so her mother-to-be, my third wife Smoky, went to the Halloween party as an overly pregnant nun. We were all hoping that she’d go into labour right then and have to be rushed to the delivery room in costume, but Ruth didn’t emerge for yet another week, and then only with the help of pitocin.

          Chris had an avant-garde aesthetic. I once played him a recording of Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, of which I was inordinately fond, and his comment was that it had nothing new that he hadn’t heard before. Well, duh! It was a more than 90-years-old piece, for shit’s sake. He did, however, introduce me into all sorts of then-new forms of musical expression — Weather Report and Jan Garbarek being examples that leap most readily to mind — that I still enjoy these many years later. The irony here, of course, is that the Harlequin Dinner Theatre, and Chris’s own avenue of public artistic expression, played it safe by putting on safe theatre that would appeal to the “blue-rinses”, as Chris characterised his audiences.

          Somewhere along the line someone got a kiddie croquet set, which we set up. Nobody really knew the rules, so over time we developed the game of Full-Contact Croquet. Full-Contact Croquet was best played under the influence of alcohol and whatever else was on the menu for brunch. Other friends joined in. Later, in late 1984 or early 1985, when we’d given up the house and Florence and Chris had moved to a place in the mansion-infested urban suburb of Terrell Hills, they formed the Terrell Hills Full-Contact Croquet Association, and had a float one year in some Terrell Hills municipal parade. Maybe they’re still doing it.

          One Xmas early into the piece Chris gave Florence an old pinball machine, and Chris and I both became expert on it, and racked up enormous numbers of points. It was a true joy to play the damn thing until it finally packed up a few years later. Florence wrote me that it is still in their garage, still in need of repair, and has a large amount of theatre junk piled on top of it.

          For a while there Chris had a job with an Audio-Visual company — setting up public-address systems mostly. Once he did the p.a. for a meeting of Navy dentists at the Convention Center in downtown San Antonio. When putting away the gear after a demonstration of anaesthetic procedures he discovered that a fairly large cylinder of nitrous oxide had been left behind. Somehow it found its way to Florence and Chris’s broom closet.

          After filling balloons and getting us woozy for a few weeks, the cylinder inevitably came up empty, and we were faced with the issue of what to do next. We discussed it, and nobody had the cods to go to the appropriate place (we found out where it was) to try to buy a refill. It was taking up space in the closet. We decided to move it back to an otherwise unused garden shed at the back of the property, and eventually it became the concern of whoever lived there after us. Or after them. Hell, it might still be there now, for all I know.

          When cable TV came in some time around 1982, Chris would come over to drink beer and watch bizarre sports with me. Our favourite was Aussie Rules football on ESPN. We wanted to get hats like the Aussie Rules goal judges wore then, as we loved making the hand signals with them whenever either team scored a goal or a behind, but the show only touted team jerseys of the various sides. We agreed absolutely that they made up the game as they went along.

          In 1983 some mutual friends opened up a punk nightclub called the Bone Club. Chris was heavily involved. He and some other garage musicians developed a punk band named Uvula. He also fell into his curator’s role and put on an exhibition there of dozens of his most bizarre afternoon-newspaper posters (saved in the spare room) screaming out tasteless headlines. My favourite was always: “Wine Jug Thug Mugs Pug”.

          In the summer of 1984, right after I got teacher certification, I drove for Yellow Cab 12 hours a day, then worked out at a relatively posh gym in the suburbs, and most evenings drank and watched cable with Chris for an hour or so before I turned in.

          “Well, I guess I’ll turn in,” I’d say.

          And Chris would ask, “What are you going to turn into?”

          “A sleeping fat man,” I’d reply.

          And off he’d go.

          Rituals can be comforting.

          People I knew fell in with Florence and Chris too. When one of my girlfriends and I broke up, she continued right along hanging out with them. Marian Reeves Owens from Augusta, Georgia, with her round head and crooked smile, playing board games on the floor. When I got together with Smoky, who was to be my third wife, she also integrated naturally into the scene, going tubing down the Guadalupe River with Florence, riding on the Full-Contact Croquet float, and so on.

          When Smoky took our daughters on several trips back to the Old Country during the 90s, during which I chose to stay at home in New Zealand, she almost always managed to fit in a bit of time with Florence and Chris.

          Over the past few years Chris has evolved into something of a theatre Identity in San Antonio, being a past president of the San Antonio Theatre Coalition. He’s also bottled Scottish-style sour marmalade, brewed mead and ginger beer, and engages in many other sorts of kitchen exploits, including baking. He teaches mead-making at the San Antonio Highland Games and eats haggis at least once a year.

          Florence has taken her involvement in Scottish Country Dancing to things Celtic on a wider scale, with trips to Scotland, being treasurer of the Scottish Society of San Antonio, and, for the past couple of years, in Celtic Wicca. She also performs in a Celtic-music band named RTFM, which is an acronym either for ‘read the fucking manual’ or the first names of the band’s members, and in which she plays bodhran and sings.

          They go to a neo-pagan festival out in the woods twice a year. Florence reports that it involves, “All kinds of folk running around with or without clothing. Late nights drumming and dancing around a big bon fire. One day I saw a beautiful statuesque blond woman walking in the rain with nothing on but her Doc Martins. Turned out she was post-op and used to be a ‘he’.  I couldn't have liked it more.”

          As far as I can tell, to folks in their particular milieu they are the Grand Old Couple of San Antonio theatre. And they’re a hell of a lot younger than I am.

          We still keep in almost constant contact via facebook.

Mojo

Mojo

          When I first moved into my shady old duplex on Claremont Avenue in 1977, my neighbours on the other half of the porch were a quiet lesbian couple, but they moved out a couple of months after I moved in. Mojo and his Harley moved in sometime early in 1978, and they — Mojo and his Harley — lived next door to me for a couple of years. Mojo brought a ramp with him when he moved in so that he could roll his hog up over the front steps into the house. He kept it in the living room at night.

          At the start, Mojo had a woman with a large German shepherd living with him, but after a while they moved out and Celeste replaced her. Celeste was passionate about motorcycles, too. When I first saw her she wore a “No Putt No Butt” T-shirt. In Mojo’s terminology at the time, a big Harley was a putt-putt.

          Mojo managed a Harley-Davidson repair shop down on Broadway. He was a bull-goose biker, no doubt about that, but although he had biker friends who’d come to visit and get fucked up, I got the impression that he was more a lone wolf than the leader of any one pack. He was burly and loud. He had curly dark hair and a scraggly black beard. His eyes looked sleepy and his lip had a curl to it that could instantly turn into either a sneer or a secret-looking smile. He had a drawling, Southern way of talking, and always seemed to be trying to make a point, even on mundane topics. It was as if he felt he’d acquired some great store of wisdom and was duty-bound to hand it down. He kept guns.

          We gave each other room at first. I imagine he had trouble getting a firm grip on how to peg me. I left the house every morning in my Ford Maverick, wearing a three-piece suit. But I had that beard, and I played strange music, and fairly loud sometimes. And I had odd-looking friends come by to see me from time to time. Aromas carried over between our open balconies. Mojo offered to sell me a lid. Okay, that was settled. I was officially Mojo’s beatnik. That’s how he introduced me to his friends: “This is my beatnik.”

          Mojo ran a tight neighbourhood. Celeste told me once that Mojo had been a Master Sergeant in the Army. (That was when I found out Mojo’s square name: “Master Sergeant Terry Browning,” she’d said, saluting.) A petite Chicana stripper whose stage name was Little Mary lived in one of the duplexes across the street. She had long, bleached-blonde hair and the word “FLACA” (‘skinny’) tattooed to her right thigh. Little Mary was friendly enough, in a neighbourly sort of way, but Mojo had a problem with her boyfriends. They would park at the curb and honk their horns for her. Mojo thought this was unacceptably bad manners. Nice young men went to the door to escort their girls to the car. They didn’t honk their horns and expect their girls to come running. Especially if the neighbour across the street is sleeping something off. All this shouted from the upstairs balcony with great clarity and hostility, and — once or twice — with a firearm being displayed. And Little Mary’s young men started showing her more respect — when it came to going up to her door and knocking, at least.

          A retired Army sergeant and his wife lived in the free-standing house on the uphill side of my place. The wife was dying of cancer, but she was extremely friendly — giving me tips on hanging out my wash, and things like that. His name was Sarge, but her name was always Mrs Melancon. Mrs Melancon told me that she loved Mojo; him being there made her feel safe.

          Once a couple of bimbo sales clerks I’d met whilst peddling advertising at one of the malls came by to see me, get high, and tease me. One of them, the non-blonde, was wearing a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt. While they were there Mojo came by the house for something. When he saw the girls the first thing he drawled was, “Oh! Do you have a Harley-Davidson? Or just a tee-shirt?”, his lip in sneer mode, dragging out the word tee-shirt so that it sounded as disgusting as ‘dog turd’ or worse.

          Another time he encouraged a well-tattooed female friend of Celeste’s to climb over the little barrier between our balconies and wake me up most pleasantly in the wee small hours one weekend. I’m forever grateful. The next day I dropped by Mojo and Celeste’s about noon. The three of them were drinking coffee and offered me some. I said, “I had the strangest dream last night,” and they said, in unison: “Did you?” Too bad it didn’t work out with her and me in the long run. She had Tweetie tattooed on her right thigh in full colour.

          Eventually Mojo and Celeste had problems and then resolved them and so on and then they moved on. Little Mary had a baby and was thrilled that it was really blonde. Mrs Melancon died and Sarge took to spending his days in a no-frills bar down on Broadway.

After a few years Mojo and Celeste came by to see me, passing through. Mojo had picked up a job as a cook on a shrimp boat and had put on a bit of weight. He told me that the guys on the boat were particularly fond of his pies.

Randy Osherow; Ron White

Randy Osherow

          A few months after I transferred from the Northside Sun to the Express-News retail advertising department in early 1978, I got a message to call on a lawyer who wanted to advertise cheap divorces. The law concerning professional advertising had just changed, and it had gone from lawyers not being allowed to advertise to: okay, lawyers may advertise, but it’s considered tacky.

          This lawyer wasn’t above seeming a bit tacky, but he did have a sense of humour. His name was Randy Osherow — Randolph N. Osherow, but he stuck determinedly to Randy. He was a burly, red-headed guy who grinned at every opportunity. The burliness came from being an iron-pumping freak. He also ran with his Labrador, named Winchester. He wore standard-issue lawyer suits and cowboy boots. His father had made a small fortune with a direct-mail advertising business in St Louis. His wife, Ceci (Cecilia), was the daughter of a Venezuelan oil family. Ceci ran his office. She also painted. Her painting teacher encouraged her to be a fauvist.

          Randy’s office was in a upscale-townhouse/condo/office complex just north of snobby Alamo Heights. It was the place where Federal Judge John Wood got shot down outside his home by Woody Harrelson’s father in a contract killing for some Lebanese-Mexican gamblers and importers. The victim of this crime had picked up the handle of “Maximum John” Wood for his invariable decisions not to err on the side of leniency. Randy, as a lawyer, considered Maximum John to be “a mean man.”

          Randy wanted to run long, wordy advertisements filled with legal advice — to make himself look substantial, I guess (I never asked him why) — but he only wanted to buy wee little ad spaces, so I had to employ my editing and proofreading skills beyond the limits of what editing and proofreading could accomplish. Eventually he dropped this approach when the newspaper insisted that he clearly label his essays as advertisements.

          One day when I was in his office picking up copy and having a yack, I tossed my MasterCard across the desk to him and told him to divorce me from my second wife, who’d gone to live with some chap in a tipi out in the country.

          Twice I went to parties at his law offices. At one I got picked up by a crazy blonde society interior decorator, who also had premises at the complex where Randy’s office was. She found me to be a fascinating bearded “Hebrew”, and sold me weed later on when I was involved with somebody else. At the other I got too drunk on the Chivas Regal and behaved somewhat embarrassingly.

          Randy and Ceci had me by for a meal a few times in their nice but cramped apartment a half a block or so from the campus of Trinity University. Randy was one of those folks who didn’t like to stray too far from the scene of those bright student days. Ceci was one of those folks who never quite knew what to make of me.

          They had my mother and me over for dinner one time when she was in San Antonio.

          When I took up jogging I went out jogging a few times with Randy. He’d go slow for me and then have a bit of an extra run once I was finished.

          I couldn’t believe how naive he was about some things. He couldn’t believe that athletes could be into drugs. Hell, he’d been hanging around gyms since he’d been a kid. He’d never seen anything that’d made him think of the other iron-pumpers doing shit. He was crushed when it got out that a couple of the San Antonio Spurs were associated with cocaine.

          And we kept hanging out. I can’t explain it. It was Randy who suggested to me, long after I’d left the advertising racket and was struggling to get by freelancing, that I should take up teaching, which I proceeded to do.

          Somewhere along the line Randy decided to get off divorces and into bankruptcies. The whole process delighted him. I’d been doing some part-time work for him updating his law library. He showed me his desk drawer: no more box of tissues. He’d been tired of having to watch people cry in his office. And the pissed-off men could be dangerous. Bankruptcies, on the other hand (he told me), were a revelation. He said he loved to watch the expressions on his clients’ faces when he told them which debts they wouldn’t have to pay: “They kinda snicker the first time they say, ‘You mean I’m not gonna have to pay that?’, and a lot of them walk out of here laughing.”

          Randy’s some kind of poobah in the bankruptcy lawyers’ association now. He’s been a Trustee of the United States Bankruptcy Court. I tracked him down on line and we kept in touch for a few years in the new century. He told me he once wore a Hugo Chavez t-shirt at his Venezuelan-oil-money in-laws’ house. We’re both weird for detective novels and recommended them back and forth to each other for a while. He mailed me a copy of Nick’s Trip, by George P. Pelecanos. Last I heard before we lost touch again, he and Ceci were headed to China to adopt a baby.

Ron White

          Usually an invisible wall separates the people in the advertising department of the Express-News and the people in the editorial department: the editors, reporters, columnists, sports writers, and so on. I could see that I would probably be able to get along better with the people in editorial than with my fellow advertising jerks and creeps. And I was mildly acquainted with some of the editorial people from Truckers and from just being around.

          In the Autumn of 1977 I auditioned for a part in a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and got cast as Gooper, Big Daddy’s other son. Ron White, the Express-News’s critic-at-large had been moderately kind to me in his review (“... a wild man in a business suit” was a phrase he used), and I ran into him in the elevator at the newspaper building one day during the play’s run. He was medium-sized, just barely shabby about the sport coat, with thick dark-blonde hair and beard. Looked every inch the intellectual pot-head.

          We’d met before, and he looked at me funny for a moment there in the elevator, and he said, “Richard, I didn’t know that you could act.”

          I gestured vaguely toward my three-piece suit and my briefcase and said to him, “Well, what the fuck d’you think I’m doing right now, Ron?” And we became sort of tangential friends after that. Not close: his wife didn’t approve, I don’t think, but we got along. We scored pot for each other once or twice and exchanged kind words occasionally.

          After I left the advertising business for good, swearing that I’d sooner shit in my pants than ever sell another ad, I got a call from Ron, who’d become chief Sunday and features editor at the Express-News. He put me on to Ben King, the editor of the Friday tabloid, the Weekender, and my neighbour Steve at the Sunday magazine, which was called the Star, and I started to get freelance writing assignments. Feature stuff. Fluff, for the most part, but plenty of it.

          A year or two later I heard that Ron had made an announcement in the news room that he thought ‘drugs’ (which ones I don’t think he specified) had been hampering his effectiveness as an editor, and that he was going all-natural from that day on.

          After I stopped writing stuff for the Express-News we lost touch with each other.

Glenn Frey

Glenn Frey

          When I went to work for Bizarre in 1969 my hours were long and usually included evenings, which along with my deeply ingrained lack of social skills resulted in my having a minimal social life. I did, however, occasionally deliver equipment for acts that were playing at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, at the time the preeminent live music venue in that part of the world, and it provided me with some social contact.

          The Troubadour basically had two public rooms. The live music took place in the show room, which cost money to get into. The front bar, however, was open to the public and generally patronised by Hollywood music-biz types. Considering myself to be a Hollywood music-biz type, I began to patronise the Troubadour’s front bar on the evenings I wasn’t working. People who recognised me from having been in contact with them through work accepted me there, and the general clientele tended to make me feel at home.

          What with regulars going off on tour and out-of-town friends coming by to play the Troub or just to visit, the usual gang was a changeable one. Two regulars who were usually around and with whom I frequently swapped quips and observations were Russ Giguere, from a band called the Association (‘Along Comes Mary’, ‘Windy’, ‘Cherish’, and so on), and Glenn Frey, then with a semi-electric folk-country-rock duo with JD Souther called Longbranch Pennywhistle.

          The fellow who owned the Troubadour, Doug Weston, was also Longbranch Pennywhistle’s manager, so Glenn was able to eat and drink there on the tab. He also did well with the place’s female employees and with random groupies who’d show up. One night he and Russ and I and Ed Sanders, the founder of the legendary Fugs and in town to make a solo album, upon which John Ware played drums, were at one end of the bar bending our collective elbows and making off-colour conversation about establishment politics and hillbillies’ sexual proclivities and so forth. Over the course of about four or five hours Glenn excused himself three times after being approached by decorative young women, disappeared for an hour or so each time, and then returned to us and a fresh beer.

          “Damn!” Sanders noted. “that boy gets more ass than a toilet seat!”

          As an aside, Sanders was perhaps the most convivial of all the pop and underground Legends to pass some time in the front bar between sets and otherwise. Probably the least convivial was Van Morrison, whom I idolised. Between his stunningly magnificent sets he sat at the bar over what looked like straight whisky, his stay-the-fuck-away-from-me body language and facial expression so powerful that it was tangible as well as visual, to the extent that nobody in the crowded room of socialising musicians and music-biz people dared to penetrate that palpable barrier and sit within two barstools of him.

          Despite his band’s performance genre, Glenn as a music consumer – and the Troubadour had plenty of music to consume – definitely seemed to prefer heavy-on-the-backbeat stuff. The sound of the performances in the show room made it out to the bar, clearly enough if the connecting door was open. The only time I can remember Glenn getting up from his seat and dashing into the showroom for an act was for some rockabilly band in the Carl Perkins-Elvis-Jerry Lee mode. He came back muttering about how much he was born to do rock and roll and fuck this folk-music shit.

          Hollywood, like I suppose New York and London and other places, attracts tens of thousands of the world’s most talented people every year. People who have won their colleges’ talent contests hands down, or who were way too much for Oklahoma City or Mobile or similar places to handle. Only a few, obviously, achieve fame and fortune – let alone flash-in-the-pan, essentially small-time name recognition, or poorly remunerated appreciation by cognoscenti, or even a living. When I was in the business there I almost became dulled by talent, seeing so many people who had so much of it going nowhere.

          Recognising that talent alone does not equal popular success, I became somewhat fascinated by trying to figure out what did. An oversupply of hamminess, of a willingness to do anything to catch the public’s eye, is certainly a factor. And, as with so many other things in life, unshakable self-confidence is another.

          Glenn was certain that he was going to be a star. He had absolutely no doubts at all. He told me once that one day they’d put a bronze plaque outside the door to the grotty little place in Echo Park where he was living then, commemorating it as a place he’d lived at the start of his glorious career. The funny thing was that when he said this he was completely believable. I wonder if that plaque’s there now.

          I encountered Bernie Leadon once during the course of my job. At the time he was with a revolving-door band called the Corvettes, which sometimes played behind Linda Ronstadt. I took a sort of instant dislike to him, as in the minute or two I was there he flaunted a dismissive, ego-centric arrogance bordering on right-wingedness. I’m sure I made no impression at all on him as, being a faceless, voiceless member of the servant class, my fate was to be ignored.

          I heard second-hand that when Glenn and Bernie and the others were first putting their as-yet unnamed band together their manager was so taken by the amount of self-assured star quality that they exuded that he called them ‘The Egos’. They only changed this a bit when coming up with the band’s final name.

Joaquin Gardea; Bobby Jack Nelson

Joaquin Gardea

          Some time in the autumn of 1976 I answered an ad in the paper and got a job with a 50-ish character with a sculpted, pencil-thin, two-piece moustache and an insincere-looking smile featuring many small, straight, extremely white teeth. He had a mellow baritone voice, a suave, tough-guy way about him, and had a smiling sidekick named Manuel. His name was Joaquin (“Call me Jack”) Gardea. He liked to be sarcastic about fellow Hispanics named Jesus calling themselves Jesse or Chuy: “Why don’t they just call themselves Jee-zus?” he’d ask, and then show that line of straight white teeth as he laughed. I didn’t mention the Joaquin-to-Jack thing. He was my boss.

          I’d known him since I’d been at Truckers. Louie’d done some business with him as a subcontractor on some leather-goods orders. His main visible business was importing, manufacturing, and selling Mexican and Mexican-style leathercraft. He told me that he was originally from California. He’d got involved in buying up stuff cheap in Mexico and flogging it around the U.S. in trade shows and marts, and had finally settled in San Antonio.

          He called his operation ILFCO, for Imports and Leather Fashions Company. He also owned a notable conjuntos nightclub, which was in the front part of his large Southside warehouse/factory, and had Other Business Interests. The factory part of his operations took up a large segment of his establishment. He had machines that would carve bags and other leather products to look as if they were hand-tooled. They took a few minutes to do what Louie and I had got done in a day. I don’t know if the workers he had operating them were hired via one of his Other Business Interests or not, but I had the feeling they were. He carried a large wad of bills in his trousers pocket and did business mostly in cash. A gran macho, was our Jack.

          The main part of my job was managing a fair-sized tienda, more a shop than a stall, that Jack owned in El Mercado, San Antonio’s downtown tourist-trap Mexican market. It specialised in norteño-style leathercrafts — handbags, belts, jackets, saddles, and anything else that could be sold with that mariachi-style tooling, whether by hand or by machine. It also carried the usual range of schlocky souvenirs found in the mercados. When Jack first took me there to show me the place he said, “Richard, the most important thing you have to remember is that nobody, anywhere, actually needs any of this shit. You’re trading in human folly.”  I liked it fine — playing the fool for the customers, letting them negotiate on the prices. I could laze around reading Graham Greene novels when it was slow, but Jack didn’t like it when he caught me doing that. When it was slow I should have been dusting. How right he was.

          Jack decided to send me on sales trips to flog schlock wholesale in places like Houston and Corpus Christi. When Jack decided on short notice to send me on the trip to Corpus and the beach towns during which my second wife confessed her infidelity, he was amused and appalled when I phoned her from his office to see if it was cool with her if I just took off. He was of the opinion that a man should never ask a woman anything, only tell her. I hate to say it, but in this case he was definitely right. He and she would’ve got on great.

          Jack was a bachelor. He lived in a well-appointed house across the parking lot out in back of ILFCO. I think Manuel had a room there, too. The one time I was admitted to this sanctum I’d just got back from out of town, and I was carrying a large wad of cash for him that he didn’t want to wait for until morning. He and Manuel were eating steaks. A girl who looked to be about 16 lurked around the room. She was obviously Jack’s. She did what he said. He said it in Spanish. I don’t think she spoke any English, which meant that she was probably an undocumented immigrant. She seemed docile, even resigned. I wondered if she was a by-product of one of Jack’s Other Business Interests, but of course it was none of my business.

          By the early part of 1977 Jack was becoming harder and harder to work for. It was the post-Xmas slump and he wasn’t happy with the value for money he was getting from me. It seemed to me as if I was making damned little, but Jack was inclined to take a short-term view of business cash flows. He started to talk about putting me on a percent of sales, with no guaranteed income. With a lull in business, this seemed to be a recipe for starvation. Then John Kuehne told me about a job that was open selling advertising at the newspaper, and said to use him as a reference. I didn’t see Jack Gardea again after telling him adios.

Bobby Jack Nelson

                

           One of my customers when I was an advertising jerk with the Northside Sun was Bobby Jack Nelson, who made and tried to sell wooden tables and bins at a workshop/showroom sort of place in some far-suburban industrial park. We chatted extensively.

          Bob told me that he’d grown up on a ranch in eastern New Mexico, somewhere between Tucumcari and Amarillo. He said he’d been in his early twenties before he’d ever seen a Jew. Had no idea. Didn’t even know that Jews and people were the same thing. At about the same time as he first engaged in visual hebraics, though, he’d answered an ad and had taken a job as a cowboy on an enormous cattle station in the far Australian Outback.

          Then he’d written two novels, one set in Australia and one in New Mexico, and they’d been published. He’d sold the movie rights to one of them, and although the movie had never been made, just selling the rights had made him enough money to buy a Mercedes-Benz and the tables-and-bins business.

          We yakked about writing and writers and stuff. He loaned me copies of his books to read and I thought they were good. He signed the copies I read — wrote witty little inscriptions in them — and gave them to me. My sales manager at the Sun, a tough-guy ex-marine, was a bit of a literary-cultural poseur. Hung out at the better used-book stores looking for first editions: that sort of thing. Anyway, he borrowed Bob’s books to read them and never returned them to me. Signed first editions, after all.

          After a few months Bob cut his hand seriously on one of his power tools, I’d guess working at night while drunk or better or both. It reminded me of Paul Osborne’s accidental self-mutilation. Paul’s wife Judy hadn’t been sympathetic; she’d needed him to be turning out sellable products. I don’t think Bob’s wife was all that thrilled, either — they had a couple of little kids, too. Anyway, his business had always been marginal, at best, and one day it — and Bob — were simply no longer there.

          I just did a Google search on him. He’s written two more novels and a favourably-reviewed memoir, entitled Keepers, and done a bunch of other stuff, too. In 2014 his step-brother, a blogger who writes under the name Old Jules, posted a blog in which he detailed some further biographical information. It seems that in the late 1990s Bob had taken off for somewhere in South America and would no longer keep in touch with anybody, but then some friends said that they’d seen him in various parts of Texas. Then he received word that Bob had done a suicide in an old folks home in San Saba, Texas in 2013 or 2014.