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.