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.