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.