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.

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.

Carl Johnston & Louis Parra

Carl Johnston

          A Trailways bus deposited me in San Antonio in July, 1974. It was hellishly hot everywhere that wasn’t air conditioned. I didn’t have a car. I took a city bus from near my furnished room off St Mary’s Street out to the On Stage office just off the Loop 410 beltway.

          The owner of On Stage was an extremely likeable young blonde hustler named Carl Johnston, from the local upper-middle class. He had bushy blonde eyebrows and a blonde wife and two blonde children.

          He’d been selling outdoor advertising for a big corporation, making, he said, an easy $50,000 a year doing basically jack shit (that’s almost $250,000 in 2016 dollars adjusted for inflation). And I thought, Why the fuck haven’t I ever fallen into a deal like that? But he’d had some contact with Star Attractions and had become acquainted with John Kuehne whilst buying ads at the newspaper. And he’d been bitten by the show-biz bug. So good-bye, billboards; hello show-biz.

          Anyway, On Stage wasn’t happening, and Carl was losing a bundle. He put up a good, cheerful, optimistic front, but it was soon clear to me that the reality wasn’t there. He put me on the phone to try to sell some acts to clubs in the Southeast. One of them was Rufus Thomas. The Funky Chicken, however, had been off the charts for a while, and so on, and nobody was buying. By the time I showed up, On Stage only had a few weeks to go.

          A year or so later, Carl decided to go about trying to save his big suburban house and blonde family by selling — with the assistance of his blonde wife Joanne and a dark-haired associate named Margie — potted house plants on the party plan. Suburban plant parties. I tried to picture it then and I couldn’t. I try to picture it now and I can’t. He called his operation The Plant People. He asked me to help with some of their promotions. “The Plant People Are Coming!” Heavy stuff, eh?

          After a fairly short while it became apparent that this wasn’t $50,000 per annum stuff, and he decided to open a shop, also to be called The Plant People. He got in with some other semi-artsy Upper-Middle-Class entrepreneurs and started developing a several-cutesy-shoppe complex in an old house way out San Pedro, in what was then the country. The place, now in mid-suburbia, has since been bulldozed as part of a road-widening project. They called it Country Concepts. Carl did most of the carpentry work on the conversion of the place. He seemed happy whilst hammering away in the sun.

          For the grand opening Carl envisaged something rather ambitious. He set about organising a small-scale hippie craft fair, with entertainment and so on. Pony rides for the kids. He had me help out a bit. I did a radio ad for him, but the would-be mainstream radio station wouldn’t run it, preferring instead to produce a dj-over-country-banjo bore-ass. No comedy allowed.

          The Cosmic Apple was there. The Cosmic Apple sold fresh fruit out of a bathtub at concerts and craft fairs and similar outdoor entertainments. The wife of the principal fruiterer sold home-made lemonade. I don’t remember seeing her at Carl’s extravaganza, and she doesn’t remember seeing me, but she was there, and so was I. She and I met again nine years later and got married and had kids.

          Country Concepts didn’t last out the year. The next move involved The Plant People moving into a flashy new retail location south of Alamo Heights along with a half-dozen or so other upmarket shoppes. For this purpose Carl took the business upmarket, with tall exotics and so forth. I went over to visit him there from time to time, but I didn’t feel particularly comfortable in that setting. I remember Carl asking me what “promotions” I was involved in, but all I was after then was survival. Then other concerns intervened. We lost touch. The Plant People disappeared from that location. I heard that Carl was selling off his inventory on the party plan.

          Four or five years later I ran into Joanne Johnston in an Italian restaurant. She introduced me to her new man. She and Carl had broken up. Carl was living in the Hill Country, building decks for people.

Louis Parra

          A week or two after Helena took Naomi back with her to New Orleans in July 1974, I discovered that around the corner from my garage apartment, and down Hildebrand Avenue a long half-block, was a hippie leather-crafts and headshop called Truckers General Store. Being a neighbour, I dropped in from time to time, and I got to know some of the heads that worked there, particularly the owner, Louis Parra.

          Louie was a shortish, nattily-dressed (in a hippie sort of way), relatively anglicised Chicano with thick glasses and longish, almost kinky black hair. I really admired the way he could wear flowered or paisley cowboy shirts and pull it off. I knew that I never could. He had a whiney nasal voice and a habit of pushing his glasses back up his nose with his forefinger. Young women tended to find him very attractive.

          He was about my age, I guess, and cool enough. He played the piano and knew everybody at the hipper live-music clubs. He was a concretely creative dude. He also knew where to get all kinds of dope, and all that. We got to know each other a bit. He started teaching me leather craft, and by November I was working there on and off. It was a good place to meet people.

          By February or March 1975 I borrowed $1500 from my mother and Howard and bought into Truckers as a minority partner. Fuck being a waiter and having to suck up to rich people in expensive restaurants. Fuck rich people and fuck expensive restaurants.

          Louie, like most proprietors of small businesses, tended to sail pretty close to the wind financially, taking draws as needed against an ocean of debt, and my infusion of capital helped revive the place.

          Truckers taught me a large amount about various drug paraphernalia (“Sold as novelties only. Not intended for use with any illegal substance.”), cheap hippie jewellery, fancy belt-buckles, and brands of incense. Truckers also carried magazines (High Times), how-to books (growing your own, and such), and underground comix. Mr Natural forever!

          I moved into the spare bedroom at the house Louie was buying in a nice, working-class neighbourhood off Blanco Road north of Hildebrand but well inside Loop 410. He had a cool record collection and had the money to buy hip new releases. I hadn’t bought music for a while, and anything recent I had wasn’t anything that had made the mainstream. I even first heard Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe (’) when Louie played it for me.

          Louie and I worked together, often side by side, for more than a year. I spent most of my days and evenings at Truckers, waiting on people and doing leather craft. I could never escape the idea that if I’d been in India I’d’ve been so unclean as to be beneath the untouchables, working all day with cowhide.

          Controlled substances were, of course, integral to the scene at Truckers. I remember in particular one guy in a dusty old Dodge who stopped off on his way back to New York from a vacation in Arizona. He’d filled the trunk of his full-sized sedan with peyote buttons he’d picked himself. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of those suckers in there. And would we accept some in trade for some merchandise? Louie and I looked at each other. We would.

          Back before Xmas 1974 Louie had, in exchange for some advertising time, made a shitload of leather key fobs with the call letters of radio stations KMAC & KISS on them. At that time KMAC/KISS was a funky little operation that broadcast an odd playlist that was moving toward what would become alternative, and eventually would become hard rock/heavy metal. They broadcast Spurs games live back before the Spurs joined the NBA.

          Anyway, Louie thought it’d be a good idea if I would make the commercials Truckers had coming, me being the class clown and all, so I wrote up a couple that I thought’d be funny and went down to their studios in an old art deco apartment building facing a park at the north edge of downtown. And I did them, using extreme character voices, and they sounded okay, and people came into the shop talking about them.

          Louie and I worked out a wholesale price list and made up a more or less complete line of sample leather belts, bags, hats, sun visors, key fobs, and so on. I stowed my gear at Truckers, loaded the samples and Naomi into my 1959 Karmann-Ghia, and headed for the coast. I found it fairly easy to take orders from surf shops and craft shops and souvenir shops and so on in Rockport and Port Aransas and Corpus Christi. I came back to help Louie and the craftspeople he had helping us from time to time fill the orders. It took a little longer than I had hoped, but we got them done, and Naomi and I returned to the coast to make a little more hay while the summer season lasted.

          This time it took Louie longer to fill the orders than before, what with his own adventures with drugs and women and suppliers reluctant to extend his credit further. I was pretty perturbed by the delays — I’d given my word to some of these people about delivery dates — but, really, I can see in retrospect that I was in no moral position to be critical about delays caused by dope and pussy and general human weakness. Still, it seemed to me that I’d done an awful lot of selling without noticeably increasing my supply of pocket money.

          When I got back off the road from selling I took to sleeping in Truckers’s main workroom in back. Then, in early 1976, I moved out of the workroom at Truckers — and into another garage apartment. This place was one of a line of garages and garage apartments in a long, low structure facing an alley off Huisache Avenue in Laurel Heights. It made my first garage apartment seem cool. The plumbing tended to back up, spilling turds onto the floor around the toilet, so I had some contact with the landlord, a chiropractor who spent his evenings as the Ring Physician at professional wrestling exhibitions. He gave me a good bone-cracking once, on the house.

          Anyway, it started to seem unfair to me that I was busting butt and living in a hole while Louie seemed to just swan around, sleeping late and going to nightclubs, and making payments on a two-bedroom house. To make ends meet I got a job as a waiter, which made me resent Louie more. And so things built up, and by February we were going through a nasty business divorce. I took off with a bunch of the jewellery and belt-buckles and other small, easily transportable items, just so I didn’t come out of it with nothing. Louie followed me to my girlfriend’s mother’s house, so he knew where I was holding it, but he agreed to let me keep it. We got somebody to take inventories, and went through a division of assets. My girlfriend and I ended up taking the shit I took from Truckers to a flea market or two, where most of it was shoplifted.

          Louie and I didn’t see each other again for about six years. Then we ran into each other in a bar across Broadway from Brackenridge Park, near where I was living at the time. He’d gained some weight, but he was still sharply dressed. For a moment we didn’t know whether to start scrapping right there or what. Then we both shrugged our shoulders. I bought him a beer. He bought me a beer. We talked about nothing in particular. We haven’t seen each other since.

Bill Marsh; Brenda & Tyrone

Bill Marsh

          Tall and lean, a long-drink-of-water of a man, Bill Marsh was a Marsh of the Marshville Marshes from Marshville, North Carolina (pronounced Nokaleina), a rural settlement of about two thousand immortal souls near the South Carolina state line, about 30 miles (50 km) from Charlotte. The nearest town of any size is Monroe, which is about ten miles (16 km) away, and is where the residents of Marshville have to go to buy beer, because Marshville’s dry.

          Bill’s horizons stretched a bit further, however, and at the appropriate age he took off on his beloved Indian motorcycle to travel the country and see what he could see and do what he could do. After a few years he wound up in New Orleans and got a job as a pressman with New Orleans’s daily Times-Picayune. He bought himself a nice little house in a quiet neighbourhood in the Mid-City district, commuted by bicycle, grew a beard, read books, and found outlets for his need to express love and caring by acquiring dachshunds and a wife. None of this is in any particular order, but by some time in the 1950s or early 60s he had accomplished all these accomplishments. I consider having a beard and commuting by bicycle in the context of the era to be accomplishments.

          His wife, a seamstress, was named María, a mestiza from Honduras. She already had three children by her first husband, Martínez (divorced), and one by her second husband, Gatto (widowed). Her second husband, who was an Italian Lombard from France, had been some kind of a big-shot manager with the United Fruit Company, and after his premature death by drowning, whilst surfing, I believe, Chiquita had gone to the trouble to relocate his widow and her children to New Orleans as US citizens. How they managed this I don’t know. Anyway, she and Bill went crazy in love and remained so. They had two children of their own. Bill learnt Spanish.

          And so life settled down in the warm glow of steady work, family, bicycles – he and María got a tandem bike – books, and dachshunds. Of the three Martínez children, Raúl went off to university and became a research chemical engineer with the DuPont Company, Eliseo (“Just call me Joe”) got into sales, because he was like that, and Graciela got married and moved off into the middle-class Midwest somewhere.

          The problems, other than María’s occasional grog binges, tended to be associated with the banana-boss’s daughter, Helena Gatto, my first wife. Ignoring high-school academics in favour of dope, sex, and the fast life in the French Quarter, she kept life from becoming too settled. When I fell in love with her in Biloxi, for example, she was fighting two felony raps for selling weed. I helped to keep her out of the slammer, something that helps to make me feel good about myself.

          Bill and I got along real well. He had a laid-back way of talking, as if he’d modelled his speech on Bing Crosby and Dean Martin, with just the murmuring ruffle of down-home Marshville around the edges. He appreciated ideas and Latin American food and my little dog Naomi. He let Helena and me borrow the tandem bike to tour the city. He didn’t seem to have any liking at all for the sort of flamboyantly loud and drunken bullshit that characterises tourist New Orleans, and although not religiously inclined he was disposed kindly toward María’s extravagant Latin Catholicism.

          Bill wasn’t along the one time I visited Marshville. I was travelling with Bill and María’s two kids: Larry, who was in his mid-teens, and Annamaria, who was just barely pubescent. Our hostess at the old family home with multiple verandas was Bill’s elderly great aunt – I’m sorry to say I forget her first name – who was mostly blind and a relic of an earlier era. She gave the impression of being old enough to remember owning slaves, but that couldn’t have been right.

          She was most pleased to see the young people named Marsh, but I apparently bewildered her. ‘Ah declayuh, Honeychile’ (She actually said that to me in her almost-another-language rural Carolina drawl), ‘but I don’t believe we’ve ever had a Jewish person in Marshville before.’ (I’m sparing you the dialectical transliteration.) ‘All we’ve ever had in Marshville is Baptists and Methodists and backsliders.’

          I assured her that I fit right in, being a backslider, at which point she informed me about the need, mentioned above, to drive to Monroe if I wanted to buy beer.

          Soybean prices were up that year, which meant that everybody in that neck of country was eating off the highest part of the hog, and the first oil shock was just breaking. We went fishing on her farm’s stocked pond. It was a hot, humid, uncomfortable day swarming with various insects. Everybody, especially the old great-aunt and little Annamaria, caught plenty of fish – except me. I caught none. Then we drove on.

          The last time I saw Bill was on Christmas day 1974. Helena and I’d separated about a half a year earlier and I’d been living alone in San Antonio. She had moved back to New Orleans, had Naomi, and I wanted my little dirtball back. Having the holiday off work, I’d driven through the night to New Orleans in my 15-year-old Karmann-Ghia and had tracked Helena down to Bill and María’s house. After some acrimonious phone calls, during which I did myself no credit, I drove up to the kerb in front.

          María, apparently drunk, was shouting in Spanish out one of the front windows. Bill came out of the front door, Naomi initially at his heels, and then running full tilt to me once she saw-and-smelled me.

          Once he got to me Bill drawled in his lazy voice, ‘What are you fucking up our Christmas for?’

          I replied something like, ‘Well, it wouldn’t even be a fucked-up Christmas for me without Naomi.’

          He considered this for a moment, and then, dachshund lover that he was, said, ‘Yeah, it aint right to keep a man away from his dog.’

          It was all over except for some loud and vigorous theatrics from María, who brought out a basket containing some puppies to whom Naomi had given birth a few weeks before, and me writing Bill a cheque to reimburse him for their veterinary bills, and I was off back to San Antonio, leaving Bill to recover his Christmas.

          I wonder if digitalisation eliminated the need for Bill’s job and, if it did, if he’d been able to retire first.

Brenda & Tyrone

          One day Helena and I were sitting on our front porch on Adams Street and this little kid came over from a front porch across the street and a few houses down with a note for Helena. The note said, “Hi, Let’s be friends,” and the skinny woman sitting on the other porch waved over at us. And so we got to know Brenda and Tyrone.

          Tyrone and Brenda were coon-assed to the marrow, and not your better sort of coon-ass, either. White trash, some might say. Anyway, Tyrone was by trade a house-painter, and by legal definition a prison escapee. I’m not sure what he’d been in for. Stealing stuff off building sites, I’d imagine. It doesn’t matter. The police wanted him. They came by looking for him from time to time.

          Once they came zooming up in police cars, sealing off our block at both cross-streets. Then they came down our street from both directions, as Helena and I watched from our porch, and converged on Tyrone and Brenda’s house. They surrounded it and went in by both the front and back doors. They searched that little two-bedroom shotgun house for the better part of an hour, then they came out, packed away their stuff, and drifted off. The street returned to its normally sleepy-quiet state.

          Then Tyrone came out onto the porch, stretched, and sat down on the porch swing to drink a beer. I was fucken amazed. Later, Helena got their secret out of Brenda: he’d hid in the fridge.

          Tyrone was a friendly sort, about my age. We got high together a few times. After I split from the French restaurant, he took me with him to a couple of building sites while he bid on painting jobs, but being Tyrone’s painter’s helper seemed much less attractive to me than being Murray’s apprentice trucker had been, and I hadn’t done that. And Murray hadn’t been wanted by the cops and acting real cocky about it.

          But they were friendly folks, and Brenda wasn’t nearly as crazy as Helena. They eventually disappeared, and a pleasant, friendly, unexciting working-class African American family took their place.