John Ware 1971-1975

John Ware 1971-1975

          After the demise of the First National Band Ware returned to the house in Claremont and that arty way of life. He painted. He started playing the Hollywood Living-Room Circuit, which he described as, ‘this loose-knit group of about 20 or 25 guys who played backup for West Hollywood’s I-can’t-make-it-but-I’m-cool folk-rock guys. Hoyt Axton. John Stewart. People like that.’

          Early in 1971 a character in Herb Cohen’s office called Leon Danielle steered him into producing Nansi Nevins (as she spelt it then), the former lead singer with Sweetwater, the opening band at Woodstock. She’d been badly hurt in a nasty car smash, her voice was affected, and she was out of a contract. Ware got me some work doing strong-back-weak-mind stuff for Nansi, cleaning junk out of the back yard of the place where she was rehearsing. Ware thought she was really brilliant, a really good songwriter, but so far off into her own little world that after working with her for the better part of a year he didn’t think he got anywhere. He did eventually do some demos for Warner Brothers, who just dismissed them out of hand.

          Ware then spent almost a year as a sit-down drummer in a six-night-a-weeker playing country standards at a bar in Glendale. It was, he told me, ‘a hideous gig, but it put money in the bank.’ I went to see him once at this gig in 1972. The bar was a barn-like place in a truly dismal neighbourhood. It wasn’t an impressive experience.

          Then a guy he knew from just being around the scene for years approached him about playing drums for Johnnie Tillotson in Las Vegas. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t a fan of late-50s-early-60s white bubblegum pop, but he’d had it with the LA folk-rock-psychedelic music scene and the dive in Glendale, so he and his old high-school bass player from the Continentals, John Selk, started playing some gigs with Tillotson. He spent the summer of 1973 playing with him.

          “Playin’ Las Vegas. Playin’ the Flamingo. Playin’ the Tropicana. Playin’ the Sands. In the lounge. I’d go on stage at ten to ten-thirty, and then I’d go on stage again at about two. It was just awful. I can’t tell you how many times I played ‘Poetry in Motion’ to six people. Sometimes it was six people, one of whom was like Johnnie Carson, with two bimbos de soir, but essentially I was playing to fat, lower-middle-class, drunken gamblers.”

          Whilst engaged in this labour he ran into Kenny Edwards from the Stone Poneys in LA. Edwards had been back in contact with Linda Ronstadt, who was selling tons of records by that time, had a tour lined up with Jackson Browne, and, according Edwards, needed to get serious about a band. A few phone calls later Ware had an audition. He said it felt strange to audition for someone he’d already played with, but he got the gig.

          He loved working for Ronstadt again. He thought she was singing wonderfully, and the band she’d put together was fun to play in: Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Bobby Warford, Kenny Edwards, and Andrew Gold. Jackson Browne also had a band Ware thought was great. They toured for a year of hardly ever being home, both acts travelling on a Continental Trailways bus. It was hardly a rock & roll bus, until they started ripping seats out and getting blow-up rafts from army-navy surplus stores.

          In the autumn of 1973 I was living in Wilmington, Delaware, working for my step-father — just as in 1961 — and married to a woman who had mental-health problems with which I was having difficulty coping. I was wallowing in a sort of beaten-down-by-dead-end-job, terrorised-by-wife state when I heard that Linda Ronstadt was coming to Wilmington, and would be playing at my old high school’s gym. Ware and I were still in touch with each other fairly regularly, and he let me know when the entourage were likely to be arriving at the Hotel Dupont in downtown Wilmington.

          My wife appeared to be in a bit of a quandary over this one. Ware was, manifestly, not a woman about whom she could make a pretence of being jealous. She was, however, intensely jealous over anything and everything that had to do with my former life in Hollywood. She finally made it plain that she would tolerate — barely — me catching up with Ware, but any contact at all with Linda Ronstadt, including going to see the show for free, even if she and I went together, would almost certainly provoke a savage reaction.

          So, after some disruption when Ware — the West Point Hippie and, it seemed, always the unofficial roadie — moved the entourage from the Hotel Dupont to a suitable suburban motel and checked out the concert venue, he and I went out and about on a bit of what in rural New Zealand is called a tikitour. I took him by request to the Duponts’ Winterthur Museum. He seemed to sympathise with my bedraggled state, but he clearly had problems relating to it.

          He really tried to help by telling me a few obvious truths — such as, for instance,  happiness comes from staying at it — and then apologising for sounding smug. He said he was handling continuing life on the road by checking out museums and by practising his drumming constantly, often on a wood-block, to maintain and increase his level of professional competence. He came to the house for a bite to eat and to meet my wife, and then it was off to the concert for him, and a strong bourbon-and-soda and early to marital bed for me.

          The Ronstadt-and-Browne show played in Washington, DC in late 1973 or early 1974, not long after Gram Parsons died. Ware had heard about a girl named Emmylou Harris that Gram had been hanging out with, but he’d never heard any of her music. He met her in a backstage drink-up there.

          “Playing with women is different, backstage. The backstage people are mostly weird. It’s not groupies. Not even groupies for girls. There were, for instance, all those goddamned months that Jerry Brown was on the road with us. Yeeesh! Jerry Brown, governor of the fucken state of California, and his bodyguards, on the road with us. Sitting around in the back of the dressing room kind of wistfully, with moon-struck puppydog-eyes. I couldn’t figure that shit out.”

          At the end of 1973 the tour took a break and Ware took his wife on a three-week vacation to Ireland. When they returned he received a phone call from Peter Asher, who was then managing Linda, telling him that the Heart Like A Wheel album was done, and it was time to go on the road — first class this time. Ware wondered how the album could be done if he hadn’t played a note, himself.

          Asher told him that Gold, the rhythm guitar player, had played drums on the record, that he’d learned Ware’s drum parts by listening to live tapes, and that he’d played on Ware’s drum set, which he’d taken out of the storage hall because that’s the sound that everybody wanted. Asher was mystified that Ware was pissed off, but he was, and he quit.

          About a week later somebody called him and told him that Ian Matthews, who’d been with Fairport Convention, Matthews Southern Comfort, and Plainsong, was back in LA and was looking for a band. Ware knew him from when he’d been in London with Nesmith, made a couple of phone calls, and took the gig. He moved to New York to play with Matthews’s band, which Matthews was calling Plainsong again. They played in England and New York. Ware enjoyed it, but was still earning about $200 a week, plus per diem, and mailed it all, in cash, to Linda Ware in Claremont from a tobacconist on Third Avenue.

          In late 1974 Ware and Matthews were back in LA, looking to put together another band. They fell to networking the bars and recording studios. Ware ran into an old friend named Bobby Warford, who’d been playing some gigs backing up the Everly Brothers, along with Warren Zevon on piano. After tensions with the Everlies had come to a head (Phil Everly smashed his guitar and stormed off the stage midway through a concert), Coleman started looking for country-rock players to come in and play the San Fernando Valley. A scene grew out of this at the Sundance Saloon in rural Calabasas. It was a fairly small dive, but eventually there were six or so bands playing there each week. Each night had a different band, made up of people from major bands who, when they returned to LA from the road, gathered to play with their gang of Tuesday Nighters, or Wednesday Nighters, or Thursday or Friday Nighters, playing only for beer.

          Ware was in the Tuesday Night band at the Sundance for a few years, when he was off the road. Don Everly was the lead singer, and it included Skunk Baxter, Bobby Warford, John Selk, John Hartford, Sneaky Pete, and Albert Lee. If enough people were off the road there were a dozen people in the band, playing behind Don Everly.

          Meanwhile, Ware and Matthews ran into a songwriter named David Palmer in a bar in Pasadena. Palmer had just finished writing all of Carole King’s Jazzman album. Matthews and Palmer didn’t combine well, but Palmer hooked Ware up with Charlie Larkey, who was Carole King’s husband. Larkey was a bass player, playing with Bobby Keys, the legendary sax player.

          Ware started playing a few nights in bars with Larkey and Keys, and whatever their pick-up bands were — usually some of the loose guys from the LA part of the Rolling Stones’ touring band. Keys didn’t like Ware’s playing style (“too simplistic”), but Larkey liked it, and invited Ware up to his and Carole King’s house. Ware went. Then he dragged a set of drums up there. Then David Palmer started falling by.

          After they’d been up there for a few thousand cans of beer, Palmer started bringing songs up. Then King and Palmer were singing together, and they added a couple more people, and started having auditions for more people, and there was a band going, with a talented keyboard player-singer named Michael McDonald. They moved out of the house and into the Alley Rehearsal Halls in North Hollywood, where they worked hard for several months, calling the band Honor Bright. Ware thought it had more than promise, and that in the studio it was a killer. Lou Adler, King’s manager, was excited and chasing record companies.

          But Honor Bright either just was never meant to be, or didn’t happen fast enough. King seemed to Ware to be losing interest in the band and in Larkey. Then the lead singer of the Doobie Brothers OD’d, and in a panic the Doobies called Michael McDonald and asked him to come join them for the rest of that tour, and he left Honor Bright. After two days of what Ware called “acrimonious snivelling about Michael leaving us,” he ran into one of the roadies from the Linda Ronstadt-Jackson Browne tour at the rehearsal hall. The roadie asked what Ware was doing and he told him. The roadie then told Ware that he was just starting work with Emmylou Harris, and she’d been calling around trying to find out who the drummer was downstairs, because that was the sound she wanted.

          That night Ware got a call at home in Claremont from Eddie Tickner, Harris’s manager. He asked if Ware would like to come play drums for her. Ware mentioned Honor Bright and Tickner told him who else was playing with Harris, all of them people Ware thought were great players. He couldn’t say no. He called Palmer and signed off, and two days later they started rehearsing the Hot Band.

          The first gig the Hot Band played was April 15, 1975 in San Francisco, and Ware’s life changed forever on that night. He was staggered. The playing was hotter than anything he’d ever experienced. When Harris ran out of songs, Rodney Crowell jumped up and sang. They’d never rehearsed. There weren’t any rules. They just played.

          After finishing the first 115-minute show, with another show to go, Ware estimated that he’d probably already lost eight to ten pounds (3-4.5 kg) in sweat. It was all over the floor underneath his drum kit. He ran back behind the curtain and sank to the floor, almost passing out. He looked next to him and saw that Crowell was there doing the same thing. They looked at each other and both said, “Wow! What was that?” And they embraced. Out front, the crowd went insane. Close to three years of what for Ware was the most staggering music possible followed.

          I remember sitting in my dismal little “garage apartment” in San Antonio Texas, where I was eking out a miserable living as a waiter in an overpriced steak house, reading a letter from Ware in which he told me that he had just joined this new outfit called the Hot Band, which was more fun than anything he’d ever done before in his life. They were playing behind some singer named Emmylou Harris. I think I’d maybe heard of the name, but she really wasn’t in my frame of reference. I wasn’t plugged into that stream of popular music in the mid-to-late 70s.

George Dancause; Raúl Gonzales

George Dancause

         In the summer of 1984 I had my teacher certificate, but I didn’t have a job, Dean’s list or not. Maybe it was the old guy-with-a-beard rap one more time. I don’t know. Not performing further with Margaret in Curtis’s erotic video started to look like a mistake. I put out applications almost everywhere and fell into a groove driving at Yellow Cab.

          August was almost over and the teaching job offers were not flooding in. Then one evening my ex-girlfriend Marian, who was a teacher, phoned me. She was teaching out in the Edgewood District, and had, over some after-school enchiladas and beers at a West Side roadhouse, heard one of the principals complaining that he still hadn’t staffed one position: a new thing the state was requiring schools to do called in-school suspension (ISS).

          So the next day I brought my cab back to the depot at noon, climbed into my Toyota, and drove out to the deep West Side. The principal, Ricardo Bocanegra, was well enough impressed by my height and burliness. About my glittering references and Dean’s-list honours he showed little interest. He hired me.

          Edgewood Independent School District was dirt poor. I read somewhere that at the time it hired me, it was the fifth poorest school district in the whole United States. Poverty of that magnitude carries with it a skimpy tax base, which meant that at that time teachers in Edgewood got paid less than teachers elsewhere, but I had a job. The demographic at the school that hired me, Wrenn Junior, was about 90% Chicano and 10% African American, or black, as was the phrase back then.

          The idea behind ISS was that kids who got kicked out of class for being disruptive, or got busted for minor crimes in the rest rooms, would all get sent to a special disciplinary classroom in a modular structure standing free from the main school building, rather than be sent home. Sending kids home on suspension was a bad idea, went the reasoning. Suspended kids were being deprived of school, often had homes where they would be unlikely to have responsible adult supervision during the day, and were likely to spend their days doing burglaries, which the community understandably didn’t appreciate.

          My immediate supervisor and colleague in this enterprise was the assistant principal, George Dancause. He was a big, strong, jolly family man with a round head and a ready smile inside his goatee. Bocanegra clearly went for size for his disciplinary staff. George was from some rural county in deep South Texas near the Rio Grande Valley. When I was telling him about a new machete I’d bought as a weapon in my losing war against some bamboo at a house I’d moved into he responded with a tale about how in his home county people call machetes belduques, since in the nineteenth century they’d all come from the Bell & Duke Foundry in Houston. I still have my hyper-sharpened belduque hanging within arm’s reach of this keyboard, just in case.

          We did morning duty together, trying to maintain some sort of order before the bell rang to get things going. My station was inside the school, in the central hall, keeping an eye on the banks of glass doors front and back. George prowled outside. One of our duties was breaking up fights, which were fairly frequent. George was the first responder; I was backup.

Boy fights were easy. We grabbed the would-be combatants, who had been circling each other throwing shadow-boxing jabs and dire imprecations, from behind until they cooled off. The whole business tended to be a showing of peacock feathers. They rarely struggled much in our grasp. Girl fights were an entirely different matter. Girls wanted to kill each other. I can remember George, who must’ve been a good 115-kg-plus and me, no shrimp, wrestling pairs of skinny 12-year-old girls to the ground and they’d still be pulling out handfuls of hair and applying fingernails to faces until we managed, with difficulty, to tear them apart.

George was full of such job-specific wisdom as grabbing kids caught smoking in the Boys’ room by the wrist and taking a big whiff of the tips of their thumb-and-forefinger to determine by smell just what they’d been smoking there. He also told me that most of the misbehaving at school was by the slower students. ‘Kids don’t like people thinking that their dumb,’ he explained. ‘There’s so much more peer-group status in having a reputation for being bad. I mean, Michael Jackson hasn’t made a billion dollars singing, [here he went into falsetto and a little finger-pointing-into-the-air dance step] “I’m dumb! I’m dumb!”’

          When I married the girls’ PE teacher between my first and second year at the school he told me to put a marble into a jar every time we fucked, and after our first wedding anniversary taking one out every time we fucked, adding that the jar would never be empty.

          So much wisdom in an assistant principal of a small intermediate school in a heart-rendingly poor neighbourhood.

Raúl Gonzales

         Since most of my detainees at In-School Suspension were repeat offenders, I got to know many of them fairly well. Some of them were sad and pathetic, some of them were nasty and sociopathic, some were boringly rebellious, and a few were absolutely charming. One of these was a sort of Chicano Bart Simpson — displaying most of the signs of foetal alcohol syndrome — named Raúl Gonzales.

          Raúl was doing the seventh grade for, I think, his second and third times doing the two years that he regularly visited me at ISS, but he was no dimwit. He had a good deal of sly intelligence that he directed into areas that seemed promising to him. Most schoolwork failed to fit into this category. He lived with his older brother Freddie, who was also in seventh grade on the five-year plan, his father, who ran a conjuntos night club, and a series of step-mothers.

          Whereas Raúl was effervescent, charming, and cheeky, Freddie was quiet, polite, and always respectful, at least in front of me. Freddie was definitely dyslexic, which probably made him feel stupid (whether he was or wasn’t), but I don’t think special help for dyslexia was available for kids like Freddie Gonzales back then. The way of the world required Freddie to spend a good deal of time in ISS, too.

          Whereas Raúl drank this and that and smoked this and that, Freddie wanted to be a bantamweight boxer and lived a healthy lifestyle. After school I could often see him doing roadwork, jogging at a good pace along the road.

          One of the school’s English teachers, a former priest named Carroll Ray, found both Raúl and Freddy to be greatly entertaining. After he showed his classes Reefer Madness as an example of a certain type of movie he told me that Raúl had loved it – thought it was wonderful and wanted to see it again. After seeing another of the movies Carroll had shown them Freddy decided to take on the ring name of Little Big Man.

          They told me that what the kids in ISS needed was structure, so I covered the walls with posters repeating over again the same basic four or five rules: QUIET, and YOU MUST WORK, and FACE YOUR OWN DESK, and ONLY ONE TRIP TO TOILET BEFORE LUNCH, and ONLY ONE TRIP TO TOILET AFTER LUNCH. The ISS room had its own toilet, in a little cubicle back in the far corner from the only door.

          I can’t be sure, but I think that one day Raúl actually sold some dope to another kid in ISS! On the way to and from the toilet. Slicker’n shit and I didn’t catch him, but I think he did.

Al Lavelle

Al Lavelle

          I did my student teaching in early 1984 at a large suburban high school named after Theodore Roosevelt. TR High. Al Lavelle was two classrooms down. He taught world history, Russian, and Japanese. He taught me that a teacher’s best friend is his or her stapler. And I believe him to this day.

          At the time I met him Al was approaching retirement age. He was mostly bald, and what hair he had was white, as was his moustache and goatee. He was shortish and roundish and had weaknesses for skinny cigars and a confection called Gummy Bears. He once told me that, after a certain age, a man’s metabolism slows down, and he grows rounder and rounder until he gets cancer; then he starts to get thinner and thinner, and just about the time he’s starting to look good again, he dies. Al delivered little gems of wisdom like this with an impish smile and Irish eyes that twinkled.

          He told me he’d grown up in a starchy upper-middle-class Irish-American family in Colorado. They’d dressed for dinner. He’d started his career as a pilot when he’d been a teenager in the 1930s. He had, he told me, been involved back then as a bush pilot with an expedition mapping the Amazon River basin. When I knew him he was almost 65 and was continuing to do aerobatics in his microlight at least once a week. He’d been a military pilot of some sort during the second world war and in Korea, and there were still people around who addressed him as Colonel Lavelle, but he didn’t seem to like that.

          He’d had some experience with managing reconstruction with the Occupation in Japan, which is where he’d learnt Japanese. He told me there was even a high school north of Tokyo that had been named after him. After he left the military he’d gone more or less in that direction, and had ended up with the State Department. I think it was the State Department that had him learn Russian. He told me stories about working as a translator of intercepted Russian military communications during the Cuban missile crisis. Russian air force pilots apparently liked to sing bawdy-to-filthy songs to each other over their radios, just for a laugh and probably because they knew the Americans were listening to them.

          He’d then done a long stretch for the State Department in Vietnam, working on village reconstruction and fortification with the hill tribes. It had been what he’d done in Japan, only in a seriously different historical and cultural milieu. But still, he told me, building a wall or a school in wartime Hmong country wasn’t much different from a construction standpoint than it was anywhere. Anyway, he’d learned their languages and cultures and lived with them. He had, he said, accepted wives as presents from grateful tribal villagers, never forgetting his wife and family back in Texas. Well, at least not for long.

          He told me of leaving Hmong country once for home leave. They helicoptered him out to Saigon, put him on a transport to Guam, and then onto a commercial flight for the US. He found himself sitting in a comfortable jet plane high over the Pacific, heading for suburban San Antonio and his middle-class family, and looking down and seeing that he was still wearing all the symbolically-woven bracelets and amulets and so on that signified his relationships with his various tribes and wives. These were things that had been vitally important to him a few days before, and now looked totally ridiculous and out of place. He took them off.

          He did woodwork for creative release — joinery and carpentry. He said he always had. He told me that the key to post-disaster reconstruction work was just knowing how to estimate how much timber, nails, and suchlike were needed to build a certain number of structures. He’d started out his teaching career as a wood-shop teacher; he showed me the photos. Extensive creative woodwork adorned his house at the start of the Hill Country northwest of San Antonio.

          I went out there a few times to be sociable. I remember once he invited me out when his daughter Dawn was there. Dawn was a Navy helicopter pilot stationed on Midway Island. Al was enormously fond of her and proud of her, telling me that she’d always loved challenges, which is why she had such a bizarre job. She was a very good-looking woman, too, and it became embarrassingly clear that Al was trying to set us up, and that Dawn wasn’t having any of that.

          Another time Al took me to the airfield where he kept his microlight in which he did his aerobatics. Then we went to a room he had at another airfield, where they called him Colonel Lavelle, and he showed me various documents and photos and trophies commemorating various stuff he’d done. It was cool, but I didn’t know why he thought I had to see proof of his bona fides; I was gullible enough to take his word for the stories he’d told. Then he showed me an enormous, unedited manuscript of his memoirs. He was concerned that the State Department or somebody in the government would confiscate it. He claimed that it told some truths that had long been hidden. Al had something of an anomaly about him. For all his military-aviation, State-Department-in-Vietnam background, he was, as he put it, a committed socialist and secular humanist.

          Al and I continued to hang out now and again long after I finished at TR, and I enjoyed my visits out to his rancho. He liked to read history so I gave him a book I’d read called The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment. A wedding present he gave when I got married again in 1985 is still the favourite bowl of one of my grown daughters. We kept in touch after I moved to Guam, and he expressed a bit of envy when I told him I was moving to New Zealand, under the mistaken impression that somehow New Zealand was a socialist country, which it never was. Then somehow we lost touch with each other. I saw on the internet that he died in 2008 at the age of 88.

Holly Moe

Holly Moe

          One of my life-long pleasures has been (generally) to interact and (specifically) to joke around with people I run into behind counters and desks and cash registers and so forth. It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s relatively painless. And in this way I made friends with a razor-thin young woman taking money at one of the registers at the UTSA cafeteria when I was going to teacher training there in 1983. Her name was Holly Samson and she was a graduate student in the art department, working on an MFA.

          She had a husband, Curtis, who was an officer in the Air Force. He’d joined up because he’d wanted to be a top-gun pilot, but as things turned out he was prone to air-sickness, and kept barfing all over the inside of his cockpit. Pilot trainees have to clean up their own yuck when this happens, so Curtis had washed out of pilot training. He still owed the Air Force some time, though, and since he had a BA in psychology, they assigned him to psychological testing, where he was supposed to be writing multiple-choice items for psychological tests. His quota of items to be produced was, well, small, so he read novels most of the time. I directed novels to him through Holly — at the time I was really big on Harry Crews — and Curtis sent me some strange books back.

          And Holly and Curtis and their MFA friends interlocked with the Chris-and-Florence circle. I started going to some nifty art openings and similar social events. I remember in particular one opening at a new gallery in a run-down formerly industrial area south of downtown – by now I’m sure thoroughly gentrified – at which someone put a few handfuls of magic mushrooms on a plate on the snack table along with the traditional water crackers and brie. Whoopie!

          Holly’s artistic medium was carpets. A glance at the entries about her on the internet indicates that it remained so. By carpets I mean cheap, short-pile carpets, such as a company mindful of costs might install in the offices of its lower-paid clerical workers. She cut it into shapes and used unfiltered ready-made cigarettes to burn lines into it, as if a platoon of clumsy smokers had dropped their smokes onto them and been too lazy to pick them up. She composed these burn-lines into drawings of ordinary things. Fairly recent reviews of her exhibitions reveal that she has taken to using gunpowder, in addition to cigarettes, as a way of burning art into the cheap fibres. To this day I have a Holly Moe runner, into which she had burned a picture of ceramic pots, needing vacuuming on my kitchen floor.

          It was about the time that I started hanging out with Holly and Curtis that I started making hanging sculptures out of flotsam and concrete poured into moulds scooped out of wet sand. I remember the first one I made, in a flat plywood box back by the shed behind Chris’s and my duplex on Claremont.

          Chris and Holly and Curtis stood around as I rummaged around in the sand to see if the concrete had set. It had. Holly reached into the sand to feel how it was and said, “Oh, Richard! It’s hard!”, as concrete is. Amidst general chuckling at the double meaning, Chris offered Curtis a large, evil-looking garden hoe — his favourite weapon — to use if he cared to deal to me. But that wasn’t Curtis’s way. He had a mild-mannered, almost spaced-out, way about him, not what a person would expect from someone who’d wanted to be a fighter pilot.

          Holly and Curtis moved into an apartment over a brake shop on the light-industrial northern fringe of central San Antonio. Major parades, such as the Rodeo parade and the Battle of the Flowers parade, mustered on the street below, which made their easily-accessible rooftop the place to be on such occasions. Getting in was a bit tricky, due to having to go a short way through the brake shop — and the brake shop’s guard dogs, which made it tricky — to get to the stairs to the apartment, but there was a way and people were okay if they followed the procedure. The apartment often stank of cigarettes burning lines into cheap carpets.

          Then, in late 1983, Holly, Curtis, and some of their artist friends took a lease on a nightclub, which they re-did in punk and called the Bone Club. A couple of my concrete sculptures had the honour of gracing the place, one of them over the table where people had to show their IDs and pay the cover to get in. The club had formerly been a gay bar, and they joked about all the AIDS dust they raised when redecorating it. A spaced-out artist lived and worked in the loft overhead. They had a problem, however, in that there was yet another gay bar next door, and the punks and the queers got along poorly, and in the end — after less than a year, I guess — the gay bar bought out the Bone Club’s lease and evicted them. I was getting ready to be a teacher at the time, and didn’t attend the club as often as I would have like to do.

          Apparently feeling on the underprivileged side artistically, Lt. Curtis got stuck into making amateur, artsy-fartsy videos. Chris told me that Curtis dug doing the camera work while Holly frolicked in various bizarre and erotic ways with artist friends in the altogether. One evening I was up there over the brake shop visiting, sharing a toke or two, and a fellow MFA person named Margaret was there also. It was in the summer of 1984 and I had just finished teachers’ college and was looking for a teaching job. Curtis got out a camera and started shooting tape of Margaret and me. Soon Margaret was naked on a chair and I was down to my Levis chewing on the chair leg. Holly stood to one side, making suggestions.

          Unfortunately, I decided that my upcoming career as a teacher didn’t need any video evidence of my moral turpitude, so I decided not to take the plot any further. I don’t want to think about what would have happened if I hadn’t had such an attack of the straights.

          Holly and Curtis were drifting apart. They moved, along with a few of their art-world friends, into an old victorian mansion on the southern edge of downtown that had formerly been the headquarters of some Nationalist Chinese organisation. A semi-circular sign over the front door read, “Chung-Kuo Kuo-Min-Tang”. They rented the place’s ballroom to Sandy Dunne, a friend of ours who had a modern-dance company, for rehearsals. Holly and Curtis took separate bedrooms, but remained friendly.

          Then Holly got a girlfriend: a somewhat hard-faced blonde woman named Judy Bankhead, a not-all-that-distant relative of Tallulah. Judy was much more demonstrably affectionate than Curtis had been, which, as my new wife pointed out to me after they’d been by to visit, Holly seemed to appreciate. Holly and Judy then adopted an extreme high-garlic diet and became detectable by even the weakest nose from several metres. They, however, claimed not to notice the aroma themselves, at least not in regard to each other. Meanwhile, art continued to be created, shows and galleries continued to be opened, and fun continued to be had.

          Curtis finally finished doing his time and left the Air Force. I missed most of that party. He made an effigy dressed in his uniform and burned it. I saw the remains later. The Corfam^® shoes had been almost totally unaffected by the bonfire. He showed me the photos.

          Just before we left San Antonio there was an art opening out at the McNay followed by a bit of a retreat at Chris and Florence’s house in Terrell Hills. Curtis and Judy were getting along all right. My daughter Ruth crawled around under everybody’s chairs. Holly was being Holly, smiling and taking everything with at least one grain of, if not salt, then dried garlic.

          It was after I left San Antonio that I heard that Holly had broken up with Judy and had taken up with a man, who Chris told me was a good sort. Just what Holly needed. Holly and I got back in touch with each other in the mid-90s. We really didn’t say that much in the two or three letters we exchanged. She sent me invitations to her art-show openings. Apparently she’s now living in Bandera, in the Texas Hill Country a bit of a distance from San Antonio. I’m sure her place out there is extremely hip. I’ve read some reviews of her late-90s exhibitions on the internet, noting that she’d taken her work in carpets in new directions, but she seems to have evaporated from digital view some time around the turn of the century.

Jessica Jewett; Joyce Honeychurch

Jessica Jewett

          One of the sleaziest dickheads I’ve ever known was an advertising agency creep who bought an old house down near the foot of Claremont Avenue. When he wasn’t at his agency’s tastefully converted old house on the park side of Broadway, doing sleazy advertising things, he was engaging in the cocaine-and-other-drugs business, or just getting wasted and doing stoned-out things about the house, pretending to be pursuing renovation. From time to time he’d get wasted and go to a bar and maybe get into a fight or something.

Somehow, he obtained a stop-traffic-gorgeous 17-year-old school-dropout girlfriend named Jessica.

          Jessica was six feet tall, slim and stacked, and had abundant blond hair, flashing blue eyes, and a smile featuring what seemed like an amazing number of perfectly configured and blindingly white teeth. It was summer when I met her and she always wore next to nothing, although sometimes she did wear in-line roller skates. She was, of course, usually stoned. More surprisingly, she was also friendly and flirtatious with me. I didn’t know if she was that way with everyone, or what, but I appreciated it.

          We ended up being friends, even long after her affaire with the advertising creep ended. She seemed to think that I was an intellectual, a “beatnik genius”, as she told me once, and she seemed to think I was an adornment of some sort on her scene. She showed me the trophy she’d won at a ping-pong tournament when she’d been thirteen or fourteen.

          I remember one time I was driving her somewhere, I think to a legendary Italian lunch restaurant near the big wholesale produce markets, and she leaned out my car window, flashed her million megawatt smile, and waved – at the world in general, as far as I could tell. At least one male driver slammed on his brakes and several swerved out of their lanes, fucking up traffic in both directions for about a block either way. I was impressed on multiple levels. She could actually fuckin stop traffic.

          I did have one window of opportunity, not long after her break-up with the ad-creep, to consummate the unavoidable lust I continually had for her. I blew it. Drugs. She’d come by my house, and we had begun getting physical for the first time, on my waterbed. I couldn’t believe my luck. Then she told me she had to go meet a girlfriend of hers at some night club out on the Austin Highway, but that if I showed up after midnight or so, I could ‘pick her up’ and take her back to my place. But I was coming down from some substance abuse, and by the time midnight or so rolled around had reached the severely incapable phase of the process; I couldn’t even get my sorry ass out to the car to drive to the club, and that was that.

          And so Jessica blended into the scene. My friend Chris dubbed her “Bimbo Deluxe”. She got a succession of jobs that involved being pretty a lot, such as being a receptionist, and the like. She got an apartment and some beatnik books, and I recommended Bukowski and a couple other books to her. She invited me to little parties at her place, where nothing really went on that I could see.

          She wore a conspicuous gold cross on a gold chain around her lovely neck. When I asked her why she wore religious jewellery, she expressed surprise and said that she didn’t understand what I meant. I pointed out the gold cross, and she said, “That’s not religious. That’s just a cross.” Okay.

          Not surprisingly, one thing I found it almost impossible to do was to say no to her. One time in 1981 or 1982 she roped me into going on a rafting trip down the Guadalupe River with some old friends of hers — from her early adolescence in her old neighbourhood — and I got entirely too drunk. I imagine I behaved below my usual standards. I don’t remember seeing much of Jessica after that.

Joyce Honeychurch

          I was scrambling after drivable cabs while taking a couple of summer school courses in education in 1983. The most interesting feature of finally taking education courses was a sort of friendship I developed with the associate professor in charge of my course in educational sociology, Dr Honeychurch. Joyce.

          Joyce was, I estimated, a few years older than me. How many years I don’t have a clue and wouldn’t even hazard a guess. She had remarkably pale yellow hair, worn in an unobtrusive professional cut kind of close to her large head, and a roundish Central-European face. She had a way of smiling slyly, in which she caught her lower lip with one of her upper teeth which wasn’t exactly straight. She wore no-nonsense, professional outfits. Over-the-knee skirts that didn’t move much when she did.

          Joyce was a real classroom star — an entertainer to be sure — demonstrating many of the things she was saying with physical theatre and good comedy timing. She could, for instance, crawl around on her hands and knees to demonstrate different learning styles, as I recall from her first lecture, when her nose was running from some virus. And I remember her holding off to perfection on the punchline of a story about a company that demonstrated eye make-up in her daughter’s school, using her daughter as a model (“My daughter does have beautiful eyes”), and then tried to use this foot in the door to peddle serious cosmetics to her. Joyce-the-feminist-professional, y’know? The fool. Sly smile.

          She projected a seriously on-top-of-it, intellectually rigorous persona. Early on she made it clear that she was, first and foremost, a Stanford alumna. Not a person to be trifled with, although macho men and the religiously zealous in her classes seemed to be drawn toward challenging her.

          And then, a couple of weeks into the summer session, she decided to join me in the cafeteria when I was in mid-lunch, eating (up until then) by myself. I would have guessed her for a health-food nut, but her tray was covered with a generous quantity of egregiously greasy food. She packed it away like a movie extra, chatting away all the while about this and that. I was honoured.

          We met for chats fairly often over the summer, even went out for dinner once at my favourite Japanese restaurant. She had a son who was backpacking Europe and a daughter in high school. I don’t recall hearing much about the ex-husband, from whence came the catch-your-eye Honeychurch tag, but I did learn that the on-again-off-again boyfriend back in Palo Alto was “an investor” in the Bay Area. And either he or someone else close to her was with something called the Food Research Institute (FRI) at Stanford. Her father’s nickname had been “the Midnight Czech”. She was of course in complete support of gay rights, but the actual mechanics of what went on in gay bath-houses was something upon which she preferred not to dwell. I couldn’t believe that she took me seriously, but I started to take myself a bit more seriously as a result, even if she did make it clear that romance was not part of the programme.

          Joyce was all set to be my student-teaching supervisor, but then she got an opportunity to be a low- (or non-) paid research fellow back at Stanford, and since she’d never liked Texas all that much, off she went. I guess the thing with the rich boyfriend was on-again. Anyway, she told me she thought I should go and be a researcher at FRI instead of becoming a teacher, and offered to write me a killer recommendation, but I wanted a job with a steady income.

          The last time I saw Joyce was in her snug little office at UTSA. She was packing up her desk and shit to send back home to Stanford. She gave me some cards with high-quality reproductions of various pictures by Friedrich Hundertwasser on them. I’d never seen any of his stuff before. She said she thought they looked like they spoke my language, and of course they did. But at the time I was in something of a depression over money, and having to drive cabs instead of concentrating on academic stuff, and I distractedly left without taking them with me. I regretted this when I emigrated to New Zealand and went in search of Hundertwasser’s stomping grounds in the Bay of Islands.

          A Google search on Joyce’s further academic career reveals that it took her to Alaska and the United Arab Emirates before depositing her at Florida Gulf Coast University. She has authored two online home teaching resources about Alaska, Alaska the Elephant and A Geopoem about Alaska. She has semi-retired to North Carolina, where she keeps a hand in as an independent higher education consultant as she approaches 80.

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.