There is a phenomenon that sometimes occurs around small towns like Medina that some call the "hidy sign" but I call the "Medina wave." A driver encountering another vehicle on the highway will casually, effortlessly raise his index finger from the wheel in a brief salute, acknowledging the other driver, the countryside, and life in general. The other driver, unless he's new to these parts, will respond in kind. Occurrences of the Medina wave diminish as you reach the outskirts of the bigger towns, disappearing almost completely as you travel farther, or at least that's how it used to be. With so many new people in the area, the custom is vanishing like the fast-moving tail of a comet. These days, you're just as likely to see drivers saluting each other with their middle fingers.
Like it or not, the peaceful, scenic, bucolic Hill Country is being dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. The old-timers, who once worked the land, who drove horses and carts over these hills, who still give directions by the bends of the river, now sit in little coffee shops in little towns and watch the parade of progress. The folks from the big city are escaping the madness, believing they are making a new life for themselves in the wilderness, possibly not realizing what the old-timers already know: that sooner or later, no matter where you go, you always see yourself in the rearview mirror.
Though the Hill Country has always been warm and friendly to newcomers, tradition demands that you be born here or dead before you're truly accepted. My family has owned and lived on the same ranch on the outskirts of Medina for fifty years, yet many of the locals still refer to it as the old Sweeney place. The Reverend Sweeney was a circuit preacher who lived here in 1921, drove a Model T Ford, and kept meat down in the well for refrigeration. In the twenties the Sweeneys traded the ranch for a restaurant in San Saba that went belly-up. Several years ago, five generations of Sweeney women came through on a road trip, and a lady close to ninety gave me a message to give to my octogenarian friend Earl Buckelew. She said, "Tell John Earl the little Sweeney girls came by to say hello." Rivers run deep in the Hill Country.
Yet some things go on as usual. Utopia has a new restaurant called Garden of Eat'n. Bandera continues to be the hell-raising Cowboy Capital of the World, with the Silver Dollar still featuring live country bands and sawdust on the floor, and the Old Spanish Trail still serving a chicken-fried steak as big as your hat in its John Wayne Room. The cedar choppers have all but disappeared from Ingram, and the disgruntled dentists
"I think if I had it to do all over again, I'd sit on this chair frontwards."
keep pouring into Hunt. Some people brag about the new Kerrville Wal-Mart, but others are just as proud of a local institution with a memorable moniker: the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library. And back at the Medina post office, a Volvo has just driven up with a bumper sticker that reads "Free Tibet."
And the old-timers, like old dogs in the sun, are vaguely aware of traffic jams and conservative little towns like Fredericksburg now transmogrified into shoppers' paradises. Meanwhile, in hillbilly heaven, Slim Dodson sips his coffee, remembering a time long ago when the neighbors asked him why his cats were always going into their garbage cans. He told them, "They wants to see the world." Earl Buckelew is there, too. He recalls once showing some acreage to a guy from the city who wanted to know if the land was any good for farming or livestock. "No," said Earl. "All it's good for is holding the world together."
COMING OF AGE IN TEXAS
ooking at the stars in the Texas sky, you couldn't tell the difference between now and then. But it's there, all right. It's the difference between a picture you carry in your wallet and a picture you carry in your heart. But hearts can be broken and wallets can be stolen and you know you've grown up when you realize how far you are away from the stars.
In the early fifties, however, when I was a child, I spat as a child, I shat as a child, and I wore a funny little pointed birthday hat as a child. I knew what every little kid knows about Indians, which, in a purely spiritual sense can often be considerable, and of course absolutely nothing about ex-wives. When I grew up and was finally released from the Bandera, Texas, Home for the Bewildered for rhyming words too frequently, I knew a little more about Indians and still absolutely nothing about ex-wives except what Alden Shuman had once told me: "They'll stick with you through thick."
As far as Indians go, which is usually a good bit farther than ex-wives, I've collected about a million arrowheads over the years and made frequent visits to the Frontier Times Museum in Bandera, which is just down the street from the Bandera Home for the Bewildered. As well as countless Indian artifacts, the museum features a real shrunken head, a two-headed goat, and many other weird and arcane objects that delighted me as a child, and because of a rather unfortunate state of arrested development, continue to hold the same fascination for me now.
Children, it has always seemed to me, have a greater inherent understanding of many things than adults. As they grow up, this native sensitivity is smothered, buried, or destroyed like someone pouring concrete over cobblestones, and finally replaced by what we call knowledge. Knowledge, according to Albert Einstein, who spent a lot of time, incidentally, living with the Indians when he wasn't busy forgetting his bicycle in Princeton, New Jersey, is a vastly inferior commodity when compared with imagination. Imagination, of course, is the money of childhood. This is why it is no surprise that little children have a better understanding of Indians, nature, death, God, animals, the universe, and some truly hard-to-grasp concepts like the Catholic Church, than most adults.
Now, with the eyes of a child, I lit my first cigar of the morning and focused softly on everything that wasn't there. I'd survived half a fucking century on this primitive planet where the pecking of poison parakeets in the Northern Territories of Australia was the very least of our worries. I cast my mind back to when I was seven years old, sitting like Otis Redding on the dock at the deep water at Echo Hill Ranch in the Texas summertime. It was there and then that a rather seminal experience occurred in my young life, a small thing actually, but as Raymond Chandler often observed in his final stages of alcoholism: "Tiny steps for tiny feet." It was the first time I'd ever seen a man's testicle, unknowingly suspended, almost like a Blakean symbol, outside the lining of his fifty's-style bathing suit.
The man was named Danny Rosenthal, a nice man with a moustache and a cheery smile who probably had had his own problems then but, of course, as a child, these were not known to me. Danny Rosenthal was a friend of my father's and the only problem that I could see that he had at the moment was that a singular large, adult testicle was trapped like a dead rat outside the lining of his bathing suit. Danny Rosenthal was totally oblivious to this matter but it delighted me as a child, and because of a rather unfortunate state of arrested sexual development, continues to hold the same fascination for me now. Danny Rosenthal's testicle, indeed, hangs suspended like a sun over the happy memories of the last days in the lifetime of my childhood.
You don't see people's testicles hanging out of their bathing suits much anymore. Styles have changed, people have changed, the world's a different kind of place, they say. Instead of looking up at things we now spend most of our time looking down on them. Another reason we don't have Danny Rosenthal's testicle to kick around anymore is that people don't appear to have many balls these days. Balls, like imagination, seem to shrivel with age.
As far as Danny Rosenthal is concerned, I believe I remember my father saying that he stepped on a rainbow some years back. If that is indeed the case, I'm sure he's now swimming in the sky with his wayward testicle relegated in the way of all flesh to the shadows on the walls of Hiroshima. I've never told anyone about this small incident of a small child, least of all Danny Rosenthal, but I'm sure he's long past the mortal stage in which social embarrassment might have been incurred. I believe God watches over every testicle, even those that sometimes, quite involuntarily, stray from the herd. I believe that all of us will some day be swimming in the sky with Danny Rosenthal, or at least wind u
p in a bar somewhere singing Jimmy Buffet cover songs.
To my left and to my right the phones were now ringing. I puffed on the cigar a bit longer, then half dreamily picked up the blower on the left.
"Are you there?" said a voice.
"Where else would I be?" I said.
ROMEO AND JULIET OF MEDINA
n 1985, after the death of my mother, I left New York for good to seek shelter in the small towns that lay scattered about the Hill Country as if they were peppered by the hand of God onto the gravy of a chicken-fried steak. In New York, people believe that nothing of importance ever happens outside the city, that if it doesn't occur inside their own office, it hasn't occurred at all. My friends told me that I would be a quitter if I gave up whatever the hell I was doing in New York and went back home. One of the things I was doing was large quantities of Peruvian marching powder, and I now believe that leaving may have saved my life.
I'd had, it seemed, seven years of bad luck. One of my two great loves, Kacey Cohen, had kissed a windshield at ninety-five miles per hour in her Ferrari. My other great love, of course, was myself. My best friend, Tom Baker, troublemaker, had overdosed in New York. I'd come back to Austin just in time to spend a few months with my mother before she died. My dear Minnie, from whom much of my soul springs, left me with three cats, a typewriter, and a talking car. She wanted me to be in good company, to write, and to have somebody to talk to. The car's name was Dusty. She was a 1983 Chrysler LeBaron convertible with a large vocabulary, including the phrase "A door is ajar." At this time of my life, one definitely was. My mother had always believed in me. Now, it seemed, it was time for me to believe in myself.
After New York, you'd think Austin would be a pleasant relief, but to my jangled mind, there still seemed to be too many people. So I corralled Cuddles, Dr. Skat, and Lady into Dusty, and together we drifted up to the Hill Country, where the people talk slow, the hills embrace you, and the small towns flash by like bright stations reflecting on the windows of a train at night. As Bob Dylan once wrote, "It takes a train to cry." As I once wrote, "Anything worth cryin' can be smiled."
What is it about small towns that always seem to be oddly comforting? Jesus was born in one. James Dean ran away from one. While visiting Italy, my father once said, "If you've seen one Sistine Chapel, you've seen them all." This is true of small towns as well, except they're not particularly good places to get postcards from. ("Why would anyone want to live here?" somebody always says. "It's out in the middle of nowhere. It's so far away." And the gypsy answers, "From where?")
There is a fundamental difference between big-city and country folks. In the city you can honk at the traffic, shout in small towns, deep as the sea of humanity, deep as the winding, muddy river of life. There once were two lovers who lived in Medina: Earl's youngest son, John, and his true love, the beautiful Janis. Though still in their teens, it is very possible that they shared a love many of us have forfeited, forgotten, or never known. A love of this kind can sometimes be incandescent in its innocence, reaching far beyond the time and geography of the small town into the secret history of the ages.
In June of 1969, at a country dance under the stars, John and Janis quarreled, as true lovers sometimes will. They drove home separately. On the same night Judy Garland died, Janis was killed in a car wreck. John mourned for her that summer, and in September, he took poison on her grave, joining her in eternity. John and Janis were much like another pair of star-crossed young lovers, the subjects of one of that summer's biggest films. The town was too small for a movie theater, but that year, many believe, Romeo and Juliet played in Medina.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
He's a dreamer who never sleeps. He's a soldier who never kills. He's a drinker with a writing problem. He's a cowboy who only rides two-legged animals. He's a writer of fiction who tells the truth. He's the only free man on this train.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
PART I * Advice on Life, Death, and Everything in Between
UNFAIR GAME
ARRIVEDERCI MELANOMA
A POCKET GUIDE TO MULLETS
THE FIVE MEXICAN GENERALS PLAN
BRING HIM ON
EPILOGUE
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
I DON'T
ZERO TO SIXTY
TENNIS ANYONE?
SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
PART II * My Personal Heroes
THE NAVIGATOR
DON IMUS DIED FOR OUR SINS
ANIMAL HEROES
TANGLED UP IN BOB
POLY-TICKS
TWO JACKS
HERO ANAGRAMS
ODE TO BILLY JOE
THE BACK OF THE BUS
LOTTIE'S LOVE
PART III * Advice on Writing
KILLING ME SOFTLY
FICTIONAL CHARACTERS KILLED OFF BY THEIR CREATORS
TALENT
STRANGE TIMES TO BE A JEW: NOTES ON MICHAEL CHABON'S LATEST NOVEL
DON'T FORGET
A TRIBUTE TO ME
WHAT WOULD KINKY READ?
QUESTIONS FROM A BRITISH JOURNALIST-1999
DOES NOT COMPUTE
PART IV * Advice on Going on a Journey
TEXAS FOR DUMMIES
NEVER TRAVEL WITH AN ADULT CHILD
HOW TO DELIVER THE PERFECT AIR KISS
LET SAIGONS BE BYGONES
WILD MAN FROM BORNEO
MAD COWBOY DISEASE
CLIFF HANGER
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON IN SAMOA
WATCH WHAT YOU SING
PART V * Advice on Coming Home
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
GOD'S OWN COWBOYS
SHOSHONE THE MAGIC PONY
THE HUMMINGBIRD MAN
HOW TO HANDLE A NONSTOP TALKER IN A POST-9/11 WORLD
SOCIAL STUDIES
GETTIN' MY GOAT
CHANGE, PARDNERS
COMING OF AGE IN TEXAS
ROMEO AND JULIET OF MEDINA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World Page 17