Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  At Ann’s request, Richard Moya helped Jane Hickie cover for her abrupt and unexplained absence from the commissioners’ court. David and her children came to Minneapolis toward the end for what the doctors and counselors called “Family Week.” They were obliged to play a game called “sculpting,” in which family members were told to mold Ann into a form that to them best represented her character and personality. She wound up seated in a chair with her arms upraised and her hands in fists. “In their eyes I had succeeded in what I had worked so hard to be, and that was Superwoman,” she wrote. “But that was the last place in the world I wanted to be, and the last thing I wanted them to think of me. Even though my friends might doubt it, I have tried very hard to get out of that chair.”

  A few days before she came home, Ann wrote the Sharlots a letter that was hardly full of optimism.

  Dear Sue and Michael,

  How much fun to get letters from you. Everyone has been good to write but few have the flair for it. Your letters provoke a laugh and those occurrences are rare.

  I should write you an upbeat jolly jump-up letter but I need for you to know some serious things. I’m terribly fearful of coming home. As you say, Sue, our lives and activities are so centered around “using” (generic term for take your choice) that I do not know at this juncture how I can fit into the scene. We are told repeatedly what a threat we will be to our friends and family. We are taught techniques for dealing with situations but the bottom-line message is that when we feel we might succumb to any alcohol, dope, etc. we must “get the hell out of Dodge.” An aftercare program is set up for each of us that includes at least two meetings of AA weekly. There is a lot of spirituality—“higher power,” “god” concepts—linked to the program which is hard to deal with intellectually, but I accept it on the basis that if the program works I will learn to give up control and let it work. The total alteration of my lifestyle is overwhelming. I know that David and all of you will be as supportive as possible but the new me will wear off very quickly.

  The family week was torturous. It made the “interrogation” at your house seem like a picnic. I think it did the family a world of good, though, and we are doubtless the richer for it. I am now searching the deepest recesses of my guilt, anger, fears . . . which must be delivered orally next Monday. I seem to be getting a lot of intense attention because the counselor and staff are fearful that I cannot buck the ingrained drug usage in the political system and my lack of acquaintance with non-users.

  It takes a minimum of one year for the physical system to stabilize without chemical ingestion—particularly the blood—and a number of mood shifts occur as a direct result. We are told how to anticipate these situations but evidently they play havoc on everyone else.

  I feel better now that I’ve dumped all this stuff—I am so afraid that my homecoming will be a downer. Physically, I’ve never been better—EKG back to normal, no more heart pains, cholesterol stabilized. . . . I might add that my memory is also improving and it is great to be rid of hangovers.

  I love you both a great deal and for good or ill, will see you next week.

  Ann

  When Ann returned to Red Bud Trail, she asked the people who had taken part in the intervention to come over to her house one evening.

  I wanted them to know that I didn’t want them to feel uncomfortable around me, that their drinking was not going to affect me. My job was to take care of me, and their job was to take care of them. I was their first experience with Life After Alcohol. Most people don’t know that you’re still going to be you. . . . Things with David had not improved. They weren’t worse, and I was better able to deal with them, but again our lives were drastically altered. I didn’t want to leave work and go to the Raw Deal and sit and drink beer for several hours and listen to everyone get wise. So our whole pattern of living changed, and I think that was very hard on him.

  Despite her bravado, she was not all that serene about what she had been through. She had lost quite a few pounds; people who were used to seeing her thought the strain was obvious. That fall, not long after she came back from Minnesota, she and David took part in another caravan down the lower canyons of the Rio Grande. The first four days were glorious—nothing but birdsong, canyon walls, blue sky. They came into a stretch of rapids that was difficult and dangerous. Some of the canoeists got out and ranged along the banks of the racing river in case anyone got in trouble. When David and Ann took their turn, they did not make of it an easy run. In the back of the canoe, he started yelling: “Turn right! Turn right! Turn right!” In exasperation and defiance, Ann pulled her paddle out of the water, gripped it with both hands, and held it high over her head. It was the same Superwoman pose she had been made to assume in the crowd of her family in Minneapolis. They crashed straight into a rock, though this time they did not turn over and lose everything.

  Then the weather changed; a norther blew in. They had, by this time, made the pass around the river’s dramatic bend, which meant they were now paddling back north, into the cold front’s gale. “Ann literally turned blue,” said their reporter friend Dave McNeely. “The clothes she brought were cotton, and she couldn’t get warm. We finally found an overhang, a little cave, and we built a fire so she could recover.”

  Not long after the intervention, Ann was preparing to make a speech about her years as an alcoholic. The notes she jotted down, talking points for speaking off the cuff, were a fair measure of her self-esteem, and probably the voices in her mind at night.

  Physical manifestations . . . shaking hands . . . coffee cup with two hands. Headaches, hangovers, really needing a drink . . . because the only antidote to alcohol is more alcohol.

  Accidents . . . prone to spatial distortion . . . driving home with one eye closed to focus on the yellow line . . . so there is only one.

  Cut finger—broken leg—bruises.

  Seizures. Combining diet pills and alcohol . . .

  That time in the kitchen she had sliced herself so badly that Dan had to drive her to the emergency room for stitches; the other time she was unsteady on her feet and staggered on a doormat that shot out from under her, and there she sat on the porch of her home with a broken leg.

  She had lied to herself about the seizures, holding at a long arm’s length the epilepsy diagnosis in Dallas.

  Personality manifestations . . . self-pity, fear, jealousy, feelings of isolation, rejection . . . inability to accept affection . . .

  How it is to want to tell someone . . . say how you love them but unable to do it unless you have enough alcohol to do it . . . and the horror of having your children listen to your maudlin talk.

  Loss of memory and blackouts . . . vague notions that you were insulting or that you embarrassed yourself or someone in your family . . .

  Carrying a drink in your purse and finding a soggy mess in your lap.

  When people decide the loves of their lives no longer measure up, the outcome is seldom pretty for any member of the family involved. Ann and David hung on until the holidays of 1980, when the kids were coming home. Then something tipped the balance, and he moved out.

  Roaring arguments seldom erupted in the house on Red Bud Trail, and the Richardses’ kids were skilled at avoidance. Ellen, the youngest child, took the breakup of her parents hardest. “I had gone away to school for the first time that fall,” she told me. “Mom didn’t share a lot of things about herself with me. She kept them close to herself. It was a rough time for everybody in varied ways. I was aware there were issues between Mom and Dad, and her drinking was very difficult. It was something I didn’t understand. I didn’t have any perspective on alcoholism.”

  Some friends of the family have remarked that Clark was angry when he found out about his dad’s relationship with Sandy Hauser, an attractive young woman who had been working at Scholz’s and the Raw Deal while pursuing a degree as a nutritionist. Their romance began on a train trip to Laredo and rowdy, laugh-filled evenings beside a pleasant hotel pool and onward across the
Rio Grande bridge. The Laredo jaunt was the first time I met David and several other close friends of Dorothy. Seeing my hesitation, David and Sandy, with great warmth, waved me into the gang. Fantasizing that the wild sixties and seventies were not yet over, two members of the party dropped acid and disappeared into Nuevo Laredo (which was a much safer place to be doing that in those days). The men missed the return train to Austin, and one of them was especially miserable on the slow bus ride north, knowing the reception that awaited him when he got back home.

  Without question, that frolic, occurring just as Ann was adjusting to her new life of sobriety, accentuated a long marriage coming to its painful end, but just as truly, it did not cause that dissolution. Unaware of much in her parents’ lives, Ellen Richards wrote in a letter to Ann that Clark might be happier if he stayed with David when he came home from school in Connecticut.

  “I was an egghead kind of kid,” Clark told me. “I was scrawny, couldn’t play sports very well, so that put me sort of low in the Westlake pecking order. Of course, with Mom, anything that smacked of masculinity was not encouraged. School was a very different thing for me when I went to St. Stephen’s, because out there I could be socially accepted. When I was a sophomore, I was an exchange student in Japan. I lived with a family in a suburb of Osaka. The school had some kind of Episcopal affiliation. There were two other American kids. I wrote a lot of letters back home that year, and got a lot of letters in return, but I don’t know if we had more than one phone conversation. I was fifteen. I have children now, and I’m bewildered that it didn’t seem odd to me then to be away from my family for a whole year.”

  Clark was a lawyer practicing with his brother and dad when he told me those stories. “Cecile and Dan had graduated by then,” he said, “and when I came back to St. Stephen’s, I felt myself invincible. I engaged in lots of things that were against the rules. I got kicked out between my junior and senior year. It was entirely my fault, and I owned up to it. Several of those teachers appreciated that. Right after that, I wrecked my dad’s truck, totaled it, right down Red Bud Trail from where we lived—drunk as Cooter Brown, and I got a DWI as a juvenile.

  “Mom, being a county commissioner, arranged for me to do some community service for a woman who ran the Travis County Alcohol Counseling Service. I went to a couple of AA meetings. Nobody said, ‘You’re drinking and smoking pot and it’s a problem—we’re mad at you.’ There was none of that kind of discussion. People in those meetings were in their forties and fifties. They looked like classic skid-row types. I couldn’t relate to them.

  “After that, Mom didn’t really want me around Austin. They found a prep school for me in Connecticut. I made no lasting friends, and it was touch-and-go whether I’d get thrown out of there, too. But I did graduate. And then I started college at Northwestern in Chicago. My role in the family was being the kid who was off somewhere else.”

  When I asked him, “What did your mother do when she was drunk?” Clark was quiet for a moment. “Everybody drank a lot then. There was a lot of the pot calling the kettle black. I can see that being married to Mom would have been tough. Being married to Dad would have been tough. I can’t say that either of them was wearing the black hat or the white hat. I can’t judge them.”

  Clark worked his way around to answering my question: “In a lot of ways I’m a poor historian of family lore. I was gone so much. When Mom was in St. Mary’s, at that Family Week we had no idea what to do or say. I couldn’t stand those meetings, and I was just trying to get out of there. Mom had a real sarcastic wit, you know. It would seem like fun when she was tearing up George Bush, but for an eight-year-old it was a bit much. And then when I was in college, I’d be back in Austin for spring break or some other holiday, and I’d come home drunk at night. She’d be up, and she’d jack with me. ‘Well, aren’t you special?’ I didn’t really want to spend a lot of time around Mom. I tried to stay in Chicago.”

  He thought for a moment, and then said: “This is jumping ahead in the story a little. After I graduated from Northwestern I got in more trouble, and I had to go to drunk school, too. That was during the boom of Alcoholics Anonymous and ‘Find Your Inner Child.’ Everybody was on some kind of bandwagon about recovery paradigms.

  “I spent several months backpacking around Asia by myself. I was coming to the end of my backpacking adventure and arrived in Tokyo. Somewhere along the way I’d picked up a copy of Lonesome Dove. I’d probably read a little bit of McMurtry, but I was so moved by that book, so full of nostalgia, and I wrote a long impassioned letter to Mom about how important she was to me, and how perhaps I hadn’t communicated that. I remember getting a note back from her saying, ‘Well, I guess I owe thanks to Larry, and I’ll be sure and let him know the next time I see him.’

  “In Tokyo, I found this guy who was a therapist. He knew about AA and all that, and I started seeing him. It was the first time I had been to a therapist who didn’t already know who my mother was. And it dawned on me: one of my problems I had in Austin was that Mom had become sort of a demigod of the recovery community. She was a champion and everybody looked up to her. I saw her that way, too. But part of me wanted to say I was upset about the way things went when I was a kid. That part of me didn’t have a chance to express itself. Any time I went to a group, I couldn’t say, ‘Godamighty, when I was young and Mom was drunk, she was mean.’

  “Nobody wanted to hear that story. Part of me had a need to say to somebody, ‘You know, that hurt.’ So this guy provided me with an opportunity eight thousand miles away, and I could say when I was young, Mom would sometimes have these rage attacks, and boy, they scared the hell out of me.”

  In Austin in 1982, Ann and her daughter Cecile Richards enjoy a high point in the race for state treasurer. Cecile was a creative force in each of her mother’s campaigns, especially on issues of organized labor. She later worked as deputy chief of staff for U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and since 2006 has been the national president of Planned Parenthood.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Class of ’82

  Ann and David twice attempted to reconcile, but it brought them no closer, and after a few months he left for good. “Why didn’t you get divorced then?” I asked him once. He responded with an unknowing shrug, “She didn’t want it.” After all those years of marriage, they entered the purgatory of prolonged separation.

  Ann’s life narrowed almost entirely to her work as a county commissioner, the feminist friends she had made in politics and government, and sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous, which she sometimes attended several times a week. Cecile Richards was by then living in New Orleans and working as a union organizer for workers in service industries. In that pursuit, she met her future husband, Kirk Adams. Clark started college in Chicago, and Ellen was attending a school in Concord, Massachusetts. Dan was living alone in an Austin apartment and working in the furniture warehouse scavenged by Bullock’s Raiders; at twenty-one, he was well out of the nest.

  Ann cherished her sudden privacy and solitude—the increased time she had to curl up on the sofa with her feet under her and talk to friends like Virginia Whitten, Sue Sharlot, Claire Korioth, and Jane Hickie. But the sprawling place on Red Bud Trail would never again be the party house of Mad Dog, Inc. Many evenings, Ann put on some music, scarcely bothering with her own dinner, and with her dog and cat sat outside and watched the shadows of sundown move across the canyon they called Oracle Gorge. The message no longer held such promise.

  A few weeks after the intervention, Ann won a second four-year term as county commissioner; the race was a formality—she was unopposed. But a succession of setbacks had left her in the political doldrums. Ronald Reagan was president, George H. W. Bush was vice president, John Tower was a senator with growing seniority, and Bill Clements was Texas governor, with little reason to think he might be denied another term. Clements had launched his first campaign by throwing a rubber chicken at John Hill, then the state’s attorney general, at a joint appearance in Amaril
lo and declaring that he was going to hang Jimmy Carter around the Democrat’s neck the way rural Texans punished a chicken-killing dog. And he lived up to his boast. The tough-talking driller wore loud plaid sport coats, walked with a limp, griped about the hitch in his get-along, and drove around in an old Mercury station wagon with fake wood panels. He had built his Dallas-based companies around a bunch of cronies with whom he had played high school football on a state championship team in Highland Park, back when helmets were made of leather.

  Karl Rove was a face in the crowd back then. He had come of political age as a Goldwater Republican, but his real hero became Richard Nixon. When George Bush took on the thankless task of serving as national chairman of the post-Watergate Republican Party, he spotted Rove’s talent and gave the young man a job with the party in Washington. Then he had to pull Rove back on learning that the FBI was asking questions about a tutorial on campaign dirty tricks that Rove had been conducting for the College Republicans. Rove bounced around the country for several months as the sidekick of another young GOP attack specialist, Lee Atwater. Rove arrived in Houston in a Ford Pinto, inspired to work on Bush’s presidential race, which to his dismay would eat Ronald Reagan’s dust. In the meantime, Rove offered brief political advice to George W. Bush, a congressional candidate who was then enjoying only spotty success in his attempt to match his dad’s legendary success as a West Texas oilman. In 1978, the younger Bush impulsively plunged into the race against Kent Hance, a conservative Democrat from Lubbock. Bush later said he did it because Jimmy Carter was threatening to increase regulation of the natural gas industry. On an issue important to Panhandle farmers, Bush made a major mistake by supporting a grain embargo that blocked the sale of Texas wheat to the Soviet Union because of its invasion of Afghanistan. Bush had more than twice as much money in his campaign coffers as Hance, but the Democrat turned that against him—it was the money of “outsiders,” code for “Yankees.” Hance successfully cast him as an overage preppie who knew next to nothing about West Texas. His stump speech mocked his opponent with a joke that had Bush asking a fellow driver for some rural directions. The other driver told him to go down the road about a mile, turn left, and look for a cattle guard. To which Bush replied, “Now, what color uniform is this cattle guard wearing?”