It turns out to be the game of the tournament. At the end of the first half, the Mavericks lead, 14-12. For the first time all weekend, a Harlequins side is behind. In the second half, the Mavericks increase their lead to 24-12, but the Harlequins “dig deep and pull out that something extra,” as Nelson Spencer has said. The game ends in a 27-27 tie. In the sudden-death tie-breaker, the Harlequins win, 32-27.
“A game like this takes about nine years off my life,” says Mr. Engelbrecht. “I’m getting too old for it. I said last year and the year before: ‘This is going to be my last year.’ But you get so involved. You want to be part of the winning team. You want to help the tradition continue. So you come out every year, and you think: ‘If I wasn’t playing rugby, what would I be doing?’ ”
In the final game of the tournament, the Quins’ first side is to play Belmont Shore, a club from the Bay Area of California, which has two huge visiting Australians in its lineup. “Look at that guy,” one of the Harlequins says. “Each of his legs is as big as a man.”
It doesn’t matter. The Harlequins win, 22-0. In nine games, the Quins’ two sides have outscored their opponents, 255-67.
I was born on a mountaintop, raised by a bear…
As the photographer for a rugby magazine is trying to line up the victors for a team picture, Kevin Phillipson appears as if by magic, groggy and wearing a neck brace, but alive.
“I went in to get the ball,” he says. “Next thing I remember is looking up into the paramedic’s sunglasses. They wanted to keep me in the hospital overnight and give me a bunch of tests, but I told them, “The hell with that. I have a plane to catch.”
Later, the Harlequins learn that one of the casinos had a line on the Belmont Shore game, favoring the Quins by three. On the plane back to Dallas, the flight attendants run out of beer.
The Harlequins’ 1984 national championship trophy, their Western championship trophies, and a few others are on display in a glass case at the Mucky Duck, a bar on Welborn Street where the Quins hang out. Still others sit on shelves at the home of Des Kirkwood, their vice president for operations and sometime coach. But while the two huge Las Vegas trophies rest snugly in his Porsche, Bob Latham is driving out Garland Road to one of those rental storage companies.
He stops at the office for a key, then drives through the electronically controlled gate and around the maze of storage buildings. He stops, gets out of the car, and unlocks one of the bins.
It’s piled with boxes filled with jerseys that have been presented to the Harlequins by visiting international stars, with framed antique rugby prints, and with trophies, dozens of them, lying in a jumble.
“We have more trophies in here than most clubs have won,” Mr. Latham says. “Our dream is to have our own clubhouse someday, where we can display all this.”
He lays the two big trophies on top of the pile. “So visitors can come and see, and immediately know who the Dallas Harlequins are.”
February 1993
I met Ben Davis only once. We sat in his living room and had a quiet talk about his religious faith, his homosexuality, and his loneliness. I thought he was a very brave man.
A couple of weeks after this piece ran, he died of AIDS.
Fundamental Differences
One fall day in 1948, Ben Davis’ mother taught Sunday school in the morning, made lunch for her pastor and a visiting evangelist, went into labor while doing the dishes, and gave birth to her son that afternoon. “By the next Sunday I’d already been in several services,” Mr. Davis says.
One night when he was five, Ben was awakened by the voice of God calling him to be a Pentecostal preacher. “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel of salvation and temptation,” God told him.
“It scared me so badly I almost wet the bed,” Mr. Davis says now. But after discussing the incident with his mother, he abandoned his ambition to become an ambulance driver. “From that moment on, all I ever wanted to do was preach the Gospel,” he says.
When he was about seven, the Reverend Oral Roberts held a meeting in Dallas, and Ben’s father asked the evangelist to pray for God to give Ben—a sickly lad—an appetite. And God did. “Overnight my appetite became ravenous,” Mr. Davis says, “and in no time I’d bloated up like a poisoned dog. I’ve been fat ever since.”
These and other stories are in Strange Angel: The Gospel According to Benny Joe, Mr. Davis’ memoir of the Assemblies of God congregations in which he spent his childhood and adolescence, singing, shouting, speaking in tongues, preaching, and praying seven nights a week and all day Sunday in meetings where “the power of God was so strong the entire area was literally held by the ankles over hell.”
The book relates Mr. Davis’ memories of Pentecostal Christianity in the pre-TV-evangelist days, when it was regarded as an across-the-tracks religion practiced only by the poor, and of his years spent studying for the ministry at Southwestern Assemblies of God College in Waxahachie, Texas. They are warm and often funny. “When you go to church seven nights a week,” Mr. Davis says, “a lot of funny things happen.” And any reader who grew up in the smaller congregations of any brimstone-preaching fundamentalist denomination will identify with many of them.
The real reason Mr. Davis wrote his book doesn’t appear until page 172:
“I stood there, numb, staring at myself in the mirror, unable to move. Nothing would ever be the same again. What had gone wrong? I was fourth-generation Pentecostal. I was a licensed Assemblies of God minister, and I was to graduate from Southwestern in May. A lifetime of preparation, work, and dreams lay dead at my feet. How could it have happened? What would I do?”
He had come to realize that he was gay. And, because the Pentecostal churches consider homosexuality to be a sin, he says, he knew he would never be permitted to fulfill his lifelong dream. “I only knew two things for sure,” he would write. “I couldn’t be a preacher, and there was absolutely nothing else I wanted to be.”
Mr. Davis says he still might have remained a member of his church if he had continued to hide his homosexuality, but his conscience wouldn’t let him. “I decided I wouldn’t be a hypocrite,” he says.
At that point, the humor in the story assumes a tinge of bitterness. Mr. Davis dropped out of school ten weeks before he was to graduate. He confided in his pastor, seeking comfort. The preacher told him he would roast in hell. When Mr. Davis told his best friend that he was gay, the friend spread the news to the rest of the congregation.
The church members froze him out of their lives, turning their heads away whenever they would meet him. His mother went to her pastor, seeking guidance, and the minister told her: “Well, Sister Davis, as the mother of a queer you’re not fit to teach Sunday school. I’ll have to take that class away from you.”
When Corona Publishing, a small house in San Antonio, brought out Strange Angel two years ago, Mr. Davis was amazed at the response it received. “People have called me from all over the country,” he says. “Members of fundamentalist churches who have had divorces, who have had affairs, who have had abortions—who are sinners, in other words. They tell me of the ways those churches crucified them, tarred and feathered them, threw them out of town. They all say, ‘I can identify with what you went through.’ I’ve had calls from parents of gay children in fundamentalist churches. They say, ‘You speak fundamentalist language. We know that you know what you’re talking about.’ Mothers tell me they were embarrassed to ask their children certain questions about gay life, and some of those are answered in the book, and it has made it a little easier for them to cope. My favorite was a mother who called and said she had lost her only son to AIDS, and that reading my book was the first time she had smiled since his death. I really love that.”
On the other hand, he says, his former best friend “wrote me a letter saying I’m no better than Hitler, a child molester, an abortionist, or a murderer, then signed the letter, ‘Your friend in Christ.’ ”
And at his grandfather’s funeral, when Mr. Davis trie
d to shake hands with his uncle, a retired Assemblies of God missionary, “the man turned away,” he says. “It’s sad that the first twenty-one years of my life…it’s like somebody has put a wall down, and the people I knew during that time won’t even speak to me, when they used to be my family. I’ve felt more compassion from the people that the church has cast out than I have from people who think they’re Christians.”
For a while after his congregation shunned him, Mr. Davis visited a number of “mainstream” Protestant churches and a gay church in Dallas, hoping to find another congregation in which to worship. But, accustomed to the emotional fervor of Pentecostal worship, he found the services too cold and formal. “Besides, it doesn’t appeal to me to go to a church that wouldn’t want me there if they knew who I was,” he says. “I’ve come to feel like there is no place for a homosexual in a regular church today. They’re structured for families and for people who are looking to get married and start families.”
As for the gay church, “It’s extremely liberal,” he says. “I couldn’t be comfortable in a situation like that, either. I think I’ll have a private relationship with God and just leave it at that.”
He pauses. “I prayed to God, ‘You know my heart, and you know how I’ve struggled.’ In the Bible it says if you pray and pray and pray and there’s no answer, you need to wait awhile. And that’s where I am now, just sitting on the sideline, waiting…. ”
He pauses again. “Deep down,” he says, “I don’t think I could ever be anything but Pentecostal.”
November 1993
If Robert James Waller’s name is mentioned in future histories of American literature, it’s likely to be as one of the worst novelists ever to touch a keyboard—and one of the most successful, financially. The critics don’t like him at all. But at this writing, his first novel, The Bridges of Madison County, has been on The New York Times best-seller list for 142 weeks.
He has published two more novels since. They’re even worse than the first, the critics say, but not as successful.
When I heard that he had moved to my home country in the Trans-Pecos of Texas, I couldn’t resist an inquiry.
The ‘Last Cowboy’ of Brewster County
This fellow walks into the Parsons Real Estate office in Alpine and says, “I want to buy a big ranch. Maybe a thousand acres.”
Flop Parsons regards him with a sad blue eye. “Wellsir,” he says. “Around here, a thousand acres is little.”
The fellow looks like just a cowboy, says Flop’s wife and business partner, Joy. “Of course, we don’t know who he is.”
He says he already has a place in mind. He has read about it in The Alpine Avalanche. He has flown over it in an airplane. He asks if he can drive out and have a look at it. Flop tells him sure, go ahead.
This was about a year ago, Flop says. A few months later, the fellow buys his thousand acres from Dr. John Pate, a local physician. The new owner and his wife haul in a Toyota full of gear from Iowa, and Brewster County acquires its most famous resident.
“He don’t want people to know exactly where he’s at, if you don’t mind,” Flop says. “He tries to keep a little privacy as best he can.”
If privacy is what’s craved, few places can provide it in larger supply than Brewster County, whose boundaries embrace more than six thousand square miles of rugged mountains and desert on the southern edge of Far West Texas, just a short wade across the Rio Grande from the equally harsh barrens of Chihuahua and Coahuila. It’s a country where humans are scarce, and almost every form of plant and animal life scratches, bites, or stings, and “No Trespassing” signs mean what they say.
So Robert James Waller can be as alone as he wants to be.
“Most people in town have never met him,” says Jean Hardy, proprietor of Books Plus. “They’ve never seen him. They just know he’s here. He’s just a presence.” And no, he isn’t available for interviews, his New York publicist has declared. Not now. Not ever. At least not before his third novel, Border Music, is in the stores.
If the name Robert James Waller doesn’t ring a bell, you probably haven’t looked at The New York Times best-seller list for more than two years, and you aren’t among the 6 million-plus people who have bought a copy of The Bridges of Madison County. Nor one of the additional millions who have borrowed dog-eared copies from friends or libraries.
Mr. Waller wrote it. He’s the creator of middle-aged-but-studly traveling photographer Robert Kinkaid and middle-aged-and-bored-but-still-sexy Iowa farm wife Francesca Johnson, who enjoy a torrid four-day love affair while farm husband and kids are away at the state fair, then spend the remainder of their years in unrequited longing for each other.
The story is a three-hanky paean to that apparently rare being, the sensitive-but-virile American male, of whom so many women are said to dream so hopelessly. And who can blame them? This is what goes through Mr. Kincaid’s head when he stops at the Johnson farm to ask directions and claps eyes on Francesca for the first time:
“She was about five feet six, fortyish or a little older, pretty face, and a fine, warm body. But there were pretty women everywhere he traveled. Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted. That’s why he found most young women unattractive, regardless of their exterior beauty. They had not lived long enough or hard enough to possess those qualities that interested him.”
Mrs. Johnson, on the other hand, sees Mr. Kinkaid as “a leopardlike creature who rode in on the tail of a comet.”
Like most first novels, The Bridges of Madison County was published without fanfare. But Oprah Winfrey read it and raved about it on her TV show. Thousands of her viewers went out and bought it, and word-of-mouth—the most valuable kind of publicity, publishers say—spread the book’s fame like the proverbial wildfire.
It also changed the life of the surprised University of Northern Iowa business professor who had written it in the course of a few days, his daughter says, for the amusement of family and friends.
The book’s astounding success—and the more modest success of Mr. Waller’s second novel, Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend—has made the author a millionaire and a celebrity. The more than six million copies of Bridges that have been sold so far are all in hardcover. The sure-to-be-lucrative paperback edition is still to come, and soon the little book will become a major motion picture starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep as the bucolic lovers.
“He did it for fun,” says Rachael Waller-Young, the only child of Robert and his wife, Georgia. “He had this idea, and he wrote it. The original manuscript has a note he wrote on it: ‘This is something I did just for fun.’ We have that in a lock box now.”
Ms. Waller-Young moved to Brewster County from Brooklyn soon after her parents. She and her husband, Vincent Young, of the Bronx, were married last August in the Wallers’ back yard, with Hallie Stillwell, the legendary ninety-four-year-old rancher, chili cookoff judge, and justice of the peace, performing the ceremony. The newly-weds live on a 350-acre spread that Ms. Waller-Young’s parents bought for them.
An outgoing, energetic, quick-to-laugh fancier of dogs and horses, Ms. Waller-Young has become a favorite neighbor in her part of the county. “Everybody likes Rachael,” Joy Parsons says. “How could you not?”
The daughter, twenty-seven years old, is still amazed at her father’s success. “I can’t believe he wrote the best-selling novel in history,” she says. “My dad?”
But the published reports that the author and his wife had to abandon their home in rural Iowa because too many tourists were crowding up to their door for autographs and snapshots just aren’t true, Ms. Waller-Young says.
“He enjoys his fans,” she says. “He’s a very personal guy. But a writer has to have privacy to do his work. He wanted what he called ‘an artist’s retreat,’ a place where he and my mom could go and get away. They wanted a place that was warm. My mom�
��s tired of Iowa winters. They were looking around the South. They’ve gone there a lot. My mother has really embraced Mexico. She goes there every year. But my dad has always loved West Texas and everything about West Texas. To see him here is to see the little boy in him. Here he has everything he dreamed about when he was little. He has always been a cowboy. He couldn’t show it so much where he was, but there has always been that cowboy inside him. And it fits. I look at him with that Stetson on, and it’s just killer. He wore a black tux and a Stetson at my wedding. He looked so cool.”
The snapshots of the man in the black Stetson that Ms. Waller-Young displays on her coffee table are the spitting image of Robert Kinkaid, the studly photographer, who calls himself “one of the last cowboys” in Mr. Waller’s novel. Like Mr. Kinkaid, Mr. Waller also shoots pictures, plays the guitar—as well as the banjo, the saxophone, the flute and the mandolin—and sings.
“Kinkaid is Dad in lots of ways,” Ms. Waller-Young says. “I read the book and went, ‘This is my mom and dad.’ But in a different lifetime, know what I mean? Not in this lifetime, because none of the things in the book really happened. The description of Francesca is my mother exactly. She’s stunning. Everybody thinks she’s my dad’s second marriage. She doesn’t look like a woman in her fifties, I tell you.”
Her parents aren’t at home right now, Ms. Waller-Young says. They’re off somewhere on a “swamp crawl.”
“Destination unknown,” she says. “Even I don’t know where they are. They do this a couple of times a year at least. They call them ‘swamp crawls’ because the first time they did one they went down through like Florida and Louisiana, through swamps,” she says. “They don’t make any plans. They reach an intersection and flip a coin to decide which way they should go. Dad finds some of his characters that way. That’s also how they found Alpine.”
When the Wallers bought their ranch, Flop Parsons says, their plan was to live part of the year in Brewster County and part on their Iowa farm. But when they began extensive remodeling and expansion of the ranch house and drew up plans for a huge art studio for Mrs. Waller’s pottery- and jewelry-making, they began to think differently.
Generations and Other True Stories Page 15