Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions

by J. R. Helton

  When I fell in love with Susan Hampton, I also jumped ship on my own family. I never wanted to be at my own house anymore. It suddenly seemed dull, and the fights between my parents had become so severe that either my father or mother was gone half the time, or my father’s fights with Alton and me had grown even more physical and mean. He couldn’t whip us; both of us were bigger than him now, but we were still afraid of this angry man and tried to stay as far away from him as possible.

  I almost moved into the Hampton home, I was there so much. They had a large, open limestone-and-cedar ranch house on a high hill above the whole town of Cypress. Susan had a four-year-old little brother named Jason, and we often babysat him or took him down to swim in the blue creek that ran behind their land. I felt that Susan’s parents were more laid back and much more interesting than my own. They smoked dope and had cool jobs, Dean writing his books and his wife, Betty Sue, still able to land an occasional acting job, mainly in commercials now.

  More than anything, I was deeply impressed by Dean Hampton, a real writer. It felt good to have this intelligent, tough, sarcastic, and funny man take such a genuine interest in me. I did more talking than writing back then, telling Dean stories about my troubled family and life, and I can remember the real pleasure it brought me to make him laugh. He even encouraged me to write these stories down. One day, standing in his kitchen, he told me that my constant complaints about my school, my friends, and especially the stories about my family reminded him of J. D. Salinger, whose books I had just read for the first time and loved. It was pretty much the highest compliment anyone, especially a published author, could have possibly given me as a sixteen-year-old boy, and I really believed him.

  Dean was interested in what I was reading, and we talked at length about books. He gave me many books from his own shelves, good authors to read, all of which I liked, including a first-edition orange-and-yellow hardback of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and a battered, black, dog-eared paperback of his favorite novel, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, a book he suggested I read at least twice to get it all, which I immediately did.

  Dean told me hours of his own stories late into the night as I hung out at their house, not wanting to go back home where I would only get into trouble. He and Betty Sue let me crash on the couch in their living room or on a bed in the den. Dean always had trouble sleeping due to his many football injuries, including a twice-broken back, and he would wake me up sometimes at three in the morning as I lay on their couch, and he’d sit across from me as we watched old movies he had on video, some of his favorites like The Wild Bunch or The Lion in Winter. He knew every line of dialogue in the screenplays, the significance of every scene, and taught me how to appreciate different films, different directors, and their techniques.

  Mostly he talked of himself. He told me of the harsh realities of playing in the NFL as a tight end, how it had ruined his enjoyment of the game as an amateur high school and then college football player. He said it had never been better than winning the state championship in his senior year in high school back in his home state of Ohio, or the bowl game, the national championship, he won at Ohio State. More than anything, he complained to me of his life right then, explaining how he really felt about the publishing industry, that he thought it was brutal and too commercial as football had become, angry with what his publishers expected from him as a writer.

  I remember him telling me in 1979 how frustrated he felt after the major success of his first novel about football. Even though it had also been made into a profitable, popular feature film, he said he just didn’t want to write about football. He said he wasn’t even that interested in sports anymore. He talked of politics and history instead, and the political stories he wanted to write—investigative articles or novels on corporate and government corruption. He showed me a long detective novel he was working on, hundreds of typed pages, and he seemed crushed only a year later when it was repeatedly rejected and he was forced to write yet another book about football, in what became a series of less and less popular novels about sports, the only books his agent could sell or magazine articles he was paid to write.

  * * *

  My own father was a hard-ass who had always had a boss. He had worked at low-wage manual-labor jobs for many years of his life until, by working two jobs and putting himself through night school, he finally landed a well-paid white-collar position and started commuting to work at a large insurance company in Austin. He had convinced me that “real men” could still work with their hands and their backs though, a message thoroughly pounded into my head, and into Alton’s, all our lives. I found it especially intriguing then that Dean Hampton, as a full-time well-paid writer, didn’t really seem to work for anybody. For years my father had risen at dawn, gone off to a hard job to slave away for others, and come home every evening angry and tired. I was worried he was training me to do the same thing.

  But Dean, he could sleep till noon, get stoned in the middle of the day, and then take a bunch of Dexedrine and codeine and write all night, standing up, writing by hand on long yellow legal pads at his lectern in the big Hampton den with its tall glass wall and deck looking out over the hills of Cypress. He could snort some coke and write for hours, or he would just stop when he didn’t feel it, smoke a joint, and go see a movie. He’d get high and go outside and shoot off one of the many, many guns in his large collection or come home drunk at four in the afternoon, put on the Allman Brothers’ first live album, At Fillmore East, turn up the volume, play air guitar wildly, and sing every word to “Whipping Post” as loud as he could. I was right there, and I watched him do all these things. I had never seen anyone so thoroughly and successfully be their own boss, with so much control over his own time, doing whatever the fuck he wanted, when he wanted, every day. I was seventeen years old. I forgot about that whole rich architect or doctor thing. And as I watched Dean Hampton at work and at play, I said to myself: Yes, yes, yes, this is the job, this is what I want to do.

  By the time Susan and I got back together in ’83, we’d had half a dozen dramatic breakups and reunions. Somewhat like us, her mother, Betty Sue, and Dean also had a volatile relationship, but it was much more violent, hard, and real. At that time, as I was quitting college, both Susan and her mother had gone into hiding, Susan down in San Marcos, her mom up in Austin. Betty Sue had finally worked up the courage to divorce Dean Hampton and had fled to live with an old close friend, a wealthy screenwriter and producer in Austin named Martin. I found out all of this by accident, as I had sworn off Susan for good once I’d gotten into UT and moved to Austin. It was an accident that we’d even found each other again.

  Susan was working as a phone operator in San Marcos at the small exchange there in town. I made a phone call from Austin to San Marcos one day and dialed the local phone company information line to ask for a number. I had no idea Susan was working there, and after the operator gave me my number, she paused, and before I could hang up, she said, “Jake?” I recognized her voice and said “Susan?” and neither one of us could believe it; it seemed like fate. She asked if she could call me back and I said sure, and when she did, we talked for hours. She drove to see me in Austin that same night, walked in the door of my apartment and we had sex on the carpet in the living room, talked some more, and went and fucked in my bed for an hour. She spent the night and never really left again.

  Susan told me that her father had had a paranoid rage- and drug-fueled nervous breakdown after his latest book came out and failed at the same time her mother had filed for divorce. Dean Hampton was tall and carried guns on him at all times, at least two or three, a .38 pistol in an ankle holster, a Beretta automatic behind his back, or a heavy, silver .357 Magnum in a large shoulder holster beneath his left arm. Though the game of football had broken down his body, he was still a strong, imposing man. Worse, he was now dependent on opiates and cocaine and was threatening to do things like “knock out all of those pretty teeth I paid for, right out of Susan’s fu
cking mouth!”

  Betty Sue was a petite woman, and she was getting the worst of it, especially when Dean showed up and broke into their house in Cypress one afternoon. She said he picked her up by the throat and punched her in the stomach. The county sheriff came out, and Dean pulled a twelve-gauge pump shotgun on him. The old sheriff knew Dean well, they’d once been friends, and after he calmly talked him down, Dean spent a week in jail and had a restraining order put out on him. He had to leave the Cypress house for good and moved into a hotel off Oltorf and I-35 (not a mile away from my own apartment), where he had joint visiting rights to see his son, Jason, every week during the divorce.

  Once Dean found out that Susan was living with me in Austin, he phoned me immediately, and he caught me off guard.

  “Hey, Jake, how’s it going?” He sounded friendly, the same old Dean.

  “Okay, man.”

  “Listen, I need to talk to Susan, is that all right?” I looked at Susan, and she waved me off vigorously and mouthed the words “No way.”

  “Uh she can’t talk right now, Dean. I’m sorry, but—”

  “Yeah. I see. You’re sorry. You know, I thought this might happen. I thought you might take their side. Actually, I knew you would take their side.”

  “Come on, Dean, what am I supposed to do? She’s my girlfriend, and Betty Sue’s her mother.”

  His voice grew hard and mean. “Listen to me, Jake. Listen to me very carefully, okay? All right?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Don’t you ‘yeah right’ me. Look, you are a man now, do you understand? You’re not a little teenage jock anymore. And you better hitch up your pants if you wanna fuck with me, son. You got that? You’re a grown man, and you are fucking with my life, my wife, and my kids.”

  “I’m not trying to fuck with your life.”

  “Jesus Christ, how naive can you possibly be? Don’t you realize those two women are just using you? Jake, Betty Sue and Susan, both of those women are smarter than you and me put together. They are fucking black widows who eat men for breakfast. They are using you to try to replace me in my son’s life, in Jason’s life.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, Jake, you think I don’t know what’s going on? Jason may only be seven years old, but he’s a sharp kid and you think he’s not gonna tell his father what his manipulative, shallow, lying little bitch of a mother is trying to do to me, his father, the only one person in all of this who really cares about him? He told me that they even had you taking baths with him and reading to him in the bathtub just like I used to. Are you gonna deny that?”

  I stumbled briefly. They had asked me to do this once, and I’d felt uncomfortable when I did so out at the ranch house in Cypress. He was right; it was a pretty blatant replacement move, and I’d turned down both Betty Sue and Susan when they tried to get me to read to Jason in the tub again.

  “No, I’m not gonna deny it, but yeah, that was uncool. It only happened once.”

  “So you can see it now. You can see how they are trying to replace me. And don’t think I don’t see how they’re both using sex to manipulate you as well. I mean, we already know that Susan is a whore—”

  “Hey, don’t call her a whore—”

  Susan began to flutter around me. “Hang up the phone, Jake. Hang it up.”

  I waved her off, getting pissed. “Listen—”

  “You two were fucking so much under my roof in my house I told her I was going to have to give her away in purple.”

  “Yeah, she told me you said that a few years ago.”

  “Did you ever read her little diary that I told you about? Did you read about all the other guys she was fucking when she was fucking you?”

  I could feel my ears turning red. I had read a few pages of her diary once in our senior year, and yes, she had been with other guys, but I’d been with other girls also. At the time it pissed me off so much that it led to one of our many breakups, which Dean knew well. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and he rolled over me.

  “You think I didn’t see the way Betty Sue sat on your lap and put her arms around you and told you just how cute your skinny little ass was all the fucking time? Huh? Did that give you a hard-on?”

  “Dean—”

  “Honestly, you are going to tell me that you have not noticed how very much my wife flirted with you constantly and wanted to fuck you too?! Are you fucking her too, Jake? Has she gone that far yet? To get her way? Because she will. Betty Sue was fucking nigger football players the same week I married her ditzy ass. She sure as hell wouldn’t hesitate to screw her daughter’s boyfriend if it helped her out in a custody battle, which, once again, you so naively do not see. They are both using you to replace me and I am not going to let that happen! And you’re not gonna do shit about it because you are a coward.”

  I stumbled again, taken aback. “I’m not a coward.”

  Susan was crying now, her hand to her mouth. “Please hang up the phone.”

  Dean laughed. “Jake, you had an ulcer at seventeen years old. And now you’re what, only twenty-one and your fucking hair is falling out. You’re afraid of your father; I know you are, you told me you were. You don’t even know what you wanna do with your life. First you tell me you want to be an artist, then you wanna be a writer, and I heard you just quit college, that you can’t even hack that. You need to grow the fuck up, man. But more than anything, you need to stay out of this custody battle or you will regret it. I can promise you that you will regret it.”

  I was finally getting my bearings back a bit, and my own voice took on a familiar edge I didn’t like. I sounded like my father, and I spoke slowly: “Okay, tough guy. Are you threatening me now?”

  His voice changed back to the person I had found so charming for years, and only minutes before. “No, no, no, no. Hey, Jake, come on, man. I’m not threatening you. I’m just trying to warn you about those two women. I’m trying to simply tell you that they are trying to destroy me and that I can guarantee they will destroy you.”

  “Is that right . . .” I lit a cigarette. “ ’Cuz it sounds like you’re trying to threaten me, that you’re trying to scare me or something.”

  “Listen, I am not threatening you. I do not want to go back to jail, all right? I just got out of seven days in jail because Betty Sue said I hit her.”

  “Yeah, she told me you punched her in the stomach.”

  “That’s what she told you?!” he said, with exaggerated disbelief. “See, man, this is what I’m talking about. Remember Betty Sue was an actress. You can’t trust anything an actor ever tells you. The reality is that I tried to reach inside of the back door of the ranch house—you know, the patio door for the kitchen—and she is the one who shut the door on my hand. I mean, my fingers just barely brushed against her shirt, the front of this loose-fitting shirt she had on, and she calls the cops and turns that into an assault charge and a restraining order and seven days in jail, which crushed Jason. So no, I am not threatening you, or Susan, or Betty Sue, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call the cops and say that I did. All right?”

  “I don’t need to call the cops on you.”

  “Good, that’s good, Jake. Again, I just wanted to tell you to please, please be very careful right now. Be very careful.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Okay, and listen, you guys have a happy Easter. Tell Susan I said that: You guys have a happy Easter.”

  “Sure,” I said and hung up, my stomach churning.

  Susan looked at me and shook her head. “He’s poisoned right now. Do you see what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes I do.”

  * * *

  I had been threatened more by my own father over the years, but it hurt to have Dean turn on me. He did scare me enough that I went to a pawnshop on the East Side of Austin, on First Street, and bought a .45 automatic, just in case he dropped by the apartment. I bought a box of bullets at Walmart. I got stoned, though, one day and took the gun
apart to clean it, just as Dean himself had once shown me when he taught me how to shoot and care for such guns in high school. But without his help I couldn’t put the gun back together and ended up taking it back to the pawnshop in pieces and lost some money.

  Susan and I got married a few weeks later, in 1983, both of us now twenty-one. We had the ceremony in the living room of her “uncle” Martin, the successful old screenwriter and producer who had taken in her mother as his full-time secretary and personal assistant. He lived in the highest hills in Westlake, and it was an easy, fun wedding with only a few of our closest friends and relatives there. Susan’s little brother Jason walked her down the improvised aisle to give her away to me. We were married by some old, smart, Austin stoner judge, and Susan and I said our heartfelt vows that we’d written ourselves. We kissed as everyone clapped, standing there in Martin’s big living room looking down over the green, cedar-lined hills and valleys, the clear rivers and creeks that ran into Austin.

  Dean called me again as soon as we got back to my apartment off Riverside. We were about to leave to go to South Padre Island on the Texas coast for a week to stay at a nice beach house a friend of Martin’s owned for our honeymoon. We had scored two eight balls of good blow, had a bag packed, and were ready to walk out the door when I picked up the phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “Jake?”

  “Dean?”

  Susan yanked open the front door of the apartment. “Hang up the phone right now!”

  “Jake,” he said in an almost comically ominous voice, “now you truly know why you are a coward.”

  “Yeah, hey, Dean, I don’t have any more time to listen to your bullshit. You caught me off guard last time. But you can go screw yourself now.”