by Bryan Mealer
Then one night Tina’s father called the house and Opal handed Bobby the phone.
“Tina says y’all are about to run off and get married—’s that true?” he asked.
And Bobby, finally put on the spot, denied it up and down.
That revelation must have broken Tina’s heart and sent her running. Because two days later, one of Bobby’s friends came up and said, “I just seen your gal down at the Wagon Wheel hanging all over Bucky Ford.”
Bobby had no interest in tangling with Bucky Ford. But he knew he had to do something, so he drove around until he found Bucky and confronted him like a man.
“Is it true?” he asked.
Bucky nodded. “It is.”
“Well,” Bobby said, feeling his emotions well up in his throat. “You can just have her then.”
He bought some beer and drove around most of the night half crying. He knew Tina was a dead-end deal, but to have Bucky steal her from him? That stung.
To make matters worse, he’d just heard that Marie was about to get married to an aspiring preacher from Tennessee, who was helping her “to walk closer to the Lord.” Not that he cared.
The sum of which meant that he was stuck in Big Spring, and alone. And the more he drove around, the more worthless that made him feel. The aloneness scared him, because by himself he could not resist the things designed to drag him down. In his heart he knew he needed God, but he could not reach out and touch the hand of God on his own, nor could he summon the courage to walk that rigorous road. Only bad things could happen when alone.
If only there was someone out there who could do that for him, be a lifeguard for the times when the Devil spun his riptides. Someone pretty, someone who could love him.
He knew just the person.
* * *
It was Sharon Moore from Snyder, the girl who would one day become my mother. He’d dated Sharon on and off during his years with Marie, and just talking to her always made him feel better.
Sharon possessed something familiar to him, though he couldn’t name it at the time. Later he recognized it as what his mother had, which was peace of the spirit. There were people like him who felt forced to walk the righteous road, as if gun-marched, for fear of the consequence. Sharon dwelled there instinctively, unburdened by hell. God dwelled in the calm center of her eyes, drawing people in.
Like Merlee, Sharon seemed wise beyond her age, and she met Bobby with honesty. She was dating other guys, but she did not sleep around. Back when they first dated, he’d understood that she wasn’t rebound material. That and the fifty miles that separated them was enough for Bobby to turn back to Marie.
Yet all the while he was thinking of Sharon, anticipating their next meeting. But whereas she was honest, Bobby was not. Whenever he’d see her, he’d swear that he and Marie were finished and that she was the one for him. “I could love you easy,” he told her once, and she surprised herself by saying she could do the same.
She’d fallen for him way back in January 1969, at their first church youth rally together. It was in Snyder, and after the service Bobby had walked up and asked if she wanted to join their group for dinner. He drove her to the Rip Griffin truck stop in his black Maverick, which he’d just bought. She’d noted the red plaid seat covers and his mod wardrobe and wondered if he might be rich.
He called her a few weeks later. They played mini golf and he told her some sob story about Marie, and she kissed him then, not sure what to believe, but vanquished nonetheless by his charm. And ever since, he’d been writing her love letters. The letters were mostly silly (“Man alive do you have a set of hot lips, I dig ’em”) but others were frightfully serious and revealed a vulnerability (“I don’t have what I used to, I mean the experience with God. I want you to pray for me, please … I am falling fast.”)
But he never truly declared himself, and so she never took him seriously. His tendency toward backsliding, boozing, and dope made her nervous, although she did have this strange urge to care for him, to help guide him to the Lord. Perhaps God had sent Bobby for that very reason?
She dated someone else all senior year, a hulking tight end named Joe Bullard. But she ended the relationship after graduation. She was soon entering college and Joe was a year younger. She wanted no ties.
At Western Texas College, located in Snyder, she became head cheerleader for the basketball team, joined a sorority, and made new friends. Meanwhile Bobby kept sending her letters—each one a big event. She opened them in the kitchen and read them aloud to her mother, giggling at his stupid jokes, not even trying to conceal her joy. So of course, she felt a flutter of excitement when she learned that Marie had moved away and was seeing the Tennessee preacher. Yet the next thing she knew, Bobby was dating Tina—and every church girl from Hobbs to Sweetwater knew about her.
When she confronted him about Tina, he talked about her as if she were something that had befallen him unexpectedly, like a burdensome relative who appeared one day and wouldn’t leave—something temporary, but unavoidable all the same.
“Do not worry about Tina,” he wrote. “I shall take you back to Snyder and marry you and live happy after ever—or ever after—whichever you prefer. I will give you a choice. Be sweet, Baby, and remember I am nothing without your wonderful love.”
She bought that line, though she was not proud of it. The sincerity in the letter was just enough to keep her excited about their next meeting—a youth rally the following weekend at the First Assembly of God in Big Spring. She arrived early with her friends and saved Bobby a seat. And when he entered the chapel moments later, grinning like he’d just won something, a hush swept the room. On his arm was Tina, wearing those killer red boots.
Sharon had been so angry, and so hurt. She dismissed him as a player and refused to answer his calls and letters. After a while, he stopped chasing her. But when she heard he was in the hospital several months later with appendicitis, she caved. She drove to Big Spring and visited him, then sent a sweet card to his house. The gesture surprised him and he seized the opening.
“I can barely remember you coming to visit me I was so doped up,” he wrote in a letter dated March 9, 1972. “I can still remember those beautiful brown eyes. I think they are what pulled me through. Sharon, I still have your picture in my billfold and you are still one of the most beautiful people in it. Who are you going with? What is he like? Does your mother like him?”
He was right. She was going with someone else—a tall, blond golfer from Abilene named Tim, and they were getting serious. But Tim, unlike Bobby, was true marriage material. He was honest and attentive, and he was grounded—a college man on scholarship—without all the vice and spiritual torment. The only problem, if there was one, was that Tim was Catholic, and Tim’s mother told Sharon that if they intended to marry, she would have to convert, which would mean renouncing the church she loved so dearly. Tim played it down, saying, “You don’t have to listen to her.” But still, she worried.
Somehow—not from her—Bobby had discovered Tim’s identity, and despite the usual goofiness in his next letter, she sensed panic in his tone.
“I have prayed about this four times and I think it is God’s will that you break up with Tim and start dating me again,” he wrote in May. “I will even learn how to play golf.” He was losing weight, he told her. He threatened to end his life. “There is one thing I love more than myself and that is you, and if I can’t have you, there will be no reason for me to live.”
She read the letter to her mother, and they both rolled their eyes and had a good laugh. Then she sat down with a pen and paper and explained that she was committed to Tim. Yet even as she wrote the words, she wondered if it was really true.
His next letter arrived over a month later, during the second week of June. The return address was in Portland, Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico.
“I bet you are wondering why I am in Portland,” he began. “It all started after I got your last letter. It almost killed me to know that you loved some
one else. After five sleepless nights of worrying I came to the conclusion that I must really take my life. This was going to bbe very hard for me to do. Guns + knives were out because I hate the sight of blood, especially my own.
“Finally, I decided that I would move to Portland—from Portland I would drive to Corpus Christi, where the famous Harbor Bridge stretches across the Gulf of Mexico (but for me, the Sea of Death). Yes, I planned to jump off the bridge, and no one lives through that. But before I made such a big step I thought maybe I would give you another chance to break up with Tim.”
The truth was he’d gone to Portland to lick his wounds. The situation with Tina and Bucky had embarrassed him so much, he thought it best to get out of town. His uncle Wendell had moved down in Portland with his family to take a job at the Reynolds Metal Company. This was Wendell Hahn, Granville’s brother, whose daddy had doused him with boiling water in New London before walking out on him and his family. Wendell now had a son named Denny, who was Bobby’s age, and the two of them had dug up a lot of mischief together as kids.
Denny knew a company in Portland that was hiring guys to run tests on oil field pipe. It was rugged, outside work, the kind Bobby abhorred. But Denny made it sound kind of romantic, and besides, Bobby was desperate for anything. His father, upon hearing this, even told him, “A man’s job will do you some good.”
He and Denny worked as a team, hoisting twenty-foot sections of steel pipe that were plugged on one end onto a rack, whereupon a guy sitting in a truck shot them full of pressurized water to test them for leaks. Most of the jobs were in soggy pastures, and the coastal heat and humidity left them wilted and tired. The work was also dangerous. Sometimes the plugs came loose and launched like mortar rounds from the pressure; other times the pipes just exploded.
He and Denny lasted two weeks before quitting, then applied for easier jobs in Corpus. Bobby interviewed at the local grocery store, and when the manager insisted he cut his hair, he bought a cheap wig instead, returned the next day, and was hired.
In exchange for his room and board at the Hahns’ house, Bobby had to attend church with Denny and his family at the local Assembly of God, which his uncle had helped to build. That, plus the clean living under his uncle’s roof, had delivered some clarity and made him pine for Sharon. One Sunday after church, he wrote her a serious letter, in which he apologized for his behavior and made one last appeal.
“I didn’t want to live up to Christian standards and I knew that would be the only way it would work for you,” he wrote. “I am ready to straighten up and live for God, but I need help. The kind of help that only you could give me.”
Sharon grabbed the letter from the mailbox and took it to the kitchen, as she’d done all the others. But after hearing those sentences, her mother stopped her short, saying, “You better read that one by yourself.” By the time she was finished, she was filled with confusion.
She spent the next week in a state of torment, pulled between two very different futures. Finally, her father sat her down and said, “You have to do what you know is right.” And she did. That same afternoon, she drove to Tim’s apartment and gave him the news.
“I can’t let you go on loving me,” she told him, then ran out of the room. She spent the whole night on her front porch, sobbing.
Down on the coast, Bobby received new life.
“I will straighten up and give you something to be proud of,” he vowed. “I am tired of dope! I am tired of cheap girls! I am tired of running from God.”
They were engaged by Christmas, during which time Bobby moved to Snyder and enrolled at the junior college. He worked at the Exxon filling station owned by Sharon’s father, who taught him more about mechanics in three months than his own dad ever had.
Opal and the rest of the family couldn’t believe his turnaround. The fact that he’d convinced such a prudent and godly (not to mention beautiful) young woman to marry him was not only a miracle, it was slightly suspicious. In fact, they made sure to give her the treatment the first time she visited for Sunday lunch. Opal and Norma Lou plied her with intrusive questions while Zelda simply stared at her throughout the meal. Finally Zelda asked, “What color eye shadow is that?”
Sharon froze. She must think I’m a Jezebel.
“It’s Maybelline,” she answered. “Electric Blue, I think.”
“I love it,” Zelda said.
They were married in Snyder in early June 1973, a week after receiving their junior college diplomas. The whole family was in attendance. They rented a small apartment in Odessa, which was cheaper than Midland and close to where Preston and Norma lived, plus his aunts Fannie, Allie, and Velva. Sharon took a receptionist job with a law firm while Bobby bounced between gigs, a married man searching for his niche. At first he tried the local Safeway, then a plumber named Bill hired him on as an apprentice.
“Two things,” Bill told him right off. “Righty tighty, lefty loosey, and shit don’t flow uphill. Remember that and you’ll do fine.” The two of them spent their days installing hot water heaters, digging ruptured pipe, and running closet augers through clogged toilets while housewives watched in their curlers.
For a while he painted houses with a couple of Big Spring guys, Mark Powell and Donny Janks, but their ways were nefarious and reacquainted him with old habits. Mainly they got high, thanks to another friend of Bobby’s named Dale, who kept them in good supply.
Dale had landed on Sharon’s bad side the day she came home and discovered he’d de-seeded his marijuana at her kitchen table. He was a considerate dealer in that way. He was even kind enough to telephone from jail the day he got busted to alert her about the duffel bag he’d stashed under the house.
As someone who strived constantly to be a better Christian, how was she to handle these things? She did not smoke cigarettes or pot. She hated the taste of beer, and even today will only occasionally enjoy a glass of chardonnay. But that was her, and she didn’t feel comfortable passing judgment on other people, particularly her husband. She’d known his backsliding ways when she’d broken up with Tim and given her heart to Bobby. She’d signed on to be his lifeguard in the turbulent patches and his companion in their spiritual journey together. It wasn’t her nature to nag—she was cool—but she also knew how widely her husband was capable of straying. The balance was hard to strike, especially since she was twenty years old and in the first months of marriage.
The answer, it turned out, presented itself on its own. In April the following year, she discovered she was pregnant.
She’d developed a kidney infection and the doctor took her off the pill, but with the assurance that she’d be safe for three months. He was wrong. She and Bobby hadn’t planned on having children for a few years but made their peace with the news. Bobby was terrified, yet somehow he was also relieved. He needed walls to guide him, and between my mother and a baby, a fresh path revealed itself.
What he needed was a career, something he enjoyed. He was tired of the grocery business and didn’t have the stomach for plumbing. He’d also sworn off the oil patch after his last experience. For a brief time, between Portland and moving to Snyder, he’d tried working as a floor hand on a pulling unit south of Big Spring. He was one of four guys on a small workover rig, extracting sucker rods and steel pipe from old pump-jacked wells they were trying to get back on line.
Using two heavy wrenches, one in each hand, his job was to unscrew the thin sectional rods that acted like pistons to bring the oil to the surface, then latch each one to a traveling block and cable. The operator then gunned a diesel engine that lifted them up to the derrick man, who hung them on a rack.
When they pulled the pipe itself, he and another guy had to set the slips so the pipe didn’t fall back into the hole, then use a pair of giant tongs to loosen each threaded joint. Some of the pipe was decades old and had to be beaten with a sledgehammer before it gave, and even then, Bobby had to push his whole body against the tongs to get it unscrewed.
Oil and mud often b
lew up with the tubing, and when it did, the other men, whom Bobby found crude and intimidating, shouted, “Hey worm, cup the hole!” And Bobby would have to bend down and place his body over the hole to keep the sludge from spraying on them. It was the kind of work his father had done for twenty-five years, and it was so punishing, so exhausting, that he passed out during lunch breaks and had to quit after two weeks.
Now, with a baby on the way and in need of a career, he remembered something his father once said, how back in the Depression, the only men with money in their pockets were the car salesmen.
Selling cars, he thought. That was more his speed.
He drove twenty miles to Midland, where the real money was, and pulled into the biggest dealership in town, Bill Rogers Ford. He walked inside and asked for the manager.
“I’d like to be a salesman,” he told the man, who looked him up and down and said, “If you wanna sell cars for me, son, you’re gonna have to cut that hair.”
Bobby grinned. “Funny you say that, mister, ’cause I was just on my way to the barbershop.”
He started on the showroom floor selling Thunderbirds, Gran Torinos, and LTDs. The pay was on commission, plus the dealership gave him a new demo to drive. Bobby chose a sleek black Mustang II, which happened to be sitting in the driveway the day Sharon went into labor.
Bobby was home for lunch when she came running out from the bathroom in a panic. At first he called Opal, screaming, “I think Sharon’s water broke!”
“Baby, either it did or it didn’t,” his mother answered. “Now get her to the hospital.”
He was so nervous about soiling the seats on the Mustang that he covered them in four layers of towels. Then, as an added precaution, he rolled up another and handed it to Sharon, saying, “Stick that one down your pants.”
After three hours of labor at Odessa’s Medical Center Hospital, I was born on January 23, 1975, at 2:37 in the morning. At first they named me Brett, then two days later, changed it to Bryan—after a tennis player they’d known at college.