The Time of My Life (24 page)

The people who want to secede live in the southern end of Brewster County, around the park. The population centers are Terlingua, an old mining ghost town that regained some renown several years ago when Frank Tolbert started leading crazy people out there once a year to cook chili; Lajitas, which used to be just a store run by Bill Ivey but now includes a resort built to look like an old Wild West town; and Study Butte, another old mining ghost town that now has a few stores that sell beer, ice, and other necessities to tourists.

The population of Lajitas and Study Butte is estimated at thirty-five each. The population of Terlingua is disputed. Some say it's fourteen, some say it's six. The whole area they want to incorporate into their new county is about three thousand square miles with a population of about three hundred. I would say that estimate is generous.

It sounds like paradise, doesn't it? So why do the folks down there want to mess up their landscape with a courthouse and a speed trap and all the other stuff that counties have to have?

Because they're being ignored. Terlingua's county commissioner lives in Alpine, which is ninety miles away, and he rarely goes down to check on the welfare of his southern constituents. The area's dozen teen-agers have to ride a bus on a daily round trip of 180 miles to go to Alpine High School. The citizens of Terlingua, Study Butte, and Lajitas pay taxes, by durn, but don't believe they're getting their fair share of service from the courthouse in the big city. So why not keep the money at home, build your own courthouse and school, and tell the fancy Alpine people to go to hell?

The scheme isn't as outlandish as it may sound. When the Texas legislature split Jeff Davis and Brewster counties off of Presidio County to go it alone in 1887, it authorized the creation of a third county out of Brewster County's southern river country. It was to be called Foley County. But Foley County never got around to holding elections and organizing itself, so it has remained part of Brewster. If there's no time limit on organizing, there may be no legal reason why Foley can't still become Texas' 255th county.

Before they decide to do so, however, the southern Brewster County folks should send a study group to Texas' 254th county to find out if its citizens are really any better off than when they organized back in 1931. Loving County, a triangular plot of 648 square miles between the Pecos River and the New Mexico border, has one town—Mentone—about three roads and one hundred citizens. The rest of its territory is occupied by some of the sorriest livestock range in the state and several of Texas' finest oil fields.

A number of years ago, the federal bureaucrats started feeling sorry for poor Loving County. They mailed a check for a whole lot of money to Mentone, but Loving County returned it with a note. “We've already got plenty of money,” it said. “What we need is rain.”

And the feds never sent any.

That's typical of all governments, I think. They never give you what you really need, and there's no reason to believe a Foley County administration would treat the river people any better than Brewster County does.

Furthermore, the tranquility of the wilderness would be ruined by the fight over whose relative would get the janitor's job at the courthouse.

March, 1981

That Sinking Dallas Feeling

M
ONDAY
AFTERNOON
, I was sitting in my living room, reading the new issue of
Texas Monthly
, which had just arrived in the mail. The article was entitled “Welcome, Mr. Kennedy, to Dallas,” and began:

My sons, visiting me during their spring break from school in Saint Louis, were in the den, watching an ancient rerun on Channel n. Suddenly the tone of the television noise changed. The wacky babble of comedy gave way to a solemn news voice announcing—erroneously, as it turned out—the death of James Brady, President Reagan's press spokesman.

By the time I got to the den, the bulletin had ended and the babble resumed. “What was that about?” I asked.

“Somebody has shot the president and some other men,” replied Ted, who is eleven.

“My God!” I said. “Where did it happen?”

“In Dallas, I think,” Ted said. “He came here to make a speech.”

Fighting that sinking feeling that has become so familiar to Americans during the past twenty years, I asked, “When? When did you hear it?”

“About fifteen minutes ago,” said Patrick, who is nine. “It was during ‘I Dream of jeannie.'”

“Why didn't you come tell me?” I yelled.

“You were on the phone,” Ted said. “And then we forgot.”

My sons' account, as it turned out, was as erroneous as the bulletin about Brady's death and many other reports during the early hours of the newest American outrage. It was Vice President Bush who was in Texas, and he was in Fort Worth, not Dallas, and he wasn't shot. But my reaction to the news and my sons' reaction were typical of who we are, and somehow embarrassing.

Upon hearing news of an assassination, only a citizen of Dallas would ask first: “Where did it happen?” Or feel the deep relief I felt when I switched to a network station and learned that
this
president had been shot in Washington, not Dallas.

And only children who have been fed on television almost from birth would forget to mention that, by the way, Dad, the president was shot while you were on the phone. To them, a bulletin about an assassination attempt on the nation's leader was only another pause for a message, another interruption of “I Dream of Jeannie.” Just something that happened on TV, where everything happens these days.

That's what I thought at first, anyway. “May we turn back to Channel 11 now?” asked Patrick after a few minutes of network solemnity.

“No!” I said. “Don't you realize how important this is?”

Then Edwin R. Newman said NBC had received so many phone calls asking when regular programming would resume that he was obliged to announce, sorry, the newsmen would remain on the air until they learned whether the president of the United States was going to live or die, whether there was going to be a new president sworn in or not, whether the country was in danger or not. My sons and their generation were not the only Americans impatient with the intrusion of boring reality into their TV fantasyland.

I was wrong about the other thing, too.

When Dan Rather of CBS said the accused assassin, although a resident of Colorado, had gone to high school in Dallas, I was angry. Why, why, why did the networks have to find some puny Dallas angle to every assassination? If an assassin once changed planes at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, I thought, the network guys would mention it and raise their eyebrows. John Hinckley, Jr., was from Colorado, damn it. Leave Dallas out of it!

Then Frank Reynolds of ABC announced that Hinckley had bought two guns at a Dallas pawnshop. He paused to let the news soak in, then, in case we missed the significance, repeated:
Dallas!
Why didn't the s.o.b. have the decency to buy his guns in Memphis or Los Angeles or Denver? I thought. Anywhere but on the very street where Kennedy was shot.

And it turns out, of course, that the accused assassin's connection with Dallas wasn't tenuous at all. He's the son of an oilman whose company recently moved from Dallas. He grew up in Highland Park, where Ronald Reagan ranks second only to God. He's a graduate of Highland Park High School, but an “outsider” in a school and town where to be “in” is everything and to be “out” is worse than nothing. He's a mentally sick person whose ideas and desires were too crazy, too violent even for the American Nazi Party.

Hinckley was just a little boy, growing up in what the
Texas Monthly
article called “a hotbed of half-crazy, right-wing activity” when John Kennedy was shot. And maybe he was just watching TV that day.

April, 1981

Oh! A Kite in the Evening Wind

W
E WERE
STAGGERING
up the street, our heads bowed into the west wind that always finds its way to Dallas in the spring. “It's a great day for kites!” shouted one of my companions.

“Kites!” shouted my other companion over the gusting zephyr. “The only thing you can do with a kite is get it up! Once you've done that, there's nothing left to do! Kites are boring!”

I laughed.
The
wind grabbed my laugh and blew it down the block. The people standing on the curb at the other corner looked around, searching for its source. My companions didn't hear it, but I didn't care. I knew about kites, and that was enough.

I had flown a kite just the previous evening. It was my latest adventure in a lifelong devotion to kite-flying. My companion who thought kites are boring has never kite-flown with me, so couldn't be expected to know that kite-flying is the last truly exciting activity still available to Western man.

But I had entered the kite season reluctantly, as usual. Whenever my kids come down here on their spring break, the first thing they want me to do is go fly a kite.

I always demur, claiming I don't own a kite, until they buy one for me, assemble it, attach the string andput it in my hand. Once in the park, though, I'm always glad I went. I have so many fascinating experiences and meet so many interesting people.

For instance, I've lived in my neighborhood for more than two years and never knew there were any hippies about. But hardly had we launched our fragile craft into the currents of the blue before a couple of them showed up. They were a man and a woman who appeared out of nowhere, carrying a sleeping bag.

“Hey, man,” the male said to the female, “let's crash here and watch the kites.”

They unrolled the sleeping bag under a tree, and the female lay down on it and went to sleep. The male sat upright beside her, very alert, and saying, “Oh, wow!” every time one of the kites would move from one place to another.

He also knew quite a bit about kites and kept giving me advice on how to fly mine. “What I used to do,” he said, “was buy a bunch of rolls of string, and when one roll ran out, I would tie another one onto it, and the kite would go way, way up there. So high it would just be a speck. And when I got tired of flying it, I would just let it go. Who wants to roll up all that string?”

“Yeah, I used to do that, too,” I said. “Sometimes I would use four or five rolls of string.”

“I used six or seven,” he said.

The kite my kids had bought me was one of those modern plastic jobs, and it kept dipsy-doodling around, threatening to nosedive at any moment. Jog gers and bicyclists stopped and watched me try to keep it aloft.

“Look how much better the kids fly their kites than the grown man flies his,” a cyclist said to her companion.

“Theirs are bigger and better designed aerodynami-cally,” I explained. “See, their kites have tails like airplanes, and mine has no tail at all. Just some little pieces of plastic that flutter.”

Two young boys showed up then and watched me do my stuff. “Your kite is aerodynamically unstable,” one of them said. “You're not getting any rudder effect at all.”

“Rudder effect?” I asked.

“Yeah. There's no way you can guide that thing. If you put a tail on it, you could dogfight with the other guys.”

“I don't want to dogfight,” I said. “Leave me alone.”

About then, a man who had been walking his Doberman but had stopped to watch me fly my kite let his dog off the leash, and the dog galloped to me and started sniffing my leg. I don't like Dobermans sniffing my leg, but I've never thought of a polite way to tell one to please stop. The sniffing made me nervous, and my kite went into a dive toward the mimosa tree just beyond the playground.

The hippie sitting on the sleeping bag laughed and tried to wake up his companion. “Look!” he said. “He's had it this time!” The female hippie tried to raise her head, but couldn't manage it.

Miraculously, I maneuvered the kite back into a climb just before it reached the mimosa, and I turned and gave the couple a triumphant smile. But the strain of the climb was too much for my string. It broke. The kite, instead of just falling, sailed off down the creek somewhere.

The Doberman owner snapped the leash on his dog and left. The cyclists and joggers continued on their way. The hippie male somehow revived the hippie female, and they picked up their sleeping bag and disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared.

My kids let me hold their kite strings for them while they went looking for my kite. They never found it. I was relieved.

April, 1981

Clean Closets and Clean Minds

E
VERY
SIX
MONTHS
or so I get the urge to make myself a better person, learn to like myself better, or make the world a more pleasant place in which to live. Dozens of books have been published that are supposed to help me accomplish one or more of those goals, and my first step in any project to improve myself or the world is to consult one of them.

It never works.

The night I dipped into
I'm OK, You're OK
I was wrapped in the misery of the Hong Kong flu and knew damn well I wasn't OK (or okay, if you prefer). I also doubted that anybody else was okay, and if anybody else
was
okay, I knew I would hate him if I ever met him.

Another time, when every person I knew, including my lady and Pussycat and Mockingbird, was angry with me and thinking of me as a rotten person, I picked up
How to Be Your Own Best Friend
. But after reading a few pages I concluded that those who were angry with me were probably right, and I didn't want a lousy best friend like me.