Armadillos & Old Lace (2 page)

As we left Big Wong’s and walked up Mott Street that night, I could almost feel the hot Texas sun on my shoulders and the gentle breeze rustling the sycamore against my old green trailer like the wings of a cowboy angel. In the skies over Manhattan the stars were barely bright enough to make a wish on. I’d wait until I got to Texas.

“The thing I like about the Chinese,” said Ratso, as he looked around the crowded, oblivious street, “is that they don’t hold the Jews responsible for killing Jesus.”

“Yeah,” said Rambam, “but I think they know we contracted the lumber.”

Being in the process of lighting up and concomitantly attempting to laugh, I came precariously close to swallowing my cigar. I wondered fleetingly if there was a form of the Heimlich maneuver available for Americans who swallowed their cigars while laughing. Most likely not, I reasoned. There weren’t that many people who actually smoked cigars and, for those who did, life, very probably, was not all that funny. You could always not smoke and not laugh. Then you’d probably get run over by a bookmobile.

There is, of course, a very thin line between laughing and choking to death. Both sound about the same, look about the same, and, often, may feel quite similar to the occupant. The only difference is that if you’re only laughing you’ll eventually stop, but if you’re truly choking to death, you’ll go on laughing forever.

Apparently, I was only laughing. I said good-bye to my three companions as we dodged traffic on Canal Street. McGovern gave me a bear hug and Rambam clasped my shoulder with an iron grip. Ratso shook hands and copped a cigar from me. Then he borrowed my butt-cutter. Then he bummed a light.

“I’m a full-service friend,” I said.

“Well, at least you’ll get some rest down there, Kinkstah,” said Ratso. “Nothing much happens in Texas.”

“That’s true,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of wide open spaces.”

“Especially between people’s ears,” said Ratso.

The next morning as the plane clipped like a Spanish dancer over the New York skyline, I watched the twin Trade Towers shrink to the Tinkertoys of a child, and the Statue of Liberty to the bright prize from a Cracker Jack box. Somewhere below, McGovern was probably still sleeping, dreaming of old-fashioned silk skirts rustling across make-believe ballrooms.

Ratso was down there too, someplace. Most likely tossing and turning in his cluttered warehouse of an apartment, having a nightmare about the five hundred interviews he’d soon be embarking upon in order to complete his new book on Abbie Hoffman.

Abbie was down there, too, I reflected. At peace finally. Somewhere off to the left.

Rambam, no doubt, had been up all night on a stake-out. Right now he was probably sipping coffee in a parked car and watching a door or a window or an alleyway. Those are good things to watch because, unlike many aspects of human experience, something meaningful may occasionally come out of them.

The cat had never taken kindly to the notion of leaving the loft on Vandam Street where the two of us had survived more winters than the saber-toothed tiger. Like many New Yorkers, the cat believed that no life whatsoever existed outside the confines of Manhattan. I could just imagine what her mental state would be like after flying four hours in the baggage compartment in a cage next to a golden retriever and somebody’s pet boa constrictor. I’d given her half a cat Valium before we’d left. The other half I’d taken myself. If mine didn’t kick in soon, I figured, I might have to up-grade to heroin suppositories.

I watched New York telescope away and then disappear completely beneath the cloud cover. I thought of the troubles and tension conventions I was leaving behind. The friends. The lovers. The little black puppet head sitting all alone on top of the refrigerator. How many times, with the colorful parachute attached and the key to the building wedged in its mouth, had I thrown it out the window into the eager hands of visitors and housepests? How many times had it come back to me, still smiling one of the most genuine smiles in New York City? What the hell, I thought. Maybe I’d get a little head in Texas.

I sipped a Bloody Mary for a while, then I closed my eyes and drifted through time and space like campfire smoke. We weren’t anywhere near Texas yet, but I could already see the ranch. My folks had bought the place forty years ago and in the summertime they’d operated it as a camp for boys and girls. I’d been a camper there myself, then a counselor, running the waterfront. These days, however, I felt a bit o-l-d to interact too intensely with the kids. The range of my responsibilities now rambled from dropping the laundry in town every morning in the pickup truck, to poisoning occasional mounds of fire ants, to feeding the hummingbirds, to singing a song once in a while at a campfire or hoedown. It was strenuous work.

The ranch was called Echo Hill. I had nothing but happy memories from all the years I’d been involved with the place. Now, for the first time, like echoes in a dream, I had a slight sense of foreboding about my imminent return to the Hill Country. A half-conscious uneasiness that I attributed to the fact that the guy sitting next to me in the plane looked like a mad scientist from Pakistan. If I’d known then what was awaiting me in Texas, I’d have grabbed the pilot by the beezer and told him to turn the plane around.

I woke from a fitful sleep, and having nodded out through lunch, had to make do with another Bloody Mary and a healthy piece of celery. I needed all the celery I could get. The accumulated stress of living in New York was still weighing heavily upon me. I felt vaguely troubled with a sidecar of impending doom as I looked out over what some New Yorkers call “flyover country.” America, I suppose. The place where celery comes from.

I drew some comfort from an old Texas axiom: Whether your destination is heaven or hell, first you have to change planes in Dallas-Fort Worth.

It was late in the afternoon when I finally arrived in San Antonio, but the weather was still hotter than a stolen tamale. It reminded me of my days with the Peace Corps working in the jungles of Borneo as an agricultural extension worker. My job had been to distribute seeds upriver to the natives. In two and a half years, however, the Peace Corps never sent me any seeds. In the end, I had to resort to distributing my own seed upriver, which had some rather unpleasant repercussions. But I loved the tropics and seldom complained about the weather in Texas. Without it, no one would ever be able to start a conversation.

I breezed through the corridor to the gate and on into the terminal past straw cowboy hats, belt buckles as big as license plates, happy Hispanic families. At the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, where I’d gotten off the plane briefly to smoke a cigar, the women all had that blond, pinched look halfway between Morgan Fairchild and a praying mantis. The men at DFW appeared to have come in on a wing and a prayer themselves. They’d looked well fed and fairly smarmy, like so many secular Jimmy Swaggarts. At the San Antonio airport the people looked like real Texans. Even the one Hare Krishna had a nice “Y’all” going for him.

Greyhound bus stations, I reflected as I passed long rows of television chairs all individually tuned to “Ironsides,” used to tell you a lot about the character of a town. Today, it’s airports. All bus stations tell you anymore is the character of the local characters, and there’s damn few of them left these days in most places. I wasn’t even sure if I was still one myself.

I waited at the baggage claim for a period of time roughly comparable to the length of the Holy Roman Empire.

“What comes around goes around,” I said to a man who was dressed as either a pimp or an Aryan golfer.

“True story,” he said. “Last time I went to New Jersey the airline sent all my luggage to Las Vegas.”

“Sounds like your toilet kit had more fun than you did,” I said.

We waited.

Eventually, with suitcase, guitar, and pet carrier in hand, I strolled onto the sun-blinded San Antonio sidewalk like a lost mariachi and gazed around for anybody wearing an Echo Hill T-shirt. The cat gazed around, too. She had not taken the trip very well, apparently, and at the moment, appeared to be pissed off enough to scratch out the eyes of Texas.

If someone is late to meet you in New York it is cause for major stress and consternation. But Texas is close enough to Mexico to have absorbed by some kind of cultural osmosis a healthy sense of
mañana.
In the old days at the ranch, my brother Roger always used to throw any leftover food on anybody’s plate out in the backyard. “Somethin’ll git it,” he’d say.

In the same way, I knew someone would get me. The cat did not seem to share my confidence. She made loud, baleful noises and scratched unpleasantly at the bars of the cage. Several passersby stopped briefly to stare at us.

“Don’t make a scene,” I said. “We’ll be at the ranch in about an hour.”

The cat continued making exaggerated mournful moaning noises and clawing at the cage. The new vice-president of the Nosey Young Women’s Society came by and bent down over the pet carrier.

“Is he being mean to you?” she said to the cat. “Did he make you fly in that little cage?”

“We’re both on medication,” I said. “We’ve just returned from a little fact-finding trip to Upper Baboon’s Asshole.”

She left in a vintage 1937 snit.

I took a cigar out of a looped pocket in my lightweight summer hunting vest, began prenuptial arrangements, and, after all preparations were complete, I fired it up with a kitchen match. Always keeping the tip of the cigar well above the flame. I sat down on a cement bench and, for the next ten minutes or so, I watched the wheels go round, as John Lennon would say. Then I got up and stretched my legs a bit until I was almost vivisected by a Dodge Dart. The bumper sticker on the Dodge, I noticed, read: “Not A Well Woman.”

Suddenly, there was a horn honking and somebody yelling “Kinkster!” I gazed over and saw a familiar-looking gray pickup with a familiar-looking smiling head sticking out of it. Both the truck and the head were covered with dust. It was Ben Stroud, a counselor at the ranch.

“You came a little early,” said Ben.

“That’s what she told me last night,” I said, as I put the guitar and suitcase in back and the cat in front and climbed in next to Ben, who was drinking a Yoo-Hoo. Ben was not tall but he was large and loud. In Texas, you had to be large and loud. Even if you were an autistic midget.
Especially
if you were an autistic midget.

“What’s new at the ranch?” I asked.

“We’re still having borientation,” said Ben. “The kids don’t arrive for a few more days.”

I settled back in the cab and entertained a brief vision of the ranchers, as we called them, arriving in a cloud of dust on chartered buses. The old bell in front of the ranch office would be ringing. A small group of counselors, all wearing Echo Hill T-shirts, would be milling about, waiting for their charges in the afternoon sun. Uncle Tom, my dad, would be bringing the buses in, as always, walking in front of them motioning with his arms in the confident, stylish manner of someone leading a cavalry brigade. Uncle Tom would be wearing a light blue pith helmet that looked as if he borrowed it from someone in a Rudyard Kipling story. Tom, who was much loved and respected by the ranchers, counselors, and me, had a great attachment to tradition. It seemed at times that he borrowed himself from a Rudyard Kipling story.

“Tom’s assigned me as his Director of External Relations,” said Ben. “That means I drop the laundry in town every morning and bring back his paper for him.”

“Hey,” I said, “that was supposed to be my job! Now I’m an unemployed youth.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. You’ll be helping me out. I think you may be plenty busy with other things, too. Pat Knox called Uncle Tom yesterday. She wants to talk to you. It sounds like some pretty mysterious shit.”

Pat Knox was the feisty little justice of the peace in Kerr County who’d beaten me for the job some years ago in a hotly contested campaign. One of the other unsuccessful candidates had chopped up his family collie with a hatchet two weeks before the election. He’d still received eight hundred votes.