Chinaberry Sidewalks (15 page)

Although he could never bring himself to say as much, I knew my father was sorry about punching me in the face. As for me, I was over it before I hit the floor. Letting Broden know what I thought about him and his boxing gloves was worth ten blows to the jaw.

When school resumed in early January, I was surprised at the lack of interest in my one-punch demise. The world I knew before Christmas break was now a weirdly different place. Terry Holt and the junior Rebels assumed their usual position in the back of the bus as if on sedatives; four lobotomies couldn’t have produced a more marked change in their demeanor. As for Delbert, he didn’t return to school and simply vanished from our midst. My curiosity about what became of him wasn’t as strong as my desire to slip back into my invisible shell, and Delbert Matheny exited my life as enigmatically as he’d entered it four months before.

The first Friday afternoon in 1963, a seventh-grader named Tommy Hughey followed me off the bus. As my stop was six blocks past his, this struck me as odd. I liked Tommy, and his ability to remain invisible when the heartless barbs of teenage cruelty flew like poison darts was an inspiration. Though he was six months older than me, I had a four-inch height advantage. But when he took off his jacket and pronounced himself ready to fight, I nearly laughed out loud. “You gotta be kiddin’ me,” I said. “Did Terry Holt put you up to this?” Tommy seemed perplexed by the question, and it occurred to me that he was like my father’s red Studebaker when the engine kept running after the ignition had been switched off. I had an inclination to cream the twerp on general principle, but instead told him to go home. “The fightin’ stuff’s over. I’m not gonna fight you or anybody else for the rest of my life.”

I stood there remembering how Delbert hung on my every word those golden September mornings waiting for the bus. Tommy gathered his books and jacket, and as he trotted away called over his shoulder, “See ya on Monday.”

Pawnshop Drums

I
n the late fifties, thinking he might pick up a little extra cash playing hillbilly music in east Houston’s honky-tonks and icehouses, my father cobbled together a sparse little musical outfit called J. W. Crowell and the Rhythmaires. In the beginning it was slow going, but in time his belief in the band proved stronger than the club owners’ indifference, and business started to pick up.

The combo consisted of Elbert Smith, a harelipped harmony singer, on lead electric mandolin; Edward Lee Alexander on bass; and Bat Putnam, the “Blind Boy from Port Arthur,” on drums. My father, as lead singer and rhythm-guitar player, used his knowledge of country music to create playlists suitable for white-trash dives like Cal’s Corral and Red Bluff Sally’s. Historically, the icehouses considered jukeboxes more user-friendly in the selling of cold beer, but dance-friendly icehouses like Cal’s Corral, Duke’s Highway 90, and Red Bluff Sally’s were the exception. Bands were welcome to set up in the corner, tables were pushed aside, and those so inclined were encouraged to glide across the concrete floor until their feet hurt.

The financial arrangements were heavily in favor of the owners. At first, a cigar box placed in front of the mike stand was the sole means by which the band got paid, and the stream of loose change and dollar bills destined for the “kitty” depended on the bandleader’s ability to handle song requests and keep dancers on the floor. Whether it was a rare appearance at Cook’s Hoedown or at some shit hole with only a neon beer sign advertising its existence, my father approached every performance as if he were hosting the Grand Ole Opry. He dutifully brought a brand of showmanship to the icehouses that, in the Rhythmaires’ early going, flew as far over the heads of the lowbrow clientele as Shakespeare’s sonnets would’ve.

Still, by the end of 1961 J. W. Crowell and the Rhythmaires were working semi-regularly at Cal’s Corral and the Igloo. With a two-dollar cover charge on top of the kitty to split among band members, my father saw that his ship was coming in.

The rise in his musical stock irritated my mother. By default she’d inherited the job of collecting cover charges. Being torn between her wifely duties and God’s will put her in an awful funk. “J. W. Crowell,” she’d harp, “I can’t believe you want to drag me in and out of the Devil’s house just so I can take up money from ever’ Tom, Dick, and Harry that walks through the door. And that’s the sorriest bunch of women I ever seen, every one of ’em waitin’ to spread their legs for you out in the parkin’ lot.”

“Aw, hell, Cauzette,” he’d gripe back, “you ain’t got a bit more sense than God give a mule. We runnin’ a
biz-ness
here. You think I can trust somebody else to take up that money? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

The Rhythmaires’ increased activity didn’t sit well with Bat Putnam either. Between cab fares—he was too proud to accept rides from his bandleader—and a fondness for whiskey (barrels of it, I’ve since been told), he wasn’t seeing much cash prosperity. Preferring more convenient opportunities back home in Port Arthur, the blind musician bid J.W. and the boys a fond farewell.

In May of 1962, my father came home from work with a set of pawnshop drums. Short of dragging pots and pans from under the kitchen sink, a more rudimentary drum kit would’ve been hard to find. A sparkly blue bass drum with an attached ride cymbal and a black-and-gray-striped snare drum on a stand were the extent of its working parts. But center stage in the living room, in spite of its poor quality, this contraption looked almost worthy of a Gene Krupa solo.

Springing it on his unsuspecting family, as my mother and I knew, gave him a temporary feeling of invincibility. Experience had taught us there was nothing to be gained by denying my father’s craving for omnipotence. Somewhere along the way we’d made the choice to take at face value his wholehearted belief that he could perform the impossible if the two of us kept our mouths shut long enough for him to work out any kinks in his plan. As a result, we’d come to accept his refusal to explain his actions in advance as part of a deep-seated need for our blind loyalty. He would fill us in on the drums when he was good and ready.

As much as I’d like to think my father saw his only son as a prodigy, it was simple economics—not having to pay someone to replace Bat—that inspired him to invest eight dollars in the notion I could play drums.

“Come on over here,” he said, between boasts to my mother about how using a kitchen chair as a drum stool further proved the limitlessness of his ingenuity, “I’m fixin’ to show you something.”

Pounding the bass-drum pedal with his right foot, producing the familiar wooden
thock
of a cross-stick rim shot with his left hand while riding the cymbal with the stick in his right, my father played a well-articulated shuffle that was very impressive.

“How’d you know how to do that?”

“I’m fixin’ to teach you how.”

“What, play drums?”

“Hell, yeah. They ain’t nothin’ to it.”

By scooting the kitchen chair closer to the action, I found I could reach the bass-drum pedal with the tip of my toes, and within a short time I was playing a shuffle vaguely reminiscent of the one my father had demonstrated. By the end of the week, I was playing drums behind J. W. Crowell and the Rhythmaires at Red Bluff Sally’s.

“Just watch my foot!” my father shouted before launching into the first song. “Match the bass drum to how I’m pattin’ and everything’ll be all right. If you get lost, stop and start over.”

It was a long night. To conceal their embarrassment, Elbert and Edward Lee had matching ain’t-he-something smiles smeared across their faces. The music itself was an endless succession of rhythmic train wrecks. As for Red Bluff Sally’s hard-core regulars, my tendency to get the beat turned around did little to alter the ebb and flow of their dance-floor traffic. The kitty nearly filled up.

At night’s end, several drunken women with big titties and beehive hair went to work pinching my cheek. Each had her own blend of cheap perfume, cigarettes, and stale beer. I had to agree with my mother that Red Bluff Sally’s was ground zero for Podunk women. Considering the level of musicianship I’d put on display that evening, I found this cheek fondling wholly misplaced.

By the second weekend I’d worked out a few of the rough spots in my limited style. My starts weren’t as slow to develop, nor were my stops as jarringly abrupt.

“I want you to watch how I keep ’em on the floor once I get ’em out there,” my father said one night, driving us to a beer joint on Telephone Road called the Igloo. “Ain’t nobody keeps ’em out there dancin’ like ole J-Bo.” I’d long before accepted the responsibility of diverting his predilection for braggadocio whenever I could without threatening his highly refined vanity. But in this particular case, his was a fair assessment. He did have a knack for keeping a dance floor full, and there were times when he’d string six or seven songs together without pause. His more inspired sequences sometimes landed five or six dollar bills in the kitty before the sweat-soaked dancers repaired to their tables for cold beer and fresh cigarettes.

“Here’s one by the late, great Hank Williams,” he’d announce through the revved-up distortion that came with plugging a pawnshop microphone into an overloaded Gibson Falcon amplifier. There was implied immediacy in how he called a crowd back to attention that kept the focus on the business at hand. Four bars into “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” the dancing clientele would dutifully have chugged their beers, stubbed out their smokes, and trooped back onto the dance floor by the first mandolin turnaround. Moon Mullican’s “Pipeliner Blues” and George Jones’s “White Lightning” would then follow in hot succession. This set up the all-important slow song.

“And now for a little belly-rubber,” he’d say, lowering his voice to a more sexual register. “Here’s one called ‘May You Never Be Alone Like Me.’ ” My father knew how to set up and deliver a tear-jerk ballad as well as any hillbilly singer in Nashville. If you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask him.

It was during the belly-rubber that a honky-tonk’s sexually charged undertones reared their horny little heads. While my father delivered heartfelt renditions of “(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such As I,” “Slowly,” “No One Will Ever Know,” and “Cold Cold Heart,” I saw every kind of skirt lifting, ass grabbing, ear licking, tongue sucking, and dry humping there is. Invariably, it was during the slow song that fights broke out—caused more often than not by some guy ramming a tongue down some other guy’s best friend’s drunk wife’s throat.

At the first signs of violence, my father would drop whichever ballad he was rendering and break into a fast song, magically transforming the fight into a dance floor full of white-trash jitterbuggers doing the dirty bop. There were times when he seemed some kind of honky-tonk alchemist. His ability to turn bloodlusting drunks into dancing fools was a sight to behold, and that’s when I was most proud of him.

The most vivid altercation happened to involve my mother—she and an unsavory barroom queen by the name of Nelda Glick. This particular night at Cal’s Corral, Nelda chose to dance the slow songs all alone in a masturbatory reverie only two feet in front of my father while he came on to her like the honky-tonk gigolo he so often imagined himself to be. Soon after the thought crossed my mind that my mother wasn’t going to allow this to go on much longer, I noticed her swimming toward the front through the dancers.

“I’m gonna teach y’all to act like heathens!” she hollered, grabbing a handful of Nelda’s dyed black hair. Yanked without warning from her oversexed absorption, Nelda hit the sawdust-covered dance floor like a dropped medicine ball.

But she came up fighting. Quick as a cat, she buried her painted red claws in the side of my mother’s neck—an unfair tactic, given that my mother had chewed off every fingernail she’d grown since 1930.

Dumbfounded, my father allowed the song he was crooning to unravel altogether. There would be no transformative fast song. From where I sat behind the drums, it was difficult to make out specific insults. Judging by the high-pitched wailing, territorial rights to his dickhead ardor were in hot dispute.

He made a feeble stab at re-establishing his control. “Dang if it don’t look like the Wednesday night fights came a little late this week,” he joked into the microphone. Two, maybe three, muted chuckles rose from the crowd, and I watched the back of his neck and ears turn as red as a new set of encyclopedias. This was the only time I ever saw his consummate showmanship falter.

Remembering the intensity with which my father could tear through ten straight fast songs evokes images of seeing Jerry Lee Lewis perform at the Magnolia Gardens Bandstand, the three-acre open-air dance hall and beer garden owned by the mayor of Channelview, Texas. Yet another oil-boom community built on a strip of marshland between the murky green waters of the San Jacinto River and the goopy brown chemical sludge of the ship channel, Channelview rivaled Jacinto City, Denver Harbor, the East End, and a few less-desirable municipalities around Beaumont and Port Arthur as southeast Texas’s premier white-trash garden spot. Drunken brawls and the occasional gunfight added luster to the Magnolia Gardens’ popularity. It was the most celebrated outdoor live-music venue in the region and perhaps the only stage in the world Bat Putnam would have considered coming out of retirement to play on. The rest of the band, myself not included, would gladly have volunteered for a group vasectomy in exchange for a half-hour set on that creaky old stage.

I loved Sunday afternoons there as much for the cheeseburgers and swimming as for the live music. To my father, the Magnolia Gardens represented something unattainable in his life, and he saw his inability to get a booking as proof that national stardom was beyond his reach. Although he’d rather get bit by a water moccasin than admit to despondency, his reluctance to acknowledge disappointment didn’t prevent him from expressing petty jealousy. Those who knew him well were as intimately acquainted with his susceptibility to the green-eyed monster as with his penchant to brag. If by chance some up-and-coming local dance band swung into a Bob Wills tune, my mother and I automatically put some distance between ourselves and the self-proclaimed King of East Side Honky-Tonk Singers.

“I be got-damn,” he’d bellow without regard for whoever might be listening. “I’d just as soon shit and fall back in it as listen at this bunch try and play. They sure as hell ain’t no match for ole J-Bo and the boys. Come on, Cauzette, we goin’ to the house.”

And just like that, another pleasant outing by the river came to a premature end.

Jerry Lee Lewis’s performance in the summer of 1958 was part of a package show that included Carl Perkins and featured Johnny Cash as the headliner. My father insisted we arrive two hours before showtime to claim a choice spot to watch from. Sun-bleached green and white canvas awnings lined both sides of the dance floor, sheltering a hundred or so picnic tables from the notoriously unpredictable weather. We took a third-row table, stage left and close to the dance floor.

As the crowd began to gather, so did an enormous bank of black thunderclouds on the horizon. It was well known in this neck of the woods that such thunderheads favored an ominous build-up to actual cloudbursts, so the general consensus among Gulf Coast natives was
Who gives a shit?

By the time Carl Perkins finished his opening tune, the low-rolling rumble of approaching thunder was as loud as the doghouse bass blasting through the public-address system, but if the lanky performer was apprehensive about the threatening skies, he kept it well hidden. He led his band through “Honey Don’t” and “All Mama’s Children” with hepcat ease. Fittingly, it was his big hit “Blue Suede Shoes” that brought on the deluge.

At first, the crowd seemed unsure if the show would go on, what with the musicians being from out of town and all. It was raining, as my father was fond of saying, like a cow pissing on a flat rock. As if awaiting further instructions, Perkins and his band stopped playing but didn’t leave the stage.