Hello Darlin' (4 page)

When America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, my mother burst into tears, crying
over what I can still hear her calling
“the slaughter of those poor people.” Days later a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
She continued to cry. I couldn’t comprehend what had happened or what it meant until
I was much older and knew that being remorseful and compassionate had been the correct
way to react.

It wasn’t the popular view. At the time, most Americans were brainwashed into having
contempt for the yellow race, seeing them as inhuman, even subhuman, and I’m convinced
that sort of conditioning directly contributed to our involvement in the Korean and
Vietnamese Wars. Until many of us woke up during the sixties, we were led to believe
we were correct in exterminating those people.

In the fall, my mother sent me to Woodstock Country School, a boarding school in Woodstock,
Vermont. Though I’d been away twelve of my thirteen years, Mom was concerned about
how I’d react to being sent away, but I was delighted to escape Richard. She drove
me there in the Cadillac, the backseat filled with my trunk. I was assigned a roommate,
Roger Phillips. Mother and I met him and his family as we unpacked. We had a good
afternoon, laughing as we kept bumping into each other. The Phillipses seemed like
a great family.

But just when I was nearly settled my mother took me outside in the hall.

“Larry,” she said in a hushed voice, “I want to tell you something.”

Since I’d never been to boarding school, I expected some sort of lecture.

“Yes, Mother?”

“You know that Roger and his family are Jewish?”

I had no idea what a Jew was. I’d never thought about such things. Mother didn’t know
me. How could she? We’d never spent any time together. With great bravado and fake
worldliness, I said, “I know he’s a Jew.”

“I wanted to make sure.”

“Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

Not once in my life had I ever judged a person by race or religion, and I didn’t start
then. Nor have I since.

From the moment Roger and I moved in together, we’ve been best friends. We had something
in common right away. He brought a beautiful white gelding named Stormy. He got me
interested in riding, taught me how to ride bareback and vault a horse. I loved it
so much I ended up working every weekend for two years at Fergie’s stables, near school.
I mucked out stalls for fifty cents a day, plus a great meal at quitting time and
the owners’ trust to exercise their horses.

At school, I also made another lifelong friend, Severn Darden. He grew up to be a
well-known character actor, and we worked together many times. But Sev was already
a character in school. I remember him visiting me in Connecticut over spring break.
Though fifteen, he drove from New Orleans to Connecticut by himself. Not only that,
he showed up in a 1937 Rolls convertible
and
he brought a bottle of Courvoisier for my mother.

Mother was somewhat taken aback. But she learned to love him, as we all did, for being
an original till the day he died.

Compared to those two worldly guys, I had so much to learn. Woodstock was the first
coed school I’d ever attended. It was a progressive institution, a bastion of liberal
educational theory and thought where students created the rules. Yet, as they explained
on the first day’s indoctrination, there was no smoking, no drinking, and no sex.
The three biggies, they called them.

I broke them all.

*   *   *

I didn’t actually have to try. The school year was only a few months old when Klaus
Heinmann, one of the boys in the dorm, taught us how to make applejack. We bought
a barrel of cider for $16, added sugar and yeast, then let it set for a while in the
cellar next to the coal furnace. After it fermented, we took it outside and let it
freeze. The part that didn’t freeze was pure alcohol. We got drunker than shit a
few times. Then Klaus went blind for about three days after one batch, and that ended
that experiment.

The other two rules toppled when I started going with “an older woman.” She was a
junior, and gorgeous. At sixteen, she was already a woman, light-years ahead of me
in worldliness, relationships, everything. I wasn’t even aware of it myself until
I saw her smoke. That said a lot. She must’ve thought I had potential, because one
day she offered me a cigarette. I said no. I wasn’t going to smoke cigarettes.

“If you take a puff,” she said, “I’ll let you put your hand on my breast.”

Well, I smoked for twenty years after that. I didn’t stop until I was thirty-four
years old.

The next year she took up with another guy, leaving me with a broken heart and a nasty
smoking habit that nearly led to me burning down the boys’ dorm. It was late one cold
winter night, and Roger and I were smoking, flicking butts onto the roof of the porch
outside our window. We didn’t know there was an oil mop out there. One of the butts
landed on it and within minutes the mop began to smolder. We didn’t even notice.

A movie was just letting out directly across the street. A bunch of sailors were among
the crowd bundling up as they hit the cold air. One of the sailors noticed the smoke
and yelled, “Fire!” Soon the group was running toward the dorm as if they had been
called to battle stations.

Hearing the commotion, I stuck my head out the window and saw the sailors staring
at me. Then I noticed the smoking mop.

The dorm was a little wooden house, a 150-year-old tinderbox, and our room was on
the second floor. Thinking I’d save the situation, I reached out the window, managed
to grab the mop, brought it inside, and tried to shake the fire out. Sparks flew in
all directions. In an instant, the curtains caught on fire, followed by the bedding,
and soon we were engulfed in flame. I was so stupid.

Roger responded much better. He ran downstairs, grabbed the fire
extinguisher, put the fire out just as the headmaster stepped through the smoke,
and received the hero’s congratulations he was due. I was suspended for two weeks.
I accepted the punishment but not the blame. I’ve always known the real culprit was
my girlfriend, who let me touch her breast if I tried her cigarette.

*   *   *

Later that year my mother came to see me. She hired a horse and carriage to take us
around the lovely Vermont town. I sensed she had something important to tell me because
of the way she was acting. She told the driver to stop, collected her thoughts, and
looked deep into my eyes. She told me that during the summer she was going on the
road in
Annie Get Your Gun
and wanted me to come with her.

“There’re a couple of small parts,” she said. “Hellers going to have one. I’d love
to have you in it too.”

I went numb. I had no aspiration to be onstage. Worse, the thought of being with Richard
for a year on the road made me dumbstruck.

Mother anxiously awaited an answer.

My mind was blank.

I remember staring straight at the horse’s ass in front of me, and suddenly I got
an idea.

“Mom, I really want to be a cowboy.”

The thought had never entered my mind before. I was inspired by the horse’s ass.

“I want to go live with Dad in Texas and be a cowboy.”

My mother was disappointed but took it well. She said she understood.

“I know you want to be with your father. That’s okay.”

*   *   *

So that summer, after school ended, I took the train to Texas from New York all by
myself. The trip was uneventful until I stepped onto the platform in Weatherford.
Then it was like entering a new world. I
didn’t look anything like a fifteen-year-old from Texas. I wore a Brooks Brothers
suit and tie, had thick glasses, and my hair was done up as was stylish in New York,
in a big wavy pompadour.

“First thing we’ll do is take a trip to the barbershop,” said my dad, who kept his
hair in the same buzz cut he’d been given upon joining the National Guard.

A buzz cut was unimaginable. I begged Dad to let me keep my hair a little longer.
Eventually he said okay, but he made me agree to a deal.

“You have to play football,” he said.

“Why do I have to play football?”

“Because in Texas, men play football.”

I made the team as a second-string defensive end, but my gridiron glory was short-lived.
In the first game I tripped over my own foot and broke my ankle. For the next few
months I hobbled around on crutches, but that turned out to be a boon to my social
life, attracting lots of sympathy from the girls on campus.

Then I met Joey Byers, who became my first love. She was beautiful and kind and a
year older and much smarter than me. We were hot and heavy when my ankle healed and
my dad told me that I had to go back to the football team. I didn’t want to. I’d endured
enough pain and suffering and asked if there wasn’t something else I could do.

“The Golden Gloves,” he said.

“What?”

“Boxing. You can box in the Golden Gloves tournament.”

I saw what was going on, but there was no way I could be as tough as my dad. Ben Hagman
was a two-fisted, drinking, good old Texas boy. He’d spent seven or eight days behind
the German lines during the battle of the Bulge. He’d seen one of his closest buddies
get shot in the head and blown out of their jeep. He’d come back a changed man.

From the day he returned home, he slept with a .45 under his pillow. One night the
neighbor’s cat climbed up on the screen of his bedroom window. Hearing the noise,
my dad grabbed his gun and blew
the cat to pieces. A couple shells went through the bathroom wall of the neighbor’s
house too. No one was hurt, but it scared the hell out of everyone.

Given the choice between football and boxing, I decided it was better to fight one
guy than eleven. I chose the gloves. My coach was Jim Wright, the future Speaker of
the House. I’ve always said I’m sure glad he was my boxing coach and not my acting
coach. But he was a good boxing coach, big on strategy, always advising me to jab,
jab, jab, “and when you see an opening, go for it!” I won a few fights as a light
welterweight, which boosted my ego. Even better, I thought Joey, who liked me for
my long hair, liked me even better for being tough in the ring. Later she told me
it was barbarous. Go figure women.

So I kept at it. In the big boxing tournament, my first-round opponent was the toughest
kid in the draw, the bootlegger’s son. He was the toughest kid at school too. That
kid liked to fight in and out of the ring.

I knew I was going to lose. A victory for me would be survival. But I did more than
make it through the fight alive. At the end of three rounds, I was still on my feet,
throwing punches, bouncing off the ropes, bruised but breathing. As expected, the
bootlegger’s son won the bout, taking the fight on points, but I’d broken his ribs
with a flurry of punches and he had to forfeit his next fight. My so-called moral
victory was the talk of school. After that fight, nobody made fun of my hair anymore.

*   *   *

When Dad ran for state senator, I helped “manage” his campaign, which was the epitome
of a grassroots effort. My dad let me drive the two of us across the state while we
sipped bourbon from the bottle and he told stories. Before we’d pull into a little
town, he’d gargle some Listerine, and then heel give his speech in the town square,
his voice blasting out of the loudspeaker we stuck on top of his maroon
Oldsmobile. After, I’d find a shady spot outside of town, pull over, and we’d take
a nap.

I love to remember how much I learned from him. One afternoon we stopped in the countryside
to stretch our legs and I spotted a buzzard. Impulsively, I grabbed the .22 we kept
in the back of the car, and said, “Dad, watch this.” I snapped a shot off. I didn’t
look or anything. But I killed the large bird midflight. It was a brain shot, right
through his head. Probably the luckiest shot of my life. My dad, not happy, said,
“Goddamn, boy, now we have to eat that son of a bitch.”

“Huh?”

“Son, in Texas, we eat what we shoot.”

He wasn’t kidding. That night I ate buzzard for dinner. I learned my lesson. I never
again shot anything I didn’t want to eat.

*   *   *

My first big hunting trip was November 16, a day that many men regarded as sacred
as Christmas, maybe more. It marked the start of deer season. I went with my dad and
seven of his friends. Dad and his buddies leased twenty thousand acres that became
theirs to hunt for ten days. Their annual ritual began with a drive to Fredericksburg.
We started out with three cases of hard liquor, thirty cases of beer, and something
like forty packs of cigarettes. These were the most important ingredients of a good
hunt.

We had our own camp cook, a black man named Tom Simmons. The man was a genius with
a Dutch oven, which we affectionately called Simmons’ Pot. The first night in camp
someone always went out and got a doe for camp meat. Once I shot six squirrels from
a tree in ten seconds, and they went into the pot. So did an armadillo I shot. And
a rattlesnake. Simmons threw everything we brought him in the pot, let it simmer,
seasoned with jalapeño peppers, onion, sage, garlic, and whatever else was handy,
and he’d serve it over corn bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

You couldn’t breathe in that delicious aroma without getting hungry.

“Just lettin’ the juices stew,” he’d say and smile.

We slept in an old tin-sided fishing camp that had seven bunks. I didn’t get one of
those, thank you. Instead my dad handed me a sleeping bag and I made myself comfortable
on the floor. It was fine for the first few nights, but then a norther blew in and
the temperature dropped from seventy degrees to below freezing. Even with the tin
sides tied shut and the stove cranked up, it was still so cold our big old hunting
dog, Nora, curled up next to me, whimpering and shivering. I opened up my sleeping
bag and let her get in. As soon as she got comfy, she pissed all over me.