Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou (9 page)
Read Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou Online
Authors: Clay Reynolds
If the people there were “lost,” they didn’t know it or care very much. The only salvation they sought was in church, not in geography. If you knew how to get into Wichita Falls to shop at Sears for Christmas, over the Red River to “trash hill” to buy a pint of Oklahoma whiskey to “naughty up” the egg nog, and down to Fort Worth for the Fat Stock Show and Rodeo or to Dallas for the State Fair, that was all the direction you needed. County roads had numbers, but no one knew them. They were the “Country Club Road”, “The Groesbeck Road”, “Medicine Mound Road”, “The Lake Road”, “Wolf Hunt Road”, “Beasley’s Cave Road”, and “The Airport Road”. Who needed numbers in a place where everyone knew where he was all the time? “You go out to Connally’s farm an’ take a left at the watermelon patch.” Never mind that it’s February and a melon patch looked pretty much like any other field. If you don’t know where Connally’s melon patch was, you have no business running around the county in the first place.
At least one writer I know once said that he was a “herder of words.” I think most writers are “herders of souls.” Not shepherds—evangelism isn’t their purpose. Instead they gather souls together less for counting than for assessing. The small towns of West Texas—we always called it West Texas (it was, after all, west of Fort Worth)—are less places than they are collections of souls. Some of the best souls found peace in the cemeteries there. Some fled never to return. And some are still there. But a few who left, come back from time to time to consider the truer values of a place that’s invisible to the skiers on their way to and from the snowcaps of Colorado and street markets of Santa Fe. These, I think, are the writers, and in their return is where their ideas come from; in the lies they tell about their memories is where the truth of their fiction may be found.
###
So I decided to revisit my small town. I had been there infrequently throughout the years both before and since becoming a writer. Usually, though, I would go and “hide” at her house, secreting myself away from those who I might know or recognize. I didn’t realize it until that particular visit, but I didn’t want to see any change. I suppose I shared that with the Comanche.
During that visit, it snowed. My wife, a Yankee-bred girl who regards anyplace with fewer than two malls a small town, insisted we take a walk on an icy morning. We strolled through the “downtown” area—two brick-paved blocks of century-old buildings, most of which boast newer fronts on the street level at least. The snow hid a lot of defect and ruin from my eyes, but it also revealed something worse. I saw the old Dinner Bell Café where travelers ate while waiting for a train, and the Liberty Hotel, where thousands of weary pilgrims found a night’s rest on their journeys. Both were crumbling as was one of the two depots suffered to remain standing and spared the bulldozer and wrecking ball’s terror. I discovered a hundred-year-old building which had once been the only hotel in town. It was a warehouse of some sort for a while. Now, though, all the floors have collapsed, but the rickety wooden fire escape is still in place, testimony to the pragmatism of a by-gone era that thought any way out of a burning building was better than none, whether it was “up to code” or not.
I was disturbed by much that I saw during my snowy walk. Places I remembered were gone, shut down, boarded-up, gutted by fire or demolition, changed. There was a real estate office where my daddy took me for fifty-cent burr haircuts every June first. A dry cleaners had invaded the drugstore’s space where we used to sit in booths and drink soda-fountain Cokes and milkshakes. The Teen Canteen, which had formerly been a Church of Christ before they sold it to the city and built a new one, was boarded up. I learned to dance in there, tasted my first sip of wine in the parking lot, fell in love, had my heart broken more than once. It was in ruin, and honeysuckle vines covered the old porch where once an outraged coalition of Baptist and Church of Christ parents descended on a Valentine’s Day dance and raided it and jerked their mortified and sinful children home by their indiscreet ears while the band continued to play and the Methodists laughed. Someone had plowed up and planted a winter garden in the vacant lot where I learned to hit Tommy Nelson’s slider—if you got it over the holly hedge of Old Man Waterby’s backyard, it was a ground-rule homer, but you had to buy a new ball. I figure Old Man Waterby probably collected a couple of hundred baseballs in those days. We didn’t need Freddy Kruger or Jason. We were terrified enough of him. The rumor was that he had axe-murdered and cut up his wife and mailed her in little pieces packed in dry ice, back to her father in Tennessee, Railway Express. Everyone knew it, but because he was rich, no one would arrest him.
I saw him during that visit. He was old, frail, and kind of pathetically harmless as he inched his way down an icy walk to retrieve his
Fort Worth Star Telegram.
His sweater was ratty, and the house that we had all thought of as opulent and befitting a man of great wealth was in need of paint and a new roof. He had a fifteen-year-old Chevrolet rusting in the driveway. How could I have been afraid of him? I started to ask him if he still had all those baseballs, but I didn’t. I was afraid he might also still have an axe hidden away somewhere, and I remain convinced that he spends his nights counting his money.
The capper, I suppose, was walking past the high school. In small towns, life centers on the high school. My high school was a turn-of-the-century, three-story affair with hardwood floors and huge sash windows in response to a land which thought air conditioning was a dip in a stock tank and standing naked in the summer wind. There was a huge masonry arch some ancient senior class had paid to have built, and it looked like a school. But it was gone. In its place was a cold steel and yellow brick building with no windows, no expansive quad, and only one story. It had no character, no sense of tradition. Even the arch was gone.
Later that day, I visited the cemetery where my father and grandfather and other family members are buried. It too seemed cleaner, smaller, less ominous and oppressive than I remembered it. The story is that the cemetery was founded on the spot where Indians had killed and scalped a cowboy named Earle. His grave was the first one, dug before the townsite was founded. I’d never been able to find it, and I couldn’t find it under the snow that day, either. Someone had put some plastic flowers on my grandfather’s grave. They were red, once, but in the snow they looked pink and faded. The granite headstones announced dates and names, but they didn’t talk about years of back-breaking toil my father put in on an ungrateful and unforgiving railroad. My grandfather’s stone said nothing of the fact that he was a wrangler and a horseman, or that his father had fought in the War Against Northern Aggression, as my family always called it, before being burned out in Arkansas and coming to Texas to raise horses. None of the stones there, in fact, bespoke the family histories of those who lay beneath them. I knew there were good people there, bad people as well, and their lives were as much a part of the memories I had of the small town as were my own.
In short, the town wasn’t there anymore. It’s likely that it never was there, not as I remember it and imagine it in my writing. It’s as much a part of a mythic past as Old Man Waterby’s supposedly checkered life, as much a part of the fabric of imagination as the significance of a ratty, weed-grown patch of earth we called a “quad” at the high school. In my memory—and in my writing—the buildings are taller, the summers hotter, the winters colder, the winds stronger than they’ll ever be again. The people are better, and worse, than they ever were, their secrets darker, their lives entirely more interesting.
But somehow, the place still exists in my mind, and somehow, I continue to believe it’s more fascinating than the glass and steel, concrete and neon of any urban setting. In my mind, there’s more of a story to tell there than I’ll ever discover in Dallas or Houston, New York or Los Angeles. There, indiscretions and conflicts are commonplace, unremarkable, and expected. In a small town, what would be a ripple in the metropolis rolls with the force of a tidal wave as it envelopes the sensibilities and excites the outrage or admiration of all. There’s a kind of brutality there that urbanites for all their ghettos, barrios, and crime can never understand; there’s also a kind of acceptance and forgiveness that few city dwellers ever experience.
###
As a writer, then, that has been my main subject. I won’t say that I haven’t or won’t write about the cities I know, the cities I have visited. Indeed, I have set scenes already in San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and New York. But I still feel obliged to tell stories about what made me become a writer in the first place, about a place that is as infinite in its variety as it is static in its sense of time and change.
So, regardless of whether they drive Porches or pickups, of whether they deal with male menopause or milo harvesting, of whether they prefer Brooks Brothers and L.L. Bean to leather jackets and bullhide boots, of whether they drink Perrier and martinis instead of Lone Star and a “Col’ Co-cola,” all writers must find their ideas in the stuff of what they know, what they have done, else, what they create will be fabricated, false. Whether they publish or not, whether they succeed or not, the motivation that must guide writers must be found in the fabric of their imaginations. It is there they will find the profits of their prose, their personal fulfillment, and it is from there they will tell their best and truest stories, relying less on the truth and more on the genuineness of their memories.
IF THEY DON’T WIN IT’S A SHAME:
BASEBALL AS MYTH AND EQUALIZER
“This is the last pure place where Americans dream.
The last great arena, the last green arena,
where everybody can learn the lessons of life.”
—Marcus Giamatti
I’ve always loved baseball, even though I haven’t always been aware of it. That is not to say that I’ve always been the fan of any particular team. Loyalties change with geography unless you grow up in a professional club’s immediate area; when I was a kid, Texas had no major league. There was the Texas League, arguably the greatest minor league source of the greatest players in the history of the game, but the “big leagues” played far away. Maybe because of that, I’ve always rooted for the underdogs. In my very distant memories, I can remember listening to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio, but only on nights when the Fort Worth Cats were out of town. The station that broadcast the Cats’ home games wasn’t equipped to follow them on the road; when the Cats were away, it carried the Dodgers. I had no idea what part of Texas Brooklyn might be in, but I liked their scrappiness, and I felt betrayed when they abandoned Gotham for the land of sushi and tofu.
Later in my adolescence, for reasons I cannot explain, I followed the Cubs and suffered through their continuing series of heartbreaking seasons and their dedication to tradition. But the lighting of Wrigley Field darkened my enthusiasm some. I had a similar affinity for the Red Sox, largely because of Ted Williams and Carlton Fisk; but that’s now over, since the “Curse of the Bambino” has been broken. The Sox may have the pennant, but they lost their gritty glamour. The Yankees were also a dominating team of my youth; I suppose Ruth and Gehrig cast too large a shadow for latter-day players to escape: DiMaggio, Berra, Mantle, Maris enlarged the Bronx Bomber legend to a point where no pretender from anywhere else could diminish it. The Georgia Peach, Stan the Man, Dizzie Dean, Hammerin’ Hank, The Texas Express and The Big Unit might be similar heroes of the diamond. But they weren’t wearing pinstripes. They didn’t play in the House that Ruth Built.
Later, professional baseball came to Texas—sort of; I mean, it was indoors and played on a rug. The Astrodome, of course. Initially, they tried to grow grass under special glass panels in the roof. It worked, but it made the field intolerably hot for the players. They took up the grass and put down plastic—Astroturf was born. Something in baseball, though, began to die.
I still tried to work up some enthusiasm for the Astros. I followed them to their mid-eighties pennant race, and I wept with them when they lost. I even pulled for them more recently, but, in the long run, nothing helped. Even new digs with real grass and a retractable roof and a freight-train fast-baller couldn’t improve their chances. When I moved nearer the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, I started out every season hanging in there with the Rangers. Their roller-coaster-ride seasons and tendency to trade away great talent that often comes back to beat them beggars enthusiasm. They seem to be dedicated to being the team that “almost was.” Even Nolan Ryan’s arrival couldn’t inspire them to overcome the handicap of having been the Washington Senators—“First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.” That’s a joke only a true baseball fan understands.
In my childhood I was a much more loyal fan of the game. I played it, of course, in backyards and vacant lots, used a ratty old glove, a splintery bat, and a lopsided ball. It was a summertime staple. I could quote batting averages, RBIs and ERAs with all my friends. I knew the names and numbers of all the players, yearned to see them in their faraway parks, strained to hear the static-filled radio play-by-play, and ultimately squinted at their grainy black-and-white images on television and in
Life
magazine. I collected their cards, fondled them lovingly, traded them, and finally wore them out so much that they would be worthless and illegible today even if my mother hadn’t thrown them out. Like most kids my age, I loved baseball. It was an obsession.
And naturally, I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to be on a regular team. There was no tee-ball then, no coach-pitch or machine-pitch. Kids started organized ball when they turned eleven or twelve. They were expected already to know the fundamentals of the game, and most did. Because the town was small, there were a limited number of teams, which meant a limited number of games and an even more limited opportunity to play in one of them. The park was a hard-packed dirt field surrounded by a splintering grandstand built decades before when there was a city team. It always seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and during one heavy windstorm, it did. Coaches, typically, were mostly dads and big brothers, mostly interested in seeing their sons and nephews play, mostly ignorant of how to manage kids. The leagues had no minimum participation rules then, so most of the players who weren’t related to a coach or one of his buddies were usually stuck “squatting in Splinter City, warming the pine.” I was among them.
In fairness, though, I never could play the game well. I could hit the ball a ton, and often where I wanted to, but since I was fat and clumsy (“Husky,” my mother said; my uniform had to be special ordered.), I was too slow to run the bases well. I could catch okay, so when I did get in a game, I was always stuck out in right field, kicking the tops off of weeds and counting odd-shaped rocks, daydreaming, until somebody accidentally hit one my way. At that point, I would wake up (too late) and chase it until it rolled dead while the batter scampered home. During my brief stint in organized youth ball, I mostly played “left bench.”
Certainly, we had no junior high team, and—football being “king”—my high school eliminated baseball from the varsity schedule long before I was born. After the grandstand blew away, they graded the old field and made it a parking lot for the football stadium. But we still played every chance we got. And in the games we organized ourselves in vacant lots and back yards, everyone got in and played all the positions. Left on their own, kids seemed to have an innate sense of fairness and a democratic distribution of fun. (One old coach I know opined that probably the best thing that could happen to youth league baseball would be the mandatory posting of signs on all ballpark gates: “No parents allowed.”) We all—boys, girls, all ages, even the kid crippled by polio—played.
I remember one neighborhood game in particular: Tommy Hatcher’s backyard. A gravel street and a bar ditch ran through the outfield, and a home run was anything over the Brownlow’s fence, since the gate was always locked. Home plate was under a chinaberry tree, and first base backed up to a barn, so you couldn’t overrun it. We started early on a Saturday morning and played till full dark. There were no coaches, just kids managing by fiat and keeping meticulous account of batting orders. Dads, though, officiated. My father umpired for a while, so did Tommy’s, and other dads from the neighborhood drifted over and took turns calling balls and strikes, safes and outs. There were no rhubarbs, although a lot of calls were loudly disputed. Mothers brought out Kool-Aid and homemade cookies. The teams changed as kids came and went to do chores, eat dinner, go get haircuts or a new pair of Buster Browns; but on each side, a nucleus stayed the same. We played fifty-two innings. I don’t remember the score. It wasn’t important, wasn’t the point. The point was the game, itself. It was like school, like church, like visiting the old folks on Sunday afternoons. Baseball was something we just did.
###
Somewhere between that great series of Southwest Conference Football Championships racked up by UT and the Dallas Cowboys’ series of Super Bowl triumphs, I sort of lost interest in baseball. Even then, though, I was never comfortable when some beer-soaked, triple-chinned gridiron fan asserted that the NFL had replaced the American and National Leagues as the purveyors of the National Pastime. Tom Landry’s Cowboys might call themselves “America’s Team,” but I knew in my heart that they would never replace the fun-to-hate Yankees, no matter what one thought of George Steinbrenner.
Football fans were, I suspected, ignoring an observable fact: A sweaty light-dozen muscular hulks in plastic armor running around once a week on a polyethylene carpet under a climate controlled ceiling could never replace the sweet symmetry and gentle grace of a baseball team. No football field and its crowded, raucous din could substitute for the aroma of grass on a diamond on a summer evening and the soughing ripple of conversations in the outfield bleachers. No football squad, hunkered down and muscled up on a striped grid could rival the sight of a bunch of lithe and limber guys standing with casual ease around a perfectly manicured diamond, scratching their crotches, spitting tobacco juice, and trying not to daydream until a hard liner shoots toward them and they sprint swiftly to snatch it from the air and smoothly fire it back to a teammate for an easy out. No football play with its body blocks and shoe-string tackles could ever match the charm and grace of nine men moving perfectly together like parts of a well-oiled machine. No marching band could match the steady rhythm of an organ building tempo for a key pitch. Football—and its attendant indoor imitator, basketball—could never be pastimes. They were for fanatics. Baseball was for fans.
The arguments, however, became more pointed.
“Baseball,” a friend of mine asserted back in the mid-seventies, “is ten minutes of excitement crammed into three hours.”
“You just don’t understand it,” I argued. I became the kid I once was, picking up a timeworn gauntlet. “Look: there’s a pitcher and a batter. That’s the focus. The pressure is always there, first pitch to last out. The fielders, the catcher, the umpires—everyone else becomes integral to that center stage of dramatic action. From the wind-up to the swing, everything hinges on those two guys: who they are, their records, their tendencies, what they might or might not do. Every play is different, every situation unique. Prediction is only speculation. On every pitch, everything changes priority—the count, the score, the inning, who’s on base, who’s on deck, who’s in the bullpen—and it keeps right on changing, for twenty-seven outs, unless the score is tied. Then it changes again. It changes until somebody wins. It
is
exciting, damnit!”
He laughed. “I’d rather watch golf.”
I couldn’t see how anyone could fail to understand the sublime intensity of a ball hurtling toward a strike zone at nearly 100 miles per hour while a man with a round piece of wood in his hand attempted to “hit it where they ain’t.” It was raw ability versus raw strategy, timing vying with confidence, concentration pitted against focus. It was the only game in which the
defense
controlled the ball, for God’s sake. Baseball, I continued to argue, required
intelligence
to play. Instinct is secondary, talent is secondary. Even athletic ability is secondary. As one first baseman put it not long ago when he was accosted by a female reporter because of his unathletic, unhealthy habits, “Lady, I’m no athlete. I’m a baseball player.” Baseball is a game that’s played in the mind as it’s worked out on the diamond. What counts is the player’s mental alacrity, his ability to think at least three moves ahead, to know what to do in the event that any of a hundred of a thousand possibilities unfold with the rapidity of the swing of a bat.
I also pointed out that the most often asked question by fans at a football or basketball game is, “What happened?” But I forgot about instant replay on modern scoreboards. “There’s nothing in baseball to match a two-minute drill,” my friend contended in rebuttal. “Or a draw play that works, or a Razzle-Dazzle, or a Hail Mary, or a broken play that brings fans to their feet, or an end-run that breaks out behind a wall of blockers.” His basketball fan buddies made similar arguments for a fast break or inside hookshot or three-point field goal from mid-court. We didn’t even get into hockey.
I had to admit that a routine double-play, a hit-and-run, sacrifice fly, or intentional walk didn’t quite measure up, ordinarily, to those flurries of action. Even a close play at the plate, a diving catch at the warning track, or a suicide squeeze couldn’t really offer such excitement. Figuring the match-ups of lefty versus righty, pitching changes, and pinch-hitting all took time and slowed the pace. I confessed to myself that the specter of twenty-two men slamming their well-padded bodies against each other in fury every twenty-five seconds has more innate appeal than nine guys in knee-britches kicking the tops off of weeds, scratching and spitting, and waiting for something to happen. In theory, baseball is a noncontact sport that depends on developing strategy more than reactive response. So maybe it wasn’t America’s game, after all. Americans have never been all that much interested in strategy or response.
“Kicking butts and taking names,” my friends insisted. “That’s the American way.”
###
I knew they were wrong, but I had no more arguments to muster. I hadn’t kept up with the game for years. I didn’t know any of the current players besides those whose names were in the news, more often than not because of some crime or scandal or outrageous money deal. So I tried watching a few innings on television, the estimable
Game of the Week
program. It was a revelation. I was shocked to realize that in the decades gone by, somehow, the players had all become mere boys, ten-to-fifteen years younger than I. Some of them didn’t look as if they shaved more than once a week. What, I wondered, happened to those old guys who used to be so formidable? Where were the baggy, woolen uniforms, the jowly pitchers, the stocky catchers? They all shaved every day, it seemed, and some were clearly having their hair styled. Who designed those odd little O.D.-style caps they were wearing? What was up with the plastic batting helmets? When did they stop chewing tobacco, smoking in the dugout? Where did those garishly colored uniforms come from? Why did their pant legs go down over their ankles, hiding their stockings and stirrups? Where was the umpire’s heavy balloon-style chest-protector? What was all this noise about designated hitters and free agency, and when did they start sliding into the bases head first? (My Little League coach would have benched me for that, had he not had me permanently on the bench, anyway.)