The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (19 page)

Excerpt from
Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

I’ve come to learn a few things about the way fame changes people. I’m not talking about me. Those changes are evident to anyone who bothers to look. I’m talking about the way people react to fame when they’re in the presence of it.

Imagine losing your private life when you’re only seventeen years old.

When you’re approached by someone with something nice to say, imagine looking at that person and wondering what he or she wants. That’s a terribly cynical outlook, and yet it’s inevitable, too.

Imagine being asked, repeatedly, for just a few minutes of your time. If you say no, you’re an asshole. If you take the time to explain that if you gave a few minutes to everyone who wanted it, that none of your minutes would belong to you anymore, you’re an asshole.

In many respects, I was fortunate. Other than the months I was living in Los Angeles, falling in deep with drugs, I never ran with an entourage. Frank and Trevor Feeney kept a tight circle with me. My only family was Grammy, so I didn’t have a lot of people coming to me with their hand out. I’ve lived almost exclusively in the town where I grew up, and people here gave me a certain amount of latitude (although, on the flip side, they’re also more likely to tell me flat out that I’m a disappointment to them).

Last year, after I bubbled into the news again, and again for all the wrong reasons, a Hollywood producer approached me. He wanted to make a reality TV show out of my life. We never got far enough along in our talks to discuss money, so maybe I’m an idiot for having turned him away. I just didn’t want to enter that cauldron again. Reality TV? No, thanks. For me, plain old reality has been difficult enough.

35

At lunch, Raj filled in the details that wouldn’t have been in a newspaper story.

“He’s on a rig in the Bakken,” he said. “He left a couple of days after—well, you know, after all that stuff at Feeney’s.”

That clarified everything and exactly nothing. The most pregnant question of all: How does a guy go from greasepaint thespian to grease monkey rig hand in a week? Raj didn’t have all the answers, but he closed the gaps that were within his reach.

“I took Pop to my apartment that morning after we woke up at your place,” he told me, leaning into his plate of nachos. “Did you see him getting drunk? I didn’t see it. Too much going on.”

“I didn’t see it,” I said. “I should have.”

“He didn’t want to go to his house,” Raj said. “He said he was still hungover, so I was like, ‘I got a couch.’ My roommate was all, ‘That’s Hugo Hunter on our couch.’ Yeah. My dad.”

“Wha
t’d
Hugo say?”

Raj sat back in his chair. “You know, the same stuff. He was sorry. He needed to get his shit together. I’ve heard it before.”

“We all have.”

“Yeah. So he called a day or so later and said he was getting a lift to Williston, that there was a rig job waiting for him. He said he loves that Amber woman and that he had to grow up.”

“Did he say where he’ll be?”

“No. He said h
e’d
call me every couple of weeks and stay in touch. You want me to let you know if I hear from him?”

“Tha
t’d
be great, Raj.”

“No problem. He said he really felt like this time it was going to work out for him.”

“Wha
t’d
you say?”

“I wished him luck. What else could I do?”

Nothing. It wasn’t a question that demanded an answer.

“I hope it works for him,” Raj said, “but I’ve got my own stuff going on. You know?”

I reached across the table and snared a nacho off his plate and popped it in my mouth, and I shrugged.

I can’t say I was surprised by Raj’s attitude, though I was sorry to hear it. That’s what Hugo tended to do. H
e’d
grind on you and grind on you with his dreams and schemes, and by the time he came up with something that might work, you were too exhausted to invest more than middling hope in it.

The fact was, the oil field sounded like a half-decent idea to me. It had its dangers and cautionary tales, sure, but it also had things Hugo badly needed: a job and money. I also couldn’t discount the potential benefits of having his time and attention focused. That’s how boxing had first beguiled him and then held him close. When he was doing it, when he was turned intently toward a goal, he was, at once, more of a danger to his opponent and less a danger to himself.

Raj had made the simple and sane decision to protect himself. H
e’d
let hope in—he had youth on his side and could make that investment freely—and h
e’d
gone on with his own life. I had to concede that, whatever I thought of his mother and his grandfather, h
e’d
been raised well. I could sit there and condemn their actions, which
I’d
witnessed and which I believed I could see in full, but I couldn’t say anything negative about the results. And given the time that had passed us by, perhaps it was time for me to let it go.

36

Nobody at the
Herald-Gleaner
took my weeklong interlude as an opportunity to clean the joint up. I returned that afternoon to the same old workspace in the same old dingy corner of the office and with the same old Trimear preoccupied with the same old nonsense.

Over the years,
I’d
seen a few colleagues sat down for various transgressions, most of them specious. The truly gifted problem employees find a way to exercise just enough incompetence that it’s stealthily subversive, and thus it inspires only heartburn among the bosses. It takes a consistently solid citizen like me to commit a suspension-worthy sin through accepted editorial means.

The fortunate ones aren’t made to come back. They get pink-slipped, we end up having a glorious drunk in their front yard as a fuck you to the man, and they turn up a few months or years later in a far better place than Billings, Montana. Rick Westphal, truly the worst of the editors
I’d
had at the
Herald-Gleaner
, once shit-canned a reporter, Holly Hawkins, because sh
e’d
had the temerity to put in freedom-of-information requests on the property tax records of every elected official in Billings and had discovered that, lo and behold, a third of them were delinquent on their bills. Sh
e’d
approached them all, asked why, gotten a bunch of worthless equivocations, and set about writing the story under the theory that, hey, you might want to know that the folks in charge of the public trust are themselves not trustworthy. The city attorney at the time, a fetid wasteland of human worthlessness named Calvin Tandy, walked into the newsroom, strode up to Holly’s desk, and said, “Darling, that story will never see print.” Ten minutes later, he was out of Westphal’s office and Hawkins was in. The very definition of a raw deal, except for this: two years later, Hawkins won a Pulitzer in Omaha for an exposé on a buried sex scandal at a parochial school. Lucky for her that she wasn’t good enough for the
Herald-Gleaner
.

Newspapers are funny places, man, and when I say
funny
, I mean it in every constellation. If one gets inside your skin, you keep showing up because you know that someday something extraordinary is going to go down, and there’s no group of people funnier, more caustic, more bitter, more twisted than your coworkers, and you can’t imagine experiencing it anywhere else. And in all the in-between times, when nothing of much import happens and the stories move across your eyes like gray static and you sell out your soul bit by bit, you show up because you have nothing better to do. And you’re completely OK with that trade.

I walked in, and the downturned faces greeted me as if
I’d
been away at a dear family member’s funeral. I got grim half smiles, the unspoken part being this: “It was a personnel matter and William Pennington didn’t say anything, but you were gone and we know what happened, and you’re back now and this must be so embarrassing for you.”

I settled in. “Gene,” I said.

“Hey, you’re back.” Trimear dropped some page dummies on their edge, squaring them off in his hand. “You ready?”

“Yeah, sure, you know. What’s the plan?”

“Typical Monday night. Slow. Need you to fetch phones and take some scores.”

“Sure.”

“Need you to go out to Sidney on Wednesday.”

“What for?” Trimear had just put me on a five-hundred-mile round trip to Montana’s eastern edge and back. Driving straight into the sun on the way out, having it beat on my head on the way home. Endless asphalt ribbons. Not the duty I preferred.

“Eagles are gonna be really good this year, maybe the best in Class A. Need a story for the football section.”

If you take on eastern Montana by way of Interstate 94—and you really should exhaust all other possibilities for your life before you do—you’re likely to be taken in by the illusion that you’re pressing on in a straight, unyielding line. With the exception of a few scrubby buttes and river-crossed badlands, the route is clear to the horizon.

That’s the illusion. The fact is that the road unrolls north and east, in rough parallel to the flow of the Yellowstone River. Knowing this does little to stem the narcotic dullness of the drive, but I suppose it salves the soul a bit. There’s more wonder nearby than finds its way to your optic nerve. Sure, you’ve still got to get where you’re going—for me, on that particular Wednesday, it was a little boomtown on the Montana edge of the biggest domestic oil play going, 260 miles from the sun-kissed warmth of Lainie’s bed—but at least you can be content that something’s out there. Rattlesnakes and irrigation ditches and verdant fields and shattering solitude, but something. Something besides you and the road and the odd car passing you in an inexplicable hurry and the truckers opposite you headed for Billings and Bozeman and Missoula and, blessedly, Seattle.

I’d
made two calls the night before. The first, to Sidney football coach Barry Brill, had told me that
I’d
need to thread the needle between two-a-day practices, and that’s why I was on the road at five a.m. while my love snoozed back at her house. The second, to a cell phone number that Raj had given me earlier that day, told Hugo to expect me the next evening. We agreed to meet in Williston, just forty-five miles from where I was staying.

In Miles City, the midpoint of my drive,
I’d
veered off the highway for a couple of Egg McMuffins and a tanker-sized cup of coffee. Something was up with my appetite. There was no pretending that it wasn’t so, not anymore, not as I fought every morning to get my jeans above the centerline and my protruding gut pushed hard at my shirt buttons. You could make the argument that I needed the weight; my doctor certainly had, ad nauseam, over the years. My inveterate smoking habit had made a hollow-chested freak out of me, but it had also served the more noble purpose of tamping down my appetite. I was swinging the other way now, headed for fat, happy, pink-lunged land.

Nearly eighty miles on, I swung off the interstate at Glendive and picked my way straight north, where the Yellowstone jogged toward its meet-up with the Missouri. The scoria-scarred badlands fell behind me, the river held me tight on the starboard side, and I made steady progress into a fertile valley ruled by sugar beets.
I’d
been born in Montana, raised here, never left for any extended amount of time, and this country always surprised me. It’s the Montana nobody thinks of—no mountains, no deep, cold lakes, but still starkly beautiful, with horizons that stretch in all directions. It’s a hard land shaped by hard people, and those austere families who made their stands here have reaped the bounty, first in agriculture and now in oil. The countryside crawled with land men, up to their necks in paperwork in the county courthouses as they researched mineral rights, and myriad were the modest farms that now sported telltale rows of holding tanks and the masts of oil rigs reaching for the sun. People here knew about booms and busts. They built their lives around them, either riding high or riding out. Now, with the technological changes that allowed rigs to tap into pockets of oil previously unreachable, by drilling sideways into the giving earth, some people said this wasn’t just another boom but the fundamental reconfiguration of a region.

As the highway dumped me out into the wide arms of Sidney, Montana, I couldn’t say that I disagreed with that assessment. On every corner, it seemed, a new motel took shape in wooden frames and Tyvek. Clumps of dried mud covered the road, the leavings of the big trucks that came through at all hours, all day.
I’d
read the alternating accounts, the joyous recitations of the money and people pouring in and the grim outlook for such basics as wastewater treatment and bridge maintenance. Jobs and cash multiplied and beckoned, and unknown faces appeared with greater frequency. Restaurants had no end of customers and no source of labor, what with the paychecks being greater in the patch. Coffers filled and crime flourished. At every turn, a trade-off.

I checked my watch. 9:37. I had a coach to find and a story to mold. I turned off the main road and plunged in.