Chinaberry Sidewalks (22 page)

Was this the same voice that advised me to relax and enjoy the scenery while drowning in the Brazos River, a voice I associated with viable alternatives to hopeless situations—if not the voice of God, certainly a prescient authority acting on behalf of a long-dead relative, preferably Grandma Katie? Or was it my own? I couldn’t decide. No doubt there were some similar speech patterns, but that voice sure as hell didn’t sound like me. I spent a sizeable chunk of nonlinear time considering whether Paw Jim or Sol T had hijacked the afterlife’s public-address system and was wreaking his brand of havoc from the other side. Summarily nixing the possibility that marijuana was causing my brain to malfunction—I’d snuck out behind the garage to smoke some potent grass just before the television show came on—I went on weighing the pros of blowing my head off against the cons of continuing down the road to nowhere.

Just before Glen Campbell announced the John Hartford banjo segment, another voice—the old Tonto-like one familiar from days gone by—offered this pearl of high-toned wisdom:
In order for your life to begin, this has to end
. Now I was really confused. Did “this” mean my miserable existence out here in Podunk, Texas, or was it some cosmic insinuation that I didn’t know my ass from turnip greens? And for that matter, would it be too much to ask that whoever was filling my head with this crap just come out and say he’s pissed off at me for smoking dope behind the garage?

Thankfully, I met a girl who kept my mind from going bonkers. And for a while, she was the answer to every dream that never came true for me. A near-Mensa IQ did nothing to quell Matty Jackson’s appetite for carnal delicacies; if anything, it heightened her desires. A case could be made that intelligence as fierce as Matty’s was animal instinct functioning at its most primal level, citing as evidence the claw marks and bite bruises I was soon wearing like Boy Scout merit badges.

By now you’ll have noticed that my tendency to fall for the girl who was either unattainable or my superior, or both, was truly an Achilles’ heel. Years later, a psychiatrist suggested my preference for the exceptional female stemmed from my hatred of my mother’s nonexistent self-esteem, that I’d inherited her sense of shame and was perpetuating my own lack of self-worth by failing upward, sexually. In my case, she believed, chasing the beautiful or smart or inaccessible girl was—and this is where she lost me—the exact opposite of an Oedipal complex. According to her, my driving desire was to kill my mother and make love to my father. And on top of that, as long as I continued showing up at her office trying to entice her into having sex with me, our sessions were useless. She offered to refer me to one of her male colleagues, and I wondered aloud if she’d lost track of my reason for seeking out her services in the first place, that I was hoping she’d cure my fear of dying in California’s next big earthquake. She hadn’t, but I got the drift that she wanted off my case. I declined the referral.

Matty Jackson accepted my proposal and an inexpensive ring as proof of my good intentions. Her father, a blue-collar ramrod at one of the southside refineries, slapped me on the back, shook my hand, and welcomed me to the family. I liked the guy a lot. Her mother made southern fried chicken and broccoli with hollandaise sauce to commemorate the occasion, and her brother gave me the Band’s album with “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” on it. Good people.

I never informed my parents of the upcoming wedding. Despite Matty’s intelligence, she failed, as did I, to detect the layers of delusion at work in my psyche. As long as the fires of passion were raging out of control, love was real. That’s all either of us needed to know.

At some point it was decided that her plan to attend Stephen F. Austin State University was sound. I’d tag along and enroll in classes, and the wedding would sort itself out in due course.

But attending classes didn’t figure much in my days that crisp fall of 1970. Afternoons spent with any of the coeds fond of visiting the fifty-dollars-a-month digs my new best friend Donivan Cowart and I shared off campus were far more appealing. The counterculture’s sexual revolution was just then reaching its zenith in northeast Texas, and the so-called doors of perception being flung open by pot and the occasional tab of LSD were ours to walk through at our own pace, or so we imagined.

My fiancée had so admirably thrown herself into the rigors of college that excluding weekends and the occasional hour after homework—that golden hour before the dorm mother informed any couples out there French-kissing and finger-fucking in the shadows that curfew was in ten minutes—I was free to follow my urges.

For a while, I managed to keep this freedom and my engagement two separate issues. In defense of my twenty-year-old self, I can say only that I was probably living more in the moment than at any other time in my life, save riding my bicycle, stealing fishing lures, and perhaps chasing after the Mosquito Dope Truck. That I’d become a lousy husband-to-be and a shit-heel to boot never occurred to me. And then I met Annie McGuane.

Once she entered the picture, I vowed to become a different man. Nothing less than my very best was good enough for this new Aphrodite, so before our first date I broke things off with Matty. Why I thought it was a good idea to gush to her about how deeply I’d fallen for Annie is anybody’s guess. Apparently the new me was just as self-absorbed as the old.

Had my vision not been so clouded, I would’ve seen signs of trouble from the beginning. Practically from our first pizza Annie was desperately trying to avoid becoming engulfed by my intensity. My pledge to make her happy or die trying was so over the top that I all but gagged the poor girl on her own beauty. When she was unable to meet my cravings with desires of her own, I’d complain bitterly or pout until she was forced, out of self-defense, to surrender to my will. She blamed her need to keep a safe distance between her true feelings and my twenty-year-old passion on a strict Catholic upbringing and, for a while, I was happy to accept that her ambivalence might be rooted in religion. But still I couldn’t shake the sneaking suspicion she was saving herself for someone more substantial.

It was obvious Annie intended to make the most of her life, starting with college. She went to class, studied, made good grades, and spoke assuredly of her future as a speech therapist. I, on the other hand, was determined to become a dropout. And I never stopped to consider that, from her point of view, sitting around playing guitar and toying with the idea I could write songs seemed more an avoidance of reality than a respectable career path. So I internalized the feeling of being misunderstood and went on trying to make her love me, as pathetic as that was.

The death knell sounded on my college career when I found work playing bass guitar five nights a week behind a middle-of-the-road lounge singer at the Holiday Inn. Short of building chicken coops—a job Donivan and I held briefly the following summer—playing four sets a night and drinking for an hour or two after closing was as uncollegiate a lifestyle as there was in Nacogdoches. Newly flush, Donivan and I moved into a bigger house in a swankier neighborhood, and a couple nights a week my girlfriend would be waiting up when I got home from playing “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” until I wanted to vomit. Still, life wasn’t that bad.

When it came to winning Annie’s trust I was my own worst enemy. She wasn’t above smoking the occasional joint if conditions were conducive to enjoying a break from her studies. But I went at it like a viper. During Christmas break, while she was away visiting her family in Dallas, Donivan and I went on a search for weed that led us to a biker den somewhere on the outskirts of Lufkin. We were told before entering the compound not to speak until spoken to, but my friend couldn’t restrain himself from saying, “This crew would have to clean up their act to join the Hell’s Angels,” and our furtive middleman advised him that such commentary would get our balls shot off.

“The things we do to get high,” Donivan sneered.

“I’m warning you, man,” our guide hissed, his chin an inch off Donivan’s nose. “These cats ain’t who you wanna mess with.”

Before selling us a lid of street dope, the head dealer insisted that to prove we weren’t narcs we had to smoke some of his private stash. Appearing on cue was a tall black guy in Army fatigues and holding a 12-gauge shotgun. After locking his mouth around the bowl of a Sherlock Holmes pipe, he started blowing a heavy stream of blue smoke out the end of the shotgun’s single barrel. “Go on,” the head guy goaded. “Show us what you boys are made out of.”

Thinking my life depended on how well I handled this killer dope, I wrapped my lips around the shotgun barrel and inhaled as if it were a two-dollar joint. The result of this bravura was a coughing seizure so intense my body seemed to be turning itself inside out, the spasms coming in waves. And the more I coughed, the less it amused the dealer. Donivan tried pouring beer down my throat but couldn’t find a gap in the convulsing. Early in the ordeal I felt a pop in my lower abdomen, and later discovered an unsightly bulge of internal organs on the right side of my pelvis. The coughing fit had given me a hernia. It was a ghastly sight, and my first thought was
Oh, shit. Annie’s going to think I’m a freak
.

Who could blame a goal-oriented girl for starting to rethink a relationship with a guy who’d do such a thing? I tried passing off the hernia as an out-of-the-blue accident that, left untreated, would provide a guaranteed draft deferment, but I could tell she wasn’t buying it. From then on I could sense her growing more distant by the day.

During a period of receptivity to what little charm I could muster with half of my intestines bulging out from behind my lower abdominal wall, Annie invited me to meet her family in Dallas. I’d been feeling so low that I jumped at the chance to make a positive impression, though had I taken the time to think it through, surely I would’ve known that my inability to account for the lack of direction in my life might cause her father to dislike me instantly.

“What’s your major?” he asked.

“Poly sci,” I lied.

“Oh, and what do you plan to do with your degree?”

“I thought I might run for mayor of Nacogdoches or something. Sorry, sir, that was a joke.”

“I see. Annie’s only told me a little about your background, but I think it’s safe to say you don’t have a serious attitude about your education. I came up the hard way. My success in box-tape sales is the result of dedication and hard work. I’m very serious about education, especially my daughter’s.”

“Yes, sir, you’re right. I’ve been thinking lately I need to buckle down and start making something of myself. I’ve got this job playing music five nights a week, but I’m not all that sure where that’s gonna go. And I’ve been thinking that to make a life for me and Annie I need to figure a few things out before I can figure out what it is I really want to do.”

“A life for you and Annie?”

“Well, sir, I figure you can tell I’m crazy about your daughter.”

Mr. McGuane looked as if he’d just caught me crawling through his back window in the dead of night. The forced cordiality was long gone, and from that moment on the battle lines were drawn.

Mrs. McGuane was the source of Annie’s exceptional dark beauty. Her Spanish ancestry filled the house with the aura of fine breeding, and she made me think her kindness toward me wasn’t attached to some misplaced sense of duty. What she lacked in approval she made up for in decency.

Annie’s siblings greeted me with a mixture of yawns and giggles, her younger brother’s brooding disinterest oddly as comforting as her little sister’s instant crush. But it was her middle sister whom I overheard say: “If you’re happy, I’m happy for you, but good luck getting this guy past Daddy.”

I spent a restless night on the couch and limped home to Nacogdoches the next morning.

Back at school, Annie and I continued on as semi-compatible lovers, she dropping hints of transferring to the University of Arkansas and me floating the notion that we should get a place of our own. When at semester’s end she was summoned to spend the summer at the family retreat near Hot Springs, Arkansas, most self-respecting boyfriends would’ve seen her giddy relief as a sign the end was near. But by then my central nervous system could hardly be trusted and I was far enough around the bend to think our time apart would lead to a sexed-up reconciliation and a wedding.

By the end of June, phone service between Hot Springs and Nacogdoches was in such a state that “I love you” and “I know you do” and “Do you really?” and “It’s not that simple” and “Why isn’t it?” and “It just isn’t, but I’ve gotta go,” punctuated with deeper and longer pauses passed for intimate conversation.

The invitation to visit the McGuanes’ lake house over July Fourth arrived like the opening line to one of the Dylan Thomas poems my tweed-encrusted and Scotch-soaked snob of an English-lit professor had always raved about. When you’re coming off a steady diet for six weeks of three- and four-word utterances, the difference between “Daddy said it would be all right if you come for the Fourth” and “Light breaks where no sun shines” is hardly perceptible; ditto “Maybe we’ll get a chance to talk” and “When, like a running grave, time tracks you down.”

It’s possible that Annie’s summons knocked me unconscious. One minute I was on the phone in the kitchen, and the next, Donivan was lowering the flame on his fried-hamburger-and-white-rice casserole and poking me in the arm with his beloved spatula. “Hey, lover boy,” he called from somewhere outside the whiteout occupying my skull, “you need me to go get you some smelling salts?” If my laconic friend was postponing his culinary tasks in order to snatch me from a sleepwalker’s peril, you can bet money I was out on my feet.

The Fourth of July fell on Sunday, and I’d translated two nights off from the Lufkin Holiday Inn into forty-eight lingering hours to spend pressuring Annie for sex. With half the Ozark foothills as my base of operation, there was no chance Christmas wasn’t coming early that year. At ten-thirty sharp, a friend rang the bar phone with the phony, prearranged “news” that my parents had been in a head-on collision down around Crosby. So, six songs short of finishing the third of four sets on Saturday, I sped north on State Highway 59, and got to Arkansas in time to board the McGuanes’ speedboat for a morning round of waterskiing.