It might be hard for you to imagine, but I worked like that while the seasons rolled by from the time I was a little bitty boy, all the way past the time that president named Kennedy got shot dead in Dallas.
All them years, there was a freight train that used to roll through Red River Parish on some tracks right out there by Highway 1. Ever day, I’d hear it whistle and moan, and I used to imagine it callin out about the places it could take me . . . like New York City or Detroit, where I heard a colored man could get paid, or California, where I heard nearly everbody that breathed was stackin up paper money like flapjacks. One day, I just got tired a’ bein poor. So I walked out to Highway 1, waited for that train to slow down some, and jumped on it. I didn’t get off till the doors opened up again, which happened to be in Fort Worth, Texas. Now when a black man who can’t read, can’t write, can’t figger, and don’t know how to work nothin but cotton comes to the big city, he don’t have too many of what white folks call “career opportunities.” That’s how come I wound up sleepin on the streets.
I ain’t gon’ sugarcoat it: The streets’ll turn a man nasty. And I had been nasty, homeless, in scrapes with the law, in Angola prison, and homeless again for a lotta years by the time I met Miss Debbie. I want to tell you this about her: She was the skinniest, nosiest, pushiest woman I had ever met, black or white.
She was so pushy, I couldn’t keep her from finding out my name was Denver. She investigated till she found it out on her own. For a long time, I tried to stay completely outta her way. But after a while, Miss Debbie got me to talkin ’bout things I don’t like to talk about and tellin things I ain’t never told nobody—even about them three boys with the rope. Some of them’s the things I’m fixin to tell you.
Ron
Life
produces some inglorious moments that live forever in your mind. One from 1952 remains seared on my brain like the brand on a longhorn steer. In those days, all schoolchildren had to bring urine samples to school, which public health workers would then screen for dread diseases. As a second grader at Riverside Elementary in Fort Worth, Texas, I carefully carried my pee to school in a Dixie cup like all the other good boys and girls. But instead of taking it to the school nurse, I mistakenly took it directly to Miss Poe, the meanest and ugliest teacher I ever had.
My error sent her into a hissy fit so well-developed you’d have thought I’d poured my sample directly into the coffee cup on her desk. To punish me, she frog-marched me and the whole second-grade class out to the play-ground like a drill sergeant, and clapped us to attention.
“Class, I have an announcement,” she rasped, her smoke-infected voice screeching like bad brakes on an 18-wheeler. “Ronnie Hall will not be participating in recess today. Because he was stupid enough to bring his Dixie cup to the classroom instead of the nurse’s office, he will spend the next thirty minutes with his nose in a circle.”
Miss Poe then produced a fresh stick of chalk and scrawled on the red-brick schoolhouse wall a circle approximately three inches above the spot where my nose would touch if I stood on flat feet. Humiliated, I slunk forward, hiked up on tiptoes, and stuck my nose on the wall. After five minutes, my eyes crossed and I had to close them, remembering that my mama had warned me never to look cross-eyed or they could get locked up that way. After fifteen minutes, my toes and calves cramped fiercely, and after twenty minutes, my tears washed the bottom half of Miss Poe’s circle right off the wall.
With the strain of loathing peculiar to a child shamed, I hated Miss Poe for that. And as I grew older, I wished I could send her a message that I wasn’t stupid. I hadn’t thought of her in years, though, until a gorgeous day in June 1978 when I cruised down North Main Street in Fort Worth in my Mercedes convertible, and security waved me through the gate onto the private tarmac at Meacham Airfield like a rock star.
It would have been perfect if I could have had Miss Poe, a couple of old girlfriends—Lana and Rita Gail, maybe—and, what the heck, my whole 1963 Haltom High graduating class, lined up parade-style so they could all see how I’d risen above my lower-middle-class upbringing. Looking back, I’m surprised I made it to the airfield that day, since I’d spent the whole ten-mile trip from home admiring myself in the rearview mirror.
I guided the car to the spot where a pilot stood waiting before a private Falcon jet. Dressed in black slacks, a starched white shirt, and spit-shined cowboy boots, he raised his hand in greeting, squinting against the Texas heat already boiling up from the tarmac.
“Good morning, Mr. Hall,” he called over the turbines’ hum. “Need some help with those paintings?”
Carefully, and one at time, we moved three Georgia O’Keeffe paintings from the Mercedes to the Falcon. Together, the paintings were valued at just shy of $1 million. Two years earlier, I had sold the same collection—two of O’Keeffe’s iconic flower paintings and one of a skull—to a wildly wealthy south Texas woman for half a million dollars. When she tore a personal check for the full amount from her Hermès leather checkbook, I asked her jokingly if she was sure her check was good.
“I hope so, hon,” she said, smiling through her syrupy-sweet Texas drawl. “I own the bank.”
Now, that client was divesting herself of both a gold-digging husband and the O’Keeffes. The new buyer, an elegant, fiftyish woman who owned one of the finest apartments on Madison Avenue and probably wore pearls while bathing, was also divorcing. She was hosting a luncheon for me and a couple of her artsy, socialite friends that afternoon to celebrate her new acquisitions. No doubt an adherent to the philosophy that living well is the best revenge, she had used part of her king’s-ransom divorce settlement to purchase the O’Keeffes at nearly double their former value. She was far too rich to negotiate the $1 million price tag. That suited me just fine, since it made my commission on the deal an even $100,000.
My client had sent the Falcon down from New York to retrieve me. Inside, I stretched out in a buttercream leather seat and perused the day’s headlines. The pilot arrowed down the runway, took off to the south, then banked gently north. On the climb-out, I gazed down at Fort Worth, a city about to be transformed by local billionaires. It was much more than a face-lift: Giant holes in the ground announced the imminent construction of great gleaming towers of glass and steel. Galleries, cafés, museums, and upscale hotels would soon rise to join banks and legal offices, turning downtown Fort Worth from a sleepy cow-town into an urban epicenter with a pulse.
So ambitious was the project that it was systematically displacing the city’s homeless population, which was actually a stated goal, a way to make our city a nicer place to live. Looking down from three thousand feet, I was secretly glad they were pushing the bums to the other side of the tracks, as I despised being panhandled every day on my way to work out at the Fort Worth Club.
My wife, Debbie, didn’t know I felt quite that strongly about it. I played my nouveau elitism pretty close to the vest. After all, it had been only nine years since I’d been making $450 a month selling Campbell’s soup for a living, and only seven since I’d bought and sold my first painting, secretly using—stealing?—Debbie’s fifty shares of Ford Motor Company stock, a gift from her parents when she graduated from Texas Christian University.
Ancient history as far as I was concerned. I had shot like a rocket from canned soup to investment banking to the apex of the art world. The plain truth was, God had blessed me with two good eyes: one for art and the other for a bargain. But you couldn’t have told me that at the time. To my way of thinking, I’d bootstrapped my way from lower-middle-class country boy into the rarified atmosphere that oxygenates the lifestyles of the Forbes 400.
Debbie had threatened to divorce me for using the Ford stock—“The only thing I owned outright, myself!” she fumed—but I nudged her toward a cautious forgiveness with shameless bribes: a gold Piaget watch and a mink jacket from Koslow’s.
At first, I dabbled in art sales while keeping my investment-banking day job. But in 1975, I cleared $10,000 on a Charles Russell painting I sold to a man in Beverly Hills who wore gold-tipped white-python cowboy boots and a diamond-studded belt buckle the size of a dinner plate. After that, I quit banking and ventured out to walk the art-world tightwire without a net.
It paid off. In 1977, I sold my first Renoir, then spent a month in Europe, spreading my name and news of my keen eye among the Old World art elite. It didn’t take long for the zeros to begin piling up in the bank accounts of Ron and Debbie Hall. We didn’t enjoy the same income level as my clients, whose average net worth notched in somewhere between $50 and $200 million. But they invited us into their stratosphere: yachting in the Caribbean, wing shooting in the Yucatán, hobnobbing at island resorts and old-money mansions.
I lapped it up, adopting as standard uniforms a closetful of Armani suits. Debbie was less enamored with the baubles of wealth. In 1981 I called her from the showroom floor of a Scottsdale, Arizona, Rolls-Royce dealer who had taken a shine to an important western painting I owned.
“You’re not going to believe what I just traded for!” I said the instant she picked up the phone at our home in Fort Worth. I was sitting in the “what,” a $160,000 fire-engine-red Corniche convertible with white leather interior piped in red to match. I jabbered a description into my satellite phone.
Debbie listened carefully, then delivered her verdict: “Don’t you dare bring that thing home. Don’t even drive it out of the showroom. I’d be embarrassed to be seen in a car like that, or even have it in our driveway.”
Had she really just called a top-of-the-line Rolls
that thing
? “I think it would be fun,” I volunteered.
“Ron, honey?”
“Yes?” I said, suddenly hopeful at her sweet tone.
“Does that Rolls have a rearview mirror?”
“Yes.”
“Look in it,” she said. “Do you see a rock star?”
“Uh, no . . .”
“Just remember, you sell pictures for a living. Now get out of the Rolls, get your Haltom City butt on a plane, and come home.”
I did.
The same year Debbie snubbed the Rolls, I opened a new gallery on Main Street in Fort Worth’s blossoming cultural district, an area called Sundance Square, and hired a woman named Patty to manage it. Though we displayed impressionist and modern master paintings—Monet, Picasso, and their peers—worth several hundred thousand dollars, we were careful about posting prices or keeping too much inventory on-site, as a good number of derelicts had not yet been convinced to move to their new accommodations under the freeways to the southeast. Greasy and smelly, several came in each day to cool down, warm up, or case the place. Most of them were black, and I felt sure they all were also alcoholics and addicts, though I had never taken the time to hear their stories—I didn’t really care.
One day, a drug-dazed black man, filthy in thread-worn army fatigues, shambled into the gallery. “How much you want for that picture?” he slurred, jabbing his finger at a $250,000 Mary Cassatt.
Fearing he might rob me, I tried to humor him while evading the truth. “How much you got in your pocket?”
“Fifty dollahs,” he said.
“Then give it to me, and you can walk out the door with that picture.”
“No, suh! I ain’t givin you fifty dollahs for that picture!”
“Well, this isn’t a museum and I didn’t charge admission, so if you’re not buying, how am I supposed to pay the rent?” I then invited him to leave.
A few days later, he returned with an equally nasty-looking partner and perpetrated a little smash-and-grab, bursting out onto the sidewalk with a sackful of cash and artisan jewelry. Patty hit the real-live panic button we’d had installed, and I ran down from the upstairs suite, commencing a classic movie-style chase, with the robbers ducking down alleys and leaping trash cans, and me in hot pursuit, yelling, “Stop those men! I’ve been robbed!”
I sprinted at first, but slowed down a little after it occurred to me to wonder what I would do with the bums if I caught them. (I yelled louder to make up for running slower.) By the time the police collared them a few blocks away, the crooks were empty-handed, having left a ten-block trail of jewelry and $20 bills.
The incident firmly fixed my image of homeless people as a ragtag army of ants bent on ruining decent people’s picnics. I had no idea at that time that God, in His elaborate sense of humor, was laying the groundwork for one of them to change my life.
Nobody
ever told me how I got my name Denver. For the longest time, nobody ever called me nothin but Li’l Buddy. Supposably, when I was just a little bitty fella, PawPaw, my granddaddy, used to carry me around in the front pocket of his overalls. So that’s why they called me Li’l Buddy, I guess.
I never really knowed much about my mama. She was just a young girl, too young to take good care of me. So she did what she had to do and gave me over to PawPaw and Big Mama. That’s just the way things was on the plantations and the farms in Red River Parish. Colored families came in all different shapes and sizes. You might have a growed woman livin in a shotgun shack, pickin cotton and raisin’ her own brothers and sisters, and that would be a family. Or you might have a uncle and aunt raisin’ her sister’s kids, and that would be a family. A lotta children just had a mama and no daddy.
Part of that come from bein poor. I know that ain’t no popular thing to say in this day and age. But that was the truth. Lotta times the men would be sharecroppin on them plantations and look around and wonder why they was workin the land so hard and ever year the Man that owned the land be takin all the profits.
Since there ain’t no sharecroppin now, I’m gon’ tell you how it worked: The Man owned the land. Then he give you the cotton seeds, and the fertilizer, and the mule, and some clothes, and everthing else you need to get through the year. ’Cept he don’t really
give
it to you: He let you buy it at the store on credit. But it was his store on his plantation that he owned.