Signs of the Other Side

The Blog Was Kent's Idea
*******

          Driving back to Austin from my mother’s funeral last April, Kent said to me, “you should stop writing fiction.”   We were somewhere around Cross Plains.  The angle of the sun was blinding – it was about 7 a.m.  It stuck in my head because I had been thinking the same thing.  Not at that exact moment.  At that exact moment, I was stretching, trying to wake up so that I could take my turn at the wheel. 

         But I’d been thinking about it in general.  Ever since I was invited to speak to my Sunday School class about my spiritual journey.  I had a lot of misgivings about accepting the invitation.  It wasn't  that I was worried about the people in the Sunday School class.  It’s not a doctrinaire church and an even less doctrinaire group in that particular class, so I knew they were open to unconventional paths.  In fact one of the first times I ever heard someone describe their spiritual journey in that class more than 20 years ago, the story involved an exploration of how LSD had positively impacted the speaker’s spiritual growth.  That was in my early days at University Methodist, and that morning was one more confirmation for me that in spite of the fact that I don’t believe (among other things) that Jesus died to atone for my sins or anyone else’s, here was a church I could attend.  Turns out it’s a church chock full of unexpected perspective and honest doubt.  I feel right at home and never have any qualms about the many things I don’t believe.  I do believe “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a good code to live by.  And I believe there’s something greater than the here and now, something unseen that sometimes penetrates the veil.  I have an almost primitive urge to at least acknowledge the unseen.  And to honor the dead, those who have gone before, the connection I still feel to them.  I don’t know how to do that, and church seems like a good way to try.  Even if I don’t believe much in the apostle’s creed, I like reciting it with other people who have the same urge I have to honor something we can't fully understand.  Still I had struggled over describing my spiritual journey in Sunday School before I was scheduled to speak and thought until the very morning I spoke about pulling out.  It wasn’t so much worrying about having something to say as wondering how much I should leave out.  My drug use?  The dreams?  The sex in the dreams?  The visions and visitations?   I wasn't nervous about my Sunday School class particularly.  I'm just nervous about talking about those things.  In general I’m afraid that if I’m honest about what I’m thinking most of the time, many people will think I’m a schizophrenic.  I remember when I was first seeing Kent, I asked him what he thought happened to us when we died.  He said, “I think we live on in the memories of the people who loved us,” and I thought “oh shit. “  I figured once he found out that I basically think I’m in communication with the dead, that there are signs of the other side around us everywhere we look, he’d head for the highway.  But he didn’t.  He accepted my spiritual credulity – some people would call it gullibility -- and perhaps leaned in all the closer because of it.  The truth was a risk, but it was better than the alternative -- keeping an essential part of myself a secret from someone I loved.

       In the end I showed up at church on the appointed day to tell about my spiritual journey and decided in the moments before I started to speak to just go ahead and leave it all in.  Or as much of it as would fit in an hour.  And before I was even through I realized that, on top of the feeling of liberation I experienced that day, the truth made for a good story. 

       Ever since then, I’d been turning it over in my head.  Feeling a little sheepish that my response to my lack of success as a writer has been to jump genres -- couldn’t get the novel published so I decided to write a play -- couldn’t get the play produced so I started writing songs and turned the novel into a screenplay.  Knowing that it’s beginning to look like the problem is not with the genre.  In spite of that, I’d been thinking about writing a memoir piece which is what Kent meant when he said I should stop writing fiction.  He meant I should start writing non-fiction instead.  He was telling me to do exactly what I wanted to do.  It was like having my conscience speak out loud.  And saying what I wanted to hear.

        It was a Thursday – five days almost to the minute since my mother had died.  Kent and I had left Roby at 4:45 a.m. that morning so that we could make the five-hour drive back to Austin and get to work by 10 in the morning.  We should’ve left the night before.  We were supposed to leave then.  We both had Thursday classes to teach.  Neither of us could afford to miss another day.  But I couldn’t bear to go.   Couldn’t tear myself away from Roby as the sun set on the day I buried my mother.  The thought of driving away was just unbearable.  I wanted to be in touching distance of my brothers and my father who were staying until the next day.  And I wanted to be in Roby, which, in spite of the fact that it is all but dried up and blown away, barely able to limp into the 21^st century, still has a powerful grip on me.  So Nick and Helen left in Nick’s car for Austin on Wednesday evening, and Kent stayed with me to go drive around the dirt roads of Fisher County with my brother and cousins and a cooler full of beer.   To give me one more night breathing air that smells like home.   It was a burden to him, and Helen would’ve stayed with me and let Kent drive home with Nick, but Kent wanted to be the one who came home with me.   And I was grateful that he did.

       Earlier in the day right after the graveside service for my mother we had gathered at my Aunt Sandra’s house which sits exactly on the spot where Dad and Granny (my great grandparents) had raised their children and some of their grandchildren, including my mother.  Some of us sat on the porch looking out at that northern view toward the Double Mountains that my mother had grown up looking at.  Others sat at the table in the house drinking iced tea.  Others clustered around the tailgate of my cousin’s pick up out behind the house.  We were all telling stories we've told and re-told hundreds of times.  Stories about how the dog -- Keno -- used to chase my father when he’d come to pick my mother up for date.  How once when they were children, Richard left my Aunt Sandra trapped down in a well hole she couldn’t get out of and went home to eat lunch, not sending anyone to help her out until after he’d eaten.   How Granny had thrown a basin of dishwater on my mother when the swing broke and she was knocked unconscious in the fall – baby J. Neal who was sitting in her lap at the time safely cushioned by her body from injury.  How my great grandfather, Dad, had worn his khaki shirt buttoned to the top button every single day no matter the temperature.   How he had ridiculed the space program and the ambition to land on the moon.  “The good Lord just put it up there for a night light, “ Dad, who was born in 1871,  used to say.  We talked about Dad’s father, a Confederate Army draft dodger, who ran with an outlaw named Quantrell and was ultimately hung for murder.   How Dad and Granny, pillars of the community and the Roby Church of Christ, had concealed that part of their history from all their children and grandchildren.  The family didn’t know about it until the 1980s when my mother and aunt, doing genealogy research, made contact with a distant cousin from Longview who assumed that they had grown up knowing the whole story and sent newspaper clippings about the trial and the hanging along with the research she’d completed on the family origins.   My mother went all the way to Union Parish Louisiana to piece together a story that she realized immediately had haunted her grandparents – who had raised her -- and colored her own childhood.  And to confirm what we all already knew – that we are not only a family of storytellers, we are also a family of secret-keepers.   And oddly the stories are more fascinating because of the things we don't or can't tell – the memories we put into words are only the exposed part of something bigger and more complicated and often forbidden.

      The stories we told around the tailgate that day are what inspired Kent to advise me to give up fiction and take up the truth.  On the way home from Roby that morning after my mother’s funeral, we talked about what I could write in the way of a memoir.  Kent loved to brainstorm about future work and career paths.  Our children's, mine, his.  I’d been thinking about writing a piece called “My Dog, My Cat, My Mother, My Father.” Those were the four deaths I knew I was going to experience in a year.  Our dog, Moon, had died the previous August; the cat followed him in February.  Though my father was still alive, it was clear that he was not long for this world.  He was weak and getting weaker after a year and a half of battling mesothelioma.  I thought I could weave a chronological story of those deaths and my mother's in with flashbacks to JB’s death 19 years earlier.  It would be reflections on those people and pets and their legacies. Reflections on what I’d learned from death.  From grief.  Kent suggested weaving songs into it.  I’d already written songs about my father, my mother, and our cat Romeo.  That was a stretch, but Kent believed in exploring all the possibilities and got really excited by trying things that stretched the limits.   Ultimately we were talking about a performance piece that would weave memoir and song together.  Writing that right now I think – that’s crazy.  But riding in the car with Kent that morning, it seemed like a great idea.  An exciting possibility.  

      Of course, the obvious irony is the death I didn’t know about.  I felt even in the first moments after I found out that Kent was dead that I was being punished for having the arrogance to think I could process death so neatly.  As if I had said to the universe – this hurts, but I can take it; I can even turn it into something -- I'll write something clever and good about it; hell, I can even start turning it into something before it’s all over -- before they're all dead.  I still feel the regret almost physically. I repent thinking that I had a handle on death and grief.  

      I don’t think that anymore.  I do still think, though, that there are signs of the other side around me, everywhere I look.  I still believe that the dead watch over me and love me.  As I love them.  That they are pointing me toward a path that I couldn't find on my own.  Since I decided to start a blog, I think that Kent was pointing me in exactly this direction when he told me that morning in Cross Plains that I should stop writing fiction.   Fifteen days before he died.  Fifteen days before my life became even more dramatic than we could imagine.  Fifteen days before he would begin to live on in the memory of those who love him.  Before I would start seeing signs of him everywhere I look.  Sometimes it seems to me as though I began seeing signs of him even before he died.   As though words he spoke to me when he was still alive were only the exposed part of something bigger and more complicated. 

Early Signs

My Aunt Sandra’s response to the last post about Larry McMurtry marrying Ken Kesey's widow:

“How many hours have we spent talking about these books.  Cliff and I laugh about the time we all selected the cast for Lonesome Dove long before a movie was discussed.   One of my favorite memories or story is being in California, so home sick, and happening upon Moving On laying open on a table in the library.  It started in Merkel and that was like seeing someone from home.”

I don’t want to write a blog about Larry McMurtry so I’ve resisted the following post.  But  for now, a little more about how McMurtry has been a sign of something for me.

Early Signs

I think many people who know me may not know that I’ve been married three times.  They missed my first marriage because it was short – 2 years – and so long ago – I was 19 when I married.  I consider it the worse mistake of my life.  Stuart may have considered it the worse mistake of his, too.  I don’t know.  He did say to me in a raging argument near the end, “I suppose if you hadn’t ruined my life, someone else would have.”  Whether I was what ruined his life or not, it seems true enough that Stuart’s life was ruined.  The smartest person I’ve ever known – Phi Beta Kappa with degrees in chemistry and math, college graduate at 20, mensa, voracious reader, out-of-the-ballpark (not just out-of-the-box) critical thinker, more destined to be a Congressman than Michael Corleone -- he was driving a cab for a living when he died at the age of 48. 

A month or so after he died while I was visiting my parents in Roby -- the tiny west Texas town Stuart and I were both from -- I ran into Stuart’s brother at a high school football game.  Although I hadn’t seen Stuart in more than two decades, I sometimes ran into his brother Steve (who, unlike Stuart, had lived up to his father’s expectations) in the capitol.  That night when I found myself behind Steve in line at the concession stand, I told him how sorry I was that Stuart had died.  “Well, Christy,” he said, “we were all just so glad it was of natural causes.”  Steve had clearly long since grown tired of Stuart’s drug use and complementary shennagins.  And although the response sounds cold (and was), I understood.  And Steve knew I understood.  The first thing that had occurred to me when I learned of Stuart’s death was that it must be drug-related.  Even after I read the obituary which said that his heart had failed, or something equally abstract, I assumed that he had taken one too many hits of speed.  Either one too many that night or maybe just one too many for a lifetime. 

Stuart was five years older than me.  That doesn’t seem like much now, but when I was an 18-year-old freshman in college, it seemed huge.  He had been out of college for three years working in California.  For Lockheed.  That was his draft deferment – a job with Lockheed.  On top of being older, he had shoulder length hair which, in 1970, was one of the most admirable qualities I could think of in a man. 

I was actually at his brother, Steve’s, apartment with another boy from Roby -- Brent -- when I met Stuart.  Brent was visiting Austin from Texas Tech for the weekend and had spent the night before trying to convince me to view the fact that I’d missed curfew and couldn’t get into the dorm as an opportunity to have sex with him.  I was ambivalent about my virginity, but I was also ambivalent about Brent, so I had stuck to my guns.  I had lost many of my clothes, though, by morning when Steve burst in only pausing to knock before he opened the door.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m pretty sure Steve was irritated that Brent and I had occupied his bed all night.  He was willing to welcome Brent as a houseguest, but I think by morning he was resentful of having to spend the night on the couch in his own apartment.  So he came in while Brent and I were still wrestling in bed and brought his brother, Stuart, with him.  While I pulled the covers up around me and Brent groaned at the intrusion, Steve introduced me to Stuart who had just driven in from California for a visit. I knew of Stuart because we were all from Roby.  Even though my family had moved away, I had gone to part of elementary school there and had returned every holiday and long weekend since. We never took a vacation.  We just went back to Roby.  I spent weeks every summer there which is how I came to know Steve and date Brent.  But Stuart was older.  We had never crossed paths.

I’ve had 40 years to analyze why I married Stuart.  I’m still not sure I have an answer. I liked him.  I thought he was smart.  And I admired him.  It’s hard to believe that I thought that was enough, but I guess I did.  I didn't realize it in any articulate way at the time, but I have to admit now that getting married served a purpose for me.  My parents were pressuring me to move back home with them and go to the University of Houston.  And I didn’t want to.  I wanted to be independent.  But I didn’t have the wherewithal or confidence to accomplish that.  Also it turned out that Stuart was crazy about me.  Turned out later that he was crazy period, but that never really undid how charmed I was by his admiration.

After I was saved from the another round between the sheets with Brent by Steve’s exasperation, we all went out together to walk around Austin, run errands.  I’m not sure what our mission was.  Stuart had graduated from UT several years earlier so we might have just been scouting around to see which of his old haunts still existed.  Even then Stuart was nostalgic for the past.  Whatever we were doing we ended up – Stuart, Steve, Brent, and me -  at a little bookstore near campus.  Grackle Books.  It was across from Les Amis on 24^th Street and it sold used books.  I didn’t know it then, but I came to find out that Stuart was enthralled by books and knew more about more kinds of books than anyone I had ever met.  He was an encyclopedia.  And extremely opinionated.  People he liked, he put on a pedestal.  People he didn’t like, he ridiculed and disdained remorselessly.  He knew of writers -- and musicians and film makers, too --  I’d never heard of.  His tastes were remarkably eclectic.  He loved low art as much as high art  -- more, actually -- and didn’t give a flip what other people thought was good or bad.  Still to this day, people will mention to me a writer or musician that I haven’t heard of since I was married to Stuart who is just now gaining recognition.  He introduced me to John Rechy, Harlan Ellison, Vance Bourjaily, James Hilton, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Waylon Jennings, the Grateful Dead, Tommy Dorsey, Art Tatum, Russ Meyer, Ken Russell, Robert Downey (Sr.), Truffaut, Bergman, Louis Malle, Roger Korman.  He shaped my tastes and loves in art more than anything in my life, including graduate school.  And he started that first day in Grackle Books when he found a used copy of Leaving Cheyenne.  He snatched it off the shelf like it was a jewel and gave it to me on the spot.  He told me he was buying it for me.  That I had to read it.  That I would love it.  That it was great.  He was unequivocal.  He was certain that he was giving me something precious. 

In spite of his predictions I was completely unprepared for the pleasure I would take in that book.  I loved it so much that I gave it to my mother with the same enthusiasm Stuart had when he gave it to me.  She loved it as much as I did and gave it to her mother.  The last time I saw that copy of Leaving Cheyenne was at my great-Aunt Ola’s house in Roby.  It was sitting on the kitchen table held together by a rubber band – no longer a bound book, just a collection of loose pages.  Aunt Ola had just finished it and was going to pass it on to her daughter.  Meanwhile, my Aunt Sandra, off in California, was pausing to look at a book lying open on a table in a library in San Jose. 

For all of us, Stuart included, reading McMurtry was a breakthrough.  We were all readers.  We all loved books.  But we had never read about people like us.  Except maybe as caricatures or sidekicks.  McMurtry was writing about characters who might easily have been us – or in the case of Leaving Cheyenne  – our grandparents.  Texans.  Drawling rednecks.  Farmers and ranchers.  People who had tried to scratch a living and a life worth living out of the dirt.  People who went to the rodeo all three nights in August come hell or high water (which was not likely): who never missed a highschool football or basketball game; who could do the Cotton-eyed Joe and the Schottische; who had experienced first hand how hard the Church of Christ could be; who knew where the bootlegger lived, which old man molested little girls, which ones kicked their dog, and who could keep a secret.  Larry McMurtry was telling our stories.  And he did it with humor and compassion.  Honest and gentle at the same time.  Exactly the way we’d want our stories told. 

Leaving Cheyenne was out of print in 1970 when Stuart found that copy in Grackle Books.  Even when The Last Picture Show came out two years later, Leaving Cheyenne was not re-issued.  It was almost a decade before I could get a new copy of the book.  I’ve seen Larry McMurtry speak several times, but the only time I’ve ever actually spoken to him was on my 24^th birthday.  It had been three years since Stuart and I had split up.  I was visiting my friend Rusty in Washington D.C. and what I wanted for my birthday was a copy of Leaving Cheyenne.  I thought maybe Larry McMurtry would have one.  So we went to McMurtry’s bookstore in Georgetown.  When we got there Larry McMurty himself was coming out of the door.  I don’t remember what we said to him – I was star-struck -- but I remember what he said to us: “We’re closed.”  I protested, said it was my birthday or something, and he repeated, “We’re closed,” as he turned the key in the lock. Very curmudgeonly.  I don’t think I told him that I wanted a copy of Leaving Cheyenne.  I’m too shy that way – the way where you say what you want.  Still to this day.  So I had to wait another few years before I could read Leaving Cheyenne again and find out it was as good as I had remembered.

And years more than that before I began to be able to even try to make sense out of my marriage to Stuart.  I really can't say that I've made much progress on that path.  It still troubles and confuses me.  But sometimes when someone asks me about my first marriage I say that I married Stuart because he gave me a copy of Leaving Cheyenne on the day I met him.