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.