I was released from the hospital the day before I was to meet King’s flight from Washington, D.C. at the Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City. My vehicle at the time was an aged Chevrolet pick-up that I’d bought from a rancher friend in New Mexico. It was mechanically in good enough shape, but still smelled of livestock to my mind. In fact, this was the same vehicle in which I had transported the writer Nora Ephron a few months earlier. I had made the mistake on that occasion of allowing a graduate student to accompany Ms. Ephron and me on the short drive from the campus building in which she had delivered her address to her hotel room. Ephron had wound up sitting between the graduate student and me in the middle of the bench seat—the shift lever between her knees. The then wife (or recent ex—I’m unsure which) of All the President’s Men co-author Carl Bernstein apparently felt that I was somehow acting crude and lecherous when I kept reaching over and changing gears as one has to do in that sort of vehicle. I figure she was far more used to the back seats of limos and taxis.
Rather than risk similarly offending the author of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, I talked my colleague and friend, Dr. Laurie Fink, into letting me use her normal car to run up to the City. I assured her I’d have it back before she finished teaching her last class of the day. A good Christian graduate student from, I believe, Abilene, Texas, by the name of John Orr came along with me on the trip to pick up King.
I recall it was just after lunch time when the plane arrived. It was easy enough to pick the somewhat burly, bearded and bespectacled King from among the suited commuters from the nation’s capital—he was lighting a Kool brand mentholated cigarette. I cannot recall seeing him without one for the next few days. I introduced myself and my friend. From that moment on I was Doctor Querry and the graduate student was elevated to Doctor Orr. King never in thirty years referred to me otherwise. In fact, everyone he met that weekend at OU he addressed as Doctor be they College Dean, freshman student, or barmaid.
I have more than once had to explain to readers that, despite what he wrote some years later in his fine Foreword to Get-Up, King did not confer my doctorate on me in an Oklahoma City bar. That I had earned my degree and was entitled to “all the rights and privileges appertaining to” it, never mind that I didn’t know what those rights and privileges consisted of and still don’t. (King said the only reason he wasn’t a Doctor himself was due to the fact that he had “failed to do the required reading.”)
Once the formal introductions were out of the way, King announced that we had to hot foot it over to a hotel bar that was near the Daily Oklahoman newspaper building downtown—that some of his old journalist colleagues from his own newspaper days were meeting us there.
It was approaching 2 o’clock in the afternoon.
Within an hour of entering the bar I slipped away and located a payphone—this was before cell phones—and called a friend in the English Department. “Spread the word to cancel the soft drinks,” I said. “We’re back to Plan One with respect to refreshments at the King events.”
I mean, hell, it started off reasonably enough—reunions in a hotel bar among old friends who hadn’t seen King since the Midland, Texas, days. Rounds were bought and toasts were made. There was great jocularity all around.
I must tell you that Larry L. King enjoyed being the center of attention. We all do, I think, to a greater or lesser degree. But King was happiest, I think, when he was telling tales and reminiscing on past or present glories. It was just a real fine afternoon. I noticed that King had a tendency to punctuate his speech with expletives and colorful phrases—“Kiss my pussy” being one of his favorites on this day, though I don’t recall him ever using the phrase in later years.
The drinks kept coming. I was getting more and more nervous—this was a hotel bar in Oklahoma City, drinks were not inexpensive. I imagined myself being the last to leave and the bartender presenting me with a tab that would take an enormous bite out of the $10,500 annual salary that the Regents at the University of Oklahoma considered my scholarly skills to be worth. I need not have worried, King was generous with his Whorehouse royalties and those of us on the OU faculty and student body who dared attend to King’s stories and songs were never out so much as a dime.
I remember at one point that afternoon in the hotel bar asking John Orr to look at the back of my shirt as I lifted my jacket. I had the awful feeling that blood had begun to ooze from the fresh dressings over the days-old surgical incision in my lower back. Apparently, it was only perspiration.
Once during the early evening King had excused himself to go off in search of the restroom. When, after what seemed an unusually long period of time he’d not returned, I felt an obligation—as his driver and host—to go in search of the man.
Having no luck in any of the restrooms I could find, I was heading back to the bar when I heard what I took to be the distinctive gravelly voice of my charge coming from an open door down a hallway. The voice was amplified by a speaker system of some kind. At the door was a large sign announcing that this was the Annual Meeting of the Oklahoma Feed & Grain Growers Association. Looking in I was surprised to see King at the podium, concluding what had apparently been an extemporaneous address to a roomful of what I presumed to be seed and grain growers from across the state.
There was a barely polite smattering of applause as King exited the room and together we walked back to rejoin our table in the bar where King proudly showed the assembled entourage his brand spankin’ new membership card to the Feed & Grain Growers Association which, he said, had cost him fifty dollars cash money but which the ticket takers at the door had insisted upon before he could deliver his speech.
It was only much later, in his Foreword to Get-Up, that I learned, when King described this very occasion, that he had “puzzled the assembled feed-growers and feed-sellers by delivering to them—unbidden—much of the speech that had been slated for the ears of OU intellectuals.”
When a couple of the gathered newspaper folks allowed as how they were way late for supper, someone noticed it was something like eight o’clock and suggested that we remove to another establishment that he frequented that offered entertainment along with strong drink at perhaps a less expensive price. I don’t remember that we held any kind of a vote, but we made for the elevator and split up into different vehicles. On our way past the Feed & Grain Growers meeting room, John Orr and I nonchalantly took the Association’s large professionally-produced sign, thinking it would make a fine gift for our visiting celebrity to take back to Washington. As I recall King later declined the offer but signed the poster which hung in a place of honor in my own department office until some sonofabitch stole it.
A fine newspaperman named Covey Bean led our little convoy to an Oklahoma City nightspot that I had never before entered. I never went back, either. I cannot remember the name of the place, but it was—in the vernacular of the region—a “Nekked Bar.” The waitresses, if memory serves, were topless and would make a point of leaning across one’s shoulder to place a drink on the table—warm boob flesh brushing across one’s ear. The young lady dancers gyrating around brass poles on the bar wore nothing whatsoever. No pasties, no G-strings. They may have worn high-heeled shoes in the interests of modesty and good hygiene, but nothing else.
After the round of drinks appeared, our ears having been repeatedly boob brushed, we tried to make conversation. The place was extremely noisy, however, and King was clearly unhappy. Not that he was prudish about nudity, you understand, but it was hard to hold one’s posse’s attention with all that bare flesh and the very real threat of an errant pubic hair floating through the air and settling atop one’s vodka screwdriver. We finished our drinks and made our goodbyes to the journalists. We struck out for Norman.
Dr. Laurie Fink did not get her car back until sometime the next afternoon, but it was undamaged (or at least she never mentioned otherwise). After visiting a couple more bars and an all-night eatery, I had deposited King at his hotel and, having spent the past twelve hours sipping alcohol-based drinks, crawled bleary-eyed into my bed at just after four o’clock in the morning.
At a little before six my telephone rang.
“Doctor Querry,” the gravelly but chipper voice said. “It’s Doctor King. Where can we get a Bloody Mary in this town?”
We wound up at a Norman Indian Beer Bar that several friends and I favored for its dark atmosphere, its disgusting toilet, and its cheap juke box—me nursing a morning beer while the scoff-law proprietor of the establishment kept King’s coffee cup filled with a brown liquid that he retrieved from beneath the bar. Bourbon, I think it was, although it may have been Scotch.
And thus began the spring program of the Contemporary Authors Series at the University of Oklahoma.
What I can recall with any degree of clarity about the next seventy-two hours include King’s attending but not eating at the formal dinner held in his honor in a professor’s home before his talk and reading that evening—he was too “nervous” to eat, he said—but his taking a large iced tea glass of Scotch to the podium where he charmed and delighted the assembled audience.
Then there was a raucous evening crowded about a large table in a Campus Corner bar and grill where King held court with faculty and graduate students (remember, we were all “Doctors” by then), King teaching us the lyrics to one of his college fight songs—“Jesus on the Ten Yard Line”—and extending his arms like a major league umpire and calling loudly, without so much as a change of expression, “SAFE!” when Doctor Laurie Fink unfortunately tripped and took a sliding header across the dance floor while returning to the table from the ladies room.
On a separate occasion, Doctor Fink was charged with driving King back to his hotel one night. Early the next morning as he and I imbibed at the Indian bar, a pale and shaken King related to me that Doctor Fink’s driving was unlike any he’d ever before experienced. “I swear she drove across a cow pasture at one point,” he said. “I could see the lights of some distant city—I believe it was Dallas—and my life flashed in front of my eyes.” He took a long drink from his coffee cup. “Goddammit, Doctor, I could see the headlines:
“WHOREHOUSE AUTHOR DIES IN FLAMING CRASH—NATION MOURNS.”
On the day King was scheduled to fly out of Will Rogers Airport, there were tornadoes skipping across the county. King having been raised in West Texas and me in central Oklahoma, we knew too well what tornadoes could do—we laid low out of reasonably well-founded fear. When, two days later, the English Department secretary had managed to reschedule a flight to Washington, D.C., I drove King to the airport. I escorted the man and his ticket up to the young attractive lady at the check-in desk. I explained the tornadoes and the fact that Dr. King was famous all over America and had pressing appointments back East. I answered all her questions. I realized that she kept looking at King when she’d ask him something and I’d answer. I remember I told her “Dr. King doesn’t speak English,” and that King nodded in solemn agreement.
I drove myself and my bruised liver back to Norman and didn’t leave my house for two days. Oh, but this was the stuff legends are made of, and I was hailed a battered hero when next I appeared on campus. We in the English Department had thought ourselves a notoriously rowdy crew. We were humbled to learn that we were but rank amateurs compared to our just departed guest.
Rather than risk similarly offending the author of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, I talked my colleague and friend, Dr. Laurie Fink, into letting me use her normal car to run up to the City. I assured her I’d have it back before she finished teaching her last class of the day. A good Christian graduate student from, I believe, Abilene, Texas, by the name of John Orr came along with me on the trip to pick up King.
I recall it was just after lunch time when the plane arrived. It was easy enough to pick the somewhat burly, bearded and bespectacled King from among the suited commuters from the nation’s capital—he was lighting a Kool brand mentholated cigarette. I cannot recall seeing him without one for the next few days. I introduced myself and my friend. From that moment on I was Doctor Querry and the graduate student was elevated to Doctor Orr. King never in thirty years referred to me otherwise. In fact, everyone he met that weekend at OU he addressed as Doctor be they College Dean, freshman student, or barmaid.
I have more than once had to explain to readers that, despite what he wrote some years later in his fine Foreword to Get-Up, King did not confer my doctorate on me in an Oklahoma City bar. That I had earned my degree and was entitled to “all the rights and privileges appertaining to” it, never mind that I didn’t know what those rights and privileges consisted of and still don’t. (King said the only reason he wasn’t a Doctor himself was due to the fact that he had “failed to do the required reading.”)
Once the formal introductions were out of the way, King announced that we had to hot foot it over to a hotel bar that was near the Daily Oklahoman newspaper building downtown—that some of his old journalist colleagues from his own newspaper days were meeting us there.
It was approaching 2 o’clock in the afternoon.
Within an hour of entering the bar I slipped away and located a payphone—this was before cell phones—and called a friend in the English Department. “Spread the word to cancel the soft drinks,” I said. “We’re back to Plan One with respect to refreshments at the King events.”
I mean, hell, it started off reasonably enough—reunions in a hotel bar among old friends who hadn’t seen King since the Midland, Texas, days. Rounds were bought and toasts were made. There was great jocularity all around.
I must tell you that Larry L. King enjoyed being the center of attention. We all do, I think, to a greater or lesser degree. But King was happiest, I think, when he was telling tales and reminiscing on past or present glories. It was just a real fine afternoon. I noticed that King had a tendency to punctuate his speech with expletives and colorful phrases—“Kiss my pussy” being one of his favorites on this day, though I don’t recall him ever using the phrase in later years.
The drinks kept coming. I was getting more and more nervous—this was a hotel bar in Oklahoma City, drinks were not inexpensive. I imagined myself being the last to leave and the bartender presenting me with a tab that would take an enormous bite out of the $10,500 annual salary that the Regents at the University of Oklahoma considered my scholarly skills to be worth. I need not have worried, King was generous with his Whorehouse royalties and those of us on the OU faculty and student body who dared attend to King’s stories and songs were never out so much as a dime.
I remember at one point that afternoon in the hotel bar asking John Orr to look at the back of my shirt as I lifted my jacket. I had the awful feeling that blood had begun to ooze from the fresh dressings over the days-old surgical incision in my lower back. Apparently, it was only perspiration.
Once during the early evening King had excused himself to go off in search of the restroom. When, after what seemed an unusually long period of time he’d not returned, I felt an obligation—as his driver and host—to go in search of the man.
Having no luck in any of the restrooms I could find, I was heading back to the bar when I heard what I took to be the distinctive gravelly voice of my charge coming from an open door down a hallway. The voice was amplified by a speaker system of some kind. At the door was a large sign announcing that this was the Annual Meeting of the Oklahoma Feed & Grain Growers Association. Looking in I was surprised to see King at the podium, concluding what had apparently been an extemporaneous address to a roomful of what I presumed to be seed and grain growers from across the state.
There was a barely polite smattering of applause as King exited the room and together we walked back to rejoin our table in the bar where King proudly showed the assembled entourage his brand spankin’ new membership card to the Feed & Grain Growers Association which, he said, had cost him fifty dollars cash money but which the ticket takers at the door had insisted upon before he could deliver his speech.
It was only much later, in his Foreword to Get-Up, that I learned, when King described this very occasion, that he had “puzzled the assembled feed-growers and feed-sellers by delivering to them—unbidden—much of the speech that had been slated for the ears of OU intellectuals.”
When a couple of the gathered newspaper folks allowed as how they were way late for supper, someone noticed it was something like eight o’clock and suggested that we remove to another establishment that he frequented that offered entertainment along with strong drink at perhaps a less expensive price. I don’t remember that we held any kind of a vote, but we made for the elevator and split up into different vehicles. On our way past the Feed & Grain Growers meeting room, John Orr and I nonchalantly took the Association’s large professionally-produced sign, thinking it would make a fine gift for our visiting celebrity to take back to Washington. As I recall King later declined the offer but signed the poster which hung in a place of honor in my own department office until some sonofabitch stole it.
A fine newspaperman named Covey Bean led our little convoy to an Oklahoma City nightspot that I had never before entered. I never went back, either. I cannot remember the name of the place, but it was—in the vernacular of the region—a “Nekked Bar.” The waitresses, if memory serves, were topless and would make a point of leaning across one’s shoulder to place a drink on the table—warm boob flesh brushing across one’s ear. The young lady dancers gyrating around brass poles on the bar wore nothing whatsoever. No pasties, no G-strings. They may have worn high-heeled shoes in the interests of modesty and good hygiene, but nothing else.
After the round of drinks appeared, our ears having been repeatedly boob brushed, we tried to make conversation. The place was extremely noisy, however, and King was clearly unhappy. Not that he was prudish about nudity, you understand, but it was hard to hold one’s posse’s attention with all that bare flesh and the very real threat of an errant pubic hair floating through the air and settling atop one’s vodka screwdriver. We finished our drinks and made our goodbyes to the journalists. We struck out for Norman.
Dr. Laurie Fink did not get her car back until sometime the next afternoon, but it was undamaged (or at least she never mentioned otherwise). After visiting a couple more bars and an all-night eatery, I had deposited King at his hotel and, having spent the past twelve hours sipping alcohol-based drinks, crawled bleary-eyed into my bed at just after four o’clock in the morning.
At a little before six my telephone rang.
“Doctor Querry,” the gravelly but chipper voice said. “It’s Doctor King. Where can we get a Bloody Mary in this town?”
We wound up at a Norman Indian Beer Bar that several friends and I favored for its dark atmosphere, its disgusting toilet, and its cheap juke box—me nursing a morning beer while the scoff-law proprietor of the establishment kept King’s coffee cup filled with a brown liquid that he retrieved from beneath the bar. Bourbon, I think it was, although it may have been Scotch.
And thus began the spring program of the Contemporary Authors Series at the University of Oklahoma.
What I can recall with any degree of clarity about the next seventy-two hours include King’s attending but not eating at the formal dinner held in his honor in a professor’s home before his talk and reading that evening—he was too “nervous” to eat, he said—but his taking a large iced tea glass of Scotch to the podium where he charmed and delighted the assembled audience.
Then there was a raucous evening crowded about a large table in a Campus Corner bar and grill where King held court with faculty and graduate students (remember, we were all “Doctors” by then), King teaching us the lyrics to one of his college fight songs—“Jesus on the Ten Yard Line”—and extending his arms like a major league umpire and calling loudly, without so much as a change of expression, “SAFE!” when Doctor Laurie Fink unfortunately tripped and took a sliding header across the dance floor while returning to the table from the ladies room.
On a separate occasion, Doctor Fink was charged with driving King back to his hotel one night. Early the next morning as he and I imbibed at the Indian bar, a pale and shaken King related to me that Doctor Fink’s driving was unlike any he’d ever before experienced. “I swear she drove across a cow pasture at one point,” he said. “I could see the lights of some distant city—I believe it was Dallas—and my life flashed in front of my eyes.” He took a long drink from his coffee cup. “Goddammit, Doctor, I could see the headlines:
“WHOREHOUSE AUTHOR DIES IN FLAMING CRASH—NATION MOURNS.”
On the day King was scheduled to fly out of Will Rogers Airport, there were tornadoes skipping across the county. King having been raised in West Texas and me in central Oklahoma, we knew too well what tornadoes could do—we laid low out of reasonably well-founded fear. When, two days later, the English Department secretary had managed to reschedule a flight to Washington, D.C., I drove King to the airport. I escorted the man and his ticket up to the young attractive lady at the check-in desk. I explained the tornadoes and the fact that Dr. King was famous all over America and had pressing appointments back East. I answered all her questions. I realized that she kept looking at King when she’d ask him something and I’d answer. I remember I told her “Dr. King doesn’t speak English,” and that King nodded in solemn agreement.
I drove myself and my bruised liver back to Norman and didn’t leave my house for two days. Oh, but this was the stuff legends are made of, and I was hailed a battered hero when next I appeared on campus. We in the English Department had thought ourselves a notoriously rowdy crew. We were humbled to learn that we were but rank amateurs compared to our just departed guest.
You’ll notice that I have considerable luggage beneath my eyes and that I’m leaning somewhat unsteadily (albeit typically to the Left) on Dr. King’s chair—results of the previous evening’s jocularity.