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Taos, R.C. Gorman, and Glenn Wiley

7/1/2013

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After I’d left teaching in Norman, Oklahoma, I went to live in New Mexico again.  I lived in a small, adobe house on the Pecos River near Santa Rosa where  I met and married Elaine Breece Stribling.  I wrote about that fine adventure in I See by My Get-Up, which was published first by the University of New Mexico Press, and later by the University of Oklahoma Press.  That little book ended with Elaine and me living in Taos and, while as of this writing available primarily as a Kindle  e-book from Amazon, copies can be found by anyone interested in the traditional form in the normal places—regional (Southwest) libraries, Amazon, etc.

Taos was the first of a number of places where Elaine and I have lived over our long marriage that could be considered to have “Artists’ Colonies.”  Taos and Bisbee, Arizona, and San Miguel de Allende, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, come immediately to mind.  I’ll deal with San Miguel later.  Taos was early on.

Taos has attracted painters and writers especially for a long, long time.  Books have been written about the Early Taos Painters who came and stayed because of the light.  Mabel Dodge Lujan attracted writers to the area—D.H. Lawrence notably.

Taos was good for us, I think.  Elaine honed her already considerable skills in the darkroom at the Taos News and her job as the only photographer at the paper put her in a position to meet people she might not otherwise have come in close contact with.  And, at the same time, she always let me tag along if the event seemed of interest and I promised not to embarrass her.

Because she was/is quiet and unassuming, Elaine was the perfect person to be assigned the Taos Pueblo as her “beat” with the newspaper.  She was always welcomed by tribal members and so had access to events that otherwise she might not have.  For example, in the early days of what has come to be a crowded and (to me) unmanageable annual event—the Buffalo Pasture Powwow—Elaine was invited to photograph the dancers from the reviewing stand and even to enter the dance area to make images that would be inaccessible to most non-tribal people.  Her Taos Pueblo Dance Series that resulted from our time there is, to my mind, some of her finest black and white work to date.  At one time she had a contract with a publisher in Paris who proposed to do a fine edition of the dance photos with my accompanying text.  Sad to say, that publisher canceled the contract when my then agent told him that I was not giving him the rights to my second novel, Bad Medicine.  But more about the French later.  To this day we have good friends at Taos Pueblo.  We don’t have good friends in France.

The newspaper was how we came to know many of the artists in Taos.  Navajo artist R.C. Gorman, among others.  I’d actually first met R. C. Gorman in 1969.  At the time I was a Graduate Assistant in the English Department at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas.  I was friends with the artist Ray Drew who taught at Highlands and had ridden along with him one wintry day when he drove the seventy-some miles to Taos where, he said, he was to deliver a couple of his water colors to a gallery.  The gallery was the Navajo Gallery of R. C. Gorman where, in those days, he also lived.  I recall that while Ray and Gorman were talking business I was wandering around admiring the art.  Gorman told me to go ahead and look behind a closed door—it was a bathroom—where his male nudes were displayed.  I remember that I commented on the work but allowed as how I really liked a particular monograph of a Navajo woman.  He said if I’d agree to come up and pose for him sometime he’d consider giving me the monograph in return.  I was embarrassed and laughed—told him I didn’t think so.  I can report that Gorman and I visited many times up until his death in November of 2005 and the subject never came up again.  (I smile, as I write the above, to be reminded that I did once contribute—by invitation, mind you—a recipe to one of Gorman’s books in the series Nudes & Foods wherein recipes contributed by Gorman’s friends, the famous and the not-so-famous, were published alongside examples of his nudes.)

I knew R. C. Gorman to be a generous and humorous man—I’m proud to have known him.

Proud, too, that knowing Gorman in the Taos years with Elaine was also how we came to know his Gallery Director, traveling companion and social overseer, Miss Virginia Dooley.

Miss Virginia was a remarkable woman.  She was completely devoted to Gorman.  She told us that she had been a hippie selling sandwiches from a basket on Taos Plaza when she first met him.  When we knew her she lived in a large and marvelous, art-filled home north of the town of Taos.  She called the house “Shiprock East,” and it was the site of her famous Sunday dinners wherein she and Gorman held forth in the closest thing to a Salon that I have ever had the good fortune to attend.  It was at Shiprock East that I had the good fortune to meet and visit with a number of prominent people, most of them in the arts.  It was where I met Gorman’s father, Carl Gorman, a fine artist himself, a drop-dead handsome, white-haired man who, once he learned that I had served in the Marine Corps, became my dinner companion.  Carl Gorman was one of the original Code Talkers in World War II.  He told me he was fifteen-years-old when he was recruited to help establish the group who baffled the Japanese with their radio communications in Navajo.

Later, when Bad Medicine was published and Elaine and I were living in central Mexico, we visited Taos to sign books at Moby Dickens Bookshop.  Gorman and Miss Virginia showed up and, we were invited to the following Sunday’s Salon at Shiprock East.  I told Miss Virginia that my favorite uncle had come from his home near Tulsa to see us in Taos, and she insisted that he would be very welcome.  I was delighted.

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Glenn Wiley was my favorite relative, ever.  About five years my senior, he was proud that I had used his name for a character in my first novel.  When I asked Glenn if he would come along to dinner with Gorman he was pleased.  Pleased, that is, until I foolishly described to him what a great cook Miss Virginia was by mentioning the Navajo Blood Sausage she’d once served.  When my ultra-conservative Okie uncle blanched at the thought of Blood Sausage, I tried to calm him by describing the delicious Guinea Hens she’d served once stuffed with home-made tamales—that is, each small, whole bird with a tamale pushed up into its cavity.  Apparently, Glenn worried himself sick for two days over how he would excuse himself should any such unthinkable dish be placed before him.  He was, I learned later, nauseated at the thought of embarrassing me and Elaine in front of our famous friends.

You may be relieved to know—as Glenn most certainly was—that on this particular Sunday Miss Virginia served up a huge platter of well-cooked (god forbid it should have been rare) roast beef and buttery mashed potatoes along with all the side dishes that one might expect in Oklahoma.

Some years later when my aunt and niece were telling me at Glenn’s funeral how much he’d enjoyed, and how often he’d told Oklahoma friends, of his fine afternoon in Taos with R. C. Gorman, I related the story of his food worries to great peals of laughter.

I suppose you could say that I had done as much as I could to inject at least a modicum of jocularity into Glenn Wiley’s life.  As the owner of a Title and Abstract Company in a small Oklahoma town, Glenn’s life was—from my point of view, anyway—about as hum-drum as life could be.  Except for his stint in the Army, my uncle had never lived outside of Oklahoma.  He lived his life within a couple of hundred miles of where he was born.  This is a relatively common trait in my family, it seems to me . . . a trait that I happily escaped.

Anyway, Glenn and his wife, Gloria, owned and operated their company with a small staff.  The main Sapulpa Post Office was where their mail—both personal and business—was picked up daily.  So I got into the habit of sending Glenn postcards and letters from our travels.  Most notable were the picture postcards that I sent him when we lived in Mexico.

I remember one card in particular was a bright color photograph of a rather stout, heavily made-up, bouffant-haired Mexican woman with her bright red lip pursed suggestively in a wet kiss.  I address the card to “Mister Gleen Wiley” at his PO Box.  In the message area I wrote that the children “Rosa and little Gleen” were missing their daddy and wondering when he would be home.  I signed the card with kisses and hugs, “Maria.”  You should understand that my uncle was of the generation that believed with certainty that postal employees would routinely read postcards and even hold sealed envelopes up to strong lights in order to decipher any kind of titillating evidence they could gather on their small-town customers.  Gloria told me that Glenn would sometimes show my cards around the office—I guess some of them he thought a little too racy—but that he had a file in his desk marked “Ronnie” that she would sometimes see him poring over and laughing to himself.

I once sent a package addressed to Mrs. Glen Wiley with the return address of a major hotel chain with a branch in Oklahoma City—a couple of hours from Sapulpa.  In the package was an incredibly large brassiere that I had pick up at a used-clothing outlet—a Salvation Army Store, I think.  An accompanying note—also on hotel stationary—read, something to the effect:

Dear Mrs. Wiley,

We want to thank you and your husband for choosing our hotel for your recent stay. After you had checked out, our Housekeeping Department discovered that you had left the enclosed article hanging on the bathroom door.

We look forward to your next stay with us.

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A word on the Permanence of Social Media

6/20/2013

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Back when I was in school—and I’m talking here primary and secondary school, not college—I and my fellow scholars were repeatedly warned that poor grades or excessive tardiness or the common practice of chewing gum in class were offences that would go on our “Permanent Record,” and that, once recorded, could never be erased and would follow us throughout our lives and make it difficult, if not impossible, to get decent jobs or bank loans to buy new or even used automobiles.

In short, blemishes on one’s Permanent Record were to be avoided at all costs.  I imagined, at the time, that these documents were stored in yellow-brown manila file folders arranged alphabetically in dark green filing cabinets in the principal’s office and were promptly forwarded whenever an individual changed schools or moved to another town or even another state.  Of course, when one grew up, these no doubt ever-fattening files would be delivered to any prospective employer, college or technical school admissions officer, or military recruiter without those individuals even having to request them.

When I had completed my schooling I don’t remember ever worrying much about where my Permanent Record was kept nor who had access to it.  It was out there and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, now.  For all I knew the whole Permanent Record thing might have ended at some time in the 1960s since the threat from teachers seems not to be a part of later generations’ collective consciousness.  Be that as it may, I believe now that the Permanent Records for my generation were most likely kept in Washington, D.C., and were, in fact, the documents upon which the much-hated J. Edgar Hoover based his infamous files.  And while I have today neither the patience nor the inclination to apply under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain what I imagine would turn out to be a thick and scurrilous copy of my own FBI File, I am of the opinion that all those old paper-based Permanent Records are now stored—like nuclear waste—in a huge bunker inside some mountain somewhere in Utah and that the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to those documents.

Now it’s the year 2013 and we know that Permanent Records are real.  And they are permanent.  They are not kept in filing cabinets anymore, but rather stored in “the cloud”--on government servers in various places.  They are digital and contain everything we do or say or, probably, think.



Privacy is a thing of the past.  

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A Post Script to the Larry King Posts below

6/12/2013

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Larry L. King died on December 20, 2012, in Washington, D.C.  He was 83 years old.  He was buried in Austin, Texas.  It has been reported to me by a good friend whose reliability I find impeccable that there were a great many fine stories told about King by his friends and that an Austin torch singer sang “A Lil’ Ole Bitty Pissant Country Place” followed by “The Bus From Amarillo.”  Surely the first time songs from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas had been performed at a funeral.  At the gravesite in the Texas State Cemetery, next to the graves of Bud Shrake and Ann Richards, a chorale group of six men assembled in front of Larry’s urn and sang “Jesus on the Five-Yard Line”:

Oh the game was played on Sunday
In St. Peter's backyard
Jesus played right halfback
And Moses played right guard.
The Angels on the sideline
Christ! How they did yell
When Jesus scored a touchdown
Against that team from Hell!

Stay with Christ! Stay With Christ!
Jesus on the Five yard-Line
Moses doing Goddern fine!
Stay With Christ
Stay With Christ
HOKE 'EM POKE 'EM JESUS SOAK 'EM
Staaaaaaaay with Christ!

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Part II  Larry L. King Continued

6/12/2013

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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.

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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.
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My Hero, Larry L. King (Part I)

6/9/2013

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You might be surprised to learn that the fabled “life of the mind” that comes with a Ph.D. in literature isn’t restricted to all the scholarly stuff you probably imagine.  While I was on the faculty at the University of Oklahoma, I quickly discovered that there were various committee responsibilities, as well.  My favorite and, as time has proven, most rewarding duty at OU was serving on the committee that managed the Contemporary Authors Series which, as the name implies, brought mostly living authors to campus to perform before and meet with students and faculty.  Steven King came, I remember, although I didn’t teach his work and have never read any of it, and Susan Brownmiller, and Arnost Lustig, and Tillie Olsen.  And so did Nora Ephron whom I had read and whose work Crazy Salad I did include in a class.  Unfairly, certainly, I disliked Ms. Ephron personally so much that I have never again knowingly read anything she’s written.  It’s a commonplace, I think, that there is a real danger in meeting and visiting with someone whose work one admires.  Just because an individual possesses the skills and talent to capture one’s imagination and make immeasurable impact on one’s thinking does not mean that that skillful and talented person will be pleasant or likeable or engaging to any degree.  It’s hard, sometimes, to separate the artist from the art.

On the other hand, it was through that same Series that I first met and was fortunate enough to establish long and rewarding relationships with authors among whom I longed to run.  Among them Leslie Marmon Silko, who at the time had just received a McArthur genius grant; Pulitzer Prize recipient N. Scott Momaday, who had been the commencement speaker at the University of New Mexico in 1975 when I received my doctorate and whose beautiful, booming voice has never left my head; Larry McMurtry, who was just then, he told me, working on a novel about two former Texas Rangers who were driving cattle from Texas to Montana, Lonesome Dove, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986; and, most notably, Larry L. King, whose smash Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas had only recently closed after four years or, to be precise, 1,578 performances on the Great White Way.

In the summer of 1981 I was spending most of my time doing the regular kind of college professor stuff:  Drinking beer in the outdoor garden of some Campus Corner burger joint, attending chile cook-offs, and watching rugby matches.  A handsome graduate student was my companion that summer and when she made noises about doing something a little more more cultural I scored us two tickets to see an Oklahoma City road production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  I’d read some of Larry King’s works and figured it would surely be less painful than, say, watching a company of tutu-clad toe-dancers twirl about a stage or trying to stay awake during a fiddle recital.

I was right.  The play was marvelous and funny and I purchased the vinyl recording of the music the very next day and had soon committed all the tunes to memory.  I confess that I raised a few Oklahoma eyebrows with my incessant talk of Broadway show tunes at first, but I was secure enough in my manly demeanor not to let the occasional rude remark deter me all that much.

When classes started and those of us on the Contemporary Authors Series began to meet to discuss whom to invite that year, I was quick to suggest Larry L. King.  Once I got across to the couple of pointy heads on the committee that I was not suggesting the suspendered radio talk-show host of the same name (minus the middle initial), I was roundly discouraged from pursuing King on account of even if they hadn’t seen the play, other committee members knew about Whorehouse and figured that its author would be too “hot” for OU and that getting him to come and pontificate about his well-known success would likely use up all the monies that had been allocated for the Series.  When I persisted with fairly impassioned tales of King’s long-standing successes in journalism and the usefulness and appreciation for his short pieces among student writers, I was finally given the green light to approach him with the understanding that we couldn’t blow our budget.

I decided the stodgy, scholarly approach was probably not what I needed for a man who wrote unabashedly about his own drinking and carousing and dope-smoking while peppering his prose with rude and colorful expletives.

On November 14, 1981, I wrote to King in-care-of his publisher in New York.  The following is taken from that letter:

Dear Mr. King:

From the time I first “found” you in Texas Monthly and went on to other of your articles and collections, I have been a great admirer of your work.  I enjoyed tremendously the stage production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas when it came to Oklahoma City this past summer (so much so, in fact, that my shower-stall renditions of “Twenty Fans Were Turnin’” and “Hard Candy Christmas” have reached the state of near-legend in my home—if not in my neighborhood).  I require my students of Southwest Literature and composition to read, discuss and write about selections from Of Outlaws, Con-Men, Whores, Politicians and Other Artists.  A number of other faculty and certainly many students here are very interested in your work, and all of us would be eager to have you visit our campus sometime this year . . .

. . . we are particularly interested in your visit because much of your work is informed by this region.  Oklahoma students sometimes see themselves as outside the mainstream of American culture—as though art, culture and literature take place elsewhere.  We believe your work is powerful testimony to the contrary . . . .

Very truly yours,

Ron Querry


King’s hand-written response, dated November 24, 1981, follows:

Dear Doctor/Professor and/or Chairman Querry:

Thanks for your good letter.  I’m pleased and flattered by everything you say and am particularly gratified that you inflict my work on your helpless students.  I did the same thing myself when I taught.

I’d truly like to accept your invitation to come to O.U. at a later date.  Right now I’m up to my ass in complications—moving into a new home next week & settling in, facing holidays and familys and a work schedule that would discourage a coal miner.  How about the spring?  I can’t see my way clear before then.  If that suffices, drop a line to my soon-to-be new address . . . and suggest a date.  I’ll be doing a book tour in Texas in March or April, and if we can work it around that trip it would be easier on me and better for your pocketbook.  I hesitate to name a fee—I’ve spoken for as much as $3,000 and for as little as $300; on the average I try for about $1,000 and expenses—especially if it’s an overnight and involves meeting a class as well as the main speech.  If that’s in the ball park, let me know.

Best,

Larry L. King


King’s visit was set for April 1-2, 1982.  In the meantime, I read everything I could find by and about the man.  I encouraged fellow faculty to use his essays in their courses.  I tried, that is, to create a buzz about the event.

I also underwent surgery for a couple of herniated discs.

In fact, I was in St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City up until the day before King was to arrive.  While in hospital, I had seen the then-current issue of People Magazine—not something I would likely have seen had it not been for the cheerful Candy Stripe Volunteer who stopped by my room and offered newspapers and magazines.  My recollection of that issue puts Larry L. King on the cover.  It may not have been the cover, but there was an article about him in the issue illustrated with a good photograph of King in jeans and a vest and a cowboy hat.  He was smoking a cigarette.

The thing I most remember about the article is that King made a big point of bragging how, at the insistence of his wife, he’d been to a Maryland de-tox program because of his excessive drinking—“Whiskey School” he called it.  Understand, I had never personally met the man, but I had read his essays and a truckload of his letters and I knew that King was never one to shy away from the fact that he enjoyed strong drink.  It was less than a week until he was to arrive on campus and I had arranged everything—dinners, parties, lunches—to include plenty of alcohol.  I wanted to make King feel at home, and now I was reading that he was imbibing only iced tea and Donald Duck orange juice.  Luckily, there was a telephone in my hospital room and Norman was considered a local call.

I frantically called everyone involved.  I told them what I’d learned and insisted that we had to hide all the hard stuff and serve up nothing but soft drinks and iced tea.  I did not want to be responsible for any celebrity back-sliding on my watch.

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My Brief Encounter With the Klan

6/6/2013

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There was a short time in 1989-90 that Elaine and I lived in rural Oklahoma in the small (population 300 more or less) town of Butler, about midway between Oklahoma City and Amarillo, Texas.  Elaine’s great grandfather had lived there during the Great Depression and had—through good business sense or skullduggery, depending on who was telling the story—amassed a good bit of dry farmland and mineral rights.  Elaine had inherited some property and some minerals, and we went to Butler to see whether or not it might be a place we’d like to settle.

It wasn’t.

While we were living there—it was just before Christmas in 1989—I wrote a letter to my late friend the writer Bill Eastlake describing some of the downsides of life in rural Oklahoma:

. . . . I’m sitting here wrapped in blankets with all but one of our pipes frozen.  It was 11 below when we woke up this morning—mind you, that was in the kitchen, god knows what it was outside—with a wind chill of something like minus 50 degrees according to the radio (that is, when these western Oklahoma dee-jays can stop braggin’ about how the only president we’ve got [Bush senior] even if he is from Texas stood up all macho-like to that dope-dealin’ acne-scarred commie down in Panama [Manuel Noriega] long enough to give a weather report!)  Supposed to be even worse tonight.  I should tell you that [when we left] Mexico we had determined that we would rent a house in either Bisbee [the town in Arizona where Eastlake lived] or here in Butler where Miss Elaine just recently came into some “acreage.”  Seems that in the mañana lethargy induced by the warm tropics of Mexico we elected Butler on account of the cheap rent [a house for $50 a month] and the absence of distractions.  Kindly do not laugh at us . . . .

While we were in Butler we tried to make the best of living in a place where we were sore thumb outsiders.  For example, we liked to walk.  People in Butler thought that was strange—us walking.  In Butler, if you lived across the road from where you were aiming to go—your neighbor’s house, say, or the Baptist Church—you got in your car or truck and drove over.  If you were spotted walking it was likely on account of your car had run off the road into a bar ditch or maybe you’d run out of gasoline.  To walk just for the hell of it was . . . well, it was strange is what it was.

Most mornings one or both of us would walk the few hundred yards from our rented house to the post office where we could buy the Oklahoma City paper out of a paper machine.  I read every word of every paper, so starved was I for news of the outside world.  I even took to reading the want-ads and, especially, the “Personals” for entertainment.

On January 5, 1990—it was a Friday—there were at least four notices under the “Personals” heading.  There was one for Confidential AIDS Testing, one for Prepaid Dental Insurance starting at $11 a month, an appeal for ladies clothing size 16-18, and—and it was this one that attracted my attention—a notice that read: “The Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is taking applications for membership.”  A Post Office Box address was listed.

Right away I have to tell you that I was astounded to read this notice.  I do not consider myself to be particularly naive, but I really thought the KKK was something out of the past—the not-so-distant past, to be sure, but not something that would blatantly advertise in the newspaper for recruits.

Naturally, I responded with a request for more information.  I didn’t really expect to hear anything back.

Wrong.

Within a week I received a plain brown envelope with all matter of incendiary materials and an application form.  A cover letter warned me of “thousands of organizations working for the interests of blacks” and that as a “white heterosexual Christian” and a “common working man [with a] common family” I could help!  (I’m thinking that maybe my handwriting revealed me to be a “common white heterosexual Christian family man”—that, or else it was a litmus test.)

The letter was signed,

For God, Race and Nation
Marty Martin
Great Titan for the State of Oklahoma

Now, I know good and well that I shared with my wife the fact that I was just fooling around out of boredom and my surprise that such things were still going on.  But Elaine told me years later that she worried herself half sick over the whole deal and that it was years before she quit thinking that the FBI would one day knock on our door and handcuff and lead me away.

In fact, she got on to me so much for having kept the Klan materials and for having included those materials in among the archives that I sent to San Marcos that when I visited with the Director and the Head Archivist for the Collection recently, I made a point of trying to reassure them that this was all a big joke, to me—that I really am the bleeding-heart, tax-and-spend liberal that I represent myself to be and that my curiosity about the Klan and Rednecks and Evangelical Snake-Handlers was and still is really just that . . . curiosity.

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School Daze

6/2/2013

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I’ve written elsewhere how, coming from Oklahoma to San Francisco in the mid-1960s, fresh from active duty in the Marine Corps, I was somewhat taken aback by the attitudes and dress of folks around me at San Francisco State College.  Professors taught classes in blue jeans and sandals.  Everyone seemed to smoke marijuana and consume mood-elevating plants and pharmaceuticals, and young women didn’t wear a lot of underwear.  Understand, I adapted very quickly—took up a lot of the habits and fashions I found comfortable.  I can recall clearly the mother of my only daughter—a woman I’d met in a San Francisco bar and whom I never did get to know very well—telling me that I was “a goddammed hippy” not long before I last saw her.  (A couple of years later I got a call from that woman’s mother telling me that my then three-year-old daughter had just been delivered to the San Francisco airport along with another child—an infant.  I picked up my daughter, Isabel, and neither she nor I have ever heard of or seen her mother again.  I don’t know what happened to the infant.  That was in 1966.)

I was never a hippy.  I worked full-time and went to college.  I’m eternally sorry to have to say that I was never a particularly good father to my child, but my mother—a good woman—helped me out considerably.

I liked being a college student.  I liked it so much, in fact, that I kept going to colleges and universities here and there until I had earned enough degrees to suit me.  I worked most of those years in hospitals.  Hospitals operate twenty-four hours a day and shifts could generally be arranged to accommodate full-time classes.  I had early on trained to become an Operating Room Technician—the person you see on TV and in the movies who slaps the scalpel and clamps into the surgeon’s hand—and that skill served me well for the many years I remained a student.  I worked and studied in Oklahoma, San Francisco, South Carolina, and New Mexico.

I loved being in the operating room.  I enjoyed—for the most part—being around the surgeons and anesthesiologists (there were, to be sure, a good number of arrogant assholes among them, but they were in the minority).  I loved being around nurses and nursing students.  Those were good and happy times to be young and full of testosterone and energy.  I remember, for example, a bar just a block or two away from St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City that was called “ICU” (Intensive Care Unit) the walls of which were decorated with metal bedpans and IV Bags and various other hospital accouterments that made us all feel welcome at the end of a grueling eight or, often, more hours of ministering to the ill and saving lives, just like they do on television.

They were just fine times, my college days.  When I enrolled at San Francisco State I declared that I was “Pre-Med”—that I intended to become a rich, famous cardio-vascular surgeon like Michael “Black Mike” DeBakey and transplant vital organs and save lives and walk around in scrubs and a white jacket all day while adoring nurses and grateful patients and their families fawned over me.

I enrolled in Biology and Zoology classes.  I took a Human Anatomy course in which every three students were assigned their very own human cadaver to dissect over the semester.  I recall that my two lab partners and I immediately named our cadaver “Ernest” so that we could always answer when asked what we were doing that we were “working in dead Ernest.”

At the same time, however, I enrolled in as many literature courses as I possibly could on account of I loved to read and had never before—in Oklahoma or in the Marine Corps—been around people who also loved to read and, even better, to talk at length about what they were reading.  As I said, I worked fulltime in hospitals on the 3 to 11pm shifts, yet I always enrolled in eighteen credit hours each semester—actually, I sometimes enrolled in twenty-one hours intending to drop three hours once I had determined my least favorite class.  I soon discovered that there was a whole library chocked full of wonderful books and there were Bay Area bookshops that smelled good to me and where the proprietors had the good sense to place overstuffed easy chairs and ever-filled coffee pots—and these were free cups of coffee, mind you, not Starbucks outlets with their flavored and whipped creamed Talls or Ventis or whatever they call them, and cookies and pastries and CDs and other paraphernalia that cost as much as any book.  I’m thinking here of the famous “no name bookshop” in Sausalito that I favored—I wonder but doubt seriously if it still exists.

At the end of my Sophomore year I was required to undergo a “degree check” to ascertain whether or not I was progressing adequately in my scholarly pursuits.  The young woman who performed this check asked me if I was still intending to pursue medical school.  She pointed out that I had enrolled in, but dropped, basic chemistry but that, as I prepared to enter my junior year I had completed all but a single course required for a degree in English with a double minor in Biology and Psychology.  She allowed as how I might want to revisit my aspirations since completing the required coursework for application to medical school would no doubt mean I would have to enroll full-time in science and mathematics courses for the remainder of my undergraduate career.  I blanched at the thought.

That very afternoon I had a lab of some kind and I remember telling my two partners about my predicament.  A woman and a man, I wish I could recall their names.  They both said that they could see me as a tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking professor of literature.  I liked the idea.  The following week I declared my major to be English and stopped fretting over the dreaded chemistry and math.  I believe I bought a cheap pipe, too—but it didn’t really suit me, apparently.

After receiving my Bachelor’s Degree in English at Central State University in Oklahoma, I moved to New Mexico where I took a Master’s Degree, also in English, at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas.  I spent a year teaching in a college program inside the walls of the New Mexico State Penitentiary in Santa Fe.

I commuted to Albuquerque from Las Vegas and earned my Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of New Mexico in 1975.  American Studies was then a transdisciplinary program in American culture studies that was only offered to doctoral students.  I studied American Literature, History, and Sociology.

Over the next four years I did some teaching—at New Mexico Highlands University and at a private women’s college in Ohio—and I worked as a horseshoer and wrangler and I worked in the operating room at St Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe.  I’ve said elsewhere that when I was working as a teacher I was nagged by the feeling that teaching was not really work and that it seemed, somehow, dishonest to take a paycheck for reading and talking about books.  On the other hand, when I was, say, shoeing a horse I could hear my Mother’s voice asking me why I was wasting my good college education out there in the hot sun.  I was (and am, I suppose) what they call a “free spirit,” which, as I understand the term, is one who does whatever interests him at any given time.  Money has never been all that important to me—so long, that is, that I can eat and pay my bills.  I would love to be wealthy, but I’m confident I never shall be.  Looking back, I’ve had a pretty good time.

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San Francisco, 1962

5/6/2013

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It was the early 60s.  I was on active duty in the Marine Corps--stationed on board the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Coral Sea which was, at the time in dry dock at Hunter's Point in San Francisco undergoing repairs.  Marines stationed aboard Navy ships are not allowed to have civilian clothing--going ashore on liberty or leave, we were dressed in uniform.

So here I am, a Marine, roaming the streets of San Francisco.  It's late, and I don't have to be back to the ship until the next day.  I am alone.  I see a hotel, the rooms are cheap--$4 or $5 I'm thinking--and I get one for the night.  Nice to sleep in a real bed in a room rather than in the 3-storey bunk among 50-some-odd other Marines.

Some time in the night I wake to see, in the dim glow from the street lights, a stranger sitting on the bed beside me, gently patting my leg.

"Hi," he says.  "You left your key in the door."

"Oh," I mumble.  "Thanks."

He stands and looks at me for a moment.

"You're welcome.  I guess I'll go."

"Yeah," I say.  "You need to go."

I lock the door behind him.

Jeez . . . .
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Flashback(s)

4/28/2013

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I've written elsewhere that I had a short, unhappy period many years ago when I taught at a private women's college in Ohio.  I've been thinking for the past few days about one particular evening while I was there.  Some fellow who was, I think, an educational theorist of some renown was visiting the campus.  I was somehow invited(?) to stop by a faculty member's home where the fellow was holding forth.  What I recall was that he was, at the time, anyway, taken with learning to play the cello.  To that end, he carried with him not a cello, but a bow, and he was constantly "playing" an invisible instrument.  I found this whole thing quite odd.  But then, I have never been a musician.

I remember that there were, I think, three young women (students) who were in attendance and who, when it came time to leave, offered to walk me home to the house where I was temporarily staying while waiting for remodeling of what was to be my house on the farm portion of the campus.  It was cold--winter in Ohio--and one of the young women, as was the custom in those days and in that place, fired up a joint and began to pass it among the four of us.  There may have been other things--I honestly do not recall.  Arriving at my porch, they bid me goodnight and went away.  I remember hearing much laughter as they walked away.

What happened next lasted, I'd say, six or eight hours.  Alone in my room I will not try and describe the "trip" I was taking, but it resembled very much the acid trips I'd read and heard about from my days in San Francisco.  It was frightening.  I feel confident I was somehow given LSD.

As I said, it lasted six or so hours.  But it came back to me in what I can only call horrifying ways for many months afterwards.  For years, in fact.  I'm still unnerved by the recollection.

I wonder if they knew how close to psychosis they brought me?
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Scholarly Pursuits in Oklahoma

4/13/2013

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It was the fall of 1981.  I was teaching at the University of Oklahoma and enjoying it mightily.  Those were very fine days for me, and I look back on them fondly.  What I can remember of them.  To be perfectly honest, a lot of those days were filled with so much cannabis smoke and booze-fumes that some of my recollections are today a little foggy.  I shall, however, be as precise and accurate and as truthful as I possibly can in the telling.

I was single and some pounds lighter than I am today.  The scary specter of rampant sexually transmitted disease had not yet become so universally threatening.  The faculty at OU—those in the English Department, anyway—were a rowdy bunch many of whom favored Country & Western dancing in county-line bars, beer-drinking, softball and touch-football and handball playing, marathon running, golfing and enjoying ice-cold pitchers of beer at lunch with members of the rugby team.  We were some of the greatest scholars ever to have gathered in one place . . . believe it.

We once rented a large touring bus complete with restrooms and a full bar to travel from Norman, Oklahoma, to Houston, Texas (a distance of some four hundred and fifty miles), for an important Language Arts Association meeting.  I remember there was a high-stakes poker game on the ride south, and that one evening during the conference we chided the also rented bus driver into taking us to Gilley’s Dance Hall where we two-stepped around the huge dance floor to live music.  Later, on the way back to the hotel someone passed a hat and an attractive woman from the University of Oklahoma Press went into a 7/11-type store in a bad part of suburban Houston and purchased several cases of beer.  She reported that the foreign clerk was wide-eyed at the huge bus that had pulled up by the gas pumps and seemed confused when she paid for the beer with small bills.

Twelve of us, men and women, had managed to squeeze into the expensive (to us) convention-site hotel room designed for two.  I remember that my good friend David Mair who went on to make a name for himself in Technical Writing and University Administration circles curled up on the carpeted floor of the air-conditioned room with only a hotel-issued bath towel covering him.  I, on the other hand, was fortunate in that just as the dozen of us were agreeing on chaste sleeping arrangements the room telephone rang.  We figured we’d been found out by management and were about to be asked to vacate immediately.  Rather the caller asked for me.  Seems the woman from the Press who’d purchased the beer knew of our predicament and allowed as how she had an extra bed in her Press-paid room and wondered if I might be more comfortable there. Without so much as a blush I left my eleven companions to the sound of boos and catcalls.

The hotel’s atrium, I recall, had a glass elevator that went all the way to the upper floors—fifteen or twenty stories.  One night—actually, it was the wee hours of the morning—while the rest of our rowdy bunch was gathered in the lobby trying to decide where we could find some more trouble to get into, my friend and colleague Dr. Laurie Fink and I happened to enter the elevator together after visiting our respective rooms and descended to the lobby, all the while watching our party huddled below.  We waved and made faces, but no one seemed to see us.  When we joined the group I said, “Hey, didn’t you see Laurie and me mooning you people as we came down the elevator?”  Of course, we hadn’t—that was just an example of my witty repartee.  However, some time later, Laurie told me that her then-fiancé—another instructor at OU—had accused her of lying when she told him I had only been kidding.

“Bullshit!”  She reported he said.  “I saw you!”

And I think he had convinced himself, too.  Anyway, I wasn’t invited to their wedding a year or two later.

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