Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.
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Do you like this award? All of us here at me are very excited, and we’d like to thank the acadamy, and my mother, and our lord and- Oh, wait. Hold on a minute. Let’s start over …
Do you like this award? You do? That’s swell. Because you too can have a nice award, courtesy of that CSS-maven Ms. Firda Beka, who lives far away. To claim your award, just visit one of her pretty sites, specifically this one:
The fathers took the children tobogganing down the big hill in the moonlight, and the bright ice-laden snow twinkled like diamonds beneath the moon. Adrienne was nine, bundled up so snug with her stylish earmuffs.
Beside the dark woods, down the clear-lit hill upon their bucking toboggans, the children would glide, crying out in pleasure at the speed and the ghostly light, breath in clouds, their voices thin in the chill air.
And then they saw the wolves.
Three wolves stood at the verge of the trees, gazing down upon the children upon the slope, upon the fathers above, at the speeding toboggans.
The toboggans stopped. The children watched the wolves. The wolves watched the children. All was silent.
“Come, children,” said Adrienne’s father. “It’s best we went back to town.” There was no argument.
In a close group, the fathers and the children departed, drawing toboggans behind. The wolves silently watched them depart.
Dallas, Texas, 1965: I didn’t know much about negotiating back then. I knew I wanted to buy the Morgan Motor Car, and Little John had a demonstrator for $3000. I wasn’t able to talk him down, and he wasn’t much interested in my trade-in, a faded-paint Dodge Lancer with “The Spook” written on the back.
The First National Bank of Henrietta finally came through at the end of the day, a day I’d been close to tears several times, and just as night was falling, Little John handed me the keys.
I’d never driven a sportscar. Certainly not one like this.
A Morgan is very light and low to the ground. Beneath the tan leather upholstery, you’re sitting on an inflatable cushion perhaps three inches thick, and the floor is only five inches from the ground. Kind of like driving a go-cart through traffic.
Further, the hood is long and tapering, and you’re sitting right in front of the rear axel, so when you turn a corner, it appears that the distant front end of the car turns the corner, and then some short time later, you turn the corner.
As I drove through the busy nighttime Dallas traffic in the unfamiliar car, working the gears, I suddenly realized that I was sitting so low that my head was lower than many of the headlights on other cars. The speed, the new gearbox, the flashing lights, it was all quite frightening.
By the edge of town, I’d decided to take the back way through the countryside, so that there would be less cars on the highway. Or maybe I just got disoriented and found myself on that road.
This was a smaller highway, a two-laner that wound homeward through a generally deserted woods. Once free of the city, I accelerated up to 65, then the night-time speed limit.
Wow!
In the low-slung car, it seemed like I was just flying. The tachometer kept reving up, the high-pitched engine eager. And the curves! They popped into the headlights, then I was zooming around like lightning with plenty of screeching from the wide tires. I felt like I was driving a hundred miles an hour.
When the occasional other car appeared ongoing, it was as if it no sooner appeared than zoomed past, receding tail-lights behind me. And twice I came upon other cars, just dawdling they were, oddly, all of them. I passed them like they were parked on the highway.
The mystery of the speeding car was solved the next day: The speedometer was installed wrong. What I thought was 65, was actually 95, and I’d driven all the way at that speed in the unfamiliar vehicle.
Just like Parnelli Jones. Only far more ignorant.
Here are three from the “Cat Haiku” page —
Wanna go outside.
Oh, no! Help! I got outside!
Let me back inside!
Humans are so strange.
Mine lies still in the bed, then screams!
My claws aren’t that sharp …
Oh no! Big One
has been trapped by newspaper.
Cat to the rescue!
Find more on the “Pet Humor” site.
Mount Shasta: Adrienne and I went for a Sunday Drive. On the map there’s this little lake called “Crystal Lake”, some few miles beyond Lake Siskiyou. A week ago we had snow on the ground, but it’s long gone now, and Sunday being bright and clear, we went to find this Crystal Lake.
Just past the Lake Siskiyou turn-off we found the road, and turned up the hill. The woods were auburn and lofty above us, and the sunlight streaming down upon the winding road.
A quarter-mile up the road, and higher on the hill, we found a sprinkling of snow beneath the shady trees. As we drove the next quarter-mile, suddenly the snow covered the road, and soon after, the road was frozen with six inches of snow.
We stopped and turned around. Crystal Lake can wait.
I’ve never before had the experience of driving from Fall into Winter. But there it was.
Perhaps being a preacher’s son bestows a mantle of lawlessness on young males, for it certainly happened that way with Jeffrey. At age 19, Jeff and a younger friend, whom we’ll call Doug, were in full bloom as young criminals.
Somehow they’d found a set of keys. That was how they got the money.
This set of keys opened all the Coca-Cola machines in southern Tennessee. What a find!
Jeff and Doug lived in genteel poverty in a rural shack, and in the evening they’d cruise the highways and backroads in Jeff’s battered VW bus, looking for coke machines. When nobody was looking, open popped the coke machine door, out into a sack poured handfuls of coins, and off went Jeff and Doug to buy drugs. Serious drugs. Injectable drugs.
Until one evening, when cruising a backroad, Jeff spotted a cop car coming toward them down the road. Immediately Doug called out, for the cops were behind them as well. Holding the sack of coins and the keys seemed unwise just then, so in their VW bus they took off.
The cops gave chase.
At the first opportunity, Doug threw the coins and the keys from the van, but it did no good at all. The cops easily caught the boys, and had seen the keys flying, so the evidence and the boys went to jail.
Jeff, being a personable guy, was immediately invited by the resident jailbirds to go along on a jailbreak arranged for that very night, because the other prisoners had completed an arduous task only that day. A hole had been cut to the roof.
Under cover of darkness, Jeff and Doug and 28 other prisoners snaked up to the roof and slithered down the outside wall, and were off into the woods. Under the shelter of the woods, Jeff stopped Doug.
“Wait a minute,” Jeff said. “You’re a minor. Your father’s going to be here to pick you up tomorrow morning. You’re crazy to break out. You’ll get off anyway.”
Doug considered. Jeff was right.
The two boys sneaked back to the wall, and Jeff helped Doug break back into the jail. They said their good-byes, and Jeff took off. He couldn’t find the other 28 prisioners, which was just as well, for the lot of them went to a bar where they got roaring drunk and were corralled with ease next morning by the sherrif’s deputies.
Jeff, on his own, hiked through the night and, tapping on a friend’s window in the wee hours, arranged immediate transportation, in another VW van. Through the night they drove, and all the next day, arriving at Bob’s front door in San Francisco, where they spent the night in sleeping bags upon the floor.
But before they slept, wired by the experience, they stayed up all hours playing guitars and singing. So it wasn’t unexpected that Bob’s nazi roommate Greg, the apartment’s leaseholder, threw them out the next day.
Jeff’s driver returned to Tennessee. Jeff found another place to stay, and, being a skilled carpenter, found odd jobs. I hired him to make the worktable for Operators at our new location on Geary Boulevard. I’d drawn up plans, and being documentation-crazy, made him promise to return the plans. He lost them of course.
I lost track of Jeff, and the table plans, but it seems he moved to Southern California and went straight. He got married and began a family. Because he was an escaped felon, however, he couldn’t get a California driver’s license, and so it was a matter of time that some years later he got pulled over by the highway patrol, who somehow learned by immediate radio that he was a wanted man in Tennessee.
Jeff spent the night in jail. No breaking out this time.
In the morning, the Highway Patrol got through to Tennessee, to let them know they had the fugitive in hand. But Tennessee said that they didn’t want him any more.
“Jeff,” said the watch commander. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience. They don’t want you.”
Jeff stared. The officer nodded.
“You’re free to go.”
Denton, Texas, 1960’s: At North Texas State University (now called University of North Texas), Larry Burns and his father ran a coffee-house across from the English Building. It was called The Hob Nob. This place was home to some of us. Maybe it was your home, too.
I used to hang out with fellow artistes and literati Paul Miner, John B., and Billy Bucher. Paul drew pictures and wrote stories. John wrote stories and edited the school’s literary magazine. Billy played jazz music and wrote stories. I wrote stories.
All of us drank a lot of coffee and gabbed for hours and hours at the Hob Nob. We had a crew of friends — Rex May, John Mahoney, Larry Pine, Tex Allen, John Hill, Camilla Carr, Michael Murphy, and lots more.
The cups of coffee never stopped. The conversations never stopped, spinning and turning and returning again. This it was, once upon a time.
My friend Bill Bucher has expressed an interest in writing some micro-stories about that time, and about times that came later, and if any other Hobnobbers find us, we’d invite you to join in. For this purpose, at one point we set up a separate weblog for tales from that time, and tales from our later lives.
However, software changes eventually interfered, and we lost that site. Sorry.
So at least, join us in remembering. I’m sure in your memory, the coffee is as strong as ever, and in the fullness of time we’re hoping the gab will flow, richer than ever.
San Francisco, 1989: Perhaps it was reading all those mysteries, late night and eyes gritty, and the sounds of the night outside. Maybe the accident of meeting Fay, in that seedy part of town just off the waterfront. Maybe I just worried about getting fat, and thought if I was a Private Eye, I’d be the Thin Man.
Whatever it was, I became a Private Investigator.
For a while.
The business card of The Ashford Agency referred to me as “Dr. Detecto”. Adrienne kept calling me Defecto, but that was just her tough-girl style. The card had a picture of a dragon circling a castle spire beneath the moon, and a story …
“During the middle ages, a monastic order known as the Cistercians became prominant, spreading throughout Europe and the English islands. The Cistercians had an organization which allowed local control of each monastery, but an annual convocation of all abbots that they might remain united in theology and purpose.
“The order was known to be hard-working and honest, stressing simplicity and truth, and they preserved many manuscripts which were already ancient. One such obscure manuscript appears to be an account of a Dragon which lived nearby and spoke with men, although the time of this Dragon was already long past by the time of the Cistercian manuscript, which is circa 1272 A.D. —
“In Ashford Tower upon the plain,
In Time of Auld did Dragon dwell.
In knowledge were He Deep and Fair,
In Visage Dark and Fell.
“The Ashford Agency has chosen this ancient image as a symbol of the eternal search for truth and man’s endless struggle to pierce the veil of illusion, to perceive life as it is, and the ultimate victory of love and hope over the forces of evil.
“The Ashford Agency is licensed by the State of California Department of Consumer Affairs, Bureau of Collections and Investigations.”
Isn’t that just swell?
Alas, my agency and my P.I. career fell quite short of these lofty goals, though I did manage to investigate a traffic accident, serve papers on a couple of guys, wear a disguise, and attempt to tail somebody to their hideout in order to find where they’d hidden the assets. I also got a job to recover funds from some scam boys, but scam boys were way better than me, and remained unfound.
The job did give me a reason to grow a moustache, and to buy a grey surveillance vehicle and a Minolta camera with fancy lenses. The camera turned out to be great for high-speed shots of skateboarders, and for close-ups of the roses in Golden Gate Park in the Spring.
Fay, who helped me set up The Ashford Agency, on the other hand, eventually uncovered an extensive murder ring among a family of gypsies. Honest to gosh, she actually did.
But that’s another story.
