Pink Adobe Hacienda

Here’s what happened the night I met my husband fourteen years ago today.

My Sacred Heart classmates had flown into Houston to celebrate Labor Day weekend with me. I was working at the ranch that Friday (Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital). I knew that by the time I fought traffic on 59 South and made it to my apartment in the Upper Kirby Business District that it would be dinnertime. I left a key for them with the management. They sunned poolside until I showed up.

We were on a mission to get to the Mucky Duck by 7:00 p.m. A rockabilly band called the Hollisters was playing. I slammed on a pair of denim overalls and a T-shirt with the logo for a local bar, The Black Labrador. And in retrospect, let me just say, yuck. I didn't even have enough time to put on makeup.

The Mucky Duck was not just any venue. It was my home away from home. I was there most nights, getting inspired to write songs and play my guitar. The owners, Rusty and Therese, knew me by name. Their pub calendar was on my refrigerator.

The Hollisters were not just any band. They were my ex-boyfriend’s favorite band. He and I were always trying to get out to a Hollisters show, but somehow we never made it out to see them.

Susan and Suzanne were not just any friends. They were my best friends. They had endured Father Wagner’s impossible Friday vocabulary quizzes with me senior year of high school. One day in Fr. Wagner’s class they asked me to go to Florida with them over spring break. I am fairly certain the three of us failed the test Fr. Wagner gave us the week back after spring break for a novel (I do not even recall the name of the book) that none of us read. I know I failed that test. We were part of a group of teenagers that roamed Louisville with the original moniker, The Gang. Susan and I choreographed a dance to the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” that we performed for certain graduates of a boy high school on the night of their graduation. Suzanne and I shared the coincidence that our fathers had graduated from another boy high school in the same class with Tom Cruise’s dad, whose last name was actually Mapother.

When we arrived at the Duck, we made a beeline to the bar. Three Aggies in starched shirts and khaki pants accosted us. We dismissed them. After all, my friends were married, and I wasn’t looking for a starched shirt.

We settled down at a long table just in front of the stage. I always have to be in the front row.

Now the Duck is an intimate venue that seats probably seventy-five max. It’s where I met Troy Campbell, Scrappy Jud Newcomb, Kelly Willis (who was my accomplice one night during a fight with the ex-boyfriend), Darden Smith, and Alejandro Escovedo, to name a few. It’s where I took potential boyfriends to test them to see if they liked music as much as I did.

I recall we were in high spirits at my table. The Hollisters, they rocked.

I had glanced over at another table and spotted a very handsome young man with long hair in a ponytail, and then just looked away. My girlfriends were going to get all of my attention.

So to my surprise, said ponytail man tapped me on the shoulder, apropos nothing, and asked if I would “care” to dance.

Wait, back up. I left out a big point about why our table was in such high spirits. The owner of the bar, Therese, was scheming with her decorator friend, and she sent a bottle of champagne to our table, and told us that it was from the men at the table where the guy with the long ponytail was sitting.

Okay, I would have danced with that guy even if I was perfectly sober. You see, on closer inspection, he was wearing the following:
A billiard ball motif silk shirt
A pair of jeans
A pair of suede clogs
A scrunchie (that a “girl’s mom” had made for him)

The man could shag. I had spent much time shagging in the basement of the Phi Delt house at Centre College. I had not mastered the Carolina shag, but I could fake it.

When silk shirt asked me to dance, his two friends asked my two friends to dance shortly thereafter. We all ended up on the very small area of floor in front of the stage that could accommodate dancing.

I think we danced to “Pink Adobe Hacienda." But, it could have been that we danced to “East Texas Pines” or “Better Slow Down.”

We only danced one song. They returned to their table, and we returned to ours.

At our table the discussion went like this: “Heather, he is doing all of that dancing in clogs!”

A song or two later, the three gentlemen reappeared and asked for another dance. We consented. My future husband and I left the dance floor holding hands and did not let go the rest of the night.

We moved to their table, and much sparring and Q&A ensued. My friends vetted silk shirt. And they bragged about my ability to throw a party. And they found out that he had thrown a party or two himself on his ranch in Texas.

The band packed up. We stepped out into the night sky, where silk shirt pointed out the moon, two days past full. He asked the designated Duck police officer for a pen, which he used to write my number on his hand. The number was something like 528-3869. At that point there was only one area code in Houston, and it was 713.

Silk shirt said he would like to see me again. I said that I would be busy with my girlfriends until Sunday. I asked him if he was laboring on Labor Day, and he said no. So I suggested that he call my apartment Sunday afternoon.

Susan, Suzanne and I climbed into my brown Volvo sedan. I cranked the moon roof open, and we drove back to my apartment.

I’ll tell you the rest on Labor Day.

A Whale of a Tale

When was the last time a stranger entertained you with a story? Traveling minstrels don’t favor hot concrete so I bet it wasn’t this summer. And in the absence of a minstrel, who is going bend your ear?

Larry McMurtry bemoans the death of the coffee shop story in his book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. He’s right; there isn’t much storytelling at coffee shops these days with all the laptop screens dividing customers into their own mutually exclusive, synthetic, virtual worlds.

I traveled riverside this afternoon and was delightfully surprised that the river can transcend time and technology. Those of us gravitating to the southerly flow of rippled liquid seem to want to tell and be told stories as much today as folks did back in the days of Huck Finn.

“How did you end up here?” My waiter inquired, on the shore of the Ouachita River in Eastern Louisiana. I had already told him I was en route to Fort Worth, and being that the Warehouse No. 1 Restaurant isn’t just off the interstate, it was a fair question. And I had already noticed he looked like a young Dave Grohl, so I didn’t feel like I needed to hold anything back.

I briefly mentioned that I research all my stops on a trip. I am an official member of the Hey See Club (as in, "Hey, see this," and "Hey, see that"). We don’t tote membership cards but you’ll know us when you meet us. We think the journey is just as important as the destination. That’s why we’re drawn to rivers, where the allure of slow travel on a boat still hangs in the breezes today.

So I told my waiter I grew up in a river city (Louisville, Kentucky is, after all, the River City) and I’m always trying to see ones I’ve never seen before. My waiter told me the river I had chosen to see was one of the most beautiful in the state. “Not here, where there’s all this crap in the water, but not too far from here.” He told me the river is named silver water in Indian speak. Then he told me a story.

Time was I could have my story before lunch every day—didn’t even have to wait for bedtime.  Grandpa George would drive me into Battletown before noon because it was just too hot to be out past lunch. We’d go to Jake’s General Store, the one that smells musty. There Jake would be behind the counter, ready to spin a tale about a president coming down the Ohio on a boat.

I was a story hog growing up. When I was sick with the flu or in bed with a headache, my dad would sit on the edge of my bed and ask if I needed anything. “Tell me a story,” I’d say. Then I’d add, “About when you were little.”

And Dad would oblige. He had stories about swinging across Beargrass Creek on vines, climbing the fence to get into Churchill Downs and running from the police in Germantown. Uncle Gordon never got caught and Dad didn’t think that was fair.

If Grandpa George were here today, I’d say, “Tell me a story about when you were in the CCC.” He fought forest fires in California and made a daytrip to Tijuana with his buddies. I have the Daguerreotype of them in a mule cart with a fringed surrey. But I don’t know the story behind the picture.

I think the only person who is going to tell me a story today told it to me an hour ago. Here it is: Last spring there was more rain than there’d ever been in years in Monroe, Louisiana. So much rain that the Ouachita River rose until it was “a foot up off of the deck.”

Now here I had to ask my waiter what he meant. We were on a deck that seemed to be about twenty feet off the ground. I put my hand down, like I was petting a dog at my feet, and inquired, “Do you mean it was this high?”

“No,” he said, “It was just a foot under the deck.”

“Wow,” I said.


“Yeah, it hadn’t been that high since 1991. And we all came out here on the deck, and hung a guy over the railing, keeping him just above the water.”

And that was his story. It was over just as soon as it began, but I suppose it’s the sentiment that counts.

My waiter told me to come back in the fall, when it’s cooler and people like to sit on the deck to linger over dinner. They probably flipped for me today to figure who would wait on the only woman crazy enough in Eastern Louisiana to eat lunch outside in the heat. But I think I’ll return next time I’m passing through especially if there’s a story waiting for me there.

Onward I went over the Ouachita, and after passing into Texas, at the very first stop possible, I saw a sign, shining like a beacon and a promise of all things Larry McMurtry to come. It was a DQ!



Maybe here, in this state of “tall tales and other big lies,” I’ll find someone to tell me a real story. And go on and feel free to click on that link to see one of the funniest animated shorts ever, starring Ray Wylie Hubbard and produced by my friend Troy Campbell.

Books: A Southern Train of Thought

When I moved to Chapel Hill, I heard that everyone here has an M.D. or a Ph.D. James Taylor’s neighbor told me this town was once known as Pill Hill. Forget doctors; I’m starting to think you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a writer.

I live in the land of the southern writer. I’ve seen Daniel Wallace at the Y. I’ve attended cocktail parties where Fred Chappell sipped juleps. I’ve even spotted songwriter Tift Merritt looking all rough and tumble in her jeans with Zeke at her side at the Saturday morning market.

I didn’t know much about southern literature until setting foot on the campus of the University of North Carolina, where I’ve acquired a taste for it at the annual Thomas Wolfe lecture. I fell in love with Ellen Gilchrist one year at the lecture after hearing her read from her story that begins “It was the summer of the broad jump pit." Another year, my friend Garrison Somers, the editor of The Blotter (the South’s free literary magazine), and I fell under the spell of Fred Chappell.

Hearing a writer read his stories has a certain pull for me. I’m growing addicted to it, much in the way I grew addicted to hearing a songwriter sing his songs in Texas.

Last night caught me a bit by surprise. Excuse my ignorance but I had no idea who Louis D. Rubin was until yesterday. He came to my attention as I supped alone at my dining room table and took a few minutes to ponder an e from Flyleaf Books. A reading by an esteemed writer and editor who had taught many students over the years--I’m in, I thought.

Twenty minutes later I was sitting in the community room of Flyleaf Books, listening to a spectacled southern gentleman talk as he gestured with his right hand.

He read a passage from a time in his life after he had graduated from JHU but before he went back to the campus as a professor. Can you imagine returning to Charleston and seeing the train that always piqued your curiosity, then buying a ticket to ride to the end of the line just to see where it goes?

That concept makes me think of some of the trains I missed and some of the trains I rode, and I am speaking figuratively, to be certain.

I woke this morning earlier than usual, reeling from a dream about my extended southern family preparing to board the Canadian National Railway, and twitching to write about my own American childhood. Then as I stood in the early morning light near the window, far off a train’s whistle blew.

Who is this man Rubin and what has he stirred in me? I turned on the computer and answered both questions. He is none other than the cofounder of Algonquin Books (Water for Elephants) and professor of Annie Dillard.

Something has happened in the world this night
Of rare consequence for some time to come,
Whether or not it alters the final sum.

“Passage” Fred Chappell