It was the latter days of a two-year stint working as an actor in a traveling children’s theater troupe on weekdays in remote schools in east Texas, southern Arkansas and north Louisiana. On weekend evenings, I was part of an ensemble of both locals and expatriates entertaining tourists with dinner theater fare at the Haywood House, the renovated remains of a Civil War era hotel, claimed to be haunted. On weekend days, I drove an open air, motorized trolley car working as a tour guide, telling the colorful history of Jefferson, Texas, a small town settled by New Orleanians that sprung up in cotton-rich east Texas and that just as quickly became a ghost town after the Army Corps of Engineers TNT'd the Great Red River Raft of logs that clogged the waterway. At the time, I was living out of the back of my 1982 Ford Mustang hatchback that stank of mildew from leaking seals, cigarette smoke, stale beer and body odor. My life was on the cusp of a major change.
I befriended a Jefferson local, a woman named Katie who lived with her mother and abusive father. Katie and I spent an inordinate amount of time together, and we found nourishment in cheap vodka and our mutual cynicism directed toward the outside world. I remember our fights, her throwing my pristine first edition copy of Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout at me, ruining the dust jacket and devaluing it an amount I am still unable to accept nearly 20 years later. Between fights, we laughed at the absurdity of our squalid existence as well as the town’s transient, ovine, antique-spelunking Dallas tourists who paid our paltry wages.
After many nights sleeping on floors of friends’ apartments, we found ourselves living 20 miles out of town in Ore City, Texas with a poor white couple and their long-haired teen aged son. I’ve forgotten all of their names, but the “man of the house” was an ex-con who had murdered someone and was now a house painter. His wife was an ex-prostitute, and their son was hers, the progeny of one of her unknown johns. While we were living with them, the son was expelled from high school for smoking pot. His parents were born again Christians. They spoke in tongues of a suspect vernacular: “Key-to-my-necktie! Key-to-my-Honda!"
It was dead of winter. My Mustang had burned up in a field one evening when I was driving to a party at a ranch that had a quarter-mile driveway piled with dry hay that ignited when rolled under my floorboard against the glowing ember of my vehicle’s catalytic converter. I was able to salvage a few scraps of clothing and not much else. So we traveled in Katie’s massive yellow SUV, the make and model of which I cannot recall. All I know is it lacked a working heater. The floorboard was littered with Dairy Queen burger wrappers and soft drink cups, empty crumbled cigarette packs, and other detritus I did my best to try to ignore.
We were allowed to sleep in a room off of the kitchen that appeared to be a utility room but was mainly used as a breeding area for the couple’s dachshunds and dalmatians. There was no bed, so we slept on an open sleeping bag spread atop the shit-matted brown shag carpet. Without a source of heat, we huddled next to each other, fully clothed in our heavy coats, caps, and mufflers, falling asleep passing a bottle of cheap vodka back and forth, listening to the early recordings of the Indigo Girls and R.E.M. A gap under the back door in our room was wide enough to slip a 10-ounce beer can, the frigid winter wind whistling through the gap like an Arctic tundra blizzard.
Katie was what you might call a large girl, so I nestled into her bosom like a baby polar bear cub. It was nearing Christmas, but no hot chocolate flowed, no pine tree filled scents in the air, and no stories were told in front of the crackling fire. I feared frostbite, but the straight alcohol warmed me from the inside until I passed out, ultimately relieved of any conscious fears. Katie always slept on her back with her arms fully extended, her palms parallel with the floor and ceiling as if she were warding off the wraith of all rapists. I remember waking up one morning to hear the couple yelling at each other because one of their dalmatians that was tied to a post near the entrance to the driveway was frozen solid, unable to find shelter from the frigid, bitter weather.
Christmas Eve we were roused from our hovel by our hosts and were asked to leave after they had discovered that we were listening to “the devil’s music.” We loaded up what little we had in Katie’s yellow beast, and sped off on icy backwoods roads not knowing exactly where we were going, as we had nowhere to go. I asked her to drive me to my sister’s house in Shreveport, which was about an hour’s drive south and east of our prison. When we arrived, we unloaded my belongings onto the snow-blanketed front lawn of my sister’s house and said our goodbyes. I never saw her again.
I do not remember how much time passed before I realized that my Pentax camera and all of my lenses were missing. I somehow had gotten a ride to my parents’ house in Belle Chasse, about five hours from Shreveport. My father was dying of acute myeloid leukemia. I was having a nervous breakdown. I communicated by mail for over a year with Katie asking her to please mail my camera and photography gear. She kept stalling saying that it was on its way, but no packages ever arrived. I enlisted my brother, an insurance defense attorney in Lake Charles, Louisiana, to write Katie a letter of demand for the value of my camera. She had moved to Austin, she said in one of several letters, and had sold the camera to pay for an abortion. Her story included an emergency room visit months after the abortion due to uncontrolled bleeding from her privates. She said that she delivered a baby, the aborted child’s surviving twin At that time I was not sure in my mind how to separate fantasy from reality, but my body was the greatest bellwether, feeling the pang of ice water that seemed to shoot up my spine.
Their names were Scott and Debra and she made these hideous teddy bears and sold them to unsuspecting locals. Also, the cause of eviction from their cave wasn't for listening to the devil's music, but from Scott renting a tiny television from a local gas station and bringing the devil into their home via NBC. That and he started drinking again. I now use my powers for good instead of evil.
Posted by: Kate | June 07, 2008 at 07:03 PM
that must have been a tough time
Posted by: Magnaflow Catalytic Converter | November 16, 2009 at 02:26 PM