Chapter II
Some horses are called stump-suckers because they have a penchant for chewing wood. Once they get the taste they'll gnaw on stumps, fence posts, boards, and the comers of feed sheds. This neurotic habit is more apt to manifest itself in highly strung, overbred animals than in your common plugs.
Cowboys universally distrust the stump-sucking horse as being a beast with a mental disorder that renders them unfit for the long-term, trust-laden relationships they like to maintain with their mounts.
Boog seemed to hold the women of Washington in much the same distrust.
I have never learned to distrust women. For some reason the notion involved is foreign to me. However, I am quick to notice when I’ve wandered into a game whose rules are totally unfamiliar to me, as was the case with my first Georgetown dinner party.
The party was at the home of a senator named Penrose, and I was taken there by Cindy Sanders—a California princess I had met and become infatuated with only a few hours earlier. Cindy would not have been loath to instruct me in the niceties of social behavior, but unfortunately she was seated several yards away, across a good seventeenth-century table covered with equally good nineteenth-century damask. She had been placed there to entertain an aged statesman named Dunscombe Cotswinkle, an old man with a jaw like a Carolina mule.
It was obvious even to someone as naive as myself that Cindy had been assigned Cotswinkle because she was the most beautiful woman there, whereas he was the most important man. Unfortunately, the appropriateness of the match-up was lost on Cotswinkle—his mind was elsewhere, or at least I judged it to be, since he kept looking down the table and shouting "Is that you, Winston?" at a nervous little French journalist whose name was not Winston.
I was seated between two well-dressed ladies, neither of whom gave the slightest indication that they knew I was there. They were not young, but both were too modishly done up to be described as old. Evidently they were somewhat testy about their placement at the table, and it was hard to blame them, since each had an ugly congressman on the side not occupied by me.
It was not lost on my dinner partners that the younger and prettier women had been distributed among such senators and minor press lords who happened to be there.
"Pencil will never learn," one whispered to the other, across my coq au vin.
Pencil Penrose was our hostess, an ostensibly giddy blonde whose real name was Penserilla.
"It doesn't matter," the other lady said. "There's no one here anyway except Jake and Dunny, and I don't want to talk to them. Dunny's deaf as a brass pig, and Jake wouldn't even talk to me when I was married to him."
Dunny was obviously old Cotswinkle, whereas Jake was the eminent columnist John C. V. Ponsonby, who was seated directly across from me, so deeply bored by the deficiencies of the company that he had lapsed into what appeared to be a coma. He ate no food, but retained enough motor reflex to empty his wine glass into his mouth from time to time.
Ponsonby, by no means unimportant, had his hostess on his left and Lilah Landry on his right. Lilah was the beautiful if somewhat gangly widow of a former Secretary of State. Her tumbling red hair, dizzy smile, and trend-setting wardrobe could be seen daily on the local talk show she hostessed.
Luckily, I had seen it that very morning, while breakfasting at Boog's. The show was called Win a Country and matched a panel of columnists, ex-Cabinet members, and socially prominent diplomats against a computer called Big Hank. In order to win the country in question the panelists had to make instant choices between bribery, trade benefits, military aid, covert infiltration, saturation bombing and the like, though all Lilah had to do was exhibit her hair, wardrobe, and cleavage, and occasionally employ her abundant deep Georgia gift of gab to get some taciturn diplomat to talk.
If either of the ladies beside me had turned and suddenly required speech of some kind, I guess I would have dropped Boog's name, for despite his vulgar talk and silver ties Boog's was a name to conjure with, in Washington. His big Victorian house in Cleveland Park was constantly filled to the gills with politicians, lobbyists, aides of all species, committee persons, agency persons, journalists, and lawyers. Some of them were there because Boog had a special faucet in his kitchen that ran Jack Daniel's, while others came because they lusted after Boss, Boog's famous wife; but whatever their individual compulsions, they all liked and respected Boog, the professional's professional when it came to Hill politics.
Of course, the minute I had stepped into the Penrose mansion that night I began to canvas the objets, a habit I can't control. A scout scouts, even when purchase seems hopeless. It was hard to concentrate on Pencil Penrose when she happened to be standing next to the magnificent Belgian hall clock in her front foyer.
It's not that I dislike people, or that I'm incurious about them, either. I want to look at the people, but their objects keep jumping in front of them, demanding my attention. Sometimes I tell myself that the best way to get to know people is to first study the objects among which they place themselves, but for all I know that may be pure bullshit. It may simply be that I've been subsumed by my vocation. Until I've sized up a place and separated the good pieces from the fillers I just can't seem to concentrate on the people.
Cindy Sanders was long of limb, but short of patience. Her approach to life was emphatic, an approach she shared with my two former wives.
After ten minutes of watching me eye the ormolu, Cindy expressed herself by coming over and giving me an elbow in the ribs that would have done credit to an NBA guard. In fact, she had once been involved with an NBA guard.
"Stop looking at the furniture," she said. "You'll never own any of it."
"That's okay," I said. "I don't deal in French furniture much."
She gave me a smile that would have sold about a million tubes of any toothpaste.
"Stop yukking around and talk to these people," she said. "You said you knew Big John. They'd love some fresh poop on Big John."
"Is that the only reason you brought me?" I asked. "Because I know Big John?"
The question seemed to interest her. She tilted her head to one side for a moment, a gesture I took to be introspective. A moment was enough. Her purse might be a jumble, but not her soul.
"Naw," she said. "It wasn't decisive, which doesn't mean you can just stand around. I expect a little social support when I ask a man out."
"I see," I said. "If I turn out to be a dud people will think you're slipping, right?"
Cindy laughed, a loud California laugh that boomed right out into the room, startling a number of pale people who were sipping drinks and having muted conversations nearby. I loved it. It was such a healthy laugh that it even affected my scrotum, which immediately tightened. Her laugh reminded me of the absolutely confident way she had ripped a check out of her checkbook that afternoon, when she paid me for a earful of cowboy artifacts.
"I'm not slipping," she said, faintly amused by the thought that anyone could suppose she might be.
Then she turned on her heel and marched off to start a conversation with our hostess. Pencil Penrose.
Chapter III
One of my recurrent dreams is of driving backward down the highway of my life.
When the dream begins I will usually just be drifting gently backward in the pearly Cadillac over some broad, beautiful stretch of Interstate—perhaps the wonderful stretch of 1-90 between Buffalo and Sheridan, Wyoming, with the Big Horn Mountains off to the north.
But as the dream progresses the cuts get faster and I regress through ten years of cars, back at least to the GMC pickup I used during my first year on the rodeo circuit. The roads get worse, too—often I find myself zooming backward over the gritty wastes near Monahans, Texas, before the little psychic balance bar that keeps me from becoming an insane person tilts me back toward wakefulness.
Once in a while one of my wives is with me, in the dream—always Coffee, my first wife, the more pliable of the two. Everyone called her Coffee because she drank so much of
it. From dawn to midnight, if Coffee was awake, she was never without a cup with a swallow or two left in it. Her kisses tasted of mountain-grown Folger, and I could never make love to her without the absurd conviction that Mrs. Olson—the Swedish lady in the Folger commercial—was apt to pop in on us while we were fucking, in order to compliment us on our choice of brands.
Coffee allowed me to drag her around America for nearly a year before she bailed out and went back to Austin to work in one of Boss Miller's real estate offices.
Kate, my second wife, also worked for Boss, but in the Houston office. Boss also had offices in Dallas, Georgetown, and Middleburg, and was waiting impatiently for several young Texas cities to get rich enough to be worth her time. Kate was hard at work when I walked in one day with a suit of samurai armor I hoped to fob off on Boog. During the two years we were married most of our sex took place on the vast couch in Boss's seldom-used office, in hectic moments late in the day when Kate was giving a client time to get a little snockered before showing him a three-million-dollar property.
Kate was a true saleswoman, in the way that I am a true scout. The thought of all that money brought a flush to her face, and if I happened to be around, the flush would often spread downward and engulf us. There was never time to undress, or lay around enjoying the afterglow. Kate would be off down Memorial Drive in her Pontiac convertible, a beer in the hand whose wrist was crooked over the steering wheel. The other hand would be holding her long dark blond hair on top of her head, in an effort to cool her neck and face so she wouldn't look as if she had been doing what in fact she had just been doing.
"I don't care, I like to fuck on the fly. It's better," Kate said, when I teased her about it. In that respect she was the opposite of Coffee, who would drift around and drink a gallon of coffee, listen to several albums, and watch five or six TV shows, ignoring or simply failing to notice gestures from me that other women would have interpreted as passes—only to discover while she was brushing her teeth that she felt a little passionate. Sex was not among the things that Coffee was emphatic about.
There was never any question about my dragging Kate around America. She might have been to Dallas once or twice, but that was it. For Kate, Houston was a sufficient universe, a fact even my dream mechanism seemed to respect.
Boog would have given his eyeteeth to fuck her, but his eyeteeth were in no danger.
About Coffee I'm not so sure. The mistake I made with Coffee was to assume that because we both liked to spend all our time buying things we would naturally have a happy marriage.
The element of miscalculation in that judgment was small but crucial. I liked to buy old things, whereas Coffee liked to buy new things. I bought Sung vases, but Coffee bought Halstons and Steuben glass. She never went anyplace where she might wear a Halston, but that was not the point. Buying the thing was the point.
The problem was never one of money: The problem was that I had become an object-snob. Coffee had reasonably good taste, but mine was better. She loved modern furniture and was constantly buying chairs and lamps, but they were always a cut below the really classic modern chairs and lamps. She bought strange angular chairs, and beanbags you were supposed to sit on. She even bought a custom-made leather chair in the shape of a hippo. It didn't look like a chair, but it could be sat in, if you were willing.
The lamps were apt to be made from ostrich eggs or kettledrums. She even bought one made from a small Chinese boat—not an easy lamp to describe, much less to read by. Pretty soon our modest home in Houston contained more chairs than there would ever be guests, and more lamps than there were sockets to plug them in.
When it came down to it, I loved Coffee but couldn't tolerate her objects. She had been reluctant to leave Austin in the first place and of course went right back. What she really liked to do was talk on the phone when nothing was happening around the real estate office—when she discovered that she could do that without having to put up with my antiques she was delighted. I had traded a phone freak in Milwaukee out of some very sophisticated mobile equipment, and in time ate up thousands of American miles while chatting with Coffee, who had not left Austin since her return.
One of the things she was most emphatic about was that buying old things was an unhealthy habit. In her view the suggestion that old things were often better than new things was an affront to life. She had managed to get through the University of Texas while remaining totally unaware of the existence of people on the order of Mao Tse-tung, and I even discovered one day to my shock that she thought
World War II had occurred in the nineteenth century, although her own father had fought in it.
"Oh well, Daddy was real young at the time," she said, not really interested in the question.
Her determined rejection of history fascinated Boog, who was better read historically than anyone I knew. On nights when he wasn't too drunk to hold a book, he read himself to sleep with Thucydides, Livy, Suetonius, Gibbon, and Napier. Every ugly suit he owned had a raggedy Penguin paperback in the inside pocket, always history. Naturally he found Coffee's attitude perverse and charming. Coffee couldn't be bought outright, with money, but who was to say she couldn't be swept into romance by the right kind of presents?
Boog would find the right kind, too: things so new that ads for them hadn't even appeared in The New Yorker. He had contacts with all manner of manufacturers, foreign and domestic, and probably swamped Coffee with ponchos and belts—two of her particular loves—or chairs and lamps so esoteric that they might not even be recognizable as chairs and lamps.
Before going further I might quote the well-known Coke bottle scout Zack Jenks, who found a near-mint 1924 Coke bottle beside 1-85 near Gaffney, South Carolina, in the summer of 1979.
"Anything can be anywhere," Zack said, a statement that is to scouting what E = MC^ is to physics.
As we were breaking up. Coffee and I had many long talks, in none of which did we quite locate the nipple of the problem, to use one of her favorite phrases. Her view was simple: All my character flaws resulted from the fact that I had grown up in a trailer-house.
"You didn't have a lawn," she said, as if that was all there was to it.
Chapter IV
The trailer-house sat in Solino, Texas, and for most of my childhood it had two sad turd-hounds chained underneath it. The dogs were named Lion and Tiger. When they were puppies they liked to chew fiercely on my father's dirty socks, but once grown they lost their warlike attributes. My father kept them chained under the trailer-house anyway, in the hope that their ferocity would return if someone tried to rob us. Nobody did, so all Lion and Tiger had to do was lie in the dirt and scratch.
I grew up in the trailer-house. When I was four my mother was killed in a car wreck, a few blocks away, a fact I don't record in order to gain sympathy. In fact, I had an abnormally happy childhood, running with a lively and sexually precocious gang of Mexican kids, in the warm sun of the Rio Grande valley.
My father. Gene McGriff, took little part in my life, and not much of a part in his own. His only affliction was a lifelong apathy, which he passed on to the dogs but not to me. Clerking in the local hardware store was good enough for him, and still is.
By the time I entered my teens I was already twice as tall as my Mexican companions, and knew that basketball was going to be my game, and it was a basketball scholarship that took me to college, though I was tired of the sport even before I got there. My real passion was gymnastics: I loved the clarity, the precision, and the utter loneliness of it. But of course it was a hopeless passion, since I was six feet five inches. One day I was watching an amateur rodeo when it occurred to me that bulldogging was just a form of applied gymnastics. You jump, you grip, you swing, and you twist, and if the timing of the four actions is precise the running animal will throw himself with his own weight, rolling right across your body and whopping himself into the ground with a satisfying thump.
When I started dogging I was looking for a passion. My world was the Texas v
alley, where there were no objects of the quality of a Sung vase, or women as beautiful as Cindy Sanders. As yet unaware of the stimulus of beauty, I made do with the stimulus of sport, and rapidly became a crackerjack bulldogger. I qualified for the National finals my very first year on the circuit, and soon fixed upon four seconds as a pure limit, a goal to aim for. To chase and throw a steer within four seconds would equal perfection, the best that concentration and technique could hope to achieve.
Fortunately I had an experienced hazer, an old steer-roper named Goat Goslin. I also had a powerful little dogging horse named Dandy, with a start like a cannon shot. For two years I burned up the circuit, consistently turning in times around 5 seconds. I had a 4.8 in Salinas, a 4.6 in Miles City, and a 4.3 at the Pendleton Roundup. For two or three peak months I felt I was closing in on perfection.
At that point Goat Goslin began to worry about me, though forty years of rodeo had not exactly taught him caution. He had only one ear, the other having been butted off in Tucumcari in 1946, and his left hand consisted of a thumb and first finger, the rest of it lost to a roping accident in Grand Island, Nebraska.
In his day Goat had tried his hand at every event, an eclecticism that had left him with pins in both legs, an artificial hip joint, and a little steel plate behind his left temple that he would sometimes reach up and strike a match on. A person unfamiliar with rodeo, looking him in the face for the first time, would have had a hard time accounting for the sight. A cowboy from Wolf, Wyoming, probably put it best.
"That hairy old son of a bitch looks like he dove off a three-story building into a waffle iron," he said.
And yet Goat was actually worried about me. We were chugging along in the GMC pickup, down the east side of Oregon, the day after I posted my 4.3. It was a cold morning and we could neither get the heater to work nor the right window to roll up all the way. Goat was blowing on what was left of his crusty old hands.