DIED 2017
TEXAS LOVES ITS LEGENDS, and he was a legendary Texas legend-maker, a hard-living gonzo journalist from an oil town called Royalty, famous for articles about sports figures and strippers. On the road home to Brownwood in her green ’74 Cadillac with the custom upholstery and the CB radio, clutching a pawn ticket for her $3,000 mink, Candy Barr thought about biscuits. A heart attack, he explained after he survived one, felt like a bear sitting on your chest reading the sports page.
I read him long before I met him, and the only time I spent with him was when we all went to Venice for a wedding, during which he played an unwitting role in a moment that changed my life. He was with his third wife, The Realtor, and I was with the man I would leave it all and move to Pennsylvania for, starry-eyed in love. During a layover on the way back, my sweetheart recalled my attention to a good-night kiss I had given this writer in a hotel bar. He had seen the twinkle in the old man’s eye, and he had a pretty good idea what it meant. Oh, Jesus. What it meant was that the clock on this marriage was already ticking; the first green shoots of the plant that would strangle us had already poked through.
Which is not to say the guy wasn’t trouble. He was not good to wives, as his third wife’s best friend put it. After the fourth one left him, he finally had to learn to work the dishwasher. One day in his early eighties, he fell coming out of the shower. He lay there for four days before someone found him, then died a week later in the hospital surrounded by old friends drinking tequila out of Styrofoam cups.
That sounds like a story he could have written. Funny thing is, his editor had recently asked him to keep a “death journal,” a diary that would run in the magazine after he was gone. A final farewell, a macabre honor—but this old pro saw the flaw in the plan. How you gonna pay me? he said.