Even before the Supreme Court made their decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, my father thought that children everywhere should be going to integrated schools. He was nothing if not a fair-minded person. When I was five years old and about to start kindergarten, my father decided to introduce a bill in the state senate that would create an equal rights law in Wyoming.
Back then, the state’s Democratic Party represented its white working-class people, and so Rudy Anselmi, the Democratic minority leader, said, “I don’t know, Norm. In principle, I agree with your bill. But let’s make this particular. We got this gal down there, this Negro lady who can’t get a job because she’s a Negro. Would you hire her to teach your son?”
And my father said, “It’s amazing that you ask because I’m just setting up a school on the ranch for my son and some of the other kids who live there, and yeah, if she was qualified, I’d hire her.” When my father met Juanita Simmons, he was impressed and hired her for the job. After that Rudy Anselmi enlisted everyone on his side of the aisle to support the bill, but it still took them five years to get it passed.
In 1952, there were no black people in Sublette County aside from Juanita and her husband, Jetty, who worked as a locomotive engineer in a switching yard. In the entire state of Wyoming, there were probably only somewhere between three and six hundred black people scattered along the Union Pacific railroad line. Juanita came to work as our teacher in an old schoolhouse at the Finn place that had two rooms. One was the classroom and Juanita lived in the other. Her husband, Jetty, would sometimes come up to stay with her but not as often as she or I would have preferred, because I thought this guy was God. Jetty drove Mallet locomotives, the biggest piece of rolling stock ever to hit the rails of the Union Pacific. Back then his job was kind of like being a rocket pilot. I thought he was coolest thing going.
For twenty days every other year, I went with my parents to Cheyenne while the state legislature was in session and attended school with a bunch of Catholic kids at St. Mary’s, right next to the capitol. As the only Mormon there, I suffered a lot, mostly at the hands of the nuns. This was pre–Vatican II and my going to school there was always a weird little break in the rhythm of my life.
As a kid, I read like crazy. My parents bought me books, because it was fifteen miles to the public library in Pinedale. One thing that I read that was of pivotal importance was The Book of Knowledge, a twenty-volume encyclopedia for kids. I read every volume and that was fundamental for me, because it was my Internet. It really was. It introduced me to the idea that there were people out there who had gone to the trouble to find out how things worked and wanted to convey that information to others.
Although I was curious at the one-room schoolhouse, I wasn’t a particularly good student. I was never worth a shit when it came to getting my homework done, and I’m still not. I also realized pretty early on that I could make a lot of headway on charm alone. But even that required some doing, because I was completely unsocialized at first. Whenever I got out among others who were my own age, I had virtually no social skills at all. I had to come up with a way to essentially reverse-engineer charm.
After I finished fifth grade, they closed down the little schoolhouse and started busing all the students into Pinedale. There were times when there was so much snow that the bus could not get into town, but we had snow planes, which had been cobbled together on skis with a big airplane engine on the rear that could really get up and going on a packed surface.
At home, things were not so great. My father was an alcoholic, but back then it was difficult to be someone of note in Wyoming politics if you weren’t. He would go on binges sometimes, but he was never a mean drunk and not abusive in any way. He did make me angry and disappointed me a lot, though, in the way he took abuse from my mother that he didn’t deserve and wouldn’t have had to suffer if he hadn’t been drinking.
My mother didn’t like it. She also didn’t like the fact that as my father got into politics, he became a bigger and bigger deal in Wyoming. At one point, my father was testing the waters to run for governor against Milward Simpson, whose son Alan later served as a U.S. senator from Wyoming. Milward and my father actually ended up flipping a coin to determine which one of them would be the next governor. I don’t know if you could say my father won that coin flip or lost it, but Milward Simpson was the one who ran for the office and was elected governor in 1954.
While my father was now gallivanting around the state, he was pretty much fucking every woman he met. Women always know about these sorts of things, but my mother couldn’t do anything about it except abuse the shit out of him. Then she went to see a psychiatrist in Denver who began giving her Dexedrine to cheer her up.
I was with her down in Denver when she had a calamitous nervous breakdown. I think I was about nine years old. She wound up in the same private sanatorium where Buffalo Bill had died. They were giving her electroshock therapy just about every week, so most of the time she didn’t even have the slightest idea who I was. My father’s older brother lived in Denver with his scrupulously Mormon family, and so I stayed with them.
I lived with them for about six months. It was easy for me because I took refuge in their Mormonism. I went to church with them and to Aaronic priesthood meetings, and every Wednesday night was family evening, when we would all pray together. I’d always had these kind of religious longings as a kid and had given away my entire allowance to Oral Roberts when I was in the second grade.
If you are going to be a real member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I can tell you that they will have you doing something practically every second of the day. And that was actually a good thing. It made me feel like I was a part of something that was bigger than myself. The Mormon Church does not threaten you with hell because they don’t have one. What they threaten you with—and they don’t really threaten you—is this attitude of not understanding why you would ever want to leave the comfy bosom of your religious family.
When I went back to the ranch, I was still committed to Mormonism. Although my father did not feel that way, our foreman was a devout Mormon in spite of the fact that he had been struck by lightning three times. On the suffering and grace question, he really had a lot to say. He also had a very personal relationship with a very anthropomorphized God. As Voltaire once said, “If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.”
I was about eleven years old when my mother went upstairs and fired the twelve gauge. My dad was fooling around a fair amount by then and they’d had an argument that ended when she walked into the closet, grabbed the shotgun, and went upstairs. My father and I followed her, but she locked herself in one of the guest bedrooms and then ker-blam!
I will never forget the look that my father and I exchanged at that point. He broke down the door to get inside. She had fired both barrels into the ceiling and was sitting there with the smoking twelve gauge in her hand and this funny smile on her face, like she had finally gotten him to pay attention to her. It was a wildly melodramatic emotional act, a way for her to say “Hey!” that nobody could deny. It definitely left a mark on me.
Growing up on the ranch, I didn’t have many friends my age, but there was a little girl named Gracie Alexander who lived up the creek about three miles away. She was nine and I was eleven, and we would ride to an abandoned homestead between her place and mine and pretend to be a frontier family. Gracie’s father, Jack, was a cowboy and then a cow man who had gotten himself a little ranch. He had married a highly refined woman from the East who had come out to spend some time on a dude ranch in Wyoming and fallen in love with him. Back then, this sort of thing wasn’t unusual—there were always a number of women who had come out and gotten themselves a cowboy for all the usual reasons. The mythology, primarily.
Maybe the marriage wasn’t working out, but Jack had started drinking more and more, and he was really putting it away. His wife became concerned that this would be difficult for Gracie and so she invited her parents out from Providence, Rhode Island, to come and take Gracie back home with them. Gracie was the apple of her father’s eye. For Jack, the sun rose and set around her. My best guess is that he found out about her mother’s plan and just twisted off deep.
Back then, we were on a party line, and my mother was on the phone one day when someone picked up at the Alexander place and there was a lot of yelling. She couldn’t make any of it out, and then there was a really loud sound that she thought was the screen door slamming or something. The phone stayed off the hook, and all you could hear was someone moving around in the kitchen on the other end.
What had happened was that Jack had shot Gracie’s grandparents and her mother right away. He then went on living in the house for three days with Gracie and the family dog. Then he finished the job. He killed his daughter and shot the dog and then killed himself, too. Nobody went up there to check on them because it was the height of the mud season and difficult to get there.
Gracie was my closest friend, and I was devastated. I’m also pretty sure she watched her father kill her mother and grandparents. This was the first time I had ever lost anybody except for my grandfather, but death was something I became used to very early on. It’s one of the leitmotifs of my life. I think everybody has a curriculum, and mine has always been women and death. These are two very challenging topics. It’s not like I’m picking the easy horses, that’s for sure.