BACK AND FORTH, UP AND DOWN
(1960)
We crossed the river at dawn. City asleep. At the bus station I saw my parents’ faces. At first they literally didn’t recognize me. Then they did. I guess I looked pretty bad. Home was out of focus. My dog didn’t remember me at first. Then he wagged his tail and rolled over on his back, like he was sorry. Where have you been, Jimmy? Huddie was there for the holiday. We ate breakfast. My mother let me smoke in the house, a first. I lay on my bed with the picture of Castro still on the wall. I thought about Waco, the theatre, Vera, high school, and slept until Thanksgiving dinner.
I came home with a bag full of laundry. All of my clothes were dirty. I cleaned up for dinner and put on some high school threads that felt funny. My father was disgusted, but we got through Thanksgiving dinner without a major incident. I figured I wouldn’t push my luck, and got out of the house as soon as I could.
I cranked up the ’53 Chevy and headed for the Toddle House. After a cheeseburger and a piece of banana icebox pie I felt more at home. A couple of guys from high school were there but it was mostly new people. Somebody was in my parking spot.
The next night I went to a drive-in movie with friends who were still in high school. We got drunk. At midnight, I went into the concession stand and called Vera on the pay phone. She answered, “I wondered if I’d hear from you.”
“I don’t know what to say.” It was too late to call; the pathetic, humiliating act of someone losing it. It’s easier not to remember what I said. I apologized. She said she’d see me at Christmas. I hung up. Vera haunted me through the years. I couldn’t shake her phantom until I met my future wife.
The next afternoon I found myself in the chapel at my father’s church. A memorial cross hung on the wall in memory of Bill Madison, my old friend who had been killed by lightning. I tried to clear my head. Where’s Charley? was over. I was pretty much busted out of school. I loved the theatre but suspected it didn’t love me back.
I had only seen Paul Baker on the first day of class. He was busy in Dallas at the new graduate school, the Kalita Humphreys Theater Center, designed by his friend Frank Lloyd Wright and built in the big-money Turtle Creek neighborhood. Virgil Beavers, the set designer with whom I had come to study, was full-time with the graduate program as well. My roommate, Merrell, was making noise about going to New York. Browning talked about how good it had been last year. Sharon had an old boyfriend in the music school at University of Texas who might rear his ugly head any time. Memphis had gone on without me. I came home to a different reality, but at least I was home. “Cross the river and through the woods.” After the break, I returned to school.
Waco, Texas, is shrouded in mystery back to prehistoric time. Indians destined to be rubbed out by white devils. Frontier Texicans who fought bloody gun duels on Main Street in broad daylight.
Always a natural home for
Religious extremists
Snake handling
Unknown tongue speaking
Shaking quaking
And levitating
Fire walkers
With claims of faith
Healing and raising of the dead.
It’s like there is a spell cast over Waco, over its haunted landscape. No escape. Two rich and powerful families, who strove to minimize outside input and interlopers, controlled the town during the Depression. Factories and manufacturing facilities were discouraged. Bank loans were denied to new developers to keep the local blood pool untainted.
Baylor University operated as a world within a world. Like most colleges, the campus was surrounded with necessities of life. You could easily exist without contacting the outer world. The theatre was a microcosm within this dynamic. The polite Baptist student society isolated and shunned us. The “God Squad” put us on its prayer list and apologized, without being asked, for imaginary sins we were assumed to commit.
Tryouts were held for the second production, a play by a graduate student from Dallas and directed as a thesis project by another Dallas student. Whistle in the Night was a play within a play about an aspiring playwright and the inability to go home, very Thomas Wolfe.
I provided music for the show. I crawled up the catwalk holding the stage rigging and played harmonica on “Shall We Gather at the River” and “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” It was like Tobacco Road and worked well. It echoed through the space above the stage and hung in the air like the steam engine running through the graveyard.
The last open weekend before performances of Whistle in the Night started was something special. I discovered psychedelic drugs and pure grain alcohol on the same night. Oso Negro—Black Bear—was 190 proof. A little bear mascot key chain came with a half-gallon. Baylor! Drama students from Austin had come to party in Waco. Someone warned me about the pure grain alcohol, which I was mixing 50–50 like vodka, but I was too smart to listen. My head spun like a top and my entire lower body was numb. I sat on a windowsill, playing somebody’s guitar. An actor from Austin spoke about a pill he held in his open hand. “This little pill will make you see the music, like colors floating in the air,” he claimed.
I reached out, snatched the pill from his upturned hand, popped it into my mouth, and swallowed it, remembering Norwood Carter. The night opened up and swallowed me. When I returned to full consciousness, my head was in the upstairs toilet and I was puking purple. I was wearing different clothes than I remembered. My father’s tan cashmere sweater had purple vomit down the front. Merrell was pleading, “Move your head. I gotta piss!”
“No,” I said. “What day is this?”
“Sunday,” he replied.
“What happened to Saturday?”
“We went to North Texas State.”
“Who drove?” I asked.
“You did,” he replied, relieving himself in the waste basket.
Hell, I didn’t even know how to get to Denton, Texas. The pill turned out to be mescaline, an artificial magic mushroom. That was my first hallucinogenic experience.