On the two-and-a-half-hour drive north from Dallas, the ride gets continually more rural until you think you are lost, or certainly nuts to imagine finding something. Even the few cows are bored out of their minds. And the road narrows even more. My friend next to me wants to turn around—“There’s nothing here.”
But I know there is. Archer City is where Larry McMurtry was brought up. The writer I admired most in my beginning years of putting pen to paper. And that admiration stayed with me, held steady.
I read Leaving Cheyenne for the first time in the early seventies, when I was living in a small adobe with an outhouse and no running water in Talpa, New Mexico; I gave it a second read four years later in the Bahamas, lying in bed with a terrible flu, while my new husband stalked the bare back of the beaches alone. My husband’s father and mother had both just died, within six months of each other, in their mid-fifties—one of a heart attack, one of cancer. While he was going mad with grief, I was transported through the book to the range, to a woman named Molly and the two men who loved her, Gil and Johnny—I still remember their names.
McMurtry wrote this second book at twenty-one.
My good friend Eddie Lewis got me to read All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, another early novel of McMurtry’s. At the time this one had a university-press publisher and was autobiographical—in feeling, anyway. The main character was in his early twenties and his first book made it big (which also happened to McMurtry), and the book showed the ensuing pain of success, the pressure, the alienation. In the end the young writer is in the river—the Rio Grande—trying to sink his next manuscript, and the pages keep rising to the surface all around him—hundreds of pages. He pounces on them, pushing them down, trying to drown them.
Of his other books I read—The Desert Rose, Terms of Endearment, Cadillac Jack, Moving On, Buffalo Girls—some took place in Texas. Some were located in other places.
Eddie’s mother, Alberta, had once met McMurtry at a rummage sale in Washington, DC, where she lived. McMurtry owned a rare books store in Georgetown and was always on the lookout for antique books.
In the mideighties, as his hometown of Archer City, the setting for some of his novels, was slowly becoming a ghost town, McMurtry bought up the buildings and made each one a bookstore. One building held books of poetry, another history. He said that whenever an independent bookstore any place in the country went out of business, he bought up the stock and brought the books home. His family herded cattle; he was going to herd books.
I don’t remember when I read The Last Picture Show, but it was soon after reading Leaving Cheyenne. I’d already seen the movie, and this time the film was damn near as good as the book. Empty time, an almost empty town, a football player, a coach, his wife, a billiard parlor, wind—and a terrible loneliness. Though McMurtry had Archer City in mind when he wrote, I had forgotten that it was also the actual stage set for the movie.
By the time I drove to Archer City, I had been a successful writer for more than twenty years, but sitting there I still had stirrings of longing, gratitude, and homage.
I barely close the car door, heading for some wooden steps on a raised platform in the center plaza. No traffic. No people passing on the sidewalks. Midday sun. Silent enough to hear the flap of a crow’s wing overhead. I am physically in the center of a novel I have loved.
At the main office, a young woman, fresh out of majoring in English Lit, attends the desk. “You pick out your books, come back here and pay.” She hands us a map.
“Does Larry McMurtry ever show up?” I ask.
“You just missed him. He went home for lunch. He lives down the road.” She pointed to the left. “He’ll be back in an hour. You’ll see his white Cadillac pull up.”
I am going to meet Larry McMurtry in the flesh?
I try to act nonchalant. “Maybe I’ll pick up one of his books and have him sign it.”
“His books are probably the only ones we don’t stock. We do that on purpose. He doesn’t want to sign.”
The only other people browsing through the stores are a single book dealer from Oklahoma and a man, driving through, headed for Louisiana.
I plant myself directly across the street from the office in the floor-to-ceiling poetry building. I run my finger along the book spines, too jumpy to settle into any one poem or poet. I glance frequently out the window across the broad street. No white Cadillac yet. Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones before he was Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Mark Strand, Anne Sexton. I don’t even know what McMurtry looks like. I’d never seen a photo of him—and he never showed up at writing conferences.
A white Cadillac slips across the front door of the office and parks. I grab a book—I can’t walk into the office empty-handed.
I cross the street.
The doorknob turns easily. I feel its imprint on my hand. The office is empty but for books along the walls and a man in his sixties, maybe five feet eight inches, nondescript, wearing a white shirt.
“Larry McMurtry?”
He nods, indicating we could sit at the round table right there. The intern had called ahead. He knew there was a visitor who wanted to meet him. He had all afternoon. We are not in New York, not in LA.
He gestures with his hand. What would I like to talk about?
“I read your books,” I say.
He waits.
“I love them. They mean a lot to me.” His face is open, listening.
I look down. I look up. “I live in New Mexico. I came here to see Archer City.” I can’t think. The old litany from childhood rises up in me: You are nobody, nothing.
He bends his head to the left.
“Well, I have to pay for this book.” I jump up abruptly and open the cover. Seven dollars, penciled on the used flap. I take out my wallet and lay down a five and two singles.
“Thank you.” I glance at him across the table. My eyes dart to the chair next to him, the photo behind. “I have to go.”
Clutching the book, I run out, find my friend. She has been ready for a while.
“Could you drive?” I ask, and as the car speeds south I whip out my spiral notebook and pen Larry McMurtry a six-page letter—both sides—telling him how I feel about his work, the town, the sky, the trees by the road. I apologize for being unable to speak. My heart was in my throat, I tell him. I pour out everything I can think of, and I can’t wait to mail it, to get it out of my hands.
“Why didn’t you just tell him you wrote books?” my friend asks.
Maybe I should have, maybe I even did—I don’t know.
I never received an answer to the letter. I didn’t expect one.
So many years later, I still go over it in my head: I should have invited him to dinner. I should have told him all about my upbringing in Brooklyn—no books on our shelves either. Told him I once rode a horse named Thunder. I should have tried something subtle—handed him a tangerine.
Six years later, I return with a different friend, Bill, to Archer City. This time I notice more as we drive north. Through Denton—I love that name—along a long, flat stretch on Highway 380W; past Mr. Porky’s, a barbecue joint; past rows of rolled hay in brown winter fields—it is November—with low-hanging clouds. Past three horses, one lying down in the middle of the day, past Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Assembly of God, then an unlikely sign for a Muslim cemetery, then a line of quick signs, one after the other, for electronics, tires, pigs for sale, Prairie Estates, ending with a Phillips 66. A patch of suburban brick houses called Highland Hills, oddly displaced, nothing around them. A burned-out double wide, patches of low-growing cacti. Past Bridgeport, population 1,114.
I’m alert, anticipating this visit.
In Jacksboro, about forty miles before Archer City, we stop for lunch at Nana Lou’s Kitchen. My friend found this place in an issue of Texas Monthly, featuring an article about the state’s best small-town cafés.
The waitress—with a thick Texas twang, wearing a pink Longhorns shirt—seats us near a window. Across the patterned curtains, cowboys lasso steers.
I ask her, “Did you know the person from the magazine who did the review?”
“No, only after he called to confirm that we had eight tables.” She holds a pad and pen in hand, ready to take an order.
“Have you ever been to Archer City?” I ask her.
“No.” She shakes her head.
“Do you know Larry McMurtry?”
She shakes her head again.
“He wrote Lonesome Dove.”
“Oh, yeah. I just had no idea who came in here.”
I glance over at my friend across the table and we both take the exquisite leap—she thinks McMurtry wrote the restaurant review.
Bill orders the chicken-fried steak and biscuits with gravy.
“Oh, so that’s what it is,” I say when it’s placed in front of him. Often when I’ve seen it on a menu, I’ve played in my head: Is it chicken? Is it steak? The steak of a chicken? I never thought to ask anyone. Now I know: a steak deep-fried in batter like they fry chicken.
And the gravy is white.
I have a patty melt and it is good.
We pass the sign for Archer City: population 1,848.
The first thing we see is the Royal Theater, this time with fresh, sky-blue paint on the marquee. A box of pansies on the sidewalk with the Texas Star emblem on the outside of the box.
We go into the first bookstore building nearest the movie theater. A huge warehouse of ARCHITECTURE, ART, CRITICISM. Bill finds an out-of-print southern cookbook he’s interested in, but it’s $120.
I hadn’t quite noticed before how carefully categorized under subject every single book is, clearly lined up, shelved in order, but with no file catalog.
We browse for a while and then walk down the block to an antique store, not part of the book complex.
As soon as we walk in, the saleswoman, without our asking, says the McMurtry books are in the back. Obviously, she knows we are from out of town.
We walk straight back and thumb through them. I select a copy of All My Friends.
At the register I ask, “Does he mind that you sell his books?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you know him?”
“Oh, sure. We went to school together.”
“What was he like?”
“Real smart.”
“What’s he like now?”
“Strange.”
“How?” I’m not going to let her comment pass.
“In the way all writers are strange. I hope y’all aren’t writers.” We laugh.
I persist. “How do you mean, ‘strange’?”
“You know, standoffish. Keeps to himself.”
“Is the town proud of him?”
She hesitates. “No. Well, I guess, he’s done a lot for the town.” She tells us his siblings live nearby.
“Is his family proud? What about his father?”
“No, probably not,” she snaps out. Then, “I shouldn’t say that. His father was an old cowboy. He was really nice.”
“Have you read any of his books?”
“No, I’m not a reader.”
“Did you like Last Picture Show when it came out?”
“I didn’t much care for it. I waited to see the TV version, but Hud is my favorite.” She giggles. “That’s because of Paul Newman.”
We walk to the main office of the bookstores, where a different young woman shows us a map of the buildings.
I ask her if McMurtry is in town and she says no, he only comes around about once a month.
Bill asks me, “Are you relieved?”
I shrug. I seem to feel nervous even if he isn’t here. I bet I wouldn’t have been any better the second time.
The young woman tells us the place almost closed a while ago, but Larry decided to keep it open and he’s still buying books.
I tell her if she can find my books, I’ll sign them, and I give her some categories. Nothing is computerized. She goes off to search on the shelves.
We cross the street again to the poetry and literature building. The books now are almost all rare or out of print. I hadn’t been aware of this the first time I visited. Hardcover of Lucky Life by Gerald Stern: $70.
Bill and I are both writers—we automatically want to support a bookstore, but we like to handle books, mark them up. Rare books are a different category. We can’t find a book we want to spend so much for. I feel odd—and empty. Thousands and thousands of rare books in a vacant town.
We go back across and the young woman says she can’t find any of my books.
We walk to the Dairy Queen, a half mile down, where McMurtry wrote Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.
Bill rolls his eyes.
“We don’t have to eat there,” I say.
We pass a big brick house that’s much bigger and more formidable than anything else around. The house is dark, and clearly no one’s there. Some workers are putting up low sections of garden fence.
I point. “This is McMurtry’s.” I know it from last time. The DQ is cheery and spacious, with booths lined against two walls.
I tell Bill, “Choose your booth.”
He picks the one in the corner. I tell him, “I bet this is where McMurtry sat.”
I order a chocolate milkshake. “I never had one here before.” I smile at Bill, who scowls and tells me it will be terrible. He orders an Aquafina. I walk around and read plaques on the wall with framed covers of McMurtry’s books.
“Well, someone at least recognizes him,” I say, approaching our booth.
“Okay,” I say, opening my notebook. “One full hour. Tell your story of love. Go.”
His head jerks up. “What?” And then he dives in and we both write like mad.
But in the middle I want to stop. I’d written this all before. My story of love always leads to that one omnipresent woman.
“. . . the kind of day winter is famous for—half-light and brown fields, but still almost warm-sweater weather, sun setting low to the horizon. My mother died two months ago. I refused to visit her in Florida last Thanksgiving, and I never saw her again but wheezing on her deathbed. I don’t have remorse. I tried so hard with her that my gums bled. I couldn’t get her to love me, but I didn’t give up. I wish I had. I was always trying a new angle, hoping to be free, to be able to say, Yes, dear mother, when she snapped at me. I thought I’d figure it out. . . .”
An hour is a long time to write continuously. I watch the clock and veer off in my writing to name boyfriends and girlfriends and stay away from my maternal lineage.
I didn’t have the opportunity to meet Larry McMurtry this time, but I was reminded how often writing brings down the disdain of your hometown. Hibbing, Minnesota, Bob Dylan’s hometown, didn’t understand why he had to move away, why he didn’t visit, and but for a few folks—his English teacher included—the people on the Iron Range hated his lyrics as well as his voice. Sauk Centre, Minnesota, disliked Sinclair Lewis after he wrote his first book, Main Street, which told the truth about small towns. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1930, Lewis died alone in Italy, some twenty years later, but he asked that his ashes be buried in Sauk Centre, where they disdained him. And I remembered how his beloved Oxford, Mississippi, called William Faulkner “Count No ’Count.”
And here was McMurtry, planting books—rare books, no less—in a town that didn’t seem to care.
I was driven to write books in order to find my lost voice, to be seen by people who could not see me. Why did I think books—something I cared for but they didn’t—would wake up my parents? They would read my books and we would have the connection I longed for. I thought they would see into my true heart. Here in Archer City, the scenario felt painfully graphic—the chasm of disconnection.
It’s what I’ve come to understand: writing does not bring love—not the original love you want, at least. So many dreams we start out with as young writers. I thought I’d be invited to grand parties where pigs in blankets—something I saw in the fifties—would be served with doilies on silver trays. After all of these years I have seen ne’er a one of those miniature frankfurters.
At this point, I’m sure McMurtry gathers books in his hometown because it gives him pleasure. Finally, there can be no other reason.
I had come back to Archer City a second time so the young Natalie could catch up with the older Natalie. I didn’t come to Archer City to meet Larry McMurtry, like I thought. I came here to meet myself, to close the yawning gap, the chasm of hope and reality.
“Wind down,” I tell Bill. The hour is up. I’m glad to put down my pen.
Bill reads me aloud his brash, sad, sexy story of love. I tell him I’ll read mine on the long drive back.
We pick our way to the car in the unlit dark, walking on the broken cracks and scattered grass along the road.