WHILE I WAS wallowing in the single life I let Loyce Evetts drag me with him on a search to upgrade his mistresses. I found myself browsing through parlors named Tricky Chicks, Francine’s Flimsies, and Naughty Girls Lingerie. It was scenic.
I can assure you I would never have gone near those parlors on my own. Not unless I was disguised as a colonel in the French Foreign Legion and dressed for parade.
Loyce claimed that the shelf life of a mistress was eighteen months, depending on a man’s threshold for boredom. It was drawing close to the moment to replace Heather and Amber, the current bimbos he was keeping stashed in expensive apartments on the west side of town.
Loyce could afford high-rent mistresses. He was from old wealth that was derived from oil, ranching, grain, real estate, and stock portfolios. His family had done very well in North Texas near the Oklahoma border. Up there where the wind is the same color as the Red River.
He had a wife, Pamela, but he detested her. Primary among his reasons was that she had become a workout freak and exercised herself down to a skeleton. For that, she gave up tennis, golf, bridge, and eating.
Pamela did keep shopping on her activity list. Her best friends were now the sales ladies in the upscale stores and boutiques in the DFW “Metroplex,” as some genius named it. And burgeoning Dallas alone was beginning to seize parts of Oklahoma and Kansas as suburbs.
Loyce put a nagging question to me:
“Is it asking too much of a man to want a wife who likes to eat normal food instead of roots, and drink something besides bottled cucumber water?”
Loyce and Pamela rarely spoke. His idea of a conversation was, “Shall we dine at the club this evening? This could be Seaweed Night.”
Loyce tried to drive Pamela to a divorce by giving her presents on her birthday, Christmas, and their anniversary that plugged into the wall. His mistresses received the big rocks.
He was hoping Pamela would ditch him for the male skeleton she met while training for the city’s annual traffic-clog, otherwise known as the Fort Worth Marathon. He said, “They can chew pumpkin seeds together.”
He added, “One valuable lesson I’ve learned, Tommy Earl. If it flies, floats, or fucks, lease it.”
*****
WHEN I was introduced to Tracy Hopkins at Naughty’s that afternoon, she wasted no time using her salesmanship skills on me. By that I mean she launched directly into sexual harassment.
It wasn’t as if I’d never been sexually harassed before. I was sexually harassed by babes all through high school and college. It was unavoidable if you shaved and showered every day, wore clean clothes, owned a car, and played in the backfield.
Things are different these days. The Wasted Guitar Player Look is still around, I’ve noticed. Certain women find themselves attracted to guys in soiled jeans and grimy work shirts who go through life with the quizzical look of someone who has smoked a pound of weed every day since the ninth grade.
He’s a guy with a head of sixties hair. A guy whose best guess as to what country America won its independence from was . . . Portugal?
The Caveman Look provides competition. Here you find babes who go for guys with facial hair you’d normally see on a Schnauzer. This is a guy who thinks it makes him pass for worldly if he can stroke his beard and quote something Bruce Springsteen said.
Tracy Hopkins led me into a private dressing room where she modeled two scanty items she thought would interest “the lady in my life.” What interested me most was Tracy. She was hot. Ferociously hot. I mean hot like don’t touch her anywhere, you’ll scald your hand.
Tracy slid in next to me on a sofa in a private room and although I remained clothed, she toyed around with my body parts while suggesting things we could do in bed together if we were a couple. Most of the suggestions sounded familiar, but there were others I didn’t think were physically possible. Not that I let that stand in the way of wedlock, however.
We were married the first time in the University Christian Church by a pastor and geology professor at TCU who’d been a friend of the football program. He handed out passing grades to the gridsters in a course called Human Activity. I heard it was patterned after a course that was available throughout the Southeastern Conference.
A couple of months later one of Tracy’s girlfriends said our marriage wasn’t legit. “Christian” didn’t sound like a real religion to her. We should find a Baptist or a Methodist to do it right.
I said, “Tracy, University Christian is the Disciples of Christ. It’s the church I was raised in.”
She said, “Tommy Earl, every religious person is a disciple of Christ. I know I am, when I have the time.”
We were married again on an afternoon in an old two-story house converted into a Baptist church on Jennings Avenue on the south side. The minister introduced himself as Reverend Horace “Corky” Matthews. Tracy’s mother, Velma, the Single Mom from Hell, stood up with her. T. J. Lambert, who was coaching the Horned Frogs’ football fortunes then, was my best man.
When the minister stretched out the ceremony with talk about partnership, sharing, forgiveness, and understanding, T. J. butted in.
“Corky, old buddy,” T. J. said, “you want to shift into your hurry-up offense? I didn’t come here to piss away the whole afternoon.”
Dr. Horace “Corky” Matthews hastily declared us man and wife. I tipped him a hundred, and T. J. gave him another hundred, and we were out of there.
I couldn’t spare the time for a honeymoon. I was still in the McMansion business and forced to keep tabs on the crews who worked for me. It was where I learned never to let an employee order materials for you. He’ll double what you need. Half will be for him—and the business he’ll start up.
*****
TRACY HAD been living with her single mom in a condo in a neighborhood in West Arlington. The town of Arlington had existed for years as nothing more than a stop for gas or a liquor store if you were driving the thirty miles from Fort Worth to Dallas. But now Arlington is where the footballing Dallas Cowboys and baseballing Texas Rangers perform in modern stadiums, and Arlington is now bigger than Pittsburgh.
Tracy had described her mother as a “smart business woman,” although Velma had never held down a job.
That’s not altogether accurate. Velma worked harder to trick the system than she would if she labored nine to five doing chores for somebody else. It had to take considerable energy or creativity or both for her to earn $40,000 a year by collecting social security checks—most of them for dead people, and receiving payments for her non-existent disability, claiming food stamps to sell to others, receiving child support for her non-existent triplets, and from staying glued to the welfare rolls.
But you had to say Velma gave her daughter a well-rounded education. She hammered into Tracy never to let herself become involved with a man who didn’t have a steady job, a car that started, and a roof over his head.
Velma convinced Tracy that her pretty face and killer body were going to do more for her in life than going to school to learn how many state capitals she could name.
Tracy resigned from Naughty’s and moved into my department-store apartment to play the role of housewife, which didn’t include cooking, I discovered. No problem. We were within a short walk to a dozen restaurants that featured foods of the world. Many of those eateries wouldn’t stay in business for longer than six months, but they’d be replaced by others.
I had chosen an apartment on the second floor in case of fire. Easier to escape. Always take an edge when possible, I say.
The real estate agent tried to interest me in a pad on the tenth floor where I would have a panoramic view of the city. I explained to him that I was born and raised here and was more than familiar with the skyline.
My folks loved Fort Worth. They talked about what I’d missed in their day. Leonard Brothers Department Store, for one thing. It was an enormous three-story building covering an entire city block downtown where people could buy everything from a loaf of bread to a toy wagon to a tractor. People came from miles around to shop there at bargain prices, and they did it for more than sixty years.
The malls killed every department store in their path. That was before the malls themselves began to lose their appeal, except in the parking lots, which was where you went if you were overcome with a yearning to get car-jacked.
My folks loved the ornate movie houses that stretched along Seventh Street in the heart of downtown—the Hollywood, Worth, and Palace. When my dad came home after the war, he and my mom looked forward to seeing live entertainers like the Mills Brothers, the Ink Spots, and the Andrews Sisters, who would appear live on stage before the movie. TV had yet to exist, as you might guess.
Since Tracy no longer worked, she constantly invited friends over for drinks who stayed far too long. They were girlfriends from Naughty’s, Tricky’s, and Flimsies. They would drink too much wine, and confine the conversation to the manly equipment they’d known on an intimate basis recently.
“Sex drives men crazy,” a model said one night. That lured me into the discussion.
“Sports drives men crazier than sex,” I said. “There’s proof of this if you watch football on TV. When has sex ever encouraged a man to strip down to his jock and paint his entire body crimson and white?
“Better still, have any of you known sex to make a man sit outdoors in a stadium during a snowstorm with the letters ‘L.S.U.’ painted in purple and gold on his bare chest?”
A girl said, “I’ve never tried acid.”
I laughed but she didn’t know why. Then I said, “I’m sure none of you have gone to dinner with a man who wore a block of cheese on his head, right?”
The girls stared at each other in disbelief.
In the year and a half of our marriage I did my best to smooth out Tracy’s rough edges. I tried to interest her in reading the newspaper to become more conversant with current events. She tried but not for long. She came across too many “French words” she didn’t get.
“For example?” I asked.
She pointed out three examples. Naive, despair, colony.
I tried her on a book, a murder mystery with “Prey” in the title, which may have thrown her off. She tossed it after eight pages, complaining that nobody had been killed yet.
Tracy wasn’t careful in her manner of speech. One evening I suggested she might consider in moments of anger to use expressions such as, “Lord have Mercy,” or, “Land o’ Goshen,” instead of, well, just to cite one example, referring to someone as a “a limp-dick shit-face.”
“What’s wrong with that?” she said.
Eventually I discovered that I’d married the only woman in America who had never seen Casablanca.
She went the distance with the movie, but found it too complicated to keep up with, and on top of everything else, it was “really stupid.”
Her review:
“A chick who looks like Ilsa would never run off with a skinny guy from Checkosloggia. Are you kidding me? You can bet your ass she’d hang with Rick. The foreign dude don’t even have a job. But on a rainy night she goes off with him in a rickety old airplane. It’s no even a jet, for God’s sake.”
I HAVE to confess I was more than slightly relieved the night Tracy said, “Honey Pie, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I’ve given a lot of thought to it and I don’t think I’m suited for this marriage gig.”
She told me a girlfriend who had worked at Naughty’s had been in touch with her and said she should come to Shreveport—it was a gold mine for cocktail waitresses in the casinos.
We parted friends. She moved to Shreveport but her mother didn’t go along. In Velma’s business world it would have required filling out too many forms and possibly running into unforeseen roadblocks that would be created by what she called “those good-for-nothing jokers in the Federal gubmint.”
The first time I heard from Tracy was after the news reached her that I had “fallen in an oil well.” She badly needed a new car and it looked like I was in a position to buy her one. I sent her the money and was informed that the amount wasn’t enough for a Mercedes. I apologized and sent her the balance.
The last letter from her said:
“Hi, Tommy Earl. Life is good here. Did you know the Red River runs through downtown Shreveport like it does between Oklahoma and Texas. That astounds me. Like how did it get to Louisiana, you know? There is a reason you haven’t heard from me. I have been busy moving up in the world. I’ll have you know I’ve risen from a cocktail waitress to a blackjack dealer!
“The school for dealers is long and hard, but I made it through. Now I have a profession I can take pride in.
“I hope you are doing good, but how could you not be? Mama taught me a long time ago never to feel sorry for anybody who makes more money than I do.
“Hit 11, stay on 12.
“Love, Tracy.”