SHAKE SPENT close to two years in Europe, which can seem like an eternity at a certain stage of your life. However, it was enough time for Barbara Jane and Billy Clyde to realize they had fancied each other all along but had carefully avoided the issue.
When Shake left on his journey in search of truth, beauty, and typing paper, Barbara Jane went through stages—anger, confusion, sadness. Eventually the friendship with Billy Clyde nosedived into passion. When that occurs, life dictates that you can call in an air strike, but nothing will stop you from humming a favorite tune as you stroll down the avenue.
They had begun to have dinner four or five nights a week. It was like they didn’t know anyone else, except they didn’t care to. It was during one of those evenings when Billy Clyde said, “I’ve been holding this in for too many years—I just have to throw it out there, no matter what happens. I’ve been hopelessly in love with you forever, Barb.”
Barbara Jane said, “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to hear you say that to me.”
“I happen to have it at the top of my wish list.”
Billy Clyde and Barbara Jane were married at poolside of Big Ed’s home in Westover Hills, if you want to call something a home that has a moat, a tennis court, a bent grass putting green, a guest cottage, and an Olympic-size swimming pool shaped like a Horned Frog. I’m not lying to anybody.
An intimate group of Bookman friends were invited to the wedding. Olivia and I were among them. The high-water mark of the ceremony was when Rev. O. D. (“Dog”) Dawkins, a preacher and Big Ed’s friend, asked who gives this woman? The booming voice of Big Ed said:
“Her mother, her father, and the Fightin’ Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University!”
*****
BILLY CLYDE and Barbara Jane kept up with Shake through his postcards, which were not what you would classify as regular. Two or three months would pass.
They did hear from him after they married. Shake read a story about it in the International Herald Tribune, and he wrote to them, “I’m glad you guys saw the light. I know you won’t mess it up.”
That postcard came from Athens with a picture of a ruin on it. Another card came from Rome with a picture of a different ruin on it. He’d read in the Herald Trib about Billy Clyde gaining 203 yards from scrimmage while weaving his way to four touchdowns against the Eagles.
That postcard said, “Old 23, we’ll never forget him.”
Shake Tiller humor. Billy Clyde always wore No. 22.
Shake lived for a while in Rome and Paris—long enough to examine most of the ruins—then longer in London. The London stop was where he devoted three months to an affair with an attractive divorcee, Alexis Wells, who’d been left well-fixed financially with a townhouse on the Thames.
They’d met at Fortnum & Mason in a food aisle. Things went smoothly until the night at home when Alexis drank too much red and cursed him bitterly for not liking a sporting event she made him attend.
It was the annual “boat race.” The deadly battle of eights in the Oxford and Cambridge crew race of four miles on the Thames. Maybe things would have gone better if Shake hadn’t said the race looked more to him like a day in the park.
On another evening Alexis, loaded again on the red, cursed him for not liking the Shakespeare comedy she’d dragged him to see in a theater that was about to crumble from age. Shake said he liked Shakespeare plays when the actors had sword fights. That only drove her into another rage.
Which led to the moment when Shake said, “Forsooth,” moved out, and scratched one English divorcee. It would be easier to understand cricket.
A journalist Shake met in The Punch Tavern, a Fleet Street pub that was almost as old as the theater, suggested he try the Cotswolds, if he could afford it, and wanted to go somewhere to write.
Shake not only visited the Cotswolds, he settled there. He bought a car in London and toured all seven counties and observed so many picturesque villages he had trouble deciding where to hole up with his portable typewriter.
He chose Bourton-on-the-Water. It had slightly more charm than other villages he’d seen. Stone cottages, thatched roofs, rock walls, a knoll, a market. All that.
The body of water was the Windrush River, but in his cards and letters Shake referred to the town as “Mutton-on-Avon.”
Shake talked the manager of a little hotel into renting him a two-room suite with a private bath and a view of a cobblestone street. He could stay as long as he wished. That’s how the Old Bridge Inn became his home.
Such news required a letter from him. He confessed to Barbara Jane and Billy Clyde that he’d found the perfect place to write. Dozens of pubs were available for food and beverages. There were other villages within hiking distance. Other rivers and streams available if a man wanted to plop down, stare at them, and think. The hills were alive with synonyms and metaphors.
Months later they received the letter informing them that he was off drugs completely. Was this a joke?
No, thank goodness.
Shake became convinced that a recreational drug was a danger. Its merry path took you from smoke to sniff to needle to death. He decided to live longer. Weed had become too powerful anyhow. A man could mummify himself. That was never what he intended. He had only liked to burn one now and then, giggle at something on the TV, and hope there were some Mallomars left in the cabinet.
All on his own, he became convinced that drugs were part of a plot by commies inside and outside our own government to weaken, deaden, and do away with the America we were raised to love and respect. He was certain of this.
“Call me a patriot,” he wrote to Billy Clyde and Barbara Jane.
It was while he was cooped up in England that Shake wrote his first book, The Average Man’s History of the World. He found the name of a literary agent—Shep Burns—in a magazine, and sent it off. The book not only attracted an American publisher, it became a surprising best-seller.
That achievement was in spite of a barrage of savage reviews by critics who, according to Shake, never liked a book unless it was written by a limping Russian dwarf recalling his years in the gulag.
In his book Shake passes judgement on events and characters that have been twisted from culture to culture, as in “our culture is superior to your culture.”
A few examples:
The Napoleonic Wars in truth were fought to determine whether the Brits or the French wore the funniest hats.
Our Civil War wasn’t about slavery. It was a land-grab. The savvy old North peered into the future and saw that America was going to need golf resorts in warm-weather climates.
People of the Great Depression introduced rags for clothing, never guessing that rock musicians and teenage girls would revive the look thirty years later.
Hitler was a bad guy, no argument there. But if he were here to defend himself he’d argue that he possessed many fine traits. He loved dogs. He loved art. He loved classical music. He loved women. And he was actually pro life—at least for the people who were born naturally blond.
Football? A business venture that followed cattle drives.
Best Drink of all-time: the root beer float.
Cutting horses: Where rich people go to play cowboy.
Is it Hungro-Austria or Austro-Hungary?
Why does Java keep all the best typhoons for itself?
Two things are guaranteed to make a Russian laugh: One, give him a pair of American jeans, or two, let him shoot a German.
Stop complaining about taxes, unless you don’t want us to have an Army and Navy.
Vietnam? The most fun any door-gunner could have.
The over-romanticized sixties? Even ugly people could get laid.
Shake had written most of the book on his portable typewriter, but he finished it on a laptop computer, which he said was God’s gift to writers.
The best thing Shake’s book did was bring him home. The home he selected was a rental cottage in Hollywood. His book’s success had led to an advance on a novel that came with a movie tie-in. He had been grinding on the novel for months. Not surprisingly, it was about a football player. So far, he was struggling with it. He was only satisfied with the title: Stud Lovable.
While Shake was overseas, I watched Barbara Jane become a movie actor who hated it—she was only good playing herself. And I watched Billy Clyde retire as a gridiron hero and become an NFL analyst on TV.
Shake arrived in the States as Barbara Jane was finishing up her last scene in her last movie, Melancholy Baby.
It almost didn’t get finished. She kept refusing to say lines in the script written by “a bearded elf.”
Billy Clyde was on the set the day Barbara Jane said to the writer, “I will not say, ‘Love is like a work of art—it takes an artist to do it right.’ I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere, or read it somewhere. And allow me to be clear one more time. I would never say that if I fucking believed it.”