AS I CONTINUED MY CAREER at Spanish Creek, I rekindled a relationship that would have a major impact on my life. It all began in 1981 when I was working as a cowboy for the Three Forks Ranch. I got a call from a woman named Cathy Tamke, who was putting on a fashion show for a ski company at a hotel near Helena. She offered me $150 to do some rope tricks for the show.
One hundred and fifty dollars to do fifteen minutes of rope tricks was big money, so I made the hour-and-a-half drive to the hotel. When I met Cathy at the hotel, she introduced me to her friend named Adrian Logan. Adrian was a very beautiful woman.
They took me backstage to a dressing room so I could change into my red-white-and-blue Tom Mix–wanna-be trick-roping outfit. The room was full of gorgeous models, and if there were any other men there, I didn’t notice. I was nineteen years old at the time, in the middle of beautiful girls running around in their bras and panties. Some of them didn’t have any clothes on at all. I was trying to be a gentleman and not look, but let’s not forget that I was only nineteen. It took me the longest time to get dressed. The place was as close as I’ve come to the Playboy mansion.
Cathy came in and got me, and I went out and did my rope tricks. I did the usual Texas Skip, the One Hand Stand, and the Pop Over. I also did the Double Merry-Go-Round, which requires two ropes: it involves changing the right loop to the left hand and the left loop to the right hand, and then doing it all behind your back. At the time only two people in the history of trick roping had ever done it. Will Rogers was one, and I was the other. The audience applauded and whistled and screamed, and that was quite a thrill for me.
Afterward Cathy, Adrian, and I went out for a bite to eat. Adrian was a blonde, three years older than me. She was real witty, too, with a comeback for anything or something else cute to say. Plus, her dad was Pete Logan, a famous rodeo announcer, and she had been around ranches and the rodeo business forever. I did whatever I could to charm Adrian. Although she knew I was interested in her, she also knew Cathy was attracted to me, so she remained pretty standoffish.
I didn’t see Adrian again until the fall of 1984 when one day she just walked into the arena in Gallatin Gateway where I was riding horses. I couldn’t have been more surprised. She was a student at Montana State, and she was looking for a place to keep her horse. She was also interested in the training methods I was using. At that time she was engaged to marry a world-champion bronc rider named Clint Johnson, who was using these methods, too, on his own saddle horses. Kevin Stallings, a good hand from South Dakota and a friend of Clint’s, had mentioned to Adrian that I’d quit doing rope tricks and was using the new methods as well. That’s when Adrian decided to look me up.
It was a cold day, but the stall barn was warm, and we sat and talked for a couple of hours. We really hit it off. Her interest in hanging around made me start to think that maybe I had a chance with her after all. I was amazed. I’d never have thought that a girl like that would have given me a second thought.
I had been studying accounting at Montana State off and on, and I was thinking about going back for the winter quarter. Knowing Adrian was a student cinched it.
We got to be good friends at school, and we spent quite a bit of time together. We had a lot of fun, and I helped her with her horse. Adrian really liked to ride; she had good balance and a pretty good feel for a horse. She really liked horses, which meant quite a lot to me.
Adrian broke off her engagement, and we started dating. Shortly after we became serious, she took me home to meet her parents, Pete and Audrey. Pete wasn’t very friendly, but I told him that I was honored to meet him and that I had always wanted to work in one of his rodeos. Pete worked the big shows, and even though my trick roping was top level, I had never been in one that size. I told him that I’d have known I’d made the big time if I’d gotten to work in a rodeo that Pete Logan was announcing.
As soon as I said that, Pete decided I was all right. He’d been a legend in the rodeo business, but some of the younger, more outgoing announcers were getting the work now. All legends eventually have to back away and let the younger guys take over; that’s where Pete was in his career, and he was a little bitter about it.
The Logans had two boys and another daughter, but Adrian was sort of the son that Pete had really hoped for. He was closer to her than he was to his other kids. They were so close she’d rarely make a move without first checking with her dad. Pete never really wanted Adrian to move away, and neither did Audrey. Adrian was their way of hanging on to their youth, I suppose. The pressure of their possessiveness had ruined Adrian’s relationship with a couple of good men before me, but I figured that I could fix about anything, and I hung in there.
Nevertheless, there were times when Adrian’s parents encouraged her to go out with other men. I guess I should have seen that early on. Adrian was telling me how much she loved me, but at the same time she was going out with—of all guys—my buddy Jeff.
The three of us were taking classes at Montana State. One night she’d be with me, and the next night she’d be with Jeff. Neither guy knew it until I came by her place unannounced one night. She was living in an apartment on Grand Street in Bozeman, and I was going to take her out for a bite to eat. When I pulled up, I saw Jeff’s pickup parked in front. I didn’t even bother getting out and going to the door. I just drove away.
When I stayed away for a little while, Adrian finally phoned me to ask why she hadn’t heard from me. I told her about seeing Jeff’s truck, but she didn’t really apologize. She liked both of us and felt kind of torn. She didn’t want to hurt either one of us, which sounded like a pretty weak excuse to me.
An old friend told me once, “Any woman who allows two men to fight over her is playing both ends against the middle, and she isn’t any good for either of them.” He was right, but Jeff and I were like a couple of young bulls. When we found out we were rivals for the same woman, it was a hell of a wreck and it destroyed our friendship for a while. In the end, it would be the thing that strengthened it.
If the same kind of thing happened again, I’d walk away as fast as I possibly could. But at the time, I hung in there, and I guess I won the contest because Adrian broke up with Jeff and continued to date me. Jeff and I went from being best friends to being enemies.
I moved away from Spanish Creek and leased another indoor arena across the valley. I also rented a small apartment in Belgrade, just outside Bozeman, near the new arena. The place was a glorified bunkhouse, with a hot plate, a bed, and a bathroom that I built. Pretty modest digs, you’d have to say.
Still, Adrian moved in with me. She didn’t want her parents to know we were living together, so she kept her own apartment where she kept a few clothes. She was always worried about what her parents would think, which in some ways was certainly understandable. But as our relationship developed, I saw she wasn’t just close to her parents, she was totally manipulated and dominated by them.
Although Adrian and I talked about marriage, she kept putting off our engagement. Normally it’s men who do that sort of thing, but not in this case. It hurt, because I really loved her and wanted to be married to her.
One day I was riding colts when Preacher Dave Edwards came by. Preacher Dave had started a little Baptist church in Bozeman that catered to the cowboy crowd, and Adrian and I had become friends with him. He told me he needed to talk to Adrian and me about our living together. He said that because he loved us both, he thought we ought to think about going ahead and getting married because living together wasn’t right. He knew we weren’t raised that way.
Preacher Dave must have been right because after he put us on the spot, Adrian and I started talking about marriage. Over the next few days, we talked about it a little bit more. Adrian said she didn’t want to have a regular wedding; she didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. My guess was that she was afraid her folks would be angry and wouldn’t come. She didn’t even want Preacher Dave to marry us; instead, she suggested a justice of the peace.
I was very disappointed. I wanted our wedding to be a big deal. I was so proud of her, I wanted all my friends to come and share my happiness. On the other hand, if we were going to get married, it only would happen her way.
We took out a marriage license, and one morning we decided we’d drive over to Broadwater County near where her parents lived and get married by the local justice of the peace.
Adrian called her parents and said, “We’re going to do it, and we’d like you to be there.” Although the justice of the peace was just a fifteen-minute drive away, they refused to come. That really upset Adrian. We drove into town, and she cried all the way. I told her, “Adrian, if you don’t want to do this, let’s just stop and forget it. I’ll turn the truck around, and we won’t.”
She shook her head. “No, go ahead. We need to do this. Keep driving.”
God knows why I didn’t turn around, but I didn’t. I was under the impression that Adrian, who was now twenty-seven years old, had decided she finally needed to take charge of her life and make a decision without her parents.
Adrian continued to cry. I felt terrible, too, but we went through with the ceremony. The justice of the peace did the honors, and a couple of total strangers were witnesses.
None of my family was there either. Betsy Shirley, my foster mother, who had raised me through some tough times, was very disappointed. When I called and told her what had happened, she said she understood, but it would have been a special thing for her to be at the wedding.
Afterward, Adrian wanted to go to her parents’ house and visit them for a minute. Although seeing them was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, I wanted my bride to be happy.
You would have thought I had committed murder in the first degree. The Logans made me feel like a criminal. Rather than being happy for her, they acted as if somebody had died. It was like a funeral, dead quiet.
I had my own business and was getting to be successful. I didn’t depend on anybody for anything, and I loved the Logans’ daughter to death, but that wasn’t enough for them. They had plans for her.
At one time, Adrian had been dating Montana’s secretary of state, a man who was being touted as the next governor until he was killed in a plane crash. Adrian had stopped dating him by then, but her parents remained disappointed that she married a cowboy like me. They still had hopes she’d be the first lady of Montana, I suppose.
As Adrian walked out to the truck, Pete held me back. With a begrudging handshake, he said, “You better do this right, or I’ll kill you.”
That visit to her parents had done the trick. Ten minutes after we were married, Adrian began to feel she had made a mistake. For my part, I believed that if she came to understand how much I loved her and she came to realize she had to leave her parents and cleave to someone else, as the Bible says, then things would work out.
It never happened. Adrian and I got along only all right. We didn’t fight, but things never really did improve. I suspect Adrian always figured on leaving me. I know for a fact her parents wanted her to. Many years later I found out that even after we were married, they encouraged Adrian to go out on a date with another man.
Adrian didn’t go out with him that I know of, but it wasn’t for lack of her family’s trying. We always spent holidays at their house, and one Easter Adrian’s sister Leslie, who was up visiting from Texas, brought up the man’s name at the dinner table. All the Logans started talking about how he was probably going to be the next governor, which led to talk about some of Adrian’s other past boyfriends. Although I tried to be good-natured about it, I thought the conversation was inappropriate in front of me, but it wasn’t my dinner table.
When Pete said I couldn’t be compared to the politician, I lost my temper. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” I said angrily, “I can compete with him as well as anybody because I’m a good man. I try to hold myself up as a good example to other people, and I think I’m a good person, and you can go to hell.” That marked the first time I ever stood up to Adrian’s father. As I got up to leave the table, I told Adrian that she could stay if she wanted to, but I was going home.
Even though they didn’t apologize, the Logans asked me to stay, and I calmed down enough to finish dinner. There wasn’t much talk for the rest of the meal, and when it was over, I left. Adrian didn’t. She said she’d be home in a few days, so right then and there I found out where her loyalties were.
Adrian did return two or three days later. For the next couple of years we stumbled along, even with lots of good times. Adrian liked riding colts and helping me out, and the business was starting to grow. I was settled into doing some clinics, and I was riding a lot of colts. We bought twenty acres and a doublewide trailer house in a pretty spot near Belgrade. It was the first time I ever owned anything substantial in my life. Granted, it was just a trailer house, but it was brand new, and it beat the hell out of the bunkhouses I’d been living in.
For the next several months I rode colts like crazy. I rode fifteen a day, every day, until I had our little place paid for.
Just one week after I’d made that final payment, Adrian and I were loping horses around a tilled track that circled our little slice of heaven. The date was October 18, 1987. I had stopped the colt I was riding for a breather, taking the time to enjoy the red-and-orange sunset over the Tobacco Root Mountains. Adrian and I were to have dinner with Allan and Jood, friends who had come in from California, and I was about to put my colt away and start the evening feeding.
After riding hundreds of horses in my life, I’d gotten used to the sound of hoofbeats. I knew what they should sound like, and the ones coming from behind me didn’t sound right. I looked around just in time to see Adrian and her gelding, Rooster, falling to the ground. They seemed to be falling in slow motion. I was off my colt and running toward her before she landed.
For some reason, Adrian didn’t put her arms out to break her fall. Her head slammed into the ground. When I got to her, she was unconscious. She wasn’t breathing, and her heart had stopped.
I yelled for help, and Jood ran out of the barn. Fortunately, Jood knew CPR, and as she worked on Adrian, I ran inside to call an ambulance.
Although the local hospital arranged for a flight to the trauma center in Billings, the doctors told me they were pretty sure Adrian wouldn’t live through the flight. Ninety percent of her brain had hemorrhaged, and even if she made it to the hospital alive, the swelling would likely kill her within a day or two.
Adrian was in a very deep coma and put on life support. She was at what the doctors call a level eight, which is non-responsive. The neurologist was blunt about it. He told me on several occasions, “I can’t give you any good news. I can’t even tell you that she’s going to live. In fact, I’m surprised she’s lived this long.”
I spent the next seven weeks by Adrian’s side. I slept in my clothes in her hospital room for the first few weeks, and then I stayed in Billings on the living room couch at a place that belonged to the daughter of a friend from Belgrade.
My insurance was not enough to cover all the medical bills. Plus, I had other expenses. I fell way behind because I wasn’t working. When I ran out of money, Tom Dorrance and some of my other California friends put together a benefit clinic in Malibu on my behalf. The event gave me the money to live on while I was by Adrian’s side in the hospital.
The frustration was awful. I missed Adrian horribly, but I couldn’t talk to her. There was nothing I could do to help her. It was the same kind of frustration I had experienced when my mother died, and in my misery I got a tiny glimpse of what my father might have felt.
The Logans spent lots of time at the hospital, too. Their beautiful daughter had been hurt, and since it seemed as if they had to resent somebody, they resented me. I couldn’t tell if they blamed me for the accident or if they just hated me because I married Adrian and took her away from home.
They didn’t mince words. When I’d walk into the hospital room, Audrey would look at me and ask, “What are you doing back here? She never wanted to be married to you.”
It wasn’t true, of course, but it didn’t matter to me then. Adrian’s getting well was all that mattered.
Weeks went by, and I sat with Adrian every day. The only times I wasn’t by her bed and talking to her to try to make contact, I was in the hospital chapel praying like I’d never prayed before. Desperation makes for a religious man. Seven weeks went by, but there was still no sign of improvement. It seemed there was no hope.
A constant stream of people came by to tell me how much they loved me and cared for me. They all gave me a lot of support. Allan and Jood and Preacher Dave were there. Chas Weldon, the saddlemaker, came by, and so did Bob Mulkey, and my friends Bob Potts and Greg Eliel. Ray and Caroline Hunt called, and so did the Dorrance family. I wasn’t alone, but it was a very lonely time.
I was in the hospital’s waiting room when a phone call came from Jeff. The last time I’d seen him, I wanted to beat the hell out of him because I felt that he’d taken advantage of our friendship. I’m sure he felt the same way. I can only imagine what he must have gone through deciding whether or not to call after he heard about Adrian. But he did call, and I was grateful. We talked a little bit, and a few days later he visited me at the hospital. A lot of what had seemed so important in the past no longer mattered now, and continuing to harbor the bitterness and anger that I had felt was now senseless. Jeff and I spent time together and rebuilt our friendship, both of us realizing that the reason our friendship had ended was the reason we were friends once again.
Betsy rarely went into Adrian’s room. She felt that Pete and Audrey resented her, too, if only because she was my foster mother. She waited in the hall or in the waiting room for me. When I came out for a few minutes’ breather, she would give me a reassuring hug. Betsy was almost seventy years old at the time, and the days she spent at the hospital were hard on her, too.
At nine o’clock one night during the eighth week, Jood came by to help out. I had run out of strength and hope, and while Jood stayed with Adrian, I went down to the chapel. I got down on my knees and said, “God, You’ve been listening to me for a long time, and I’ve given all I’ve got. I feel like I’m used up. I don’t have anything left. All I ask is that You just give her a chance—give us a chance—that we might get our lives back, and that I might talk to my wife … my friend again. I don’t know if You really give signs, but I need one now.”
I sat there for a long time, feeling sorry for myself, and lonesome, too. Then feeling a little guilty for trying to tell God what I thought He ought to do, I went back up to Adrian’s room.
As I walked in, Jood looked at me and asked, “Where were you two minutes ago?”
“Down in the chapel,” I replied. “I was just praying, asking God to give us a break.”
“Well, you got your break,” Jood said. “Two minutes ago Adrian’s eyes opened and she squeezed my hand. She didn’t look at me, but her eyes did come open.”
Adrian started to regain consciousness. She became aware of things, but only on a very basic level. At first she didn’t recognize me. One of her doctors, a woman named Morstad, suggested that I go home and get her wedding ring, on the possibility that seeing it might eventually help Adrian remember she was married to me. I didn’t want to leave the hospital, so I asked a friend to get it, and when it came I put it on Adrian’s hand.
Whenever the Logans came to visit, I left them alone so they could have private time with their daughter. They told her she was not in love with me and had made a mistake in marrying me.
And because Adrian’s memory of her parents was long term, she recognized them long before she recognized me. To her, I was just a friendly guy at the hospital who was taking her to her different therapies, cheering her on, helping her in and out of her wheelchair, washing her, changing her diapers, and getting her ready for bed at night. She still didn’t know I was her husband, so I wasn’t much competition for her parents.
The doctors had suggested that Adrian not be asked to deal with adult situations or be expected to be capable of adult reasoning and thinking. In short, they asked me not to put any sort of demands on our relationship. They knew full well that Pete and Audrey were trying to turn her against me, and although the doctors advised them against it, the Logans weren’t listening. Adrian was very childlike when she came out of her coma, which the Logans seemed to appreciate. Manipulating their little girl was much easier than misleading the adult woman who had made the decision to marry a cowboy like me. They wanted their daughter back home again, and this was an opportunity to tear her away from me.
Before the accident, Adrian was never foul-mouthed, she never swore, but when she came out of the coma she could put a truck driver to shame. Her recovery wasn’t like in the movies, where someone wakes up out of a coma and gives you a big hug just before the closing credits roll. When Adrian wasn’t hollering and swearing, she was a wild animal, screaming and making no sense. It was as if a bunch of tape players were all going at once, as if thousands of words were coming out of her mouth at the same time. Every thirty seconds or so, I’d hear a word that I recognized. Adrian’s mind was so jumbled up, it seemed as if she was possessed by the devil.
The pain and despair of being the spouse who had not been hurt began to make me question my own sanity. I’d rather have been dead than to see Adrian go through what she was going through. If I could have traded places with her, I would have. And I know that if I had been able to trade places, I wouldn’t have been alone. My friends and my family would have been there for me.
Adrian spent nearly three months in rehabilitation. Minute by minute, day by day, her recovery continued. She had a busy schedule. Every day she’d go from occupational therapy to physical therapy to speech therapy. I pushed her wheelchair to each session. When I could help the therapists by taking part, I did. Sometimes I was the cheerleader, and sometimes I was the therapist. The doctors wanted me to take part as much as possible because they were trying to help her remember me and remember what we were.
It wasn’t easy. When you look at someone you love so much, your best friend, and she is finally able to speak again, and her voice sounds like it used to, as if she’d never been hurt, and you look in her eyes and see hate, and when she looks back at you and she says, “I hate you, I wish you would never, ever come back,” it’s hard. And then when a minute later she says, “I love you so much. Thank God you’re here, I couldn’t do it without you,” that’s hard, too.
The entire time Adrian was in rehabilitation, her parents tried to convince her to go home with them rather than stay with me. They knew why the wedding ring was back on Adrian’s hand, and they didn’t want her to remember she was married to me. And since the ring didn’t mean anything to the Logans, they convinced her sister Leslie to take it off her hand.
By the time I saw the ring was missing, Leslie and her parents had already gone back to the apartment they had rented in Billings. I knew what had happened. I went to their apartment, and when Leslie answered the door, I asked, “Where’s Adrian’s ring?”
She said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I want her ring, and I want it now.” I knew she was lying.
Leslie knew she was caught. “I’m not going to give it to you.”
Pete and Audrey came to the door. I knew Pete carried a gun in his coat pocket; he’d told me he did. He had his hand on it now.
I looked at him and lost my temper. “You better not pull that gun out of your pocket unless you plan on using it because I’m going to shove it up your ass.”
Audrey jumped in front of husband and pushed him back out of the doorway. “Pete, don’t do it.”
“You better not, Pete,” I continued, “because if your wife can hold you back, you don’t want any part of me.” I turned to Leslie, “This is not the end,” I said and walked away.
A few days later Adrian left the hospital. She left me, too. The day she got hurt, we were as close as we had ever been, but the person she was before the fall no longer existed. During her recovery she and I hung in there and saw it through, all the tough parts and the tougher parts. She did great, but it wasn’t enough.
Still, as I helped Adrian into her parents’ car, she told me, “I’m just going to go home to get well.”
Perhaps she genuinely believed she would come back to me, but I told her, “Adrian, you aren’t responsible for what you’re saying right now. You don’t understand what you’re saying. I know your parents will never let you leave. In a few days, they’ll have you convinced that I’m some kind of monster. This will probably be the last time I ever tell you that I love you, and it’ll probably be the last time we ever see each other.”
A week later, I was served divorce papers. I lost everything. Our house and twenty acres, the barn and corrals that I’d built were all gone—my few assets were added to the Logan estate.
I had no money, but my bills were paid and I had a little time before the divorce became final and I had to get out of the house. My response was to hide. I stayed indoors with the door locked and shades pulled down, watching TV and drinking coffee. I didn’t talk to anyone.
After two months of such mourning, I woke to a sunrise much the same color as the sunset I remembered October 18. I got up, walked out to my round pen for the last time, and stepped onto a horse. And as the sun rose, so did my spirits. It was time to live again.
I drove out of that part of my life with only a pickup truck and a horse trailer. For most of that spring I just kind of bounced around, hanging out with Jeff and his dad and some of my other Flying D friends and helping out with sorting cattle and branding. I did a couple of clinics, which kept me going part of the time, but I wasn’t really going anywhere in particular until later on that summer when I went to work for Jorie Butler Kent’s polo operation.
Later that year I got a letter from Adrian. She sounded as if nothing had really happened. It was as though the way she divorced me hadn’t devastated me financially, hadn’t taken everything I had ever worked for. She didn’t come right out and say it, but reading between the lines it seemed as if she was trying to patch things up. She did say she wanted to hear from me, but by then it was too late. The pages had already been turned on that chapter in my life.