I was living on the ranch on my own and started bringing out these thoroughbred girls I had known in New York and Los Angeles to keep me company. They would break a fingernail and that would be that: Goodbye, Bar Cross Ranch. Having all these temporary frontier housewives on the ranch wasn’t working out very well, and so I finally concluded that it was impossible to operate a large cattle ranch in Wyoming without conceding that a man and a woman had to run it together. That was just the way it had to be. There was a natural division of labor that required two people to fulfill.
I knew I needed a woman who was tough enough for the position, and I thought about all the girls I had ever been romantically involved with. I even went so far as to make another list that included some with whom I had never had a relationship.
I had begun my career in the study of women at Fountain Valley. I was still a virgin then, but I guess you could say that technically I had lost my virginity about a year before I went there. In those days, there were cathouses all along the Union Pacific railroad line. I went down to one in Evanston, Wyoming, with a bunch of my miscreant friends and that was that, but I never thought of it as being the real thing. I later learned that Daniel Ellsberg had lost his virginity in the same kind of cathouse in Laramie.
Toward the end of my sophomore year, I fell into a high school romance with a “townie” in Colorado Springs. I had gone into the city one afternoon with some friends and we were just killing time when I met Judy on a bus. In our way, we loved each other an awful lot. Both of us were still really virgins, and so we went at the process of crossing that divide together. I was sixteen at the time and she was a very heated-up Southern Baptist, which lent a certain something to it all.
I spent the summer after I graduated from Fountain Valley working in Colorado Springs as an independent contractor for the sale of frozen confectionaries. In other words, I drove a Popsicle truck. It was a little pink Jeep with a surrey roof and a small mechanical music box that played the same hugely and poorly amplified lullaby about every eleven seconds all day long. Sometimes that song still comes back to me in a dream. Most of the time, extreme rendition could not force me to repeat it.
As a marketing aid, I was wearing chaps and a cowboy hat, and I would show up wherever I pleased so I could constantly surprise the kids. I always wanted to work in the sections of town where the families did not have enough money to afford a big refrigerator but could afford Popsicles, especially as they were being sold by a mythological fellow like me. That summer, I made serious bank.
One day I was driving past the front yard of the house of Judy’s best friend, Elaine Parker. She was out working on her tan, and it was working. Elaine had dark eyes and dark hair and the kind of skin that could really take a tan. She asked me in for some lemonade and from that day forward, I knew one thing about Elaine Parker and me. We were good at that.
Nonetheless, I did my best to keep my relationship with Judy alive during my freshman year at Wesleyan. There were several weekends when I drove from Middletown to Colorado Springs to see her. It was about 1,900 miles each way and I would leave on Friday and come back on Sunday. My metallic purple 1965 Chevy Impala Super Sport had a 550-horsepower engine that I had souped up by putting two four-barrel carburetors in it. I had fucked with this car so significantly that I could run it for hours at insane speed.
Gas cost only twenty-eight cents a gallon back then, but I was not getting even ten miles to the gallon at the speed I was driving. I almost had to stand under the hood while constantly pouring gas right into the carburetors to keep going. Back then, the speed limit was eighty-five miles an hour, but no one seemed all that concerned about enforcing it and so I would be going a hundred miles an hour easy.
At about three o’clock one Kansas morning while I was going roughly 130 miles an hour and had been for a long time, I was not quite nowhere but I could certainly see it. Suddenly, the main bearings in the differential seized and the rear wheels were locked. With astonishing velocity, I veered off the highway into a cornfield. Entering a cornfield at 130 miles an hour is like slamming into deep water. Breathtaking.
After the car finally came to a dead stop, I walked back up to the highway and stood by the side of the road until someone came along and picked me up. While I was standing there, I suddenly realized that driving all the way to Colorado Springs to spend the night with my girlfriend was even crazier than I was. I couldn’t do it anymore.
Instead, I decided to focus my attention on the women’s colleges of New England, and I discovered that I could ride my motorcycle to places like Bennington and Sarah Lawrence, recite poetry of my own composition to anyone who might be interested, and do okay without a 1,900-mile booty call.
Between April 1966 and December 1974, I was involved with many other women, but I never lost contact with Elaine. At one point, she was operating the cash register at the Yale Law School cafeteria, and I went to see her there. But just when I thought that we might start something up, she fell in with a promising student there who then became, at a startlingly young age, the president of the Union Pacific railroad. They were together for several years, and he took her with him to southern California.
Elaine eventually broke up with him and returned to Colorado Springs, where she got into a relationship with a guy we had both known when I was at Fountain Valley. For a summer, they traveled around the Rockies in a VW bus with Elaine’s older sister, who had fallen in with him, too. Eventually, their road led to the Bar Cross.
Although it was the middle of haying season, Elaine and I felt pretty cozy with each other. The feeling that I had after she left made me understand strongly that, whether we’d had a romantic history or not, she was now at the top of my list. It would still be a long-distance relationship, but I had gotten a pilot’s license and was leasing a plane, so I started flying down to Colorado Springs to see her nearly every weekend.
This courting by airborne siege went on for a while until she finally said, “Barlow, what are you doing?” And I said, “I am attempting to win your heart.” And she said, “Keep working on it.” And I said, “At least, I’d like you to come up and share the Bar Cross Ranch with me for a while.”
She said yes, and we lived there together along with my mother from December 1974 until July 1976, at which time Elaine had had a belly full of me and dashed back to Colorado Springs. I spent the balance of that summer engaged in a relationship with a girl who would have been the answer to all of my financial dilemmas. She was also beautiful, smart, and funny, and I might have ended up with her, but I realized that trouble would come between us, as it does to every married couple, and I didn’t want there to be a little voice in the back of my head saying “You did it for the money.”
By Christmas of that year, neither Elaine nor I was very happy, and I resumed my lonely flights of courtship down to Colorado Springs. Over a period of about a month, I persuaded her to come back. This time, I wanted to nail it out of the chute, and so I proposed to her almost immediately, setting a date and beginning to create a matrix of details and expectations that might keep her from bolting again.
We were to be wed on the Bar Cross on June 21, 1977, the day of the summer solstice. Let me tell you that, as difficult as being married can be, getting ready to be married can be even more difficult still, especially if you’re involving hundreds of people who know no master.
Weir was going to be my best man, and we had agreed that, on the day of the wedding, we would go up on the hill at sunrise to lay out a line of rocks pointing away from a big medicine circle we had built. Then at sunset, when we expected the service to be over, everybody would pick up a rock and lay it out pointing to the setting sun.
The night before, everyone was drinking. Earlier in the day, Weir and I had both gone straight to the Everclear, which is pure ethanol, 190 proof. You can run your race car on it. Everclear is not really meant for human consumption, but it is sold in liquor stores. We each had a pint of it in our hip pockets and we weren’t mixing it with anything.
At some point during the night, Weir apparently abandoned me and went off to sleep in a bunkhouse. This was an act of disloyalty I could not abide. In those days, it had become my practice to punctuate points I wanted made very clearly by blanging off a round from my .357 Magnum into the floor. Since the bullet leaves the muzzle of that gun at twice the speed of sound, the exclamation point it makes is accompanied by two sonic booms.
At about four-thirty in the morning, I went out to fetch the faithless Weir from his alcohol-induced coma. I entered the bunkhouse and, without any warning, I fired off my exclamatory round into the floor. But I had forgotten that this was the only inhabited building on the ranch that didn’t have a plank floor. In fact, it had once been a chicken coop and had a concrete floor, over which we had placed a rug.
There was a remarkable silence as there often was following one of these shots across the bow. Suddenly, Weir said, “You shot me!” And I said, “Oh, I did not.” He said, “Turn on the light. Come see.” I turned on the lights and went over to him and sure as shit, it was clear that I had shot him. It was a minor wound but a piece of shrapnel had gone all the way through Bobby’s nose, and in fact the entire wall right above his bed was peppered with shrapnel.
If Bobby had sat up when I had come through the door, I would have killed him for sure. Which would have given the day an entirely different flavor. But what it came down to instead was that Weir wound up serving as my best man with a Band-Aid over his nose.
Right after this incident, I jumped on my motorcycle and left the ranch. In the tradition of the groom not seeing the bride before the wedding, Elaine was staying with a close friend of mine. I don’t think I mentioned the shooting when I came to see them that night, but after I had left the ranch, the guests talked about whether or not to follow me. The first question anyone asked was, “Is he still armed?”
The next day, a wonderful man performed the ceremony, the Reverend Calvin Elliot, who had grown up next door to Katharine Hepburn in the tonier end of Hartford, Connecticut, back in the days when Hartford had a tony end. The reverend had come to Wyoming because he felt closer to God there. He was conservative but extremely refined and a real gentleman. In the sunset light, he looked like God almighty. There was a party after the wedding, and John and Caroline Kennedy were both there because John was still working for me at that point.
Elaine and I had talked about a honeymoon but had not gotten up a serious plan. Although Weir had been muttering about me going with him to Los Angeles for a while to keep working on the album that came to be called Heaven Help the Fool, I didn’t realize that none of the songs had been written yet and we were already paying for studio time. Unfortunately for me, by shooting Weir on the night before the wedding, I had significantly lengthened his guilt lever.
We’d already had one emergency songwriting session in Salt Lake City. I was drinking and doing cocaine with him and we went to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir while more or less stinking drunk. We were staying in the Hotel Utah, where my parents had gotten married, because Weir and I thought that if we got together in a hotel room, it would help us work. We got Keith Olsen, who had just produced the Dead’s Terrapin Station, to come out as well. As far as I could tell, his principal function seemed to be supplying us with blow.
Weir went to Los Angeles right after the wedding, and then I followed him out there five days later. I left Elaine behind, which was not a terribly romantic thing to do, but nevertheless that was what happened. And so Elaine and I never did have a honeymoon. She took that period of time to move into the main house on the ranch, which she felt was fair to claim as hers.
After the wedding, my mother had gone off on an extended tour of the South Pacific and was then in Papua New Guinea among the mud men. Which meant that, among other things, Elaine was able to remove the Christmas tree that had been in the living room for more than eleven years. It was a gigantic sagebrush, seven feet tall and nine feet wide, the likes of which you rarely see. My mother had put twenty-eight hundred little white Italian lights on it, which had been quite an ordeal for me to watch her do. Why did she do this? Because it was an objet d’art. That was what my mother said all of her artist friends called it. Elaine felt like she now had the right to take that damn tree down, and I was totally with her on that.
In Los Angeles, I wrote the lyrics for six of the eight tracks on Heaven Help the Fool in a short time, pretty much the whole album. I’m still proud of that record because I think it turned out amazingly well. Weir was playing with some truly serious studio musicians, including David Paich, Mike Porcaro, Bill Champlin, David Foster, Nigel Olsson, Waddy Wachtel, and Tom Scott. Generally, they were right there in the room playing alongside Bobby. It was definitely a scene of major proportions, but if you’re not a musician, the studio can really be a dreadful place because nothing happens for the longest time.
I returned to the ranch to find a whole new order in place. Which was okay by me. It had to happen sooner or later, and I was glad to see Elaine becoming the woman of the Bar Cross.