I WOULD BE skimping indeed if I ended my account of my time in Cow Town, as Fort Worth is still sometimes called, without expanding a little on my few fruitful glimpses of the protean Dave Hickey, now at last officially certified as a genius by the MacArthur Foundation of Chicago.
As long as I’ve known Dave I still am not sure what best to call him: writer, curator, art writer, editor (of Art in America ), gallery owner, and the author of the best sentence ever to appear in The Texas Observer (I quote from long memory): “Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse of a sow’s ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.”
Among the things Dave Hickey has done are:
A. Run, with his first wife, a gallery in Austin.
B. Edited a magazine in New York.
C. Written country songs in Nashville, including a notable one about Oscar Wilde and Billy the Kid.
D. Written a brilliant book of short stories.
E. Written several books about art, one of which soars as far above my head as calculus.
F. Curated a famous exhibit in Santa Fe.
G. Inhabited my ranch house for a time, just before his star rose.
H. Now teaches at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.
Months after Dave’s fortunes had risen I happened to be inhabiting the ranch house myself. I was, in fact, in the bathtub reading when I heard the front door open. Whoever entered—a cowboy, I assumed—came down the hall and turned out to be Dave.
“Oh, sorry,” he said. “I just dropped in to borrow this volume of Coleridge’s letters.”
I haven’t seen Dave Hickey since, but I do expect to see him eventually, probably in similar circumstances. I included his great story “The Closed Season” in a volume of stories from, more or less, the present-day West. The book is called Still Wild .