Miracles Ain't What They Used to Be Read online

  Neal was like family. I remember him being amazed that we didn’t care for the beach. He and his wife Ruth loved it. He felt our children were being deprived. One day the mail came. Opened the envelope. It was full of beach sand and seashells. A note was included: “So your children will know.”

  Still have that sand. Miss Neal every day.

  “Survival stuff.” I like that. You are writer-in-residence at Stephen F. Austin University. Does this mean you never have to leave the house, except for MoonPies?

  I do leave the house to teach one long night a week, but I like it. I haven’t taught lately, though. I’ve been traveling a lot, and I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t stand to grade a paper. I may teach some more, but right now I’m investing that time in other projects.

  Martial Arts Hall of Fame? Who do you have to whip to get in?

  You have to have made a significant contribution. There are lower-level awards for Sparring Champion of the Year, Instructor of the Year, and so forth. The ones that count are the Lifetime awards, or System Creation awards. I have a little of all those from the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame, and the United States Hall of Fame. Also had one for using martial arts in my writing from the Texas Martial Arts Hall of Fame, but that hall has closed down. Too many cows in the hallway, I guess.

  I love martial arts. These recognitions are nice, but it’s the art itself I love, and for me, when you get right down to it, there is only one martial art—Martial Arts.

  It says in your bio that you live in Texas with your wife, dog, and two cats. Is that her real name or a nickname? Do the cats get along?

  Ha. I am actually known as Dog to my wife and a few friends, and she is known as Bear. Our kids are of mixed animal genetics, I suppose. Little Dog and Red Panda, and we think the Red Panda, our daughter Kasey, might be some kind of raccoon. We have a fine family and pets. Our dog is a rescued pit bull, and our cat is old.

  Love your Texas Observer essays. How did you, a fiction writer, get involved in writing opinion pieces?

  My first sales were nonfiction, so articles weren’t new to me. I’ve had quite a few published. I started writing for the Texas Observer because the editor called. He asked if I would cover a Poe exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. I started the car, drove to Austin, saw the exhibit, and wrote a piece on Poe. They liked it, and so did I (it’s included in this book), so I began to do articles for them whenever I had the chance. Then they changed editors. I did one for her, then she was gone, and then they changed editors again; I did one for him, and now they’ve changed editors again. So, we’ll see. But so far I’ve written quite a few Observer pieces. I really enjoy doing it, especially the more nostalgic pieces.

  You once said that you admire Hemingway’s style but not his subject matter. What the hell does that mean?

  I love the way he writes, but I could care less about killing animals for trophies. He certainly wrote about more than that, but I didn’t care for that aspect much. I don’t see hunting as a sport. When I was growing up it was part of how we ate. It wasn’t the only thing we had going, but it was a nice supplement.

  Hemingway influenced us all. I liked the fact that he had a kind of simple yet poetic style. I like his short stories the best: “The Killers,” one of the finest stories in the English language; “The Battler,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” I also like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, which is kind of a hardboiled Harlequin romance for men. Islands in the Stream, which many do not like, is my favorite.

  Ever meet Molly Ivins? Or are there more than two liberals in Texas?

  I did meet her. She was drunk at a signing at the Texas Book Festival, if I remember right. Neal Barrett Jr. was with me. I think she was hitting on Neal. She was witty and funny even in that short time.

  You seem to show up on movie sets of your pictures more often than most writers. Is this because you are in disguise, or do they actually want you there?

  I am given a lot of freedom and even say-so on all of the stuff of mine that has actually made it to film. I’m grateful. I think I’m so much a part of my stories that it’s hard to separate me from the secondary creation of film. But I’m sure there may be others in the future who will not want me on the set. I’ve become involved in producing as of late, so I’m getting to spend time on the sets of other films not related to my work.

  What kind of car do you drive? (I ask this of everyone.)

  My wife and I have a Prius apiece.

  Do you have a regular drill for writing? You know what I mean.

  I get up, take the dog out (if my wife doesn’t beat me to it), have coffee, read my e-mail and the New York Times headlines, and start writing. My deal is three to five pages, and then if I want to quit, I can. If I want to continue, I can. I rarely miss that plan. I love to write, and I’m not one of those that loves “having written” (like Dorothy Parker). I love doing it. I write five to seven days a week, about three hours a day most days, though once in a while I’ll come back after lunch and work a little; but mostly it’s just mornings. I show up and write, polish as I go, then give it a once-over when done. Day in, day out. For my birthday I write as a treat to myself, same for Christmas and other holidays. I used to not write when I traveled, but now I do, as I travel more. I wrote mornings before the Hap and Leonard TV show shoots, or in the evenings when it was done. I write. That’s what I do. The short time period gives me workout time, which is getting harder as I age, and time to read and be with family, watch movies, play with the dog, the usual stuff we all do. Or should do.

  Did you like Winter’s Bone? Know how to skin a squirrel?

  Winter’s Bone. Loved book and the film, but they don’t know from squirrels. You don’t clean a goddamn squirrel by hacking it. You peel its suit off, from feet to head, and then you cut the head off, and then the paws, and then you gut from stomach down, not stomach up, so as not to drag squirrel shit back up into the body. That’s how you clean a squirrel.

  When I was young, I ate a lot of squirrels that we hunted. My dad told me once that if I started to enjoy seeing them fall, I needed to sit down and have a serious talk with myself. We ate for food, not sport.

  What do Hap and Leonard never ever talk about?

  They never talk about you. Or me either.

  You weren’t an English major, but you seem well read in the “mainstream” classics. What do you read these days for fun?

  I read what interests me and always did. I love to read history as well as fiction. I tried to read all the classics, American and otherwise, to have some understanding of how literature developed. Some I loved, some I didn’t. I read classics in the genres, science fiction, historical, coming of age, fantasy, mystery, crime, suspense, western, you name it. I read the foundations for movements, like the Beats, and so on.

  So many writers I can read and in five minutes realize they don’t have any history. You have to know what’s gone before, know the rules in order to break them. I am sometimes embarrassed for the people teaching literature. You talk to many of them and realize they have only read the modern stuff, which is fine, but the other is important too. I read modern literature if it’s something that appeals or seems impactful. Same with films, art, comics, etc. One way to stay fresh is to constantly add fresh ingredients, otherwise your soup grows stale.

  If you got tossed out of Texas, where would you live?

  That’s a toughie. I love Italy, but for long term, I’d need the USA. I like trees, but I don’t like cold. Maybe Santa Fe, though I’d get tired of all that open space pretty damn quick. It would have to be someplace in the country. We live on ten acres of woods with a pond now, and we love it.

  I do love Texas, though its warts are many and its sublime moments are few (except for us). We have peace and quiet and good people around, even if some of them love Jesus insanely and vote Republican.

  Shit, you can’t have everything.


  I judge my neighbors on their character, actually, not on who they vote for or what mythology they serve. If they can rise above those things on a daily basis, and if I can rise above my own prejudices, then it’s fine. Of course, they’re wrong and I’m right.

  Okra question: boiled or fried?

  Pickled.

  DARK INSPIRATION

  I CAN’T THINK ABOUT Edgar Allan Poe without thinking about my life, because he was there in dark spirit, in my room and in my head. He was out there in the shadows of the East Texas pines, roaming along the creeks and the Sabine River, a friendly specter with gothic tales to tell. It was a perfect place for him. East Texas. It’s the part of Texas that is behind the pine curtain, down here in the damp dark. It’s Poe country, hands down.

  These thoughts were in my mind as I toured the Harry Ransom Center’s current exhibition, From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe. The Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, is celebrating the bicentennial of Poe’s birth with an exhibition that includes original manuscripts and illustrations. Looking at these artifacts, it occurred to me that Poe reached out from the grave and saved this East Texan from the aluminum chair factory. I know there are those who will say working in an aluminum chair factory is good honest work, and I’m going to agree. But I will say without hesitation and with no concern of insult that it damn sure wasn’t work of my choosing, and that it takes the skill of a trained raccoon and the IQ of a can of green beans, minus the label, to get it done.

  Like Sisyphus forever rolling his rock uphill, I feared I would spend my time on earth matching up aluminum runners, or linking chain to be pinned together by hissing and snapping and cutting and crimping machines, which in turn would be forklifted away in shiny piles of bent rods and flexible seats. Something to be sold and brought out on hot days at barbecues, and on hot nights to give mosquito-attacked, beer-drinking drive-in theater patrons a place for their butts to nestle.

  I did all manner of work after that, some of it even less pleasant, actually, but it was that factory, the trapped tedium and uniformity of it all, that has stayed with me like a scar. Again, it’s good honest work like digging a ditch or filling condom machines in gas stations, but even to this day, I have bad dreams of the aluminum chair factory, like some kind of horrid, slinking, saliva-dripping imp, clanging and cutting and crimping, and tugging at my soul. When it tugs, I can feel my spirit move inside my head. I feel it being slowly drawn away, and I awake thinking my life as a writer has all been a dream. That now it’s time for me to get up and pull on my clothes and go to work and make lawn furniture.

  But it’s only a dream, because Poe, bless his little crazy heart and messed-up mind, like some kind of superhero came to save me. Climbed up out of the grave and swooped out from the darkness and stuck his shadow in my head and gave me something to hide beneath and something to investigate. His shadow had been with me before, when I was kid, but during my time in the factory I had lost it for a while. When it came back, it came back with a dark, wing-flapping vengeance, and brothers and sisters, glory hallelujah, as the church folks say, I was set free.

  Let me explain.

  When I was a boy growing up in East Texas, from first grade to fifth, I lived in a town with about a hundred people. It was a fun thing for a child in many ways. I lived a kind of Huck Finn existence, except I got to go home to a loving family when I tired of the woods and creeks and bicycle rides. But without those things, I found the world where I lived somewhat empty. It was as if everything was painted gray, and there was very little shading; it was flat gray, like the walls of a prison, inside and out.

  But there were little bits of hope. There were comics, bright and shiny and rich in action, all in color for a dime. And there were books, which gave me strange new worlds and all manner of adventure, and then there was Poe.

  My family was a poor one. My father couldn’t read or write and my mother had an eleventh-grade education, but she was a reader. And when I was a very young boy, she handed me a book of horror and detective tales by Poe.

  That book darkened and shaded the gray around me, gave me velvet shadows that quivered at the bottom of my dreams. They thrilled me so deeply I often awoke with such an intense feeling of excitement and fascination that I would walk about my room for hours in an overstimulated stupor, stopping weak-kneed to grab a pen and paper to try to write down my own stories of wicked doings and dark designs. He was the first author to do that for me. There was something so strange about his work, yet so inviting and satisfying. For a long time, Poe owned me.

  At the Ransom Center, I read that he liked the night and dark places. I almost let out a whoop, because I’m much the same way. I live a more balanced life, no drunken forays and drugged nights, and I like the day better than Poe, but when I write during the day, I like it dark. I like the shades drawn. I love sitting in darkness and reading with only one light on. I like rain and grim skies and an atmosphere that creeps with possibilities dark and forlorn.

  Perhaps this is because I read Poe at an early age, or perhaps it was because he was a kindred spirit: someone who felt better clothed in shadows and mystery, someone who liked a world of twisted logic and bizarre puzzles, and found it more interesting than day-to-day dealings, discussions of the weather and the position of the Yankees or the Cowboys in the World Series or Super Bowl.

  I’m not one of those who thinks Poe’s drinking, depression, and drug use contributed to his writing and made it better. I believe he wrote to escape these personal demons. Poverty was another problem he had, another thing from which he wished to escape, and when I was a kid, and in fact until I was in my middle twenties, it was part of my daily existence as well. Sometimes, to escape the thought of pockets full of lint and no change, it was necessary to enter into a world where anything was possible. A world of one’s own creation. But to do so, others had to show you how to open the doors and give you a bit of furniture here and there. They had to tease you into coming over to their side and looking around inside their house.

  Writers as diverse as Kipling, Tennessee Williams, and H.P. Lovecraft, his greatest disciple, have acknowledged their debt to Poe. He moved through their writings like an apparition. His shadow is large, and it’s changeable. He wrote detective stories, invented them for that matter. He wrote horror stories, and stories of the psychologically weird and the grotesque, as well as stories of dark humor. He wrote a little bit of everything, including love poems, provided you like your love dark and dank and dead.

  As a person, Poe was so acidic and unpopular that even his literary executor tried to destroy his reputation. But his talent remains, vibrant and as influential as ever. Not even his literary executor could drown that. Poe may go down deep for a while, pushed there by fashion and critics, but he floats. He bobs up. He’s always there to remind us of his dark genius. He may be the most influential American writer ever, and maybe one of the most influential in the world. He had such impact on the world of literature that awards are named after him, comics are drawn depicting his work, and there is even an action figure of Poe, minus the kung fu grip. Take that, Dostoevsky!

  And this brings me back to the aluminum chair factory and his influence. Yeah, that’s right. I’m never far away from the aluminum chair factory.

  I thought of his stories while I worked, carrying rods, or racking links, or holding my foot on a pedal that made a machine hiss, thump and bind. I thought of his stories until I could hear the beating of Poe’s tell-tale heart beneath my feet. See his black cat out of the corner of my eye. Imagine a wall freshly bricked up with a man scratching at it from the other side. He helped me get through my shifts. He was there, and he’s here now, with me most mornings when I write. He is stronger than the aluminum chair factory. He was a fate-changer for me, and I love him for it.

  Thank you, Edgar Allan Poe, for saving me from a fate that would have been a premature burial the length of my life.

  Thank goodness Poe was correct when he wrote
, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends and where the other begins?”

  Anyone with a creative spark knows what that means. And anyone of a creative spirit is thankful for it. It gives us a place to go that isn’t contained and bound in the plain gray wrapper of our flesh.

  Thank you, Edgar Allan Poe.

  THE DROWNED MAN

  IN OUR EARLY TWENTIES, my wife and I didn’t have any money or real jobs. We were going to college and doing day labor in Nacogdoches. What we didn’t have was a house we owned. The one we were living in rented for very little, but it had some drawbacks. One was an outhouse. The outhouse was a favorite hangout for snakes so big they looked as if they belonged in a Tarzan movie, not to mention spiders large enough to wear multi-legged pants. Every trip to the privy became worthy of an Indiana Jones adventure.

  Another drawback was no inside water. There was a pump to a well outside and a water hose, but stripping off and taking a bath with the hose in freezing weather was, to put it mildly, uncomfortable. Our heat was firewood I chopped to burn in two large fireplaces. There was a small electric heater that whined like a small child and might have blown up had we tried to warm a marshmallow in front of it.

  So we wouldn’t starve, we decided to move to Starrville, where my parents lived, and stay with them while we worked and Karen went to school part-time at Tyler Junior College. So in my oil-guzzling old Ford and Karen’s truck, we headed out, like two leftover Joads from The Grapes of Wrath, and went north to Starrville, which is about the size of a postage stamp. Actually, we ended up on its outskirts, so we can’t claim actual residence there.