Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions Read online

  Dispatches from the Working Class

  J. R. HELTON

  a memoir

  Liveright Publishing Corporation

  A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York London

  WITH THANKS TO CRUMB

  Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.

  —Bertrand Russell

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: 1989

  Other People

  Halloween

  Kansas

  Sweetheart of the Rodeo

  Finding the Cure for Cancer

  Epilogue: 1989

  Acknowledgments

  1989

  My Uncle Cotton died out in East Texas, near Huntsville. I found out through Alton that he had left us both his old truck. Alton said he didn’t have time to go get it, wasn’t worth the trip, so I took the bus from Austin to Hunstville and my aunt Dee picked me up and gave me the title and Uncle Cotton’s truck, a blue 1979 F-250 Ford. The tires were worn, it was a little battered, but it had a nice full headache rack over the whole bed that could hold any paint ladders I had, lumber or roller poles, and a lockbox in the bed I could put my brushes and other tools and supplies in. I thanked my dad’s sister profusely, and she gave me a pan of her blackberry cobbler and I split back to Austin. The Ford was ten years old, but it had low miles, didn’t leak oil, and I finally had a halfway decent ride.

  I’d moved out of the rent house Susan and I had in Travis Heights, but she stayed. We were still seeing each other here and there, mainly whenever she felt like it. I moved into a fourplex atop a high hill off Ninth Street in Clarksville. It was a nice, small efficiency on the second floor surrounded by tall, ancient green live oaks. It was like a little tree house with big old double-hung sash windows on three sides, my view 180 degrees over South Lamar and all of downtown Austin to the east. I put my desk, typewriter, and the few books I had taken with me in the corner in front of the windows. I could look out across the green trees and buildings of the city as I wrote, typed, and listened to cassettes on a Sony Walkman I’d bought.

  I didn’t have a couch because Susan was so pissed when I moved out that she kept it. That was okay, but she also kept my entire album collection, and that was bad. I had hundreds of records, from sixties releases like the Doors’ first album, or original, green Apple editions of the White Album, Hey Jude, old, original Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, the Allman Brothers, the Isley Brothers, Marvin Gaye, Neil Young—all the music from the seventies—to Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, punk, new wave, Terry Allen, Doug Sahm, Texas country redneck rock, and many a local Austin band. It was a massive, eclectic mix of records from 1968 to 1989. Some of those albums had belonged to my extended family, but most of them had been my one great indulgence in life when it came to money. They represented so many days and years of good times as I had listened to them to escape from my daily reality as a child, as a teenager, and as a young man, listening to them while either drawing, or writing, or just sitting alone and thinking, watching the records spinning around on my turntable.

  I went over to the house in Travis Heights then one day to load up my couch in the truck and get all my records, my turntable and speakers, but I found that Susan had changed the locks on the front and back doors. I also found out, when I called her that night, pissed off myself, that she had thrown away several stacks of my drawings and paintings, watercolors, pastels, that had been under our large bed. To be fair, she had called me first and asked me if she could get rid of all the drawings, or, really, she had said, “Do you want all this stuff, all these sketches, or what? You wanna just come get them? Because if not . . .”

  I had foolishly said no at the time, I wasn’t coming for them. I was trying to sound tough and casual, as though I didn’t care, possessions didn’t matter to me. Thinking it over later, I realized those charcoal, pen-and-ink, and pencil drawings, my pastels, my stacks of sketchbooks were so completely full of drawings that they represented hours, weeks, and years of my work and life. There were drawings in there I’d done of my mother and father when I was a boy, realistic portraits of my now-dead grandparents, or old girlfriends, landscapes of the Texas hill country and our home, still-life drawings from years of my father’s enforced “drawing time” at my drafting table when I was a teenager, and some of my very best work, when I was finally getting some real instruction and developing skill in the advanced life-drawing classes I’d taken in college before I quit. It wasn’t genius or anything, but it was irreplaceable, and I let her toss it all. I had grabbed only two of my paintings off the wall when I left, a bloody red acrylic portrait of Augusto Pinochet and a black-and-white-wash two-panel canvas painting of Robert Oppenheimer testifying before HUAC in the 1950s. I put them both in the one closet in my new apartment. Susan kept the portrait of Leonid Brezhnev though, or she said she did. I never saw it again.

  My tree house was pretty empty then, but I liked it. I had no pets officially, but there was a stray, a cream-colored cat who started showing up occasionally, meowing outside my door on the balcony railing. This cream-colored cat began to come around a lot, and one day she walked in my open front door, took a look around, and ran back out. I always kept my door and windows open as I sat there in the evenings looking out at the trees and the tops of the buildings of Austin.

  I was comfortable, but I suppose I was a little lonely too, and when the cream-colored cat came back the next time, I jumped up and got her a bowl of milk, and she lapped it all up. Before I knew it I was buying cat food, the cheapest dry stuff I could find, and when she showed up again, I put some out and she ate it and let me pet her. I did this for a few weeks, and we got friendlier and she began to trust me. I named her Sandy, and sometimes I would let her come in my place in the afternoon to sleep on the kitchen floor or clean herself, whatever, but I always kicked her out of the apartment at dark to go live out on the street as I didn’t want her getting too comfortable. I didn’t want a litter box or some cat I had to be responsible for, spraying the walls or sleeping on my bed at night.

  I had to get a job. In 1983 when I was twenty years old and a student at the University of Texas at Austin, I published one of my first short stories in a magazine. That story won a small prize, and I got some money for it. I thought, Man, this is gonna be easy, and I dropped out of college to write full-time. I didn’t know then I wouldn’t publish another word for fifteen years. Either way, I was quickly dead-ass broke.

  Ronald Reagan had just become president. The UT campus was in the middle of Austin, up the hill from the tall, pink granite State Capitol at the top of South Congress. UT was a relaxed, liberal place when I arrived in 1981, where you could throw Frisbees on the long green lawn before the Tower and smoke dope in the afternoon and not get hassled, play with your dog, or just lie there in the grass and stare up at the sky instead of studying, which I did a lot. There was a mock South African shantytown some group had built on the West Mall, where students debated politics, the main two issues at the time, the need to free Nelson Mandela from prison and for Israel to quit killing so many Palestinians.

  I’d come onto campus with the same long-haired, dope-smoking, country-boy Marshall Tucker Band look my friends and I’d had in high school, but I immediately dropped it when I discovered the whole punk rock scene in Austin. There was music everywhere, and my few new college friends and I went to punk clubs like Raul’s on the Drag (Guadalupe Street, across from campus) or down to Liberty Lunch to see bands like Jerry’s Kids, the Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, or Black Flag. We wore ripped jeans and white T-shirts on which we’d scribbled the words “Fuck Off
” with Magic Markers, and considered ourselves hard core. We couldn’t stand the new wave music that was also coming along, to the point that, one night, me and a couple of other punks saw the orange-haired lead singer from the group Flock of Seagulls walking down the Drag and almost beat the shit out of the poor guy. We ate speed, white crosses, and smoked clove cigarettes down at Les Amis, gabbing into the night, and were generally insufferable.

  They closed down Raul’s, and I got tired of the macho-mosh-pit bullshit and succumbed some to new wave anyway, or to more local Austin music and started hanging out at the Soap Creek Saloon to watch the Uranium Savages or bands at the small Continental Club, or Clubfoot downtown off Fourth Street, or we went up to a rectangular firetrap on Guadalupe called Antone’s where you could get your boots shined and hear real, old blues musicians play. You could see the Clash for cheap down at City Coliseum, where we booed Stevie Ray Vaughan off the stage, or Elvis Costello or the Pretenders. Down at Clubfoot, one night you could be watching local acts like Joe King Carrasco, and the next night James Brown would be on stage with his cape, doing his whole deal.

  We used to go down to Town Lake and swim in it. There was no Dell Mansion on Lake Austin. Texas Instruments was some company out in the country way up in North Austin off Highway 183. As far as I knew, they made calculators there. We went to Zilker Park in the summers to jump into Barton Springs, a clear, cold, blue-green, limestone-bed swimming hole as big as a football field, where women sat topless on the opposite bank and no one cared. There were still hippies in town, real ones, a little older now, and South Central Austin along Riverside and Lamar, South Congress, Oltorf Avenue—they were all cheap places to live, with neighborhoods like Travis Heights filled with small old inexpensive houses surrounded by a number of low-rent apartment units.

  * * *

  Almost overnight this weird, white Ronald Reagan wave hit UT. The campus was suddenly overflowing with Young Republicans who dressed and acted like Michael J. Fox in Family Ties, and a whole new set of frat boys and sorority girls were everywhere, too many for my tastes, yet another reason to get out of college. Even though the rest of the state was going into a recession, many people were now moving to Austin. Houston was nothing but a giant mass of people, traffic, concrete, mosquitoes, and flooding brown polluted bayous; Dallas, a nondescript big city sprinkled with rich white pricks, always either too hot or too cold up there. But Austin was still a small place, perched on the edge of the Hill Country, filled with old trees, clear creeks, blue lakes, and limestone hills, with the wide green Colorado River cutting right through the center of town.

  The city was booming then, and the skies were filled with steel cranes, the streets suddenly lined with many more men and women in suits. I enjoyed watching the big-haired young women who seemed free and attractive and windblown downtown, all of them dressed in different colors, walking alone or in pairs. The businessmen seemed to travel only in groups of three or four or six, all white, all loud, all dressed alike in dark-blue suits, white shirts, the only spark of individuality an occasional odd-colored tie. When these men weren’t marching by on the sidewalks they seemed to glide effortlessly past me in gigantic black Suburbans, an arm around the man sitting next to them, laughing and talking within an insulated cocoon.

  * * *

  I had been reading every book I could find and drawing everything I saw since I was a child. I’d always made the highest grades in school, eager to please my teachers, and eventually got myself an academic scholarship to UT Austin based on my transcripts, essays I had written, and my extensive drawing portfolio. My parents firmly expected me to become a successful artist someday, or a rich architect, a rich doctor, whichever came first or paid more. My older brother, Alton, was more of a typical Texas redneck, more so than me, I felt. My mother and father didn’t expect much from him, ever, and they let him know it. I was the one who was supposed to do something with my life.

  My parents had married very young due to my mother being pregnant with Alton when she was only fifteen. I came along just a year later. They had had it rough for a long time and were strict and rigid. My family, all we ever did, was mostly fight out there in our small house in the country. Or we did our chores, constantly, around the house and on the few acres of land my father owned, clearing cedar, cutting firewood, mowing pastures, weeding the gardens, or hauling hay. I always had some ass-busting job to do for as long as I could remember. I hated to work, but I was strong and did what I was told. Since I could also draw, my father turned that into another job, forcing me to start drawing at my desk every night for hours. He called it “drawing time” and said it could help me become a wealthy commercial illustrator or, even better, an architect. I had to do it after school every day, after my job at the grocery store, after my chores, sports practice, and homework, until one night I began to forget why I ever even started drawing in the first place.

  * * *

  I got back with my old girlfriend Susan Hampton in 1983, the year I quit college. We had been dating off and on since we were in high school in Cypress, a small town out in the Hill Country. Her mother, Betty Sue, was an attractive mostly retired actress from Texas. Susan’s father was a former football player for the Los Angeles Rams named Dean Hampton, who had quit the game to become a successful novelist. I’d met Dean in 1978 when I was sixteen and started dating his daughter, at what turned out to be the height of his power, wealth, and fame.

  When I first met Susan, she was unlike any other girl I’d ever known. She read books all the time, just like me. She loved movies as much as I did, but she had seen them from behind the scenes and wanted to be an actress herself one day, like her mother. Susan’s music, her whole look and outlook, were still mostly stuck in the late sixties. Both of us felt we’d been born just a few years too late and had missed all the fun. I thought she was intelligent, more worldly than me, having moved into our small Texas town from Los Angeles. We had an identical, smart-ass take on our school, our town, our state, the country, everything. She and I would talk for hours into the night, sharing every intimate memory and detail about our families and pasts. I did everything a teenager could, every day and night, to try to get away to be with her.

  Susan was tall, with thick, dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, full pink lips—her bottom one slightly larger, pouting above her chin. She had a disarmingly sweet and wholesome smile she could and would turn on to full power. Her parents often left us alone, and we would have sex in her bedroom while listening to albums late into the night, old ones like Let It Bleed or Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which Susan wore out on her turntable. She was somewhat flat chested, which I liked, with a firm small ass, and a light brown bush of pubic hair I would bury my face in when she went down on me and we got into a sixty-nine. She had the same insatiable sex drive as I did. Though I’d had to beg my old girlfriend to just give me a bad hand job, Susan would slowly and deeply suck me off at lunch in my truck in the school parking lot, asking me to come into her mouth, swallowing as though she truly wanted all of it. We had sex anywhere we could for the first year we knew each other.

  It was the first time I had ever experienced romantic love, had ever given myself over so completely to another person. Susan and I were also best friends. We had our little two-person clique and felt we were above most every other country yahoo student in the rest of the high school. One day though, in our junior year, Susan suddenly broke up with me with no warning, no signs at all of anything being wrong. I had always had girlfriends, and plenty of breakups, so it wasn’t that big a deal. What was strange was how utterly cold she suddenly became toward me. She had made me feel so special and smart before, and yet, within a twenty-four-hour period, it was as if I were a complete stranger, a fool, and she completely ignored me. I was naive. I had thought we could at least still know each other, say hello in the halls or something, but no, she had become the Ice Queen and I ceased to exist in her eyes. She didn’t even get another boyfriend.

  I was baffled but also a horny
teenager surrounded by beautiful country girls in our small high school. I figured, Screw this weird chick and started dating a couple of other girls. To my complete surprise, as soon as I went out on two or three dates with other girls, it was as if someone had switched a light back on in Susan’s heart. Not only did she know me again, she threw herself at me so dramatically it was embarrassing. She wrote me dozens of notes and love letters every week, bought me gifts, albums, and for Christmas, a brand-new receiver, expensive turntable, and big Pioneer speakers, a whole stereo system. She called my house constantly, waited for me outside every class, asked me to come to her house again, and at one point she even befriended Alton to reach me somehow.

  Alton had told me he thought Susan was “a snob” when he first met her. The first time she came to see our parents, they didn’t like her either. They felt she was “too independent” and “spoiled.” “It’s like she thinks she’s smarter than me,” my father said. Plus she demanded way too much of my time, which my father felt belonged entirely to him. Alton didn’t like her at all and didn’t know (or maybe he did) how much Susan made fun of him for being ignorant in class, cutting him down to me in private, all of which I went along with, as I felt he was a bit of a dumb-ass too. But he was a sweet guy, more gullible than me, and when she befriended him, crying, asking for me to take her back, even Alton said I should give her another chance.

  When we got back together, it was as if nothing had ever happened. We were having sex again every day. She was being normal and nice. It felt so good to be back in her favor, to have her complete attention, such blatant adoration, to have her listening to my every utterance and word. I fell in love with her even more than I had been before, which didn’t seem possible. And then, three months later, she did it again: She abruptly broke up with me, I went out on a couple of dates with the tall, sexy drill-team leader, Tammy Ortiz, and fucked her in my truck one night, Susan prostrated herself before me, and we started all over. It was a mind game before I even knew what mind games were, but the sex was so good that in the end, I could never resist her. I always went back.