A Deeper Blue (6 page)

an accomplishment about which Harris must have had doubts at some points—but he was still “different”; he had not “hardened.” Hence, to Pecos Townes went. He worked with a crew for a few weeks, then, with two weeks left to work, he lit out for Dallas, unannounced and unbeknownst to his parents. He stayed with a friend from Shattuck there, then with another friend in Fort Worth, then he hitchhiked to Oklahoma, to Luke Sharpe’s farm. He told his parents of his exploits only after he returned home. Harris knew that he had more work to do.23

Some of Townes’ friends and classmates at Shattuck reflect the view that Luke Sharpe summed up years later, that Townes had always been a “creative type,” and that creative types “can be pretty hard bipolar characters; and that was Townes in a nutshell,” says Sharpe. “He was prone to stimulants, prone to bursts of creativity, and then prone to the depths of depression. That’s our boy.…

But I never saw Townes as a weak person, or as controlled by substances. This was always a clear choice by Townes.”

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No Place to Fall

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FTERGRADUATINGFROMSHATTUCKANDsurviving summer in the West Texas oil fields, much to his relief, Townes Van Zandt was accepted at the University of Colorado at Boulder in September 1962, the fall after his sister Donna graduated.

He loved Colorado, loved the Boulder area, and, short of following in his parents’ footsteps to the University of Texas, CU was an obvious choice for Townes. The Van Zandts had just moved back to Texas, to Houston, where Harris had accepted a position as vice president of the Transwestern Pipeline Company—

something less stressful, hopefully, than his work with the giant Pure Oil—and Townes naturally liked the idea of staying far from home. He signed up for a general liberal arts schedule at Colorado. “I hit that place like a saddle bronc hits the arena—coming right out of military school and all,” Townes later said.1

His dramatic description is only partially misleading. Before hitting CU “like a saddle bronc,” Townes had a false start and quietly withdrew from school on October 8, after barely a month of classes. He had first phoned his parents and told them that he was uncomfortable, and that he was sure he just wasn’t ready
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
to get serious about college. They thought they had convinced him to stick out the semester. Instead, Townes dropped out and hitchhiked to Minnesota, where he stayed with an old girlfriend near Shattuck. After a couple of days, Townes wandered onto the Shattuck campus and went to see his old acquaintance, the headmaster, who decided to try to help Townes’ cause.

Townes was confused and discontented, but he trusted the headmaster and claimed he wanted to work. With a combination of understanding and indulgence, the headmaster laid out a list of teaching and coaching duties he thought Townes could perform if he were to accept a position there at Shattuck.

He then promptly phoned the Van Zandts and explained that Townes was there, that he wanted to work, and that he would give Townes a chance.2

Two weeks later, Townes was back at his parents’ house at 6322 Deerwood in Houston. Exactly what Townes told his parents about his reticence to either work or start college is unclear.

He later told a doctor that he started experiencing increased feelings of depression during this period, but it is not clear that he revealed this to his parents at the time. Harris was apparently willing to give Townes time to get his bearings if he needed to, but there’s little doubt that he was somewhat perturbed. It is likely that Harris told his son at this point to make up his mind quickly. Townes spent the holidays in the bosom of his family as he prepared to return to Colorado for a second try at college in the upcoming spring semester.

Now, the saddle bronc hit the arena. Classes almost immediately became secondary to other pursuits. Townes’ drinking and substance abuse, at first sporadic and experimental at Shattuck, soon became methodical and habitual, and the pattern of mood swings he had exhibited in his later teen years became steadily more pronounced. As Van Zandt told the story, during his freshman year he would shut himself up in his apartment for days at a time, staying drunk on cheap wine, listening to records, and playing the guitar. “Then,” Townes later said to a journalist, “I’d come out at the end of a week of this and throw a giant party.”

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This is how Van Zandt told the story of his most infamous youthful stunt to that writer:

I lived on the fourth story of this apartment building, and at one point during one of these parties I went out and sat on the edge of the balcony and started leanin’ backwards. I decided I was gonna lean over and just see what it felt like all the way up to where you lost control and you were falling. I realized that to do it I’d have to fall. But I said, “Hell, I’m gonna do it anyway.” So I started leanin’ back really slow and really payin’ attention, and I fell.

Fell over backwards and landed four stories down.

Flat on my back. I remember the impact and exactly what it felt like and all the people screamin’. I had a bottle of wine and I stood up. Hadn’t spilled any wine. Felt no ill effects whatsoever. Meanwhile, all the people had jammed onto the elevator, an’

when the doors opened I was standin’ there and they knocked me over coming out—an’ it hurt more bein’ knocked over than fallin’ four stories.3

Van Zandt’s roommate in that apartment was Bob Myrick, a Boulder native and fellow freshman. He and Townes had met at Tulagi’s, a popular nightspot on University Hill in Boulder, just off campus, where bands played and students danced and drank 3.2 beer, and where both Van Zandt and Myrick were employed part time, working the door and doing odd jobs. “At that time, Tulagi’s was the third-leading beer seller in the nation. Colorado has always been kind of a party school, because of the skiing,”

Myrick says. “Townes started working at Tulagi’s, … and after a few months we decided to room together, and we moved into this little place called Varsity Manor, a block or so off campus.”

Myrick remembers Van Zandt having what he called “a drinking problem” from the earliest days of that first semester. “Actually, Townes was a rather abusive fellow,” Myrick says. “Back then we all did a lot of partying, a lot of drinking. But Townes drank every day; every day. And it was horrible rotgut that we used to drink. There were two types of wine, one was called Showboat, and the other Bali Hai. It tastes like Robitussin. We
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
had tons and tons of empty bottles of Bali Hai around.” Myrick recalls having a lot of parties at the apartment, most of them less crazed than the one that featured Townes going over the balcony. “He didn’t fall; he jumped,” Myrick says of the notorious occasion, “and it was the third floor. We were all blasted. I think it was just alcohol. And he was standing on the balcony, and he had his cowboy boots on, and he said ‘I wonder if I’d break my leg if I jumped.’ We just looked at him like he was nuts. And he did it. He sprained his ankle but he didn’t break anything. And the landing was not soft.”4 The story almost instantly assumed legendary status on campus.

Harris Van Zandt had bought a 1961 Chevy Impala 409 for Townes to drive at college that spring, but Townes kept it parked at Varsity Manor. Myrick recalls, “He almost never drove it, because a lot of times he was just too drunk to drive. We’d walk up to Tulagi’s, which was only about four blocks.” Another thing Myrick recollects is Townes coming out to play softball. “In the early days,” he says, “when I was pitching for Tulagi’s softball team, he would play on the team occasionally. He was a pretty good hitter, but he played in his cowboy boots, and he always had a bottle of wine with him. Once he hit a home run, but going from third to home he fell down, only about ten feet from home. He was called out, and he had crawled on his hands and knees the last ten feet, and he was just about to put his hand on the plate, and they called him out. We wouldn’t let him play a lot, because he was always drunk.”

Van Zandt made it through his first year of college much as he had made it through high school: with minimal effort. Townes’

report card for his first complete semester (spring 1962–63) shows four C’s and an F. The failing grade was in freshman English, which he retook that summer for a B (along with principles of economics 1 and 2, in which he received a B and a D, respectively).5

Later that summer, Townes visited his old roommate from Shattuck, Luke Sharpe, in Checotah, in eastern Oklahoma. “He just dropped in, kind of an itinerant, which I would expect from Townes, drifting from here to there,” Sharpe says. Sharpe was No Place to Fall

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working on a hay crew, and as Sharpe recalls, “When they put up hay, they would put it up in a square bale, which weighs about sixty-six and two-thirds pounds, and they stack this stuff in a barn. So you have hay crews, and it was the standard practice for young kids who want to make a little money, or want to get in shape—which was my particular project, having gotten interested in athletics—to work on a crew. And Townes came down and said, ‘yeah, I’ll work on the hay crew with you.’ So for three weeks or so we worked on the hay crews in Oklahoma.”6

Van Zandt proved to be a good worker, but, according to Sharpe, “always a smart aleck and always a needle artist. I thought he was gonna get killed by a couple of black guys on the crew, but hey, that’s just Townes.… Townes on his best days was certainly loosely wired.”

That same summer, Van Zandt and Sharpe went to a dance at the Muskogee Country Club. As Sharpe recalls, “Through his ill-chosen words—although I think he chose them on purpose, actually—we ended up in a fight in the parking lot. But that was just life with Townes. Townes loved to play the edge—first, last, and always.” Sharpe also recalls distinctly that Townes was drinking heavily that summer, and that he had a new favorite drink: “cherry vodka; as much as he could handle.”

After returning to Boulder in September 1963 for his sophomore year, Townes met Fran Petters, a bright, pretty, seventeen-year-old blonde Southern Baptist girl from Houston. As Fran recalls their first meeting, Townes was working the door at Tulagi’s, and as she tried to walk in the front door, Townes stopped her and told her she’d have to give him a kiss to get in. “Then he got embarrassed,” Fran says, and shortly afterward, “he sent me flowers to apologize for being fresh. Then he said that if I was from Houston he would marry me. It was kind of instant love.”7

Fran was working for the president of the university and lived in a garage apartment behind the president’s house. “Townes and I were both in the arts and sciences school,” she says. “I was studying math and science, and he was just taking the basic curriculum.

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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
Most of the time he was figuring he was going to be in pre-law.…

He was always being pointed in that direction, toward a professional career of some kind.” That he would follow a professional path was indeed what Townes continued to tell his family, and what he now told Fran. How much he believed it at this point is another question. Townes’ classes that semester comprised American government, his second semester of freshman English, general psychology, philosophy, and physical education. He ultimately received a B in government and C’s in the other classes.

“Townes was brilliant,” Fran says. “He had a genius I.Q. Everything came very easy in studying. He never went to class, but still he’d make whatever grades he decided he wanted to make.

But he was always trying to lead his friends astray, to talk them into skipping class. One of the things we would always do,” Fran recalls, “all of us would meet at some place on the Hill for lunch.

And Townes would always say to one of his friends, ‘So, do you want to go to class or do you want a beer sandwich?’ And they chose the beer sandwich every time.”

Despite her boyfriend’s erratic behavior, Fran remembers that semester at Boulder as a period of very good times with Townes.

They socialized with other student couples and often engaged in some outdoor activity or other, including numerous climbs up Boulder Canyon. “There was one great picnic we had with this other couple,” she recalls. “This guy, when he married this girl in college, his dad disowned him, made him go on his own for awhile. So we always did things that didn’t cost any money.…

This guy would hunt; that’s how he filled his freezer.… So he provided the meat and we brought baked potatoes or whatever it was, and we went up [the canyon]. There was an old abandoned train station up there, and we had a picnic, a cookout.”

Another picnic sticks fondly in Fran’s memory. “One time Townes asked me to go on a picnic and the weather turned really bad. He said, ‘Well, I really want to go on a picnic; come over to the apartment at such and such a time.’ So I came over and he had the living room all set up with a stream and a little No Place to Fall

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tree, and the picnic on the floor with wine and cheese and everything. It was really funny.”

Fran was not much of a drinker—“I’d barely had a glass of wine before I got to college,” she says—but for the most part she tolerated Townes’ drinking, figuring that it didn’t seem that much more excessive than that of other students they knew. She also knew well the story of Townes’ fall from the balcony the previous year—knew a variety of versions of the story, in fact, as it varied depending on who was telling it—and also remembers other instances of Townes’ risk-taking. “Townes and his good friend, Tom Barrow, thought of themselves as mountain climb-ers,” says Fran. “But they would only do it after having a few beers. We would all be sitting around after dinner, listening to music, just kind of a typical evening, and somewhere around eleven o’clock all of a sudden one of them would say, ‘Let’s go climb the Flatiron!’”

“One night I said, ‘You all can’t go unless I go.’ So we wound up climbing the Flatiron. When they put a rope around me, it was probably the safest they ever were, because they were afraid that I was going to get hurt. So they wound up hauling me up with this rope around my waist, then hauling me down. I was scared to death. This was in the middle of the night. It was for the adrenaline rushes that they would get.” Townes finally quit, she says, after a nasty fall during a tough climb in Boulder Canyon. “It scared him,” she says. “He was taken to the hospital …