We Are Still Married (4 page)

“No, it had someone's name in the title.”

“Well, I wrote a book entitled
Pa! Look Out! It's
—
Aiiiiieee!”

“No, I think it had the name of a horse.”

“Could it have been
Ck-ck Giddup Beauty! C'mon Big Girl, Awaaaaayy!”

“That's the one. Did you write that?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“Huh. I thought so.”

And right there you brace yourself for him to say, “Y'know, I never was one for books and then my brother gave me yours for Christmas and I said, ‘Naw, I don't read books, Craig, you know that,' and he said, ‘But this is different, Jim Earl, read this, this isn't the girls' literature they stuffed down our throats in high school, this is the real potatoes,' so I read it and by George I couldn't put the sucker down, I ran out and did the chores and tore out and back in the pickup to check on those dogies and I read for two days and two nights without a minute of shuteye. Your book changed my life, mister. I'm glad I got a chance to tell you that. You cleared up a bunch of stuff that has bothered me for years—you took something that had been inside me and you put it into words so I could feel, I donno, not so weird, feel sorta like
understood,
y'might say. That was me you put in that book of yours, mister. That was my life you wrote about there, and I want to say thanks. Just remember, anytime you're ever in Big Junction, Wyoming, you got a friend there name o' Jim Earl Wilcox”—but instead he says, “You wouldn't know where the little boys' room is, wouldja?,” as if I were a library employee and not a book author. So it's clear to me that when people read my books they like me a little less at the end than at the beginning. My fourth book,
Company A, Chaaaaaaarge!,
is evidently the worst. Nobody bought it at all.

I know what it's like to be disappointed by a hero. You think I don't know? Believe me, I know. I met my idol, Smokey W. Kaiser, when I was twelve. I'd read every one of his books twice—the Curly Bob and Lefty Slim series, the Lazy A Gang series, the Powder River Hank series—and I had waited outside the YMCA in Des Moines for three hours while he regaled the Rotary with humorous anecdotes, and when he emerged at the side door, a fat man in tight green pants tucked into silver-studded boots, he looked down and growled, “I don't sign pieces of paper, kid. I sign books. No paper. You want my autograph, you can buy a book. That's a rule of mine. Don't waste my time and I won't waste yours.”

Smokey's problem was that he was a jerk, but mine is that I get halfway through a story and everything goes to pieces. In
Wagons Westward!!! Hiiiii-YAW!
the pioneers reach Council Bluffs, having endured two hundred solid pages of Indian attacks, smallpox, cattle stampedes, thirst, terror, bitter backbiting, scattered atheism, and adulterous inclinations, and then they sit on the bluffs and have a meeting to decide whether they really want to forge onward to Oregon or whether maybe they should head east toward Oak Park or Evanston instead. Buck Bradley, the tall, taciturn, sandy-haired, God-fearing man who led them through the rough stuff, stands up and says, “Well, it's up to the rest of you. Makes no nevermind to yours truly, I could go either way and be happy—west, south, you name it. I don't need to go west or anything. You choose. I'll go along with whatever.”

I don't know. I wrote that scene the way I heard it in my head but now I see it in print, it looks dumb. I can certainly see why it would throw a reader, same as in
Giddup Beauty! C'mon Big Girl, Awaaaaayy!,
when Buck rides two thousand miles across blazing deserts searching for Julie Ann and finally, after killing twenty men and wearing out three mounts and surviving two avalanches, a prairie fire, a blizzard, and a passel of varmints, he finds her held captive by the bloodthirsty Arapaho. “So, how are you doing?” he asks her. “Oh, all right, I guess,” she says, gazing up at him, wiping the sweat from her brow. “You want to come in for a cup of coffee?” “Naw, I just wanted to make sure you were okay. You
look
okay.” “Yeah, I lost some weight, about twenty pounds.” “Oh, really. How?” “Eating toads and grasshoppers.” “Uh-huh. Well, now that I look at you, you do look lighter.” “Sure you won't have coffee?” “Naw, I gotta ride. Be seein' ya, now.” “Okay, bye!” To me it seemed more realistic that way, but maybe to the guy reader it sounded sort of unfocused or something. I don't know. Guys have always been a tough audience for me. The other day a guy grabbed my arm in the Quad County and said, “Hey, Dusty! Dusty Pages! That right? Am I right or am I right?”

“Both,” I said.

“Mister,” he said, “your book saved my life. My brother gave it to me and said, ‘Buck, read this sometime when you're sober,' and I put it in my pocket and didn't think about it until, October, I was elk hunting up in the Big Coulee country, other side of the Little Crazy River, and suddenly
wham
it felt like somebody swung a bat and hit me in the left nipple. I fell over and lay there and, doggone it, I felt around and didn't find blood—I go ‘Huh???????' Well, it was your book in my jacket pocket saved my life—bullet tore through the first half of it, stopping at page 143. So, by Jim, I thought, ‘This is too crazy, I got to read this,' and I started to read and I couldn't believe it. That was me in the book—my life, my thoughts, it was weird. Names, dates, places—it was my life down to the last detail, except for the beer. I don't drink Coors. The rest you got right. Here.” And he slipped an envelope into my hand. “This is for you,” he said.

It was a subpoena to appear in U.S. District Court the 27th of November to defend myself in a civil suit for wrongful misuse of the life of another for literary gain. I appeared and I tried to defend, but I lost. My attorney, a very, very nice man named Howard Furst, was simply outgunned by three tall ferret-faced bushwhackers in black pinstripes who flew in from Houston and tore him limb from limb in two and a half hours in that cold windy courtroom. They and their client, Buck Bradley, toted away three saddlebags full of my bank account, leaving me with nothing except this latest book. It's the first in a new series, the Lonesome Bud series, called
The Case of the Black Mesa,
and it begins with a snake biting Bud in the wrist as he hangs from a cliff while Navajo shoot flaming arrows at him from below and a torrent of sharp gravel showers down on his old bald head. From there to the end, it never lets up, except maybe in Chapter 4, where he and the boys shop for bunk beds. I don't know what I had in mind there at all.

T
HE BREAKUP OF THE MOMENTIST MOVEMENT in 1962 in St. Paul was a deliberate decision on the part of all four of us. We were sitting in Swedlund's Drugstore one afternoon when Patty said, “It's great being together and all but—you know, it's never going to be this good again, so I think it's time we said goodbye.”

So we left town, or so I thought until last Christmas, when I saw Ed's book,
Once There Was a Time,
a “memoir” of that St. Paul scene—a book riddled with factual errors, a betrayal of all that we stood for—and I read on the jacket that he now owns Swedlund's (renamed the Scene Shop), where he has “preserved the atmosphere of Momentism in all its raw brilliance and vitality.” So a few weeks ago, on my way out to the Coast, I stopped off in St. Paul to see for myself.

I'm not naive. I realize that the St. Paul scene became legendary after we left, that any number of artists have claimed the Momentist mantle, and that popular mythology links our movement to everything from rebirthing to “self-denial,” to the work of such Inciden-talists as Karen Johnson and Charles Shur, to the grab bag of the New Wave, No Wave, Now Wave, and Bye-Bye movements of the early eighties. I'm well aware that every year, on May 14, thousands assemble in Rice Park and jump into the fountain, to commemorate an evening of ours in 1962. And I'm not surprised. We Momentists fully expected to be misunderstood and exploited. I just never thought it would be done by one of us.

From the airport, I took a cab to our old block on Maple between Hyacinth and Sycamore, and I couldn't believe my own eyes. Three restaurants claim that we met there.
Two of them weren't even in business in 1962!
The Scene Shop is the third. As Swedlund's, it was a place where we met
occasionally
—
but not where they say we did!
They have a booth roped off that they say was
the
booth, but it wasn't.
The
booth was in the front by the window, and the table was linoleum-covered. This one is butcher block and they've set four places on it. (1) We never
ate
at Swedlund's, only drank coffee, and (2) there were always more than four of us—I mean, there were four of
us,
but some of us usually brought a friend.

Anyone who knows squat about Momentism can see this joint for the fake that it is. The same goes for the Four Friends, the Loft Bar, the Momentary Playhouse, Les Amis Gallery, and all the other tourist traps. None of us were playwrights or painters; we were Momentary artists. Permanence repelled us. Les Amis was a guy we
never
invited to our group. And yet there's Les, cranking out the same old trashy collages and claiming to be our heir! We have no heirs. We left nothing behind to inherit. That was the point of it.

What a dismal sight it is! The tony restaurants, the antique streetlights and paving blocks (all new since '62), the same dreary street-singers and sidewalk painters you'll find in the Village or at North Beach or the French Quarter—a scene of weary decadence where once we four were briefly young and hopeful, all artists together making something fresh and new and
momentary.
Now tourists wander in a carnival that claims us as inspiration for the cheap goods it sells.

In
Once There Was a Time,
Ed says he met Patty at the Four Friends, on the northeast corner of Maple and Sycamore. He offered her a Camel. She had never smoked, but she accepted it and said, “I am going to smoke one cigarette in my life. Only one. That way I will always remember it.” That led to Momentism. Later Patty brought in Cheryl and Cheryl brought in me.

Untrue.

We four met on April 21, 1962. Patty and Cheryl got off work at the Flameburger at 8:00 P.M. and went to Maple and Sycamore to catch a bus downtown and go roller-skating. I was at the bus stop, blowing my nose, a little upset, having just broken up with my girlfriend Donna, who lived at 1987 Hyacinth and whose parents forced us apart because we were getting “too serious” and they couldn't stand the sight of me. I had gone to her house to return a couple of photographs of her, including one of us standing beside her dog, which she tore down the middle and gave me the half with her in it and I promised to keep it forever, and we said goodbye and cried, and I walked to the corner for the bus. Actually, the bus I wanted was the westbound Maple bus, but, distracted by grief, I went and stood with the two girls on the
southwest
corner of Maple and Sycamore, and caught the eastbound. One of them asked if I was all right. We talked. We sat in back, on facing seats. Ed was there. He sort of attached himself to us. I thought at the time he was a pushy guy.

In
Once There Was a Time,
Ed claims that the trip downtown occurred much later, after he and Patty had laid the groundwork of Momentism, but in fact it was something that just happened among us three even before the bus came. We started fooling around, just kidding,
improvising
things, and suddenly it clicked. We all knew it. It was not any one thing that we said, and it wasn't like we were thinking, “Hey, this is a movement!”—it
happened.
We got on the bus together, we got off downtown at Fifth and St. Peter (with Ed in tow), we walked around for several hours and talked a lot and did things, and then we said, “Let's get together tomorrow.”

I wish we hadn't. Looking back on it, I can see that that evening was the high point, the apotheosis of what Momentism was all about. If we had let it go at that and not made a movement out of it, Momentism would have been
purely
momentary, but as it is Momentism became a self-contradiction—the Moment extended, recalled, amplified, and now commemorated. It's a shame.

People ask me, “But what exactly was
said
that night? What did you four
do?”
That's not the point. It was a feeling, more than anything specific. We were young and had fallen together accidentally and we shared a feeling that this was a brief moment in our youth when everything was iridescent and meaningful and charged with importance in a way it would never be again.

To write about it, however, the way Ed has (“The streetlights cast great cones of light into which we walked, the soles of our shoes clicking certain rhythmic changes that excited us, and we saw our own mystery in the great blank darkened windows, a mystery of unutterable poignance as cars swished by filled with persons whom we would never see again, and all of this happening on a night that we would never know again; no matter how much we might wish to recapture it, its essence was fleeting and would never be described, not even in this sentence”), is to make it trivial, a moment similar to moments in other people's lives. It wasn't similar at all! It was unique to us, and we knew it. A moment of art, perfect and complete, so why try to translate it into a work of art so that a lot of jerks could look at that and say, “Oh, yeah! I understand what you felt there! It's a lot like my own life in a way!”
No, it wasn't. They don't understand at all. How could they?