Quitman: An Unstarted Story

  “How about Bum,” I asked. “He’s certainly colorful.”

  “Bum is too one-dimensional,” she retorted. “Good comic relief, but I don’t think a one-eyed garden-tractor-rider is the best character to build a novel around. Bum might be good to use to make a point, like the fool in Shakespeare.”

  “I thought that was your job - the wise fool,” I suggested.

  “Honey, I ain’t no fool. Ready for another Hamm’s?”

  Maybe that was it. Maybe the beer could be the protagonist. A 25-cent hero.

  “Besides,” she said, setting the cold Hamm’s before me, “I’m too depressed to play the fool.”

  “Depressed?” I asked in surprise. “Why would you be depressed? You have everything you need right here.”

  She put a hand on her brick hip and stared deeply at me. “This bar is depressing.”

  I shook my head. “No, no… this bar is the only thing that makes sense.”

  I look around and continued, “It has structure. There are clear limits. Four walls. A simple system of exchange… 25¢ gets you one beer. No worries. No bills. No wives. What else does anyone want?”

  “You just described a prison,” said Shelda, wiping the table with her bar rag.

  “But this prison has music and beer,” I protested. “People don’t want to leave!”

  Shelda was walking back to her station behind the black bar. “Oh, they leave,” she said. “And they take their prison with them.”

  No, they don’t, I thought to myself, visualizing the dead-end jobs, the hoary wives, the whining kids, and the meaningless existences waiting at home. Their prisons are out there.

  Chapter 6

  On a cold Saturday night at Frank & Fran’s, some of the best entertainment was when the band took breaks. Then the talents of the bar really came out.

  Olaf Booth would invariably wave me over to his small table. Olaf bore the hotly contested title of town drunk. His eyes were always half closed, with his head rolling back or to the side in a stupor. The only time the eyes opened wide were to punctuate the punchline of a joke, when he looked you straight in the eye, eyebrows arched, and his trademark raspy roar delivering the truly fun climax. Now he was in “eyes half mast” mode.

  “Hey… drummer… c’mere… play shum drums on our table… y’know… tha’ thing you do…,” he trailed off. Then suddenly, “Hey, everybody! Shu’ up! Lishen to thish!”

  I stepped to the table and dramatically produced a pair of drumsticks from the back pocket of my black slacks. If a song was playing on the jukebox, I simply played along. If not, I improvised. My “act” was simply using the utensils on the table, and often the table itself, as my drum kit. Beer glasses, ashtrays, cans, and bottles were put to use as cymbals, snares, and toms. My favorite accent was dragging the stick tip across the railed chair backs, making a washboard-type sound. Later, during my Peru tour, I witnessed a scruffy group of street boys accompany their Christmas carols with an entire orchestra of Fanta bottles, caps, rocks, boxes, and sticks, but in my youth in Quitman I originated the use of the bar as musical instrument.

  The effect on the regulars was predictable yet gratifying. Roars of appreciation went up with every accent. When I performed a dramatic switch from table top to chair back, sometimes to wall to floor, not missing a beat, they shook their heads in disbelief. Who was this prodigy, they thought, who could turn their cans into a tinny symphony?

  At first, I used to think I had to perform intricate rhythms… paradiddles, and flam taps, but I learned that their pleasure came from the fact I was doing it at all. That was where I first realized the importance of showmanship over talent.

  When the song ended, I usually had a lineup of three full Pabst’s from the appreciative customers.

  After those displays, playing drums seemed rather ordinary. So occasionally I played Wipeout on the wall and curtain rod. The effect was most splendid, however, when performed inches from a spectator’s nose.

  Chapter 7

  My earlier observation that Frank & Fran’s was a self-contained universe was not completely true. Immediately next door to Frank’s was another bar. (In Quitman, there were three bars, all on the same side of the one block Main Street). In the spirit of neighborliness, a door was installed in the wall between the two bars, so patrons did not have to actually walk outside to travel the two steps to the other bar. They could commute at their leisure simply by walking through one door. People even carried their drinks back and forth, so there was never any danger of a price war - both bars simply served the same drinks at the same prices.

  People traveled back and forth not in search of bargains, but more in search of the elusive “atmosphere.” On some nights, it was a simple choice. One club had a band, and the other didn’t. Most people congregated by the music, although old-timers and cardplaying regulars of either bar went the opposite direction of the crowds. So both bars benefited when either had music.

  On the rare nights when a band played in each bar, the choice became only slightly more complex. Usually, Frank’s played country western, while Emily’s featured country rock. Kids went to Emily’s, the rest to Frank’s.

  This revolving door was also great for the bands. We tended to coordinate breaks so one band could listen to the other. It was the only way to discover new licks and new songs in Quitman.

  There was a great synergy happening on cold winter Saturday nights in Quitman, Iowa.

  “So how’s the novel coming?” Shelda asked as she wiped the bar and took another seductive drag on her Marlboro.

  I looked up from under befuddled eyebrows and sighed.

  “You know, Shelda, I can’t do it here. This bar may be where I end up, but I’m going to have to leave first.”

  “Oh, the whole ‘no place like home’ theme,” she said. “Of course, there’s the ‘can’t go home’ thing, too.”

  She stopped wiping and looked through my brows and through my eyes.

  “So go, then. We’ll find out how it comes out.”

  I finished my draft Hamm’s and headed for the door. I stopped and turned. She was still staring at me.

  “Don’t worry,” she read from her script. “We’ll all still be here.”

  Chapter 8

  A 1962 two-door pink Rambler Classic was not the vehicle to see the world in.

  I got it from a farmer near Marshalltown, Iowa. A hundred and twenty-five bucks. My dad saw it advertised in the classifieds, and drove me over to the guy’s house. I looked at it, and gave him the money. It would get me to Ames, from the dorm to the girly bars, and home for the weekend. It also would take me on my first adventure.

  It wasn’t called the “Classic” for nothing. It was the first car I’d ever seen that had reclining front seats. Great for the girls, I anticipated. Turned out the only times I used the reclining feature was when I had to sleep in the car at a KOA. Even then the back seat was so full of drums and Coors beer, the seat wouldn’t recline much past vertical.

  My first car wasn’t very secure, either. The trunk lock had been lost. You opened the trunk by pulling on a bent coat hanger that had been threaded through the hole where the lock should have been.

  “Padlocks on the door? Geesh, Henderson.” Even Rusty Patterson thought that was demented.

  For some reason the two door locks didn’t function, either. In a pattern disturbingly prescient to the way I would solve problems throughout my life, I bought two hasp locks at Gambles and screwed them into each door. Two keyed padlocks, and my paltry possessions were safe from really desperate thieves.

  Patterson is the guy I would go to Colorado with. Why Colorado? For Iowa farm boys, it was El Dorado.

  “It has everything Iowa doesn’t have,” said Patterson. “Mountains, lakes, skiing, cool people...”

  “Coors beer,” I added. I was convinced.

  We made plans. Patterson was in Fort Dodge. I’d meet him on Interstate 80, just west of Des Moines. He drove a 1958 Chevy pickup. I would meet him in my
pink Rambler and we’d convoy to Colorado. It was a plan from a cheap movie.

  What would I take on my odyssey? My drums, and my stereo. Let’s go.

  I pulled in to the truck stop at the preordained intersection off Interstate 80. I gassed up, bought some milk and a roll, and waited. So this is what adventure felt like. So far, it was pretty much the same as what I left. Not too many cultural rifts between eastern Iowa and western Iowa. I noticed some of the farmers wore CASE caps instead of John Deere, and inwardly chuckled at their quaint ways. I was beginning to feel the insufferable superiority of the novice traveler.

  The sight of the blue pickup pulling off the ramp didn’t reassure me.

  “Why the hell are you pulling a boat?” I yelled as I ran alongside the slowing truck.

  “A 15-foot sailboat,” he corrected. “It’s Baker’s. His folks asked me to pull it out to Colorado so they can use it when they come visit him at college.”

  Sam Baker, the lawyer’s son. Quitman’s wealthy.

  We made a motley trio, traveling on 80 West to find adventure. Stopped at a small town in Nebraska for a drink. Found old men and young bartenders. Flirted with the girls and answered the drinkers’ questions. Picked up a hitchhiker who smiled all the time and said, “Have a nice day” to everyone. First time I had seen that phrase used in action, and was impressed. Saw the mountains for the first time. Didn’t realize it took another day of driving to actually reach them. Lived stories in Colorado. Getting there. Being there. Leaving there. Ended up being towed home behind my dad’s pickup truck, with broken down Pink Rambler filled with Coors beer and two drum sets. But that’s another tale.

  Chapter 9

  “You know,” he said to himself. “You’re a fraud. You’ve lived your whole life just so people will like you. Take any field. Music: you started out writing songs that meant something, and ended up writing songs that were easy to play and made people laugh. Education: you never took a class that interested you or helped you advance your knowledge; all your studies were designed to keep your grade point high. You even chose teaching as a career because that’s where you had the most credits.”

  I was right. I was a fraud. I was living a lie. No, I was living a life that is the result of shallow, cowardly decisions. I was living a shallow, cowardly life.

  Even worse, I was living life one layer removed. Instead of living, I was playing at living. Writing funny songs was a way to keep people away. Instead of scraping my soul down to the bone, and risking people laughing at what they found, I goofed around on the surface, and when people laughed I was in on the joke.

  “Fred,” said my first supervising teacher, “are you uncomfortable being a teacher?”

  I shrugged.

  “Because you are trying to teach without being a teacher. You act as if you only want the kids to like you. You can’t be a student and a teacher. You have to act like a teacher. You have to BE a teacher.”

  I’m going to try not being nice. I’m going to monitor when my desire to be liked overpowers my making the right decision or making the correct argument.

  I’m going to risk having some people not like me.

  Is that all right with everyone?

  ===

  Fred Henderson wrote:

  Just saw Mom as a child. It just struck me how little removed we are - on both sides - from hillbillies. I guess I should look at my life as a soaring accomplishment considering how one generation back we were poor cow milkers and grocery baggers scrabbling to make a living in Skunk River.

  John Henderson wrote:

  Last week I was wondering about telling you "how little removed we are from hillbillies", but I hesitated because I thought you might take offense, being "how little removed we are from hillbillies".

  Maybe you fit somewhere in that story of Quitman's characters you wrote other than solely narrator.

  I am glad you realized that too. Yes, we are hillbillies, I am still not sure about the degree of separation.

  Reply to John:

  Actually your comment on my story is right on target. My character just hasn't realized it yet. (I continue to add to it... it is becoming “my life story” as fiction.)

  I didn't realize I was part of a culture until I left the country. I remember, after being overseas for a while, watching a movie of a 4th of July parade in the midwest. I was shocked to see all the overweight, pasty, gray-haired, polluting, consuming, farming, self-righteous, uncurious, unaware hillbillies sitting in plastic lawn chairs waving rayon American flags. I was almost nauseated to realize I was one of them. (So I was young - as Twain said, there is no one so obnoxious and self-important that travel won't make him more so.)

  Asimov had a story about beings living in a petri dish. Occasionally one would crawl up the side and realize they WERE living in a petri dish. Those were our geniuses - Einstein, Bohr, Von Braun. The lab researchers would always flick them back into the dish, like nasty boogers.

  So, we're all still living in petri dishes. Some dishes are just slightly larger.

  ===

  I was even scratching surfaces and missing the point in the most hallowed kingdom of youth - the Catholic Church.

  I’m not going down the Catholic path in this story, but there is one incident that interests me.

  As youth preparing for confirmation - where we would become soldiers of God - we were instructed to study the saints and choose one of their names for our confirmation name. There were like 2000 saints.

  My choice was made easier by the fact that I wanted to do something funny. That wiped out a good 90% of the choices. Not much funny about St. Paul or St. John, of which there were many.

  Conveniently, I happened to have acquired a nickname while a student at Robert Johnson Elementary School in Ames, Iowa. My nickname was “Bernardo.” I have no idea why, although the kid who bestowed it tried to tell me I reminded him of a cartoon character with that name.

  So as we kneeled reverently at the altar of St. Mary’s Catholic Church on a Saturday evening in Ames, could barely control our lurching shoulders as were tried to hide our laughter as the Bishop solemnly intoned, “I now christen you ‘St. Bernard.’”

  No wonder I have a screwed up conception of sex. Whenever the S word came up on Johnny Carson (which in those days was the only place on television where it did come up), Mom would palpably tense up, “tsk” under her breath, and busy herself with sewing, reading, or in most cases, by physically getting up and leaving the room. Her behavior, meant to be subtle and incidental, was patently obvious to us pre-adolescent children as extreme discomfort with the notion of sex. Years later I find this ironic, as in order to leave the living room, Mom, had to gingerly step over the 9 children she had conceived. We were physical testimony to her physical enjoyment of the procreative process.

  Today, I find I react much the same way in the midst of my children. Some baggage I can’t put down.

  Except in writing.

  Family names around Quitman were chosen by a demented novelist.

  Stutzworth

  Hole

  Butt

  Plank

  Even our school name was forlorn. When the towns of Hampton, Quitman, and Mallard (interesting names themselves) consolidated, they became “Mid-Plains.” What images of power, grace and solitude that name conjures. I envision hayseeds standing in the middle of an endless prairie, a grassy desert. That’s pretty much what it was, too.

  Chapter What the F?

  Where the hell am I? Have I left Quitman yet? Can you ever leave Quitman?

  It’s getting harder and harder to go back to Quitman, I know that. We were supposed to go back at Christmas. Not to the hazy Quitman of the past. But to the sterile, stagnant Quitman of today that never changed from the past. It kept all the stupid fillips of the past without any of the charm, naivete, or interesting characters. It’s like the movie Groundhog Day, but not in a funny way.

  Anyway, we were supposed to drive back, in the middle of winter. As the departure da
te drew closer, we just decided not to go. No reason. Just didn’t want to. Didn’t want to go back to the same library on the same streets with the same stores with the same people saying the same things in the same ways.

  Heck. We could do that here.

  Chapter 10

  Action vs. Analysis.

  You can’t write a novel without having DONE something to write about. Who can sit in a room and write anything while doing nothing? Someone who doesn’t exist, that’s who.

  Quitman isn’t a town. It’s a novel. A novel where nothing ever happens. If anything happened, Quitman would disappear.

  Quitman is the entire universe. The rest of the world has disappeared. All that’s left is Quitman inside the city limits. Even that is vaporizing, constricting existence down to Main Street. Soon, all that will be left is Frank & Fran’s. Get inside quick. That’s where the world starts and ends. No one even bothers to get up and look out the door to see if anything else is left.

  The End.

  Chapter 11

  Another Ending.

  “Terlingua with air conditioning.”

  “That would make a great bumper sticker,” the bartender said. She had opened a bar in Wellman, Texas, with the idea to capture the ambience of that famous Texas oupost on the Main Street of a real town.

  I had stumbled in on a whim, waiting for my kids to finish their 4-H meeting. Inside the door were Terlingua gew gaws and knick knacks (but all with the “Terlingua” name missing since it was trademarked), $75 straw hats, 4-foot yardsticks, and CD’s by bands famous only in Terlingua. At the back was a bar with a newly carved cedar top, in front of a mirror and hutch salvaged from the old drug store across the street.

  There were also five people, not counting the bartender: two women, a Harley biker, a musician, and a guy from England who lived in Texas. Then me.

  “Why, Fred Henderson,” one woman said, looking up from her cell phone call. “Here is the man who wrote Groundhog Stomping,” she announced to the assembled sparseness.

  “How are you,” asked the gentleman from England.