#5
Crazy Horse
When I was a kid
any time I heard a story
about Geronimo
or Crazy Horse
it made me feel like
there were lightning bolts
inside my body
trying to get out
Whenever a band plays Powderfinger
for their encore
I scream out at the top of my lungs
and pump my fist in the air
Look out Mama
There’s a white boat
comin up the river
Franklin
A blind one year old pug chihuahua mix
is playing outside in the yard next door.
He is racing around with reckless abandon,
pausing occasionally to bark at nothing.
8 out of 10 times that I’m in a store
and see a super soft dog bed
or some Pup-Peroni treats on sale
I instinctively reach out to add them to my cart.
I haven’t had a dog in 9 years.
Augustus Blues was his name.
Augustus for Augustus Mcrae.
Blues for the Blues Brothers.
“The bigger one or the taller skinnier one?”
the nephew asks.
”Neither really,” I say, “He’s like another brother
that just didn’t show up on screen.”
The nephews have a cat named Aretha.
Whenever they refer to her by her full name
I’m momentarily confused
that her middle name is a boy’s name.
Like when you’re in trouble
and your mom uses your first name and middle name.
”Aretha Franklin! What have you done!?”
It’s not a boy’s name at all though.
It’s the Queen of Soul.
Aretha Franklin is a gray striped cat.
Augustus Blues was a fawn colored pug.
I called him Gus for short,
and Augustus Blues when he got in trouble.
Standing in my yellow kitchen upon the news of his passing
I’m reading my favorite parts of Lonesome Dove
and standing in my kitchen crying like a baby.
I think of my friend Jack and it makes me smile and laugh.
He would be crying hard today too.
My friend Jack always said everything you needed to know in life
you could probably learn from Augustus Mcrae.
I know who I am now.
Who would I have aspired to be for all those years that I didn’t if Mcmurty hadn’t written it?
Jack and I used to sit on his porch for hours,
fancying ourselves to be Augustus.
At our best, I like to think we came close some days.
Larry McMurtry died today.
I stood in my yellow kitchen and cried,
and smiled thinking about my good friend Jack.
He loved Lonesome Dove more than anyone I’ve ever met.
We would have sat up all night crying and laughing,
and reciting our favorite Augustus Mcrae quotes.
We would’ve been drunker than hell.
Words from Someone else
Lonesome Dove (pages 838-840)
Larry McMurtry
They loped off, watched by the whole camp. The crew had been made melancholy by the approaching clouds. Po Campo had wandered off looking for roots.
Augustus and Pea Eye passed him nearly a mile from camp.
”Po, you’re a rambler,” Augustus said. “What do you expect to find on this old plain?”
“Wild onions, “ Po Campo said. “I’d like an onion.“
“I’d like a jug of bourbon whiskey, myself,” Augustus said.
”I wonder which one of us will get his wish.”
“Adios,” Po Campo said.
A day and a half later the two scouts rode over a grassy bluff and saw the Yellowstone River, a few miles away. Fifty or sixty buffalo were watering when they rode up. At the sight of the horsemen the buffalo scattered. The cloud bank had blown away and the blue sky was clear for as far as one could see. The river was swift but not deep - Augustus paused in his crossing and leaned down, drinking from his cupped hands.
The water was cold.
“Sweet water, but it doesn’t compare with bourbon whiskey,” he said.
“Jasper won’t need them floats,” Pea Eye remarked.
“He might,” Augustus said. “He might fall off his horse if he gets real nervous. Let’s chase the buffalo for a while.”
“Why?” Pea asked. Po Campo had packed them plenty of meat. He couldn’t imagine why Gus would bother with buffalo. They were cumbersome to skin, and he and Gus had
no need for so much meat.
Nonetheless, it was follow or be left, for Augustus had loped off after the buffalo, who had only run about a mile. He soon put them to flight again and raced along beside them, riding close to the herd. Pea Eye, caught by surprise, was left
far behind in the race. He kept expecting to hear Gus’s big rifle, but he didn’t, and after a run of about two mile came upon Gus sitting peacefully on a little rise. The buffalo were still running, two or three miles ahead.
“Kill any?” Pea asked.
“No, I wasn’t hunting,” Augustus said.
“Did you just want to run ‘em off, or what?” Pea asked. As usual, Gus’s behavior was a complete puzzle.
“Pea, you ain’t got your grip on the point,” Augustus said.
”I just wanted to chase a buffalo once more. I won’t have the chance much longer, and nobody else will either, because there won’t be no buffalo to chase. It’s a grand sport too.”
“Them bulls can hook you,” Pea Eye reminded him.
”Remember old Barlow? A buffalo bull hooked his horse and the horse fell on Barlow and broke his hip.”
“Barlow was a slow thinker,” Augustus observed. “He just loped along and got hooked.”
“A slow walker, too, once his hip got broke,” Pea Eye said.
”I wonder what happened to Barlow.”
“I think he migrated to Seguin, or somewhere over in there,” Augustus said. “Married a fat widow and had a passel of offspring. You ought to have done the same, but here you are in Montana.”
“Well, I’d hate not to be a bachelor,” Pea Eye said.
“Just because it’s all you know don’t mean it’s all you’d enjoy,” Augustus said. “You had a chance at a fine widow right there in Lonesome Dove, as I recall.”
Pea Eye was sorry the subject of widows had come up. He had nearly forgotten the Widow Cole and the day he had helped her take the washing off the line. He didn’t know why he hadn’t forgotten it completely - he surely had forgotten
more important things. Yet there it was, and from time to time it shoved into his brain. If he had married some widow his brain would probably have been so full of such things that he would have no time to think, or even to keep his knife sharp.
“Ever meet any of the mountain men?” Augustus asked.
”They got up in here and took the beavers.”
“Well, I met old Kit,” Pea Eye said. “You ought to remember. You was there.”
“Yes, I remember,” Augustus said. “I never thought much of Kit Carson.”
“Why, what was wrong with Kit Carson?” Pea Eye asked.
”They say he could track anything.”
“Kit was vain,” Augustus said. “I won’t tolerate vanity in a man, though I will in a woman. If I had gone north in my youth I might have got to be a mountain man, but I took to riverboating instead. The whores on them riverboats in my day barely wore enough clothes to pad a crutch.”
As they rode north they saw more buffalo, mostly small bunches of twenty or thirty. The third day north of the Yellowstone they killed a crippled buffalo calf and dined on its liver. In the morning, when they left, there were a number of buzzards and two or three prairie wolves hanging around waiting for them to leave the carcass.
It was a beautiful morning, crisp for an hour or two and then sunny and warm. The country rolled on to the north, as it had for thousands of miles, brown in the distance, the prairie grass waving in the breeze.
Larry McMurtry 1936 - 2021
Watch the whole show, with tribute to his Dad here
A Good Life (for Jack)
He used to cry all the time.
He'd cry about lost loves,
and about friends and animals that had passed on.
He'd cry about his Mama, and how the Mennonites
took such good care of her at the end of her life.
He got the biggest kick out of the fact that I'd been raised Mennonite,
and had identified as one into my early 20s.
"A jack mennonite," he'd laugh, "like a jack mormon".
A wayward Mennonite.
He was the guy you'd call if you needed to borrow money,
or needed a ride, or needed to borrow a tool,
or if you needed advice on how to fix something.
He peed in cups for his friends on probation,
and housed countless "n'er do well shed dwellers"
in his workshop/shed if they needed a place to stay
for a night or a week or longer.
I was even a "n'er do well shed dweller" one night after I'd moved away
and was back in town visiting, and had too many drinks to get home.
He wore jeans and cowboy boots.
He had good hair, and a perfect 70s/80s mustache.
He was a true Texan.
He always wore his shirt unbuttoned a button or two too low.
He was a true Texas ladies man.
He'd been married 5 times.
He married two women twice.
The third one was a "wild card."
He was a self described devout atheist.
He'd tell the story of how when he was 15,
and living on the border in Harlingen Texas,
how one night he brought an older Mexican girl home for supper,
and how his Daddy Bob pulled him aside and said "Jackie, your mama don't know it, but that girl's a whore. And you shouldn't bring her into this house."
"And she was a whore," Jack would say through tears.
"She was a Mexican whore and I loved her."
And then he'd pause, and sobbing hard he'd say "shit, she's probably dead now".
He'd been to 48 of the 50 states.
He worked for the circus for many years, advancing shows.
He'd travel on ahead of the circus and make sure everything was set up in town for when the show arrived.
He worked for an oil company for years as well, driving back and forth all across the country.
When I moved into the RV park he'd just retired from his final job - a master plumber.
He was proud of that.
I had the biggest yard in the RV park,
but he had the nicest setup.
We'd sit on his porch for hours,
drinking and listening to music and telling stories.
Merle haggard and the Stones and John Prine
and that Emmylou Harris Mark Knopfler record were his favorites.
He smoked American Spirits and drank box red wine.
He loved ice cold Shiner Bock and Lone Star beer (bottles only please)
and occasionally Spaten Optimator if he was really celebrating.
He'd had to give up liquor,
but he always kept a bottle of bourbon in the freezer for Gailon and I.
The 3 of us and Gus the pug would sit on his porch every day.
He loved that Gus the pug was named after Augustus Mcrae.
Lonesome Dove was his favorite book and his favorite movie.
He said everything you needed to know in life
you could probably learn from Augustus Mcrae.
He'd been a hippie in the Haight in the 60s.
Arrested for having a "peench" of weed,
he was facing 10 years in prison,
and he had to become a drug smuggler to afford his lawyer costs.
He'd fly bricks of weed in his army bag from CA to New Mexico,
with dryer sheets on top.
The scene in NM would always be a buzz when The Grasshopper's shipment showed up.
No one ever knew The Grasshopper's identity, but they always celebrated his arrival.
One time when he got off the plane
and went to pick up his army bags
he noticed a bunch of guys standing around in dark suits.
He thought he was busted,
that his time was finally up.
He lowered his head, and scooped his bags off the carousel,
and quickly spun around and knocked right into one of the guys in the suits.
Before he could even apologize the guy held out his hand and said "My name's Bobby Kennedy, and I’m running for president.”
He hated Rick Perry with a passion.
When the Texas governor's mansion burned down in 2008 he was briefly a suspect. Two DPS agents showed up in the RV park one day, saying that they had some questions for him.
"Shit, I knew Rick Perry was in Europe," he said, "if I'd burned it down I'd have done it when Rick Perry was inside."
When a thief smashed out a window and broke into my girlfriend's home he was the first person we called after the police left.
"Hold tight," he said, "Ill be right there."
He showed up 20 minutes later with 4 Lone Star tall boys.
"I thought you might need these," he said.
"There were 6 of em, but I drank one on the way, and I'm taking one with me for later.”
He nailed a piece of wood over the window and the next day, first thing in the morning, he and I went to the glass store and replaced the window.
Freddies place was his favorite bar.
They had great happy hour deals every week day 4-7.
At 3.59 each week day he was parked in the parking spot closest to the front door.
On the rare occasion that someone would already be parked in his spot,
he'd sulk and be sullen the whole night,
or until Casey showed up and gave him a kiss on the cheek
or Clare made him laugh.
He almost always bought every round for Gailon and I.
We'd sit on his porch listening to music on his Bose indoor/outdoor sound system.
Bose was expensive but worth it he'd say.
If it ever breaks you can mail it to them and they’d fix it at cost.
He'd mailed it in 3 times in 20 years.
The final time he mailed it in they said they didn’t even make the parts for it anymore. They said they couldn't repair it.
He cursed them, and said old man Bose would be ashamed, and would have never allowed it - He'd been to old man Bose's house in Framingham Massachusetts.
Old man Bose was a good man, but he'd never buy another Bose product again.
There was a long list of places in Austin that he'd never visit if he thought they'd wronged him at some point.
For his 70th birthday my girlfriend and I took him to see John Prine.
I told him he needed to be on his best behavior though,
because my girlfriend's mom was coming with us,
and she was a nice Catholic woman.
He was drunk when we picked him up,
but not as drunk as he could have been.
We all had the best time at the show.
We laughed lots.
He'd totaled 5 cars.
He'd been shot at twice, hit once.
"In the war?" I asked him.
"Jealous husband," he said.
"He walked in and she was on top of me. First shot hit the mattress. The second one hit me in my ass as I took off running naked down the street."
His favorite scene in Lonesome Dove,
the one he liked to quote most often,
was the scene when Call comes to visit Gus,
and Gus is lying in bed and says:
"It ain't dyin' I'm talkin about Woodrow - It’s livin!"
He'd get choked up every time he said it,
and yell out that last part about livin.
"It's a good life if you don't weaken,” he used to tell me all the time.
That's what he always said the most.
There’s a small piece of paper that I’ve carried around for years.
When I first got it I had to put it somewhere safe,
where it wouldn’t get destroyed or lost.
Somewhere where I knew I’d be able to find it when I needed it.
I finally went looking for it today.
It was in the second place I looked -
in the middle of “Where the Sidewalk Ends,”
in between the pages of the Love poem, about the missing V.
It’s about the size of a photograph, slightly bigger than a note card.
It’s yellowed from cigarette smoke, and has tack holes at the top -
a handwritten sign that says "It’s a good life it you don’t weaken.”
It hung above Jack’s front door in his living room all the years I knew him.
It hangs on my fridge now,
above a picture of the Debbies,
next to a picture of the nephews.
He used to cry all the time,
but only for a minute or two.
He'd cry about his Mama,
and about friends and animals that had passed on.
He cried when Gus the pug died.
He used to cry about how hard it was to love two women at the same time.
I always thought that one was a little ridiculous.
I was a lot younger then though.
I don’t think it's so ridiculous now.
"You're a good man Chad," he used to say to me,
usually after I brought him more wine from the kitchen,
"I don't care what they say about you,"
and we'd laugh and have another drink.
We’d sit for hours on his porch,
sometimes til we ran out of beer,
and I'd help him up out of his chair,
and get him up the 2 steps into his RV.
"I appreciate you Chad," he'd always say.
Sometimes "I appreciate you" means infinity more than just "thank you.”
He used to call every holiday,
and he'd ask about my family,
and how Gus was doing.
He'd always ask when we'd be coming back.
He always said he looked forward to it.
We used to laugh all the time.
Lots of people called him Jackie Joe.
I always just called him Jack.
”It’s a good life if you don't weaken,” he always used to say.
It's a good life if you don’t weaken.
Stay strong ⚡🚀💥
Love ya. Enjoying what you are doing with this.