The Hollow Men - Episode 39
Drew completes his Master’s degree, receives a gift from his Mom, reconnects with Mark, Kate and Jack, and returns to Odessa for the ten year reunion of the Odessa Permian High School class of 1976.
Last week in Episode 38 of The Hollow Men Drew isolates himself, experiences a breaking point, watches the stars fall from the sky, and has an epiphany.
The Hollow Men is the second collection of not quite true tales of Texas. If you have recently subscribed and like to read things from the very beginning feel free to start with The Cold Days of Summer, the first collection of not quite true tales of Texas. Each episode of The Cold Days of Summer and The Hollow Men contains a link to the previous and next episode so you can easily move through the story line.
Graduation day and beyond
Turns I was pretty damn productive sober. Without being hampered by hangovers or writing in an inebriated fashion the number of rewrites and edits significantly dropped. The second week of November the formal review and defense of my thesis began. The Friday before Thanksgiving I had a small number of edits to finalize things. I had my edits completed Friday evening and everything reprinted by Tuesday before Thanksgiving. School was effectively closed the week of Thanksgiving but the first day back, Monday, December 2, my (hopefully) final review was scheduled.
I flew to Odessa on Thanksgiving day. Bud picked me up at the airport and I spent Thursday, Friday and most of Saturday in Odessa with Budd, Elizabeth, Mom, Mary, George and Brutus. Sam was missed but was back in Austin with Billy and his parents. Brutus seemed a little glad to see me but kept looking for Sam all day Thursday. Saturday afternoon I flew back to Austin and I was back in my house with Sam that evening.
By Wednesday of the next week everything associated with my Master degree was officially completed and I would be a graduate in December. I decided not to walk in the ceremony. Mom wasn't able to come to the ceremony and she was the whole reason I would have walked.
The Monday after my graduation I found a little extra something in the U.S. Mail – a box from Mom. When I brought it into the house, Sam immediately sniffed it and became quite excited. The box wasn't much bigger than a shoe box, in fact, that's what it was. I pulled off the postal wrap and found a shoe box. I pulled off the lid and inside were two small wrapped presents and an envelope. The larger present was for Sam, the smaller present and the envelope were for me. Sam, never the most patient of animals, insisted on my opening her present first. It was one large dog biscuit and a large rawhide chew. Sam immediately devoured the biscuit then carried the rawhide chew to the couch, jumped on the couch and put her entire attention to chewing, leaving me with my envelope and small package.
I opened the envelope to find a graduation card and a handwritten note. The note read:
Drew,
I wish I could be with you at your graduation. Your father and I are very proud of you. I've held back this small present until now but I know that Gene always wanted you to have it. I hope you like it and that when you wear it you will think of us.
Love,
Mom
I opened the small package and found a silver ring with a gold inlay. It was a Navy service ring. The silver and the gold were worn but I could still the eagles on the sides of the ring and the inlay showed a large bee holding a machine gun. Surrounding it were the words Construction Battalion. Underneath the bee one could read SeaBees and the letters USN. It was my Dad's service ring, received in recognition for his years in the U.S. Navy Construction Battalion, the SeaBees, in the Pacific theatre during World War II. I had seen him wear it on rare, more formal occasions. Now his ring was mine. The only problem is I don't wear jewelry. Hell, I don't even wear a watch. I put the ring in the top drawer of my dresser, reminding myself to wear it when my Mom was around. Enough of that for now, I had a life to live.
Mark, Kate and Jack were impressed but a little leery of my non-drinking, Jack being the most leery. His main concern was that he missed the drinking Drew and wasn't all that sure how much he liked the “always sober, rarely sloppy, edgy son-of-a-bitch” I was becoming. I'm not sure that I was really all that edgy but I will admit I was probably a little less patient sober all the time than I was when I would have a few beers daily.
Now that I was graduating it was time to look for something useful to do with my time. I still had plenty of money from VP Tanks but since I was no longer drinking or going to school I needed to find someway to pass the hours. There was only so much golf I could play, or books I could read. I decided to find a job, not a real job, not a career by any means, but that something that would keep me off the streets, so to speak.
The IBM site on Burnett Road had several openings for technical writers, something that I seemed at least somewhat qualified to do. After a few go-arounds with the HR department I got an interview in early January 1986 for a contract (6 months) to perm technical writing position.
The interview went interestingly. It was an all day affair, I talked to six different people in one on one interviews, three in the morning and three in the afternoon. Lunch was spent with the hiring manager and three other IBM'rs. Since I had just graduated with a Master’s degree they were expecting someone around 23 to 24 years old, not someone who was 28. I had to explain to every interviewer why I looked so old, that led to what VP Tanks was and what we did, then as time would run out we would talk briefly about the position and what they saw as the challenges. The job didn't seem that hard, it was to take highly technical information and make it less technical but still accurate. While technically my degree and research had nothing to do with technical writing I was able to explain to them how I would approach the problem. I talked about the computer science courses I had taken at UT and the programming languages I had a little skill in. I also brought along some of my earliest writing samples, the brochures Rick and I had made for VP Tanks. I told the interviewers these were early examples, but how what we did at VP Tanks was similar to what they needed, take a concept and present it in a straightforward, concise and succinct fashion.
Something I said must have been convincing because in February of 1986 I received an offer to join IBM as a contract writer at the Burnett Road plant. My first day would be Monday, March 10, 1986. If all worked well, if we all liked each other, I would come on as a true IBMer in October of 1986. The pay was good and since I was on contract I would be held to a strict 40 hours a week, which was all right with me, after all I still had a life to lead, even it was a sober and sometimes boring one.
The work was actually interesting. I was writing various brochures, articles and manuals for AIX, IBM's workstation version of the UNIX operating system. In April I bought a new PC's Limited Turbo PC and installed the XENIX operating system on it so I could have a UNIX box at home to get familiar with. My transition to being a geek was nearly complete. I could go into a long dissertation about the beauty and simplicity of UNIX but I'm pretty sure no one is the least bit interested. I could see eyes glaze over when I broached the subject with Mark, Jack or Kate.
Speaking of Kate, she joined a local accounting firm and had a small apartment in Austin. For the first couple of months out of the Army she had lived with Jack but Jack starting dating Shannon Porter in February and right off the bat the relationship seemed serious. Shannon had recently passed her board exams and was a practicing lawyer for an environmental law firm in Austin. As we got to know her, she tried to figure all of us out. She seemed most confused by me. Mark and Jack, sometimes even Kate, would talk about the wild times while I would smile and take a sip of iced tea. My new sober life did not seem to be in synch with tales of El Guitarra or buying a six pack of beer before Jack and I were in high school. Jack was convinced that my wildness would return some day but Mark wasn't so certain. As for myself, I was getting used to waking up every morning without a hangover and was seriously thinking of making my sobriety a permanent thing.
In April we all received invites in the mail for the “10th anniversary of the 1976 class of Odessa Permian High School.” The dates for the reunion were June 6-7, 1986, and the event would be hosted from the Raddison Hotel in Odessa. Friday night there would be a party at Dos Hermanos, a Mexican restaurant on the north west side of town. Saturday afternoon there would be a family picnic at Sherwood Park. On Saturday night another party would be held at the Raddison. We all planned to go. I reserved a room at the Raddison for the weekend. I figured the nights, especially Saturday night, would be long and it would be nice at the end to just take the elevator to my room.
That same month Jack asked to buy me out of the house he was living in. He had been paying the mortgage from the beginning and had also been paying back to me, when he could, the original down payment. According to my books he only owed $5000 on the original down payment. Jack saw it a little differently. We had bought the house in January of 1981 for $89,000 and since then the real estate market in Austin had done well. Similar houses in Jack's neighborhood were now on the market for $120,000 to $135, 000. His feeling was that I should realize a good chunk of the profit on the increase in the value of the house, since I took on most of the original risk. His initial offer was $25,000 to buy me out, $5000 to pay off the down payment and another $20,000 as my profit. That was tempting, but my goal wasn't to make money off a friend. I made a counter-offer, one that would satisfy Jack but at the same time wouldn't feel to me like I was taking advantage of him. I had bought the house for $89,000, made an initial down payment of $17,800 (of which Jack had paid off all but $5000 of) and financed the house for 30 years. Jack had made the monthly rent/mortgage payments and in the five plus years had made over $47,000 in mortgage payments. True, most of the mortgage payments went to the interest on the loan and not for principal, but still, over the five years, his investment in the house was well over two and a half times mine. I made my counter offer – for $17,000 Jack could buy me out. That seemed like a fair amount to both of us. Jack was a little surprised but once I showed him the math he realized I wasn't bending over backwards and that the $17,000 buyout was a fairer representation of the risk we had both put into the investment. He just wasn't used to someone negotiating down with him.
Shannon used her lawyer networking skills to find us a real estate lawyer who drew the papers up for us and in May, 1986 I received a check for $17,000 from Jack and in return he became the sole owner of the house.
Ten years after
I was still talking to Mom once a week and when I told her about the upcoming reunion I suggested that we all get together for dinner Friday night before the reunion festivities went into full swing. She liked that idea and after a few minutes of discussing the finer dining options available in Odessa we agreed to meet for dinner at Harrigan's, a bar/restaurant at the corner of University ad John Ben Shepperd Parkway at 6:00 pm Friday, June 7th. The next week Mom told me that Elizabeth, Bud, Mary and George all looked forward to seeing me. I was committed.
At 10:00 am Friday, June 7th, I carried out the last of my things to my truck. I had already placed in the cab of my truck a bottle of water, a travel canister of iced tea and some snacks for the road. I locked up the house, walked over to the Tindle's house and knocked on the door. Billy and his mom answered the door. I gave them my extra key, told them once again where Sam’s food was located. Told them once again Sam was in the back yard, and that I had left the back door of the garage open so she could come in out of the weather and that her bowls of food and water were on the fake grass rug in the garage. I say once again because this was the third time I had told Billy and the second time I had told his mom. She laughed at my persistence of walking through everything again and said “If you don’t quit talking and leave soon, you’ll miss your reunion. Don’t you worry about Sam. Billy and I will take good care of her.” I handed Billy twenty dollars and told him that I would pay him the other twenty when I got back to town Sunday. With that I roughed up his hair with my hand (I don’t know if Billy liked that or not, but it seemed to be the thing to do), told them both goodbye and walked back to my truck. I climbed in, started up the engine, waved at Billy and his mom once again, backed the truck out of the drive way and drove down the road.
The night before I had laid out my road maps and made my plans for the drive. I took highway 71/290 out of Austin heading west towards Brady and Llano. From there I planned to take highway 87 to San Angelo, then work my way north and west to Odessa. It was a good route, I could travel fast on most of the roads, but the roads had enough interest in them to keep me alert and focused. Based off my start time, a full tank of gas and John Dos Passos’ “The 42nd Parallel” on audio tape I figured the drive would take about five and a half to six hours of steady driving.
I stayed on schedule and a little after 4:30 pm I arrived in Odessa. On the way down I was excited about coming back to Odessa. I looked forward to the reunion, seeing old friends, even the town itself, but something happened to me when I crossed the Ector county line. I immediately started thinking of leaving, right then and there, just turning around and heading back, not even stopping until I ran out of gas or got back to Austin, whichever occurred first. It was almost as I had become allergic to west Texas. I felt myself freeze up, I felt the anger and frustration start to build up the farther along into Ector county I drove. But I couldn’t turn back, or if I did I had some real explaining to do.
So, I was stuck for the weekend and would have to make the best of it I could. I tried to resurrect the positive thoughts of Odessa and the weekend ahead and was somewhat successful, but there was a part of me that was already brooding. In my more liquid times I handled the brooding via more than a few cold brews, enough to take the initial edge off, then a regular cadence to keep things mellow. I had to come up with a different plan for this trip.
First stop was a 7-11 convenience store. I bought some bottled water for my hotel room. Even though I had grown up drinking Odessa water a short time in Austin had weaned me off it and I found I needed bottled water whenever I came back into town. Just up the road from the 7-11 was the Raddison hotel at loop 338 and University drive. This was on the newer east side of town, in between old Odessa and the Country Club Estates, one of the enclaves of the well-to-do of Odessa. I checked in, went up to my room, placed by bottled water in the little refrigerator in the room and threw my bags on the floor and myself on to the bed. It was 4:55 pm. I closed my eyes and let West Texas seep back into my lungs and into my pores. The transformation was over. It was time to get moving.
I needed a shower and a change of clothes before I left for dinner. Fifteen minutes later it was done, a quick shower, a drip dry in the arid West Texas air and a change of clothes. It was 5:15pm and Harrigan’s was only 10 minutes away, maybe less if I drove fast.
I needed a drink. That’s what I needed and that’s what breathing in West Texas had done to me. I needed a drink, despite it being over eight months since I had a drink. After the first week of being sober, which was a bit rough mostly because I had drunk so much since my Dad's funeral up to the point I stopped, I hadn’t missed the stuff at all over the months, but right now, I missed it. I missed it bad and there was not a bottle in sight. That was a good thing, because the feeling passed quickly, like a chill of a fever it was gone. I was not going to drink tonight or this weekend, despite the temptations that would be walked in front of me during the reunion, I would not drink.
I needed to do something to kill the 30 minutes or so. I turned on the television and flipped through the channels. I didn’t want to watch the news or the entertainment programs and I found nothing else to grab my attention. Thank God I brought enough books for a small library with me. I broke open the second duffel and started skimming through Pure Golf by Johnny Miller, Five Lessons by Ben Hogan, The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Rolling Stone Interviews. I settled on the Rolling Stone Interviews and began reading an interview with Paul McCartney shortly after the breakup of the Beatles. He talked about the little bits of music, the little throwaway snatches of songs, lyrics and noise. He didn’t like cleaned or engineered music, he liked music to feel alive. I think I understood what he meant.
It was 5:40, and I was ready to leave for Harrigans. I would be the first to get there, as Harrigans was only five to ten minutes away and that’s if I hit the one signal light between here and there. I took one last look in the mirror, ran my hand through my hair, splashed some water on my face to cool me off and headed out the door, down the elevator and out to my truck. The West Texas heat, like walking into an oven, hit me before I was able to close the door, start the engine, and turn up the air conditioner.
Six and a half minutes is all it took, and that’s counting waiting through a stop light. Ten to fifteen minutes at least to wait in the parking lot at Harrigan’s. Maybe more, my sister has never been the most timely of people. I sit in my truck, spanning the AM dial of my radio hoping to find something I can listen to. No luck, but that’s not too surprising, AM radio in West Texas resembled the terrain in many ways, a virtual desert of sounds. I switched to FM and continued my search and ended up listening to KOCV, the radio station at Odessa College. KOCV was the closest thing to a progressive radio station in Odessa and it would do. As I listened I thought back on my days at Odessa College.
I drifted along for several minutes until I noticed the persistent tapping on my window. It was Bud, Elizabeth’s husband, that was patiently tapping. I looked up, nodded at him, got out of the truck and steeled myself for the famous/infamous Loggins handshake of death. After Bud joined the family and brought to this world the first grandchildren to my Mom and Dad he displayed what could be called, in polite company, a firm handshake. Truth is, Bud believed a handshake that didn’t break at least two bones in your fingers was a sign of weakness. Add to that, with Bud, you had to give as good as you got.
So there we stood, looking each other in the eye and squeezing the last ounce of blood out of our hands, waiting for one of us to break. Luckily, Elizabeth knew the game well. She let it go on for a few seconds then broke between us to give me a hug. My right hand was eternally grateful and, lucky for me, decided to not show any of the visual effects of a severe contusion.
We spread our hellos around, first Elizabeth, then a slap on the back and a “Hell, how are you doing?” from Bud, shy glances up and quiet “Hello, Uncle Drew” from George and Mary. I stared at them for a moment before I said hello back. I hadn’t seen them since my Dad’s funeral less than a year ago, but I swear they were not the same children I saw back in October. Eight months is forever for three going on four years old.
I saved my final hello for my Mom. It started with a firm, long, warming hug, and followed with a “Let, me look at you now” as she pushed me to arms length. Time had done her good. She seemed younger than when I last saw her. I knew I looked older.
Author’s note: For the last 10 years or so, most of the books I read are in an e-book format. I like the ability to have a whole “stack” of books available to me wherever I am via my phone. Before that when I traveled I often did carry a second duffle or backpack stuffed with books. I did own a paperback copy of The Rolling Stone Interviews that traveled with me from Odessa to Houston to San Jose, California and back to Pearland, Texas but at some point I donated my copy to a public library.
Earlier this year Lynn and I attended a garage sale where I found a hardback edition of The Rolling Stone Interviews for $3.00. I bought it and a few other books that caught my eye.
This is the edition I remember reading in Odessa. I also have an ebook version that was published in 2007 but what is annoying in the more recent edition is that it isn’t the edition I first read, but has been “supplemented” with more recent interviews. I say supplemented in quotes because in order to make room for the more recent interviews some of the interviews from the earlier edition were left out. I don’t really understand that. I would have called the original edition Volume 1, then you could have Volume 2 that contains interviews after 1980.
Next week in Episode 40 of The Hollow Men Drew goes to his 10th year high school reunion and comes to a realization he is isn’t too happy with.
the reality of small things