Chapter One
The Llano Estacado lays on the earth like an overturned platter two hundred miles long and a hundred and fifty miles wide. With no rivers, ponds or even patches of damp earth, it is one of the most inhospitable places in the country. The hard dry earth barely keeps alive the short crab grasses that are scattered around, their course stems reaching across the ground like dying tarantulas crawling towards a mirage. Life only exists there because it is unaware that there are better places to be. The plateau would have remained barren of human life except that underneath was the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast, fresh water ocean that, once pumped up to the surface, created the perfect environment to grow cotton, endless sun and infinite water.
Growing cotton was the reason my grandfather loaded up my mother, her three sisters and four brothers into a horse drawn wagon and migrated there from Arkansas around 1915 to became tenant farmers. The four brothers lived there for their entire lives. It was always joyful visiting them. Their houses were scattered across a landscape so flat they could be seen in the distance like peppercorns on a window sill before expanding as we approached to reveal a modest wooden home, a couple of out buildings and a tree or two. We visited each of my Uncles homes in turn where we were always joyfully greeted like a long lost prodigal family. I was particularly happy to play with my cousins because my family always lived in small towns as we bounced from state to state between the Dakotas and New Mexico, rarely staying in one place for more than a year. They introduced me to chickens and cows, let me pet the horses and play on their tractors. They took me to swim in the deep irrigation ditches running through the patches of cotton like streets through a city. The water was pumped out of the ground with Allison V-12 aircraft engines, the same kind used to power the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter plane during WWII. The enormous engines sat on the flat land towering above me like a cathedral with twelve exhaust pipes pointing up at the sky blaring out a thunderous roar that vibrated the ground and rattled my chest. I bowed to its power.
My grandmother lived in one of those peppercorns on the flat plain that my Uncles called the table rock. It was a gray weathered house, the paint blasted off long ago by sandstorms and, even though it was the fifties, had no electricity. We guided our way to her homemade feather beds by kerosene lamp, my young arms so small they wrapped around the glass base like it was barrel, the light flowing along the hallway into the dark rooms like an amoeba. She wore print dresses hanging down to her ankles with her hair twisted on top of her head like a hat. Let down, it hung to her mid calves. She also chewed tobacco and spit the juice into an empty coffee can. If an AI was asked to make a composite of a pioneer woman it would be her. That house and her seemed like a natural growth sprung out of the Llana Estacato like a small mesa. Hers was a life stripped down to its essence and the rock of my soul, inhabiting me as I drifted untethered through the world. Her and her fours sons living within miles of each all those years seemed solid as a landmark as the Estacado. It was comforting to me that they stayed so close together and were always there during our sporadic visits through the years. I remember them coming to visit us while staying with my grandmother in her risen from the earth house. I could see the cars coming from a mile away, a dot moving across the flat land with a fuzzy caterpillar of dust trailing behind. Uncle Custer, Lucian, Pride and Charlies sat in on the dark porch with my father and mother after dinner and talked long into the black sky vailed by the Milky Way. I sat on the floor listening to their laughter like it was music. That is how I remember them, a tight loving family. They have given me an origin story. Every time I step on dry crispy grass that crackles beneath my feet or every time I see a run down old farm house in the middle of nowhere it feels like the comfort of home. I want to live there and let the distant horizon suck the thoughts right out of me.
Growing cotton was the reason my grandfather loaded up my mother, her three sisters and four brothers into a horse drawn wagon and migrated there from Arkansas around 1915 to became tenant farmers. The four brothers lived there for their entire lives. It was always joyful visiting them. Their houses were scattered across a landscape so flat they could be seen in the distance like peppercorns on a window sill before expanding as we approached to reveal a modest wooden home, a couple of out buildings and a tree or two. We visited each of my Uncles homes in turn where we were always joyfully greeted like a long lost prodigal family. I was particularly happy to play with my cousins because my family always lived in small towns as we bounced from state to state between the Dakotas and New Mexico, rarely staying in one place for more than a year. They introduced me to chickens and cows, let me pet the horses and play on their tractors. They took me to swim in the deep irrigation ditches running through the patches of cotton like streets through a city. The water was pumped out of the ground with Allison V-12 aircraft engines, the same kind used to power the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter plane during WWII. The enormous engines sat on the flat land towering above me like a cathedral with twelve exhaust pipes pointing up at the sky blaring out a thunderous roar that vibrated the ground and rattled my chest. I bowed to its power.
My grandmother lived in one of those peppercorns on the flat plain that my Uncles called the table rock. It was a gray weathered house, the paint blasted off long ago by sandstorms and, even though it was the fifties, had no electricity. We guided our way to her homemade feather beds by kerosene lamp, my young arms so small they wrapped around the glass base like it was barrel, the light flowing along the hallway into the dark rooms like an amoeba. She wore print dresses hanging down to her ankles with her hair twisted on top of her head like a hat. Let down, it hung to her mid calves. She also chewed tobacco and spit the juice into an empty coffee can. If an AI was asked to make a composite of a pioneer woman it would be her. That house and her seemed like a natural growth sprung out of the Llana Estacato like a small mesa. Hers was a life stripped down to its essence and the rock of my soul, inhabiting me as I drifted untethered through the world. Her and her fours sons living within miles of each all those years seemed solid as a landmark as the Estacado. It was comforting to me that they stayed so close together and were always there during our sporadic visits through the years. I remember them coming to visit us while staying with my grandmother in her risen from the earth house. I could see the cars coming from a mile away, a dot moving across the flat land with a fuzzy caterpillar of dust trailing behind. Uncle Custer, Lucian, Pride and Charlies sat in on the dark porch with my father and mother after dinner and talked long into the black sky vailed by the Milky Way. I sat on the floor listening to their laughter like it was music. That is how I remember them, a tight loving family. They have given me an origin story. Every time I step on dry crispy grass that crackles beneath my feet or every time I see a run down old farm house in the middle of nowhere it feels like the comfort of home. I want to live there and let the distant horizon suck the thoughts right out of me.
A drawing of stick figure is the most simplified version of a person as possible, eliminating any need for details like fingers, toes or muscle structure of any kind. Such a minor effort would not seem to be enough to trigger the shape shifting reaction of euphoric joy in me but I was feverishly infected. The drawings spread across every available piece of paper like a bacterial mold invading the spare spaces in my school notebooks and sometimes in the books themselves in an unrelenting advance.
Over time I became aware that my drawing habit was not normal. With my arm wrapped around the top of my school desk like a rampart and my head held low, I created a hidden space for my pencil to execute the life and multiple deaths of my new creations. It was like being on heroin. I think I felt the same sense of relief when the pencil hit the page as when the needle punctured the skin.
Over time I became aware that my drawing habit was not normal. With my arm wrapped around the top of my school desk like a rampart and my head held low, I created a hidden space for my pencil to execute the life and multiple deaths of my new creations. It was like being on heroin. I think I felt the same sense of relief when the pencil hit the page as when the needle punctured the skin.
The flying shoe, as I call it now, was my own private plane and in that plane I drew a friend. I was very happy that friend was with me. Together we flew over mountains, fields, houses and cars. The sensation of flight felt real and thrilling; but the sensation existed only as long as I was drawing, rapidly moving the pencil to keep the sensation alive. I had to repeat the images over and over again, tucking them into the free spaces until the page was a mess. Once home I continued on any scrap piece of paper around. The concept of a sketchbook did not exist in my world.
Living in a mountain side cave or a boat at sea was so thrilling that even remembering those drawings gives me the same familiar sense of comfort I felt back then. I liked being alone, distant from the world, adrift and connected at the same time. There is a certain thrill to moving, saying goodby to the recently made friends and moving on to new neighborhoods with new children eager to become the new friends. It was so easy. Basically I just stood still and accepted whoever came up to me.
During those times, when daydreaming seemed real, I used to lull myself asleep by imaging being in a large tent. I was laying on the ground with my head stuck outside where it was icy and cold. Inside the tent however it was warm with entire village of aunts, uncles and cousins eating by a fire, laughing and hugging each other. It was a wonderfully cozy feeling having them in the warm tent while my head was outside looking at strangers ride by, the hooves of their horses barely missing me. I fell happily to sleep.
In every town I lived in the boys loved to have pretend battles. We loved to kill and, also, to die , throwing ourselves into air from the impact of the pretend bullets and tumbling to the ground in imagined death. Imitating real battles make sense because we knew that war was real and we might need to kill. That takes a lot of rehearsing. I tried to recreate those sensations through drawings, repeating the same gestures over and over, exaggerating the pose, digging the pencil into the paper and moving it fast as I can all to enhance the feeling of impact of a bullet or thrust of a sword. The pursuit could last for hours.
There is no different between my drawing of a flying shoe from playing with a toy airplane nor any difference from my tug boat than a dollhouse. My gun fighters/swordsmen/superheroes are no different than the action figures children to play with. I don't consider those drawings art. I was not concerned about composition and did not show any of those drawings to anyone, in fact I tried to hide them from view. Only enough anatomy was learned from comic books to make my figures seem real enough to continue the fantasies as my maturing mind demanded more realism.
My son, when he was thirteen or, more likely, ten, was sitting on the floor holding a GI Joe, twisting it's body as the loose arms flopped side to side. He said, "I am just not feeling it anymore". He seemed puzzled. His mind was moving on. The drawings were my toys and I played with them far longer than I probably should have. Boys my age had moved on to playing sports or rambling through the neighborhood talking about how Sonny Listen was going to murder Cassius Clay. I was drawing the life I wasn't living.
Living in a mountain side cave or a boat at sea was so thrilling that even remembering those drawings gives me the same familiar sense of comfort I felt back then. I liked being alone, distant from the world, adrift and connected at the same time. There is a certain thrill to moving, saying goodby to the recently made friends and moving on to new neighborhoods with new children eager to become the new friends. It was so easy. Basically I just stood still and accepted whoever came up to me.
During those times, when daydreaming seemed real, I used to lull myself asleep by imaging being in a large tent. I was laying on the ground with my head stuck outside where it was icy and cold. Inside the tent however it was warm with entire village of aunts, uncles and cousins eating by a fire, laughing and hugging each other. It was a wonderfully cozy feeling having them in the warm tent while my head was outside looking at strangers ride by, the hooves of their horses barely missing me. I fell happily to sleep.
In every town I lived in the boys loved to have pretend battles. We loved to kill and, also, to die , throwing ourselves into air from the impact of the pretend bullets and tumbling to the ground in imagined death. Imitating real battles make sense because we knew that war was real and we might need to kill. That takes a lot of rehearsing. I tried to recreate those sensations through drawings, repeating the same gestures over and over, exaggerating the pose, digging the pencil into the paper and moving it fast as I can all to enhance the feeling of impact of a bullet or thrust of a sword. The pursuit could last for hours.
There is no different between my drawing of a flying shoe from playing with a toy airplane nor any difference from my tug boat than a dollhouse. My gun fighters/swordsmen/superheroes are no different than the action figures children to play with. I don't consider those drawings art. I was not concerned about composition and did not show any of those drawings to anyone, in fact I tried to hide them from view. Only enough anatomy was learned from comic books to make my figures seem real enough to continue the fantasies as my maturing mind demanded more realism.
My son, when he was thirteen or, more likely, ten, was sitting on the floor holding a GI Joe, twisting it's body as the loose arms flopped side to side. He said, "I am just not feeling it anymore". He seemed puzzled. His mind was moving on. The drawings were my toys and I played with them far longer than I probably should have. Boys my age had moved on to playing sports or rambling through the neighborhood talking about how Sonny Listen was going to murder Cassius Clay. I was drawing the life I wasn't living.
Frailty prevented me from playing sports. The frailty was not from illness, it was more of a runt of the litter kind of frailty. I was weak from birth as far as I knew, an additional cruelty that was another burden given to me by the God chosen for me by the country I was born in. Attempts to maintain some dignity did not prevent me from complaining so much about myself that I was irritating to be around. "You just have an inferiority complex," was the response used just to shut me up. However, I had proof. The frailty was not just in my head, it had been displayed publicly for all to see.
Every year in gym class, probably by Nebraska law, the students were required to take a fitness test, all written down on a form attached to the coaches clipboard. Push ups, sit ups, running, rope climbing and wrestling were all public performances that left no doubt that I was not a threat to anyone being last in all categories. Not just last but ridiculously last; Cartoonishly last. Especially running. I simply couldn't move my legs. The most torturous test was running around the track circling the football field. Grasping for air and barely able to move my wobbly legs I was hardly past halfway around when I could see the rest of the milling around the finish line watching me. "Come on Nace!" the Coach Thorell yelled loud enough to travel the hundred yard expanse I still had to cross to inspire my wobbly marionette legs to squeeze out their best effort. Through my bobbling I could see the class had begun walking toward the main building to change clothes. The coach stayed behind as I lumbered along the cinder race track to tell me had done a good job when I finally crossed the finish line as he dramatically clicked his stop watch with the braided leather cord hanging down. Then he wrote the results on his clipboard.
Coach Thorell was handsome and so full of himself all the girls loved him the boys wanted to be like him. Like many coaches he also taught history since it only consisted of handing out reading assignments so he was my seventh grade teacher. My approach to class was to sit in the back, hunker down and try to be invisible as possible. It been only nine months since my father's death so I was not ready to be corralled together with all new students from the three other elementary schools then shuffled randomly from class to class for the hour long sessions. Random seating arrangements each hour gave me the opportunity to get lost in the crowd. Having willed myself to be invisible, by that I mean not warranting a second look, I felt relatively safe until Coach Thorell announced in front of the class that he was going to make me smile before the year was over. I looked at him dully because there was no smile in me, of that I was calmly certain even as the whole class turning to look my direction. What chilled me was a bizarrely obsessive habit I had with a bolo tie that was nearly exposed by his attention.
A bolo tie is a type of necktie consisting of a piece of cord or braided leather with decorative metal tips (called aiguillettes) and secured with a decorative slide made of silver and turquoise. They were made popular in the southwest by the Navajo tribe and I had the habit of wearing one everyday. The metal tips of my tie was made of coiled wire and looked like a rattlesnake rattle. I had discovered that sliding the tip between the side arms of my glasses and my temple created a ratcheting sound I found soothing; so soothing that I could not resisted doing it continuously throughout the day. So much so I was probably boring a hole in my skull. Such behavior had to look extremely odd I knew, which was another reason to hunker down in the back row; another reason to greatly relieved that I was not rattling the bolo tie in my glasses when Coach Thoreau threw down his challenge. I did not smile but I stopped wearing the bolo tie since, in his class at least my sense of invisibility had disappeared. The classic technique of the prey playing dead worked for me because he moved on to other topics but he was not done with me yet.
During the winter the gym class played inside. At the end of each session we ran circles around the gym. Being the slowest I drifted to towards the center of the gym to let the rest of the boys pass me on the outside. I was in the center letting the class pass me when the Coach Thereau yelled "Push him!". A hand in my back thrust me forward. "Keep pushing," There'll yelled again, then again and again as I was continuously thrust forward by the hand. Barely able to keep my legs under me I was hauling in painful quantities, burning my throat, ripping my ribs open and exploding sweat out me like tears. . After a seemingly endless torture of public humiliation and betrayal the class went into the locker room to change clothes. No one looked at me and I looked at no one during the showers. I was sitting on a bench, towel wrapped my waist when Thorell walked up, followed by the athletic students who had pushed me, and asked how I was feeling. The sincerity of his question wiped away all the tumultuous thoughts in my head and I accessed the condition of my body.
Physically I felt fabulous. Electrical circuits I didn't know I had were firing and blood was cascading through arteries I didn't know existed. In that moment I was in a new body filled with a sense of power that thrilled me. I was actually giddy when I told him how wonderful I felt. The boys who had been pushing me let out a cheer of congratulations as if I had passed a test and joined an exclusive club. I felt loved. I realized at that moment that Coach Thorell had not been torturing me, he was just doing what coaches do everyday, push athletes beyond their physical barriers, usually by yelling at them. He had opened up a new world for me, life after breaking a sweat. However, without a coach, without that hand pushing me, breaking a sweat was almost impossible to achieve and I was not worth the effort. He had dozens of able bodied boys to mentor. Instead Coach Thorell asked me to be the student manager for the football team, a position I accepted with total defeat. The lack of my self determination positioned me, the most frail of the frail and shy of the shy, with the most gregarious and strong gang of boys in a daily communion. Looking back, just based on the scientific data, I was pretty pathetic. But I could have just as easily been pathetic alone. Coach Thorell had drug me out into the public and, in retrospect, the public treated me kindly. Perhaps, as my best friend Dave told me not too long ago, I had been on a class wide suicide watch back then. Perhaps, by the odd turn of my situation, I had been treated with a kinder world.
If were to look back and try to piece together how I was seen back then by my classmates, I would guess I was a story before I was a person. In late December, after my father had to be admitted to the hospital it came time for me to finally go to school. The sixth grade teacher must have informed his students that a child who was soon to come to class had been at home taking care of his father during the prior few months. After all, it was the principle of the school who had met with me, along with my mother and the doctor, to ask me if I would be willing stay home with my father while he recovered from lung surgery. There were no social services at the time in Alliance, Nebraska and we did not belong to a local church. We were an under the radar family at the time. With a mother who had to work all day the only available person was me. It is just a guess, but a child alone in a house with father who was slowing dissolving away was probably a story worth some discussions, worth some imaginings of mystery of it all.
That could would explain why, just after my appearance in class a week before Christmas, we were all loaded into a bus and went to the very hospital where my father was to sing Christmas Carols. The class advanced slowly from room to room, one of being my father's, who fortunately was out sight line. I stood with the class while they sang in their off tune sixth grade voices not knowing what to think. Did they know that they were singing to my dying father or not? Their faces gave no clue. I stood in their midst pretending to sing feeling every emotion and no emotion, like all the colors of the rainbow combining to make no color at all. I just knew it was one horribly fucked up situation and God had to be a fucked up dude to make this oddity happen. The class continued on down the hall and afterwards we were all loaded back into the bus to return to school. Later I walked back to the hospital to sit with my dad well aware as I walked along the hallway that the class lived in their own world and I lived in mine. Fifty years later, in a sad moment when I related the story to a friend they said, "They were probably just trying to be nice". That thought had never occurred to me but in retrospect it was an obvious possibility.
Every year in gym class, probably by Nebraska law, the students were required to take a fitness test, all written down on a form attached to the coaches clipboard. Push ups, sit ups, running, rope climbing and wrestling were all public performances that left no doubt that I was not a threat to anyone being last in all categories. Not just last but ridiculously last; Cartoonishly last. Especially running. I simply couldn't move my legs. The most torturous test was running around the track circling the football field. Grasping for air and barely able to move my wobbly legs I was hardly past halfway around when I could see the rest of the milling around the finish line watching me. "Come on Nace!" the Coach Thorell yelled loud enough to travel the hundred yard expanse I still had to cross to inspire my wobbly marionette legs to squeeze out their best effort. Through my bobbling I could see the class had begun walking toward the main building to change clothes. The coach stayed behind as I lumbered along the cinder race track to tell me had done a good job when I finally crossed the finish line as he dramatically clicked his stop watch with the braided leather cord hanging down. Then he wrote the results on his clipboard.
Coach Thorell was handsome and so full of himself all the girls loved him the boys wanted to be like him. Like many coaches he also taught history since it only consisted of handing out reading assignments so he was my seventh grade teacher. My approach to class was to sit in the back, hunker down and try to be invisible as possible. It been only nine months since my father's death so I was not ready to be corralled together with all new students from the three other elementary schools then shuffled randomly from class to class for the hour long sessions. Random seating arrangements each hour gave me the opportunity to get lost in the crowd. Having willed myself to be invisible, by that I mean not warranting a second look, I felt relatively safe until Coach Thorell announced in front of the class that he was going to make me smile before the year was over. I looked at him dully because there was no smile in me, of that I was calmly certain even as the whole class turning to look my direction. What chilled me was a bizarrely obsessive habit I had with a bolo tie that was nearly exposed by his attention.
A bolo tie is a type of necktie consisting of a piece of cord or braided leather with decorative metal tips (called aiguillettes) and secured with a decorative slide made of silver and turquoise. They were made popular in the southwest by the Navajo tribe and I had the habit of wearing one everyday. The metal tips of my tie was made of coiled wire and looked like a rattlesnake rattle. I had discovered that sliding the tip between the side arms of my glasses and my temple created a ratcheting sound I found soothing; so soothing that I could not resisted doing it continuously throughout the day. So much so I was probably boring a hole in my skull. Such behavior had to look extremely odd I knew, which was another reason to hunker down in the back row; another reason to greatly relieved that I was not rattling the bolo tie in my glasses when Coach Thoreau threw down his challenge. I did not smile but I stopped wearing the bolo tie since, in his class at least my sense of invisibility had disappeared. The classic technique of the prey playing dead worked for me because he moved on to other topics but he was not done with me yet.
During the winter the gym class played inside. At the end of each session we ran circles around the gym. Being the slowest I drifted to towards the center of the gym to let the rest of the boys pass me on the outside. I was in the center letting the class pass me when the Coach Thereau yelled "Push him!". A hand in my back thrust me forward. "Keep pushing," There'll yelled again, then again and again as I was continuously thrust forward by the hand. Barely able to keep my legs under me I was hauling in painful quantities, burning my throat, ripping my ribs open and exploding sweat out me like tears. . After a seemingly endless torture of public humiliation and betrayal the class went into the locker room to change clothes. No one looked at me and I looked at no one during the showers. I was sitting on a bench, towel wrapped my waist when Thorell walked up, followed by the athletic students who had pushed me, and asked how I was feeling. The sincerity of his question wiped away all the tumultuous thoughts in my head and I accessed the condition of my body.
Physically I felt fabulous. Electrical circuits I didn't know I had were firing and blood was cascading through arteries I didn't know existed. In that moment I was in a new body filled with a sense of power that thrilled me. I was actually giddy when I told him how wonderful I felt. The boys who had been pushing me let out a cheer of congratulations as if I had passed a test and joined an exclusive club. I felt loved. I realized at that moment that Coach Thorell had not been torturing me, he was just doing what coaches do everyday, push athletes beyond their physical barriers, usually by yelling at them. He had opened up a new world for me, life after breaking a sweat. However, without a coach, without that hand pushing me, breaking a sweat was almost impossible to achieve and I was not worth the effort. He had dozens of able bodied boys to mentor. Instead Coach Thorell asked me to be the student manager for the football team, a position I accepted with total defeat. The lack of my self determination positioned me, the most frail of the frail and shy of the shy, with the most gregarious and strong gang of boys in a daily communion. Looking back, just based on the scientific data, I was pretty pathetic. But I could have just as easily been pathetic alone. Coach Thorell had drug me out into the public and, in retrospect, the public treated me kindly. Perhaps, as my best friend Dave told me not too long ago, I had been on a class wide suicide watch back then. Perhaps, by the odd turn of my situation, I had been treated with a kinder world.
If were to look back and try to piece together how I was seen back then by my classmates, I would guess I was a story before I was a person. In late December, after my father had to be admitted to the hospital it came time for me to finally go to school. The sixth grade teacher must have informed his students that a child who was soon to come to class had been at home taking care of his father during the prior few months. After all, it was the principle of the school who had met with me, along with my mother and the doctor, to ask me if I would be willing stay home with my father while he recovered from lung surgery. There were no social services at the time in Alliance, Nebraska and we did not belong to a local church. We were an under the radar family at the time. With a mother who had to work all day the only available person was me. It is just a guess, but a child alone in a house with father who was slowing dissolving away was probably a story worth some discussions, worth some imaginings of mystery of it all.
That could would explain why, just after my appearance in class a week before Christmas, we were all loaded into a bus and went to the very hospital where my father was to sing Christmas Carols. The class advanced slowly from room to room, one of being my father's, who fortunately was out sight line. I stood with the class while they sang in their off tune sixth grade voices not knowing what to think. Did they know that they were singing to my dying father or not? Their faces gave no clue. I stood in their midst pretending to sing feeling every emotion and no emotion, like all the colors of the rainbow combining to make no color at all. I just knew it was one horribly fucked up situation and God had to be a fucked up dude to make this oddity happen. The class continued on down the hall and afterwards we were all loaded back into the bus to return to school. Later I walked back to the hospital to sit with my dad well aware as I walked along the hallway that the class lived in their own world and I lived in mine. Fifty years later, in a sad moment when I related the story to a friend they said, "They were probably just trying to be nice". That thought had never occurred to me but in retrospect it was an obvious possibility.
