The Best American Essays 2013 (42 page)

I liked knowing men who were older than me, because I liked learning from them, and so I liked Ripley, even when I wasn’t always comfortable with him. First of all, despite being a large landowner in Central Texas (he’d sell an acre now and then when he needed cash), he was always broke and mooching. He would often slump his big shoulders and virtually pull out the pockets of his pants right when he got to the cash register with a bottle of whiskey, looking at me like a puppy dog. I didn’t really like whiskey, and though I plead guilty to drinking more of it than I ever had in my life, he drank three to my one. I lived in an apartment with only a wife, a double mattress on the floor we shared, a rocking chair, a TV (black-and-white), and a newborn baby who shared the rocking chair with her and the mattress with both of us. This was the entire expanse of our belongings besides clothes and books. I barely made the monthly rent, and that was with construction side jobs I did.

Along with Ripley’s busty girlfriend, whom he called Peaches or Cookies or Creamy—I can’t remember—we were once asked to leave a late-night Denny’s. They’d been eating their food with too much wet, licking spoons and chewing on forks, too drunk and high, and I did laugh too loud myself, too. Though I’d concede that the noise at our table didn’t help, in my opinion the heap of staring was out of a visual taboo—his petite girlfriend, who was in her early twenties, looked fifteen and would often be taken for his daughter if left without an introduction, while he, being overindulgent in every category of intake, had more middle-aged bulk, and his other excesses prematurely lined his face into that of a man in his mid-forties. Not that the two of them couldn’t in fact offend. Back in his apartment, little Peachie might jump on his stuffed chair, straddle his lap, and pull up her top so that he could nibble and suckle. I had to tell Ripley that, nice as that seemed even from my distance, could he please take me home?

Numbers of events in his El Camino. I had to tell him often to be careful when he spoke about Mexicans. Always uncomfortable with his cracker side, I would steam about his favorite descriptives. When I’d blow, he’d say I was crazy and exaggerating and being overly sensitive. Once he was driving and another car did something he didn’t appreciate. Niggers, he yelled, though none were black. I had to tell him:
Let’s be clear, Ripley. You ever have a problem with any black dudes because you just said that, I’m telling you now I do not and will not back you up. You are on your own, and I will make it very well known whose side I’m on
. He could only shake his big head and go like it was me making something of nothing, not getting his humor, while I would wonder what I was doing riding with him. I didn’t drink whiskey and I didn’t like shitkickers. Maybe it’d be considered exciting to be moving at 100 mph, bouncing high off the small rises on Mesa, that big west-side El Paso street, but I was never drunk enough to not think it was way stupid and beg him to stop. Like slowing through red lights and stop signs, driving too fast was his deal. Maybe the draw for me was that Harvard mix in it. He was going maybe forty-five through Kern Place—a desirable, rich, attractive Anglo neighborhood—and ahead not fifty yards, on the left side of the street, a yardman in a straw hat was raking leaves. Without losing any speed, Ripley steered that El Camino and ran it over the curb and onto the middle of the lawn and into a stop exactly beside the man who could not have moved fast enough. He rolled down his window. As stunned as I was as a passenger, the Mexicano clutched the rake. His mouth might not have been open, even if it seems as though it was to my memory. I swear he didn’t blink. I too would have thought I had just survived death were I him. And then, as he did, I started listening to Ripley lecturing on the topic of life’s sorrows and expectations after retirement from sports. The yardman, who I don’t think was following a word of it even if he knew enough English, didn’t move, didn’t flinch, made no sound whatsoever. It certainly was not as hilarious as it hit me, drunk enough, but I was crying with shameless and shameful laughter.

Laughter. Laughing was how we wrote a poem one afternoon at a relatively new gourmet-style coffee shop on Mesa Street. Ripley was in a graduate class in poetry and had to write a poem. He didn’t write poetry, and no, I certainly could not help him—never an attempt at verse ever. “Come on, Dagoberto.” There was always something funny, humor-inducing, about Ripley even saying my name. It alone caused me to grin. Maybe how he made each syllable a drawled word of badly accented Spanish . . . He wrote a line. I shook my head. Then we had to talk and figure until we started laughing about what we were trying to do—you know, scamming out a poem for a class to keep his parole grades up—and it got so that what the poem should be about was us doing this. That is, not working, drinking, high, creating poetry, more cheating on “homework” than making art. Which was the art of it! As true poets, he’d pronounced us, we were so often so very busy “researching” for serious art that it was demeaning to have to write obligatory poetry for a class. Therefore, it wasn’t fair. He’d write a line about life not being fair. Once a line made us both laugh, it became a keeper, and more lines piled up. It got so that, toward the end, we were laughing way out of control. A funny poem, the fun, much of it off the page, was that we were writing this at all, and editing it through laughing. We were just messed up, until finally he was downing coffee to get sober enough to type it up and submit it to his early-evening seminar.

The poem was about us sitting there in an air-conditioned coffee shop, in the middle of a scorching desert afternoon in El Paso, having nothing but poetry to do, while everybody else out there in the world was responsibly employed. All we wanted to do—all we had to do—was to have a little bit of fun. That was what Ripley always said, like it was his motto or creed. Especially when he was Rippedly, wasted on drugs or liquor, usually both, which was a lot. Funny, Ripley was a sad, self-destructive, self-abusing man. And when he was really too fucked-up, so gone his mass became a limp blob of can-barely-move, he might get his breath too close to my face, and in his most insincere voice say, “Dagoberto, all I want to do is have a little bit of fun before I die. Now is that too much to ask for? Is it?”

By the mid-’80s, I was the father of a second son and I’d joined the union in Los Angeles as a class-A, high-rise journeyman carpenter. Now I wrote short stories. I thought once I’d published a few, agents or publishers would believe in me as a writer and want that novel I’d finished in El Paso, which I didn’t realize yet was simply lousy. I mean, they were in love with Raymond Carver, and if they wanted working-class, well, I actually was still working in that working class more years than I wished I had to.

We lived in a duplex near Micheltorena that overlooked Sunset Boulevard. Next to the building was an empty lot that descended from our street curb down to the sidewalk along Sunset. It was ground-covered in ivy. Which is a jungle paradise for rats. During the fall, it rained so much that the rats were running openly all around in front of our narrow street to get out of their flooded nests. It was sick. I went after disgusting rats like a serial killer. I wrote a story called “The Rat” and I sent it to the literary magazine
Quarterly West
. It was Ripley who turned down the story, saying something like it wasn’t him but the rest of them who didn’t like Mexicans or literary fiction about them. He’d moved on too. After he’d finished a master’s degree in creative writing at
UTEP
, he went for a PhD in creative writing at the University of Utah.

It wasn’t too long after that, he was in L.A. doing a tiny drug transaction, which also coincided with him getting an opportunity to visit his buddy James Crumley, who was in Hollywood to write a screenplay of his novel
The Last Good Kiss
for the director Robert Towne. Crumley had briefly become a creative-writing teacher at
UTEP
right after I left, and as part of their bonding and mentoring, he and Ripley drank, and so on, a lot. No, not only did I not mind him so wasted when I agreed to drive him to visit Crumley that Saturday afternoon, I was outright excited. At its most lucrative, my life consisted mostly of getting to construction sites by six in the morning and putting in ten or more. When would I ever get to see what it looked like to be put up free in a posh hotel as a writer? But try as I might to finally leave once we’d been there long enough, Ripley sipping more and more, Crumley insisted that Ripley could not be left there. I didn’t blame Crumley, but I wasn’t expecting to have to care for Ripley the rest of the day either. What else could I do but drive him to the last place he’d been?

Some time before, my wife had been telling me that she thought there’d been a rat in her car, which was a fifteen-year-old Chevy Nova. She showed me our baby’s car seat as evidence. I saw how some of its upholstery was shredding at a seam, but I thought there was some other explanation and didn’t take it seriously. I was driving Ripley in the Chevy because it was the more luxurious of our poor cars. Ripley was aiming for stupor by the time we left Crumley, and I wasn’t especially thrilled. I was afraid he’d gotten the address of the next place we were going wrong, and I would be stuck with his bloat for many more hours. I remember making turns assertively, just, you know, because. If I turned left, the Rippedly would bounce against the passenger door. If I went right, he tipped over to hit my shoulder. I was on the Hollywood Freeway, probably sighing because now I didn’t even have anyone to talk to—though I was always tired because of construction work—when I felt his fingers scratching my left shoulder. When I turned my head to him to ask what the fuck, he was drooling with his eyes closed, slumped against the passenger door. I turned my head toward the windshield and felt, then saw, the rat quickly clawing down my left arm, which was attached to the steering wheel. My window was up, but the wind wing was open, turned to allow wind in always because a thief had broken it off its upper hinge and it dangled from the bottom. Ripley! I yelled. The rat jumped from my wrist to the top of the driver’s side windowsill.
Ripley!
I yelled. He moaned. The rat scooted to the wind-wing opening.
Ripley, look!
He moaned. The rat held itself there for between one and two seconds, pondering, looking left and right, down at the strobe of the white lane stripes, who knew? And it dove onto the Hollywood Freeway.
Ripley, did you see that?!
“What, Dagoberto?”
That rat, the rat that just jumped out!
“Come on, Dagoberto.”
I’m telling you!
I yelled. “Dagoberto, you have rat on your brain.” Drunk, he did not believe me. Sober, he never did either, as many times as I recounted that amazing, disgusting rat suicide.

Tales of Ripley accumulated. One had him in Central Texas driving wild in the country, with open beers and empty cans in his vehicle, and when he pulled over to pee, he was swarmed and arrested by the Secret Service. President George Herbert Walker Bush was quail hunting nearby. Another had him in Utah at a party where it was either Rust Hills, fiction editor of
Esquire
, or some other big-shot editor like that, drunk and cocained, who battled him in a groveling contest. As Ripley explained, it involved the two crawling across the room to see who was more wasted. When he didn’t make it there first, Ripley told the editor that the winner of a groveling contest was he who couldn’t get there. The biggest news exclaimed that he had been given a book contract by Atlantic Monthly Press. To me, it was his funniest creative-writing achievement ever. Ripley had taken the stories he had written for a master’s degree and linked those into a novel, a creative “dissertation,” to earn a PhD and what became
Prisoners
, his only book. Yet as the sales of the publication faded quickly, so did Ripley. No more fellatio-obsessed fictions by him, only more sorry tales of him multiplied, and then he was busted traveling from Texas on his way to Colorado, holding, a large quantity, sales, along those lines. He was weeks in a local jail before his family bailed him out.

But what became the oddest Ripley event ever began back while he was in Utah. I don’t know if he had published any previous short stories, but one did appear in the first volume of a series titled
The Best of the West
. I hear echoes of our coffee shop laughter in the opening of this mediocre short story (the Dagoberto character became a snake handler, something like that). What I heard was that it was published because his reputation was consuming Utah. Since I was a figure in his lore, therefore I too seemed to have earned some strange cachet. Which was the only explanation I could come up with for why, one day back in El Paso—where I, my sons, and my wife had returned after Los Angeles—I opened an envelope to find a volume of poetry, which I assumed was for review. By that date, the later ’80s, I had published lots of short fiction but only a chapbook-size collection of them, the first book from a new small press in El Paso. I’d never been asked to review or blurb anything, and anyone asking had to be suspicious. And this was a poetry collection from an established press. The author, Wyn Cooper, someone I’d never met, was a young poet, a grad of the Utah program, a protégé I assumed, smitten by the romance of Ripley’s debauchery. The only poem that stood out to me, “Fun,” I remember well, a liveliness and color and style not in the others, was about Ripley. I left the volume near my bookcase.

Years passed. I’d estimate it was near a decade that I didn’t have the slightest inclination to speak to or contact Ripley, because I was so pissed off at something he’d done. I’d hear of him once in a while, sightings and tales, but it was when my friend, author of
Afoot in a Field of Men
, Pat Ellis Taylor (who changed her name to Pat Little Dog), a woman’s Kerouac, known all over Austin, whose book was published and promoted alongside Ripley’s by the same publisher, that I found forgiveness. Pat did many kinds of the lowest-paying jobs to earn a living and write poetry and live in humid apartment complexes. During the Fourth of July period, she’d open up a fireworks stand. She and her partner would clean out abandoned buildings and suites from failed businesses, and they’d sell the used wares along the side of the highway. One of her more steady gigs was the annual gathering of
TAAS
test readers and graders. The
TAAS
test system was Texas governor George Bush’s emphasis on testing public school students, and it panicked almost everyone whose job it was to teach the young. The Republicans, in particular, believed these tests would make the schools, rich or poor, accountable, and they were particularly proud. What no one talked about were the test graders, those making sure the kids were good boys and girls—an overeducated social caste who were the most habitually underemployed or unemployable, who saw
TAAS
as major seasonal income, after which they could return to their various drug addictions, alcoholisms, manias, phobias, severe depressions, marijuanísmos, general unsuitablenesses, and plain weirdnesses. And so it was that Pat Little Dog, regular
TAAS
grader and reader, told me she had actually sat next to and lunched with Bill Ripley during
TAAS
grading, where they laughed about their literary success. She told me Ripley said to say hi to me. And I once again smiled about that Rippedly. I was over it. I told her to say I said hello back. I told her to give him my phone number.