by Johnny Hughes © 2011
When I was in the first grade, Niki Sullivan (one of the original Crickets with Buddy Holly) and his parents lived with my family in a very small house. There was a piano, guitars, and music every night.
Niki did not leave the Crickets before they made it big. They made it big on the first tour, Lubbock to New York, and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. He was in the band when That'll Be the Day started being a hit. They made it big before they ever left Lubbock via radio. When they got the advance for the first tour, they went to Coach Brown's Varsity Shop, and got suits, which changed their look from Levis, rolled up sleeve T-shirts. Later, they'd buy more matching outfits, Buddy in white and them in black, color coordinated.
As you know, the first tour booker (never saw them in person, but heard them on the radio) thought they were black and sent them out on a bus tour with several big black acts that toured around. They ended up in New York and played the Apollo in Harlem. The bus was cold, the black guys would straighten their hair with this really smelly stuff. I think, memory hazy, they were offended by Little Richard, whom we had all seen at the Cotton Club. They gambled with the blacks, dice and cards. Buddy didn't really care if he lost. Somewhere in the middle of the tour, Buddy bought a Cadillac. I rode in it, it was off pink, as close to Elvis as he could get. I once sat in Elvis' car, but no ride.
Niki took a job delivering flowers for a florist while they were home. My memory here is hazy, but after they got off the first tour, they were broke. I got Joe B., Jerry, and Buddy to come play poker and they set a fifty cent limit.
It was at this point that Matt Sullivan, Niki's dad, began to question record producer Norman Petty's criminal business ways. However, it was Buddy who got cheated the most of all, because he made the same as the rest in basic royalties and tour fees, although he made bigger songwriter royalties.
I also believe that Niki and Buddy remained friends, when Jerry and Joe B. sided with Norman. Peggy Sue's greater, funny lie was that Buddy left the band where they could get another singer, as if Buddy was fired.
The last time I saw Buddy, I was driving a truck for Lubbock Electric. He was riding a motorcycle. I invited him back to the business to have coffee and he followed me. He knew one of the electricians his age. They were two years older than me. We went to the upstairs coffee room which filled up. They made me go back to work. Later, I was cleaning an electric motor with naptha by spraying it, and Buddy came to the back to say goodbye -- our final goodbye. I was spraying naptha from a high-pressure hose. He was dancing around trying not to get naptha on his fancy pants which I remember as red and white, big stripes like a barber pole. I'd sprayed his direction as a joke. I have asked Maria Elena about those pants and she didn't remember them.
For a seminar at the Buddy Holly Center, I told Joe Nick Patoski that story and asked him, as moderator of a panel with the family and Maria Elena, to ask each of them of their last memory of seeing Buddy. Each told a moving story, until the often-angry widow just said, coldly, "It was in New York."
Made me wonder.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
Showing posts with label Johnny Hughes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Johnny Hughes. Show all posts
May 03, 2011
December 01, 2010
That Musical Christmas Meeting in Jail - Amarillo, Texas, 1913
By Johnny Hughes © 2010
When the Sheriff's deputies brought Lonnie Hogan to the Amarillo jail, Ryan O'Malley was already incarcerated. It was a meeting that they'd laugh about for many years. Both men were 26 years old, and had thick, curly, brown hair, and chocolate-colored eyes. Both were handsome men, and knew it. At 6'2", Lonnie was six inches taller than Ryan. Ryan talked most of the time. He talked fast, walked fast, ate fast, and was impulsive. Lonnie was naturally quiet, slow-moving, and deliberate. Ryan was most interested in Lonnie's guitar, which the deputies locked in a closet.
"I heard 'em say they had you as a gambler?" Ryan offered his hand to his new cell mate. Lonnie shook, but with little enthusiasm. They were the only prisoners.
"We were playing poker at the Amarillo Hotel. They arrested me for winning a horse and fancy buggy off this old, drunk Doctor. He kept jacking up the stakes. It was a fluke. I've offered to give it back or sell it cheap if they'd cut me loose. It has soft, leather seats. Anyways, what you in for?" Lonnie's Texas cowboy accent and slow speech lent itself to an unexcited calm.
"Singing songs. I'm a Wobbly. A soap boxer. I was down at the railroad yard singing, Joe Hill's 'Pie in the Sky.' My union card says International Workers of the World, ever heard of it? That's the Wobblies. One big union. They got me for Vagrancy, being temporarily without funds." Ryan was boastful, as always.
"I've heard of these union and communist kind of troubles. What's your trade? You a railroad man? A miner?" Lonnie asked. "You a busker? Goin' around singing with your hat on the ground for tips?"
Ryan agreed that basically he was a busker, and said his guitar was with a railroad man he knew only as Hank, but being a union brother, he knew he'd get it back.
"Nah, I want to be a labor organizer. But I've never had any trade or other union card. My family ain't much for working. Most Wobblies are two card men, belonging to a trade union also. I'm headed for southern Colorado. Big labor strikes with the miners against Rockefeller."
Lonnie said they had raided his room at the Amarillo Hotel early that morning. They found six decks of cards, and a dozen pair of dice, all of them on the square. They'd charged him with keeping a gambling house but hinted that he'd be out soon because of Christmas. Ryan said he had no idea of when he would be released, explaining that Wobblies were police targets all over the country. When he asked Lonnie about the poker game, Lonnie explained it was dealer's choice, mostly high draw, no openers, bet or fold with a stiff ante that grew through the night. They agreed that they thought stud was too slow and draw without openers gave the dealer a real advantage.
Then Ryan challenged Lonnie to play heads up draw poker when they were released. Lonnie laughed that off, saying, "You ain't got no money. Cash on the wood makes gambling good. I'm sure I'm a better poker player than you and a better singer."
Lonnie seemed to think this was hilarious. Ryan took offense.
"I'm an O'Malley. I come from a long line of gamblers. You could come up to our family farm by Duke, Oklahoma. There might be a handful of uncles or cousins who are off the road. Ever single one could beat you at any gambling game. And my whole family are great musicians. I'll bet I can play guitar better than you."
Lonnie explained that he had been singing in a duet at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico for over a year, and playing in the daily poker game on the second floor. Then he began to sing in a deep, rich baritone, "There is a house in New Orleans, they call the rising sun, Its been the ruin of many a poor boy, and Lord, I know I'm one."
On the second line, Ryan took the harmony, very loudly, with his perfect-pitch Irish tenor. Both men were on their feet, their dark eyes shining. After a few verses, Ryan said, "I'll bet you five bucks I know more verses than you do to that song."
Ryan said, "A good gambler doesn't gamble with brokes," then he sang, "Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts... He was her man, but he done her wrong."
Now each man would sing lead on a verse and the other would back him up. Lonnie said, "I know verses where she gets off, and I know verses where she goes to prison." They both knew Shine On Harvest Moon and Glow Worm.
Being single, Jack Collins had drawn Christmas duty guarding the jail. He had come back to the cells and was listening. He told Lonnie he didn't have a key to the closet or he would get him his guitar. Then he said, "Don't say nothing to spoil the surprise, but the Sheriff's wife Alma is cooking a turkey and all the fixins. She'll bring the best damn food you ever laid a lip on over here this afternoon or evening. Y'all can sing for her."
Jack Collins started a song in his off-key, whiskey voice:
Lonnie said that he had been a cowboy on a ranch outside Mobeetie, Texas. There was so much gambling in the town that he was able to make that his living.
Jack Collins broke in, "First man to own a ranch in the Texas Panhandle was killed in a poker game. Ol' Man Springer opened this here way station, general store, outside Mobeetie to serve the trail herds and buffalo hunters in 1877. He kept a poker game going almost every day. That was only two years after Quanah Parker and the Comanches surrendered to Col. MacKenzie and went on the reservation. Springer and his hired man were playing poker with some Cavalry men, buffalo soldiers, colored soldiers. The Indians called them that because their hair was like a buffalo's. A couple of them killed Springer and his hired man saying they'd been cheating. The Army had a little hearing about it, 'course nothing come of it. Poker can be dangerous. Ol' Springer was supposed to have won a lot of money and cows. The cowboys with them herds could get chips for cows, and Springer got together a big herd."
Lonnie started singing Stag O'Lee. Gentlemen of the jury, what do you think of that? Stag O'Lee killed Billy de Lyon about a five-dollar Stetson hat.
Ryan knew the song and the two were amazed at just how well their mellifluous voices blended together. They sounded like brothers who had sang together since childhood. They were very good, and they both knew it immediately.
After exchanging sanitized and slightly magnified versions of their life stories, Lonnie said they could get a job singing at the La Fonda in Santa Fe easily if Ryan was really good at guitar and could get over there.
"There's this here powerful Judge, Rudy Vigil. He loves poker and plays there nearly every afternoon. Long as he is there, it is never above five-dollar limit. But at night, after he leaves, they vote and take the limit off. "
Lonnie said he had been singing with an incredible beauty and musician, Gloria Chavez, a member of a well-known musical family. Lonnie didn't reveal that he loved her. He said he and Ryan could "sho nuff make better music and land a job easy." Her three brothers also had an act that rotated with their's at La Fonda. Gloria, only 20, had eloped with a wealthy rancher from northern New Mexico who was 46. Her father and brothers were making death threats. The families had hated each other for a couple of hundred years.
Dr. Grover Monahan, one of Amarillo's first and most respected doctors, sent a hired man over to see Lonnie. He apologized profusely and said the Doctor had nothing to do with his arrest. He also asked if he'd sell the horse and buggy back and asked what Lonnie wanted for it. Lonnie had walked over to the livery stable with the drunk Doctor around daylight and barely looked at his new prize. Lonnie told the man to ask the Doctor for a fair offer.
Lonnie and Ryan weren't surprised that they had both started out on shape note singing. Lonnie had sang with two church choirs. Both of their fathers played guitar and sang. Ryan said his uncle was in this Irish musical show in New York. Ryan said the whole O'Malley clan were big on their Irish roots, Irish foods, and songs. Lonnie said his family were Irish but he knew nothing of that. It was rarely mentioned.
Deputy Jack Collins broke in with another of his stories. "Right after Oklahoma became a state, there was this here man in the Oklahoma panhandle going on trial for something. The night before his trial, Ol' Temple Houston, Sam Houston's son, was playing poker with his two lawyers. He thought they was cheating and shot them both dead. He was a lawyer, so Temple defended the man for free and got him off. Then he got his own self off. Poker can be mighty dangerous."
Right at sundown, with slants of flat land light illuminating the jail, Deputy Sheriff Doak Bradshaw and his wife, Velma, came in with a pumpkin and pecan pies, mashed potatoes, and some unopened cans of cranberry sauce. Right after that, Sheriff Dink Flournoy arrived, followed closely by his wife Alma. She began to spread a white table cloth on the desk. The Sheriff was obviously drunk and carrying a gallon of red wine. He opened the cell door and handed the wine to Ryan who took a big swallow and handed it to Lonnie who did likewise.
"Sure hope y'all are hungry," Sheriff said, "'Cause Alma has been fussing over this all day."
When Sheriff Dink staggered across the room with Lonnie's guitar, both men pulled guitar picks from their pockets. Ryan reached out and grabbed the guitar. He picked a few notes, tuned it, and then quickly demonstrated that his finger picking style was more advanced than Lonnie's cording and strumming. Then he launched into House of the Rising Sun, and he and Lonnie stood facing the others, singing together, obviously delighted. Dink said, "these are bound to be the happiest jail birds I ever saw."
Just then, Ryan made it a medley doing a few verses of Frankie and Johnny and on into Stag O' Lee.
"These ol' boys don't just gamble, they sings about gambling," Dink continued. "Y'all need to sing a hymn or Christmas music for Alma. She's mighty religious."
Jack Collins started Rock of Ages, and then Silent Night. Ryan led them all on Joy to the World. Before dinner, Alma said a long prayer mentioning several Amarillo residents, her Arkansas cousins, sinful Texas cowboys, and other lost souls. Dink brought out two more gallons of red wine, and everyone but Alma was drinking freely. At the end of dinner, Dink was slurring his words when he presented Lonnie a check for $350 from Doc Monahan for the horse and buggy which was worth four times that. Lonnie accepted graciously, very surprised and happy to get it. They ate, sang, and drank long into the night, and often praised Alma for the memorable feast.
Lonnie staked Ryan to a train ticket to Santa Fe, a cheap suit, and a Porkpie hat that Ryan always wore with the brim up. He located his guitar. Lonnie had this annoying habit of writing down all his expenses, especially money loaned to or spent on Ryan, in a little black notebook he always carried in his coat pocket. They drew great crowds at La Fonda Thursday though Saturday nights. They always opened with House of the Rising Sun, their signature song. Ryan went into every business and government office in downtown Santa Fe introducing himself and inviting people to their show. Soon he put a tip jar on stage, which brought in good extra money. They added a Sunday afternoon show which was always packed.
Lonnie made the rules and was the unofficial boss. He banned any form of cheating at the poker, union songs, and mention of unions, especially Wobblies. Ryan swore he knew lots about cheating but never would because of the danger. Bravery was never Ryan's long suit. They were both regular winners in the afternoon poker games with a limit of $5. They played each other heads up and Lonnie always won. If wealthy ranchers made the night game too high for him, Lonnie would quit. Not Ryan. He went broke and built back up a bank roll over and over. One night Ryan was $1600 winner with Lonnie as his partner. Lonnie cut out his share of the winnings, urging Ryan to quit. Ryan lost his share all back. The very next morning, Lonnie was making Ryan a loan and marking it in the little notebook. Ryan wrote a funny song about Scrooge's Notebook and sang it at La Fonda. Lonnie loved it and wrote a couple of verses while they sang. That was the beginning of their song-writing partnership.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom, a novel.
When the Sheriff's deputies brought Lonnie Hogan to the Amarillo jail, Ryan O'Malley was already incarcerated. It was a meeting that they'd laugh about for many years. Both men were 26 years old, and had thick, curly, brown hair, and chocolate-colored eyes. Both were handsome men, and knew it. At 6'2", Lonnie was six inches taller than Ryan. Ryan talked most of the time. He talked fast, walked fast, ate fast, and was impulsive. Lonnie was naturally quiet, slow-moving, and deliberate. Ryan was most interested in Lonnie's guitar, which the deputies locked in a closet.
"I heard 'em say they had you as a gambler?" Ryan offered his hand to his new cell mate. Lonnie shook, but with little enthusiasm. They were the only prisoners.
"We were playing poker at the Amarillo Hotel. They arrested me for winning a horse and fancy buggy off this old, drunk Doctor. He kept jacking up the stakes. It was a fluke. I've offered to give it back or sell it cheap if they'd cut me loose. It has soft, leather seats. Anyways, what you in for?" Lonnie's Texas cowboy accent and slow speech lent itself to an unexcited calm.
"Singing songs. I'm a Wobbly. A soap boxer. I was down at the railroad yard singing, Joe Hill's 'Pie in the Sky.' My union card says International Workers of the World, ever heard of it? That's the Wobblies. One big union. They got me for Vagrancy, being temporarily without funds." Ryan was boastful, as always.
"I've heard of these union and communist kind of troubles. What's your trade? You a railroad man? A miner?" Lonnie asked. "You a busker? Goin' around singing with your hat on the ground for tips?"
Ryan agreed that basically he was a busker, and said his guitar was with a railroad man he knew only as Hank, but being a union brother, he knew he'd get it back.
"Nah, I want to be a labor organizer. But I've never had any trade or other union card. My family ain't much for working. Most Wobblies are two card men, belonging to a trade union also. I'm headed for southern Colorado. Big labor strikes with the miners against Rockefeller."
Lonnie said they had raided his room at the Amarillo Hotel early that morning. They found six decks of cards, and a dozen pair of dice, all of them on the square. They'd charged him with keeping a gambling house but hinted that he'd be out soon because of Christmas. Ryan said he had no idea of when he would be released, explaining that Wobblies were police targets all over the country. When he asked Lonnie about the poker game, Lonnie explained it was dealer's choice, mostly high draw, no openers, bet or fold with a stiff ante that grew through the night. They agreed that they thought stud was too slow and draw without openers gave the dealer a real advantage.
Then Ryan challenged Lonnie to play heads up draw poker when they were released. Lonnie laughed that off, saying, "You ain't got no money. Cash on the wood makes gambling good. I'm sure I'm a better poker player than you and a better singer."
Lonnie seemed to think this was hilarious. Ryan took offense.
"I'm an O'Malley. I come from a long line of gamblers. You could come up to our family farm by Duke, Oklahoma. There might be a handful of uncles or cousins who are off the road. Ever single one could beat you at any gambling game. And my whole family are great musicians. I'll bet I can play guitar better than you."
Lonnie explained that he had been singing in a duet at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico for over a year, and playing in the daily poker game on the second floor. Then he began to sing in a deep, rich baritone, "There is a house in New Orleans, they call the rising sun, Its been the ruin of many a poor boy, and Lord, I know I'm one."
On the second line, Ryan took the harmony, very loudly, with his perfect-pitch Irish tenor. Both men were on their feet, their dark eyes shining. After a few verses, Ryan said, "I'll bet you five bucks I know more verses than you do to that song."
Ryan said, "A good gambler doesn't gamble with brokes," then he sang, "Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts... He was her man, but he done her wrong."
Now each man would sing lead on a verse and the other would back him up. Lonnie said, "I know verses where she gets off, and I know verses where she goes to prison." They both knew Shine On Harvest Moon and Glow Worm.
Being single, Jack Collins had drawn Christmas duty guarding the jail. He had come back to the cells and was listening. He told Lonnie he didn't have a key to the closet or he would get him his guitar. Then he said, "Don't say nothing to spoil the surprise, but the Sheriff's wife Alma is cooking a turkey and all the fixins. She'll bring the best damn food you ever laid a lip on over here this afternoon or evening. Y'all can sing for her."
Jack Collins started a song in his off-key, whiskey voice:
"Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie,Lonnie took over and sang several verses, with Ryan backing him up as best he could. "See, that's a lot of my act. My daddy had been a cowboy out of Wichita Falls and worked for ol' Burk Burnett some. He got these magazines that had all the words to these cowboy and trail driver songs."
Where the wild coyotes will howl over me.
Where the west wind sweeps and the grasses wave,
And sunbeams rest on the prairie grave."
Lonnie said that he had been a cowboy on a ranch outside Mobeetie, Texas. There was so much gambling in the town that he was able to make that his living.
Jack Collins broke in, "First man to own a ranch in the Texas Panhandle was killed in a poker game. Ol' Man Springer opened this here way station, general store, outside Mobeetie to serve the trail herds and buffalo hunters in 1877. He kept a poker game going almost every day. That was only two years after Quanah Parker and the Comanches surrendered to Col. MacKenzie and went on the reservation. Springer and his hired man were playing poker with some Cavalry men, buffalo soldiers, colored soldiers. The Indians called them that because their hair was like a buffalo's. A couple of them killed Springer and his hired man saying they'd been cheating. The Army had a little hearing about it, 'course nothing come of it. Poker can be dangerous. Ol' Springer was supposed to have won a lot of money and cows. The cowboys with them herds could get chips for cows, and Springer got together a big herd."
Lonnie started singing Stag O'Lee. Gentlemen of the jury, what do you think of that? Stag O'Lee killed Billy de Lyon about a five-dollar Stetson hat.
Ryan knew the song and the two were amazed at just how well their mellifluous voices blended together. They sounded like brothers who had sang together since childhood. They were very good, and they both knew it immediately.
After exchanging sanitized and slightly magnified versions of their life stories, Lonnie said they could get a job singing at the La Fonda in Santa Fe easily if Ryan was really good at guitar and could get over there.
"There's this here powerful Judge, Rudy Vigil. He loves poker and plays there nearly every afternoon. Long as he is there, it is never above five-dollar limit. But at night, after he leaves, they vote and take the limit off. "
Lonnie said he had been singing with an incredible beauty and musician, Gloria Chavez, a member of a well-known musical family. Lonnie didn't reveal that he loved her. He said he and Ryan could "sho nuff make better music and land a job easy." Her three brothers also had an act that rotated with their's at La Fonda. Gloria, only 20, had eloped with a wealthy rancher from northern New Mexico who was 46. Her father and brothers were making death threats. The families had hated each other for a couple of hundred years.
Dr. Grover Monahan, one of Amarillo's first and most respected doctors, sent a hired man over to see Lonnie. He apologized profusely and said the Doctor had nothing to do with his arrest. He also asked if he'd sell the horse and buggy back and asked what Lonnie wanted for it. Lonnie had walked over to the livery stable with the drunk Doctor around daylight and barely looked at his new prize. Lonnie told the man to ask the Doctor for a fair offer.
Lonnie and Ryan weren't surprised that they had both started out on shape note singing. Lonnie had sang with two church choirs. Both of their fathers played guitar and sang. Ryan said his uncle was in this Irish musical show in New York. Ryan said the whole O'Malley clan were big on their Irish roots, Irish foods, and songs. Lonnie said his family were Irish but he knew nothing of that. It was rarely mentioned.
Deputy Jack Collins broke in with another of his stories. "Right after Oklahoma became a state, there was this here man in the Oklahoma panhandle going on trial for something. The night before his trial, Ol' Temple Houston, Sam Houston's son, was playing poker with his two lawyers. He thought they was cheating and shot them both dead. He was a lawyer, so Temple defended the man for free and got him off. Then he got his own self off. Poker can be mighty dangerous."
Right at sundown, with slants of flat land light illuminating the jail, Deputy Sheriff Doak Bradshaw and his wife, Velma, came in with a pumpkin and pecan pies, mashed potatoes, and some unopened cans of cranberry sauce. Right after that, Sheriff Dink Flournoy arrived, followed closely by his wife Alma. She began to spread a white table cloth on the desk. The Sheriff was obviously drunk and carrying a gallon of red wine. He opened the cell door and handed the wine to Ryan who took a big swallow and handed it to Lonnie who did likewise.
"Sure hope y'all are hungry," Sheriff said, "'Cause Alma has been fussing over this all day."
When Sheriff Dink staggered across the room with Lonnie's guitar, both men pulled guitar picks from their pockets. Ryan reached out and grabbed the guitar. He picked a few notes, tuned it, and then quickly demonstrated that his finger picking style was more advanced than Lonnie's cording and strumming. Then he launched into House of the Rising Sun, and he and Lonnie stood facing the others, singing together, obviously delighted. Dink said, "these are bound to be the happiest jail birds I ever saw."
Just then, Ryan made it a medley doing a few verses of Frankie and Johnny and on into Stag O' Lee.
"These ol' boys don't just gamble, they sings about gambling," Dink continued. "Y'all need to sing a hymn or Christmas music for Alma. She's mighty religious."
Jack Collins started Rock of Ages, and then Silent Night. Ryan led them all on Joy to the World. Before dinner, Alma said a long prayer mentioning several Amarillo residents, her Arkansas cousins, sinful Texas cowboys, and other lost souls. Dink brought out two more gallons of red wine, and everyone but Alma was drinking freely. At the end of dinner, Dink was slurring his words when he presented Lonnie a check for $350 from Doc Monahan for the horse and buggy which was worth four times that. Lonnie accepted graciously, very surprised and happy to get it. They ate, sang, and drank long into the night, and often praised Alma for the memorable feast.
Lonnie staked Ryan to a train ticket to Santa Fe, a cheap suit, and a Porkpie hat that Ryan always wore with the brim up. He located his guitar. Lonnie had this annoying habit of writing down all his expenses, especially money loaned to or spent on Ryan, in a little black notebook he always carried in his coat pocket. They drew great crowds at La Fonda Thursday though Saturday nights. They always opened with House of the Rising Sun, their signature song. Ryan went into every business and government office in downtown Santa Fe introducing himself and inviting people to their show. Soon he put a tip jar on stage, which brought in good extra money. They added a Sunday afternoon show which was always packed.
Lonnie made the rules and was the unofficial boss. He banned any form of cheating at the poker, union songs, and mention of unions, especially Wobblies. Ryan swore he knew lots about cheating but never would because of the danger. Bravery was never Ryan's long suit. They were both regular winners in the afternoon poker games with a limit of $5. They played each other heads up and Lonnie always won. If wealthy ranchers made the night game too high for him, Lonnie would quit. Not Ryan. He went broke and built back up a bank roll over and over. One night Ryan was $1600 winner with Lonnie as his partner. Lonnie cut out his share of the winnings, urging Ryan to quit. Ryan lost his share all back. The very next morning, Lonnie was making Ryan a loan and marking it in the little notebook. Ryan wrote a funny song about Scrooge's Notebook and sang it at La Fonda. Lonnie loved it and wrote a couple of verses while they sang. That was the beginning of their song-writing partnership.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom, a novel.
October 05, 2010
I Screwed Your Sister in High School: A Lubbock Fable
By Johnny Hughes © 2010
Billy Sue Bailey, well-known local Tea Party leader, and prominent member of one of Lubbock's founding families was standing at the checkout counter in the upscale grocery store, Market Street.
Dewey Huffknot was standing right behind her. "I screwed your sister in high school," he said loudly, "In the backyard of y'all's historic home."
The teenager at the cash register was a frozen statute, holding a can of Del Monte Sweet Corn in mid-air. Dewey's naturally buggy eyes and perpetual half-grin gave him a surprised, innocent expression. His perfect flat top, and short-sleeved shirt with a plain, black, clip-on, bow tie shouted out, "Square!"
"What did you say to me?" Billy Sue turned sharply, with a rattle of bracelets and ear rings.
"I've seen you around many years. I've always wanted to say that to you. We dated a while. Where is Wild Jenny? I heard she is in Santa Fe. I hear you on talk radio all the time. Me and Jenny didn't go together long but she wanted to screw in the backyard one summer night I'll never forget."
Billy Sue Bailey still occupied the family home, one of the historic knock-offs of Tara, the plantation in Gone With the Wind, that face Texas Tech on 19th Street. Dewey always, always thought of Wild Jenny when he drove by there.
Billy Sue almost ran for the parking lot, abandoning her groceries and the startled clerk. She stood by her Lexus in the 100 degree heat calling her lawyer on her cell phone. Billy Sue was known far and wide for the walkouts and demonstrations at the annual county and state Republican Conventions. Neo-Nazi blogger, Don May, a.k.a. Dr. Doom, was her ideal ideologue. She labeled most everyone socialists on a few talk radio call ins each week. She liked to point out correctly that she was farther to the right than everyone else, everyone. Of the talk show hosts, Chad loved her. Wade tolerated her. Jim and Jeff went to a hard break or a Zogby Poll. At 38, she was a striking, even beautiful, brunette with the figure of a college girl.
Billy Sue hadn't spoken to her New Age, hippie, socialist sister in seventeen years, even though Jenny came to Lubbock often. In Santa Fe, Jenny was a crystal healer and channeled a five-hundred-year-old Navajo woman named Velvet Hands who was a massage therapist. Billy Sue didn't doubt for a minute Dewey's backyard humping memory.
Dewey's life was crashing down before his eyes. For sixteen years, he had been the Life Skills teacher at the Tornado Christian Military Academy, funded almost entirely by the late Asa Sheridan, Dewey's best friend, mentor and Bacardi Rum and Diet Coca-Cola partner every single Sunday afternoon. Dewey told folks, and it was very true, that Barack Obama killed Asa Sheridan, and therefore the Academy, which needed killing.
In the early days, Asa wanted the students to wear uniforms to celebrate the combat experience he had in World War Two, which was a lie since he entered the Army two years after the war ended. Asa was thrown out for bed wetting, sleep walking, and an outrageous, false charge of public masturbation stemming from a technicolor world-class wet dream he had in the barracks. The Academy parents resisted uniforms and most tuition increases.
Dewey had a wife, Ariel, the first four years he taught at the Academy. With him gone every Sunday, she began an affair with the young man who drove an ice cream truck through the neighborhood playing, "Pop Goes the Weasel" over and over. When Ariel changed Dewey's pet name from Cuddles to Caliban, he should have known the jig was up. Ariel and the ice cream man moved to Longview, Texas and opened a wildly successful Chuckie Cheese franchise. Any time Dewey would see an ice cream truck or hear any of their songs, he'd cry.
The Academy students were a joke all over town because they all marched for one class period a day outside if the temperature were above 25 degrees and the wind was below 90 miles per hour. Kids tagged them the "Tornado Marchers." The Academy, for seventh to ninth graders, was down to 164 students even though they hosted the annual Easter egg hunt for "home skooled" students hoping to meet some other right-wing white folks avoiding the socialist, government-run schools and minorities. The did have five old non-operative M-1 rifles and some students developed drill team skills twirling them around. Dewey took them over to Asa's house for delivered pizza, and they got drunk and watched them left face and right face around the yard. Dewey didn't really like rum and coke and would never have ordered it in a bar. However, he had lied to Asa on that first afternoon and it became their personal tradition.
In the early days, Asa and Dewey watched football with the rum and cokes, but since Obama's election, Asa, 81 when Obama finally killed him, left the television tuned to Fox News 24 hours a day, even when he slept. When Bill O'Reilly was on, Asa would stand very close to the set, militarily erect, almost as if at attention, but more like a trance. Asa had ordered O'Reilly's book for all the Academy parents, whether they could read or not. When Obama was elected, Asa was the model of health, and had five million dollars he had inherited from his father's lumber yard chain. He promised each Sunday that the Academy would be taken care of by the mysterious and generous will he spoke of often as a sick, old man's con. About three quarters way down the rum bottle, he'd let it slip that Dewey would get "a nephew's share" in his will.
Actually, telemarketers in Las Vegas who had "proof" that Obama was a foreign-born Muslim and Manchurian Candidate Muslim plant beat Asa out of most of his fortune, and he gave the rest to Sarah Palin. He had a series of strokes starting with Obama's election and became most profane at cursing the TV. Dewey thought it was Alzheimer's. Asa was the maddest man he had ever seen. He was popping Lipitor and Atenol like popcorn. Fox News was helping him secure some eye-popping blood pressure numbers.
When Dewey got home that afternoon, Todd, a lawyer and his younger brother, called with a "deal." He had to stay away from Billy Sue, not mention their family and get counseling or she would file stalking charges for holding her up to public ridicule. Billie Sue had also told Ronda Eloyd, the principal of the Academy, who couldn't make payroll anyway. Dewey protested that he really did screw Billy Sue's sister and that he was just telling the truth.
As a sideline, Dewey spoke in small high school assemblies on Life Skills which was basically an anti-sex lecture. He'd started out with twenty small town high schools a year, but most didn't invite him to return. Dewey, with the same flat top he'd had in high school, would sit in the middle of the stage at a table with his yellowed, veteran index cards and warn the teenage girls that boys will tell any lie, do anything to touch certain spots. He'd talk about hands outside clothes, hands that would unfasten bras, hands and the dangers of drive-ins and parking. He'd tell of a boy driving a girl out in the country and saying, "If you are not here after what I am here after, you will be here after I am gone."
He'd say that every boy, every single boy, will go into that locker room and tell that you went all the way whether you did or not if you let him touch certain spots. If he feels of your breast, he tells. Boys hated him as a gender traitor. When Dewey repeated his signature phrase, certain spots, he'd drag the words out and pause as he made eye contact with the prettiest girls. More than one high school counselor noticed that Dewey liked to hug the girls and that he held the hugs with the chubby ones way too long. Dewey was steadily hitting up on the young chicks in those small towns, often in the oil fields south of Midland.
Ronda asked for and received Dewey's resignation and a small retirement party was held at the Academy for the faculty. Ronda had heard talk that Dewey was a lecher with the girls in small towns. She had lost her own husband, an evangelist, when they were teaching at a Christian summer camp in New Mexico. Her husband had been caught giving two teenage girls LSD and malt liquor. They were thrown out that night. Their marriage did not survive the long, painful bus trip back to Texas.
For Dewey Huffknot's retirement party, they had a white cake from a bakery, some Fritos and bean dip, and this fire-engine red punch they served at every occasion. Ronda said some of the expected things, then Dewey began to speak.
"This place was founded by Asa Sheridan who promised me long-range funding one thousand times. Hey, we're all turning a page, huh? It's honesty time. When I'd go give those anti-sex lectures in the little towns, it would make me horny. I nailed me twelve of those young Texas beauties but none were underage, nothing illegal. I'd wait. One girl worked at the Dairy Queen in Crane. I started courting her when she was only fifteen. Single roses and Hallmark cards. I would drive 100 miles out of my way to see her."
It was the summing up of his years of teaching, and he chose his favorite memories.
The room began to empty rapidly. Ronda's fists had balled up and she couldn't open them, just like on that dreaded last bus ride with her ex-husband.
Dewey's brother agreed that he would attend a therapy group. This was someday-Doctor Nina Hemply's on-going group, last labeled anger management. Everybody there had made some deal to go there to keep from criminal charges being filed against them. Nina started out going over the rules for the new members, although Dewey was the only new member. Confidentially. Free expression. Cooperation. Share your feelings. No seeing other members outside the group.
Calvin, an outrageous gay dude with so many piercing's he couldn't pass though airport security, had stabbed his roommate in a dispute over a floral arrangement. He chimed in, "Why is that Big Nurse? What if I want to see Mr. Wilson or Jose for a beer or something?"
Nina went into this carny pitch about being a Rogerian explorer helping them map their untapped inner feelings.
Mr. Wilson's son had attempted to have him declared incompetent in order to control the worthless oil rights on the old family farm. He had traded away the cotton farm and kept the mineral interest in order to invest in exploration and 3-D Seismic surveys that indicated there was no oil. Mr. Wilson said it was the greatest hot weather for a record cotton crop after record rains. The price of cotton had nearly doubled in a year, the highest in twenty years. His family wouldn't harvest a single boll. Not one boll because of his idiot son. Mr. Wilson had fired both barrels of a shot gun over his son's head in his front yard when he came out to get his Lubbock Avalanche Journal one morning.
Nina was a large, tall woman, not fat, more like a big, muscled man. She ran the group with an iron hand and a soft heart. She was very, very good at what she did although few of the clients knew that. She warned Mr. Wilson that "graduation" from the group was based on her report to the District Attorney's office. It depended on progress in "owning and authenticating and using your anger."
Ernest Watkins and his wife were locked in a bitter child-custody battle. Neither he nor his wife wanted their black-clad, heavily tattooed, nail-polish sniffing, expert shoplifter, twin girls. He was the maddest man there.
There was also a wife abuser, a man who was abused by his wife, a hard-shell Baptist church youth minister, a parolee, an ambulance driver, and a Catholic priest, all men.
When Nina asked Dewey to reveal the source of his anger and how his anger brought him to the group, he said he didn't hear about anger until after he got there. Then he told the story of Billie Sue at the supermarket, and his confession at his retirement party. The other guys roared with laughter. Nina saw this as as cohesion building and a critical stage in the group developmental process. She was curious about the sex part. She left for the bathroom.
While she was gone, Mr. Wilson invited them all over to his house that very evening to grill steaks outside, drink beer, shoot pool, and break Nina's rules. All but Jose Alvarado accepted. He was on parole and a member of a lesser-known, out of favor, prison gang.
"I can't be hanging out with all you outlaws," he said. "I'd end up back in jail."
That first night, Dewey brought his old index cards with the famous quotations, and jokes from old Reader's Digests. Calvin immediately asked him about his twelve sexual conquests in the little towns. Mr. Wilson echoed that question. They liked to talk about sex and the group bonded, just as the absent Nina intended. There was Dewey, just as he was supposed to be, just as he felt called to be, up before a group talking about sex, only now, he could tell the truth, finally.
They continued to meet each week at Wilson's house, and even took up a collection for a turquoise and silver necklace for Nina. She cried. Life-long friendships were developing. Mr. Wilson funded a used CD and book store for he and Dewey to own together. It became a hangout for the group members who often came for coffee in the mornings. Dewey Huffknot had another rich mentor and another job, for awhile.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
Billy Sue Bailey, well-known local Tea Party leader, and prominent member of one of Lubbock's founding families was standing at the checkout counter in the upscale grocery store, Market Street.
Dewey Huffknot was standing right behind her. "I screwed your sister in high school," he said loudly, "In the backyard of y'all's historic home."
The teenager at the cash register was a frozen statute, holding a can of Del Monte Sweet Corn in mid-air. Dewey's naturally buggy eyes and perpetual half-grin gave him a surprised, innocent expression. His perfect flat top, and short-sleeved shirt with a plain, black, clip-on, bow tie shouted out, "Square!"
"What did you say to me?" Billy Sue turned sharply, with a rattle of bracelets and ear rings.
"I've seen you around many years. I've always wanted to say that to you. We dated a while. Where is Wild Jenny? I heard she is in Santa Fe. I hear you on talk radio all the time. Me and Jenny didn't go together long but she wanted to screw in the backyard one summer night I'll never forget."
Billy Sue Bailey still occupied the family home, one of the historic knock-offs of Tara, the plantation in Gone With the Wind, that face Texas Tech on 19th Street. Dewey always, always thought of Wild Jenny when he drove by there.
Billy Sue almost ran for the parking lot, abandoning her groceries and the startled clerk. She stood by her Lexus in the 100 degree heat calling her lawyer on her cell phone. Billy Sue was known far and wide for the walkouts and demonstrations at the annual county and state Republican Conventions. Neo-Nazi blogger, Don May, a.k.a. Dr. Doom, was her ideal ideologue. She labeled most everyone socialists on a few talk radio call ins each week. She liked to point out correctly that she was farther to the right than everyone else, everyone. Of the talk show hosts, Chad loved her. Wade tolerated her. Jim and Jeff went to a hard break or a Zogby Poll. At 38, she was a striking, even beautiful, brunette with the figure of a college girl.
Billy Sue hadn't spoken to her New Age, hippie, socialist sister in seventeen years, even though Jenny came to Lubbock often. In Santa Fe, Jenny was a crystal healer and channeled a five-hundred-year-old Navajo woman named Velvet Hands who was a massage therapist. Billy Sue didn't doubt for a minute Dewey's backyard humping memory.
Dewey's life was crashing down before his eyes. For sixteen years, he had been the Life Skills teacher at the Tornado Christian Military Academy, funded almost entirely by the late Asa Sheridan, Dewey's best friend, mentor and Bacardi Rum and Diet Coca-Cola partner every single Sunday afternoon. Dewey told folks, and it was very true, that Barack Obama killed Asa Sheridan, and therefore the Academy, which needed killing.
In the early days, Asa wanted the students to wear uniforms to celebrate the combat experience he had in World War Two, which was a lie since he entered the Army two years after the war ended. Asa was thrown out for bed wetting, sleep walking, and an outrageous, false charge of public masturbation stemming from a technicolor world-class wet dream he had in the barracks. The Academy parents resisted uniforms and most tuition increases.
Dewey had a wife, Ariel, the first four years he taught at the Academy. With him gone every Sunday, she began an affair with the young man who drove an ice cream truck through the neighborhood playing, "Pop Goes the Weasel" over and over. When Ariel changed Dewey's pet name from Cuddles to Caliban, he should have known the jig was up. Ariel and the ice cream man moved to Longview, Texas and opened a wildly successful Chuckie Cheese franchise. Any time Dewey would see an ice cream truck or hear any of their songs, he'd cry.
The Academy students were a joke all over town because they all marched for one class period a day outside if the temperature were above 25 degrees and the wind was below 90 miles per hour. Kids tagged them the "Tornado Marchers." The Academy, for seventh to ninth graders, was down to 164 students even though they hosted the annual Easter egg hunt for "home skooled" students hoping to meet some other right-wing white folks avoiding the socialist, government-run schools and minorities. The did have five old non-operative M-1 rifles and some students developed drill team skills twirling them around. Dewey took them over to Asa's house for delivered pizza, and they got drunk and watched them left face and right face around the yard. Dewey didn't really like rum and coke and would never have ordered it in a bar. However, he had lied to Asa on that first afternoon and it became their personal tradition.
In the early days, Asa and Dewey watched football with the rum and cokes, but since Obama's election, Asa, 81 when Obama finally killed him, left the television tuned to Fox News 24 hours a day, even when he slept. When Bill O'Reilly was on, Asa would stand very close to the set, militarily erect, almost as if at attention, but more like a trance. Asa had ordered O'Reilly's book for all the Academy parents, whether they could read or not. When Obama was elected, Asa was the model of health, and had five million dollars he had inherited from his father's lumber yard chain. He promised each Sunday that the Academy would be taken care of by the mysterious and generous will he spoke of often as a sick, old man's con. About three quarters way down the rum bottle, he'd let it slip that Dewey would get "a nephew's share" in his will.
Actually, telemarketers in Las Vegas who had "proof" that Obama was a foreign-born Muslim and Manchurian Candidate Muslim plant beat Asa out of most of his fortune, and he gave the rest to Sarah Palin. He had a series of strokes starting with Obama's election and became most profane at cursing the TV. Dewey thought it was Alzheimer's. Asa was the maddest man he had ever seen. He was popping Lipitor and Atenol like popcorn. Fox News was helping him secure some eye-popping blood pressure numbers.
When Dewey got home that afternoon, Todd, a lawyer and his younger brother, called with a "deal." He had to stay away from Billy Sue, not mention their family and get counseling or she would file stalking charges for holding her up to public ridicule. Billie Sue had also told Ronda Eloyd, the principal of the Academy, who couldn't make payroll anyway. Dewey protested that he really did screw Billy Sue's sister and that he was just telling the truth.
As a sideline, Dewey spoke in small high school assemblies on Life Skills which was basically an anti-sex lecture. He'd started out with twenty small town high schools a year, but most didn't invite him to return. Dewey, with the same flat top he'd had in high school, would sit in the middle of the stage at a table with his yellowed, veteran index cards and warn the teenage girls that boys will tell any lie, do anything to touch certain spots. He'd talk about hands outside clothes, hands that would unfasten bras, hands and the dangers of drive-ins and parking. He'd tell of a boy driving a girl out in the country and saying, "If you are not here after what I am here after, you will be here after I am gone."
He'd say that every boy, every single boy, will go into that locker room and tell that you went all the way whether you did or not if you let him touch certain spots. If he feels of your breast, he tells. Boys hated him as a gender traitor. When Dewey repeated his signature phrase, certain spots, he'd drag the words out and pause as he made eye contact with the prettiest girls. More than one high school counselor noticed that Dewey liked to hug the girls and that he held the hugs with the chubby ones way too long. Dewey was steadily hitting up on the young chicks in those small towns, often in the oil fields south of Midland.
Ronda asked for and received Dewey's resignation and a small retirement party was held at the Academy for the faculty. Ronda had heard talk that Dewey was a lecher with the girls in small towns. She had lost her own husband, an evangelist, when they were teaching at a Christian summer camp in New Mexico. Her husband had been caught giving two teenage girls LSD and malt liquor. They were thrown out that night. Their marriage did not survive the long, painful bus trip back to Texas.
For Dewey Huffknot's retirement party, they had a white cake from a bakery, some Fritos and bean dip, and this fire-engine red punch they served at every occasion. Ronda said some of the expected things, then Dewey began to speak.
"This place was founded by Asa Sheridan who promised me long-range funding one thousand times. Hey, we're all turning a page, huh? It's honesty time. When I'd go give those anti-sex lectures in the little towns, it would make me horny. I nailed me twelve of those young Texas beauties but none were underage, nothing illegal. I'd wait. One girl worked at the Dairy Queen in Crane. I started courting her when she was only fifteen. Single roses and Hallmark cards. I would drive 100 miles out of my way to see her."
It was the summing up of his years of teaching, and he chose his favorite memories.
The room began to empty rapidly. Ronda's fists had balled up and she couldn't open them, just like on that dreaded last bus ride with her ex-husband.
Dewey's brother agreed that he would attend a therapy group. This was someday-Doctor Nina Hemply's on-going group, last labeled anger management. Everybody there had made some deal to go there to keep from criminal charges being filed against them. Nina started out going over the rules for the new members, although Dewey was the only new member. Confidentially. Free expression. Cooperation. Share your feelings. No seeing other members outside the group.
Calvin, an outrageous gay dude with so many piercing's he couldn't pass though airport security, had stabbed his roommate in a dispute over a floral arrangement. He chimed in, "Why is that Big Nurse? What if I want to see Mr. Wilson or Jose for a beer or something?"
Nina went into this carny pitch about being a Rogerian explorer helping them map their untapped inner feelings.
Mr. Wilson's son had attempted to have him declared incompetent in order to control the worthless oil rights on the old family farm. He had traded away the cotton farm and kept the mineral interest in order to invest in exploration and 3-D Seismic surveys that indicated there was no oil. Mr. Wilson said it was the greatest hot weather for a record cotton crop after record rains. The price of cotton had nearly doubled in a year, the highest in twenty years. His family wouldn't harvest a single boll. Not one boll because of his idiot son. Mr. Wilson had fired both barrels of a shot gun over his son's head in his front yard when he came out to get his Lubbock Avalanche Journal one morning.
Nina was a large, tall woman, not fat, more like a big, muscled man. She ran the group with an iron hand and a soft heart. She was very, very good at what she did although few of the clients knew that. She warned Mr. Wilson that "graduation" from the group was based on her report to the District Attorney's office. It depended on progress in "owning and authenticating and using your anger."
Ernest Watkins and his wife were locked in a bitter child-custody battle. Neither he nor his wife wanted their black-clad, heavily tattooed, nail-polish sniffing, expert shoplifter, twin girls. He was the maddest man there.
There was also a wife abuser, a man who was abused by his wife, a hard-shell Baptist church youth minister, a parolee, an ambulance driver, and a Catholic priest, all men.
When Nina asked Dewey to reveal the source of his anger and how his anger brought him to the group, he said he didn't hear about anger until after he got there. Then he told the story of Billie Sue at the supermarket, and his confession at his retirement party. The other guys roared with laughter. Nina saw this as as cohesion building and a critical stage in the group developmental process. She was curious about the sex part. She left for the bathroom.
While she was gone, Mr. Wilson invited them all over to his house that very evening to grill steaks outside, drink beer, shoot pool, and break Nina's rules. All but Jose Alvarado accepted. He was on parole and a member of a lesser-known, out of favor, prison gang.
"I can't be hanging out with all you outlaws," he said. "I'd end up back in jail."
That first night, Dewey brought his old index cards with the famous quotations, and jokes from old Reader's Digests. Calvin immediately asked him about his twelve sexual conquests in the little towns. Mr. Wilson echoed that question. They liked to talk about sex and the group bonded, just as the absent Nina intended. There was Dewey, just as he was supposed to be, just as he felt called to be, up before a group talking about sex, only now, he could tell the truth, finally.
They continued to meet each week at Wilson's house, and even took up a collection for a turquoise and silver necklace for Nina. She cried. Life-long friendships were developing. Mr. Wilson funded a used CD and book store for he and Dewey to own together. It became a hangout for the group members who often came for coffee in the mornings. Dewey Huffknot had another rich mentor and another job, for awhile.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
August 05, 2010
Russian Spies
By Johnny Hughes © 2010
So, they caught some Russian spies! Finally. I've been waiting since the end of World War Two when I started grade school. I'm from Lubbock, Texas, the second-most conservative city in the USA. We grew up on imaginary enemies, foreign and domestic. During World War Two, my Dad was a Major in the Texas Army Reserves. They did maneuvers in Mackenzie Park. I was five when a tear gas grenade landed near the car I was in. They had dances and could jitterbug like crazy. We had a Army Ambulance in the backyard. Dad worked for a German! A geologist, and I kept an eye on him for sure. We kids played war all the time, killing Japanese and Germans, not called that. One big deal was that we were always cauterizing imaginary wounds. We'd walk to the nine-cent movies, the money came from selling coke bottles purloined from garages. Then we'd come home and "play" the movie. Wasn't a kid in Texas couldn't make a pretty good machine-gun sound or pantomime pulling the pin of a grenade with their teeth and throwing it or getting shot always in the chest, with a slow dramatic death scene. We also fell on a large number of grenades temporarily dying for our friends. The girls played nurse and they were always "treating" us. Bandages and slings for our arms. I'd get imaginary shot right off the bat, to snuggle up to a healing nurse.
I visited a friend and while prowling his garage, I saw a big box of sunglasses that were round. Wow. Japanese probably, like all the propaganda war movies. I visited my grandmother on the edge of Los Angeles. Japanese-American farmers were growing beans and other vegetables right down the road. I attacked, tearing up as much as I could. I was six.
With the war over, the new enemy were the Godless, Russian communists. It was a tad confusing. They had been our pal and Germany and Japan and Italy for a while had been the bad guys. They showed a T.V. series to all the students in grade school each week entitled, "I Was a Communist For the F.B.I." Its premise backed up by a nut-case, self-promoting, evil U.S. Senator named Joe McCarthy was that there were communists everywhere infiltrating American society. McCarthy said there were a lot of communists in the State Department or the Army. We grade school kids were on the lookout for them.
The House Un-American Activities Committee imagined a nest of Hollywood actor, director, and writer commies. This made the Salem Witch Trials seem like a Cub Scout meeting. Political careers were made chasing imaginary communists who were a lot sharper than the real communists.
Rather often, a New Yorker or some kind of yankee would be mistaken for a possibly-evil foreigner because they talk funny, not like we Lubbockians. Everyone from Richard Nixon on called their opponent a communist in political races. The biggie was "soft on communism" as a common tag put on anybody to the left of Atilla the Hun.
One of my best pal's fathers would go downtown and show these John Birch Society movies on the side of the white walls of the Lindsey Theatre while a line was waiting to see a real movie. I still remember the maps with all the countries the communists controlled in black and arrows of where they were coming after us.
In school, we'd practice fire drills, my favorite part of school, and atomic bomb drills where we would sit under our wooden desks and cover our heads with our hands. That was a good time to slip an Alka Seltzer in the ink well of the girl you were flirting with most and passing notes where she put little circles for the dots on the i, and a row of x s to indicate kisses. These were on blue-lined notebook paper folded four times to fit in a back Levis pocket and easy to pass without the teacher seeing.
Radio and television kept up a steady drone about atomic warfare. The mushroom-shaped cloud was tattooed on our little brains and nobody expected to live too long. Our first readings of Kerouac and the beats confirmed that.
My Aunt was an Army Nurse, a Lieutenant Colonel finally, in World War Two and Korea. From Korea, she'd send funny letters about fighting the communists. This was the first of a series of surrogate wars, Vietnam being the biggie, where we fought the Russians in some other country. Usually North versus South kind of like our civil war. The Germans, historically uncooperative, were divided East and West, but that was our side's doings.
For Korea, we had maps to trace the troop movements. She wrote the university there was named, "O Pusan U." She was in the Mash unit that provided fodder for the TV series. Suddenly, the Chinese communists came flooding down from the north, and our forces, including the field hospitals, were in full retreat. We had a new enemy: Chinese.
The old showman, General Douglas MacArthur, of the corn-cob pipe and long-brimmed Army hat with lots of gold braid wanted to bomb hell out of North Korea. So did conservatives in West Texas, but they are always for bombing someone, now Iran or Mexico or maybe British Petroleum. When President Truman fired MacArthur, the General got this big ticker tape parade in New York, and made a speech. Here again, we in grade school all listened to the speech in our class rooms. He sounded like the hard-shell Baptists' idea of God and said, "Old soldiers never die. They just fade away."
When General MacArthur split the Philippines at the start of World War Two, he loaded all his furniture and personal effects on a ship and left the troops for the Japanese prisons. Being this remarkably quotable guy he said, "I shall return." That would be on free Army cigarettes. And he did return.
When I started college in 1957, we had to sign a loyalty oath saying we weren't communists. We'd all been looking for communists really hard but nobody had ever actually met one. The devious sons of bitches. I played poker to go to college the next eight years. By the sixties, I was subject to the draft, and had to pass in college to keep a deferment. The Army Reserve had this option where you go for six months active duty and six years in the reserves making weekly meetings and summer camp.
In 1962, I joined the Army and truthfully listed my profession as card player: poker, gin rummy, and tournament bridge. Card players had been instrumental in breaking the Japanese code and had worked in intelligence and cryptography, code breaking. I was a 723.1, I think I remember. When they'd take pictures of the troops, me and my buddy would be told to stand aside. We went to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri for basic training in July. Dumb. The Sergeants stole lots of food at night from the mess hall. The psycho, company commander Lieutenant would not allow but one glass of milk, one slice of bread per meal. Everybody was getting skinny.
Once they announced that guys with hurt feet or sore feet could volunteer to ride in a truck to the rifle range and set up targets. A quick IQ test. Several smart and funny guys limped out from varied places. Rather than march 14 miles in oppressive heat carrying packs and rifles, we rode in the back of a truck and joked and joked. We became a cohesive group of a few names: The Unauthorized Stragglers, The Colonels of the Urinal, The Rumor Core. We started rumors often. We rode the truck every day. Guys would pass out often from the heat and hit the pavement with a lot of noise.
After basic I went to Ft. Gordon, Georgia to communications school. I got a Top Secret Clearance but not in time for the cryptography school. A few gambling arrests slowed it down. I typed these five numbers in rows over and over. We also learned intelligence and were trained in keeping secrets. We were to watch out for Russian women trying to talk to us in the bars of Augusta. We got to go to town all the time, but the Russians screwed it up with the Cuban Missile Crisis. One day we go in the rec room, where the Sarge is watching cartoons. It pissed him off when we turned to Kennedy telling about the brink of atomic war. Fort Gordon went wild. They told everyone to write their wills. Real soldiers, career guys, were shipping out. My buddies and I went to a Jackie Gleason movie on post, and did not leave when they made this emergency announcement for all troops to return to quarters. They'd been telling us about the mushroom-shaped cloud since I was in knee britches, so I'd built up some immunity.
In the Army we did a atomic bomb drill. We put on our plastic, rain ponchos. The Sergeant said to sit on the ground and cover your head with the poncho. Then he said, "Now kiss your ass goodbye."
Hey, I'd figured that part out sitting under my desk in grade school.
Paul Krasser had a New York underground newspaper called The Realist. He sold and I bought a colorful bumper sticker with hammers and sickles that read: FUCK COMMUNISM.
We six month soldiers were often called draft dodgers by the Sergeants. No way they'd use us. In basic, when the Puerto Rican Sergeant would lead us in marching and singing the songs, he had a thick accent, "I got zee girl live up on zee hill. She won't do it but her seester will."
We'd sing in back in the accent. Not great soldiers.
We were confined to the fort until I got out before Christmas. Lots of guys left to camp in the Florida Keys. Marines came through all the way from California riding in the back of a deuce and a half, a truck. Even those scary-looking WACS, built like fullbacks, began to look good.
Back home, I didn't have to go to the Army Reserve meetings every week or the summer camps but twice. I had papers saying I worked nights at Dub Barnett's liquor store. I did work there some. He also staked me in bigger poker games. When Viet Nam escalated, I had to go back to meetings. My first summer camp, I went to the N.C.O. (non-commissioned officer) academy which was silly. I was an E-2, the lowest rank of all the whole six years of reserves. While there, I lost all my money fading dice to some Hispanics from San Antonio. I started out hiring guys to shine boots, take off laundry, etc. I ended up doing it for chump change.
Our unit of the reserves was Civil Affairs basically training to occupy a South American country. Each week, the guy would pronounce words in Spanish and we'd repeat them loudly. He didn't tell us what the words meant, if he knew. It is neat to at least pronounce words well in Spanish.
One summer, I was the Master of Ceremonies and corny joke teller at the Division Talent Show and Beauty contest at Ft. Hood. We prepared a week, and I wore civies, slept late, and had a Captain driving me around. The beauties from all over Texas each thought the allotted minute and a half I would read about them was not enough. Lots of twirlers. They promoted me to Private First Class for only that one night, and got me a shirt with a stripe. My only Army stripe ever. I can claim to be an ex-PFC, like Wintergreen. There were five generals and nine-hundred people at the show. As soon as it was over, everyone but me headed for the party at the officer's club. They put me on days of field kitchen patrol scrubbing John Wayne size pots in the unforgiving Texas sunshine.
After college, I got my first job, as a traveling book salesman for McGraw-Hill Book Company. Half of Texas and all of New Mexico was my territory. Our Dallas office was in the Texas School Book Depository. This was in 1965, two years after the Kennedy assassination. Finally, after decades: a communist was spied, the first real one anybody knew of. A communist had worked there: Lee Harvey Oswald. First rattle out of the box, the owner of the joint has me standing in this sixth-floor window which was Oswald's perch. The people that worked at the Texas School Book Depository believed it was a conspiracy. When William Manchester's book about the assassination and the Kennedys came out, I'd read part of it in each high school or college I stopped at, and had it read in a few days.
We'll never know, but I think Oswald was the only shooter but he had a small group involved, the honcho being New Orleans mafia boss, Carlos Marcello. I'd been in Jack Ruby's strip club when he freaked out yelling at a comic for saying, "Jesus." Hard to believe he was in on a conspiracy but he knew Marcello and probably laid off football bets to him. May have owed a bunch of money. Texas Tech's Southwest Collection has the papers from the Texas part of the Kennedy assassination investigation, including Jack Ruby's phone records. He called out every few minutes before kickoff on big football bet days.
Finally, communism fell in Russia because communism doesn't work. It is so inefficient that it has spies here that couldn't touch a computer-nerd fifth grader when it comes to finding information.
We are going to swap some spies with the Ruskies. They need to go to the Check Point Charley in Berlin, which is probably not there now, on a really foggy night, everybody in a full-length London Fog rain coats, with fedoras pulled over their eyes, and shoulder holsters with barking iron. They can talk about, "coming in from the cold."
The punishment for the Russian spies is that they have to go live in Russia. Serves the son-of-a-bitches right.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
So, they caught some Russian spies! Finally. I've been waiting since the end of World War Two when I started grade school. I'm from Lubbock, Texas, the second-most conservative city in the USA. We grew up on imaginary enemies, foreign and domestic. During World War Two, my Dad was a Major in the Texas Army Reserves. They did maneuvers in Mackenzie Park. I was five when a tear gas grenade landed near the car I was in. They had dances and could jitterbug like crazy. We had a Army Ambulance in the backyard. Dad worked for a German! A geologist, and I kept an eye on him for sure. We kids played war all the time, killing Japanese and Germans, not called that. One big deal was that we were always cauterizing imaginary wounds. We'd walk to the nine-cent movies, the money came from selling coke bottles purloined from garages. Then we'd come home and "play" the movie. Wasn't a kid in Texas couldn't make a pretty good machine-gun sound or pantomime pulling the pin of a grenade with their teeth and throwing it or getting shot always in the chest, with a slow dramatic death scene. We also fell on a large number of grenades temporarily dying for our friends. The girls played nurse and they were always "treating" us. Bandages and slings for our arms. I'd get imaginary shot right off the bat, to snuggle up to a healing nurse.
I visited a friend and while prowling his garage, I saw a big box of sunglasses that were round. Wow. Japanese probably, like all the propaganda war movies. I visited my grandmother on the edge of Los Angeles. Japanese-American farmers were growing beans and other vegetables right down the road. I attacked, tearing up as much as I could. I was six.
With the war over, the new enemy were the Godless, Russian communists. It was a tad confusing. They had been our pal and Germany and Japan and Italy for a while had been the bad guys. They showed a T.V. series to all the students in grade school each week entitled, "I Was a Communist For the F.B.I." Its premise backed up by a nut-case, self-promoting, evil U.S. Senator named Joe McCarthy was that there were communists everywhere infiltrating American society. McCarthy said there were a lot of communists in the State Department or the Army. We grade school kids were on the lookout for them.
The House Un-American Activities Committee imagined a nest of Hollywood actor, director, and writer commies. This made the Salem Witch Trials seem like a Cub Scout meeting. Political careers were made chasing imaginary communists who were a lot sharper than the real communists.
Rather often, a New Yorker or some kind of yankee would be mistaken for a possibly-evil foreigner because they talk funny, not like we Lubbockians. Everyone from Richard Nixon on called their opponent a communist in political races. The biggie was "soft on communism" as a common tag put on anybody to the left of Atilla the Hun.
One of my best pal's fathers would go downtown and show these John Birch Society movies on the side of the white walls of the Lindsey Theatre while a line was waiting to see a real movie. I still remember the maps with all the countries the communists controlled in black and arrows of where they were coming after us.
In school, we'd practice fire drills, my favorite part of school, and atomic bomb drills where we would sit under our wooden desks and cover our heads with our hands. That was a good time to slip an Alka Seltzer in the ink well of the girl you were flirting with most and passing notes where she put little circles for the dots on the i, and a row of x s to indicate kisses. These were on blue-lined notebook paper folded four times to fit in a back Levis pocket and easy to pass without the teacher seeing.
Radio and television kept up a steady drone about atomic warfare. The mushroom-shaped cloud was tattooed on our little brains and nobody expected to live too long. Our first readings of Kerouac and the beats confirmed that.
My Aunt was an Army Nurse, a Lieutenant Colonel finally, in World War Two and Korea. From Korea, she'd send funny letters about fighting the communists. This was the first of a series of surrogate wars, Vietnam being the biggie, where we fought the Russians in some other country. Usually North versus South kind of like our civil war. The Germans, historically uncooperative, were divided East and West, but that was our side's doings.
For Korea, we had maps to trace the troop movements. She wrote the university there was named, "O Pusan U." She was in the Mash unit that provided fodder for the TV series. Suddenly, the Chinese communists came flooding down from the north, and our forces, including the field hospitals, were in full retreat. We had a new enemy: Chinese.
The old showman, General Douglas MacArthur, of the corn-cob pipe and long-brimmed Army hat with lots of gold braid wanted to bomb hell out of North Korea. So did conservatives in West Texas, but they are always for bombing someone, now Iran or Mexico or maybe British Petroleum. When President Truman fired MacArthur, the General got this big ticker tape parade in New York, and made a speech. Here again, we in grade school all listened to the speech in our class rooms. He sounded like the hard-shell Baptists' idea of God and said, "Old soldiers never die. They just fade away."
When General MacArthur split the Philippines at the start of World War Two, he loaded all his furniture and personal effects on a ship and left the troops for the Japanese prisons. Being this remarkably quotable guy he said, "I shall return." That would be on free Army cigarettes. And he did return.
When I started college in 1957, we had to sign a loyalty oath saying we weren't communists. We'd all been looking for communists really hard but nobody had ever actually met one. The devious sons of bitches. I played poker to go to college the next eight years. By the sixties, I was subject to the draft, and had to pass in college to keep a deferment. The Army Reserve had this option where you go for six months active duty and six years in the reserves making weekly meetings and summer camp.
In 1962, I joined the Army and truthfully listed my profession as card player: poker, gin rummy, and tournament bridge. Card players had been instrumental in breaking the Japanese code and had worked in intelligence and cryptography, code breaking. I was a 723.1, I think I remember. When they'd take pictures of the troops, me and my buddy would be told to stand aside. We went to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri for basic training in July. Dumb. The Sergeants stole lots of food at night from the mess hall. The psycho, company commander Lieutenant would not allow but one glass of milk, one slice of bread per meal. Everybody was getting skinny.
Once they announced that guys with hurt feet or sore feet could volunteer to ride in a truck to the rifle range and set up targets. A quick IQ test. Several smart and funny guys limped out from varied places. Rather than march 14 miles in oppressive heat carrying packs and rifles, we rode in the back of a truck and joked and joked. We became a cohesive group of a few names: The Unauthorized Stragglers, The Colonels of the Urinal, The Rumor Core. We started rumors often. We rode the truck every day. Guys would pass out often from the heat and hit the pavement with a lot of noise.
After basic I went to Ft. Gordon, Georgia to communications school. I got a Top Secret Clearance but not in time for the cryptography school. A few gambling arrests slowed it down. I typed these five numbers in rows over and over. We also learned intelligence and were trained in keeping secrets. We were to watch out for Russian women trying to talk to us in the bars of Augusta. We got to go to town all the time, but the Russians screwed it up with the Cuban Missile Crisis. One day we go in the rec room, where the Sarge is watching cartoons. It pissed him off when we turned to Kennedy telling about the brink of atomic war. Fort Gordon went wild. They told everyone to write their wills. Real soldiers, career guys, were shipping out. My buddies and I went to a Jackie Gleason movie on post, and did not leave when they made this emergency announcement for all troops to return to quarters. They'd been telling us about the mushroom-shaped cloud since I was in knee britches, so I'd built up some immunity.
In the Army we did a atomic bomb drill. We put on our plastic, rain ponchos. The Sergeant said to sit on the ground and cover your head with the poncho. Then he said, "Now kiss your ass goodbye."
Hey, I'd figured that part out sitting under my desk in grade school.
Paul Krasser had a New York underground newspaper called The Realist. He sold and I bought a colorful bumper sticker with hammers and sickles that read: FUCK COMMUNISM.
We six month soldiers were often called draft dodgers by the Sergeants. No way they'd use us. In basic, when the Puerto Rican Sergeant would lead us in marching and singing the songs, he had a thick accent, "I got zee girl live up on zee hill. She won't do it but her seester will."
We'd sing in back in the accent. Not great soldiers.
We were confined to the fort until I got out before Christmas. Lots of guys left to camp in the Florida Keys. Marines came through all the way from California riding in the back of a deuce and a half, a truck. Even those scary-looking WACS, built like fullbacks, began to look good.
Back home, I didn't have to go to the Army Reserve meetings every week or the summer camps but twice. I had papers saying I worked nights at Dub Barnett's liquor store. I did work there some. He also staked me in bigger poker games. When Viet Nam escalated, I had to go back to meetings. My first summer camp, I went to the N.C.O. (non-commissioned officer) academy which was silly. I was an E-2, the lowest rank of all the whole six years of reserves. While there, I lost all my money fading dice to some Hispanics from San Antonio. I started out hiring guys to shine boots, take off laundry, etc. I ended up doing it for chump change.
Our unit of the reserves was Civil Affairs basically training to occupy a South American country. Each week, the guy would pronounce words in Spanish and we'd repeat them loudly. He didn't tell us what the words meant, if he knew. It is neat to at least pronounce words well in Spanish.
One summer, I was the Master of Ceremonies and corny joke teller at the Division Talent Show and Beauty contest at Ft. Hood. We prepared a week, and I wore civies, slept late, and had a Captain driving me around. The beauties from all over Texas each thought the allotted minute and a half I would read about them was not enough. Lots of twirlers. They promoted me to Private First Class for only that one night, and got me a shirt with a stripe. My only Army stripe ever. I can claim to be an ex-PFC, like Wintergreen. There were five generals and nine-hundred people at the show. As soon as it was over, everyone but me headed for the party at the officer's club. They put me on days of field kitchen patrol scrubbing John Wayne size pots in the unforgiving Texas sunshine.
After college, I got my first job, as a traveling book salesman for McGraw-Hill Book Company. Half of Texas and all of New Mexico was my territory. Our Dallas office was in the Texas School Book Depository. This was in 1965, two years after the Kennedy assassination. Finally, after decades: a communist was spied, the first real one anybody knew of. A communist had worked there: Lee Harvey Oswald. First rattle out of the box, the owner of the joint has me standing in this sixth-floor window which was Oswald's perch. The people that worked at the Texas School Book Depository believed it was a conspiracy. When William Manchester's book about the assassination and the Kennedys came out, I'd read part of it in each high school or college I stopped at, and had it read in a few days.
We'll never know, but I think Oswald was the only shooter but he had a small group involved, the honcho being New Orleans mafia boss, Carlos Marcello. I'd been in Jack Ruby's strip club when he freaked out yelling at a comic for saying, "Jesus." Hard to believe he was in on a conspiracy but he knew Marcello and probably laid off football bets to him. May have owed a bunch of money. Texas Tech's Southwest Collection has the papers from the Texas part of the Kennedy assassination investigation, including Jack Ruby's phone records. He called out every few minutes before kickoff on big football bet days.
Finally, communism fell in Russia because communism doesn't work. It is so inefficient that it has spies here that couldn't touch a computer-nerd fifth grader when it comes to finding information.
We are going to swap some spies with the Ruskies. They need to go to the Check Point Charley in Berlin, which is probably not there now, on a really foggy night, everybody in a full-length London Fog rain coats, with fedoras pulled over their eyes, and shoulder holsters with barking iron. They can talk about, "coming in from the cold."
The punishment for the Russian spies is that they have to go live in Russia. Serves the son-of-a-bitches right.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
April 03, 2010
Crazy Colonel Ranald MacKenzie: The West Texas Indian Wars of the 1870s
Johnny Hughes © 2010
In this part of West Texas, Colonel Ranald "Bad Hand" MacKenzie is seen as the hero of the Indian wars of the 1870s. There were so-called battles in all our area canyons: Yellow House, Blanco, Tule, White River, and the last and largest battle of the Red River Wars, in Palo Duro Canyon against Quanah Parker, and several tribes. MacKenzie had to spend more time killing people than anyone in American history. He entered the Civil War in 1862. Right after the Civil War, he began leading cavalry charges on Indian villages against dozens of tribes in several states and Mexico. This went on until 1880.
To hell with the movies, there was a real sameness about Bad Hand's methods and goals. They wanted all the Indians in West Texas to die or leave for Oklahoma reservations. When the cavalry found an Indian village, they attacked, shooting Gatlin guns, and repeater rifles. They had artillery and superior numbers. The Indians rarely fought back. The Indians were basically retreating and hiding for a few years. At the first shot, the Indians would flee. Some of the warriors would harass the cavalry some, so that the women and children could get a head start on the sabers. My home town of Lubbock has a large park named after Col. MacKenize and a Junior High. The Indians camped in these area canyons near the edge of the Caprock so that the women and children could climb up the sides to the flat Llano Estacado to escape when the cavalry attacks began. Who knows how many were killed? Or died later from their wounds, disease, exposure, and starvation. From Montana and into Mexico, across decades, MacKenzie would ride in after the initial assault and they would burn every thing the Indians owned: lodges, blankets, buffalo robes, stored food stocks, weapons, clothing. They killed all their horses. In several of the canyons, the bleached bones of the horses remain. In the final big "battle" in 1875 in Palo Duro Canyon, MacKenzie burned all the lodges in five villages, and all the food stored for the winter. His troops captured 1400 horses. They kept 300 and shot the rest. They kept an accurate count on the horses, mules, and ammunition, but the number of Indians who died as a result of this government policy has not been written. MacKenzie led white and black soldiers, the famous buffalo soldiers.
With winter approaching, the Indians were left without food, horses, blankets, warm clothes, or a place to hide. Most surrendered to face a long, cold, hungry walk to Oklahoma. Those that surrendered to the cavalry were in a herd on foot, and herded like cattle or horses.
One reason researchers don't find as many Indian artifacts in the panhandle is that crazy ol' Ranald MacKenzie burned them all. The Indians said they lost sixty or so in the initial assault in Palo Duro. MacKenzie reported three. There weren't as many killed in these battles as one might think. Who knows? The reports are obviously falsified. Sul Ross has a college named after him. He reported on attacking a small Indian village when all the men were off hunting. He killed some Comanche women. Bat Masterson, the famous lying gunfighter, probably only killed one man in an actual gunfight. He was one of MacKenzie's scouts. MacKenzie's allies were the Tonkawa Indians a.k.a. the Tonks. This was a smaller band that hated the Comanches. They scalped, dismembered, and ate some of the Comanches. They'd burn all the dead and wounded and it made an accurate account of the Indian losses difficult to ascertain. Women and children weren't mentioned, but the United States government policy was to make war upon them if they were not on the reservation. Texas Rangers, buffalo hunters, and anyone else were welcome to assist in the policy.
The Indians would make attacks when they had superior numbers, and atrocities were a regular occurrence on both sides. The Indians attacked Adobe Walls, a trading mini-town, with hundreds of warriors. They killed two guys sleeping in a wagon, and scalped them and their St. Bernard. Then the eighteen men in town killed some of the Indians from inside fortified buildings. I don't think the Indians ever won.
Oh come on, Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan knew all those years that Ranald MacKenzie was nuts. One biographer said he had syphilis, the worst sexually contacted disease which leads to insanity. Every once in a while he'd take a mental health leave, and had five orderlies keeping him focused on the burning left to be done. In the scene in Dances With Wolves where Kevin Costner rides around between rebel and union lines trying to get shot, that was based on Crazy Ranald. He was brave like only a crazy man can be. He got shot with bullets and arrows. He was also called Bad Hand because he lost two fingers in combat.
MacKenzie never married. After he freaked out and had a mental leave, they made him a general. He decided to get married. On the night before his marriage, the now general went into a store. He broke the leg of a chair and nearly beat the owner to death. A crowd subdued him, babbling and incoherent which he was to remain most of the time for the rest of his life. They retired him from the Army and placed him in a mental institution in New York.
Later, he was released to live out his days with a cousin. He did not speak or appear to communicate. Col. Ranald MacKenzie's father had also been a military man. He was a Captain in the Navy, but he made a bad career move when hung the son of the Secretary of War for mutiny.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
In this part of West Texas, Colonel Ranald "Bad Hand" MacKenzie is seen as the hero of the Indian wars of the 1870s. There were so-called battles in all our area canyons: Yellow House, Blanco, Tule, White River, and the last and largest battle of the Red River Wars, in Palo Duro Canyon against Quanah Parker, and several tribes. MacKenzie had to spend more time killing people than anyone in American history. He entered the Civil War in 1862. Right after the Civil War, he began leading cavalry charges on Indian villages against dozens of tribes in several states and Mexico. This went on until 1880.
To hell with the movies, there was a real sameness about Bad Hand's methods and goals. They wanted all the Indians in West Texas to die or leave for Oklahoma reservations. When the cavalry found an Indian village, they attacked, shooting Gatlin guns, and repeater rifles. They had artillery and superior numbers. The Indians rarely fought back. The Indians were basically retreating and hiding for a few years. At the first shot, the Indians would flee. Some of the warriors would harass the cavalry some, so that the women and children could get a head start on the sabers. My home town of Lubbock has a large park named after Col. MacKenize and a Junior High. The Indians camped in these area canyons near the edge of the Caprock so that the women and children could climb up the sides to the flat Llano Estacado to escape when the cavalry attacks began. Who knows how many were killed? Or died later from their wounds, disease, exposure, and starvation. From Montana and into Mexico, across decades, MacKenzie would ride in after the initial assault and they would burn every thing the Indians owned: lodges, blankets, buffalo robes, stored food stocks, weapons, clothing. They killed all their horses. In several of the canyons, the bleached bones of the horses remain. In the final big "battle" in 1875 in Palo Duro Canyon, MacKenzie burned all the lodges in five villages, and all the food stored for the winter. His troops captured 1400 horses. They kept 300 and shot the rest. They kept an accurate count on the horses, mules, and ammunition, but the number of Indians who died as a result of this government policy has not been written. MacKenzie led white and black soldiers, the famous buffalo soldiers.
With winter approaching, the Indians were left without food, horses, blankets, warm clothes, or a place to hide. Most surrendered to face a long, cold, hungry walk to Oklahoma. Those that surrendered to the cavalry were in a herd on foot, and herded like cattle or horses.
One reason researchers don't find as many Indian artifacts in the panhandle is that crazy ol' Ranald MacKenzie burned them all. The Indians said they lost sixty or so in the initial assault in Palo Duro. MacKenzie reported three. There weren't as many killed in these battles as one might think. Who knows? The reports are obviously falsified. Sul Ross has a college named after him. He reported on attacking a small Indian village when all the men were off hunting. He killed some Comanche women. Bat Masterson, the famous lying gunfighter, probably only killed one man in an actual gunfight. He was one of MacKenzie's scouts. MacKenzie's allies were the Tonkawa Indians a.k.a. the Tonks. This was a smaller band that hated the Comanches. They scalped, dismembered, and ate some of the Comanches. They'd burn all the dead and wounded and it made an accurate account of the Indian losses difficult to ascertain. Women and children weren't mentioned, but the United States government policy was to make war upon them if they were not on the reservation. Texas Rangers, buffalo hunters, and anyone else were welcome to assist in the policy.
The Indians would make attacks when they had superior numbers, and atrocities were a regular occurrence on both sides. The Indians attacked Adobe Walls, a trading mini-town, with hundreds of warriors. They killed two guys sleeping in a wagon, and scalped them and their St. Bernard. Then the eighteen men in town killed some of the Indians from inside fortified buildings. I don't think the Indians ever won.
Oh come on, Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan knew all those years that Ranald MacKenzie was nuts. One biographer said he had syphilis, the worst sexually contacted disease which leads to insanity. Every once in a while he'd take a mental health leave, and had five orderlies keeping him focused on the burning left to be done. In the scene in Dances With Wolves where Kevin Costner rides around between rebel and union lines trying to get shot, that was based on Crazy Ranald. He was brave like only a crazy man can be. He got shot with bullets and arrows. He was also called Bad Hand because he lost two fingers in combat.
MacKenzie never married. After he freaked out and had a mental leave, they made him a general. He decided to get married. On the night before his marriage, the now general went into a store. He broke the leg of a chair and nearly beat the owner to death. A crowd subdued him, babbling and incoherent which he was to remain most of the time for the rest of his life. They retired him from the Army and placed him in a mental institution in New York.
Later, he was released to live out his days with a cousin. He did not speak or appear to communicate. Col. Ranald MacKenzie's father had also been a military man. He was a Captain in the Navy, but he made a bad career move when hung the son of the Secretary of War for mutiny.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
March 03, 2010
Those Grifting O'Malleys
By Johnny Hughes © 2010
Now Sky had done some flying bootlegging before I went on the road with him and Sam Hogan. They'd bring booze from El Paso and Mexico to Dallas, and that's how him and ol' Benny Binion got to be real close friends. They were very young bootleggers together. When Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were the most famous bank robbers in America when they got gunned down by the Texas Rangers over yonder in Louisiana in 1934. They'd killed some folks, including some laws. Ol' Benny was only thirty years old, but he was already big in outlaw circles. He had big dice games in Dallas, which just kept getting bigger until he ran twenty-seven dice games in downtown Dallas during the war. He had a piece of some fancy casinos too. You know how most outlaws keep with their own kind for telling stories, and such, but ol' Benny would show out, even early on.
So, Benny comes to Sky and says he wants to hire Sky to fly a plane over Clyde Barrow's funeral to drop a floral wreath of fifty yellow roses. They went back and forth on it all one day, but Benny could talk a frog up out of a log. Clyde was real unpopular with the laws, but Sky did it anyway. It was in the Dallas newspaper, but the article didn't mention Sky or Benny.
Sky and Sam Hogan were my uncles. Sam was married into the O'Malleys with my aunt Grace. I'd been practicing cheating with cards since I was eight, but I wasn't really ready to do anything. I went on the road with them when I was fourteen. They'd leave out of Duke, Oklahoma and work every little town all the way through West Texas down to El Paso as gamblers. They both could play most anything pretty darned good. This was 1937. Sky wore these old painter's clothes, and had said he was headed for a big job, but he'd tell folks he'd lost a fortune gambling in his life. Him and Sam would shill up at dominoes, or pool, or poker if they could find it. Every town had a domino hall. They were both good players, and they'd take the O'Malley edge. They could false shuffle dominoes or playing cards, but they weren't good for any cold decks or big moves. In dominoes, Sky could hold the double six under his palm when he shuffled and throw it by Sam or himself every time, and I couldn't even see it. He'd leave some cards on the bottom of the deck and false shuffle. I could see that, which kept me half scared the whole trip.
When we first left out of Duke, Oklahoma, they both got nearly broke in a poker game in Amarillo, Texas, and nearly got in a fight. Any time trouble came up, Sky would say he was a classical pianist and couldn't hurt his hands, but Sam liked fighting, and he did the fighting for the family. Both of them were average-size guys, but wiry and strong. Sky'd give a grand speech, and there wouldn't be a fight, or I never saw one. Sky had a lock box over in El Paso, a fair spell away. Anyways, when they are acting, Sam does the winning, and Sky seems like an all-day sucker. If there was a movie house in any of those towns, we'd all three go to the movies, which wasn't smart for looking like we didn't know each other. Sky would say he looked like Errol Flynn, but he didn't.
When we got to El Paso, they were good winners and each had given me a few bucks. During the Depression, sometimes they were gambling for loose change and a few lonely singles. Sky traded for this slick shiny black Ford Roadster. He dressed up real fancy. O'Malley's have this genetic weakness for clothes that they don't need. On the way back, he'd tell how he won thousands off this banker in El Paso. Sam would tell them he was cold trailing Sky because he knew he'd blow his boodle. Well, the greed of the mark is my family's stock in trade, and it was hard to belly up to the table for all the folks hustling Sky. He'd flash a lot of cash. And Sam would win it off him, or appear to. Sometimes, Sky would figure out the best producer in a town, and end up playing him one on one something. They'd gather up all the money open, and get ready to go. Sometimes, Sky would soak a fake diamond ring to somebody right before we left.
Even with a nice, plump bankroll, Sky is always doing short cons. He'd steal milk off back porches with five hundred cash on him. We'd go in a cafe and Sky would go to praying, and Sam is calling him Reverend and all, and he'd get a free meal or something. He'd keep a dead fly in his coat pocket and slip it in the soup, and raise hell with the owner. In this pretty nice cafe, considering the depression, right outside Wichita Falls, he'd did the fly con, and the owner got madder than a hatter. He started grabbing the change out of the cash box and slamming it on the counter. Ol' Sky was scooping it up, and putting it in his handkerchief. Sky got out of there with a big ol' bunch of coins, but he could have got killed. That man was red as a fire engine.
So, they were my teachers and wouldn't much leave me be. Sky's always yakking about my education. He'd always say he was gonna buy me a new suit of clothes and a hat. Young guys like me wore a cap. In any town, I wanted to go find some folks my own age, mostly girls. We made a big circle around hitting several towns, and got to some little ol' town just north of El Paso, in New Mexico, but right by Texas. There was about thirty of them bad women, bootleggers, burglars, big 'uns, gambling at dice, poker, and pitching quarters at the line. Well, I was good at that, and Sky and Sam got to betting on me, but it wasn't much, just the experience. It was mostly a dice game, and there was no edge, except fading the square dice. They even let me fade, and I was just fourteen years old.
So, this deal came up where Sky is going to take this guy's plane and fly it to Dallas. Sky says it is a big money deal. I could tell you of several times he got flimflammed his own self. They were all drinking. Sky wants me to ride with him to make sure he stays awake. I'm not getting on any airplane with Sky O'Malley, drunk or sober, either one of us, even if I have to walk back to Oklahoma. So Sam goes, and they leave me to drive the car back. They were drinking, and they just flew off. I'd been driving lots on the highway, but I'd never driven alone. That fancy black Roadster could get you robbed or killed in those bad lands and hard times. At first it wouldn't even start, and I went to walking, madder than I have ever been before or since. Then I went back and it started easy.
I drove right to the bridge connecting El Paso and Juare. I parked the car, and walked over the bridge to Mexico. In a half a block, I bought a whiskey and coke for a nickel. It didn't take much to get me drunk, being only my fourth of fifth time. I bought this big sombrero, and two fifths of fancy, but cheap champagne. That was a mistake, because I had to carry them everywhere, and if I wore the sombrero, folks would hoorah me. It was as big as a wagon wheel. I bought this gold watch that turned my wrist green. I barely remember finding the car, and going to sleep in it. The next day, this man in a filling station is showing me how to get to Carlsbad, New Mexico and on to Lubbock. I'd never read me a road map, and the man just gave it to me. When I started to put it in the glove box, there was over five hundred dollars cash, and not a bill over a ten. I went back and gave that filling station man a ten spot, probably two weeks pay for him in those tough times. It was coming a golly whopper of a rain storm, so I figured to spend one night in a fancy hotel. O'Malleys were always hanging around the lobby of a swell joint looking for some action. I stayed downtown at the Plaza Hotel four days. Each morning and evening I'd know I should call the farm in Duke, but somehow I never did. In order to avoid the law, and look like a fellow who was not driving a bent car, I bought a new suit of clothes, and my first fedora. Everyone knows the laws will leave a rich man or his son alone. I even got a tall-collar, stiff, white shirt, but I only wore it once. I'd eat at the hotel in a fancy dining room with a table cloth and all. They had a lamb and potato dish I still remember.
Well, they joke about that trip when they swap O'Malley family stories. I tried to marry a gal in Big Spring, and her daddy came at me with a deer hunting rifle. I lost $100 in a poker game at the domino hall there, and I tried to claim me being only fourteen, it wasn't fair. I looked all grown up, and I nearly got whupped over it. I stayed at a motor court in Lubbock about a week, and ate at a cafe every single night. I'd go downtown to the picture show every afternoon, and buy something, a shirt or shoes or something. And I took to wearing a suit, tie, and a hat. I bought another black fedora with red, green, and brown feathers. It had a white silk lining. They say the people in Lubbock, Texas are the friendliest in the world, and I found no reason to question that.
Never said it, but I'm Pat O'Malley, not the famous wrestler. He was my cousin. The main thing about that trip was that I was alone for the very first time, and I had lots of time to think or daydream. I got to liking just driving down the road. Being the Depression, there were lots of hitchhikers, bums by the rail yards, and general misery. So, I'd pick 'em up, sometimes three at a time. I'd buy a big ol' loaf of bread, some onions, and some bologna, and some soda water, and they'd wolf it down. Lucky, I didn't get heisted.
I'd been just stopping in towns and lallygagging around for about three weeks, when I finally decided to go on to the farm in Duke, and see what was up. I'd decided that for sure Sky wouldn't know about the money or how much anyways. I had $200 left, and the whole back seat full of new clothes, shoes, real fancy clothes. I had two fedoras and a pork-pie hat. Thinking he might not even know he'd left money there, I had made up some good stories about me winning gambling at everything all along the way. Sky was at the farm. Must have been ten of the family came out into the yard. Sky knew to the dollar how much was in that glove box. I gave him a hundred, and held out a hundred, even though he was really yelling. I knew he wouldn't hit me or anything with a yard full of laughing O'Malleys around.
They still quote what I said, "Well, just chalk up a few hundred to the price of your education."
Editor's Note: Benny Binion really did hire a plane to drop a floral wreath at Clyde Barrow's funeral in 1934, when Benny was thirty.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
"Tough times make tough people." - Benny BinionBeing an O'Malley, I was learning the grift by age fourteen and I drove a car across Texas all by myself in 1937. You go ask any old person in the Southwest if they've seen my uncle Sky O'Malley's act, and they'll remember and laugh. They had this ol' bi-plane during the Depression. They'd go to county fairs and rodeos and such. Sam Hogan, another uncle , would do some trick flying. Then when he was off on break, Sky would come out acting real drunk with a fifth of rot gut in his hand, and he'd pretend to steal the plane. Well, he'd fly all over, doing tricks, and he'd let go this here smoke trail and go flying toward the audience, and all until he crashed it right in front of a fair size crowd in Oklahoma City. He had some broke bones and what not. A Deputy Sheriff didn't know it was an act and handcuffed him.
Now Sky had done some flying bootlegging before I went on the road with him and Sam Hogan. They'd bring booze from El Paso and Mexico to Dallas, and that's how him and ol' Benny Binion got to be real close friends. They were very young bootleggers together. When Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were the most famous bank robbers in America when they got gunned down by the Texas Rangers over yonder in Louisiana in 1934. They'd killed some folks, including some laws. Ol' Benny was only thirty years old, but he was already big in outlaw circles. He had big dice games in Dallas, which just kept getting bigger until he ran twenty-seven dice games in downtown Dallas during the war. He had a piece of some fancy casinos too. You know how most outlaws keep with their own kind for telling stories, and such, but ol' Benny would show out, even early on.
So, Benny comes to Sky and says he wants to hire Sky to fly a plane over Clyde Barrow's funeral to drop a floral wreath of fifty yellow roses. They went back and forth on it all one day, but Benny could talk a frog up out of a log. Clyde was real unpopular with the laws, but Sky did it anyway. It was in the Dallas newspaper, but the article didn't mention Sky or Benny.
Sky and Sam Hogan were my uncles. Sam was married into the O'Malleys with my aunt Grace. I'd been practicing cheating with cards since I was eight, but I wasn't really ready to do anything. I went on the road with them when I was fourteen. They'd leave out of Duke, Oklahoma and work every little town all the way through West Texas down to El Paso as gamblers. They both could play most anything pretty darned good. This was 1937. Sky wore these old painter's clothes, and had said he was headed for a big job, but he'd tell folks he'd lost a fortune gambling in his life. Him and Sam would shill up at dominoes, or pool, or poker if they could find it. Every town had a domino hall. They were both good players, and they'd take the O'Malley edge. They could false shuffle dominoes or playing cards, but they weren't good for any cold decks or big moves. In dominoes, Sky could hold the double six under his palm when he shuffled and throw it by Sam or himself every time, and I couldn't even see it. He'd leave some cards on the bottom of the deck and false shuffle. I could see that, which kept me half scared the whole trip.
When we first left out of Duke, Oklahoma, they both got nearly broke in a poker game in Amarillo, Texas, and nearly got in a fight. Any time trouble came up, Sky would say he was a classical pianist and couldn't hurt his hands, but Sam liked fighting, and he did the fighting for the family. Both of them were average-size guys, but wiry and strong. Sky'd give a grand speech, and there wouldn't be a fight, or I never saw one. Sky had a lock box over in El Paso, a fair spell away. Anyways, when they are acting, Sam does the winning, and Sky seems like an all-day sucker. If there was a movie house in any of those towns, we'd all three go to the movies, which wasn't smart for looking like we didn't know each other. Sky would say he looked like Errol Flynn, but he didn't.
When we got to El Paso, they were good winners and each had given me a few bucks. During the Depression, sometimes they were gambling for loose change and a few lonely singles. Sky traded for this slick shiny black Ford Roadster. He dressed up real fancy. O'Malley's have this genetic weakness for clothes that they don't need. On the way back, he'd tell how he won thousands off this banker in El Paso. Sam would tell them he was cold trailing Sky because he knew he'd blow his boodle. Well, the greed of the mark is my family's stock in trade, and it was hard to belly up to the table for all the folks hustling Sky. He'd flash a lot of cash. And Sam would win it off him, or appear to. Sometimes, Sky would figure out the best producer in a town, and end up playing him one on one something. They'd gather up all the money open, and get ready to go. Sometimes, Sky would soak a fake diamond ring to somebody right before we left.
Even with a nice, plump bankroll, Sky is always doing short cons. He'd steal milk off back porches with five hundred cash on him. We'd go in a cafe and Sky would go to praying, and Sam is calling him Reverend and all, and he'd get a free meal or something. He'd keep a dead fly in his coat pocket and slip it in the soup, and raise hell with the owner. In this pretty nice cafe, considering the depression, right outside Wichita Falls, he'd did the fly con, and the owner got madder than a hatter. He started grabbing the change out of the cash box and slamming it on the counter. Ol' Sky was scooping it up, and putting it in his handkerchief. Sky got out of there with a big ol' bunch of coins, but he could have got killed. That man was red as a fire engine.
So, they were my teachers and wouldn't much leave me be. Sky's always yakking about my education. He'd always say he was gonna buy me a new suit of clothes and a hat. Young guys like me wore a cap. In any town, I wanted to go find some folks my own age, mostly girls. We made a big circle around hitting several towns, and got to some little ol' town just north of El Paso, in New Mexico, but right by Texas. There was about thirty of them bad women, bootleggers, burglars, big 'uns, gambling at dice, poker, and pitching quarters at the line. Well, I was good at that, and Sky and Sam got to betting on me, but it wasn't much, just the experience. It was mostly a dice game, and there was no edge, except fading the square dice. They even let me fade, and I was just fourteen years old.
So, this deal came up where Sky is going to take this guy's plane and fly it to Dallas. Sky says it is a big money deal. I could tell you of several times he got flimflammed his own self. They were all drinking. Sky wants me to ride with him to make sure he stays awake. I'm not getting on any airplane with Sky O'Malley, drunk or sober, either one of us, even if I have to walk back to Oklahoma. So Sam goes, and they leave me to drive the car back. They were drinking, and they just flew off. I'd been driving lots on the highway, but I'd never driven alone. That fancy black Roadster could get you robbed or killed in those bad lands and hard times. At first it wouldn't even start, and I went to walking, madder than I have ever been before or since. Then I went back and it started easy.
I drove right to the bridge connecting El Paso and Juare. I parked the car, and walked over the bridge to Mexico. In a half a block, I bought a whiskey and coke for a nickel. It didn't take much to get me drunk, being only my fourth of fifth time. I bought this big sombrero, and two fifths of fancy, but cheap champagne. That was a mistake, because I had to carry them everywhere, and if I wore the sombrero, folks would hoorah me. It was as big as a wagon wheel. I bought this gold watch that turned my wrist green. I barely remember finding the car, and going to sleep in it. The next day, this man in a filling station is showing me how to get to Carlsbad, New Mexico and on to Lubbock. I'd never read me a road map, and the man just gave it to me. When I started to put it in the glove box, there was over five hundred dollars cash, and not a bill over a ten. I went back and gave that filling station man a ten spot, probably two weeks pay for him in those tough times. It was coming a golly whopper of a rain storm, so I figured to spend one night in a fancy hotel. O'Malleys were always hanging around the lobby of a swell joint looking for some action. I stayed downtown at the Plaza Hotel four days. Each morning and evening I'd know I should call the farm in Duke, but somehow I never did. In order to avoid the law, and look like a fellow who was not driving a bent car, I bought a new suit of clothes, and my first fedora. Everyone knows the laws will leave a rich man or his son alone. I even got a tall-collar, stiff, white shirt, but I only wore it once. I'd eat at the hotel in a fancy dining room with a table cloth and all. They had a lamb and potato dish I still remember.
Well, they joke about that trip when they swap O'Malley family stories. I tried to marry a gal in Big Spring, and her daddy came at me with a deer hunting rifle. I lost $100 in a poker game at the domino hall there, and I tried to claim me being only fourteen, it wasn't fair. I looked all grown up, and I nearly got whupped over it. I stayed at a motor court in Lubbock about a week, and ate at a cafe every single night. I'd go downtown to the picture show every afternoon, and buy something, a shirt or shoes or something. And I took to wearing a suit, tie, and a hat. I bought another black fedora with red, green, and brown feathers. It had a white silk lining. They say the people in Lubbock, Texas are the friendliest in the world, and I found no reason to question that.
Never said it, but I'm Pat O'Malley, not the famous wrestler. He was my cousin. The main thing about that trip was that I was alone for the very first time, and I had lots of time to think or daydream. I got to liking just driving down the road. Being the Depression, there were lots of hitchhikers, bums by the rail yards, and general misery. So, I'd pick 'em up, sometimes three at a time. I'd buy a big ol' loaf of bread, some onions, and some bologna, and some soda water, and they'd wolf it down. Lucky, I didn't get heisted.
I'd been just stopping in towns and lallygagging around for about three weeks, when I finally decided to go on to the farm in Duke, and see what was up. I'd decided that for sure Sky wouldn't know about the money or how much anyways. I had $200 left, and the whole back seat full of new clothes, shoes, real fancy clothes. I had two fedoras and a pork-pie hat. Thinking he might not even know he'd left money there, I had made up some good stories about me winning gambling at everything all along the way. Sky was at the farm. Must have been ten of the family came out into the yard. Sky knew to the dollar how much was in that glove box. I gave him a hundred, and held out a hundred, even though he was really yelling. I knew he wouldn't hit me or anything with a yard full of laughing O'Malleys around.
They still quote what I said, "Well, just chalk up a few hundred to the price of your education."
Editor's Note: Benny Binion really did hire a plane to drop a floral wreath at Clyde Barrow's funeral in 1934, when Benny was thirty.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
February 03, 2010
From Beatniks to Hippies. The Early Sixties. A Memoir.
By Johnny Hughes © 2010
I get out of the Army in 1962 and go to this Ed Snow party, which went on every weekend for several years it seems. The "Group" at Texas Tech were a perfect blend of intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals: drama majors, English majors, Philosophy majors, Grad students, and me, in my fifth year of proudly owning a small gambling house. Hey, I was never robbed or arrested at my own poker game and there was never a fight. I only pulled a gun three times or so. Had two robbery attempts and shot over the head of one of them. By Texas terms, I'm saying I had a peaceful place a long, long time.
Eddie was this short, black-headed guy with a wispy beard, and Beatles boots. The Group kept a table of talkers going from early morning to after sundown, or two tables, ten or twelve folks in the Student Union aka the Sub, two or three conversations sprinkled liberally with Sartre, Kerouac, Camus, et. al. Eddie Snow was crazy, but we didn't know it. He was to go on to write an article in Texas Monthly about his seven incarcerations in mental joints. Bummer. But back then, well Marlon Brandon and James Dean had this ripple effect and lots of guys mumbled to show their angst, which was the way to get some pussy. Pity and angst were selling like hot cakes because the pill was new. One young Professor was so good at that "I am depressed, screw me" angle that he made it through lots of women at the First Unitarian Church. This was this terrific time of hope and beatniks becoming hippies, and a youngish President who wasn't shot yet, and all that.
Ed has a party at his tiny garage apartment, called an alley pad, every Thursday afternoon to kick off the weekend in addition to the one, big, sanctioned "the Group" party. Everything is bring your own booze. I go in and the floor is totally covered in people. There are people everywhere outside. In the kitchen, there is a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly plus a loaf of bread. Fix your own, the only refreshments provided. Eddie stood on his couch reading the first lines of a Hemingway novel about it being 1919 and the welcoming of heroes was over. He would often read that and play scratchy old jazz records.
The big Saturday night parties moved around but it was the same 100 or so folks, and the observation of the bring your own, leave everybody else's booze alone worked very well. Folks would drink obscure brands. I bought Carling's Black Label. There was a tremendous amount of hustling other folk's dates, and it would rage all night. Eddie drank this syrupy Richard's Wild Irish wine. Yuck. The linoleum floor in his kitchen looked like a crime scene from the wine stains. Eddie had a couple of pretty neat girl friends over time.
I dressed like these gamblers twenty years older than me -- in very expensive clothes. Only with the group, I wasn't this outside guy I had always felt like. They thought me making my "sometimes small, sometimes large" living as a gambler was cool.
I had moved to a nice two bedroom house with a big kitchen for the poker game, and had a partner for awhile. When he left for the Army, I didn't have to cut up the score. It was then when I nervously hosted my first Group party of many. I gave this gal $100 and told her to get some chips and dips, ice and cups. She spent the whole thing, which I had not intended. By 8:30 or so, no one had showed. I hid a lot of that dip and stuff in cabinets and went off to get my date in Acuff,Texas. When I got back, the joint was packed.
This ol' tough guy pal of mine had happened by. Roy was an unpredictable tough guy. He had two black eyes, a black shirt with a white tie, and he looked scary. He and the main philosophy grad student, self-proclaimed intellect of all time, hit it off, and were in a conversation for hours. They ate all the chips and dip. Later, for the party, I'd get one bag of ice.
The Group rented a house together for awhile, three bucks a month or fifty cents in a beer can, but there were political squabbles about folks screwing in the afternoon so proudly. I moved into the perfect gambling joint. There was only one entry up a flight of stairs or so I thought. It was right next door to Lubbock Theatre Center. At those parties, we'd do acts. There were folk singers. Jimmie Gilmore and James Howell back when they were still in high school. Barry Corbin, Charles Benton, Michael Neimczyk and I did improv and the audience would call out characters, scenes, and take part. There were sing alongs to Dylan tunes way too often. Eddie Snow and Eric Alstrom did this comedy bit where they were in a World War II foxhole being different characters: Pops, Mississippi, Hi Pockets, Tex. Scenes from the movies we grew up with.
Eddie tried for many years to have rent parties but with not much luck. One night at his pad, I put on my brand new Beatles album, wondering what the scratchy jazz and Bob Dylan crowd would think. They were on their feet. Even the stiffest son of a bitch there was singing, and it was magical, and a change of some sort. They just loosened up as if some drunk or other.
I want to hold your hand.
Also at parties, we would set up a typewriter with a long roll of news print in the kitchen. Everyone would go in and add their thoughts.
A few short years later, I start acting in plays and the poker kind of dry's up, and I am big broke for the first time in a long time. There were no poker players and the bigger games were hurting. Some of the big road gamblers moved off. Poker drought.
I moved into Eddie's tiny apartment upstairs in this old apartment house at Main and X, across from Bob's Cafe. He made me a pallet on his floor. I had hocked the diamonds and pistols, and stored the fancy clothes at my parents, who had moved back to town. It was near my last semester after eight years as an undergraduate. The Group called tennis shoes, and sloppy clothes, "rehearsal clothes" and they sure beat those hard leather shoes. Eddie would set the alarm for seven or so, and put it on a ten minute delay, and it would go off every ten minutes until nine, when he'd turn it off for good and sleep. He'd throw his dirty socks on my pallet. As all those couch people in South Austin tonight can tell you, if you don't pay rent, shut up.
I scored some money and moved back to the pad by the theatre, and got my first job, for McGraw-Hill. They paid me. Then, without any risk of me getting broke, they paid me again. All those years I had looked down on the square John, nine to fivers took on a new look. I still never really nine to fived it.
Eddie moved into a pad at 806 Ave U., and tried to give parties for a living in 1965, and the group expanded, and hippie was in the air. The cops raided a big party the next year and ran straight to the two guys in the bathroom who had a little bit of weed. They laid felony charges on them and the three dudes renting the apartment. When the laws ran in, there were some black folks near the door, and folks were dancing, stereo blasting. The cops told the blacks, "Run, nigger." And they opened the door. I said I'd run, and I was the first one out, abandoning my young bride. I testified before the Grand Jury. I said I didn't smell any marijuana, and they asked how I knew what it smelled like. I said it smelled like burning leaves, and I'd smelt it in Mexico but I did not inhale.
Then the guy asked, "Were there people with beards at that party?"
"Yes." says I.
"How many?" he asked.
I told him I didn't know only, to be asked if I had counted the folks in sandals.
Eddie moved down to Austin awhile, and folks said he was getting too crazy. When I went down he was planning a trip to New York. He went and stayed in Barry Corbin's apartment, as Barry was doing dinner theatre down south. Eddie would have delusional times, and lucid times, and all I know of his misadventures, he told me.
Eddie was severely bipolar, and the booze washed out the horse sized pills they'd give him. He had this literary delusional system involving himself, with his father, Norman Mailer, and his grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, and Joe Namath, the football player in there some way.
Eddie kept writing Mailer letters signing them the Texas kid.
"The Texas kid is coming to town for the big shootout. Me and you. Mano a mano."
Mailer was running for Mayor of New York, and Jimmy Breslin was running for Vice Mayor, I think. They canceled a rally because of Eddie. Eddie is also stealing his food,bouncing a tennis ball off buses for exercise, and living with a too-young runaway when he decides he is John F. Kennedy and ends up in Bellevue. Right off, he meets another dude that is also convinced he is John F. Kennedy and reinforces Eddie's delusions. His brother came up, but Eddie would not go with him.
After a few mental hospital trips, and living in Harlingen, Eddie arrives back in Lubbock on the exact day we are headed out for this ill-fated rock festival in 1970, that had 600 cops from all over Texas, and 3,000 festival goers. The Hog Farm would throw out a head of lettuce every now and then to symbolize something. The wind and dirt are blowing and the staff of this underground newspaper is in the back of this truck, most high on life and psychedelics or whatever acid like. Everybody is sitting in the back of this dark, rented truck, when Eddie starts scaring the folks, doing a number saying he is fresh out of a mental hospital and that he might or might not be violent. Then he turns to this Air Force Captain's wife, and said, "You are my little dancer. Come with me." She did. She left her husband, and she and Eddie moved in together, and he finally got his degree in English.
During that time, I saw him walking though the Student Union, with no shoe on one foot and his sock rolled over his toe, and he is kicking imaginary extra points. Joe Namath. Get it?
He'd sit on the end bar stool in Fat Dawg's, almost motionless, holding a cigarette up face high in an abnormal way. He'd just sip the beer and make it last for hours. His fingers were nicotine stained and he'd burn himself. A couple of times he called me at last call to come pay his bar bill or they'd beat him up. He wouldn't speak to me I drove him home.
Eddie moved back to Harlingen, near Mexico, where he grew up and where his mother lived. He just drank out his days at local bars. I wondered if he ever told them about the Group, and when he was the hero in that bright and shining time we unwisely called youth.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
I get out of the Army in 1962 and go to this Ed Snow party, which went on every weekend for several years it seems. The "Group" at Texas Tech were a perfect blend of intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals: drama majors, English majors, Philosophy majors, Grad students, and me, in my fifth year of proudly owning a small gambling house. Hey, I was never robbed or arrested at my own poker game and there was never a fight. I only pulled a gun three times or so. Had two robbery attempts and shot over the head of one of them. By Texas terms, I'm saying I had a peaceful place a long, long time.
Eddie was this short, black-headed guy with a wispy beard, and Beatles boots. The Group kept a table of talkers going from early morning to after sundown, or two tables, ten or twelve folks in the Student Union aka the Sub, two or three conversations sprinkled liberally with Sartre, Kerouac, Camus, et. al. Eddie Snow was crazy, but we didn't know it. He was to go on to write an article in Texas Monthly about his seven incarcerations in mental joints. Bummer. But back then, well Marlon Brandon and James Dean had this ripple effect and lots of guys mumbled to show their angst, which was the way to get some pussy. Pity and angst were selling like hot cakes because the pill was new. One young Professor was so good at that "I am depressed, screw me" angle that he made it through lots of women at the First Unitarian Church. This was this terrific time of hope and beatniks becoming hippies, and a youngish President who wasn't shot yet, and all that.
Ed has a party at his tiny garage apartment, called an alley pad, every Thursday afternoon to kick off the weekend in addition to the one, big, sanctioned "the Group" party. Everything is bring your own booze. I go in and the floor is totally covered in people. There are people everywhere outside. In the kitchen, there is a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly plus a loaf of bread. Fix your own, the only refreshments provided. Eddie stood on his couch reading the first lines of a Hemingway novel about it being 1919 and the welcoming of heroes was over. He would often read that and play scratchy old jazz records.
The big Saturday night parties moved around but it was the same 100 or so folks, and the observation of the bring your own, leave everybody else's booze alone worked very well. Folks would drink obscure brands. I bought Carling's Black Label. There was a tremendous amount of hustling other folk's dates, and it would rage all night. Eddie drank this syrupy Richard's Wild Irish wine. Yuck. The linoleum floor in his kitchen looked like a crime scene from the wine stains. Eddie had a couple of pretty neat girl friends over time.
I dressed like these gamblers twenty years older than me -- in very expensive clothes. Only with the group, I wasn't this outside guy I had always felt like. They thought me making my "sometimes small, sometimes large" living as a gambler was cool.
I had moved to a nice two bedroom house with a big kitchen for the poker game, and had a partner for awhile. When he left for the Army, I didn't have to cut up the score. It was then when I nervously hosted my first Group party of many. I gave this gal $100 and told her to get some chips and dips, ice and cups. She spent the whole thing, which I had not intended. By 8:30 or so, no one had showed. I hid a lot of that dip and stuff in cabinets and went off to get my date in Acuff,Texas. When I got back, the joint was packed.
This ol' tough guy pal of mine had happened by. Roy was an unpredictable tough guy. He had two black eyes, a black shirt with a white tie, and he looked scary. He and the main philosophy grad student, self-proclaimed intellect of all time, hit it off, and were in a conversation for hours. They ate all the chips and dip. Later, for the party, I'd get one bag of ice.
The Group rented a house together for awhile, three bucks a month or fifty cents in a beer can, but there were political squabbles about folks screwing in the afternoon so proudly. I moved into the perfect gambling joint. There was only one entry up a flight of stairs or so I thought. It was right next door to Lubbock Theatre Center. At those parties, we'd do acts. There were folk singers. Jimmie Gilmore and James Howell back when they were still in high school. Barry Corbin, Charles Benton, Michael Neimczyk and I did improv and the audience would call out characters, scenes, and take part. There were sing alongs to Dylan tunes way too often. Eddie Snow and Eric Alstrom did this comedy bit where they were in a World War II foxhole being different characters: Pops, Mississippi, Hi Pockets, Tex. Scenes from the movies we grew up with.
Eddie tried for many years to have rent parties but with not much luck. One night at his pad, I put on my brand new Beatles album, wondering what the scratchy jazz and Bob Dylan crowd would think. They were on their feet. Even the stiffest son of a bitch there was singing, and it was magical, and a change of some sort. They just loosened up as if some drunk or other.
I want to hold your hand.
Also at parties, we would set up a typewriter with a long roll of news print in the kitchen. Everyone would go in and add their thoughts.
A few short years later, I start acting in plays and the poker kind of dry's up, and I am big broke for the first time in a long time. There were no poker players and the bigger games were hurting. Some of the big road gamblers moved off. Poker drought.
I moved into Eddie's tiny apartment upstairs in this old apartment house at Main and X, across from Bob's Cafe. He made me a pallet on his floor. I had hocked the diamonds and pistols, and stored the fancy clothes at my parents, who had moved back to town. It was near my last semester after eight years as an undergraduate. The Group called tennis shoes, and sloppy clothes, "rehearsal clothes" and they sure beat those hard leather shoes. Eddie would set the alarm for seven or so, and put it on a ten minute delay, and it would go off every ten minutes until nine, when he'd turn it off for good and sleep. He'd throw his dirty socks on my pallet. As all those couch people in South Austin tonight can tell you, if you don't pay rent, shut up.
I scored some money and moved back to the pad by the theatre, and got my first job, for McGraw-Hill. They paid me. Then, without any risk of me getting broke, they paid me again. All those years I had looked down on the square John, nine to fivers took on a new look. I still never really nine to fived it.
Eddie moved into a pad at 806 Ave U., and tried to give parties for a living in 1965, and the group expanded, and hippie was in the air. The cops raided a big party the next year and ran straight to the two guys in the bathroom who had a little bit of weed. They laid felony charges on them and the three dudes renting the apartment. When the laws ran in, there were some black folks near the door, and folks were dancing, stereo blasting. The cops told the blacks, "Run, nigger." And they opened the door. I said I'd run, and I was the first one out, abandoning my young bride. I testified before the Grand Jury. I said I didn't smell any marijuana, and they asked how I knew what it smelled like. I said it smelled like burning leaves, and I'd smelt it in Mexico but I did not inhale.
Then the guy asked, "Were there people with beards at that party?"
"Yes." says I.
"How many?" he asked.
I told him I didn't know only, to be asked if I had counted the folks in sandals.
Eddie moved down to Austin awhile, and folks said he was getting too crazy. When I went down he was planning a trip to New York. He went and stayed in Barry Corbin's apartment, as Barry was doing dinner theatre down south. Eddie would have delusional times, and lucid times, and all I know of his misadventures, he told me.
Eddie was severely bipolar, and the booze washed out the horse sized pills they'd give him. He had this literary delusional system involving himself, with his father, Norman Mailer, and his grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, and Joe Namath, the football player in there some way.
Eddie kept writing Mailer letters signing them the Texas kid.
"The Texas kid is coming to town for the big shootout. Me and you. Mano a mano."
Mailer was running for Mayor of New York, and Jimmy Breslin was running for Vice Mayor, I think. They canceled a rally because of Eddie. Eddie is also stealing his food,bouncing a tennis ball off buses for exercise, and living with a too-young runaway when he decides he is John F. Kennedy and ends up in Bellevue. Right off, he meets another dude that is also convinced he is John F. Kennedy and reinforces Eddie's delusions. His brother came up, but Eddie would not go with him.
After a few mental hospital trips, and living in Harlingen, Eddie arrives back in Lubbock on the exact day we are headed out for this ill-fated rock festival in 1970, that had 600 cops from all over Texas, and 3,000 festival goers. The Hog Farm would throw out a head of lettuce every now and then to symbolize something. The wind and dirt are blowing and the staff of this underground newspaper is in the back of this truck, most high on life and psychedelics or whatever acid like. Everybody is sitting in the back of this dark, rented truck, when Eddie starts scaring the folks, doing a number saying he is fresh out of a mental hospital and that he might or might not be violent. Then he turns to this Air Force Captain's wife, and said, "You are my little dancer. Come with me." She did. She left her husband, and she and Eddie moved in together, and he finally got his degree in English.
During that time, I saw him walking though the Student Union, with no shoe on one foot and his sock rolled over his toe, and he is kicking imaginary extra points. Joe Namath. Get it?
He'd sit on the end bar stool in Fat Dawg's, almost motionless, holding a cigarette up face high in an abnormal way. He'd just sip the beer and make it last for hours. His fingers were nicotine stained and he'd burn himself. A couple of times he called me at last call to come pay his bar bill or they'd beat him up. He wouldn't speak to me I drove him home.
Eddie moved back to Harlingen, near Mexico, where he grew up and where his mother lived. He just drank out his days at local bars. I wondered if he ever told them about the Group, and when he was the hero in that bright and shining time we unwisely called youth.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
December 21, 2009
Christmas Money for Misty
By Johnny Hughes © 2009
A sudden shower drenched Misty Morgan a.k.a. the Movie Star, as she was known in Las Vegas poker rooms, as she was walking to the Silver Arrow Casino in Rio Hombre, New Mexico. Her sheer white blouse, her revealed nipples, her beauty, her cascading, thick, curly,brunette locks were discussed for weeks. She seemed to put her long hair over her nipples, then move it, then put it back, in a hypnotic fashion.
When folks told Misty she was the most beautiful woman they had ever seen, it was about as common to her as good morning. There were three poker tables running. Misty bought chips in the two, five blind no-limit Texas Hold 'em game, and the rest is New Mexico history.
Cory "the Kid" Bradley, the poker room manager, fell in love with Misty, as men often did, before she peeked at her first hole cards. Cory was very good looking himself. He looked kind of like George Clooney. Misty noticed, as she usually did not. He brought her a towel, and offered her a free casino coat, food comps, and silently, just to himself, his life-time devotion. Three regulars grumbled, as they always do. After a mega-rich Texas rancher, drunk in the morning, started the "yore so purty" talk, she said she had been Miss Amarillo. She heard his remark about the "winner of the wet t-shirt contest is...." The rancher was raising every pot, and winning half. Misty laid a prop on him before her seat warmed up. "I'll give you a five dollar checker every time I win a pot, and you give me one when you win a pot."
"Make it ten," the rancher said, doubling her score. Misty hardly ever won a pot, but her stack was building. Cory knew to watch her like a paranoid hawk. Prettiest hustler off the road anyone had seen, but a hustler off the road none the less. The old Route 66, the Mother Road, America's highways had been delivering scam artists since Moby Dick was a sardine.
When Misty Morgan sat down at a poker table, she always unbuttoned two or three buttons, exposing delicious, eye candy. Poker is a social activity where staring at others is not only accepted, it is part of the game. She'd limped out of Las Vegas broke after a year of winning.
After about two hours, Misty was $900 winner. The Texan had left his hot air balloon tied in a red ant bed. Financial Sam, 91 years old, was the producer, dropping millions around Albuquerque, and not even denting his stack. When Sam headed for the buffet, Misty asked if she could go with him. Sam felt hearing was over rated, and rarely turned on his hearing aid. She had to shout three times, and now everyone in the casino questioned her motives.
Misty bought Sam's buffet. Sure enough, Misty laid her best story on Sam, her road story. She was temporarily broke, like most casino folks, but she was to inherit the historic Morgan Ranch, 473 oil wells, 47,000 acres, and a bunch of cows in the Texas panhandle. Financial Sam said basically, "Sure, you are."
Iggy "Little Drummer Boy" Thomas, computer wizard, Asberger's, ADD, mildly bi-polar, and universally hated, beat the twenty-dollar limit like it was a drum, and he'd sing out, "Ah rump pa pum pum." He searched everyone's name he could find in the Internet search engines, and gossip was his hobby. Iggy announced the next day that Misty, 30, had been Miss Amarillo, and had a warrant out for borrowing money, and defrauding a 93 year old man in a casino in Arizona. Margaret "Mother Hen" Eppler was a retired school counselor from Big Spring, Texas. She spent ten or more hours a day at any poker table that had Texas Hold 'em, and comforting words for the afflicted were her road games. She was tighter than Phil Hellmuth's hat band.
Margaret called Misty to the edge of the poker room, and told her of Iggy's announcement that filled the most gossipy poker room in America. That's because so many were regulars. Cory "the Kid" took Misty to the comp room, and gave her three Silver Arrow casino coats: two shiny, one heavy, winter coat, three embroidered shirts, six hats in varied colors, and a week's worth of buffet comp tickets. Misty took them out to her car, and didn't show back up until two weeks before Christmas. Margaret, Kat the dealer, and Betsy Underground, the six-foot-six stripper, were right outside the casino where Kat could smoke on her break. As many as six women would go out together. Misty, Betsy, and Margaret stood there talking an hour. They invited Misty to the all womens' support group meeting that very night at Margaret's apartment, near the casino. None of these folks appeared to have any real money, but Misty agreed to go anyway. When she sat down in the short-handed, no-limit Texas Hold'em game, the table filled up before she had finished unbuttoning the second button. That's what always happened when Misty Morgan played poker.
Margaret had a Ph.D, and a whole string of credentials, but what Misty heard when she got to the counseling session was the roar of a blender making margaritas, and what she smelled was the best, and strongest home-grown marijuana. Kat, Gracie, and Betsy were all three rolling joints, which was overkill. Gracie was also a poker dealer. There was a bright, decorated Christmas tree. Margaret's little Santa Claus bric-a-brac collection was everywhere. Elvis was singing, "Blue Christmas" on the stereo. April Perez was the last to arrive. She brought tamales.
Kat weighed 104 pounds and had on 40 pounds of Harley-Davidson apparel, and decoration. To say she was a biker, was like saying Sea Bisquit was a horse. After a couple of hours of life stories, the roar of the blender, and the reefer, the worst tragedies brought gales of laughter. Misty knew more short cons than Amarillo Slim, the other famous person from her home town. She had already checked the medicine cabinet. Then Misty discovered that nine quarts of rum had no tax stamps. Further furtive examination of the cabinets found them packed with rum, smuggled from Mexico, and for sale. And neatly packaged home grown marijuana worth a few thousand bucks. Margaret had a sideline or two. Margaret and Kat were whispering about the price of the home grown. Kat proposed a prop bet that Betsy at six-foot-six, and Misty at five-foot-nine, had the same proportionate measurements. Misty was a math wizard, and bet $200 with four of them that they were not. Finally, after measurements and arguments, the bet was called off in the name of feminine unity. They were proportionate. Trust me.
When there were only six drunken, stoned women left, Misty said, "I want to tell you how we can steal the bad-beat jackpot." They all promised that even if they did not go along with the con, they would keep it a secret. Swearing secrecy is as easy for a woman as blinking her eyes or writing a dear Square John letter. The Silver Arrow Casino was fourteen years old. Nobody had ever won the bad beat jackpot. It was $318,000. Cory "the Kid" Bradley's father and uncle owned "the Shop," the most legendary poker room in West Texas for thirty-five years. He grew up knowing everything about poker, and could run a tournament better than anyone in New Mexico. He was often loaned out to other Indian tribes. The one thing Cory did not know was that the house is expected to steal most of the bad beat money
Misty told them that when the casino poker room was closing on Chrismas Eve, we'd ask for a few hands of women only, and photograph it for the story she was doing for New Mexico magazine on women poker players and dealers. She handed a forged press credential on letterhead around for all to see. All the dealers want off to be with their families. Kat and Gracie will offer to be there until the last. Cory had said the poker room would close around 1 p.m., depending on interest.
When Misty had them sit down at the kitchen table where she could show them the cold-deck move, they all began to believe slowly that it would work. Misty had a big straw hat. She'd sit right behind the dealer, and bring in the cold deck, the prearranged deck. Margaret would start with a A,K and someone in on it would start with A,Q and both would make full houses. If aces full got beat, then the jackpot would go to those at the table. She showed them the move. The hat would come off with her right hand to block the overhead camera, and the rigged deck would go in under Kat's right arm with her left hand, as Kat put the other deck in her lap, right after the cut. Then, in the excitement of the bad beat jackpot, Misty would clean up, getting the old deck from Kat's lap, with the same move. They tried it with Gracie, also.
Almost as if she were mentioning the weather, Misty told them she would get a double share, and that she had Cory "fixed", which was a skillful lie. There was a long silence. Exchanged glances calculated their chances. Finally, Margaret spoke, "If she can do the move drunk, she can do the move sober. Getting all women at the table will be the hard part. The overhead camera could ruin everything."
Gracie pointed out that Misty and the dealer, either her or Kat are the only ones at any risk of being caught, and wondered aloud if the dealers share could not be a little higher. Misty was marvelous, putting it in gambling terms. You get a full share, but have a fifty per cent chance of no risk. April Perez said Misty would make a good double-talking politician. Misty explained they needed one more poker playing woman. Kat suggested Tattooed Nicky, one of the only lady loan shark collectors in Albuquerque, and there was a chorus of objections. Margaret said she had the perfect person, but would reveal her, or invite her to the next party. Then she swore them to secrecy, something they were getting used to. Kat raised her right hand each time. She had them draw names to exchange small, gag Christmas gifts, and not tell anyone who they got. Betsy asked, "Where is the nearest Harley Davidson store."
They were back at Margaret's apartment the next night with the blender roaring, and steaks and chicken on the grill. Nita Morales came. Talk about some sour faces. Margaret said she had full trust in Nita, and who would be better? Who was more well known around Silver Arrow Casino?
Kat and Gracie had both been dealing a little, three-table, $100 entry, Texas Hold 'em tourney when Mrs. Morales, as she was always called, attacked this Senior Engineer from Sandia on the very first hand, saying, wrongly, that he shorted the pot. He called her "a bitch", and eight of her relatives jumped to their feet to defend her honor. Hector Morales, 20, kept holding his hand sideways as if he had a gang gun, and saying, "I'll cap you. I'll cap you." Three old, tired, security guards were coming out of the side door, putting on their coats, as if in slow motion. They threw the engineer out, and refunded his entry. He fled. Mrs. Morales insisted they blind off, not pick up his stack, and they did. Even with a third of the field, all of her relatives ran in the mud.
After the ritualistic swearing of secrecy, Margaret told all the women one or two at a time that Mrs. Morales was 100 per cent trustworthy since she stole every single day from the gift shop with the assistance of her cousin. Her relatives in the Sheriff's office, and the highway patrol could help, if need be.
There were three more parties at Margaret's apartment. Mrs. Morales regaled them with stories of her large family, and their political careers. They were all beginning to really like her. When they were really drunk, Kat said, why wait until Chrismas, let's cold deck a table full of men tomorrow night. The cold deck move was getting seamless with practice. All the ladies watched the practice with growing confidence. The two women would move their arms in unison. Misty explained any early introduction of the hat or weird moves would queer the deal. It had to be Christmas Eve. April Perez said, "I will have enough money to keep my daughters in the Montessori School until they are thirty if I want to."
They were all rested and ready on Christmas eve. Misty was all over the casino, shooting pictures with this big Nikon camera with a zoom and a flash. She took several of Cory, whom she hugged several times in Christmas joy. She showed anyone who looked remotely like an Indian her letter from prestigious New Mexico magazine. She got pictures of several women wearing the big straw hat, with a stand of turquoise as a hat band. The casino was clearing out. Even the slot players go home Christmas eve. They have a lot to feel guilty about. When the eight dollar limit game broke, all the women moved to the two five no-limit Texas Hold'em game, where Kat had just started dealing. They asked Financial Sam to sit out where they could do some photos of a real all-women's game. He was glad to. Gracie took the camera, and kind of took charge, as Gracie will do.
But Iggy Thomas raised a big fuss citing civil rights, sex discrimination, and tribal laws, to get started. Misty whispered that she would sleep with him if he would hush, and head for the cage to cash in his chips. Kat said she would stomp a mud hole in him. He headed to cash the chips in track-star fashion. Just as soon as the poker game got down to all women, Misty put on the hat which was the signal. Cory would have seen the move if Gracie hadn't blinded him with the flash from the camera. He was the best bird dog in New Mexico, but Misty counted on his silence. She thought of offering him a share, but an all women's take down was her goal, and it worked. When Misty exchanged glances with Gracie, Gracie put the camera in Cory's face and hit the flash. The cold deck move, and the flash went together.
There was a lot of yelling, and hugging, and the magic hands sat there on the table. Financial Sam had been a hundred yards away, but he knew what had happened as soon as he returned. Iggy knew something was up. He'd rather have the useless promise of Misty sleeping with him than a share. He was also afraid of Kat. Cory told the tribal elders he had reviewed the video tape, and saw nothing wrong. "We have to pay it, and pay it fast," he told them. The casino paid it, with separate checks for each woman's share. They met at Margaret's apartment to settle up, and really enjoy Christmas, and celebrate in memorable fashion. Misty told them, in confidence, about the historic Morgan Ranch she was going to inherit, and promised them all a share some day when there is pie in the sky, and we find the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Johnny Hughes is the author of the Texas Poker Wisdom.
A sudden shower drenched Misty Morgan a.k.a. the Movie Star, as she was known in Las Vegas poker rooms, as she was walking to the Silver Arrow Casino in Rio Hombre, New Mexico. Her sheer white blouse, her revealed nipples, her beauty, her cascading, thick, curly,brunette locks were discussed for weeks. She seemed to put her long hair over her nipples, then move it, then put it back, in a hypnotic fashion.
When folks told Misty she was the most beautiful woman they had ever seen, it was about as common to her as good morning. There were three poker tables running. Misty bought chips in the two, five blind no-limit Texas Hold 'em game, and the rest is New Mexico history.
Cory "the Kid" Bradley, the poker room manager, fell in love with Misty, as men often did, before she peeked at her first hole cards. Cory was very good looking himself. He looked kind of like George Clooney. Misty noticed, as she usually did not. He brought her a towel, and offered her a free casino coat, food comps, and silently, just to himself, his life-time devotion. Three regulars grumbled, as they always do. After a mega-rich Texas rancher, drunk in the morning, started the "yore so purty" talk, she said she had been Miss Amarillo. She heard his remark about the "winner of the wet t-shirt contest is...." The rancher was raising every pot, and winning half. Misty laid a prop on him before her seat warmed up. "I'll give you a five dollar checker every time I win a pot, and you give me one when you win a pot."
"Make it ten," the rancher said, doubling her score. Misty hardly ever won a pot, but her stack was building. Cory knew to watch her like a paranoid hawk. Prettiest hustler off the road anyone had seen, but a hustler off the road none the less. The old Route 66, the Mother Road, America's highways had been delivering scam artists since Moby Dick was a sardine.
When Misty Morgan sat down at a poker table, she always unbuttoned two or three buttons, exposing delicious, eye candy. Poker is a social activity where staring at others is not only accepted, it is part of the game. She'd limped out of Las Vegas broke after a year of winning.
After about two hours, Misty was $900 winner. The Texan had left his hot air balloon tied in a red ant bed. Financial Sam, 91 years old, was the producer, dropping millions around Albuquerque, and not even denting his stack. When Sam headed for the buffet, Misty asked if she could go with him. Sam felt hearing was over rated, and rarely turned on his hearing aid. She had to shout three times, and now everyone in the casino questioned her motives.
Misty bought Sam's buffet. Sure enough, Misty laid her best story on Sam, her road story. She was temporarily broke, like most casino folks, but she was to inherit the historic Morgan Ranch, 473 oil wells, 47,000 acres, and a bunch of cows in the Texas panhandle. Financial Sam said basically, "Sure, you are."
Iggy "Little Drummer Boy" Thomas, computer wizard, Asberger's, ADD, mildly bi-polar, and universally hated, beat the twenty-dollar limit like it was a drum, and he'd sing out, "Ah rump pa pum pum." He searched everyone's name he could find in the Internet search engines, and gossip was his hobby. Iggy announced the next day that Misty, 30, had been Miss Amarillo, and had a warrant out for borrowing money, and defrauding a 93 year old man in a casino in Arizona. Margaret "Mother Hen" Eppler was a retired school counselor from Big Spring, Texas. She spent ten or more hours a day at any poker table that had Texas Hold 'em, and comforting words for the afflicted were her road games. She was tighter than Phil Hellmuth's hat band.
Margaret called Misty to the edge of the poker room, and told her of Iggy's announcement that filled the most gossipy poker room in America. That's because so many were regulars. Cory "the Kid" took Misty to the comp room, and gave her three Silver Arrow casino coats: two shiny, one heavy, winter coat, three embroidered shirts, six hats in varied colors, and a week's worth of buffet comp tickets. Misty took them out to her car, and didn't show back up until two weeks before Christmas. Margaret, Kat the dealer, and Betsy Underground, the six-foot-six stripper, were right outside the casino where Kat could smoke on her break. As many as six women would go out together. Misty, Betsy, and Margaret stood there talking an hour. They invited Misty to the all womens' support group meeting that very night at Margaret's apartment, near the casino. None of these folks appeared to have any real money, but Misty agreed to go anyway. When she sat down in the short-handed, no-limit Texas Hold'em game, the table filled up before she had finished unbuttoning the second button. That's what always happened when Misty Morgan played poker.
Margaret had a Ph.D, and a whole string of credentials, but what Misty heard when she got to the counseling session was the roar of a blender making margaritas, and what she smelled was the best, and strongest home-grown marijuana. Kat, Gracie, and Betsy were all three rolling joints, which was overkill. Gracie was also a poker dealer. There was a bright, decorated Christmas tree. Margaret's little Santa Claus bric-a-brac collection was everywhere. Elvis was singing, "Blue Christmas" on the stereo. April Perez was the last to arrive. She brought tamales.
Kat weighed 104 pounds and had on 40 pounds of Harley-Davidson apparel, and decoration. To say she was a biker, was like saying Sea Bisquit was a horse. After a couple of hours of life stories, the roar of the blender, and the reefer, the worst tragedies brought gales of laughter. Misty knew more short cons than Amarillo Slim, the other famous person from her home town. She had already checked the medicine cabinet. Then Misty discovered that nine quarts of rum had no tax stamps. Further furtive examination of the cabinets found them packed with rum, smuggled from Mexico, and for sale. And neatly packaged home grown marijuana worth a few thousand bucks. Margaret had a sideline or two. Margaret and Kat were whispering about the price of the home grown. Kat proposed a prop bet that Betsy at six-foot-six, and Misty at five-foot-nine, had the same proportionate measurements. Misty was a math wizard, and bet $200 with four of them that they were not. Finally, after measurements and arguments, the bet was called off in the name of feminine unity. They were proportionate. Trust me.
When there were only six drunken, stoned women left, Misty said, "I want to tell you how we can steal the bad-beat jackpot." They all promised that even if they did not go along with the con, they would keep it a secret. Swearing secrecy is as easy for a woman as blinking her eyes or writing a dear Square John letter. The Silver Arrow Casino was fourteen years old. Nobody had ever won the bad beat jackpot. It was $318,000. Cory "the Kid" Bradley's father and uncle owned "the Shop," the most legendary poker room in West Texas for thirty-five years. He grew up knowing everything about poker, and could run a tournament better than anyone in New Mexico. He was often loaned out to other Indian tribes. The one thing Cory did not know was that the house is expected to steal most of the bad beat money
Misty told them that when the casino poker room was closing on Chrismas Eve, we'd ask for a few hands of women only, and photograph it for the story she was doing for New Mexico magazine on women poker players and dealers. She handed a forged press credential on letterhead around for all to see. All the dealers want off to be with their families. Kat and Gracie will offer to be there until the last. Cory had said the poker room would close around 1 p.m., depending on interest.
When Misty had them sit down at the kitchen table where she could show them the cold-deck move, they all began to believe slowly that it would work. Misty had a big straw hat. She'd sit right behind the dealer, and bring in the cold deck, the prearranged deck. Margaret would start with a A,K and someone in on it would start with A,Q and both would make full houses. If aces full got beat, then the jackpot would go to those at the table. She showed them the move. The hat would come off with her right hand to block the overhead camera, and the rigged deck would go in under Kat's right arm with her left hand, as Kat put the other deck in her lap, right after the cut. Then, in the excitement of the bad beat jackpot, Misty would clean up, getting the old deck from Kat's lap, with the same move. They tried it with Gracie, also.
Almost as if she were mentioning the weather, Misty told them she would get a double share, and that she had Cory "fixed", which was a skillful lie. There was a long silence. Exchanged glances calculated their chances. Finally, Margaret spoke, "If she can do the move drunk, she can do the move sober. Getting all women at the table will be the hard part. The overhead camera could ruin everything."
Gracie pointed out that Misty and the dealer, either her or Kat are the only ones at any risk of being caught, and wondered aloud if the dealers share could not be a little higher. Misty was marvelous, putting it in gambling terms. You get a full share, but have a fifty per cent chance of no risk. April Perez said Misty would make a good double-talking politician. Misty explained they needed one more poker playing woman. Kat suggested Tattooed Nicky, one of the only lady loan shark collectors in Albuquerque, and there was a chorus of objections. Margaret said she had the perfect person, but would reveal her, or invite her to the next party. Then she swore them to secrecy, something they were getting used to. Kat raised her right hand each time. She had them draw names to exchange small, gag Christmas gifts, and not tell anyone who they got. Betsy asked, "Where is the nearest Harley Davidson store."
They were back at Margaret's apartment the next night with the blender roaring, and steaks and chicken on the grill. Nita Morales came. Talk about some sour faces. Margaret said she had full trust in Nita, and who would be better? Who was more well known around Silver Arrow Casino?
Kat and Gracie had both been dealing a little, three-table, $100 entry, Texas Hold 'em tourney when Mrs. Morales, as she was always called, attacked this Senior Engineer from Sandia on the very first hand, saying, wrongly, that he shorted the pot. He called her "a bitch", and eight of her relatives jumped to their feet to defend her honor. Hector Morales, 20, kept holding his hand sideways as if he had a gang gun, and saying, "I'll cap you. I'll cap you." Three old, tired, security guards were coming out of the side door, putting on their coats, as if in slow motion. They threw the engineer out, and refunded his entry. He fled. Mrs. Morales insisted they blind off, not pick up his stack, and they did. Even with a third of the field, all of her relatives ran in the mud.
After the ritualistic swearing of secrecy, Margaret told all the women one or two at a time that Mrs. Morales was 100 per cent trustworthy since she stole every single day from the gift shop with the assistance of her cousin. Her relatives in the Sheriff's office, and the highway patrol could help, if need be.
There were three more parties at Margaret's apartment. Mrs. Morales regaled them with stories of her large family, and their political careers. They were all beginning to really like her. When they were really drunk, Kat said, why wait until Chrismas, let's cold deck a table full of men tomorrow night. The cold deck move was getting seamless with practice. All the ladies watched the practice with growing confidence. The two women would move their arms in unison. Misty explained any early introduction of the hat or weird moves would queer the deal. It had to be Christmas Eve. April Perez said, "I will have enough money to keep my daughters in the Montessori School until they are thirty if I want to."
They were all rested and ready on Christmas eve. Misty was all over the casino, shooting pictures with this big Nikon camera with a zoom and a flash. She took several of Cory, whom she hugged several times in Christmas joy. She showed anyone who looked remotely like an Indian her letter from prestigious New Mexico magazine. She got pictures of several women wearing the big straw hat, with a stand of turquoise as a hat band. The casino was clearing out. Even the slot players go home Christmas eve. They have a lot to feel guilty about. When the eight dollar limit game broke, all the women moved to the two five no-limit Texas Hold'em game, where Kat had just started dealing. They asked Financial Sam to sit out where they could do some photos of a real all-women's game. He was glad to. Gracie took the camera, and kind of took charge, as Gracie will do.
But Iggy Thomas raised a big fuss citing civil rights, sex discrimination, and tribal laws, to get started. Misty whispered that she would sleep with him if he would hush, and head for the cage to cash in his chips. Kat said she would stomp a mud hole in him. He headed to cash the chips in track-star fashion. Just as soon as the poker game got down to all women, Misty put on the hat which was the signal. Cory would have seen the move if Gracie hadn't blinded him with the flash from the camera. He was the best bird dog in New Mexico, but Misty counted on his silence. She thought of offering him a share, but an all women's take down was her goal, and it worked. When Misty exchanged glances with Gracie, Gracie put the camera in Cory's face and hit the flash. The cold deck move, and the flash went together.
There was a lot of yelling, and hugging, and the magic hands sat there on the table. Financial Sam had been a hundred yards away, but he knew what had happened as soon as he returned. Iggy knew something was up. He'd rather have the useless promise of Misty sleeping with him than a share. He was also afraid of Kat. Cory told the tribal elders he had reviewed the video tape, and saw nothing wrong. "We have to pay it, and pay it fast," he told them. The casino paid it, with separate checks for each woman's share. They met at Margaret's apartment to settle up, and really enjoy Christmas, and celebrate in memorable fashion. Misty told them, in confidence, about the historic Morgan Ranch she was going to inherit, and promised them all a share some day when there is pie in the sky, and we find the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Johnny Hughes is the author of the Texas Poker Wisdom.
November 04, 2009
A Young Man and Road Gambling
By Johnny Hughes © 2009
In my early twenties, when I went on the road gambling, I usually limped home scratching a broke man's ass. Lubbock was a real poker and gambling center. No need to travel, but we did, often. Johnny Moss moved to Lubbock in 1938 for the poker for a while. In the late 1950s, and early 1960s, many big gamblers moved to Lubbock, and the poker was fantastic. Dallas/Ft. Worth had gambling turf wars with many killed, grand jury indictments, law crackdowns, and vicious hijackers.
Big gamblers would live in a town, and play square there, but on the road, they only got the suckers one night at an Elk's, Moose, Eagle's, Country Club stag, or gambling night, so anything goes. I learned about all the cheating moves with cards and dice from Curly Cavitt, one of the top road gamblers in Texas, and the world. He worked with Titanic Thompson, Johnny Moss, Red Harris, and Pat Renfro to name a few.
Every form of imaginative dice came in and out, moved by the top magicians. Card cheating was expected. And yes, Dr. Pauly, they always had strippers. Two kinds. All those guys older than me that came out of the great depression knew how to cheat, but not anything at all like Curly and Titanic. Without a bankroll, losing is not an option. Speaking of the depression, Benny Binion said, "Tough times make tough people."
The big open, always no-limit Texas Hold 'em game at "the Shop" in Lubbock, Texas lasted thirty-five years. There were a steady supply of "road gamblers" coming and going. Nearly all lost. We called them "cross-roaders" or "scufflers", which implied cheaters. After winning the World Series of Poker at different times: Amarillo Slim, Sailor Roberts, and Bill Smith came to the Shop, and lost. Same with Bobby Hoff, who was at a few main-event final tables. Far better were the really slick, all-out con men in hot Cadillacs and nice, hot clothes. Tell 'em you like their hat or watch, they say "It's for sale," and mean it. The con men just could never handle the square poker, but they tried, and tried, and tried. They could always pump money, and how was none of our business. I knew many of them with incredible cons, but most were almost child-like at the poker.
The road gambler/con men slicks stole on the road, but not at the Shop. The biggest poker games were honest, because everyone knew the moves, and of course, some killers were ever present. Houdini would have been afraid to hold out a card. We knew nearly all the home and road poker players, and we welcomed any well-dressed stranger. The Shop was West Texas outlaw central for all manner of traveling thieves. I loved it. I wish it was open. It was my favorite place on earth, Binion's in Las Vegas second, and Texas Tech third, a weak third.
The road was way cheaper than it is today, even counting inflation. I stayed at the fanciest, legendary hotels. They had an off-room, cheap-price, or commercial-rate room. The Adolphus and Baker in Dallas. The Texan in Fort Worth. I stayed in the same suite at the Cortez in El Paso that President Kennedy had stayed in a couple of days before his assassination. They charged me $9.
I'd travel to bridge tournaments and play with clients a few sessions, and get paid. We'd bet all the old ladies $5 a piece, a gift. I was a Life Master, the highest rank, in my early twenties. We'd bet higher, but only good players took the action. But we still seemed to limp home broke. I left a lot of towns broke: Ft. Worth, Dallas often, Acapulco, Mexico City, Longview, El Paso, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, Austin, Del Rio, Los Angeles, Nashville, San Francisco, and more. Being broke on the road brings out one's inner creativity. As Benny Binion said, "I'll tell you the truth, but I won't tell you everything."
Nobody wanted to miss the big July 4th Regional Bridge tourney that alternated between Dallas and Ft. Worth. One year I was flat broke, and hitchhiked there. My golf hustler, bridge expert, complete con artist, then and now, mother passed me three times with her rich, lady friends. I had spent a fortune in poker money taking her to bridge tourneys. Often we'd fly someplace and take the long, long overnight bus home. I could sleep anywhere: buses, trains, planes, jail, back seats. I slept in a gambling joint until I was twenty-six, often while the chips rattled.
But on this trip, I was relegated to the Ft. Worth YMCA. I railed, kibitzed the bridge great, Oswald Jacoby, hit the buffet, played a few sessions, got drunk often, and had a big time. Bridge tourneys were very big, like poker tourneys now. Mother promised a few bucks walking around money, but no. On the last night, I get way to drunk to remember that my pockets were dry. I start marching back to the YMCA about 4 a.m. Being July the 4th, there are large flags everywhere. I stole one on a big, heavy pole. Now, I'm really marching. Some Ft. Worth rowdies stopped and hassled me, but I had the flag pole, the zeal of patriotism, and firewater courage. A cop car came my way, but I ducked into an alley. And I never abandoned Old Glory.
The next morning, I woke up broke on the third floor of the Fort Worth YMCA, and owe them for several days. I put the flag in my old suitcase and threw it to the street, far below. It sounded like a bomb when it hit. The suitcase broke open, and the flag unfurled on the sidewalk. I ran on down. Caught a great ride who bought me breakfast. Kept that big flag for years, as a bed cover.
Another time I go on the road with one of America's very best bridge players, Butch Adams. We drive 500 miles to Tyler, where the bridge tourney is canceled. We drive to Dallas, and there is a Calcutta. You bid on the pairs, and a pot forms with big cash prizes. The most famous bridge player of all time, Oswald Jacoby, bought us cheap. You buy half and split the winnings. There is a huge amount of richie, Dallas popularity bidding and the pot got large. We blew it on the first few hands. Amazing, Butch won everything, with everybody. We had won often. That same year, Johnny Moss staked me. So, I had the best-known men in bridge and poker as stake horses, then and now, stake me, and I lost for both of them. I was not a stake horse. i was a stick horse.
So, now Butch and I head north to Oklahoma City in time for the tail-end of a big bridge tournament. In the large open pairs, we knew only three pairs to bet with, so we got down for all the money we had left. There were hundreds of people. We placed fifth, and lost all three bets, to 1st, 2nd, and 4th. Broke again! We drove 1500 miles or more to get broke, when we could have gotten broke much cheaper in Lubbock, Texas.
Once a major sucker catches two aces, and my partner did too. They moved it to the center in the middle of winter. My man begged for a split. Sucker said no. He hit a flush, and flew to Dallas. We flew after him, and found a triple-draw low ball game with thieves. Dallas and poker thieves went together for decades. The next morning, I am walking down Commerce Street, when a slick grabs me by the arm. He says he is a colorologist with a college degree, and he had a perfect sports coat to match my "ruddy" skin color. So, I follow him into this fancy men's store, and he breaks me for my half of the traveling boodle. Coat, pants, shirts, belts. However, when I was broke, I was one of the best dressed gamblers in all of Texas.
When I went in the Army at age twenty-two, I had to tell them about my string of gambling arrests, and they listed me as a professional gambler. They told me if I played in the barracks poker game, I'd go to the stockade. It was a six-month active duty, six years reserves program. I didn't want to play in those nits and lice games anyway.
When I got out, right before Christmas of 1962, I had only my Army dress uniform to wear. I bought some fancy Signal Corps adornments, and a garish, orange sash for my shoulder, which I was not supposed to wear, bloused my boots like the paratroopers, and headed to Ft. Worth for another regional bridge tourney. This time I was staying at the Texas Hotel, like the quality folk.
With a pint of bootleg booze behind me, I went to the legendary Cellar, a beatnik, coffee house joint run by Pat KIrkwood, the son of one of Ft. Worth's biggest gamblers, Pappy KIrkwood. He had owned the fabled Four Deuces, the 2222, a full-tilt casino on the Jacksboro Highway when the gambling ran wide open, with the help of the law.
The Cellar sold fake booze. Syrupy rum and coke without alcohol. I raised a loud fuss, and they threw a United States Army soldier in uniform out. From Kipling, they let a drunk civilian in, but had no room for me. I have been thrown out of a lot nicer joints than that.
Joe Ely, a singer I later managed, worked at the Cellar, as did ZZ Top. They'd rotate playing all night. Ely said that Pat Kirkwood pointed a pistol at him rather than pay up.
At nineteen, I toured towns around East Texas with Curly Cavitt, the most legendary Texas gambler of them all. Palestine, Gladwater, Longview, Lufkin. Curly was on the road sixty years, and never went broke. His cheating skills were fantastic. I tried to fade open craps, but had no real bankroll, and lost. We went to a horse race, where I bet on a two-horse race, and lost. We went a massive Elk's Stag. There were five open dice tables, and two poker games up stairs. I got busted at five-dollar limit, seven-card stud by an old man doing an over-hand stack. Curly watched and laughed. Part of my education. He was there to stake Johnny Moss and Pat Renfro, and play in the big poker game. Two future Hall of Famers, Johnny Moss and Sarge Ferris, were battlling it out. Sarge's road game was razz, and they were playing it higher than Rush Limbaugh. I sat up in a high shoeshine stand watching big pots when players had $1000 and $500 bills in play, and there I was, broke again. Curly and Johnny Moss cut up the sweet score they tipped over.
One time coming out of Mexico with my pals, we had the cash stashed for the 300 plus miles home. Smuggling rum brilliantly, we had the backseat floorboard covered in bottles of rum. It was brutally cold, and we had our coats over the rum. The guys in the back had their knees up real high, and we got caught. It was only a $40 smuggling fine and the rum or my car, an easy choice. Case forty, oh lordy, broke again!
Two of my best friends, and first two partners and I opened a little gambling joint. We had pot cut Texas Hold 'em poker, and we dealt fast, very fast. Previously, college-age folks played dealer's choice, but Hold 'em makes the rake stronger than a garlic milkshake. We had blackjack (21), and we dealt fast, very fast. We bootlegged beer and sold mixed drinks, whiskey and coke. We'd have to run 110 miles to get beer, and we'd lose to parties when the joint was closed. When we got drunk, the hangers on got drunk. Once we made a light score, and decided to go to Juarez, Mexico, as we were prone to do. Being only 320 miles, we took no suitcases, clothes, or whatever. We did take the little joint bankroll. When three people share a road bankroll, you tend to spend.
In Juarez, we went one block past the international bridge to a favorite bar, San Felipe's. We drank a long time, and hired this band to play songs at 50 cents a pop. Every fourth song, we requested La Cucaracha, the Mexican Revolution corrido, and we sang loudly in fake Spanish, but on key. Finally, we went broke to La Cucaracha. We didn't eat in the fancy restaurant where each guy gets twenty-seven waiters, and five courses. We saw no dancing girls. We just sang La Cucaracha. We went in only one bar. Broke again.
Later, we slept in the car awhile, and headed home. We saw two giant strippers standing by the road. Their car is broken down. If we will take them to Hobbs, New Mexico, they will get us into an Elk's Stag with food, booze, and a show. Only we have to take the carnie-talking promoter, and they go in the car in front of us. Bummer. In Hobbs, we last four minutes inside the Elk's Lodge, and are thrown out. Broke again!
During my youngest years as a gambler, my folks moved around, especially Daddy, looking for oil. The Phillipines. Colorado. Michigan. Indiana. The boom towns of Texas. Once Daddy was in Ozona, Texas near the border. I got Buddy the Beat really drunk, and headed there to take Daddy my 1954 Ford. He gave me $20, and we hitchhiked on to Villa Acuna, Mexico with that our total bankroll. Some whores beat us up in the Number Eight bar, and threw us in the mud. We got separated, and I caught a flop house in Del Rio to wash my clothes, and sleep. The next day I found Buddy in Acuna. He had organized a minor search for me. Touching. We headed home broke. He was terrible to hitchhike with, even though he had more miles than anybody. I have hitchhiked away from the Mexican border a couple of times, and nobody trusted you, even back then.
When I was twenty-one, a buddy and I got a job shilling at the poker at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas for the great Bill Boyd. The shills signaled, the rake was incredible, and no one ever won. Boyd would "stake you" to your first five dollars free. As soon as they got broke, the suckers would grab for their billfold in a real sawdust, bust-out prop. Seeing broke around the corner, I wrote to my con-artist mother, recalling the time they actually gave me four silver dollars when I was nine to go the the Sorth Plains Fair. I pleaded for a loan. There were many con artists and gamblers in her family, and many upright, successful professionals.
Finally, a letter came to General Delivery, Las Vegas. There was no money. There was only one sentence from mother. It said, "The only thing worse than being a gambler is thinking you are one when you are not."
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
In my early twenties, when I went on the road gambling, I usually limped home scratching a broke man's ass. Lubbock was a real poker and gambling center. No need to travel, but we did, often. Johnny Moss moved to Lubbock in 1938 for the poker for a while. In the late 1950s, and early 1960s, many big gamblers moved to Lubbock, and the poker was fantastic. Dallas/Ft. Worth had gambling turf wars with many killed, grand jury indictments, law crackdowns, and vicious hijackers.
Big gamblers would live in a town, and play square there, but on the road, they only got the suckers one night at an Elk's, Moose, Eagle's, Country Club stag, or gambling night, so anything goes. I learned about all the cheating moves with cards and dice from Curly Cavitt, one of the top road gamblers in Texas, and the world. He worked with Titanic Thompson, Johnny Moss, Red Harris, and Pat Renfro to name a few.
Every form of imaginative dice came in and out, moved by the top magicians. Card cheating was expected. And yes, Dr. Pauly, they always had strippers. Two kinds. All those guys older than me that came out of the great depression knew how to cheat, but not anything at all like Curly and Titanic. Without a bankroll, losing is not an option. Speaking of the depression, Benny Binion said, "Tough times make tough people."
The big open, always no-limit Texas Hold 'em game at "the Shop" in Lubbock, Texas lasted thirty-five years. There were a steady supply of "road gamblers" coming and going. Nearly all lost. We called them "cross-roaders" or "scufflers", which implied cheaters. After winning the World Series of Poker at different times: Amarillo Slim, Sailor Roberts, and Bill Smith came to the Shop, and lost. Same with Bobby Hoff, who was at a few main-event final tables. Far better were the really slick, all-out con men in hot Cadillacs and nice, hot clothes. Tell 'em you like their hat or watch, they say "It's for sale," and mean it. The con men just could never handle the square poker, but they tried, and tried, and tried. They could always pump money, and how was none of our business. I knew many of them with incredible cons, but most were almost child-like at the poker.
The road gambler/con men slicks stole on the road, but not at the Shop. The biggest poker games were honest, because everyone knew the moves, and of course, some killers were ever present. Houdini would have been afraid to hold out a card. We knew nearly all the home and road poker players, and we welcomed any well-dressed stranger. The Shop was West Texas outlaw central for all manner of traveling thieves. I loved it. I wish it was open. It was my favorite place on earth, Binion's in Las Vegas second, and Texas Tech third, a weak third.
The road was way cheaper than it is today, even counting inflation. I stayed at the fanciest, legendary hotels. They had an off-room, cheap-price, or commercial-rate room. The Adolphus and Baker in Dallas. The Texan in Fort Worth. I stayed in the same suite at the Cortez in El Paso that President Kennedy had stayed in a couple of days before his assassination. They charged me $9.
I'd travel to bridge tournaments and play with clients a few sessions, and get paid. We'd bet all the old ladies $5 a piece, a gift. I was a Life Master, the highest rank, in my early twenties. We'd bet higher, but only good players took the action. But we still seemed to limp home broke. I left a lot of towns broke: Ft. Worth, Dallas often, Acapulco, Mexico City, Longview, El Paso, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, Austin, Del Rio, Los Angeles, Nashville, San Francisco, and more. Being broke on the road brings out one's inner creativity. As Benny Binion said, "I'll tell you the truth, but I won't tell you everything."
Nobody wanted to miss the big July 4th Regional Bridge tourney that alternated between Dallas and Ft. Worth. One year I was flat broke, and hitchhiked there. My golf hustler, bridge expert, complete con artist, then and now, mother passed me three times with her rich, lady friends. I had spent a fortune in poker money taking her to bridge tourneys. Often we'd fly someplace and take the long, long overnight bus home. I could sleep anywhere: buses, trains, planes, jail, back seats. I slept in a gambling joint until I was twenty-six, often while the chips rattled.
But on this trip, I was relegated to the Ft. Worth YMCA. I railed, kibitzed the bridge great, Oswald Jacoby, hit the buffet, played a few sessions, got drunk often, and had a big time. Bridge tourneys were very big, like poker tourneys now. Mother promised a few bucks walking around money, but no. On the last night, I get way to drunk to remember that my pockets were dry. I start marching back to the YMCA about 4 a.m. Being July the 4th, there are large flags everywhere. I stole one on a big, heavy pole. Now, I'm really marching. Some Ft. Worth rowdies stopped and hassled me, but I had the flag pole, the zeal of patriotism, and firewater courage. A cop car came my way, but I ducked into an alley. And I never abandoned Old Glory.
The next morning, I woke up broke on the third floor of the Fort Worth YMCA, and owe them for several days. I put the flag in my old suitcase and threw it to the street, far below. It sounded like a bomb when it hit. The suitcase broke open, and the flag unfurled on the sidewalk. I ran on down. Caught a great ride who bought me breakfast. Kept that big flag for years, as a bed cover.
Another time I go on the road with one of America's very best bridge players, Butch Adams. We drive 500 miles to Tyler, where the bridge tourney is canceled. We drive to Dallas, and there is a Calcutta. You bid on the pairs, and a pot forms with big cash prizes. The most famous bridge player of all time, Oswald Jacoby, bought us cheap. You buy half and split the winnings. There is a huge amount of richie, Dallas popularity bidding and the pot got large. We blew it on the first few hands. Amazing, Butch won everything, with everybody. We had won often. That same year, Johnny Moss staked me. So, I had the best-known men in bridge and poker as stake horses, then and now, stake me, and I lost for both of them. I was not a stake horse. i was a stick horse.
So, now Butch and I head north to Oklahoma City in time for the tail-end of a big bridge tournament. In the large open pairs, we knew only three pairs to bet with, so we got down for all the money we had left. There were hundreds of people. We placed fifth, and lost all three bets, to 1st, 2nd, and 4th. Broke again! We drove 1500 miles or more to get broke, when we could have gotten broke much cheaper in Lubbock, Texas.
Once a major sucker catches two aces, and my partner did too. They moved it to the center in the middle of winter. My man begged for a split. Sucker said no. He hit a flush, and flew to Dallas. We flew after him, and found a triple-draw low ball game with thieves. Dallas and poker thieves went together for decades. The next morning, I am walking down Commerce Street, when a slick grabs me by the arm. He says he is a colorologist with a college degree, and he had a perfect sports coat to match my "ruddy" skin color. So, I follow him into this fancy men's store, and he breaks me for my half of the traveling boodle. Coat, pants, shirts, belts. However, when I was broke, I was one of the best dressed gamblers in all of Texas.
When I went in the Army at age twenty-two, I had to tell them about my string of gambling arrests, and they listed me as a professional gambler. They told me if I played in the barracks poker game, I'd go to the stockade. It was a six-month active duty, six years reserves program. I didn't want to play in those nits and lice games anyway.
When I got out, right before Christmas of 1962, I had only my Army dress uniform to wear. I bought some fancy Signal Corps adornments, and a garish, orange sash for my shoulder, which I was not supposed to wear, bloused my boots like the paratroopers, and headed to Ft. Worth for another regional bridge tourney. This time I was staying at the Texas Hotel, like the quality folk.
With a pint of bootleg booze behind me, I went to the legendary Cellar, a beatnik, coffee house joint run by Pat KIrkwood, the son of one of Ft. Worth's biggest gamblers, Pappy KIrkwood. He had owned the fabled Four Deuces, the 2222, a full-tilt casino on the Jacksboro Highway when the gambling ran wide open, with the help of the law.
The Cellar sold fake booze. Syrupy rum and coke without alcohol. I raised a loud fuss, and they threw a United States Army soldier in uniform out. From Kipling, they let a drunk civilian in, but had no room for me. I have been thrown out of a lot nicer joints than that.
Joe Ely, a singer I later managed, worked at the Cellar, as did ZZ Top. They'd rotate playing all night. Ely said that Pat Kirkwood pointed a pistol at him rather than pay up.
At nineteen, I toured towns around East Texas with Curly Cavitt, the most legendary Texas gambler of them all. Palestine, Gladwater, Longview, Lufkin. Curly was on the road sixty years, and never went broke. His cheating skills were fantastic. I tried to fade open craps, but had no real bankroll, and lost. We went to a horse race, where I bet on a two-horse race, and lost. We went a massive Elk's Stag. There were five open dice tables, and two poker games up stairs. I got busted at five-dollar limit, seven-card stud by an old man doing an over-hand stack. Curly watched and laughed. Part of my education. He was there to stake Johnny Moss and Pat Renfro, and play in the big poker game. Two future Hall of Famers, Johnny Moss and Sarge Ferris, were battlling it out. Sarge's road game was razz, and they were playing it higher than Rush Limbaugh. I sat up in a high shoeshine stand watching big pots when players had $1000 and $500 bills in play, and there I was, broke again. Curly and Johnny Moss cut up the sweet score they tipped over.
One time coming out of Mexico with my pals, we had the cash stashed for the 300 plus miles home. Smuggling rum brilliantly, we had the backseat floorboard covered in bottles of rum. It was brutally cold, and we had our coats over the rum. The guys in the back had their knees up real high, and we got caught. It was only a $40 smuggling fine and the rum or my car, an easy choice. Case forty, oh lordy, broke again!
Two of my best friends, and first two partners and I opened a little gambling joint. We had pot cut Texas Hold 'em poker, and we dealt fast, very fast. Previously, college-age folks played dealer's choice, but Hold 'em makes the rake stronger than a garlic milkshake. We had blackjack (21), and we dealt fast, very fast. We bootlegged beer and sold mixed drinks, whiskey and coke. We'd have to run 110 miles to get beer, and we'd lose to parties when the joint was closed. When we got drunk, the hangers on got drunk. Once we made a light score, and decided to go to Juarez, Mexico, as we were prone to do. Being only 320 miles, we took no suitcases, clothes, or whatever. We did take the little joint bankroll. When three people share a road bankroll, you tend to spend.
In Juarez, we went one block past the international bridge to a favorite bar, San Felipe's. We drank a long time, and hired this band to play songs at 50 cents a pop. Every fourth song, we requested La Cucaracha, the Mexican Revolution corrido, and we sang loudly in fake Spanish, but on key. Finally, we went broke to La Cucaracha. We didn't eat in the fancy restaurant where each guy gets twenty-seven waiters, and five courses. We saw no dancing girls. We just sang La Cucaracha. We went in only one bar. Broke again.
Later, we slept in the car awhile, and headed home. We saw two giant strippers standing by the road. Their car is broken down. If we will take them to Hobbs, New Mexico, they will get us into an Elk's Stag with food, booze, and a show. Only we have to take the carnie-talking promoter, and they go in the car in front of us. Bummer. In Hobbs, we last four minutes inside the Elk's Lodge, and are thrown out. Broke again!
During my youngest years as a gambler, my folks moved around, especially Daddy, looking for oil. The Phillipines. Colorado. Michigan. Indiana. The boom towns of Texas. Once Daddy was in Ozona, Texas near the border. I got Buddy the Beat really drunk, and headed there to take Daddy my 1954 Ford. He gave me $20, and we hitchhiked on to Villa Acuna, Mexico with that our total bankroll. Some whores beat us up in the Number Eight bar, and threw us in the mud. We got separated, and I caught a flop house in Del Rio to wash my clothes, and sleep. The next day I found Buddy in Acuna. He had organized a minor search for me. Touching. We headed home broke. He was terrible to hitchhike with, even though he had more miles than anybody. I have hitchhiked away from the Mexican border a couple of times, and nobody trusted you, even back then.
When I was twenty-one, a buddy and I got a job shilling at the poker at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas for the great Bill Boyd. The shills signaled, the rake was incredible, and no one ever won. Boyd would "stake you" to your first five dollars free. As soon as they got broke, the suckers would grab for their billfold in a real sawdust, bust-out prop. Seeing broke around the corner, I wrote to my con-artist mother, recalling the time they actually gave me four silver dollars when I was nine to go the the Sorth Plains Fair. I pleaded for a loan. There were many con artists and gamblers in her family, and many upright, successful professionals.
Finally, a letter came to General Delivery, Las Vegas. There was no money. There was only one sentence from mother. It said, "The only thing worse than being a gambler is thinking you are one when you are not."
Spanish lyrics:
La cucaracha, la cucaracha,
ya no puede caminar
porque no tiene, porque le falta
marihuana pa' fumar.
English lyrics:
The cockroach, the cockroach,
can't walk anymore
because it doesn't have,
because it's lacking
marijuana to smoke.
Johnny Hughes is the author of Texas Poker Wisdom.
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