Deep Ellum Icon: Honest Joe's Pawn Shop

Here is an original sign (there were hundreds) from Honest Joe's Pawn Shop, for decades a Deep Ellum institution. Here is how I used it in "Friend of the Devil," as a pawn shop in Del Rio:

The tower bell starts ringing, bong, bong, bong, and that’s when I see, a block and a half up the street, a big sign for Honest Joe’s Pawn Shop, which I don’t remember being there before. Bong, bong, bong. So I wrap my arm tight around my guitar case and start running toward it. The whole way up, there’s folks standing there saying, Hey Slim, Hi Slim, Where you running to, Slim? And to each of them I give a nice, friendly how you all, because as anyone in the business will tell you, fans are money in the bank.
The bell is still ringing when I force myself to stop and catch my breath for a second before going in, because nothing good ever happens to anyone who comes too fast into a pawnshop. Honest Joe’s is really just a hole in the wall; less an emporium than a vestibule with a couple glass display cases filled with trays of watches, rings, and pocketknives.
Honest Joe is a little bald gnome of a man with green eyeshades, who sits perched on a swiveling metal high chair. He looks up from his racing form and swivels to face me. “Whattaya need?” he drawls.
I set my guitar case on the counter and open it. He tries not to look impressed, but he is. “That’s a Martin, innit?” he asks. I nod.
“I need a gun,” I tell him. 

(Excerpt from "Friend of the Devil," available on Kindle)

The Last Place Clyde Barrow Was Seen in Dallas

While one of the troopers runs off, this man Hamer continues staring at me the same way folks do when they think they recognize someone, but can’t quite place them. I stare back like it don’t bother me none, though, truth to tell, my knees like to buckle right under me. But I just keep on my poker face and act like I could stand there under his gaze all the doodah day.
The trooper trots back with a dark brown folder. He opens it and takes out some photographs which he offers to the big man. The big man gives his head a tiny shake, like he wants him to show them to me and that he’ll just watch me doing it.
The first picture he shows me is the girl, only this time she’s got on a long black dress and she’s posing before the front grill of a Ford. “That’s her, all right,” I say, tapping her image with my finger. The next picture shows her with two young men in suits. One I recognize immediately as my cousin Clyde, the other is a kid I’ve never seen before but he’s got that same hungry West Dallas look of a dog finally getting to have his day. I tap Clyde’s face. “I think this is the guy who was outside, but I can’t say for sure cause I saw him through the screen door.”
Hamer listens to what I’m saying like it’s from a long ways away. He stands stock still, but, even so, I can feel the wheels furiously turning inside his head.
“I didn’t see this other guy, is he the cousin?”
Hamer gives his head another imperceptible shake, like this time he’s just a little annoyed by the question. He gestures the trooper to continue. The trooper hands me another photograph. It’s a mugshot of myself.
“You seen him?”

I stare at my picture. My face is swollen from a beating I’d just taken, but still it’s me. I look up from the picture directly into Hamer’s inquiring eyes. “No, sir,” I say.
“Look again,” he orders. “You’re from Dallas. You look like a man who gets around town. You should have seen him.”I stare helpless back down at the photograph of myself staring sullenly back. And I remember the moment, because at that moment I was staring into the eyes of one of the cops who’d just beaten the crap out of me. What’s going on with Hamer? Doesn’t he recognize me? Is this some game he’s playing with me? He’s got to know that the guy in the picture is myself. But I just look up back into his eyes and say, “Sorry, sir, I don’t recognize him at all.” (Excerpt from "Friend of the Devil," available on Kindle)

Point of historical interest here. The view is of the Dallas skyline from the north eastern side of White Rock Lake. The Coca Cola truck is on Buckner Blvd AKA Loop 12. It is also right around the spot where Clyde Barrow was last spotted by the police. My source here is Ted Hinton, of the Dallas Sheriff's office, who knew Clyde growing up and knew Bonnie as a waitress at Marco's cafe. Ted Hinton was also part of the shooting party led by Capt Frank Hamer, which ultimately bushwacked Bonnie and Clyde on May 23, 1934.

Where Bonnie and Clyde Longed to Belong

Bonnie and Clyde were two grit kids from hardscrabble West Dallas. Across the river was glittering Downtown Dallas. Color film from the 1930s:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO9J91V_ETE

Friend of the Devil is a novel about people from the wrong side of Dallas. But in 1939, the right side sure looked like smart, sophisticated heaven.

The Devil Knows You Were in Knoxville

I take another big hit, like all the talk he’s putting down is just so much street patter, but the whole time I’m wondering to myself, how the heck does this evil cat know I was ever in Knoxville?

Stevens laughs. ”Oh, I know all kinds of things about you, my friend. Your name is Lowell George, isn’t it? You were second trombone for that lush dance orchestra that plays at the Starlight ballroom at the Van Buren Hotel. What’s its name?”

Stevens takes a big long hit. For the longest time he holds it in his lungs while keeping the burning reefer in his right hand as he flexes his wrist, like there’s a point he’s about to make as soon as he lets the smoke out of his lungs. I stare out the window at the marshmallow fog and wonder how I’m ever going to get out of this one.

“The Ray Covington Melody Makers,” I say like it was a long time ago. But he doesn’t seem to hear me. His mind is his own lungs all packed full with Harlem’s Best marijuana smoke. Stevens begins exhaling and immediately breaks into a hacking fit as he tries telling me something. “Huah, huah!,” he coughs. “But… you… can’t…huah, huah, huah, get…out of it…until, huah, huah, huah,…you get…into it!” he declares. “Huah, huah, huah! Am I right, Mister Lowell George?”

“Oh, you are most definitively right,” I answer, rejoicing that he only seems to know my alias.

I put my hand out for the stick, but instead of handing it back to me, Stevens takes another massive hit, again holding it in his lungs but then almost immediately letting it out as he turns to me and says, “Now is your name Lowell George, or is it Herbert T. Barrow of Eagle Ford, Texas?” He hands the three-quarters castigated reefer back to me with a flourish worthy of a cavalier with a big plumed hat.

“Either name works fine for me,” I say, like there’s nothing particularly amazing about this last feat of his. “But I’ve been thinking of calling myself Lawrence “T-Bone” Dupree. What do you think of it?”

“Oh, I like it,” he says. “I like it a lot. That’s a real bluesman’s name, not one anyone would associate with a bank robber and escaped convict.” (Excerpt from Friend of the Devil, available on Kindle)

The Road to Del Rio VII: Dallas on Their Minds

Bonnie, Clyde, and Herbert T. Barrow all came from Dallas and even though they never got to pass through it during their several-state crime spree, in a way, they didn't have to. Dallas was always on their minds. But then Dallas has always been as much a state of mind as it is an actual place.

Dallas is one of those rare cities built on an idea rather than a piece of geography. The idea behind Dallas could be characterized by a single word: Money! It was founded by John Neeley Bryant, a "man on the make" and a civic booster looking to found a city he could boost. He and men like him built a city on the prairie, overlooking the Trinity River, a glorified creek,which was really more of a nuisance than a bona fide geographical feature. Dallas rose up on the eastern side of the Trinity, a city fueled by ambition and opportunity. Once people had money, they wasted no time acquiring the best, most up-to-date style and class that money could buy.

But Bonnie, Clyde and Herbert were all from the other side of the Trinity, from West Dallas, which stayed poor and hopeless and remains that way to this very day.  Bonnie was born in Rowena, a little town an hour or so south and west of Dallas that no longer exists. Bonnie's father died when she was little more than a    baby and her mother moved her and her younger sister to a place in West Dallas called Cement City, built around a cement plant. They were considered lower middle class, which meant mainly that Bonnie's mother managed to hold down a job and pay rent and that she aspired for better things for her daughters. Bonnie attended school and got good grades and was valedictorian for her high school class. The school she went to is still there, though it shut down decades ago.  Not so long ago, people went into the school building and found a copy of her grade card.

Clyde's family could not have been considered anything but bottom-of-the-barrel West Dallas grit. It would be wrong to call them "White Trash," because they weren't. They were hard working, hard scrabble, fierce, proud, and profoundly unlucky. They'd tried farming in a couple different places around east Texas including, finally, Teleco, south of Dallas. They finally gave up and moved to Dallas, for the same reason everyone moves to Dallas; for opportunity.

But all the Barrows could afford was Eagle Ford, a place on the Trinity that was about as close as you could get to Dallas without actually being there. But Eagle Ford was still on the wrong side of the Trinity and to this day it remains an economically depressed, crime ridden hole. For a while the Barrows lived in a canvas tent, then they managed to build a shack with a gas station, both of which are still there.

Across the Trinity River was Dallas with its skyscraper buildings, its grand hotels like the Baker and Adolphus where the rooms all had flushing toilets and hot and cold running water and the big movie houses all proudly featured something called "Air Conditioning." Dallas was where Bonnie, Clyde, and Herbert T. Barrow all felt they naturally belonged. In keeping with the Dallas ethos, Clyde always dressed impeccably, spoke perfect English and even though he could barely read or write, he handled himself so well that co-workers who'd managed to graduate from high school, often invited him home to meet their sisters. To this day, if you ask around a little, you'll find people who'll tell you their grandmothers dated Clyde a few time and that he was a cordial, well-mannered fellow.

Bonnie, for all her education and literary ambitions, was a bad girl, through and through. At fifteen, she married a hoodlum named Roy Thornton, who was gone a lot and then gone permanently when he got sent to prison. Bonnie worked in various restaurants and cafes and had enough of an engaging personality that men were continually falling for her. She reportedly also turned the occasional trick. She liked dressing well, putting on makeup and going out and having a good time, something which Dallas of the day certainly was equipped to do. Dallas had gin mills, night clubs, honkeytonks, and some very classy places for dancing to orchestras, like the Debonaire Danceland, out on Samuel Boulevard, a place where, more than once, Bonnie went to dance, and Herbert sometimes played, and where they both reminisce about while driving through Oklahoma in search of gas stations and grocery stores to rob.

Herbert was much the same as the others when it came to Dallas. He dressed for Dallas, taught himself not to talk like a hick. But instead of settling in Dallas, he went on to New York, where no one at all ever suspected he came from Dallas, let along Eagle Ford. But both places continued to define him at least in his own mind.     .

Following is an excerpt from Friend of the Devil:


Clyde Chestnut Barrow might stand only five foot two, but by the way he carries himself, you’d swear he was six foot four. It’s hard associating him with the grit boy I once knew. Everything about him shouts out ‘big city’: the silk shirts with French cuffs, the fine ties and sharply tailored suits which highlight his taut, compact frame. This Clyde has correct posture and manners, can carry on a polite conversation and knows when and when not to say ‘ain’t.’ I’m just a dumb, off-the-rack country hick compared to him. But, of course, I can read and write.

Clyde dresses like a dandy and handles himself like a gent, but there’s no mistaking that glint of menace in his eyes. It’s there when he smiles and laughs. It’s there when he says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and inquires how you’ve been keeping yourself. And it’s there when he asks if you’ll do something and you tell him it’s something you don’t want to do.

Now Clyde wants me to join the outfit.

The True Love Story of a Gypsy Acrobat and a Dallas Lawyer

Fanny was an eighth-generation circus performer from France, who never thought she’d settle in a place like Dallas. But then she met Mark.

by Brendan McNally
Published 3.24.2010
From D Magazine APR 2010

Prior to meeting Mark Doyle, Fanny Kerwich dated clowns.
photography by Elizabeth Lavin

When Fanny Kerwich came to Dallas in 2000, it didn’t occur to her that it might be someplace where she would settle down. Settling down anywhere sounded ridiculous to her. Fanny was a 30-year-old circus acrobat. She was French and a Gypsy. And Dallas was just another city in a two-year tour. 

Fanny was touring with Barnum’s Kaleidoscape, a one-ring boutique circus presented in a more intimate European style than the big circuses that normally tour the United States. Kaleidoscape took place inside a tent, with the audience seated on red velvet sofas only a few feet from the performers. Fanny did a clown act, playing a frumpy cleaning woman who’d wander in and out of the show at seemingly inopportune moments. In the end, she’d transform, through a combination of magic, applause, and the audience’s love, into a beautiful, graceful acrobat. Corny as it sounded, the audience always ate it up.

After each night’s two-and-a-half-hour show, Fanny and her single colleagues usually went out to find a Deep Ellum nightclub where they could kick back for a few hours. When she went out by herself, Fanny turned heads. She had long, blond hair; a striking, almost leonine face; and a beyond-buff athletic figure. But when she was out with her friends—acrobats, jugglers, and a trio of Moroccan strongmen called the Golden Statues—wherever the bar or the city, people would swarm on them, wanting to talk, dance, and have a drink. At the end of the night, back at the hotel, Fanny and her friends would perform a little ritual before going off to bed. One of them would call out, “Cards!” And they’d hand in all the business cards they’d gotten from people that night. They would go through the cards and, one by one, try to remember the guy who’d given it to them. Then they’d toss it in the trash and he’d be forgotten. Besides putting an end to the night with an easy laugh, it was also a way of reinforcing who they were and acknowledging the wall that separates circus people from outsiders.  To read the full article, click here


Fanny Kerwich was also a big part of the inspiration behind the fictional Flying Magical Loerber Brothers in my novel Germania (first published by Simon & Schuster in 2008, now also available on Kindle here). Fanny helped me understand how the mind of an aerialist works when performing. She's there when the Magical Loerber Brothers do one of their last routines at Berlin's Admiralspalast, even as the Nazis are taking over:

First they tossed Manni up high into the air, and as he was coming down, Sebastian jumped to the far side of the springboard. Manni came down onto the other end, propelling Sebastian high into the air to the first trapeze. Then Ziggy boosted Franzi up onto his shoulders, Franzi jumped down onto the springboard, launching Manni upwards where he was caught by Sebastian, who swung him around and around before flying him off to the other trapeze. Manni spun around several times on the second trapeze before coming down onto the springboard, sending Ziggy upward. Then Sebastian and Franzi flew around and around before Sebastian flew off to the second trapeze, leaving Franzi to catch Ziggy.

It worked like an assembly line: every summersault, every spin calculated precisely, so that downward was causing upward, momentum causing momentum, and the velocity and force always increasing. In its exactitude, each brother found his own mind and body melding with the others until they were four separate parts of a single whole.

Flying from one trapeze to the next, the thought of Frau Lachmann languishing in the closet briefly flashed through Franzi’s mind. Coming down, he told himself he needed to do something about it. But by the time he hit the springboard and began flying back upward, he had already forgotten about it.

Fanny also inspired me to write this part, where Albert Speer, after a number of juggling lessons from Manni Loerber, decides to finally face off Hitler:

But Speer had changed. He was a different person now and Hitler’s power over him wasn’t what it had been. He’d learned to see things differently. He now saw things from the perspective of a juggler.

Through my conversations with Fanny, I also learned about the magic of circus and the way the performers and audience experience it together. This is the scene that perhaps illustrates it best:

Ziggy and Manni agreed to be interviewed. For ten minutes they stood together on the porch recalling stories of mishaps and emergency improvisations, and the backstage pranks which Sebastian specialized in. Of their time back together they said little, beyond that, though it was brief, it had been an extremely happy time, making them feel as if they’d never been apart.

While they were talking, the people in the street began swaying and humming bits of song; Call of the Enchanted Isles, From Monday On, My Little Green Cactus. The crowd was like an ocean, observed Ziggy, with its own energy and mood and common rhythm and the waves of grief sharing the space with those of happy memory.

“So you’re going to be playing it on Radio Flensburg?” asked Ziggy when they’d finished.

“Well yes, but it’s also already been sold to Radio Atlantik. We’re just putting the segment together. We’ve got a Brit in the studio to record the English-language text.”

The radio reporter was wrapping up his microphone cables when a man stood up on the hood of a parked car and the crowd fell quiet as a clear plaintive sound poured out into the evening air. Ziggy couldn’t imagine how anyone could play Harlem Rhapsody on a bugle, but he played it, sweet and sad, exactly like he remembered it.

The reporter quickly unrolled his cables again, switched on the machine and held out his microphone to capture the song. He watched the flickering green light on the instrument panel and smiled. “This is going to be so good,” he said.

On the 50th Anniversary of the JFK Assassination, We Ponder; What Was the Great Dallas Novel?

They came back to Dallas to film it and record all its craziness. By accident they film JFK's killers. They try to tell the world, but a friend leaves a goat in their bathroom. It gets out and eats the film.  Dang! with a Big D! Bud Shrake's acid-enriched epic Strange Peaches might just be the Great Dallas Novel. Or maybe it's Brian Wooley's November 22, or Peter Gent's North Dallas 40. By rights it should be Doctor Strangelove, by Terry Southern, only Doctor Strangelove was a movie not a novel, and it wasn't about Dallas at all, though actually, it was.

There's more to Dallas, Texas than Football, JR, and the Kennedy Assassination.  There is Bonnie & Clyde, West Dallas,  rampant sex and drug use through the years, interference by Hindu gods, extreme rightwing nut jobs, extreme wealth and power, football, and, what the hell, the Kennedy Assassination.  In eleven months it'll be fifty years and the city fathers still haven't quite gotten past it.  Somewhere in the course of all of it,  some great books got written, that are mostly forgotten, but all worth remembering.

Here is an article I did for D Magazine on the "Great Dallas Novel,"   I start off talking about Terry Southern, the great, Dallas-born satirist and hipster-king.  His life should have been the Great Dallas Novel.  Go watch Doctor Strangelove and know how completely it was informed by his growing up in Big D before the war.

Enjoy!

http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/D_Magazine/2011/August/The_Great_Dallas_Novel.aspx

The Nazi Treasure Hunter

Robert Edsel was just another Dallas guy who made a pile of oil money. Now he's hunting down priceless stolen works of art.  Here is an article I wrote about him for D Magazine.  The Nazi Treasure Hunter