Valentine's Blues from Texas and the Great Beyond

It’s not even a tone, more like a pulsing; a spot on the dial where one moment there is a faint sound and the next there isn’t, then there is, then there isn’t. It could almost be Morse code; something, nothing, something, nothing, di, di, da. I bend down closer to the dashboard speaker and try to focus on it. Gradually it becomes a voice, then I realize it’s a woman’s voice, but still far too faint for me to understand anything she’s saying. But she’s saying something and for me. It’s a human voice, and even if I have no idea what she’s saying, I can hear the sympathy and warmth in it.

Stevens taps on my shoulder. I look up. “You shouldn’t do that,” he says. “You may need to start driving any second now.”

So I sit up and put my hands back on the steering wheel. The minutes pass and slowly it gets louder until I can start making out her words.

"Because we’re all just trying to get back home. Isn’t that all that any of us are doing? Trying to get home."

And hearing her say that, I’m thinking to myself, well, I can’t speak for the fellow next to me, darlin, but it’s all I’m trying to do, I’m just trying to get home.

"Home, it’s a word we say all the time, but do we ever really think what it means? Home isn’t just a place we go to eat and sleep. It’s really the place where we come from and where we will all ultimately return. That means it’s not really an actual physical place. It’s really a spiritual place, because it is where ultimately our body and soul go to reunite with the rest of the universe. Your little gray home on the Wabash is simply a temporal representation of that great final reunion with the Sun!"

"Oh, man,” I say.

"What is that?” demands Stevens sharply, his voice teetering on the edge of disgust.

"Some lady on the radio,” I say. I’m about to add, she sounds like a sweetheart, but I don’t. I’m not going to share that with Stevens.

"Sweetheart? Are you nuts? That spook? That’s Rose Dawn, the clairvoyant.”

"The what?”

"She has a program on that Mexican station. Goddamn spook, she talks to the Great Beyond and gives answers to listeners’ questions. Rose Dawn. She’s a crazy bitch. The woman is disgusting.”

"We need to have faith that it’ll all work out. We’re all, each of us, just pieces in a grand celestial mosaic."

"Turn that shit off,” shouts Stevens.

"Fuck you,” I say. “It’s my radio.”

"It’s not your radio. This is a stolen car.”

"Yeah, well, I stole it, so shut up and if you don’t like it, then get out!”

"We’re all of us broken, so it doesn’t matter. Find your strength in knowing that!"

"I hate that crap!” fumes Stevens. “All that Celestial Hey Diddle Diddle! She’s the worst.”

"We’re all imperfect and that makes us perfect. We’re all damaged and that makes us strong."

"Unity of opposites, you’d think the crazy bitch invented it,” sneers Stevens.

"Well, I’d rather listen to her than that phony goat gland doctor,” I say.

"Hey, don’t you go disparaging Doctor Brinkley. He’s doing a marvelous service for mankind.”

"What? Transplanting goat scrotums?”

"That’s a legitimate business, but, more importantly, he makes folks understand that their Number One Priority isn’t over the rainbow, it’s right between their legs.”

"Shut up, I’m listening!”

"I’m hearing you out there, your voice calling from the other side. I’m listening, please speak to me. Do you have a message?"

"Yeah,” I laugh. “Get me the hell out of here!”

"Did you say you want to get out? Then be free!"

That instant, the marshmallow fog vanishes and, with a giant bump, we land on an asphalt roadway, right in the path of a blue Plymouth, coming at us from the opposite direction. We both swerve to keep from hitting each other. He hits his horn and lets it blast for at least ten seconds as he heads past us. Up ahead, I see a road sign that says Tupelo ten miles.

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

1930s Desperados in Love and Death

"Five minutes,” says Clyde grandly, like it’s the Pledge of Allegiance. “Five whole minutes!”

Then I hear a muffled sobbing sound. Bonnie must be getting all emotional.

"What is it, Sis?”

"Oh, Daddy,” she squeaks, “what about if when we die, you go to heaven and I don’t? What’ll happen to us?” She starts to cry.

"Oh, Sis,” says Clyde. And I know that they’re in each other’s arms again.

"Oh, Daddy!”

"Baby!”

"At least we gonna get to go down together. Isn’t that what we always said we wanted, Sis?”

"I know, but, what if…” Before she can finish, Clyde cuts her off.

"Reckon we’re just gonna have to explain to old Saint Peter that we’re a package deal. I’m sure we can get him to understand that.”

"Oh, Daddy, I love you! Don’t worry, I ain’t sceered.”

"All right!”

"Bonnie may not be scared, but I am. I’m so scared I’m shaking like a leaf. So this is how it ends. Shit. Maybe if I had my twelve-string in my hands, I could pick out a song that would buck me up a little for when that light gets turned off. Why’d I leave it behind in that car? Why, because I knew I was about to die in a hail of goddamn gunfire and I didn’t want it getting all shot up. I wanted someone else to have it to play songs on even if it was one of Frank Hamer’s boys.
(Excerpt from Friend of the Devil," available on Kindle)

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)

Texas Bluesman Explains Why He Won't Gun Down Everyone Who Pisses Him Off

I walk straight through the house without looking at anything, past the dining room all set up for supper, and the living room with all the golden chairs and couches and lamps and all the historical paintings of Brinkley and his dick. I can hear the Mexican servants hurrying to catch up. One of them runs past me to get the door open before I get to it. As he pulls it open for me, a glass door opens in one of the ante-rooms next to the circular staircase. Two heads cautiously peek out. It’s Rose Dawn and The Great Koraan. The moment he recognizes me, his face reddens. Then I hear Rose Dawn cry out, “Herbert?” But I don’t stop.

Outside, the night air is cool and sweet. The dark sky is bright with a sliver of moon and thousands of stars. My mind goes back to all those ancient-pretending paintings of Brinkley and it almost feels like what I just walked out of was Babylon itself. For a moment, I think about Hamer and find myself wondering if it was a mistake to have left him with those people. But that thought only lasts a moment and then I’m just glad to be away from them.

She called me Herbert in front of her husband and the Mexican servants. No telling who else knows it now. Great. This thing is starting to happen even faster than I’d expected. As I walk along the road toward town, I notice someone walking towards me from the opposite way. Even before I can make him out, I guess who it is. It’s that other guy. He sure does have a way of showing up.

I try to walk past him, but he keeps trying to block my path. For some reason he’s boiling angry. “You fucking asshole,” he shouts in a high-pitched voice. “What’d you have to do that for? I hand it to you on a fucking silver platter. Couldn’t you just let it happen? We’d have won. You’d have walked free. But you couldn’t do it. Why? Didn’t you see his pain? Don’t you see how the man was suffering? Why couldn’t you just let him do himself? Why do you have to play God.”

Fuck you,” I say. “I don’t believe in God.” That gets me so ticked off, for a second I actually consider taking out Old Lucky and going back and shooting him. But I don’t. If I shot everybody that pissed me off, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of people left. I don’t really hear what he says after that, except that I shouldn’t expect the next round to be any walk in the park.

By the time I finally get home to the rooming house, Jack is asleep on the rocking chair out front. As gently as I can, I pick him and carry him inside and put him down on his bed. Then I sneak into the kitchen to see if Mrs. Gruner might have put anything aside I could eat.

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

News of Bonnie & Clyde's Death Spreads Through a Del Rio Diner

I stumble up the street, feeling like my eyes just been ripped out, and the whole time I got that dang song going through my head:

Death don’t take a vacation in this land 

Death don’t take a vacation in this land 

He’ll come to your house, he won’t stay long 

Look into the bed, somebody in your family will be gone

Oh, Death don’t have no mercy in this land.

So they got ‘em. Poor Clyde, poor Bonnie, poor stupid bastards. It’s not that I’m in the least bit surprised, or that I’m not massively relieved it was them that got killed and not me, but even so, I’ve now got an emptiness bellowing inside me that don’t want to let go. For a while I just wander the streets, like I got them alive in front of my eyes, so alive, so crazy, like they was gods from the old times. But now they’re dead, dead, dead, and poor dumb mortal me is still alive.

Knowing I can’t wander the streets forever, I go into the Tastee Diner and order a blue plate special. They got the radio on with the usual worked-up preacher endlessly going on about Salvation and the Blood of the Lamb and his address, Box-435-Del-Rio-Texas. I keep waiting for someone to cut in and make an announcement, but twenty minutes and seven or eight Box 435s later, he gets replaced by another screaming preacher and I actually start half-believing it might all have been just crazy-girl talk. But then it dawns on me that, this being Dr. Brinkley’s station, they simply don’t broadcast news. So I stay on my stool, not really thinking about much of anything, just waiting for word to come, knowing it’s just a matter of time before it does. The counterman comes by and refills my coffee; I’m about halfway through it when the door opens and someone comes in shouting, “Did you all hear? The Barrow Gang’s been killed in an ambush!”

For the next few seconds it’s like this deep quiet sets in, as if, for that one moment, none of them actually believes it. But then the vacuum breaks and as the air rushes back in, I see their faces going off like they’re fireworks, some of them angry, some disappointed or glad, followed by a rumbling of voices, like we’re standing at their graves, with them already laid deep into the ground, and it’s time to offer final words, before the earth gets covered on them and we all walk away and get on with other things.

"Well, they had a good long run. Nobody expected them to last long as they did,” says one.

"They must’ve knowed they wasn’t going to get away forever,” says somebody else.

"Mean as snakes, both of them!”

"Couple of two-bit punks.”

After another minute or two, the topic has moved on to something else. I finish my coffee, pay my bill and go. A half hour later, I find Hector, ride the Tijuana Taxi across the border, do my show, collect my five dollars and then head back to Del Rio.
(Excerpt from Friend of the Devil," available on Kindle)

Enter Bonnie Parker with a Double-barrel Shotgun

A few minutes later I see this little mom-and-pop grocery store with a Socony Gas sign hanging like a banner from its eaves and two pumps in a little island out front.

I pull up and shut off the motor. The screen door opens and this skinny old guy ambles out in overalls and a beaten-up felt hat. I extract a dollar bill from my pocket and shove it his way. “Fill it up with the cheap stuff,” I tell him. “You got any sandwiches for sale in there?”

“Maw will make whatever you want. Got cold drinks, coffee, too, in paper cups.”

“Fine.”

“Gonna be closing up,” he says. “Didn’t you hear? Barrow Gang’s a comin’ this way.”

“I thought they was in the south,” I say. “I was hoping to stay out of their path.”

"No, no, they’re supposed to be around here,” he says. “There was a whole bunch of state trooper cars drove through here a little while ago. Somebody stopped just now, said they have a roadblock set up.”

“Which way was they going?”

The old boy points south.

“Well, I didn’t see anything,” I say and head inside.

The store is a small unlit room lined with shelves full of canned goods and bags of flour and coffee. On one side of the room, there is a bank of glass cases displaying some forlorn-looking cuts of smoked meat, while a heavyset woman in a white apron stands at the ready behind it.

"What for you?” she asks. I order some baloney sandwiches and ask for a Nehi. She points me to a water-filled tin box where a dozen or so capped bottles sit up to their necks in the dark water. “They’re ice-cold,” she says, nodding toward them. I pull one out and bring it to her. She takes a bottle opener and pries off the cap. “You gonna drink it here, otherwise there’s a two-cent deposit.”

"I’ll have it here,” I tell her. She nods like I made a wise choice. She hands it to me and I take a swig. The jolt of cold sugary sweetness hits me like a bomb blast. After all I just been through, it’s an irrefutable reminder I’m still here among the living. I take another long swallow, then I watch her make the sandwiches, laying down three slices of white bread on the wooden counter, then plopping down a slice of baloney on each, followed by another, then another, and then dressing them with dabs of mustard and mayonnaise and covering them with slices of bread, stacking them one on top of another. The woman wipes her hand on her apron, then cuts the sandwiches diagonally. Suddenly I realize how ravenously hungry I am and that if I could, I’d take them right now and gobble both of them down on the spot. But I don’t, because I’m on the lam and best not to do anything quirky that’ll stick in their memories. No, I’m just a quiet, well-mannered city feller who came and went without giving them no never-mind. Instead I start a conversation.

Man says you got the Barrow Gang coming through?”

“That’s what they saying on the radio.”

“What’d they say?”

“Only that they’s in the vicinity, going to effect a rendez-vous with Clyde Barrow’s cousin.”

“Cousin? Didn’t know he had a cousin.”

“Yes, sir. They say his name’s Herbert T. Barrow and that he’s a bad one.”

“Oh?”

“Mad-dog killer he is, G-men been chasing him all the way from Knoxville.”

“And they think he’s around these parts?”

“Yes, sir. Me and Paw got our guns ready in case they come here. Don’t want no mad-dog killers coming for me!” She nods at a brace of ancient revolvers lying on the glass countertop on the far side of the room and I think that if old Clyde spotted them there he might laugh, but if they was holding them in their hands, he’d likely kill them both without a further thought.

I finish my Nehi, just as she finishes wrapping up my sandwiches in a sheet of white butcher paper. “That’ll be fifty five cents,” she says.

I dig into my pocket and give her the exact change. She puts it in the till and I go back to where the empty pop bottles are sitting, before I go pick up my sandwiches and leave. Then the bell over the door jingles and the screen door opens. The old guy is standing in the doorway with his hands up. “We got company, Maw,” he says like it’s not a good thing. That’s when I see a tiny woman in a long, gaily colored polka dot dress standing behind him with a double barrel shotgun planted in his back.
(Excerpt from Friend of the Devil, available on Kindle).

One Year After the West, TX Fertilizer Plant Explosion, Looking Back on How the Czechs Found Out About Their Cousins in Texas

In April of 2013, I was living in a small town in the Czech Republic. One morning I got up at my usual crack of dawn, got on to Facebook and quickly learned that there had been a catastrophic fertilizer plant explosion in the town of West, Texas. Being from Dallas, I quickly got in touch with a couple of my coffeehouse buddies who had not yet gone to bed and were still on Facebook and got them to tell me the details of what had happened. As I was doing this, I noticed that one of my Czech buddies, a local radio reporter, was also on Facebook as he was doing his morning show.

We started chatting and I told him what had happened in West. He said he'd heard about it but didn't see why it was of any interest to anyone there in the Czech Republic. I explained to him that West was an entirely Czech town, that it was for almost everyone in Texas among their favorite places. And that Texans loved West precisely for its Czech-ness and that they considered it the heart of "real" Texas. This stoked his curiosity.

After that, I told him about the Czech Stop, the famous roadside bakery that sells authentic kolaches on the highway between Dallas and Austin and that everybody traveling between the two cities will stop there. I told him that my guess was that the explosion was something Texans took extremely personally, akin to having their hearts ripped out. My buddy said it was very interesting and that he was going to place a couple of phone calls to Prague to see if anyone was interested in covering the story there for the Czech media.

About twenty minutes later, the first of more than a dozen phone calls started coming in. Since I don't speak Czech, I was asked to get my wife out of bed to tell the nation how Czech the town of West really is. She was on, live, for about ten minutes, talking about the Czechs of Texas and how they love their heritage, her memory of chatting with some of the older residents, who'd grown up speaking the language and still did from time to time.

Then a TV station called and told us they were sending down a crew to film us looking at the news from West and our friends' reactions on Facebook. We met them in a cafe off Masaryk Square. Later in the afternoon, another TV crew came down and they shot us in the square, buying kolaches at a farmer's market and explaining to the viewers what real kolaches mean to Texans and the lengths that they will drive to get them.

That night, West, Texas was the main topic of news in the Czech republic. Viewers all watched clips of the explosion and the Czech Stop and its kolaches and, in the process, something changed in the Czech psyche.

I don't know how it happened, but somewhere in the mid-20th century, the Czechs lost any sense of connectivity with the Czech diaspora in the outside world. In this regard, they are completely unlike the Poles, who have always seen the Polish world as being global in breadth. Maybe it was the Nazi occupation or the four decades of communist rule that followed. But to the Czechs, when you go, you're gone. This goes even more for the Czechs who left in the nineteenth century. They may understand that they are out there but they feel absolutely no connectivity to them, which is something I'm not sure the Czech-Americans every really grasped.

But now, they realized that those people in that town in central Texas that got flattened by a huge explosion were Czechs, just like themselves, even though most of them drove pick-up trucks and watched high school football games on Friday nights.

One thing that had happened was the Czech Rotary Club had immediately started organizing a charity drive to raise money for the victims of West, Texas. As Waco Tribune recently reported, Rotary Clubs around the world have since raised over $100,000 to help them.

Friend of the Devil: Bluesman on the Run from the Law Shares His Sandwiches with God

He eats the other sandwich quickly and rather than look sated, he seems even hungrier than before. He looks at me again with his big mournful eyes. “I feel terrible asking you this,” he says, “but, seeing how you’re not going to eat with me, would you terribly mind if I had the last sandwich?”

“It’s yours,” I say.

He reaches into the back seat and takes the paper bag and then sets it down on his lap and begins unwrapping the last sandwich. He puts the first half up to his mouth, leaving the other sitting in its bed of white paper on his lap. I feel my stomach start to rumble. I could ask for the other half, but I think I’d rather starve.

“Funny you should say, ‘It’s yours,’” he says. “Isn’t that what you told that woman when she robbed you?”

“Why is it funny?”

“Well, you didn’t have to say it. By telling her those sandwiches were hers, you were giving them to her. Technically speaking, after that she wasn’t stealing them.”

“I’m not really interested in technicalities,” I say.

The young man looks surprised. “You aren’t? Didn’t you get sent to prison on a technicality?”

“Well, what if I did?”

“Well, it’s a lot easier to get a conviction overturned if it’s on just a technicality. It’s just a question of having the right connections; a good lawyer, for example.”

“Good lawyer?” I snort. “I’m not sure such a thing exists, least not in Texas.”

We pass an old church. He stares at it like it’s reminding him of something he’d completely forgotten about.

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

An Old Bank in My Neighborhood that Clyde Barrow Robbed

If you go around Dallas looking for places that still resonate with the memory of Bonnie and Clyde, you'll find them and, quite often, in places that have changed remarkably little since the time that the Barrow Gang came through, raising their unique hell.

Reinhardt, Texas is one such place.  A hundred years ago Reinhardt was a little settlement  outside of Dallas, built along the tracks of the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad tracks. At the turn of the century, Reinhardt had a train station, a hotel, several stores, a bank, a post office, a race track, and two schools; one for white students, the other for the "coloreds."  In its day it was a bustling place.  In 1928 or 29,  Clyde and a couple confederates robbed the bank there. A year later, it went out of business.

Just as East Dallas remained its own jurisdiction during the first half of the 20th Century, Reinhardt also stayed its own town during the 1920s, 30s, and even halfway through the 1940s. But the city of Dallas,  Big D, was growing by leaps and bounds and in 1945 annexed East Dallas, and Reinhardt pretty much stopped being its own town.  But you can still find it, if you go up along the railroad tracks that run parallel to Garland Road, a half mile east.  The old warehouses next to the depot got subdivided into a couple dozen mini warehouses and are working space and storage to countless wordworking shops, roof repair and auto body concerns, and businesses where the proprietors as a rule aren't particularly inclined to discussing how exactly they make their money.

The bank building still stands there, but it's either a warehouse or a workshop.  We went by this afternoon and could see that the lights were on inside and that somebody was doing something. But somehow we knew better than to knock on the door and ask if they knew the building's particular history.  People in Reinhardt, as a rule, don't care for idle chatter.

Here is what Clyde Barrow says about his hometown of Eagle Ford (in West Dallas) in my novel Friend of the Devil:

Sure, I may dress and act like a big- city sophisticate, but when all is said and done, what I am, sir, is a man of West Dallas.

West Dallas isn’t the same as Dallas proper. In fact, they’re about as different as you can get. Dallas has skyscrapers with elevators, hot and cold running water and an avenue downtown lined with air-conditioned movie houses. You want water in West Dallas, you best dig yourself a well or pay fifty cents a barrel when the city truck comes by every other week. Yes, West Dallas is its white trash underbelly at the other side of the Trinity River Aqueduct. We aren’t rich or modern or respectable, but damn it, we got our code. We don’t squeal, we don’t steal from each other, and we don’t betray our kin to the laws, no matter what.

If you'd like to read more about Bonnie & Clyde, check out Friend of the Devil, available on Kindle.

The Road to Del Rio XII: From Wandering Bluesman to Corporate Singing Cowboy

Just as Herbert T. Barrow might be the last man in the world to see the face of God in anything, even when staring God himself in the face, he is also the last man in the world to see himself existing anywhere on a corporate ladder. He's just a wandering bluesman, playing streetcorners and saloons to anyone with a nickle or dime to put down. True, at the moment, he's found himself a nice little $5-a-day radio gig shilling laxatives and singing cowboy songs over the Mexican Border Blaster, XER, but that's all it is. Every day he rides a taxi across the border into Mexico, does his show, collects his five bucks, rides the taxi back to Del Rio and that's pretty much that.

When Part II of Friend of the Devil opens,  Herbert is standing in the local offices of his employer, the Royal Consolidated Chemical Company, summoned by Christine, the imperious, just-out-of-secretarial-school receptionist and so far, the only person from the company he's ever actually met. She tersely informs Herbert, that from now on, he is to submit for review a playlist of the songs he's going to sing five hours before each day's show. This strikes Herbert as odd, since up until now no one from the company has shown even the slightest interest in what he does on the air. In the world of border-blaster radio, only one thing matters; how well a performer can "pull mail." A singing cowboy might well be the best yodler on the planet, but unless he can persuade listeners to order products and send in money, he's useless to them. Apparently Herbert, or 'Cowboy Slim Gatlinburg,' as he calls himself, pulls in mail just fine. Though Christine invokes the name of their never-seen boss, Mr Klingman, Herbert guesses it's merely something she's concocted to exert control over him and other would-be minions. Instead of writing anything down, he reels off a list of made-up song titles, and before she can say anything, Herbert bids her a good day and leaves.

Once outside, standing in the bright Texas sunshine, Herbert sees it's noon and time for lunch and strolls over to the Tastee Diner for a bite. Along the way, he greets people on the street he knows. At this point Herbert has been living in Del Rio about three months. Things have been going well for Herbert, so well, he's almost allowed himself to forget the craziness he'd gone through riding with Bonnie and Clyde, being pursued by Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer, as well as a band of fortune hunters and always with God and the Devil nearby, watching over it all, and betting on what they think Herbert might do next. But as tempting as it might be to dismiss it all as nothing more than a very bad dream, Herbert knows with complete certainty that these last three months of peace are nothing more than a between-the-rounds respite and that it's just a matter of time before Mr. Stevens and the Other Guy start it all up again.

Little does Herbert realize that the clockwork, corporate and celestial, has already started turning around him.

Following is an excerpt from Friend of the Devil, available on Kindle.

“What do you want, Mister Stevens.”

“Besides that song, nothing much. Wanted to say hi and to tell you there’s no hard feelings and that, you know, I still owe you a favor, anytime you might want to collect on it.”

“So, are you and, that guy, still got a bet going on me?”

Stevens frowns. “That guy? Are you talking about God?” The way he says it suggests he half expects the man might come suddenly and smite us both silly.

“He never gave me a name,” I tell him.

Stevens chuckles. “Well, you know, he has lots of names.” He fingers his beard reflectively, then adds, “but don’t we all?”

“Answer my question.”

“Oh, we’ve always got a bet going over this or that. The fate of the world can be such a complicated thing.”

“Plus the side bets.”

“Oh, yes,” say Stevens, his eyes twinkling like he’s glad someone’s finally gotten this colossal joke of his.

“And so that’s where the real action is, isn’t it?”

Stevens smiles.

“Does he understand that?”

“Hey!” Stevens rolls his eyes as might a young girl. “I have no idea,” he says. “When somebody’s eye is always on a bunch of sparrows, it’s hard to tell what else they might or might not understand.”

I don’t say anything. He looks like he’s about to leave. But then he turns back and asks, “So, are you going to sing my song or not?”

“It’s your song?”

“You said it yourself, man pays the money, so it’s his song,” he says.

The Road to Del Rio XI: Heard It on the "X"

Back when the rest of America was still stuck in the Great Depression, there was one place where everyone seemed to be doing just fine, thank you very much. That place was Del Rio, a bustling little town in South Texas right on the Mexican Border. When the rest of the country was out of hope, Del Rio had so much of it they were blasting it out every day and inviting the whole world to help themselves to. And this wasn't the spiritual sort of hope. Heck no! What Del Rio was offering was of the purely physical sort. What Del Rio was selling was sexual rejuvenation.

"Yes indeed, friends and neighbors and all you fine folks out there in Radio-Land, if you're sexually weak, sexually impotent, sexually dead. If you've got a flat tire and you're afriad that there's nothing left to live for, that all you're doing with your so-called-life is marking time between now and when you're laying there on the cold grey slab in the undertaker's parlor. If this describes you, then I want you to listen very closely to this message I have for you today during this period of broadcast. Because if you listen to what I say and do exactly as I recommend, you too can return to the bright sunshine of full sexual health and vigor..."

It all started in Milford, Kansas in the early 1920s where there was this phony doctor named Brinkley; J.R., John Romulus Brinkley. Dr. Brinkley had developed one of the greatest money-making scams of the 20th Century. It involved transplanting, or at least claiming to transplant, slivers of testicle from young billy goats  into those of well-heeled, but poorly-performing, middle-aged men. About all Brinkley probably did was make an incision, inject some colored wate, followed by just enough sewing-up afterwards that the patient had to spend a few days with his johnson sheathed in bandages, during which time he had little to do but dream wildly of all the fun he was going to have with his masculinity fully restored, of being a stallion, instead of a gelding, of being, as Dr Brinkley never tired of promising; "the ram that am with every lamb!"

Needless to say, Brinkley's goat gland proposition worked well enough that his patients convinced themselves that they had it back and thanks to mind-over-matter and a lot of word-of-mouth, Brinkley was making himself a nice little pile of dough. But word of mouth advertising wasn't enough. Brinkley needed to find a way to really get his message out and bring in the suckers in sufficient number to make him a millionaire. The answer, Brinkley realized, was radio.

The "Radio Age" had begun a few years before, and Doctor Brinkley was one of the first people to recognize its immense potential. He built a radio station in Milford named KFKB (for Kansas First, Kansas Best) and for a couple years he was wildly successful. But then two things happened. First, Brinkley, not being the sort of person who could restrict his vocal ruminations purely to matters of sex and glands, started veering off into politics. He had a golden voice and an authoritarian manner that was also warm and folksly. People ate up what he had to say, whether it was about sex or God or politics. He decided to run for governor, but the powers that be used a technicality to keep Brinkley off the ballot. So he ran as a write-in candidate and he would have won, except that the reigning political powers were able to disqualify all the write-in ballots that were not perfectly spelled.

At the same time, the Federal Government in Washington, alarmed at the anarchy going on over the airwaves, moved to regulate radio broadcasting, demanding that it be done in the public interest, and outlawing baldfaced requests for money that radio hucksters like Brinkley were engaging in. In short order the the newly constituted Federal Radio Commission shut down Brinkley's station. Brinkley left Kansas and vowed he'd never let anyone ever tell him what he could or could not do.

The solution, he soon discovered, was on the Texas-Mexican border.  The town fathers of Del Rio approached Brinkley and showed him all their town had to offer to a free-wheeling guy like himself. He could set up his hospital right there in town, they recommended he simply take over a floor of the Roswell Hotel. All they asked was that Brinkley do the right thing and spread the wealth around and not burn the locals. Beyond that, they didn't really care what he did with the suckers coming down on the train with $800 burning a hole in their pockets.  These were conditions even Brinkley could understand and respect. They shook hands all around.

Instead of building himself a hospital, Brinkely did indeed rent out a floor of the Roswell and called it the Brinkley Hospital. What he built instead was a radio station, named XER, the most powerful one in the world, just across the border in Mexico. Now he was free to broadcast anything he wanted and he did. Brinkley would spend hours each day preaching about sexual health and his miraculous goat gland operation. He'd mix it up by bringing down hillbilly bands to play music and sing. The airtime he didn't use for his own purposes, he rented out to preachers, singing cowboys and other hucksters, all of whom had come down to Del Rio for the same reason, to rake in the dough. It was a kind of paradise, far away from all the trouble and strife going on in the rest of America at the time.

Even so, if what was happening in the rest of the US might have seemed very far away to the good folks in Del Rio, to the people in the vast expanse of America,  Del Rio seemed like next door. Day after day, people let Dr. Brinkley and the other "X Station" stars into their homes. The music they played became the music everyone in America listened to: Hillbilly, Gospel, and Cowboy.

And it is into this world that Herbert T. Barrow finds himself cast. He has finally removed himself from the clutches of Bonnie, Clyde, the fortune-hunters, as well as God and the Devil. When the section opens, it's probably three months later and for all intents and purposes, Herbert is another person altogether.  His career as XER's singing cowboy is well underway. He sings cowboy songs by day for five dollars a session, and earns a heaping pile of nickles, dimes and quarters every night he plays blues at the Black Pussy Cat Cafe. Herbert is well on his way to becoming a local in Del Rio, somebody everyone knows and likes. Who knows, he just might settle down there and grab his own permanent piece of the Del Rio Dream.  But then, later that day,  when he's at the XER studios to do his program, a woman passes him in the corridor. Their eyes meet and even though neither exactly realizes it, they have both met their destiny.

Inside, everything is friendly, though businesslike; a mix of Anglo and Mexican secretaries, engineers and executives purposefully bustling about, speaking in a seamless patter of Spanish and English. At one end of the room are some leather couches. I sink into one and take my guitar out of its case and start tuning up. I’m there about three minutes when Peggy, the program director’s assistant, comes in with her clipboard in hand and says: “You’ll be in Studio C today, Slim.”

“Is it clear yet?”

“In five minutes. They’re just finishing up something now.”

“Who’s the engineer today?"

“Raoul Ortega.”

“Great,” I say, “lead the way.”

Peggy takes me through a rabbit warren of narrow, airless corridors with banks of glowing electrical panels on either side of us; large, wide metal cabinet doors with chrome handles jutting out that you hit if you walk too close to them.

We turn a corner and there’s hazy light coming from a window at the end of the corridor. That’s when I see a strange, exotic woman practically floating up the corridor towards us. She’s got on a diaphanous rose-colored gown that’s flecked in gold and her face hidden behind a veiled turban. The scent of jasmine wafts into my nose and suddenly I’m imagining the half-shadowed interior of some ancient, middle-eastern temple, rows of smooth Egyptian columns, scrolls, hieroglyphics, obelisks, statues of forgotten idols.

“Good afternoon, Peggy,” she says pleasantly as she walks by.

“Good afternoon, Rose,” says Peggy.

“Good afternoon, Slim,” she adds.

“Afternoon,” I say.

I turn around and watch her disappear around the corner.

“Who’s that?” I ask Peggy.

“You mean you don’t know?” asks Peggy, arching her eyebrows. “Well, she certainly knows you.”

“I have no idea,” I say. “Who is she?”

“Why, that’s Rose Dawn.” 

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

The Road to Del Rio X: It's Not about Good vs Evil, It's about Side Bets

Okay, it's probably a mistake even bringing this up, but one of the reasons I decided to write Friend of the Devil was that I wanted to look at questions about what it means to be human as opposed to what it means to be a god.  Man lives only a short time, gods live almost forever.  Man becomes aware of his mortality early on and most of us never really manage to lost sight of that fact. But isn't having your mortality always dangling in front of you what gives our lives their flavor, all the sweetness and sadness, the longing and fulfillment. It's what allows us to grow and change and dwell on things.

I'm only saying all this because you need some kind of baseline if you're going to try to think what existence must be like for a god. Taking what we understand about ourselves and then applying it to someone who doesn't share any of those essential characteristics, you can get some idea what it must be like.

If you live almost forever, you might go whole eons and never spent a moment dwelling on your own ultimate mortality. Just think how, compared to them, our own seemingly-incredible capacity for denial and self-deception must seem absolutely insignificant. Gods might feel the same basic urges and emotions that we do, but it can't be the same thing at all. Gods might experience something like love, but never longing. They might have whims, but never doubt. Should they experience the pain of sadness or heartache, it will only last for a moment and then it's forgotten. Nothing makes that much of an impact on them, it can't. You'd have to be human for that to happen.

Basically man can change, but gods really can't.  Or can they?

In Friend of the Devil, there is a character named Stevens, who is most certainly the Devil incarnate. He is plainly evil, though in an over-the-hill sort of way. The god character is someone without a name, though the narrator, being a staunch atheist, refers to him simply as "the other guy." He should be good, but he's not. It's not that he's bad, he's just kind of an indifferent deity. You get the sense he might not have always been like this. Perhaps something happened.

My theory is that The Other Guy fell victim to the side bet.  For countless eons, or at least as men have walked on the Earth, he and Steven have been wagering with each other over the souls of good men to see how well they actually stand up to temptation. After running such a bet a couple million times, boredom must have set in and the two of them found that the one way to spice up the proceedings was in adding sidebets on the myriad little things that might or might not happen.

The narrator, Herbert T. Barrow, is ultimately a good man, though one whose moral compass is strictly his own. He refuses to believe in a god even after giving god a ride and sharing his food with him. He refuses to sing religious songs, songs of redemption and praise, because since in his estimation God doesn't exist, songs praising Him are all bullshit and part of a Big Lie and he won't have anything to do with it. When Stevens offers him his pocketwatch in exchange for a single hymn of praise, Herbert refuses on principle. It doesn't matter that the Devil's Pocketwatch is surely a priceless thing, and that singing even an incredibly sacreligious song would fulfill the terms of Stevens' offer,  Herbert steadfastly refuses because his lack of faith is steadfast.

Herbert was a Marine in the Great War. He saw a tremendous amount of killing and killed a lot of enemy soldiers during the fighting.  He vowed, in his atheist's heart, never to kill again. Despite their endless wagering, God and the Devil no longer even care about whether or not Herbert will return to killing, while he travels unwillingly with Bonnie and Clyde. Presumably they've made that bet, but all they really care about is the sidebet on what kind of weapon will he pick when the moment does come. Will it be a pistol, a rifle, or a BAR?

God, the other guy, whatever you or Herbert wants to call him, has stopped caring about whether Herbert chooses good over evil.  He really doesn't give a shit.

Bonnie, Clyde and Herbert get pursued by men who aren't "The Laws." They're something else.  They're men who've heard about The Devil's Pocketwatch and, unaware that Herbert had kicked it out of his car a month earlier back in Arkansas, they've come hunting for it.

Texas is a great big state and the last part of the Road to Del Rio takes place somewhere, anywhere, in it between the Oklahoma and Mexican borders. Go find a map and look at the vastness and put your finger down on a spot between Fort Worth, Lubbock, and San Angelo. Bet you anything that's exactly where it takes place.

Following is an excerpt from Friend of the Devil:


"Now, next stop: Del Rio, Texas, the garden spot of the Rio Grande Valley. And I understand the Royal Consolidated Chemical Corporation is going to have an opening for a singing cowboy in a matter of days.”

Del Rio. Funny, I’d almost forgotten my dreams of going there.

“So who won?”

“Who won? Well, nobody won. It was a draw.” He says it like it’s nothing. “We agreed it’d run for a set amount of time. Now the time’s up and you’re free to go.” He shrugs like a guy who’d been born with his hands in his pockets.

“So how’d you do with the side bets?”

He brightens. “Pretty good, actually. Won eight out of thirteen.” He grins and puts his thumb up.

“Yeah, that’s pretty good,” I say. “But then you were betting on me picking up a gun and killing people.

The young man corrects me. “I was betting on you picking up a BAR and killing people.”

“Oh,” I say.

“You’re not an easy one to predict, you know. You do a lot of surprising things, very surprising things. But, you know, that’s what makes humanity so fascinating.”

“Great.”

“Hey, you’d better get moving,” he says to me. “Remember, when you get to Brady, ask for Red.”

“Right,”I say and start across the field.

“Hey, you know, you don’t have to thank me or anything like that,” he says.

“I wasn’t going to,” I say and pick up my pace.

The Road to Del Rio IX: Only One Thing to Do When the Media Keeps Getting It All Wrong

For about as long as anyone can remember, bandits and other roving outlaws maintained a symbiotic relationship with the media. The outlaws enjoyed the recognition and having their exploits celebrated in dime novels and popular ballads of the day, while the balladeers and publishers liked having content that the public was willing to fork over money for. Also, being held up and robbed by someone you've already heard about is a far headier experience than getting robbed by total unknowns. With the former, you're actually getting something for your money.

So it was with the Barrow Gang. Bonnie and Clyde loved being in the spotlight. They loved having the public look up in awe at them even as they were being robbed. It almost didn't matter knowing it would just be a matter of time before their fate would catch up with them and they would go down in a hail of lead. Being objects of public adoration seemed to make it all worthwhile.


The problem with the media is they aren't always easy to control, expecially when you're out on the road and without any means of controlling the spin. Before Herbert T. Barrow fell into their clutches, Bonnie and Clyde's fortunes were fast fading. Bonnie had been badly wounded in an earlier shootout and even though she'd been convalescing for several weeks, it was obvious she wasn't actually getting any better. The time they'd spent hiding out was time away from the public eye, which also meant the public was now on the verge of completely losing interest in them in favor of someone newer and fresher. But once they got back on the road, this time with Herbert, on a multi-state crime spree, all that changed. They were immediately catapulted right back to the top and that was something they liked very much.

But as their star continued its ascent, Clyde began finally understanding the price that it was coming at. Having Herbert suddenly being seen as the outfit's new mastermind definitely put Clyde's nose a bit out of whack, especially since, as far as Clyde was concerned, his elder cousin was just some damn goody-goody malingering pacifist, who kept acting like he was too good for them. Worst of all were his bullshit reasons for refusing to carry a piece when they were sticking up a grocery store. All he would consent to doing was carry the crippled Bonnie in and out of stores when they were holding them up.

For several weeks the trio drive all over Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, knocking over gas stations and grocery markets. At first the take is pretty decent, but by the end it mostly dries up, most of the places they hit don't seem to have more than five or ten bucks in their cash drawers. That's digging into Clyde bad enough, but now there are all these reports on the radio of some bizarre incident in Arkansas a month earlier where Herbert spectacularly turned the table on Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer and his posse of G-Men. Clyde figures that as long as he's got Hamer's gun in his possession, there has to be some way he can get himself written into the story. He figures the most efficient way to do this is to kidnap a cop and tell him all about it himself.

Following is an excerpt from Friend of the Devil (available on Kindle here):


“Got something here I want to show you,” he says to the cop in a confidential voice. Taking out Hamer’s .45, he pops the magazine out of the butt and into his hand, and ceremoniously presents the pistol to the cop so he can examine it. "Now tell me if you recognize it.”

The cop examines the pistol for nearly a minute before exclaiming in surprise. “Why, this is Old Lucky! How did you get it?”

Clyde’s grin widens. “I, ah, shall we say, borrowed it from Mr. Hamer in that little deal last month in Arkansas. But did the papers even report it? No, sir, they did not. Now what I’d like you to do, my friend, is when you get back, let the world know everything you’ve seen here today. Tell them the truth. That’s all I ask.”

“Yessir, I’ll do that,” says the cop, relieved that he’s not going to be killed.

“Everything they’ve said about that incident is a complete lie,” continues Clyde.

“Yessir.”

“Good,” says Clyde. “Now, in a little while, we’ll be letting you go. Just remember what we agreed and your debt to us will be settled and everything will be jake.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll do that, sir.”

The cop pauses like he’s got something weighing heavily on him.

“Something on your mind, officer?”

“Well, yes, sir,” he says, “I don’t know if I should say this, but...”

“Come on! Out with it!” says Clyde. “I told you, you have nothing to fear from us.”

“Well, sir, it’s just that recently there’s been all kinds of talk within police circles about that whole Arkansas incident. They’re saying now all the initial reports that got into the papers were all hogwash.”

“Oh?”
“To begin with, they’re saying now they don’t think you and Miss Parker were there at all, that everything that happened there was all Mr. Herbert T. Barrow’s doing.”

Clyde looks dumbfounded. “They think Booger here did all that by himself? That’s nuts!”

“Yessir.”

“Dang it! Boy dudn’t even fucking know how to use a dang gun.”

“Yessir.”

“See,” says Clyde. “There’s your proof that Boog here didn’t do any of that stuff. I did. Tell him, Boog.”

I stare out the window at the empty countryside. Why is it that every time I leave Texas, I hope it’s going to be forever, but every time I come back I’m glad. How many days have we actually been gone? Then I see up ahead someone walking along the road, his back to the oncoming traffic, like he’s given up on hitchhiking and humanity in general. It’s that guy who ate my sandwiches. Once again he looks up at me as we pass him. “That’s right, officer,” I say gravely. “Everything Clyde says is exactly what happened.”

“Now that’s what I want to hear,” says Clyde, affably as a politician running for reelection.

I can tell the cop still has something important to unveil. He stares at me, his eyes bugging, like he’s more scared of me than of them.

“They’re saying something else about you, sir, to explain what happened there.”

“Yes?” I ask quietly.

The cop gulps nervously. “What they’re saying is,” he begins, “that you’re in league with...the devil.” Then he adds, “sir.”

“What?” asks Clyde.

“They’re saying that about us?” asks Bonnie, sounding horrified.

“No, ma’am, they’re only saying that about him,” he says, nodding in my direction.

The Road to Del Rio VIII: En Route to a Crime Spree with Bonnie and Clyde

Upon hearing the endless radio reports claiming that he is about to join up with Bonnie and Clyde as their criminal mastermind, Herbert does his best to flee Arkansas and then East Texas, but all he succeeds in doing, is running directly in their clutches. For several days he’s their prisoner/guest in a succession of remote abandoned farmhouses which they are using as hideouts. Though Clyde promises to let him go, that day never seems to come. They spend their days smoking marijuana and playing Clyde’s saxophone and talking about their home back in Eagle Ford. It’s not altogether unenjoyable for Herbert, who is at least grateful to not have Stevens or the Other Guy in his face.

Then one day, they pack up and drive off on one of their multi-state crime sprees. Clyde drops all pretense of ever letting Herbert go. He tries to impress on Herbert all the advantages of joining their outfit. Most of the reasons seem to involve fame and meeting girls. But Herbert refuses for a number of reasons, the first being that having already killed too many men in the war, he’s dead-set against ever picking up another weapon again.

But Clyde is adamant:

"Look at us! We’re just a couple of two-bit hoods on our last legs. With you on the team, we could rule the headlines again.”

“I don’t care,” I say. “Now I told you I ain’t packing and that’s final!”

Clyde and I stare knives at each other. But Bonnie has an idea. “You know, we can always have him carry me in and out, like a porter.”

Driving through Texas, it all seems like a skylark with lots of high-spirited talk between Clyde and Bonnie with Bonnie endlessly sneaking playful but hungry looks over at Herbert. It isn't until nightfall when they reach the Oklahoma border, that things start feeling serious. They have an evening picnic in a city park just outside Elmer, Oklahoma. After eating, Clyde decides to have a nap on one of the picnic tables. Herbert half expects Bonnie is going to try for some alley-cat action while Clyde snoozes. But instead, she becomes very serious.

For once, Bonnie doesn’t start messing with me. She sits at the end of the bench meditating on her Chesterfield, and the town lights across the field. Does it occur to her that at this moment, once she walked across the field, she could probably disappear into the city of Elmer and go back to a normal life and never get caught? But she’d never do it. Without Clyde, she’d never get the levels of excitement and drama she requires. She has to be the kind of gal that they write romance stories about, not the kind who reads them.

Bonnie crushes out her cigarette. She turns around and says to me in a low voice: “Herbert, you’d better not fuck us up tomorrow. You understand?”

She glares at me, her head quavering, eyes tear-filled and blazing, like she’s half a moment from busting out into a massive crying jag. Then she pushes herself back to her feet and hobble steps over to the other side of the picnic table and crouches down onto the bench where she can caress Clyde’s sleeping head.

She brushes her fingers against the curl of his forelock. “Oh, Daddy,” she whispers, like she could be in church.

After that they drive almost non-stop for several days, sticking mainly to back roads. Finally they reach a prosperous little town in Missouri called Munson. Seeing a grocery store with lots of cars parked in front of it, they decide it's time to swing into action: Clyde goes in first, pistol in hand, followed by Herbert carrying in a shotgun-wielding Bonnie:


“All right, this is a stick-up!” he shouts out. “Nobody move!” He walks up past all the folks with their arms up and goes to the cash desk. He sticks his pistol in the lady’s face and says, give me all your money, now! And he puts a bag on the table and the lady empties out the whole cash drawer into his bag. Even where I am, I can see the fat wad of bills. Unless they’re all ones, we’re going to be pulling all right here.

Bonnie taps my arm. I let go of her and she hop-hobbles over to Clyde, who hands her the bag. Then she hobbles over to the clerk, points her pistol in his face and growls. “Cloverine Salve! All you got!”

Once Clyde has emptied the cash drawer and taken everybody's purses and billfolds, they start their exits.  Clyde heads out first, with Herbert and Bonnie taking up the rear. I lift her and carry her up toward the door. When we get there, she taps on me to turn. I carefully rotate ourselves clockwise so Bonnie can point her pistol back at everyone lying face-down on the floor. Down at the counter, Clyde is loading a last wallet in his bag. Then he gathers it together, holding it with the same hand as the sawn-off shotgun. He nods that he’s leaving, points his guns to the ceiling and starts moving up our way. I turn and push open the door and lift and carry Bonnie outside into the parking lot. Bonnie waves her pistol in every direction as we run over to the Ford and get in. Clyde lets off the brake, gives it some gas and we’re heading up that road.

An hour after that, we rob a filling station and then a little after that, another roadside grocery store and another filling station after that. Each is a piece of cake.

Hours later, they park in a secluded spot and divvy up the loot.  Assuming Herbert is every bit as charged from the robberies as he and Bonnie are, he renews his plea to Herbert to quit being odd man out and start carrying a gun. But Herbert won't budge:

He turns back to face me. “Booger, I ain’t talking anything permanent, just long enough to tide us over and till we can get another boy.”

I don’t like the sound of this, either. I fall back into my seat and start actively thinking about being riddled with machine gun bullets.

Bonnie turns and gleams sweetly at me like I’m just a boy and she’s someone’s older sister. “Come with us, Doc,” she purrs. “It’ll be fun! Wouldn’t you like to see Missouri?”

“I’ve seen it,” I say.

“Don’t be sore, Doc. Daddy’s just crazy about you.” She pouts. “You know, sometimes I think he likes you more than he likes me.” 

(Friend of the Devil, by Brendan McNally, available on Kindle)

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.

Coming Soon: The Road to Del Rio

Starting in a week or so, we'll be documenting Herbert T. Barrow's "escapitude" from the eastern Tennessee border, through Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Texas to Del Rio on the Mexican border. We'll stop along the way at different towns and places where Herbert spent some time running from the devil, evading God, hiding from Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, and on a crime spree with Bonnie and Clyde. Wherever he goes, oddball and interesting things happen. First stop will be Knoxville, TN, coming soon. Y'all come!

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Here is an excerpt from Friend of the Devil :

At that, my ears perk up. “The Crossroads? You mean Highway 61?”

“Why, yes, yes,” he says. “Highway 61. I was supposed to meet a man there at midnight.”

“At midnight?”

“Yes,” he says. “That’s when we agreed to meet. But like I told you, I’ve had a lot of problems and now I’m late.”

“The Crossroads at midnight?”

“Yes.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been a street singer and traveling blues man for some years now and I’ve probably had a hundred different cats tell me the same tale about meeting a man at midnight at the Highway 61 Crossroads.

I let out a little chuckle. “So what were you planning on doing, Mister Stevens? Selling your soul to the Devil?”

How the West Texas fertilizer plant catastrophe taught the Czechs about their Texas Cousins

Yesterday I woke up just before dawn as usual and the plan was to start working on my new book about Werner Baumbach and Albert Speer and not get on Facebook, that greatest of all timesucks. But I got on anyway, figuring I could limit it to just five or ten minutes. But when I got on, I saw that my sister Mars, in Austin, had sent a link to a TV station in Waco, and that's how I learned about the fertilizer factory explosion in West, Texas. It said something about possibly up to sixty or seventy dead.

I saw that my buddy Martin Vana, who hosts a morning radio show here in the Czech Republic, was also on Facebook. He likes to FB-chat with his friends while he's on the air. So I wrote him and asked if he knew anything about it.  He got on and said he didn't.  Then I asked him if he understoond that West, Texas is considered the Czech Capital of Texas and that everybody stops there when they drive between Dallas and Austin to get real Czech Kolaches. And he seemed surprised by that. He went and talked to the news director who knew about the catastrophe, but not about the massive Czech angle to it. He told Martin he'd check into it.

A few minutes later my phone starts ringing. And it's this lady in Prague, with Cesky Radiozurnal, asking me to explain what I knew about West and what the town was like and how Czech it was.  And so I did my song and dance to her and she also seemed very surprised.  Then she asked if I thought my wife would mind being interviewed, since she was the one who spoke Czech. And I said she was asleep, but that I'd get her up and ask her. And she said she'd call back in a few.  I got my wife up and explained to her what was happening and she was groggy and unenthused, but when the woman called, she was alert and coherent and readily agreed to be interviewed, which took place live, over the phone a few minutes later. She told them about the Kolaches and how everybody, but everybody goes there, instead of any of the other thousand places on the way to Austin,  how it is a Texas tradition, and how massively West, the Czech Stop and Texas Czechs play upon the Texas psyche. 

Not long after the interview ended,  there was another call.  This time it was from TV Barrandov wanting to know about West and Czech Texas. All of it was basically new to them. And as we went on, I kept remembering all the many times in the last twenty years, I've told Czechs about the Czechs in Texas and how crazy they were about their Czech heritage and how the old people all spoke Czech, like they had for generations.  And I'd tell them about meeting ancient Czech shit-kicking cowboys, who hadn't learned to speak English until they went to school. And how everytime I did, I just got blank stares back, like whatever I was telling them simply didn't compute. And that's when I started coming up with my personal theories about what makes Czechs so different from Poles, is that Poles always understood and accepted the Polish diaspora as being part of themselves.  But the Czechs had lost connection with the diaspora after the War,  especially following the communist takeover. To the Czechs, if you were gone, you were GONE and when you were gone, unless you were immediate family, you were the subject of the the massive Czech indifference.

But this time it was completely different. For the first time, the Czechs we talked to were genuinely interested and curious. Everything we told them seem to mean something.  The TV Barrandov asked where we were. When we told them how far outside of Prague we were, it didn't bother them.  They said they'd send a crew from Jihlava to shoot an interview with us within an hour.

Then there were more calls,  Radio Prague wanted to interview both of us,  me for their English-language broadcast, Katka for their regular show. 
> http://www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/many-dead-as-fertiliser-explosion-devastates-czech-farming-town-in-texas
>
http://www.barrandov.tv/77764-hlavni-zpravy-18-4-2013

Then another national TV station called, they were also sending a crew, this time from Havlickuv Brod.

http://play.iprima.cz/iprima/355628/all

We ended up spending the whole day giving interviews.  Before it was over, we were hearing that the Czech ambassador was announcing he would fly down to West to meet people and see if there was anything the Czechs could do for their American cousins.
 
Now Mother Jones quotes me on West, TX:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/czech-stop-open-during-west-texas-fertilizer-explosion





But the real point to all this is that for the first time, the Czech seem to understand how much Texas loves its Czech heart and how it beats in everyone's heart back home in the Lone Star State.