Mother American Night Read online

  My mother didn’t like it. She also didn’t like the fact that as my father got into politics, he became a bigger and bigger deal in Wyoming. At one point, my father was testing the waters to run for governor against Milward Simpson, whose son Alan later served as a U.S. senator from Wyoming. Milward and my father actually ended up flipping a coin to determine which one of them would be the next governor. I don’t know if you could say my father won that coin flip or lost it, but Milward Simpson was the one who ran for the office and was elected governor in 1954.

  While my father was now gallivanting around the state, he was pretty much fucking every woman he met. Women always know about these sorts of things, but my mother couldn’t do anything about it except abuse the shit out of him. Then she went to see a psychiatrist in Denver who began giving her Dexedrine to cheer her up.

  I was with her down in Denver when she had a calamitous nervous breakdown. I think I was about nine years old. She wound up in the same private sanatorium where Buffalo Bill had died. They were giving her electroshock therapy just about every week, so most of the time she didn’t even have the slightest idea who I was. My father’s older brother lived in Denver with his scrupulously Mormon family, and so I stayed with them.

  I lived with them for about six months. It was easy for me because I took refuge in their Mormonism. I went to church with them and to Aaronic priesthood meetings, and every Wednesday night was family evening, when we would all pray together. I’d always had these kind of religious longings as a kid and had given away my entire allowance to Oral Roberts when I was in the second grade.

  If you are going to be a real member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I can tell you that they will have you doing something practically every second of the day. And that was actually a good thing. It made me feel like I was a part of something that was bigger than myself. The Mormon Church does not threaten you with hell because they don’t have one. What they threaten you with—and they don’t really threaten you—is this attitude of not understanding why you would ever want to leave the comfy bosom of your religious family.

  When I went back to the ranch, I was still committed to Mormonism. Although my father did not feel that way, our foreman was a devout Mormon in spite of the fact that he had been struck by lightning three times. On the suffering and grace question, he really had a lot to say. He also had a very personal relationship with a very anthropomorphized God. As Voltaire once said, “If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.”

  I was about eleven years old when my mother went upstairs and fired the twelve gauge. My dad was fooling around a fair amount by then and they’d had an argument that ended when she walked into the closet, grabbed the shotgun, and went upstairs. My father and I followed her, but she locked herself in one of the guest bedrooms and then ker-blam!

  I will never forget the look that my father and I exchanged at that point. He broke down the door to get inside. She had fired both barrels into the ceiling and was sitting there with the smoking twelve gauge in her hand and this funny smile on her face, like she had finally gotten him to pay attention to her. It was a wildly melodramatic emotional act, a way for her to say “Hey!” that nobody could deny. It definitely left a mark on me.

  Growing up on the ranch, I didn’t have many friends my age, but there was a little girl named Gracie Alexander who lived up the creek about three miles away. She was nine and I was eleven, and we would ride to an abandoned homestead between her place and mine and pretend to be a frontier family. Gracie’s father, Jack, was a cowboy and then a cow man who had gotten himself a little ranch. He had married a highly refined woman from the East who had come out to spend some time on a dude ranch in Wyoming and fallen in love with him. Back then, this sort of thing wasn’t unusual—there were always a number of women who had come out and gotten themselves a cowboy for all the usual reasons. The mythology, primarily.

  Maybe the marriage wasn’t working out, but Jack had started drinking more and more, and he was really putting it away. His wife became concerned that this would be difficult for Gracie and so she invited her parents out from Providence, Rhode Island, to come and take Gracie back home with them. Gracie was the apple of her father’s eye. For Jack, the sun rose and set around her. My best guess is that he found out about her mother’s plan and just twisted off deep.

  Back then, we were on a party line, and my mother was on the phone one day when someone picked up at the Alexander place and there was a lot of yelling. She couldn’t make any of it out, and then there was a really loud sound that she thought was the screen door slamming or something. The phone stayed off the hook, and all you could hear was someone moving around in the kitchen on the other end.

  What had happened was that Jack had shot Gracie’s grandparents and her mother right away. He then went on living in the house for three days with Gracie and the family dog. Then he finished the job. He killed his daughter and shot the dog and then killed himself, too. Nobody went up there to check on them because it was the height of the mud season and difficult to get there.

  Gracie was my closest friend, and I was devastated. I’m also pretty sure she watched her father kill her mother and grandparents. This was the first time I had ever lost anybody except for my grandfather, but death was something I became used to very early on. It’s one of the leitmotifs of my life. I think everybody has a curriculum, and mine has always been women and death. These are two very challenging topics. It’s not like I’m picking the easy horses, that’s for sure.

  FOUR

  FOUNTAIN VALLEY

  It actually took me quite a while to realize that I was just a hick in a hick town. The fact that most of the other kids were always rough on me had a lot to do with that. As far as they were concerned, I was the princely son of Norman and Mim Barlow, and many of them resented my parents for acting like they were the only exception to the one-class system in Sublette County.

  The tough times started in elementary school in Pinedale, and then in middle school; a lot of physical shit went down as well. I wasn’t getting beat up regularly but periodically. Once will suffice. When you find yourself in that kind of situation, you can turn yourself into a victim, and I actually became extremely de-socialized.

  By then, I had seen James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause at the Skyline Theatre in Pinedale, which was a really special place. The upper part of the walls had a painted skyline with silhouettes of horses, cattle, teepees, trees, and all kinds of Western scenes, illuminated from behind by multicolored neon light that was so beautiful.

  After I had seen Rebel, James Dean became the spirit that I modeled myself after. The movie had a huge effect on me. And it also turned out that I could actually comb my hair just like his.

  I never did get to watch American Bandstand because we didn’t have a television, but there was a rock ’n’ roll radio station within range: XERF from Ciudad Acuña in Coahuila, Mexico, broadcasting over a 150,000-watt transmitter that made them sound like they were coming from some alien planet. I could pick up their signal on this little Sony transistor radio that my parents bought me in 1961 at the Seattle World’s Fair.

  A DJ called Wolfman Jack played music and aired ads for Don’s Record Parlor in Eagle Pass, Texas, just across the border. Wolfman Jack was playing what in those days was still called race music. No one else I knew who was my age was listening to this stuff as avidly as I was. I was actually buying records from Don’s Record Parlor. By the time I was fifteen, my friends and I would be driving around at night with the car radio set to Wolfman Jack, and we’d all be bumping and grinding to this music.

  I finished my freshman year at Pinedale High School with a straight F average. A root vegetable could have done better. But I didn’t give a fuck. I was in such a spiteful little mood back then that I was intentionally giving the wrong answer to questions both in the classroom and on tests.

  By then, I alr
eady had a reputation. The very first thing I did on the day I turned thirteen and a half in 1961 was take my wages from the ranch and buy myself a little Honda motorcycle. Suddenly, I was free. I could go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted. Nobody could tell me what to do.

  Almost immediately, I fell into a motorcycle gang, because all the other kids in my Boy Scout troop also got themselves little bikes. There were six of us, including a guy who later became the sheriff of Sublette County. We rode into this swampy area and built a clubhouse that you’d never guess was there until you were right on top of it. We would sit there and smoke Benson & Hedges cigarettes that I had stolen from my mother’s freezer, where she would keep them around for guests. Back then, Benson & Hedges said quality, complete with a gold box.

  We also undertook a lot of petty vandalism of which I’m not particularly proud. The motorcycles had been sold to us by an impassive, harmless gentleman named Herb Molyneux, a chainsaw salesman who had branched out into motorcycles. But he didn’t offer us very good service, and at some point, we got cross-threaded with him. One night, we went into his place and raised hell with all the stuff he kept parked out back. Then we got into blowing up Coke machines. We found out that you could strategically place three M-80s inside a Coke machine in a way that would take out every single bottle in there as well as the coin mechanism. We weren’t looking for money. We just wanted to fuck up the machines.

  Over the course of time, we blew up every single Coke machine in town. Everybody knew we were the ones who were doing it, but they couldn’t prove it and so there was no way for them to stop us. Finally, someone came and had a word with my father, who had just decided not to run for governor but was returning to his seat in the state senate. My father was told in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to go on holding that seat, it would be better for all concerned if he got his wayward son out of sight. And so we started looking for a school that was outside the sprawling confines of the great state of Wyoming.

  The first school we picked was Suffield Academy in Connecticut, but they wouldn’t let me in, which was completely understandable as I hadn’t exactly had a distinguished academic career up to that point. We kept looking and found the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, the go-to place for aristocratic kids from Wyoming who were also the sons of cattle barons. I was delighted to be going there, because I felt like I needed some kind of an upgrade in my life.

  * * *

  —

  When I started at Fountain Valley, my parents flew us all there on the original Frontier Airlines, which was aptly named because it was truly a frontier experience. All their planes were DC-3s, a fantastic aircraft. I don’t think any plane has ever exceeded the DC-3’s safety record or capacity to take abuse and keep on flying. But it was a plodder. It had a service altitude of around sixteen thousand feet, which in mountainous terrain is kind of tricky, and flew so low over the mountains that you could actually count the antelope.

  Frontier Airlines also had these really hard-bitten stewardesses. They weren’t part of the larger aviation world, where stewardesses were sex symbols and there was a chance you might even be able to take one home. Because it was always cold in the plane, these stewardesses would come up and offer you an insulated foam cup filled with steaming hot bouillon. Whenever they gave it to you, you knew you were about to encounter severe turbulence. The bouillon was scalding hot and never cooled off until after it had ended up on your balls.

  At Fountain Valley, Robert Hall Weir was rooming right across the hall from me. I met him in the first class I attended. I felt this presence behind me at my desk because the floor was shaking, and when I turned around, there was Weir with his foot just going bang bang bang against the floor. He had restless leg syndrome, which tends to attach itself to those with high math skills. In those days, he had reasonably short hair and a mono brow, and he wore these thick horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a look somewhere between genius and serial killer. He put out this vibe that I had a frequency setting for. It was not a vibe I had previously encountered, but it slotted right into something I had been looking for without even knowing it.

  By then, Weir had already been bounced out of several private schools in California. He had a guitar, and we became fast friends because I loved listening to him play. I got him the Alan Lomax collection of American folk songs, and he learned them all. It was obvious to me that he was good at this and also that he wasn’t much good at anything else.

  Our bond was inflicted upon us by the shared experience of always being the goat. There was just something about the two of us that caused the other kids at Fountain Valley to give us merciless hell. I’d had some experience with this in Pinedale and was sort of prepared for it, but it was tougher to handle in a strange new environment because I was still just not good socially. Back then, I’d be hard-pressed to push two nouns against a verb in the presence of another human being.

  Midway through the year, they finally figured out that Weir was dyslexic. Their response to this was to move him into a room with a guy who was very dyslexic. He was also the son of the CIA station chief in Saigon. Later he became a Green Beret and went off into Thailand like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now and recruited Hmong people for his own private army.

  By the time they diagnosed his dyslexia, Weir was already acting out at every opportunity. At one point, the two of us flushed a lit M-80 down the toilet and raised hell with the plumbing. In biology class, Weir initiated a spitball fight, the spitballs being the internal organs of frogs.

  That any of this was tolerated for even a second had a lot to do with the school itself. Back then, Fountain Valley specialized in admitting bright miscreants and was quite progressive. The school had been founded in 1929 on a large, beautiful ranch owned by a wealthy family in Colorado Springs. There was an architectural theme to the school, but the main thing was that we were all out there in the wide open spaces.

  To say the least, the faculty was interesting. There was Mr. Kitsen, who had once water-skied in a tuxedo. I would not have been surprised to learn he had actually done that more than once. One of the English literature teachers was gay, and they somehow found out he had been buying gay material and canned him for that. Even then, I thought that was kind of cruel. We had a biology teacher we called Old Fartin’ Martin Brown. He had once flown a tiny acrobatic airplane into one of those huge dirigible hangars at Moffett Field by Highway 101 south of San Francisco. As soon as he flew into the hanger, Martin Brown realized that the other door was closed and somehow managed to turn his plane around and fly back out.

  The way Weir remembers it is that the school finally said that one of us had to leave. Since I certainly had not yet approximated my academic potential and had been a major behavioral problem, there was definitely some discussion about throwing us both out. But in the end the administrators decided to keep me.

  After I learned that Weir had been kicked out of Fountain Valley, I wanted to spend more time with him so I convinced my father to hire him to work on the ranch that summer. My father had never seen anyone like Weir. Bobby would jump off his tractor while it was still running to try to catch a field mouse, and the tractor would end up in a ditch. He did that more than once.

  Weir was there for forty or fifty days and loved it. We did stuff together that marked the beginning of full-on adolescence. I had this 1964 El Camino (still do) and we could make it to Pinedale, which was fifteen miles away, in ten minutes. Pinedale had a drive-in run by this hip guy in his twenties and his really hip girlfriend, and they had created a kind of country beatnik hangout, with lots of rockabilly on the jukebox. Weir would bring his guitar along, and the girls from Pinedale would be all over him. But Bobby was not yet the draw for women he later became. Back then he was a Christian Scientist who was saving himself for marriage. Part of him was still a good boy.

  I eventually became so vexed at what I considered to be Fountain Valley’s unfair treatme
nt of Bobby Weir that I decided to go live with the Weir family in Atherton, California, where we would both attend this bizarre experimental school called Pacific High School. That year, the school project was making a submarine. Ambitious, right?

  But at the last minute, I got a phone call from one of my summer school math teachers, a guy who had actually lived in the Haight-Ashbury before it became a big deal and was an aficionado of slant-six engines. He said, “You know, you’ve already cut and run once. Cut and run twice and you’ve got a pattern. And it’s not a pattern that will serve you well.” I could see the wisdom of that, so I went back to Fountain Valley. That decision was a real defining moment for me; after that I started to step up academically.

  Fountain Valley had an associate dean named David Banks who had a lot of moral authority, and he basically explained Kierkegaard’s categorical imperative to me so that I understood it: “What would the world be like if everyone behaved like you have? Is that a world you would wish to inhabit?” He applied that principle to running the school, and it had a hugely moderating effect on my behavior.

  Weir and I did not see each other again for a long while, but we did write letters back in the days when people did that. I can still see his handwriting because he put little circles over all of his i’s, just like the girls would do. He wasn’t effeminate. Just an artist, I guess.

  FIVE

  GETTING INTO COLLEGE

  It took me about a year after Weir left school to get myself sorted out at Fountain Valley. By my senior year I had fine grades, but no real intention of going to college. Instead, I had this silly notion of becoming a knight of the open road. I was thinking of getting a truck driver’s license, because there is something about driving long distances that creates a very fecund situation for me. The driving takes up just enough of my attention that it slows down the inhibitory factors creeping into my mind.