You Got to Trust Yourself

Holiday Inn, Denton Texas, September 1965. James Cato was a cajun from Lake Charles, Louisiana. He had a wooden leg from his youth. He and a friend were drinking beer in the street outside a bar, when a speeding car lost control. James pushed his friend out of the way, but his leg was crushed between a parked car and the speeding car. So he was crippled for life.

He'd played guitar at the Grand Old Opry in Nashville, once upon a time, when Elvis was there. James was certain that Elvis was a tee-totaller. "I've got my first time," he said, "to see him take a drink."

At the Holiday Inn, a guy named Fred Kahler had been brought in as manager from the Lake Charles Holiday Inn, owned by the same folks as built the one in Denton Texas. Fred Kahler brought in James Cato from Lake Charles to be the night auditor in the Denton Holiday Inn. One day I asked James about how he added everything up, and he told me about it. I puzzled.

"How do you know you're right?" I asked. He gaped at me.

"You *got* to trust yourself," he said.

Now as it happened, one day James Cato told the manager and Ron the Assistant Manager, that he was going to go back to Lake Charles, in three weeks. They did nothing. He told them again. They did nothing. He told them again. They did nothing.

So in three weeks he left, and they ran about in circles, waving their arms, wailing what where they going to do?

I stood up. "I can do it," I said.

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Paul Harvey ... Good Day.

Henrietta, Texas, 1960: When I was a senior in high school, at lunch I'd run to my car and drive quickly down to the Lo' Boy drive in, to order a BLT sandwich and coke, and then ... on with the radio.

Paul Harvey. One day he said, "Sniffing glue. All the kids in Texas are doing it."

Because my high school, and the Lo' Boy, were located in Texas, I was dubious about that particular story. I knew he was full of beans.

But most of the time, he was so on. And then one day he said he'd be speaking at the VFW hall in Vernon, which was less than an hours drive. I vowed to go.

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The Wonder of Acupuncture

White Crane Kung-Fu Studio, Geary Boulevard, San Francisco, 1974: In my Kung-Fu phase, I was crazy about everything Chinese ... except the interior decorating. I know that may sound just too, too gay, but aside from mysteriously grand Chinese interiors in old movies, have you ever been in a Chinese restaurant that wasn't garish as hell?

I've come to learn that it's because Red is Lucky, and no sensible Chinese person on the planet wants to be unlucky. Of course, when you think about it, that makes perfect sense. I wouldn't either.

Back to the Kung-Fu and acupuncture. This is a story about needles and eyeballs, but it turns out OK. Just warning you ...

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The Abandoned Road

Dallas, Texas, 1966. On this particular day, my girlfriend and I decided to take the psilocybin before heading out. Driving the Morgan from Dallas to Shady Shores was an odd adventure. It was about thirty miles, and seemingly many days driving.

I knew of this place from years earlier. College roommates and I had lived nearby, and some scouting trip discovered an abandoned roadway that had once run atop a dam built across Lake Dallas. In a concrete building halfway out, remnants of the dam's machinery remained, huge wheels and vast pipes, going nowhere.

Whoever these mysterious builders were, they were fickle, for after building the dam across the lake, they'd cut a hole through it, so it was no dam any longer. Just a finger of elevated land reaching toward, but not touching, a finger of land from the other side. On the elevated crest, earth and stone and even trees, and the once roadway ran, and stopped at the cut.

Just the spot for our picnic.

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Bobby's Communion

Wichita Falls, Texas, 1960: My cousins Bobby and Danny lived in this nearby city. Their father Pfeiffer sold insurance and had a fancy red Farmer's Insurance sign painted on the doors of their white Studebaker. "It makes the car deductible," he said.

His wife, formerly Rosemary Hurn, my mother's older sister, was in fact the eldest of the Hurn children, and she was quite beautiful. As we remember that screen sirens of the 1940's were somber-faced and dramatic explains a lot about how Rosemary and my mother dressed when they were dressing up. The difference between them was that my mother, a plump and cheery-natured woman, didn't really fit in that picture, but Rosemary brought it off fairly well.

Rosemary, in my opinion as a child, rather put on airs. It was this snooty outlook which made Bobby's first Communion so unfortunate for her.

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Remembering John Lennon

New York, December 9, 1980: In the evening, John Lennon returned from the recording session at The Record Plant in New York. The limosine let him out in front of The Dakota, the gothic stone building pictured in the movie "Rosemary's Baby", and as he and Yoko Ono approached the building, Mark David Chapman called out "Mr. Lennon?" and shot Lennon five times with a .38 revolver.

Lennon was hit in the torso and the back. He called out, "I'm shot," took a few steps, and collapsed. When policed arrived, they found Chapman standing nearby, the gun on the ground. A building security guard asked Chapman, "Do you know what you've done?"

Chapman replied, "I just shot John Lennon."

Police rushed Lennon to the emergency room at the Roosevelt hospital, but he could not be revived.

Something died for many of us that day.

The sound of the Beatles, coming from the radio, startled us, back in the day. Those were college days for me. But perhaps you remember when you first heard their harmony, the enthusiasm, the sound was new and fresh.

A memory floats, quiet, like a blossom in a busy stream, and rushing around a bend, is gone.

A Tale of Toblerone ...

A Movie Theatre near Picadilly, London, 1968: Funny how memories come back to you. Pointless little things, a turn of phrase, the way some trees looked against the clouds on a dim horizon.

One of the moments in my life that I remember, from time to time, from 40 years ago, and still laugh each time, was a snippet of conversation overheard, when I first sat down in a theatre in London, to watch the film Barbarella.

The film had not yet begun, and I gradually became aware of the two guys in the row right behind me. Being American, it seemed to me that their cockney accents were thick as bad pudding.

Said one: "I'm going to the confession, mate."

Said the other: "Get us a Toblerone, eh?"

"Save me seat?"

"Guard it wi' me life, I will!"

This Newfangled Daylight-Savings Time

Dallas, Texas, Spring 1966: Living in Dunia Bean's apartment on Gillespie street, I worked at the Cabana Hotel. The Cabana is a clone of Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, complete with oversized statues of Venus, David, and the rest of the crew. Inside, a vast two-story lobby with greenish marble floor and a round sunken area with sofas enough for a football team.

Overlooking this magnificance, our front desk where I worked with Dick and Earl, dignified alcoholics. Dick taught me how to get big tips at crowded times, and Earl as a young actor fought swords with Errol Flynn in the movie Captain Blood. That was a while back.

But this was in the spring, and for the first time since the war, Texas was going to have Daylight Savings Time. We were all abuzz.

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Captured by the Black Bart Gang

Henrietta, Texas, 1956 or 1957: I'm not sure of the date. In the terror of the memory, some parts are vague, unreal. It was when I attended Junior High, which at that time was in the old, two-story brick high school building near the center of town.

Life was exciting and new. My friends and I were in the big school, with the big, grown-up kids in high school, and some of them had cars. My home life was shaken up, for my mother had married Dr. Strickland, and we'd gone to live in the flat of rooms above his office. This was on the other side of downtown, across from the hospital, and right on the main road, Highway 287, which ran through the center of town.

I had a friend named Bobby Mitchell, I had been to their house, and so I knew his older brother, Mike Mitchell.

Mike generally ignored me, or treated me with disdain. He was at that age when teen boys begin to think themselves wild and dangerouos, and that's what started the trouble.

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Peeping and Hiding

Wichita Falls, Texas, 1971: In my apartment I played my stratocaster. I was thin and trim in those days, and I'd picked up a girlfriend for a week or two, by the name of Mary.

I don't recall how I met her, but she had a teeny-tiny little apartment some dozen blocks away from where I lived, and so who knows? Maybe I met her on the street. But I'd met her somewhere, and always an eager experimenter at that time, I'd fetched her to my place for a while.

I didn't think she was a truly pretty girl, but she was eager and earnest, and ... well ... those are good qualities, with the right timing.

And Mary was a devotee of something called Sloe Gin. It's a weird kind of sweetish alcohol beverage, and she'd been drinking quite a bit of it that day there in my apartment, and she came to sit on the carpet about a foot away from where I stood, playing my statocaster.

I was rocking out. I must have thought I was pretty cool, and I was having a good time.

And ignoring Mary, for she commenced to writhe around my legs.

For just a minute there I thought I was probably Keith Richards.

But then other thoughts intruded, and we shall now pass over later events of the day. In silence.

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Michael Murphy - North Texas Troubador

1308 1/2 W. Hickory Street, Denton Texas, Spring, 1963: The movie 'Hatari' was unmemorable, but the Henry Mancini song called 'Baby Elephant Walk' had been on the radio for weeks and weeks and weeks.

That warm day, an abundance of visitors from the HobNob to my miniscule apartment somehow drove us all to clamber up onto the flat roof. We also had beer. That may have been part of it.

On the front edge of the flat roof, with our feet dangling two stories above Hickory Street, we lined up to tell stories and watch the students and passers-by across the street on the campus.

Michael Murphy had brought his guitar.

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How to Write a Sales Script

San Francisco, Many Years Ago: Back in those days, I ran an answering service and later a voicemail company from an office on beautiful, scenic Geary Boulevard.

Fueled by a talk I heard at a trade convention, I began to experiment with 'scripted' sales presentations on the telephone. The lady giving the talk had claimed that a scripted sales presentation got more sales than just 'winging' it.

But first you got to write down the script!

How to do that?

Well ...

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Margaret's Lime

Henrietta, Texas circa 1970: Darrel Blain went to school with my brother, David Strickland, and sometimes rode his bike out to the farm near Hurnville to visit. Like any kid growing up in Henrietta, his mother bought his clothes at John's Drygoods, and the Library Rummage Sale was a big deal.

But he was enterprising, and he got a job at the 'Lo Boy, cooking burgers and making cokes.

Then one day, there was this lime.

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Accumulation

Nocona Texas, 1969: Bob Standley is my brother-in-law, because he married my sister Mary. But some time before they got married, when he was in high school, he had a Chevy Malibu.

He had a little job, I think it was at the boot factory, and he had to be very careful with his money. Each week on Saturday, he took $2, and he'd fill up the gas tank -- it was a long time ago -- and there was money left over to go to the drive-inn movie, and to buy a nasty little cigar called a Swisher Sweet.

Every week he followed this $2 routine, and so as to conserve his money, he drove his car only when he had to, so that the gas would last through the week.

But then one Saturday, something strange happened.

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The Snipe Hunt

Somewhere in Kansas, Summer 1960: I was a truck driver on the wheat harvest, working for the Moser family. We cut the grain and hauled it to the grain elevator for the farmers, and we moved north as the grain ripened.

On this particular afternoon, Jake, Old Man Moser's son, was driving his pickup, and myself and another driver riding along, returning from the town. Somehow in the conversation, the other driver mentioned snipe hunting to Jake. Jake picked up his cue.

"Yeah," he said, "I've heard they have snipe around here. In fact I think I heard some the other night."

"What's a snipe?" I said.

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