Thursday, September 2, 2010

Timothy Foo

Timothy Foo went down to the zoo,
He would stare at the bear
And the kangaroo
And the cockatoo
And the aardvark, too,
And the hippopotamus, even.


Lieuen Adkins, AKA The Sparrow

The poem above was written by Lieuen (Lyoo-wen) Adkins, so you know something about him already. He was one of a kind, for which some people were grateful, but not me. I loved the guy.

Punster extraordinaire, merry man of mirth, clever writer and prodigious drinker (how many people do you know who were waiting at the door for the liquor store to open on their 21st birthday), Lieuen physically resembled Rich Moranis’ character in American Graffiti. On a good day he was a little under 5-10, bespectacled with short brown hair and a singular effervescence. Adkins never met a pun he didn’t like and was a poet of the Ogden Nash persuasion. He also knew the lyrics of a ton of Broadway songs, particularly Gee Officer Krupke, which he demonstrated often.

Lieuen still lived with his parents and the Adkins family curfew demanded he be home by midnight, after which time the door was locked and he was faced with the prospect of finding refuge elsewhere. Lieuen slept on a lot of different porches and was universally welcomed, but he wore on Gilbert Shelton and eventually became the foil for practical jokes and general harmless abuse. He tolerated it well, happy to be part of the crew, even though his own counterattacks to Shelton’s gambits were invariably and massively bungled, entrenching him as hapless Class Clown.

It was not surprising, then, that Lieuen’s first foray into romance would meet with unmitigated disaster.

Lieuen, after many years of singlehood, had found an admirer in Tammi Dean, a senior at an Austin high school and daughter of a prominent professor in the English Department at the University of Texas. Tammi was an adventuresome young girl who had discovered Life Beyond High School. She was also very bright. While sexually aggressive to a point, she usually bailed out halfway around the diamond. Until she met the fascinating Lieuen Adkins, that is.

Tammi adored Lieuen. Her great sense of humor complemented Adkins’wit and her appreciation of literature allowed her to recognize his writing talents. Lieuen was able to converse cleverly about current events, politics, religion or Texas, and his liberal bent was in tune with Tammi’s own. Moreover, despite (or perhaps because of) his shortcomings, Lieuen enjoyed great status among his peers—think Norm at Cheers—and Tammi was now welcome in a community she liked and was impressed with. She came to a Big Decision: Lieuen Adkins would be her first man. Despite her tender (and illegal) years, Tammi would surrender her maidenhood to the Prince of Puns. It would be a Tryst For the Ages.

Thus, while Tammi prepared her royal baths and beautification rituals attended by fellow high-schoolers Pat Brown and Marilyn Todd, and while Lieuen imbibed Ceremonial Nectars which would make him strong, the balance of the subculture waited nervously to see what Horrible Thing would occur to ruin his life this time. It didn’t have long to wait.

Returning early from an out-of-town seminar, Tammi’s father arrived home immediately after the deed was done. Lieuen did manage to escape in hysterics, but Tammi was cowed into naming her desecrator, and Lieuen, fornicator with an underage child, was in the biggest of Big Trouble now.

Adkins, terrified, wandered the town looking for solace, for someone who would offer a kind, reassuring word. Shelton, of course, was not the man.

“Adkins,” he opined, “you’d better leave town immediately. There are little towns all over Mexico where you’ll be safe.” There weren’t many optimists in the crowd. Only itinerant autoharpist Janis Joplin offered hope.

“Okay, you balled your English professor’s favorite daughter. So you flunk one course. Life goes on….”

“Yeh, well I’m an English MAJOR….”

“So maybe, you know, life doesn’t go on so well….”

The phone call came soon enough.

Ohjesuschrist!” Lieuen despaired. “He wants to SEE me! He wants me to come to his house and TALK to him!”

“Ugh.”

“Uh oh.”

“Shit…”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“Lordy, I don’t know. Go, I guess. He’ll probably tack me up on his wall or pull out all my fingernails or make me listen to endless hours of Billy Graham revival records. All these years of abstinence and one little mistake. Why ME?”

Lieuen enlisted Janis and I to take him to the proceedings. He had his own car, but he was too nervous to drive and if he was going to be killed he wanted witnesses to show the police to his murderer’s digs. We dropped off the poor little sport-coated, clean-cut, sweet-smelling offering around seven-thirty with instructions to return in two hours.

The wait seemed interminable. We drove around Austin, worried about Lieuen, but enjoying the unusual luxury of transportation.

“Maybe they’ll kill him,” I said, “and we’ll get to keep this fine automobile.”

“You sound like Shelton,” Janis complained.

The city was quiet and the pleasant scents of evening brought optimism. The capitol building was lit up cheerily and a few shoppers meandered down Congress. Somebody famous was emerging from the Driskill Hotel into a waiting limo. The Colorado ran low. And the Night of the Inquisition wore on.

“You’re ALIVE!” Janis screamed, as we pulled up to find a smiling Lieuen Adkins jauntily bouncing down the street near the Dean estate.

“He just wanted to talk. He wanted me to be impressed with his great majesty and years of learning and professorhood.”

“And you were, you were!”

“Ah yes, Killeen, I was the most bedazzled sumbitch you ever saw!”

“And this was a righteous posture!”

“Indeed, indeed.”

“And so all is right with the world?”

“Well….kinda.”

“Kinda?”

“Yeah. The good professor didn’t neglect to mention that if he ever remotely suspected that I was within five hundred yards of his beloved daughter, let alone talking to her, f’gawdsake, he would obliterate my academic career, never let me work in this town again, and, oh yeah, grind up my gonads with a power tool.”

“Your response being….”

“Yessiree, Pop, she’s not the only pebble on the beach.”

In Austin, love usually died hard. In Lieuen’s case, of course and as usual, perhaps we could make a slight exception.


Janis Joplin Meets The Evil Folksinger

Returning to Austin from a short stint in Houston, I was dead broke and with no place to stay. Shelton’s old apartment was but a wonderful memory, condemned to destruction to be replaced by a new, shiny post office, another monument to urban progress. Lieuen advised that Janis had been given a rent-free house by friend Win Pratt. Win was an amiable, lanky, angular fellow, very animated, laughed at the drop of a hat. The son of well-to-do parents who had shipped him off to Princeton, Win preferred to hobnob with the riffraff of Austin and he kept coming back. Apparently, one of his father’s real estate holdings had fallen into mild disrepair and was not presently occupied. Renovations were a couple of months off, so why not let a friend use the place, Win reasoned, wisely neglecting to take it up with his father.

Lieuen delivered me to a modest little white frame bungalow on a side street off Guadalupe close to the university. I optimistically bade him adieu and traipsed up to the door, all my earthlies in one meager suitcase, which was still half-empty. Janis opened the door before I knocked and never even made me ask if I could stay.

Things were good at the little white house. There was almost no furniture, but who needs furniture when they’re 21? We shared a mattress on the floor of the main room, a fair-sized bathroom with a tub and a small kitchen. Janis went to school and I went to the Ranger office, and in the evenings we visited friends, went to parties, entertained guests (which always included Lieuen) or, on Wednesdays, religiously attended and participated in what Janis called the “folksings” and UT called “hootenannies” in the student union.

These were big affairs, well-attended and great fun. Individuals or groups, talented or terrible, politely alternated turns singing everything from Joan Baez songs to Kingston Trio, from traditional folk music to bluegrass to bible.

Janis’ trio, the Waller Creek Boys (with Lannie Wiggins and Powell St. John) was one of a handful of really good groups. Powell could play guitar, banjo or harmonica, Lannie usually guitar, Janis autoharp, and all could sing. They practiced often and, despite a lot of wrangling, managed to develop a pretty good repertoire. It would have been alright with me if they played every other song, but common courtesy limited them to as few as two or three on crowded nights, a few more when the place was less than full, not often.

Although Austin has long deserved its reputation as a hotbed of music and neophyte entertainers, many of the performers at the folksings/hootenannies deserved the hook. Particularly memorable was an exceedingly fat girl who showed up every single week to lament the sorrowful Barbara Allen to the quiet groans of the multitude. The more talented performers got Janis’ rapt attention and she would occasionally adopt an eclectic wrinkle into her performance. Frequently, she picked up a new song she liked. She was often generous in her evaluation of “the competition.” And then there was Lolita.

Lolita had everything Janis felt she lacked. Glamour, for one. She was a slight young girl with long, straight blonde hair, a soft, lilting voice and an air of mystery. She generally travelled alone. The males in the audience fell all over her and listened to her songs in awed rapture. Worse yet, she accompanied herself (like Janis) on the autoharp and she could play it well. Janis, on the other hand, was like “one of the guys.”

Janis despised Lolita. They slid around each other, rarely acknowledging the other’s existence, but obviously competitive in the extreme. One night, Lolita plaintively delivered a number Janis considered one of “her” songs. The last note had not sounded before Janis had the Waller Creek Boys rolling into an upbeat version of the same song, delivered with enormous energy and power. It was one of those rare times when an entire room just sits there in seething anticipation.

Janis was extremely pissed, even for Janis.

“Goddam Joan-Baez singin’ bitch stealin’ my shit!” she muttered to no one in general. “Comes in here with her sweet little lullabies and has these frat boys creamin’ their pants! Look at her—she wears the same friggen clothes I do and she’s a lady. Me? I’m a weirdo beatnik chick. These sonofabitches think I can’t sing that la-la shit? Watch this!”

We did. At the next opportunity, with the atmosphere loaded with electricity and the audience riveted on her performance, she sounded a carbon copy of Lolita. Flesh tingled and neck hair stood at attention. It was a singular experience, not to be forgotten almost fifty years later. Lolita, adept at appearing cool, was obviously rocked. Janis was more than thrilled at her success.

“Teach her to screw around with my goddam songs…” And then….

“C’mon, Killeen, we gotta go home right NOW!” Janis whooped into the street on a killer high, perhaps the only time she ever left a folksing early, running through the evening traffic on Guadalupe. She was the Warrior Queen, conquering all challengers, and she was flying. I had to run like hell to catch up. As she neared our house, she pulled her turtleneck over her head, wheeled, and heaved it onto somebody’s lawn. Subsequently dismissed items of clothing were strewn hither and yon as she nakedly dived for the doorway.

“Jesus, Killeen, for maybe the first time in my life, I really locked that sucker.”

I picked her up and hauled her around to the back porch. The house was locked and the keys lost somewhere in Janis’ discarded clothes.

“This’ll have to do,” I told her.

“Shut up, stranger,” she laughed, “and whisper sweet nothings in my….uhm, er, oyeah….in my ear!”

Hilarious laughter. Curtain.


Lieuen Adkins, Part II (An excerpt from a letter from Gilbert Shelton to his friend Bill Helmer)

…….For the two days before that, Lieuen had unwittingly supplied much liquor for Gilbert and Karen and Joe. He started buying gin, which, unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be), looks just like water, so when he left (still can’t take liquor home) we found it after a diligent search and drank it all up and filled the bottle back up with water. Lieuen came in the next day, got his bottle, when Killeen, aware of the plot, walked over and picked up the gin bottle, asking Lieuen what he’d give him if he’d swill it straight, hot and completely, and Lieuen promised free meals for all present if such a deed were accomplished, knowing Killeen to be a teetotaler. Killeen drank it down. Lieuen continued to gape in wonder for several minutes before a dim light of realization started to appear. We made him buy us hot dogs. And Lieuen, plans of vengeance rapidly forming in his pea mind, got another bottle of gin, drank part of it, switched the remainder to another bottle and filled the original bottle up with water and hid it again in the closet, bidding us farewell with a smug grin. We found both bottles, drank the gin, replaced it with water and re-hid them. The first rule of war, Lieuen will some day come to realize, is never to underrate your foe.


Just So You’ll Know….
I don’t drink much, but I’m not really a teetotaler. Although, I think you qualify in Texas if you drink less than a sixpack a week. And that would definitely be me.


Rats!

In our last exciting episode, we were hoping for good races from Crimson Streak and Cosmic Song. We didn’t get what we wanted, through no fault of theirs.

Excuse number one (these are unlimited for horse owners): Crimson Streak’s rider got in a hassle with the stewards about his bug (seven pound weight allowance for rookie riders). They said it had expired, he disagreed. This is usually a cut-and-dried thing, but not this time. Make a long story short, we recruited the rider who was supposed to ride him in his first start, but who was injured the morning of that race. The kid, according to trainer Larry Pilotti, seemed inordinately nervous, got out of the gate slow, sat back last, and only made a move when he hit the eighth pole, gaining a ton of ground and missing second by a mere length-and-a-quarter. He was still fifth, though, and you know what they pay for fifth. You’re looking at it.

We were happy when Crimson Song worked a half-mile in 48 and one a week before her race, galloping out in 1:01 and three. That’s race-winning time. Unfortunately, however, the race wasn’t that day and she probably did a little too much in the work to come back and run only a week later. Also, she was closer to a fast pace, unlike her first race, and closers won the day. We’re still optimistic. Race horses are like giant jigsaw puzzles, every race provides another piece toward the solution of how you should train and run them. We’re just hoping this is a kids puzzle with just a few pieces and not one of these things your grandmother left out on the card table for six months.


Old College Magazine Joke (from 1961):

Diogenes was looking for an honest man in Tallahassee, when he ran into a wayfarer.

“What kind of luck are you having?” asked the wayfarer.

“Pretty good,” replied Diogenes. “I still have my lamp.”


That’s all, folks.