Willie, Billy & UFOs

Austin, TX ? You'd think luscious young things (and there are none more luscious than West Texas girls fresh out of the pickup) would disdain an old geezer like Willie Nelson, in his late 60s with the gray braids. He looks the sort of guy you not only wouldn't bring home to Mom, but might even think twice about before stepping into his truck.

But at the concert I attended on arriving in Austin the front row was crammed with clamant beauties tossing love notes and (I think) underwear at the great man. He tossed back hats and bandannas, while singing love songs that mostly take the form of apologies. Initially the band was awful, out of key and sync, all over the map and held together only by the pianist, member (I think) of the Nelson clan. I reckoned the evening was doomed. Fortunately there was a full bar. Then, in about half an hour it all comes together and Nelson and band give their best for the next 90 minutes. It's all business. Nelson barely stops to say hi or thank you, just jumps from one song to the next. His guitar-playing is strong, and though his vocal pipes sounded tight at the start, soon he's going for the higher notes and hitting them with dignity. He plays medleys of the old standards to start with. As we knew from his CD Milk Cow Blues, Willie is a good bluesman, and he duly obliged with a couple of excellent numbers. Laconically he announced they'd play a "couple for Waylon," then he unveiled a few songs from his recent CDs. We leave, very well satisfied amid a crowd of mostly 30- to 50-year-olds, all white as one might expect.

Next day I seek out my old friend Bill Broyles, once editor of Texas Monthly, then a Marine in Vietnam, then editor of Newsweek until he and Katharine Graham wearied of each other. Bill put Grace Kelly on the cover the week she died, and it sold a record number for Newsweek. But it was the week of the Sabra and Shatila massacres and Graham & Co. felt Kelly the wrong note to strike.

These days Bill, who once published a fine memoir about Vietnam, writes successful scripts for Hollywood like the recent Cast Away and the upcoming Unfaithful. His house in downtown Austin has pillars. I told him I thought it was a bank. He answered equably enough that the bank owned it. He modestly disclosed he'd just been admitted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame, in the company of Willie Nelson and others, including Cyd Charisse, whom I recall from Silk Stockings as the acme of enchantment. Bill said she still, in her 80s, looks very good. He'd asked her what it was like dancing with both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Charisse said that as a partner Astaire treated her like gossamer. After shooting a dance scene with Kelly she was black and blue.

I made some slighting references to Bill about Texas bbq and he flung down the modish grilled salmon sandwich with rouille and spring lettuce he was nibbling and said we should rush an hour out of town to Kreuz's forthwith. "No knives, no forks, no plates. Used to have knives on chains hanging from the tables. No sauce. You can buy pickles and onions. No napkins. They give you Rainbo bread for napkins. You wipe your hands with it and then you eat it. And then you get down on your knees and thank God he let you eat this, if only once in your life." I told him we should go that very night, and he nodded. Then he muttered, "Or do you want to eat really good food."

We went to Jeffrey's, George W.'s favorite, where the chow was very acceptable, and the cutlery wasn't even chained to the table leg. These Texans don't entirely disdain the civilized arts.

Meanwhile knowledgeable commentary was pouring in from musician Dave Vest and others. "You might try Dozier's in Fulshear," Vest counseled, "just west of Houston off I-10. Order back at the meat counter once you get past all the Watkins products. Eat at the picnic tables in the rear of the store. Rich lawyers in River Oaks send their chauffeurs out to Dozier's. The smoked porkchops to go are good. Dozier's is a stone's throw from Simonton, where they still have a rodeo (and barbecue) every Saturday night. Rene Magritte had his picture taken there. Shouldn't you?"

Michael Neumann roared his fury about the limitations of my bbq expertise:

"Now wait a damn minute! Are you telling us that you were in South Carolina and you have nothing to say about barbecue until you hit Alabama? Nothing about Maurice's fine mustard-based barbecue, or Little Pig's BBQ, which clearly states?I have the postcard right in front of me, from Columbia, SC?that it has 'the best barbecue in the known world'? No trip to Wilson, NC, to Parker's? And then you have the unmitigated gall to describe spare ribs as barbecue! Where are we, Swiss Chalet? Appearing on the same pages as an apologist for dirty papist baby-rapers is one thing, but as a clean-living, red-blooded American apologist for dirty terrorists, I am ashamed to be in your company."

I do admit he had me on the spare ribs. A slip of the pen.

Bill sketches out my itinerary from Austin. I'm to head out along 290 to Fredericksburg, then hit Interstate 10 till Fort Stockton, then north along the Pecos (beyond which, you'll recall, Judge Bean was the law), then up into New Mexico to Roswell, homeport for UFOs, then west to Lincoln, site of the Lincoln County wars, of which the best-remembered warrior is Billy the Kid. Bill said Lincoln looked pretty much the way it used to when Billy escaped McSween's burning house.

I head off, pass through the hill country along the Pedernales that now boasts wineries as well as LBJ's ranch, and a few hours later am rolling through the endless West Texas steppe, without no trace of luscious girls to lighten the tedium. I get into Roswell and scan the skies for UFOs, but have to slake my disappointment with the Donald Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art.

Don is the brother of R.O. Anderson, famed as the oilman who built up Arco. Don has put his moolah into art, of which the most memorable pieces are a woman humping a Volkswagen (Woman and Bug) by Luis Jimenez Lopez, and several tumultuous orgy scenes by Stephen Fleming, who is now the director of the artists in residence program. He should put his paintings on the brochure. I'm sure the flow of applicants would increase rapidly.

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Lincoln, NM ? I reached Lincoln after dark, to find that the only other guest in the handsome and nicely restored inn (once the old Patron home) was Caroline Crowley, an Irishwoman born and raised not far west of me in County Cork. Caroline was heading home after a stint working in the San Diego Zoo. Her leg brace attested to a difference of opinion with a wildebeeste. I alerted Caroline to my low opinion of this zoo, partly because of the awful panda exhibit. I remember furious aardvarks and other creatures watching the tourists scurry past their exhibits, oblivious to everything but their zeal to view two unalluring pandas eating bamboo. Caroline said my views are shared by various keepers, many of whom dream of the day when the pandas might try to break out, and could then be "shot while attempting to escape."

The next day I wandered around Lincoln, trying to figure out the basics of the Billy the Kid saga. Two of the eternal verities, military procurement and insurance, were the primal forces at work, along with the third verity, tardy authors.

In 1850, with the exception of coastal California and eastern Texas, there was barely a cow or steer west of the Mississippi. There were more cattle, nearly a million, in New York state than anywhere else. By 1870 the total was up to 15 million and by 1900 that had doubled again, to 35 million. Texas alone had 6.5 million. Industrial meat-eating had come of age. U.S. Army units needed beef to sustain their campaigns against Indians watching their protein disappear as cattle replaced bison.

Based in Lincoln, Irish good old boys known as the Firm had the local meat contract stitched up with friendly U.S. Army officers in Fort Stanton. They rustled the cows from John Chisum's vast herds farther south, grazed them on land stolen from the Hispanics, then sold them to the Army or drove them to Abilene or up into Colorado. Everyone was happy, except for the Hispanics, the Indians and presumably the cows.

Enter the archetypal dude, John Henry Tunstall. He's a rich kid from England, with a fine horse imported from New York, the most refined clothing and the softest Indian blankets. His plan: after forming an alliance with a local lawyer, Alexander McSween, he will break the Firm, grab the meat contracts, steal all the business of Lincoln from the Firm's store. Of course this is standard business procedure, and the reason America is great. But part of the standard procedure is not to underestimate the opposition, which Tunstall fatally does.

Irked by his maneuvers, the Firm used the excuse of an insurance claim to go to Tunstall's ranch. Encountering the Englishman they shoot him dead. Not long thereafter they attack McSween's house, setting it on fire. McSween dies attempting to escape. Billy the Kid and others make their way through the flames to safety, as does Mrs. Susan McSween.

These Lincoln County wars are minutely documented in papers in the various museums in Lincoln, one of them endowed by R.O. Anderson. Hundreds of articles and books, starting with Pat Garrett's memoir, ghostwritten by Ash Upson and rushed out after Garrett had killed Billy, chronicle the Kid's final years on a daily, sometimes an hourly basis. Photographs by the thousand document all the players staring grimly into the camera. They include the famous tintype of Billy, which has promoted the erroneous notion that the Kid was left-handed.

But amid this wealth of mostly amateur history, there are huge and obvious gaps. Sex, for example. From Calvert and deLeon's History of Texas we learn that ratios in Texas in 1880 were 111 men to one woman. Same ratio 10 years later. Conditions in the bunkhouses must have been similar to those before the mast. Bill Broyles, who's researched the Billy saga extensively for a novel some smart publisher should speedily snap up, says Tunstall was gay and "very close to a German called Weidemann." The only other person for whom he appears to have entertained erotic attraction was his own sister.

So maybe Tunstall's murder was a hate crime, to be requited by Billy. Was Billy gay? Maybe, like another mythic character, Neal Cassady, he was polymorphous in preference. He was certainly mourned by many Hispanic girls.