Air Guitar by Dave Hickey

Author:Dave Hickey
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Art Issues Press

MAGAZINE WRITER

Since my old pal Grover Lewis no longer walks among us, let me begin by saying that, as a physical creature, by the standards of the culture, Grover was nobody’s dream date. But he had an air about him, something likable and complicated. He had this lanky Texas stance, a big mouth with a big smile, and attired as he usually was, in boots, jeans, and some goofy forties shirt, faintly squiffed and glaring at you through those thick Coke-bottle glasses, he was a caricaturist’s delight: all eyes, mouth, angles, sweetness, and ferocious intelligence. Moreover, he was a Southern Boy to the end. He believed in truth and justice, and through all the years of dope and whiskey, Deadheads and deadlines, movie stars and rented cars, he remained an alumnus of that old school.

Women always called my attention to Grover’s “courtly manner”—alluding to his charm even. But to me, he was always Prewitt in From Here to Eternity, a clenched fist in a frail package—prince and pauper in equal parts—always passing some outrageous, absolute judgment on your life and work, while appealing to your sympathy by bumping into a chair. Which is pretty much my definition of “exasperating”—that uncanny ability to break your heart while making you smile—so you never knew whether to thank Grover or forgive him for his impertinence. In my own case, since we were old and permanent friends (and Texas boys, too, cagey with mutual respect), I usually settled for neither.

Grover was, after all, the most stone wonderful writer that nobody ever heard of and blind as a cave bat in the bargain. He had been since birth, so he had to wear those wonky glasses. So, when he really ticked me off, I comforted myself with imagining Grover and his old running mate, Larry McMurtry, back at North Texas State in the fifties, as campus pariahs: two skinny, four-eyed geeks in goofy forties shirts scuttling along the sidewalk head to head, toting copies of The Evergreen Review and plotting their mutual apotheosis—in the aftermath of which they would both be famous authors, claiming any female who fell within their view.

The pleasure I took in this imagined tableau of pathetic geekdom was considerably enhanced by the improbable fact that both Larry and Grover, each in his own way, actually achieved their apotheosis (and its consequent surfeit of feminine companionship)—so rapidly, in fact, that by the time I met them in the early nineteen sixties they were no longer geeks. They were “promising Texas writers.” McMurtry had published his first novel, Horseman Pass By. It was soon to be made into the movie called Hud, and, in the interim, he was teaching creative writing at TCU, while resisting attempts to ban Horseman from the university library. Grover had been booted out of grad school for publishing “communist pornography” in a state-funded journal and had begun publishing essays in national magazines. He had also written a bleak, feral book of poems called I’ll Be There in the Morning, If I Live and could be found reading from it in coffee houses and other fugitive venues.

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