My wife called this picture “Runberg Lane Priest Candy”. That came from a story I told her about a time in the early 90’s when I was bricking houses and living in an efficiency apartment on North Loop in Austin. It seemed the more negligent I was about taking care of things and the poorer the decisions I made, the worse my luck seemed to get. I had let the brakes get so bad on the Oldsmobile Cutlass I was driving that after heading over to a friends house to pick up a piece of mail that tracked me down in those pre-internet days my foot went all the way to the floor as I braked to make a left turn. I nursed the Cutlass to a gas station where I filled up the brake fluid and journeyed home. As I pulled up to the apartments I tried to let the car idle in to the parking lot but had to give it a touch of gas to make it over the slight hump of the entrance. I steered the car in to my parking place right in front of my own door and again my foot went right to the floor allowing the Olds to crash in to the soft Mexican brick wall at about 3/4 of a mile per hour. Some bricks flaked apart at impact and a piece or two of my windowsill came loose. Otherwise it looked like no harm no foul, though my paranoid upstairs neighbor claimed it knocked all of her Jesus pictures off the walls and toppled a ceramic Virgin. What little dough I had on hand went to having the car towed off and a brake job started. I was out of food and money and had no wheels and no phone. I changed a Kennedy 50 cent piece from my birth year (1971) that a friend had given me for quarters to call my boss and see if someone could help me get to work.
At that time I was working for a poor boy brick laying outfit that would sub contract little one story suburban houses in the new developments going up on the outskirts of town. The guy I worked for was a hustler, part carnival barker part temporarily embarrassed high roller. His lust for women and booze and screwing his business partners had left him wrecked and hiding out in Texas from the big time life he’d had in Virginia. He had been in Austin for a building boom in the early 80’s and still had a few contacts. He was convinced a few months of the subcontracting game and he’d take over the whole biz just like old times. It was going slow though. He just had me for labor and one brick layer. A hard working hard headed German guy who’s patience with the boss man was wearing thin. We’d get an assignment on a house in a subdivision and do just enough to get a draw on the pay then move everything to another house and set up again doing enough to get another draw. Because of this constant migration from site to site, I never was really sure where we were working that day. So with my car out of commission I was desperate to get word where to go. I finally got an answer from the German that we would start work on a subdivision just east of Round Rock on Monday morning. Luckily I had a friend who worked at a plant nursery on the same road and I managed to track him down to give me a ride.
When I got to Round Rock Monday morning I walked through the subdivision looking for my crew. I looped around through the curved streets and cul de sacs to no avail. I finally ran in to the general contractor who assigned the jobs. He told me that as we had a couple unfinished jobs down south he took this assignment from my boss until he completed what he had. I don’t know if I asked if he’d give me a ride down there, but however it happened I was on foot walking in the bar ditch of a farm to market road. I had no GPS, no cell phone, only the sun in the sky to assure me I was heading south. After about 30 or 45 minutes of walking a Ford LTD pulls up next to me rolling down the window and asking if I need a ride. My suspicious nature was worn down by dehydration and aching feet and somewhat by the Catholic priest cassock he was wearing. Turned out he was heading in to town and offered to take me where I needed to go. He was friendly enough on the drive, not really pushing religion, mostly asking me questions about construction work. When we got in to Austin he took the Runberg Lane exit which was pretty far from where I had told him I was going. He passed Lamar, the quickest thoroughfare to my neighborhood and at that point I started to question where he was headed. He told me he had some people I’d really like to meet. He hooked a quick left on a side street and started driving fast and deliberately, asking me if I had lots of girlfriends. I told him to let me out and finally at a stop sign had to threaten punching him to get him to stop long enough to escape. When I stepped out, he drove off in a hurry and I was left to spend the rest of the morning walking in the sunshine back to my apartment to regroup and find a way to get back to work.
Those times from when I left home in 89 in to the early 90’s were full of adventures and misadventures like this. The priest candy picture is probably from a couple years before the incident around the time I took off from my Southern New Mexico home vastly unprepared not only for real life but also for the music career I wanted to pursue. When I set foot in Austin and saw the LeRoi Brothers, Alejandro Escovedo, Will Sexton, Two Hoots and Holler and others in person, I was hesitant to even tell people I played. It was back to the drawing board for years while I worked rough day jobs, drank, raised hell and finally grew in to my guitar player shoes. I wish I’d had tougher task masters and more attentive mentors to push me along but maybe it just wasn’t my time to put anything out in the world, rather my time to absorb.
This week we are playing some shows with Dan Stuart. I absorbed a lot of lyricism and attitude and possibly fashion sense, from Mr. Stuart when he was the frontman for Green on Red. Unlike myself, Dan’s flame burned bright in his youth and he made a ton of records as a very young man with legendary producers like Jim Dickinson and Glynn Johns. He made his mark and walked away from it for awhile. In the last decades he has been putting out fantastic music at his own new pace, living in Oaxaca Mexico and writing books as well. Studying up for the shows took me on a YouTube induced trip through time and put me face to face with some old memories of cowboy hats, bolo ties and bitching about Ronald Reagan. I’m really excited to make some noise with Dan this week and present the present day versions of ourselves to whoever comes to listen.