Striking a nerve for (Southwest) Texas State

For several years I've been blogging college football over at The Austin Chronicle. (I'm a former Chron film columnist and have been writing for them for almost a decade.) For the most part it's been about the Texas Longhorns, but last year I decided to write weekly about Texas State University's first year in FBS football.

This year I've been lukewarm about continuing, but a Facebook back-and-forth led me to whip out this piece. Then I discovered the sports editor had changed in the interim and the new guy was already out at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. It took  a few emails to even find out who he was, then a couple more to find someone to post it online.

In it I make a couple of points: It's time for Texas State to be taken seriously by the area media (both Austin and San Antonio), the Bobcats are a good team with a solid defense and a freshman quarterback who is capable of doing magic, and--most important--they play on Austin TV today against the Ragin' Cajuns!

Oh, and I urged Longhorn fans to consider watching because, frankly, their team is going nowhere this year. (For the record, I've been a UT football fan since age 8 when my Dad started taking me to games. I'm also a two-degree grad of the school that shall always be known as Southwest Texas State University, and that's my license plate above.)

Then BANG. The post spread like wildfire through Twitter and Facebook, particularly the latter where it has racked up 4.6 4.8 4.9 thousand likes as of this moment (the number keeps climbing). I can only credit that to a potential fan base (the team's, not mine) that is untapped and ripe for the taking. 

It's an interesting reminder of the power of social media. Thanks for reading. Now go watch the game!

Murder, politics and Texas State football

John & Oriter Castleberry in happier(?) times.

The story goes that John Kendrick Castleberry, a respected doctor in Nacogdoches, had a thing for his nurse Dora. They first poisoned her husband, Luther, then put a dab of the same potion in a cup of tea that John’s wife, Oriter, was drinking.

After a suitable waiting period, the doctor and nurse got married and had a child. Then the doc turned up dead, and Dora left with all their cash and the youngest child.

The good doctor’s older children grew up angry and mean. If you got in their way on the streets of Nacogdoches, you paid the price. One of those Castleberry boys was my grandfather, who became first a cop then a convicted swindler. I don’t remember him, but I’m told the last time he was in our house he had a gun in his hand. I think of this story every time Texas State plays Stephen F. Austin in football. I start to wonder how much of the East Texas voodoo the Lumberjacks football team brings with them to San Marcos.

Read the rest of the story here.

Tim O'Brien says My Lai massacre too important to forget

Words have power. Sometimes more power than the writer anticipates. Tim O’Brien realized that one day as a line of fans snaked before him waiting for him to personally autograph a book. A mid-twenties man in line seemed to sway nervously. O’Brien figured the man was another would-be writer with an unpublished manuscript seeking advice from the master. But as the man approached the table, he said something that sent O’Brien back to Vietnam: “I think you knew my Dad.”

The resemblance was uncanny and unmistakable. This was the son of Mad Mark, an assassin Green Beret whom O’Brien did indeed know in the trenches of Vietnam. Mad Mark carried an enemy’s nose in his pocket. He was a true believer. He did his job and O’Brien’s nonfiction war account, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, listed him by his first name only. Wasn’t that enough to hide his true identity? Who would read this book by a then-unknown writer anyway?

The son was but an infant when Mad Mark came home and worked for a while as a short-order cook. Then Mark blew his own head off, and the son grew up and started searching for his father in any way he could. He joined the Army, learned to use a weapon just like the old man. But he never found his father until he turned the pages of O’Brien’s book. Because words have power. Sometimes they float around like a bottle in the murky sea until the right person opens them. That’s when a writer may have regrets.

“I regret hurting people, and I realized I should have disguised him better. I’m not talking about pulling punches,” O’Brien said Wednesday to a few hundred people--most students grudgingly attracted through promised extra credit—gathered in the Southwestern Writers Collection at the school that shall forever be known as Southwest Texas State University (some call it Texas State). “My job here today is to make you uncomfortable.”

O’Brien teaches a class or so every two years in the MFA creative writing program there. (I’m a grad of the program but O’Brien came after my time and I’d never met him until this day.) Part of his contract as holder of the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing is to give a few readings for the campus. It’s easy stuff: stand in front of a lectern and read your own words. He could do it in his sleep.

But the ghosts wouldn’t let him. He’d spoken to an undergraduate class and realized how little they knew about the Vietnam War, his main subject matter, his obsession, his demon. The students had read “The Things They Carried,” the short story from his book of the same name, but they didn’t know the first thing about My Lai. O’Brien’s mission this day was to make it real for them. “That’s like living in Texas and never having heard of the Alamo,” O’Brien said of the students’ ignorance of the event.

My Lai was what the American troops called the Vietnamese area in Pinkville (another made-up troop name for the pink area on the map that identified it as an all-out, anything-goes war zone). On March 16, 1968, 105 American troops massacred anywhere from 200 to just more than 500 mostly women and children in the area. For four hours they shot the Vietnamese in the heads, slit their throats, scalped them, threw hand grenades at them. They took breaks to smoke cigarettes, eat candy bars, tell stories. Not one enemy bullet came at them the entire time.

O’Brien’s novel In the Lake of the Woods alludes to the massacre and a man’s repressed memories of being a part of it. O’Brien read briefly from that work, but he gave just as much time to reading the transcripts of court martial hearings for the soldiers, most famously William Calley, the only man among them to be convicted. “What were you firing at?” one soldier was asked in the trial. “At the enemy, sir. They weren’t human beings.”

One young man with a military-style haircut and wearing fatigue shorts walked out early on when O'Brien's talk started getting brutal. Another Iraq War vet said he was trying to get his own stories down on paper. O’Brien was in My Lai one year after the massacre and saw a combination of fear and utter hatred in the eyes of villagers. It was a look he didn’t understand until My Lai became a headline, a source of shame. “It was as if a black curtain had come up,” he said of the revelation.

I (the guy writing this post) was a child when this was going on. Vietnam was white noise on the television in the background as I played with my toys. And I get O’Brien’s point here about the power of words. “The abstraction dulls the senses,” he told the students. “Atrocity is a numbing word. We lose a moral compass when we hear the word.”

Why was his lecture this day something different? Because his fiction comes from a place of truth, and that’s what it’s all about. “I do not believe in the erasure of history—a nation’s history or a person’s history,” he said and went on to quote from another of his Vietnam stories in The Things They Carried: “Every sin here is fresh and original.”

Sounding like the repentant Minnesota-born Methodist he is, O’Brien asked the crowd, “What do you know about yourselves? I did participate in evil.”

But despite the brutality of much of his talk, O’Brien reasserted his belief in humanity. He said he’d recently encountered during his 20th anniversary tour for the book the real-life model for the young girl whose photograph sustains a soldier in “The Things They Carried."

“She doesn’t look the same as in her college yearbook photo, but her eyes were the same,” he said. “The human spirit does have the ability to sustain.”

The true story of Jerry's kids

This essay I wrote back in 1998 appeared in the Austin American-Statesman. I'm posting it here for old friends of Linda to see. It also happens to be about the worst thing I ever did in my life.

The first letter comes months before the telethon. The trademark caricature of Jerry Lewis on the envelope zaps me like a stun gun. Jerry's eyelids are lowered, mouth open in hearty guffaw. Inside the note reads, ``Can you repeat your prior gift of $25 today to give my MDA Labor Day Telethon a head start?"

Of course I can. I have no choice.

This is a story of Jerry Lewis, selfish kids in love with the sounds of their own voices, my friend Linda King and a debt that can never be repaid.

As junior high boys in laid-back, mid-'70s Austin, my best friend and I loved Cheech and Chong, Alice Cooper and winning free records off of the radio (mainly for the ego boost at having our names broadcast to the city as "winners").

We owned tape recorders and tried to outdo each other creating and imitating comedy routines : aliens had multiple belly buttons, DJs were whacked out on drugs, heavy smokers cut their habit in half when one lung was removed. At night our mothers often picked up the phone only to hear us presenting these strange bits to each other, phones pressed firmly to tape players.

With the purchase of a cheap suction-cup device that plugged into our recorders, it was a natural progression to prank calls. We dialed numbers at random and offered free gifts from Burger King. "Just go to the counter and ask for their whopper," we snickered.

But our favorites came on Labor Day weekend when Jerry Lewis pulled out a never-ending string of lame entertainers, and a phone number flashed on the screen in the background.

"I'd like to donate 5 cents," my friend said into the phone in a little-kid squeak aided by the fact that his voice had yet to change.

"Well, you can get your mom and dad to bring you to the station and drop it in the fishbowl," the gushing volunteer offered.

"But I want to give it to Jerry Lewis!" my buddy whined.

"He's in Las Vegas," the operator said.

"But he's on my TV!"

That prank eventually got tiresome and, broke and facing the last days of our summer vacation, we took notice of an even better scheme for Jerry and his TV kids: join the Muscular Dystrophy Association's young army of door-to-door collectors and make some quick cash.

We bounced through the neighborhood, knocking on doors and collecting a dollar bill here, a five spot there. Then one smiling man grabbed us by the arm and yanked us into his living room. Out popped his wife with a plate of cookies and a checkbook.

"You boys give us hope in today's young people," the man said.

"Would you like some milk with those cookies?" his wife asked as she tore a $25 check loose and handed it to me.

In 30 minutes we had $40 in cash and at least $60 in personal checks. We dropped the checks in a trash can and went shopping. I purchased the latest from Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Charlie Daniels Band, went home, placed my head between two speakers and rocked. But along with the music came an oozing sense of dread. I had gotten away with a mini-heist and wondered why I didn't feel more guilty.

Eventually I got tired of Southern rock, and the albums were forgotten. I went on with my life. My best pal and I started hanging with different crowds in high school. I went on to college and entered a new world. And I met Linda, the only person to whom I've ever written a fan letter.

Linda was a regular columnist for our college rag at Southwest Texas State University when I first met her on paper. She was funny, and I sent a goofy letter complimenting her writing. I wondered if Linda thought I was weird.

We ran into each other off and on, but the letter was never mentioned. I was only on the fringe of the journalism crowd, and she didn't go to fraternity parties, so we didn't have a lot in common. My most distinct college memory of her was the night she and I were inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists. It was a boring event we attended only to add to our resumes, but Linda made it lively by following the rules of raucous frivolity. She told jokes and drank the guys under the table. This was one newspaper person to whom I could relate. Semesters passed. I was elected president of my fraternity; Linda became newspaper editor, following in the footsteps of some guy named Lyndon Johnson.

More years elapsed, and I was one of the few SWT journalism grads I knew still trying to work in the field. I lived in a small town, worked long hours for a weekly newspaper and drove a Volkswagen Beetle with a terminal oil leak to Austin on weekends to party with friends. I heard Linda was at a mid-size daily and looked her up. Linda gave my name to her boss, a guy whose existence proved positively that alien life forms do exist, but their movements are too slow to be detected by the human eye.

I saw Linda again at my job interview, and she looked the same -- dressed in black, smelling of a recently smoked cigarette. I didn't get hired then, but a few months later I got a call offering me a different job: Linda's. It seemed she'd upset the town's mayor, who had pressured the paper into reassigning her. When she was informed of the lateral move, Linda suggested me as her replacement at city hall. I later learned that such selfless acts were the norm for her.

Linda trained me in the new job and took me under her wing in those first few weeks. During slow times in the newsroom, she and I wrote fake newspaper stories about how our bosses had died in grisly "accidents." When she left to work in medical public relations, Linda bequeathed to me the long computer file of humorous and vile stories (famous quote from that slow-moving editor -- " .").

I heard from Linda only a few times in the next few years. As I prepared to leave the newspaper business and return to our alma mater to pursue fiction writing and a master's degree, Linda called from San Antonio, and she was a little tipsy. We finally talked about that letter I'd written her in college. She told me it had meant a lot to her and that she'd never received another like it. This time I think she wondered if I thought she was weird.

In 1993 we got in touch again. I sent her a copy of a self-published sick humor magazine, Lost Armadillos in Heat, that friends and I put together for fun. She loved it, and I coaxed her into writing a humor column like those she did in college.

The column she wrote for me was about her journey into the personal ads to meet Mr. Right. Linda confessed to little luck on the romantic front. In our old newspaper office she was relentlessly hit on by an infrequent bather with a red afro, Coke-bottle glasses and the personality of Susan Powter. She wasn't impressed with the pickings elsewhere in Texas, either. "Half the yuppies are Bubbas. The others are Debbie Gibson fans who pee in the shower and climb the corporate ladder by telling the grossest Koresh joke at staff meetings," she wrote. Linda never found the perfect guy, but she quit smoking, exercised regularly and looked and felt the best she had in her life.

I had tried for a long time to get another friend who lived near Linda to call her. They were both successful professionals with a passion for sports, music and fun. Linda didn't return his calls. I soon got a letter telling me she had been diagnosed with ALS -- Lou Gehrig's disease -- and asking me to pass the word to my friend. Her letter was full of hope. There is no known cure for Lou Gehrig's disease, but the full effects can take years to manifest themselves. She had time.

I sent a note reminding Linda how many people truly cared about her, but I didn't call because I didn't want her to feel uncomfortable. Or maybe I was worried about being uncomfortable. Probably a little of both. When I finally quit procrastinating and dialed, her phone was disconnected.

The next day I got the call telling me Linda was dead. The disease had progressed quickly; I had missed my chance to say goodbye.

I think about all of this as I guiltily write another $25 check to MDA and seal it in the envelope provided. On the back is a plea from a mother whose two children suffer from a different neuromuscular disease. I finally have begun to understand their pain.

The Japanese have two distinct words for debt. Giri is a debt you can make good -- like paying back $5 you borrowed from a friend. Gimu is the debt that can never be adequately covered. My debt to Jerry Lewis and all the potential Lindas in the world is a raging dose of gimu.

I mail the check and take solace in a photo. Frozen in time is a lively blonde, her arm around a friend at the San Marcos Chilympiad in 1993. Linda smiles and mugs for the camera. She wrote to me of that trip taken with two of her best friends. "We hiked up to Old Main to see the plaque they hung in 1985 with my and LBJ's names on the list of newspaper editors."

May they both rest in peace.

Goodnight, Jeff

I had that dream again last night, the one where I'd forgotten to go to class for the first couple of weeks of the semester and was late for the day's class. We've all had that dream, but for me it was mostly true. As an undergrad I skipped class frequently, drank a lot of beer and took six years to complete my degree. (I made up for it in graduate school with one B that still rankles.)

Which leads us to Jeff Henderson. I made an A in the first journalism class I took from him. The second class he had to kick me out for not showing up. He did it nicely but firmly. I didn't see much of him again until I became student newspaper adviser at St. Edward's University and started attending the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association conventions. We became reacquainted (I'm not totally sure he remembered me), and in 2004 when I was named TIPA adviser of the year, Jeff handed me the award. Two years ago when my novel came out, he was there asking for an autographed copy and visibly proud to see the success of a former student. He was just that kind of guy.

He died Thursday at the young age of 67. He'd had heart problems dating back to when he was my prof, but I still expected him to make it through. I'll be at his funeral this coming Wednesday and I anticipate a crowd. That's what happens when your life is well lived and you've left little seeds for a lot of people. Jeff's certainly was.

Bumping into old friends at AWP Chicago

I'm recently returned from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Chicago where some 7,000 introverted writers squirmingly mingled. Saw a couple of my favorite writers including Charles Baxter, Dan Chaon (got to say a quick hello to him) and Steve Almond.

I also ran into some old friends.


Poetry is everywhere at AWP, including in the elevators where poetry videos ran nonstop!


I ran into my former student Cesar Diaz and convinced him not to pose for this photo. He's in a creative nonfiction MFA program in Arizona now.


My fellow former Southwest Texas State University MFAers Greg Oaks, Kevin Grauke and Scott Blackwood convened at Scott's reading celebrating the release of his novel, an AWP award-winner.

Da-Da goes to Waco

It was a sweaty, fun night in Waco. I met up with Paul and his pal who drove in from Dallas. Some nice Baylor fan gave us two free tickets as we were about to go buy some. We wandered to the Bobcat section to cheer on the school that shall forever be known as Southwest Texas State. The game was forever close, as you can see from the 21-14 score in this photo as Boko the Bobcat mascot gets a ride through the stands after a Bobcat TD. It seemed the night was ripe for an upset, but Baylor passed at will and foiled an onside kick with little time remaining to take the game 28-20. As one Baylor fan said as we walked back from George's where we got a beer at halftime: "We suck." It's the second time in recent years (the other two years ago against Texas A&M) that the Bobcats seemed poised to upset a Big 12 team.

I came home to discover that Nicholas has learned to say (repeatedly) "Da-Da." Fortunately he repeated it for me this morning.