A Tribute to James Crumley
When I finally caught up with Jim Crumley, he was drinking beer with a beloved old poet named Richard Hugo at an umbrella table on the River Walk in San Antonio, Texas, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
It was sometime in the early 1980s. Jim and I had known each other for a decade by then and had agreed to meet at the Associated Writing Programs conference in San Antonio. He was teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso and I was an editor at UT Austin, two Texas boys who weren’t especially fond of our home state but needed the dental insurance. We had met at Chuck Kinder’s moveable feast of drunken writers in San Francisco in the mid-’70s and had become good friends. Chuck and his wife, Diane Cecily, were famous for their literary salon. On any given evening you could find amazing people gabbing around their kitchen table: Ray Carver and his wife, Maryann, Max Crawford, Bill Kittredge, Michael Rogers, Don Paul, the underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson, and Crumley, whenever he drove down from Missoula. It always felt like the ’60s at Chuck and Diane’s.
Crumley and I hit it off because we were both from Texas and didn’t particularly want to go back. We had come from small places (Mathis and Texas City); his dad had been an oil field worker and mine worked in an oil refinery; and our mothers had both been waitresses. Despite our difference in age – he was nearly ten years older – he treated me as an equal, as he did everyone. Jim Crumley was a tough guy, part Milo and part Sughrue, but to most of us he was a damned likable friend, with that mischievous twinkle in his eye and a disarming giggle while he chewed at the corner of his droopy mustache. As the years went by, when I would meet him in a bar in Austin or Chicago or Los Angeles, he was always surrounded by admiring strangers and a bartender who knew his drink because Crumley always remembered his name.
On that afternoon in San Antonio, Richard Hugo was drinking with his many admirers and I didn’t get a chance to say much to him. Writers from the conference kept dropping by to say hello to the great graying eminence. He had the look of a famous poet: large, slightly disheveled, professorial, quick with a humorous story. He was said to be the model for Abraham Trahearne in The Last Good Kiss. Crumley had derived the title from one of Hugo’s poems and had dedicated the book to him – “grand old detective of the heart.”
I don’t recall how it happened exactly, but Crumley wanted to go driving around – one of his favorite pastimes – and soon a half dozen writers piled into his gigantic rental car, which felt like a Higgins Boat with bench seating. There was a distinct division between the cultures of the front seat and back seat. In front, Crumley at the wheel with a six pack nearby, me, and my Austin neighbor, a tall affable writer named John Works (Thank you, Queen Isabella) we’d bumped into on the River Walk. The three of us in the front seat were laughing and drinking (Don’t do this, children) while Crumley wheeled us around the barrios of West San Antonio. But the three writers in the back seat were academic types, directors of creative writing programs, and they seemed nervous about missing seminar sessions and banquets, and equally uneasy about driving around in a rough neighborhood with a distracted drunk at the wheel. At some point Crumley declared, “Fuck it, we’re going to Mexico,” and headed the huge auto west out of town onto the highway leading to Laredo and the Rio Grande River, about two hours away.
He was serious. He wanted to eat dinner in Nuevo Laredo. I didn’t care. I wasn’t enrolled in the conference, anyway. I’d come to see Crumley. John Works thought it was a great idea. The three of us were still laughing and having a great time. But the academics in the back seat became vocally resistant as the car sped farther into the rocky Texas countryside toward Mexico. There was a session they wanted to attend. The banquet was at seven. Please turn the car around. This has been all in good fun but we ought to return to the hotel and freshen up before the cocktail reception. “Fuck the cocktail reception,” Crumley said, “we’re eating at this little place I know just on the other side of the river.” Mexico.
In time the protestations from the backseat became more intense. And at some point, about thirty miles outside of San Antonio, Crumley declared that he had to relieve himself, and Works and I agreed it was a good idea. The three of us got out of the car to whiz in a cactus patch off the side of the road, and the academics locked the doors on us. They wouldn’t let us back in until Crumley promised to take them back to town. It was a delicate negotiation on Crumley’s part – he’d left the keys in the ignition and someone inside had threatened to crawl over the gargantuan seat and drive away without us. They spoke to us through rolled-up windows. Reluctantly, Crumley agreed. And back to the city he drove, laughing and drinking and telling stories all the way.
Later that evening, after everyone was happy again, I left the hotel and drove north toward Austin, and my car broken down near an Air Force base only a few miles out of the city.
All I could think of, as I rolled into a convenience store parking lot with a melted radiator hose, was that wonderful line from the Dick Hugo poem. The one that gave Crumley his title:
Say your life broke down.
I called the hotel and located Crumley at the bar. “Say your car broke down,” I began. I guess I wanted him to fire up the Higgins Boat and come get me. It was dark and desolate out by the Air Force base, an occasional carload of military brats cruising in for Twinkies and Zig-Zag papers. I remembered Hugo’s line: “The tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives.”
Crumley was amused by my situation. But he was intent on dancing with the poet Dara Wier in the ballroom just then and in no shape to drive out into the desolate night.
“No hard feelings, Zigal, but I can’t make it, man.”
So I spent the night in my car in the convenience store parking lot, waiting for daylight when I would call my brother in Austin and ask him to come after me with a tow chain. The store had a paperback display, and I bought a true crime book about two incestuous, murderous twins and tried to read it by halogen light. At one point, a carload of teenagers pulled in next to my space and a girl saw me lying back in the driver’s seat, reading a paperback about serial killers. “He’s looking at me!” she screamed, and the car squealed off into the darkness.
I would see Crumley many times after that, other misadventures in other places. Over the years, I watched his health decline. My son and I visited him and his wife, Martha, in Missoula a couple of summers ago, one last time. We all saw it coming, but it still broke my heart when he died.
Several years ago I published a short story entitled “Second Lieutenants of Literature” (in the anthology Careless Weeds) in which I refashioned that ill-begotten trip to Mexico in fiction. When Crumley read it, he called and said, “Next time, put me in the damned story.”
Though I am old with wandering, I think I’m going to drive to Laredo someday. To see if Jim Crumley is sitting in that little café on the other side of the river. Surrounded by admiring friends, telling those beautiful tales, drinking with a bartender who knows his drink because the old gringo always remembers his name.
Thomas Zigal was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1948 and grew up in nearby Texas City, on the Gulf Coast. He received a B.A. in English from The University of Texas at Austin in 1970. He was accepted to the Stanford Writing Program in 1971 and earned a master's degree. He is a member of the Authors Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, the Texas Institute of Letters (former vice president), and the Writers League of Texas. Thomas Zigal is the author of the novels The White League, Into Thin Air, Hardrock Stiff, and Pariah. For more information please visit his website at www.thomaszigal.com