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I have survived both bladder and thyroid cancer. A ruptured appendix many years ago almost did me in, and I received third-degree leg burns in a senseless gasoline fire that could have killed me. Such minor inconveniences are hardly worth mentioning.

The physical pain from the surgeon’s scalpel, and mishaps inflicted by the machinery of man, are nothing when compared with the emotional pain of irretrievable loss.

I experienced that loss on the night of February 15, 1993. My first-born child, son Grady Michael Kindrick, killed himself with a .38 caliber pistol in the backyard of his mother’s home on Harriett Street in San Antonio. He had just broken up with his longtime girlfriend. It was the day after Valentine’s Day. He was 36.

I was working late in my small Action Magazine office on Broadway when I got the call. I was recently divorced at the time. The call was from my youngest of two sons, Steven, who with his older brother Grady had been staying with his mother in what had been our family home. Our daughter Gena, my youngest, was living with her mother Vicky. Grady was living in the home on Harriett Street after separating from the girlfriend, and Steve had recently moved back from Florida where he had been working in the nursing home industry.

I picked up the phone.

“Daddy…”

Steven was hyperventillating.

I knew something was wrong.

“Daddy, you have to get over here. Grady shot himself. He’s dead.”

This could not be. I could not make myself believe this. Some kind of crazy hallucination on Steve’s part. Someone must have given him a laced joint.

I went numb as I drove to my ex-wife’s house. It was close to midnight. I saw flashing lights. Police cars. An ambulance. Two cops were waiting for me when I arrived. One escorted me through the house and into the backyard. I saw Grady on the ground. He had shot himself in the head. His body was covered by a sheet. I think they were waiting for a coroner. At the time of Grady’s suicide, I hadn’t had a drink of alcohol or any drug for three years. Some predicted that I would drink over Grady’s death.

I didn’t want to drink. I wanted to die.

The night of Grady’s death I drove back to the tarpaper shack in Bulverde where I lived alone with my dog. I recall dropping to my knees and trying to look skyward through a flood of tears.

Dear Jesus in Heaven, I prayed. Please bring my boy back and take me instead.

I was raised by a Christian mother, attending services and Sunday school in the Junction First Baptist Church. But I didn’t make a real contact with God until I sobered up in a recovery program which stressed belief in a power greater than myself.

I sobbed and hated the uncontrollable tears. It was years later that I was to take comfort in the words on tears by 19th century writer Washington Irving who wrote: There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a sign of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.

Grady’s sister Gena found his body.

She had been to a concert with a friend when she stopped at the White Room, a nightclub frequented by Gena and her older brother.

Gena recalled: “Me and a friend stopped at the White Room and a guy we knew said Grady asked him for bullets. I have no idea if he got any from him. The bartender gave me a cocktail napkin that Grady had written on, listing all the jewelry he was wearing. I had a bad feeling, so I went home to look for him and found him in the backyard already dead.”

One of the policemen at the scene of Grady’s death put his arm around my shoulders and said, “I know who you are, and I know you might not care for policemen. But I truly feel for you, and I want you to know that this is the hardest part of police work for me. I will say a prayer for you tonight.”

I didn’t get the cop’s name. I never forgot him. My hard shell of resentment for authority was showing its first crack.

While driving away from my former home and the scene of my son’s death, I can recall mental flashbacks which have faded but never disappeared from my soul and my human psyche. I held Grady in the palm of my hand after his premature birth in a Bay City hospital. My first job after college was editorship of a tiny weekly called The Bay City News. Grady weighed 3.5 pounds at birth. Vicky and I were overwhelmed with both joy and apprehension. Would he even make it? By the time he was a year old he was the size of a normal yearling.

The scenes rocketing through my brain on that fateful night were vivid and almost palpable.

Grady on the little stool. He was about 3 then and his hair was curly and golden blond. Short pants and little white shoes. The cutest little kid God ever made. Grady in the visitor’s booth at Bexar County Jail. He brought me soap and tobacco. He was my only visitor when I was locked up. Grady trying to find me a lawyer. He had no money, but he tried. I learned from friends that he worried about me. Grady the night before Willie’s first picnic when Nelson introduced him to his idol–Leon Russell. The memories, the guilt. The physical fight I had with my son. Why didn’t I do better? Why didn’t we go fishing more? Why didn’t I do more? I know now that I was never really unselfish and mature enough to be a real father to my son. I was a friend, a running mate, and a confidant. We loved each other until it literally hurt, but I didn’t know what to do with it at the time.

Grady dropped out of Robert E. Lee High School, later passing a General Education Development (GED) test. He wrote a couple of record reviews for Action Magazine. I could see the talent and the potential, but the kid didn’t get the direction and help that he needed. When I started Action Magazine in 1975, Grady wanted to work for me. I wore turquoise jewelry. Grady wore turquoise jewelry. I wore cowboy boots, Grady wore cowboy boots. Grady helped me with photography and some photo lab work, but the little magazine just didn’t bring in enough revenue for the two of us. He bounced from one odd job to the next, telling me once shortly before his death: “I have never done one damn thing for myself. I have wasted so much.”

A red flag. Perhaps. But I didn’t see it. Who in the hell in my world had ever heard of something called clinical depression?

The bewilderment and sense of disbelief when one loses a child like I lost Grady must certainly have some spiritual connection to God’s animal kingdom. I saw it when my Jack Russell terrier Henry caught and killed a baby redbird that had left its nest in a hanging plant on our front porch. Three other fledglings had apparently left the nest successfully, leaving this last one. It was the baby’s first and last attempt at flight.

I knew the fledgling cardinals were feathered out and ready for flight. I should have locked the dog in the backyard. It was my fault, not Henry’s. Jack Russell terriers are hunters, born and bred to attack and kill. They are lightning quick. When the baby redbird fluttered down on the yard grass, the dog ended its life.

It was a poignant lesson for Sharon and me. The hardest part was watching the adult redbirds after their baby’s death. Cardinals mate for life, both mother and father feeding the young. With nothing but scattered feathers left of their baby, the parents were obviously in a high state of stress, squawking piteously as they flew to their now-empty nest, then to the ground, then back to the nest. They had lost their baby. They were frantic. They could not understand. In their own fashion, I am sure they were crying. I knew the near panic of inscrutable emptiness and the need to cry out. To scream for help.

Since Grady’s death, my faith has strengthened. Although I have not been a regular church man, my Higher Power is the God of my childhood. My God walked on water and raised a man from the dead some 2,000 years ago, and, yes, his name is Jesus Christ. His spirit still saves and heals, springing drunks and dope addicts I have known and worked with from their own furnace of man-made fire. I will never get over Grady’s death; but with God’s help, I have been able to get through it.

I know I will see Grady and other loved ones again. For me, Heaven will surely include the beautiful, burbling clear waters of the South Llano River where I grew up. My wife Sharon and all of my loved ones will be there, and every dog and cat I ever owned will be on hand to greet me. And I won’t be surprised if a certain little redbird is there, sitting safely on a high branch and keeping a sharp eye on Henry the Jack Russell terrier.

As this autobiography winds down, some might wonder why I withheld my son’s death until the last of this project. It was not part of a script. It was part of my personal pain that I put off as long as my mind would allow.

My younger son, Steven Howard Kindrick, died January 3, 2019, from small cell lung cancer. He was born August 23, 1958, in Shannon Memorial Hospital in San Angelo while I worked for the San Angelo Standard-Times. Vicky Kindrick, my former wife and mother of my three children, died of natural causes January 22, 2021, in San Antonio. She was born June 30, 1937.

There were bright spots in the latter days of Action Magazine, three anniversary shows at Texas Pride Barbecue that showcased musicians who ranged from Kinky Friedman and Johnny Bush to Alex Harvey, Johnny Rodriguez, and Darrell McCall. These and hundreds more like them are the artists who graced the pages of Action for 44 years.

The big surprise for me was my inclusion into the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, a huge honor which sees my work included with such Texas writer giants as Larry McMurtry and Carmac McCarthy, as well as musicians the likes of Willie Nelson, Ray Benson, and Jerry Jeff Walker. I graduated from the San Marcos university in 1957 when it was Southwest Texas State College. Sadly, Bill Wittliff, who started the museum on Texas talent, died before I had a chance to meet him. He was the Texas screenwriter who co-produced The Redheaded Stranger movie with Willie Nelson and crafted the screen version of Lonesome Dove.

My entrance into the Wittliff can be attributed to former Express-News music columnist Hector Saldana, now music curator at the Wittliff and leader of San Antonio’s Tex-Mex rock band The Krayolas. I wrote the first story ever printed on the Krayolas when Hector and his brother David were teenagers. Now Hector’s boys are in the band. 

The Wittliff Collections represent a giant museum of works by Texas journalist writers, photographers, musicians, and screenwriters. This vast body of works encompasses the entire seventh floor of the Texas State Alkek Library, and it continues to grow.

My Wittliff exhibit ties in with the outlaw country music outbreak of the 1970s when Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jerry Jeff Walker, and a few others led a limited exodus of artists from the constraints of Nashville. These were the so-called “outlaws of country music” who traded their traditional sequined coats and ostrich boots for head rags and tennis shoes, who broke from the giant record label sounds and sheen of Nashville, choosing instead to sign with smaller independent labels while hiring their own record producers, engineers, and side men for the recording sessions.

If these were the “outlaws” of country music, then I became the outlaw journalist who hung out with them and wrote about them. My exhibit at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State features me in a Mexican sombrero with a very suspicious-looking cigarette smoking between two of my fingers. Action Magazine copies covering 44 years are stored and on display in my Wittliff exhibit, as well as old columns that go back to my 1960s and early 1970s years as a reporter and columnist for the San Antonio Express and News.

So here we are, maybe at the ending for me and maybe not. Bill Shakespeare would say I seem to have survived the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Bill Wilson would say that God has transformed me from a churlish foul-mouthed Mr. Hyde into a much happier and much more pleasant Dr. Jekyll.

Some refer to this transformation as a spiritual awakening or a psychic change. Sobriety for me means far more than abstinence from alcohol and drugs. Sobriety means sanity, gratitude, and a spiritual way of life that defies adequate description. While my Higher Power is a Jewish carpenter, my state of spirituality goes beyond the structure of organized religion.

I love my wife Sharon and I will tell anyone who will listen that I have a five-foot wife and a kick-ass fairy tale life, all the result of sobriety and my faith in God. I was a deer hunter who now feeds the animals at my kitchen gate. I was a whitewing dove hunter who now grieves the death of a baby redbird. Does this make me less the mucho, macho stud duck image I had painted for myself? I can’t explain it but God can. An old spiritual advisor I had many years ago passed me the key. His name was Jack.

“Get down on your knees beside your bed every night,” Jack said. “Thank God for keeping you sober one more day. Then put your boots under the bed. When you crawl down the next morning to get the boots, ask God for another day of sobriety.”

It works.

The sun was shining and the birds were singing as I rode my bicycle on that bright spring morning near my Bulverde home. A year had passed since my last drug bust at the hands of Sumner Bowen and the Alamo Area Drug Task Force, and I had been sober and drug-free for an entire year after joining a popular God-based recovery program.

I had violated a 10-year probated sentence for drug possession with that final arrest, and a probation revocation and sentencing hearing would be the inevitable end to my freedom. I had posted bond, and there was nothing more to do but wait.

Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months as I waited to hear from the court system. Nothing happened as I attended daily meetings in the recovery program. I had heard nothing from my lawyer, and I told myself that I might be off the hook. Maybe my case just slipped through a crack in the legal apparatus. Apprehension turned into relief, and I had all but forgotten about the case when an unmarked sheriff’s car pulled my bicycle over in front of the Honey Creek Grocery Store at the intersection of Texas Highway 46 and Blanco Road.

I was arrested by deputies from the drug task force. My probation had been revoked and I was headed for jail to await a sentencing hearing before 144th District Court Judge Susan D. Reed, the toughest and most uncompromising jurist in the system when it came to drug cases. I was going before the “Hanging Judge,” as Reed was known to the criminal element. For some still unexplained reason, my paperwork had been mislaid until it landed on Reed’s court docket.

The Honey Creek Grocery no longer exists. It was a one-woman enterprise, owned and operated at the time of the arrest by my friend Mary Lou (Kelly) Gibson. Kelly and her friend Marcie Snyder were on the grocery front porch as I was being handcuffed. I recall Kelly wringing her hands in consternation. Kelly and Marcie agreed to take charge of my bicycle since I was headed for jail with no bond in the offing. I gave them a phone number for my son Grady. I also asked them to notify my Bulverde friend Sam Lowrey.

When we reached the Bexar County Jail, my incarceration education was to begin. I was first placed in a holding cell to await fingerprinting and other processing procedures. There was one other prisoner in the little cell, a middle-aged Hispanic inmate who must have weighed 300 pounds. Restroom facilities consisted of a sink and one barren commode sitting in the middle of the room.

I have never forgotten my horrendous introduction to captivity. The big boy was on the thunder mug, emptying his bowels with grunts and groans befitting a dying hippopotamus, and the gaseous stench from that monster shit filled that little holding cell like a Nazi gas chamber.

The prayer I uttered was simple and heartfelt: Oh Lord, get me out of here and I swear I will never do another drug or take another drink of alcohol for the rest of my life.

Everything seemed surreal as I was to spend the better part of a month behind bars. I was being hand searched every time I turned around. Damn it to hell. I was wearing an orange monkey suit and nobody gave a shit about my college degree and Pulitzer nomination. My smart mouth was no asset, and I soon learned the hard way to keep it shut.

The guard searching my person ran his hand too near my privates for my liking.

“I reckon you might be having fun doing that,” I smarted off.

The guard brought his fist into my crotch with sufficient force to take away my breath and any notion I might have had for further wise ass comment. It was an old-fashioned nut cracking worth remembering.

Welcome to the Bexar County Jail, Mr. newspaper columnist.

Social stratification has always been alive and well in the jail. It is a sort of caste system determined by the inmates. When I was jailed in the 1970s, the Texas prisons were over-crowded and many inmates were allowed to serve their prison sentences in county lockups. Hispanics were in the majority, followed by blacks, and then the whites like me who were the third largest in number.

I was one of the oldest of jail inmates at the time, and good fortune or maybe providence from the git-go provided me with a jailhouse angel known by one and all as the Wizard. He was a career Hispanic burglar whose Christian designation was Danny, but everyone in the jail referred to him simply as Wizard. And he looked like a wizard with sharply chiseled features and pointed goatee.       Since I was one of the oldest inmates on the cell block, Wizard christened me Pops and the appellation stuck. In jail jargon, Wizard was known as a “house man.” He had been in and out of jails and prisons for most of his adult life of 35-plus years, and he could get just about any substance delivered to his cell.

Discrimination was rampant in the Bexar County Jail in the 1970s. “Mayata” is the N word in Spanish, and Wizard was the first person I ever heard use it. My jailhouse indoctrination came from a concerned Wizard who took it upon himself to give me all the protection at his command.

Nodding toward a group of black inmates (they usually stayed grouped together when possible), Wizard said: “Pops, you need to know a few things if you are going to survive in here. Shit happens sometimes, and you need to be on the right side. It happens between the Chicanos and the Mayatas. You are a gringo and you white boys are the minority in jail. When the bad shit goes down, you need to be with us Mexicans. Not with the Mayatas. We always win because there are more of us.”

Conversely to the Wizard’s warning, my other good jail friend was a big black guy named Frank. Before the Wizard helped me get commissary money in my jail account, Frank generously shared his much-coveted Bugler tobacco and rolling papers with me. A murder-one parolee, Frank’s parole had been compromised simply because Frank had failed to report in person to his parole officer.

“Damn it, Frank,” I said. “How in hell could you fail to report when it meant you would go back to prison?”

Frank’s answer was almost typical of the jailbird whose apathy probably stems from a life with little hope or meaning.

“Hell, I didn’t go and report because I just didn’t feel like it,” Frank said. “I was out on the East Side frying me some bacon and eggs that morning I was supposed to report, and I just didn’t go in.”

Early on in my incarceration, Frank and I shared a cell, me on the top bunk and Frank on the bottom. I had heard scary tales of sodomy and gang rapes in the Texas prison system. I was nervous and on edge my first night in jail.

All prisoners had been racked up in their bunks when I called down to Frank in a loud whisper. I was jittery at this point.

I was trying to keep things light and in what I hoped would sound like a joking vein when I said, “Hey Frank, you awake?”

“Yeah, what do you want.”

Frank sounded like he was half asleep when I voiced my concerns of the night.

“I’m old and tough, and I would really be an awful piece of ass for anybody who might want to try,” I said.

Frank’s voice was loud enough to be heard all over the cell block.

“Goddamn it, Pops, will you shut the fuck up and go to sleep. There’s some of us in here trying to get some rest.”

The jail had pay phones when I was locked up, and when Wizard’s wife Rose called, he would put me on the line for one of Rose’s encouraging pep talks. I can all but hear her today.

“Everything is gonna be fine, Pops. You and Wizard will be out before you know it. I’m here keeping the home fire going. We will have us a big party at our house. Don’t you fret about it. TDC (Texas Department of Corrections) will be smoother than county, so keep your chin up. ”

The sobriety program that basically saved my life is a program that puts belief in a higher power before self-reliance, and I was intrigued when I saw the Wizard on his knees by his bunk making the sign of the cross.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Praying,” he said.

“Praying for what?”

“I’m praying to God for help doing my time.”

The Wizard explained that prayer and a positive attitude was all I needed.

“Look Pops,” he said. “You are looking at a 10-year sentence. With good behavior, you might do 18 months, maybe three years at the most. You can stand on your head and spear grapes with your tongue for 18 months. Time is just time. God will help you do it.”

The thought popped into my head and I verbalized it to the Wizard.

I asked him if he had ever considered asking God to remove the compulsion to     “Shit no,” he said. “That’s what I do for a living.”

That’s when the realization hit me.

I didn’t want to do prison time, with or without God’s help. And there I was, all but standing in the shadow of the state penitentiary. I felt like the late Billy Joe Shaver’s Georgia on a Fast Train lyrics: I got a good Christian raisin’ and an eighth grade education, ain’t no need in y’all treatin’ me this way….

It seemed like an eternity before the day arrived for my sentencing hearing in Judge Reed’s court. I was in leg irons and my orange inmate jump suit when a county van transported me from the jail to the courthouse for the 9 a.m. hearing. The only visitor I had during my incarceration had been my oldest son Grady. Grady had picked up where the Wizard left off in supplying me with commissary money for tobacco and soap. Regular jail issue bath soap was like the cheap, scentless little slivers prevalent in flop house motels of that day. With commissary money supplied by my son, I was able to purchase real and wonderfully strong scented Irish Spring bath soap. I have Irish Spring in my bathroom today, an everlasting reminder of where I came from.

When the court bailiff called my case, reality sounded in my brain like a death knell.

I knew this was it. I was going to state prison for 10 years. My little Action Magazine would be no more. Could I survive in the prison population? I didn’t snitch when Sumner Bowen made his offer. If I got shanked to death, then I would get shanked to death. By God, I would not bend over and grab my ankles. My head was processing horror scenario after horror scenario, when the judge asked if the defense had any witnesses to present.

This hit me like a hidden land mine. I didn’t even know that favorable testimony from character witnesses might be possible, that such testimony could even mitigate the severity of a court sentence.

My lawyer friend Alan Brown was with me that morning, working pro bono and as surprised as everyone else when the first wave of volunteer witnesses started coming through the courtroom door. I later asked Brown why he hadn’t mentioned character witnesses to me and his answer was, “I was positive it would do no good. Susan Reed had never ruled for a multiple bond violator on drug charges. It just didn’t happen with her.”

My volunteer surprise character witnesses were entering the courtroom when Susan Reed issued her call for witnesses we might want to present. My first witness was writer friend Joseph Harmes, another member of the recovery group I was in. I was to later learn that it had been Harmes who mounted a telephone campaign through most of the night, rallying other potential witnesses from our substance abuse group who, as it turned out, were willing and even eager to help. They were all ready to testify that I had been sober for a year, and that I was ready to turn my life around.

I never knew the name of the diminutive prosecutor the district attorney’s office assigned to my case. He was short, balding, and snotty as hell, a bantam rooster with a sarcastic leer that looked like it had been stitched onto his mouth with fishing line. The hateful gash all but dripped with vitriol.

I recognized most of my witnesses as they entered the courtroom. My lawyer knew none of them. The courtroom was filling fast as other lawyers and a couple of curious judges joined the audience. The Sam Kindrick Circus was free of charge.

“Who should I call?” Brown asked me.

“Joseph Harmes,” I whispered.

When Harmes settled into the witness chair it was plain that the bantam rooster was in attack mode and ready to denigrate any witness we might call.

“What might I ask do you do for a living, Mr. Harmes?”

“I am a writer,” Joseph answered.

This evoked a veritable cackle from the prosecutor. It was almost a hoot of joy.

“A writer, eh. And would you tell this court, Mr. Harmes, exactly who you write for and where this so-called writing appears.”

Joseph has always had a poker face. And he didn’t move a facial muscle when he answered the prosecutor.

“Yes, sir, People Magazine.”

The rooster was incredulous. He was sneering openly.

“Are you telling this court, Mr. Harmes, that you write for the national publication People Magazine?”

“I do write for People,” Joseph answered. You can verify that by checking the magazine masthead. My name is in it.”

There was a collective gasp from the gallery, and then the courtroom fell silent as an Egyptian tomb.

“Next witness.”

Next came my friend Peter, another recovered alcoholic who, even at that time, was an accomplished upper echelon corporate attorney in the San Antonio and Bexar County legal system. Reed’s jaw seemed to drop when she recognized Peter.

“Don’t you practice law, and haven’t you worked in this court?” Reed asked the witness. “And are you telling the court that you are another of these alcoholics?”

“I am a recovering alcoholic,” Peter said, “and I am here to offer testimony which I hope can help this defendant.”

“Next witness.”

Then came Steve, a broker with the Dean Witter stock brokerage.

Following Steve was Roger, owner of two high-end Mexican restaurants.

The witness after Roger was the owner of one of San Antonio’s largest ambulance and medical supply companies.

If we had been given a month to assemble character witnesses, we could never have gathered together a group of people with the honest and obvious quality to match this bunch of recovering drunks and dopers. More potential witnesses were filing through the courtroom door when Judge Reed called a stop to the proceedings.

With both hands extended toward the audience, witnesses, and lawyers, Reed said: “We will stop all proceedings here. I have heard enough.”

The judge then shocked everyone concerned when she said, “I will take this case under advisement and make a final ruling one week from today.” She then recessed the court, and the rest is history.

She put me back on another 10 years of probation and I was free to go. There was no community service that I knew anything about, but Reed did have me report monthly to the adult probation department for urine samples over what turned out to be seven years.

There were some who believed a benevolent spirit of unknown origin entered Susan Reed’s body that morning, prompting her to cut me loose. My friend Madonna, who worked in the court system and knew Judge Reed personally, said, “I don’t know who that judge was who set you free after three probation violations, but I do know it wasn’t Susan Reed.” Others attributed my third probated sentence to a stroke of raw luck. I have always been prone to agree with those who called my stunning release The Miracle of 144th District Court.

It was an act of God, and I have always known it. I have since marveled that the Spirit of the Universe would favor me in such dramatic fashion.

My drinking was in full bloom during my last years with the Express and News. This was during the early 1970s when I was nearing my alcoholic rock bottom.

A typical workday found me arriving for work around 11 a.m. after a full night of heavy drinking. When I was a general assignments reporter for the morning Express, this was the customary time for my shift to start. After I started writing a daily column with hours of my own choosing, I continued to arrive around the same time at the Express and News building at San Antonio’s Avenue E at Third Street.

Across from the newspaper plant, and a block west on Third Street, sat my second late morning home, a grubby beer joint known as The Melody Room Lounge. The Melody Room is mentioned on earlier pages of this work. For medicinal reasons known by every chronic alcoholic, I swung into the Melody for my customary two and sometimes three bottles of beer to quell my morning jitters. Josie the day bartender had the cap popped on the first one before I got settled on the bar stool. She understood my needs, and the second beer was open and sitting on the bar as I finished the first.

I chugged these beers fast before heading for the third-floor city room on the newspaper building to pick up a reporting assignment or to start writing either news articles or my general interest column. Sometimes I failed to keep the first beers down. There would come the usual dry heaves which I would stop with another beer. In those days, I worked on a manual Royal typewriter with an inked ribbon, a vital instrument that transferred my thoughts to copy paper when my hands didn’t shake. That is where the beer came into play. Without the sudden infusion of alcohol, the shakes made it impossible for me to type readable copy. A real alcoholic knows this debilitating condition. Trembling hands are a visible part of the shakes known by every true alcoholic, but the internal shakes are far worse. The nervous system seems to short out; armpits drip sweat, it’s too early in the day to start on the hard liquor, and no real practicing alcoholic will recognize the horror for what it is. Denial is not a river in Egypt, and those screaming internal shakes are real. I always called them the gut jerks. The only way to make them subside, is to add more alcohol.

I never drank on the newspaper property, although I grabbed an occasional beer while on a reporting assignment. The heavy daytime drinking started when I began writing the daily column.

Title of the column was Offbeat, and many of the characters I wrote about were regular denizens of San Antonio’s nightclub scene. The newspaper editors didn’t question my whereabouts so long as I turned in the column by a late evening deadline.

While working on the column I was working my way toward the hard booze which I usually started a few hours after sundown. Before I could eat something and get on to bourbon, vodka, or gin, the dry heaves were a part of my day. I did eat on a regular basis, and a doctor told me this was the reason I never developed liver cirrhosis. When I started spitting up blood, I went to a doctor for treatment of what I thought were bleeding ulcers, but there was no internal bleeding. I had dry heaved so hard that blood vessels in my neck were ruptured and leaking profusely.

Drinking during early nighttime hours was done in various San Antonio saloons and nightclubs such as the old Flamingo Lounge, Black Fox Tap Room, The Burnt Orange Club, Blue Room, San Jacinto Club, Papa Jack’s, The Satin Doll, and others too numerous to list on these pages. Then, after the legal closing time of 2 a.m. for Texas bars, I headed for the after-hours nightclubs owned and operated by the Sfair brothers. Elder brother Phil Sfair owned the Navy Club on Pecan Street while younger brothers Mike and George Sfair held forth a few blocks distance at the Commanders Room on Main Avenue. It wasn’t unusual for these clubs to stay open until almost daylight. Technically, they were in violation of Texas liquor laws, but the Sfairs had political connections which allowed them to operate with impunity. A number of cops and newspaper reporters drank free, ensuring the safety of these nightclubs.

After drinking in other clubs which closed at 2 a.m., I usually wound up in the Commanders Room, drunk but still mobile. When I left, many times with the first light of day starting to break, I was in an ossified stupor but somehow able to drive to my home on Harriett Street. If I stayed in the Commanders Room until after daylight, my custom was to stop for one last drink at Wynn Little’s Blue Room on San Pedro Avenue, about six blocks from my home.

The after-hours clubs operated Mondays through Saturdays. I rested up on weekends, drinking beer at home before venturing out to neighborhood drinking joints where I tried to lay off the hard stuff, sticking with beer in the belief that my body would somehow recoup before the coming Monday. A gallon jug of water always rested within arm’s length of my bed. The alcohol kept me in a near-constant state of dehydration, and I guzzled prodigious amounts of water during night and early morning hours.

Then came Monday and the Melody Room Lounge. Josie would have my medicine ready. The cycle was continuous.

The morning after my firing at the Express and News, I knew that I had to quit drinking alcohol or die. I quit drinking, and as mentioned earlier, I transitioned to cocaine and eventually methamphetamine. My musician friend Ray Wylie Hubbard said it for the both of us. We thought coke would be the answer to our drinking problem. It was not, of course, and the irony of it was that I would eventually find salvation in a God-based recovery program known worldwide. But not before I was near death and on the veritable doorstep of the state penitentiary.

My years in full-blown drug addiction were the blackest, most humiliating, and soul-smashing times of my life. I was destroying my career, my marriage to wife Vicky who never did anything to deserve the humiliation and neglect she got from me, my childrens’ right to a father they might be proud of, and what fell just short of my freedom to walk on Texas soil without chain shackles on my ankles and steel cuffs on my wrists.

My first and last arrests on felony drug charges made headlines in both San Antonio newspapers. The San Antonio Express, the newspaper for which I once wrote a daily column and garnered a Pulitzer nomination for excellence in breaking news coverage, ran my drug busts on the metro section front. The rival San Antonio Light delivered a page-one gut punch after one of the drug busts which I felt certain was designed to deprive me of little reason to keep on living in the San Antonio area. Accompanying that article was a photograph of me in a circuit-riding preacher attire which I had worn in the filming of a failed comedy film titled The Adventures of Jody Shannon.

My role in the movie which never made it past the cutting room floor was that of Preacher Sam, a hypocritical whiskey-drinking dice-shooting, whore-chasing minister who rode a jug-headed mule. The old movie promo shot featured me in flat-brim hat, arms raised in facetious supplication to a deity that didn’t exist in a heaven of acrimonious scorn for Junction hicks who dared, and failed, to hack it on the big city stage.

When that unholy scene assaulted my senses from the front page of the San Antonio Light, my reaction was short and unforgettable:

Fuck! A sense of indescribable pain and the emptiness of total loss. I have never found words to adequately recreate this awful portrait of self-doom. And I have never understood what kept this godawful image from striking me dead in my tracks. I remember saying the first real prayer that ever escaped my lips: God help me. Lord, please help me.

My transition from alcohol to drugs started with speed pill use, a practice that was rampant at the time within the music community. I purchased my dope from two renegade ex-physicians, Steven Pollock and Ted Norris. Pollock grew psilocybin mushrooms and sold them from his north San Antonio home. He died late one night when burglars ransacked his home and shot him between the eyes. There were two strong suspects, but no one was ever convicted of the crime.

Ted Norris would write prescriptions for any drug his customers ordered. When I told him I wanted 100 preludin pills, he wrote the prescription, then asked me how well the super speed worked.

“I’ve never tried those,” he told me. “Save me a pill from your prescription. I might get a script of my own.”

I graduated from pills to powdered cocaine and methamphetamine with someone offering me a line of coke which had been chopped with a razor blade and arranged on a pocket mirror. As was customary in the drug world I was entering, I snorted the line of cocaine with a tightly rolled dollar bill, eschewing any thought of shooting cocaine and later methamphetamine with a hypodermic needle, a practice known as “running the dope,” and a drug culture habit which brought with it the filthy debilitating term which all proper society has come to loathe: “Junkie.”

I was no damn junkie, I told myself. I was a snorter and not a shooter, a user and not an abuser, despite the fact that I was inhaling near the end of my drug addiction career (snorting) in powdered form enough high-grade methamphetamine to kill a moose. The high cost of cocaine soon drove me to the less expensive but equally damaging man-made killer known on the streets as “meth.” And snorting large quantities of cocaine had resulted in geyser-like nose bleeds that progressed to my filling a handkerchief with pieces of nasal tissue I called “coke meat.” Strangely enough, the meth that threatened to wreck my brain had little noticeable effect on my sinus passages. It just burned like hell. By this time, I was escalating my withdrawal from the human race.

There are 3.5 grams in an eighth of an ounce of powdered drug, known on the streets as an 8-ball, and I was consuming almost an eighth of an ounce of meth every two days and sometimes daily when my drug world ended in handcuffs and total demoralization.

Harlon Copeland was the Bexar County sheriff when I was first arrested and jailed on felony possession of methamphetamine charges. A conviction on this charge could result in a prison sentence of from 10 to 99 years. My office was in a strip center on San Antonio’s Wurzbach Road. Just across the street was a topless club known as Baby Dolls.

Sheriff Copeland and his troops hit my office late one morning. The memory of that drug bust is still a surreal media circus which included reporters from what seemed like every TV and radio station in San Antonio. To spice up the morning show was a gaggle of titty bar dancers who drifted over from Baby Dolls.

After deputies came crashing through my office door, Sheriff Copeland appeared in person to oversee all details of what he obviously viewed as a prestigious feather in the cap of Bexar County law enforcement. Copeland kept me handcuffed for almost two hours as two of his deputies called what seemed like every TV and radio station in Texas, plus both the San Antonio Express and News and the San Antonio Light.

“You have written some really bad things about the sheriff’s department for a number of years,” Copeland reminded me. “But we have got you now.”

As his deputies wound up their telephone calls to local media, Copeland stood in front of a large wall mirror I had in my office. When he had his hair combed to satisfaction, the sheriff turned to me and said, “Well, Sam, it’s time for us to go meet the press.”

The parking lot was filled with reporters and camera crews, many of whom I knew personally.

My mood was worse than foul.

A WOAI TV cameraman shoved a microphone in my face and really let me have it.

“You are live on Channel 4,” he said. “What do you have to say?”

It came out before my brain really registered.

“Fuck Harlon Copeland,” I said.

The cameraman recoiled as if from some horrible odor. I don’t know what he said to his live audience.

“Enough of that,” Copeland said. “Now you are going to jail.”

The sheriff escorted me to his personal car. One of his deputies drove while Copeland and I occupied the back seat.

“How do you feel now?” the sheriff asked.

I recall my answer as if it were yesterday.

“I feel like jumping into a big dark hole and dragging you right in behind me.”

This evoked a short laugh.

After that, and as we completed the ride to jail and a booking procedure, Copeland was almost jovial. He told me that he felt sure I would have a good lawyer. He did everything but wish me well.

The circus was over. Copeland got what he wanted.

As I was unloaded at the jail, I will swear that Harlon Copeland gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

I never knew what he was thinking.

It is hard to believe, but I escaped from this arrest with a 10-year probated sentence, thanks to high-powered attorney friends like Alan Brown and A.L. Hernden.

Less than a year went by before I was busted again on felony drug charges, this time in Action Magazine offices I occupied on the main street of Castle Hills. There was no fanfare or media hoopla with this bust. It came at night by members of the Alamo Area Narcotics Task Force, headed by New Braunfels Sheriff’s Department officer Sumner Bowen.

This arrest, I was convinced, would be the end of my life in the free world. My 10-year probated sentence from the Copeland arrest would be revoked, I was almost positive. Sumner Bowen, the task force leader also knew the stakes I was facing when he offered me the chance to turn informant. I will never forget the soul torture generated by the option Bowen offered.

The narcotics cop was folksy and congenial when he laid out his pitch. The other officers had left the room. I sat handcuffed with Bowen on another chair directly in front of me.

I will never forget what transpired next. Bowen’s every words were seared into my consciousness like the Ten Commandments Moses received from God.

“I have been reading you for years,” Bowen said. “And I have been a fan of yours for years. I don’t know how you got tangled up with people in the dope world, but I do know one thing. None of those people would do anything to help you. They would never get down for you when it counted. I think it’s about time you got down for yourself. And that is exactly what I am prepared to offer, a chance for you to do something for yourself.”

I knew what was coming next. It was like my mind and body were encased in a steel coffin that I couldn’t open. I had been around the criminal element long enough to know what happens to the informants known as “snitches.” Some die violent deaths, some don’t. Nothing is lower than a scumbag who will send another man to prison just to save his own ass.

“You have a choice here tonight,” Sumner Bowen said. “You can go to jail and then on to prison with your record, or we can go down to Maggie’s for breakfast and coffee, and then you will be free to go on about your life.”

Bowen paused long and hard before he said it: “Just give me the name of the person with the lab.”

He wanted me to give up the individual who manufactured the drugs found in my office.

The so-called “lab” was a small mom-and-pop operation when compared with most meth mills, but it was big enough to warrant the trade-out Bowen was offering.

Strange as it may seem, the image and words of Willie Nelson drummer Paul English were flashing before my eyes and playing through my mind.

Paul was a Fort Worth gangster before he straightened out and joined the Nelson band. He was what they called a “police character” in that day and time.

“The cops didn’t name us police characters,” Paul told me. “We named ourselves characters because we had character. We never ratted on our fellow man.”

I wondered about my own sanity when I rejected Bowen’s officer.

“I can’t do it,” I said. “You can take me on to jail.”

I was loaded into an unmarked police car when Sumner Bowen leaned in an open window to say, “I think you are nuts, but I respect you for the decision.”

Former San Antonio musician Larry Patton is having a rough time of it with fourth stage metastatic melanoma, a deadly form of cancer which is in his stomach, pancreas, lymph nodes, liver and pelvic area.

Patton will be recalled by San Antonio music fans for his 1970s work with Claude Morgan and the Buckboard Boogie Boys.

A bass guitarist and vocalist, Patton, who now lives in Chestmound, Tennessee, was the Flying Burrito Brothers front man for a number of years, and he has worked with such notables over the years as Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare, Ronnie Milsap, Johnny Bush, Barbara Fairchild, and countless others.

Patton was the bus driver for both Ricky Skaggs and Delbert McClinton for a number of years, and he was partially responsible for getting Mike Kennedy’s audition with Skaggs.

Oldtimers on the San Antonio music scene will recall when Larry Patton, Larry Roberson, and Ron Knuth hit town in the 1970s. They had all been members of Hank Williams Jr.’s band, and all of them found themselves out of work when Williams fell off a bluff while hunting in Montana.

Landing in San Antonio, bassist (Big) Larry Patton, drummer (Little) Larry Roberson, and fiddler Ron Knuth soon fell in with Claude Morgan to become The Buckboard Boogie Boys.

Patton married Pamela Roberts, daughter of San Antonio fiddler and band leader Slim Roberts, and the rest is music history.

With his singing daughters, Pamela and Deborah, and drummer son Will, Slim formed the popular club  band he called The Generation Gap.

Will Roberts was the contact for this article on Patton.

“Larry is my brother-in-law,” Will said. “He is also the caring and kindly spirit who took me into his home and saved my life when my addiction to drugs and alcohol was killing me. I have been clean and sober since October of 1989, and I owe a big part of it to Larry. I don’t have the words to adequately explain what a wonderful man he is.”

Will says Patton knows his days are limited, although doctors have supplied him with no time frame.

Roberts said a GoFundMe account has been set up to help the family pay expenses. Please help if you can.

When I was a cub reporter with the San Angelo Standard-Times in West Texas I learned a basic truth about people that set the tone for my life as a professional writer.

Not all readers demand a conventional winner, and the Norman Rockwell myth has never applied to the vast majority of us.

Tom Steph was the San Angelo city editor who launched me into a world of characters who have included the hustlers and the hustled.

Steph came to the San Angelo newspaper from the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, and I never forgot what he taught me.

“Be different,” Steph said. “Write your articles about the losers and the off-color characters of this world. Steinbeck did it, Erskine Caldwell did it. People get sick of hearing about the winners. There is a little loser in all of us, and we can all identify. So many of us are a little odd, a little off-whack, a little removed from the beaten path.”

A year after that, I had transferred to the San Antonio Express-News where I started as a general assignments reporter. My first opportunity to put Tom Steph’s visionary advice into newspaper print was soon to be forthcoming.

The San Antonio Livestock Show and Rodeo was in full swing, and the city editor had suggested that I try to interview world all-around champion cowboy Jim Shoulders for a feature article.

Before heading for the rodeo grounds, I stopped off at the Melody Room Lounge, a drinking dump on Third Street directly across from the newspaper building. There were a couple of cheap hotels in the immediate area, and this is where I met Robert (Coyote) Perry, a little-known Choctaw Indian rodeo performer and stock pen manure scooper who followed the rodeo tour, entering both bull riding and saddle bronc riding events.

We were shooting 9-ball pool when a cowboy friend of Perry’s introduced him.

“This is Coyote Perry,” said the cowboy. “He is the losingest cowboy on the rodeo circuit. Some call him Wolf Perry, but to most of us he is Coyote Perry. He gets his name from the coyote yips and howls that come out of his mouth every time he is thrown by a bronc or a bull. When Coyote Perry hits the arena ground they can hear his howling all the way to Tulsa.”

Jim Shoulders was forgotten. Coyote Perry had captured my imagination.

Coyote Perry was built like a human fireplug, a swarthy competitor who did his best.

I soon learned that Perry’s rodeo winnings were from scant to non-existent, and he earned most of the money used to get him from rodeo to rodeo by shoveling shit out of the arenas and stock barns. Sometimes he slept in the barns, sometimes in cheap hotels like the one near the Express and News.

When asked about his situation, Perry said, “Heck, who says I’m the losingest? I won eighth place in bull riding at Cheyenne one time, and I placed fifth in saddle bronc at Pendleton. I guess it was a year or so back.”

I asked Perry why he fought it with the professional rodeo circuit.

“I rodeo because I have a bad back,” he said without blinking. “I think I have one of them slipped disc doohickeys or something like that. Rodeoing beats hell out of riding a Farmall tractor on the reservation from daylight til dark. It was killing my back.”

I asked Perry if being thrown and maybe stomped on by a brahman bull wouldn’t be equally or more painful than the tractor. He had a simple answer: “Being thrown and stomped on only hurts for a little while. Riding that tractor hurt from daylight til dark.”

I left Robert Perry in the Melody Room to return to the newspaper city room where I wrote about Coyote Perry, the losingest cowboy on the professional rodeo tour.

The wire services picked up on the article, and, within hours, Coyote Perry was featured in newspapers all over the United States, as well as the front cover of the London Times.

That West Texas editor, Tom Steph, was right. The losers have a place, too. And many of the off-plumb winners might look like losers through the lens of proper society. I had found my way with that segment of humanity which has produced many of my friends and subjects of my writing. People are continually asking me about the rapport I have enjoyed with many of the subjects.

I guess it came natural for me, and I answer most questions as candidly as possible.

How in the hell did I talk world renown pool hustler Minnesota Fats into wearing a Santa Claus suit for a picture shoot?

Simple. I asked him and he jumped into the suit.

My entire life as a writer has included subjects who Hank Williams might have described as fractured stars from “Life’s Mighty Gallery of Pictures.” Some famous and some infamous, the characters who have made my world go around. From Rudolph Wonderone Jr. (aka Minnesota Fats) they have included the likes of David Alan Coe, Big John Hamilton, Hondo Crouch, Honest Charlie Potter, Willie Nelson, world renown tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle, Leon Russell, Johnny Rodriguez, and Bourbon Street Chaplain Rev. Bob Harrington.

The names and the memories will never leave me. The list goes on into what seems like infinity–motorcycle daredevils Even Steven and Igo Mendoza, golf legend Lee (The Flea) Trevino, San Antonio and Las Vegas sports handicapper Tony Salinas, George Strait, Wild Man Ray Liberto, madam Theresa Brown, Johnny Bush, Darrell McCall, Alex Harvey, wild piano pounder Blind George McClain, Augie Meyers, Gary Stewart, Texas Ranger legend A.Y. Allee, boxer Tony Ayala, Red Adair with Boots and Coots, pool shark and billiard parlor owner Bananas Rodriguez, gambler and bookmaker Jack Hanratty, San Antonio Bandidos chapter founder Royce Showalter, Dub Robinson, saddle bronc champion Case Tibbs, Randy Toman.

The criminal defense lawyers such as Alan Brown and A.L. Hernden are both personal and professional associates. Others include Ray Wylie Hubbard, police figure shotgun-toting Arthur (Bunny) Eckert, and Bobby (Kid Death) Thomas, boxer and scam artist who was by far the craziest bastard I ever knew. And many many more. I guess I loved Bobby, and, at some level, I know he loved me. And I guess the same might be said about a bunch of them.

“Sambo!” Bobby always called me, with heavy emphasis on the “bo!”

Nobody but Bobby (Kid Death) Thomas could peddle laundered and blow-dried sheep skins for baby polar bear hides and get away with it. Bobby showed me how he did it. All lanolin was removed through the laundromat washing and drying process, and the fluffy, snow white sheep hides resembled what all of us thought an infant polar bear skin would surely look like.

I was greatly impressed by the blinding white sheep fur.

I was told that Thomas got $50 each for the skins. He sold a few but I never knew how many.

I realize that I would never have fit well in polite society, so I chose that other fork in the road which included booze, drugs, hustlers, felony charges and jail, pitfalls and pratfalls, and some of the most interesting and talented people this world has ever known.

Alex Harvey wrote hits like “Delta Dawn” and “Ruben James,” and he offered me this bit of encouragement as I entered my mid-80s and started on this book.

“It ain’t the number of years you have that is important,” he said, “it’s still all about how high you can jump.”

In the early 1970s I was drinking hard but enjoying some measure of success. The Express and News had published my first book, a paperback titled The Best of Sam Kindrick–Secret Life and Hard Times of a Cedar Chopper. It was basically a compilation of short articles and columns I had written for the newspaper. Nothing like the size or scope of this project. The paper paid for 20,000 copies of the book, and the deal called for the paper recouping all printing expenses before I was to share in the profits.

Sales of the book were going at a brisk clip, one of the big reasons being television promotions by U.S. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez. Henry liked me. His 20th Congressional District covered a large area of San Antonio and Bexar County, and I know that some of those books sold simply because Henry strongly suggested that people should buy it. During this era both the Express and News and KENS 5 TV were owned by Harte Hanks, so I had unlimited newspaper and television exposure for the book.

My early friendship with Willie Nelson was starting to grow. Nelson was playing John T. Floore Country Store in Helotes

on a regular basis, and my understanding at the time was that Willie needed these regular gigs to pay off his gambling debts. I do know that Nelson liked to play poker for money, and he also loved to play golf. It was the game of golf that first tied Willie to San Antonio golf hustler and caddy Larry Trader.

Larry Trader had carried the golf bags for pro golfer Tommy (Thunder) Bolt, and he was a friend of Lee Trevino, the El Paso hustler who became the greatest Hispanic golfer of all times. Larry’s brother Bobby Trader was another scratch golfer who had played on the University of Houston golf team. At that time, Nelson was letting Larry handle some of his bookings at John T. Floore Country Store in Helotes. Old man John T. had taken a liking to me, and I had the run of Flores when Willie was playing the big outdoor patio during spring and summer months.

I first played golf with Nelson and Trader when Willie was hanging out at an abandoned country club in Bandera. He had an eye to buy the Bandera club, but scrapped that idea and moved to Austin when the redneck culture around Bandera started rubbing his fur the wrong way.

Nelson and I were inconsistent duffers during those early golf outings, shooting in the 90s on many days.

“The safest place to be on the course with Willie and Sam is directly in front of them,” Larry Trader was fond of saying. “They will drive a golf ball in every direction, but seldom straight down the fairway. Flying buzzards and ground squirrels are in constant danger.”

In subsequent years, Nelson got much better at the game. I gave it up in disgust when it became obvious that I would never be the next Arnold Palmer.

When I started giving Nelson ink in my Express and News column, he seemed grateful. This was long before the world found out about the amazing talent from Abbott, Texas.

I recall asking Willie if there were other newspaper writers around the country who recognized his talent and were writing about him.

“There are,” he said. “They are in pockets around the country. Like you, these guys are willing to go out on a limb for me.”

This was a time when Nelson had become disillusioned and disgruntled with the county music recording industry based in Nashville. This was also a time when marijuana possession was still a felony, and Willie was making little attempt to hide his almost open use of the evil weed.

“I have decided to record my music in Texas,” Willie told me. “I guess people wanting to buy the records will just have to come to Texas to get them.”

Those were heady years for us all. Nelson’s Saturday night gigs in Helotes ended at midnight, giving us plenty of time for impromptu visits to San Antonio live music venues that stayed open until 2 a.m. On many of those nights I would pile into Willie’s Mercedes with him, Larry Trader, road hand Billy Cooper, and some member of his crew who drove. Two clubs we always hit were the eclectic Bijou and Scotty Young’s Scotchman’s Club, both on San Pedro Avenue. Sam Noin and Romy Vela owned and operated the Bijou. And after these came the Longneck Club off Blanco Road where Augie Meyers and other top local talent was showcased. Ronnie Branham was the Longneck operator.

The Bijou was one of those rare and ratty little joints that appealed to musicians. It was a musician’s bar with a soul of its own. I recall one night with Willie when we entered the Bijou to find blind Blind George McClain pounding the piano. Blind George was out of Austin. He had about 10 percent of his eyesight but no more. His aggressive piano style was combined with his loud foot stomping on plywood stage flooring as he rocked the house. When we entered the Bijou that night, Willie quietly slid in next to George at the piano. He whispered something to Blind George and McClain lit up like a brush fire. He instantly knew who was with him on the piano bench. The duet that followed was epic–Blind George and Nelson ripping the house down with Willie’s “Bloody Mary Morning.”

On another note, I have always wished I had a video clip of Blind George and his equally blind brother-in-law fist-fighting one night out behind the Bijou. They finally punched themselves out and I don’t think either of them landed  a single solid blow.

When we visited the Scotchman’s Club, Victor Lopez and Los Blues were the house band, a hot group including Jimmy Casas and Bobby Rey.

“I look back now and can hardly believe it,” Lopez told me

shortly before his death in 2017. “When you all came into the club I would invite Willie up to sing a number. He usually just sang one song or maybe two and got down, always polite and the gentleman. I would thank him and got back to playing. What a dunce I was. Here was one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and I was letting him off my stage with a mere ‘thank you.’ I should have encouraged him to play all night.”

Nelson truly enjoyed club hopping in those earlier times, and so did I. Late one night we stopped at my house on Harriett drive to pick up some money and that was when Willie stepped on the dog bone. In those days, we were still feeding the dogs bones and table scraps.

The bone went through Willie’s tennis shoe. There was blood everywhere. His howl of pain awakened my wife Vicky, who walked in to find Nelson holding his injured foot and hopping across the living room on the other one.

I recall my then wife telling one of her girlfriends: “Yes, I woke up to this horrible noise and could hardly believe my eyes when I walked into my living room to find Willie Nelson hopping on one foot and holding the other one.”

Nelson and I were pretty tight in 1973 when I hatched a plan for a world championship menudo cookoff. I had attended the much-ballyhooed first international chili cookoff at the Big Bend ghost town of Terlingua, which featured chili cooks H. Allen Smith and Wick Fowler. By then I was hobnobbing with Luckenbach imagineer Hondo Crouch and future movie star Guich Koock, and I had an idea that we could pump up a pretty good crowd with the right kind of promotion.

Menudo is the Mexican and South Texas soup made from tripe, hominy, chopped onion, serranos, and various other spices. Tripe is the rubbery and powerfully pungent lining of a beef stomach. The legends of Mexico have always touted menudo as a hangover cure.

I stole the name for our cookoff product from a Wheaties cereal box. Our cookoff would feature the true “Breakfast of Champions.” It might not be a medically proven hangover cure, I conceded, but a lot of drunks ate menudo and flour tortillas after a hard night on the alcohol sauce. “The Breakfast of Champions” cookoff captured the heart and imagination of San Antonio and South Texas. I started pumping it in my newspaper column, and the results were amazing.

Entrants for the cookoff numbered almost a hundred, some of them being cooking teams who came from distant towns like Corpus Christi, Brownsville, Harlingen, and Victoria.

On that morning of the big day, it was April and hot. Cars were jamming the access road leading from IH 10 to Raymond Russell Park. I will never forget the DPS cop who called me out of Raymond Russell Park and demanded by what authority was I causing a gigantic traffic backup which was endangering human life.

I told the cop we were fixing to host the greatest menudo cookoff ever held, and that he would need to talk with my co-sponsor for the event for any questions he might want answered.

“Who might your co-sponsor be?” the cop bawled at me.

“Congressman Henry Gonzalez,” I answered.

“The United States congressman?” the cop was about to cry.

“One and the same,” I told the policeman.

I hadn’t bothered to tell Henry that he was co-sponsoring a menudo cookoff, but I felt confident that he would back me up.

The poor cop headed back to his cruiser while cars and trucks passed him as they turned into the park.

I recall cringing when I looked up to see a Winnebago full of prostitutes and a big banner proclaiming “Hot Pants Menudo.” It was my friend madam Theresa Brown and some of her working girls, and I recall the little sinking sensation I felt in my belly while trying to figure out what I would do with Theresa.

“Damn it, Theresa,” I told her. “What the hell are you trying to do to me? I don’t need the heat.”

T-Brown was unfazed, and her smile promised nothing but mischief when she gave me her answer:

“Fuck you, Sammy, I know more about menudo than you do.”

We would have the Willie Nelson band and others who might want to join in. Before it was over we had Johnny Bush and the Bandoleros, plus more than 20 other groups and a mid-afternoon boxing match that would feature homicide detective Roy Aguilar and criminal attorney Alan Brown.

This captured the fancy of both lawyers and cops, who talked it up for weeks prior to the event in both the courthouse and the police headquarters.

Brown was the nephew of bookmaker Jack Hanratty, and Hanratty told me in advance to bet as much money as I could get down on Brown, a former Golden Gloves champion from Edinburg in the Rio Grande Valley.

To the unpracticed eye of most of the spectators, this fistic match between detective and lawyer looked like a mismatch that might result in serious injury to the attorney.

Homicide detective Roy Aguilar was a former street fighter and police academy athlete who was built like a steel oil drum with muscled arms and legs. Brown was a couple of shades paler than Aguillar with a snock of hair hanging over one eye and nothing to suggest arm or leg power that could hurt anything much bigger than a long-legged yard toad.

Minutes before the fight was to start, I heard Hanratty holler out: “Two-to-one.” Then only seconds before the opening bell I heard him yell “Five-to-one.”

I was standing next to the old bookie when he upped the odds yet again: “Ten-to-one.”

I looked at Jack and he said, “You will not lose if you bet on Alan. He has whipped every fighter in the Rio Grande Valley at least once.”

It was late spring and blazing hot that day. Jimmy Parks was refereeing the fight.

Aguilar was the aggressor from the opening bell.

He charged Brown hard, punching and missing and sweating.

“Twenty-to-one” Hanratty yelled.

There were no takers.

Second round ended with no punch from Brown, just bobbing, weaving, ducking, and dodging.

Roy was dripping sweat when the third and final round started.

And then it was over. Alan hit Roy with a crashing right cross that glazed his eyes and turned his legs to spaghetti. And even as Aguillar was plunging to the canvas, Jack could be heard in the distance: “Forty-to-one.”

I recall saying a little prayer at the time–Oh, Lord, don’t let Roy be dead.

The great cookoff ended sometime before dawn. Crowd estimates unofficially topped 20,000, but we had no official count since no tickets were sold. We did sell rivers of beer with my associates getting away with most of the profits. A few gravestones were upended by vandals in next door Mission Park Cemetery, but nobody got killed that I ever heard about. I did have a deputy sheriff escort a radio station executive off the grounds when he and his wife engaged in a hollering cuss fight that could be heard all over Raymond Russell Park. Hal Davis was general manager of the Doubleday radio stations KITE AM and KEXL FM at the time. I had no information on Mr. and Mrs. Davis, just that they were raising holy hell with each other. Ironically, Davis would play a large part in my future, but I will talk about this when we get there. One of our county commissioners told me later in private that I shouldn’t try any more promotions in county parks for a long while.

At this stage, I was hungover, dog tired, and in dire need of rest. But my rest and recovery would be short-lived and fraught with stunning and traumatic upheaval.

A few short weeks after my menudo cookoff, I awakened to learn that Australian newspaper billionaire Rupert Murdoch had purchased the Express and News from Harte-Hanks for $17-million. I had an uneasy sensation in my gut upon learning this news. Houston Harte Sr. had hand-raised me in the newspaper business like an orphaned goat, putting up with my kid shenanigans at the San Angelo Standard-Times, and following my progress in San Antonio when he bought the Express-News. Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza couldn’t have had it any better. As I mentioned earlier, the elderly newspaper titan loved to walk into the Express city room and plant his rear on a corner of my desk to talk.

Harte Senior installed Conway Craig as the Express and News general manager, but Houston Harte Jr. was directly in line to take over when the elderly Craig retired, and I always sensed that my invisible cloak of protection had been passed down from father to son. Houstie liked me as well as his father and I knew it.

Charles O. (Charlie) Kilpatrick, our scrotumless sycophant and social climber of an executive editor, was more than half scared of me because of the rapport I had always enjoyed with the Hartes. Kilpatrick’s expertise at posterior oscillation was a fact to be acknowledged, and, by God, his good standing membership in the self-imagined royalty of the Texas Cavaliers was a sad prize to define one’s blue blood worth as a human being. At some level I was aware of this although I had never really thought much about it.

It was the morning after sale of the Express and News that I got the call. I was to report to the office of executive editor Kilpatrick.

I was about to be fired from my column writing job with the Express and News. I knew it but had trouble believing it. From hurricanes to uprisings in the onion fields, I had covered it all, putting my heart and soul into the San Antonio newspaper job. I had never made much money, but with childlike faith I had always looked with optimism for some sort of future with the Express and News.

When I walked into Kilpatrick’s office I knew. Charlie was looking at the wall somewhere behind me when he spoke.

He had wanted to do this for a long time. I could tell. The Harte’s were gone and I was standing there like a naked fighting rooster with no spurs.

“You are the best writer I have ever been associated with,” Kilpatrick said, “but I have to let you go.”

I asked for a reason, nothing more.

“You associate with criminals and other undesirable people,” he said.

He named a couple of my San Antonio friends before dropping Willie Nelson’s name.

“This musician you just had out at Raymond Russell park is a known dope addict,” Kilpatrick said.

Then he dropped the name that confirmed what I had suspected.

“Paul English,” Kilpatrick said. “The Nelson drummer is a pimp. I know for a fact that English is a pimp, and these are the people you have been associating with.”

I knew then that Kilpatrick was getting his information from within the Nelson camp. Or very close to the camp. It is true that Paul was a Fort Worth gangster and pimp before he joined the Nelson band, but Charlie Kilpatrick had no way of knowing this. Someone close to Willie fired the torpedo that sank my canoe. I was dumbfounded when it happened. I am pretty sure now who the Judas was. The slimeball sneak is dead now, but my resentment is still very much alive.

My hands were shaking when Kilpatrick ended my newspaper career. I recall the surreal feeling I had of being skinned alive and refitted with another person’s skin. I looked down at my hands and saw shriveled folds of skin that didn’t belong to me as workers from the Express press room rolled stacks of boxes filled with copies of my book down the hallway next to Kilpatrick’s office.

“I have decided to give you your remaining books as severance pay,” Kilpatrick said. “The press room workers will help you load them in your truck.”

There were many boxes, containing the unsold books. The newspaper had recouped all printing costs, and I was to get my pay through future book sales. I had no way to market these books. Thousands of them. I had no money. I had school age kids at home.

I can recall the tangle of emotions that hit me. I felt for a minute like crying; I felt for another minute like going back to Junction and being that carefree little boy running the beautiful South Llano River bottoms of my childhood. Then the anger hit me like a runaway freight. I felt like cutting off Charlie Kilpatrick’s balls and them tamping them down his throat with a 10-pound maul. I felt like getting drunk and I did.

Then I picked up the pieces and went on. I had to quit drinking and I did. I started doing dope as a substitute, recalling now the words of my musician and songwriting friend Ray Wyie Hubbard.

“We figured cocaine was the answer to our drinking problem,” Hubbard was heard to say.

It wasn’t. It was the gateway to another little stretch of hell on earth. I stuck with my mantra–Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. And the insanity got its second wind.