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Out Beyond the Buoys:
Billy Porterfield
By Diana Finlay Hendricks
Memoirs and Biographies
Billy Porterfield
By Diana Finlay Hendricks
Memoirs and Biographies
Billy Porterfield was the first writer selected for the prestigious Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, and invited to live for a year in a writer’s retreat at the former ranch of J. Frank Dobie, southwest of Austin. As a reporter in the early 1960s, he won the national Ernie Pyle Memorial Award for outstanding journalism. His list of accomplishments goes on and on.
Today, the legendary journalist and author is lost in his own mind. When he moved to the Alzheimer care facility about three years ago, guilt or something like it drove me out to see him several times a week. Some days he’d forget who I was completely. Other times he knew me well – and occasionally he thought I was his old colleague, Molly Ivins. I went with the flow, and listened, and talked. Our weekly visits stretched to every other week. Lately, weeks have gone by with me thinking I needed to get over there but… And so it goes.
Some of what you will read below could be disputed. Some of what you read, I garnered from conversations long ago. Some of the details are colored in like a lower case “e” on an old Royal typewriter. Others may hit a little above the line. But in the words of the newspaper editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
Out Beyond The Buoys
I can’t tell you exactly where this story begins. Certainly not here, as I walk out of the Texan Care Center. This is just one day of many that are becoming more and more alike. Visits with an old friend.
You might recognize his name. He used to live on top of a mountain in the Texas hill country. Today, his home is on the Armadillo Trail wing of a very nice assisted living center. It’s not hard to find. Just follow the signs in the cartwheel-shaped building. It’s to the left of Roadrunner Alley. And just beyond the Cactus Cantina. I go there a lot. I’m still bothered by the pre-school décor and the Texana-theme. And I’ll never get used to that smell of stale piss or rotting minds.
He’s getting worse. But he is pleasant. Agreeable. I carry the conversation, rambling on about things of no consequence. Old names he remembers. Backroads he loved to wander.
I find myself repeating back to him those stories he used to tell me. Stories I know by heart. I tell him the one about working for whorehouse madam and sleeping in trees and trailer parks. And the time Molly Ivins knocked his tooth out in a Houston bar, and the publisher of the paper put an extra $25 in his paycheck to cover the dental bill. Or the time he ordered a set of encyclopedia from a young and hungry Willie Nelson. I recite these stories like they are scripture.
I want to push him into those memories and find a place in his brain that has not worn thin. And I watch for a spark of recognition in his filmy eyes. Sometimes I am rewarded.
But most of the time, when I ask him something, he just nods. “I think that is a very good question.” He asks with deliberation, “What kind of answers are you looking for?”
When he struggles to find a word he is looking for, his fingers move on the bed sheet or lap blanket, as though they are typing on a keyboard. It’s as though the words he has lost are right there at the tips of his fingers, but just out of reach.
Two decades ago, he told me that the same story can start in many different places. Because he had a habit of tossing out the first page of anything he wrote, he told me that he liked starting his stories on the second or third page – and letting them wander farther than they should. So today, maybe this story begins on page three, with mermaids and broken angels, buoys and mountaintops.
• • • • •
It was a ruthlessly bright Monday morning in May. I climbed to the top of his mountain in search of a hill country-sort of truth that might be found in his writing shack. the House of Fables. I was coming out to write a lifestyle piece about his new Harper-Collins memoir. Regional features were my bread and butter in those days. But more than that, I was looking for direction.
I’d made this trek many times before, as a student, a friend, and even for a short while, his editor for a regional entertainment magazine. Billy didn’t believe in email in those dawning years of the Internet, and I liked the excuse to come hang out on his mountaintop. But I hadn’t been out in a couple of years. I guess I hadn’t needed him for a while.
So it felt like coming home as I turned off the pavement and opened the gate, drove through, and got out to close the gate behind me. The first rule of the ranch is to always close gates behind you. But then everyone knows that.
A mile or so down the road, the ruts finally ended completely. A rusted green Ford stepside pickup was parked next to an old tractor. The truck hadn't been there long. Johnson grass grew up all around the tractor and morning glory vines wove into the engine block. The grass was flattened under the wheels of the pickup. He was around.
A trail led up the hill beyond a well house and through a grove of cedar trees. A couple of hundred yards up on a little rise, I came to the old rock house. An old blue merle border collie hobbling out the door and started a trill of non-stop barking.
I had been plainly warned by his son and his wife that Billy had grown to respect no sense of time. These days, he eats, sleeps, reads, and writes, they explained. Sure enough, a sundial, the only clock evident on the property, read high noon. So much for daylight savings time.
Billy may not have had much use for time, but his sense of direction had always been pretty sharp. He knew every backroad and cut-through in Texas- and had taught me the pleasures of taking the long way home. Yes. I would come to learn that if I was lost, he was a certain true north.
That day, Billy was working on a deadline– repurposing an old story into a weekly column for some little East Texas newspaper. “Make yourself at home. Give me a minute and I will finish this up. Then I have to run down to the Radio Shack to fax it to the Malakoff News,” he called, from the door of the cabin.
I remembered the first time I had come out to visit him – to talk about being a writer. I followed him into a 16 x 20 room filled with stacks of boxes spilling over with ragged and spent yellow writing pads. Ladderback chairs held wobbly wooden crates filled with old newspapers, three framed pictures leaned against the wall waiting to be hung, and a dusty guitar leaned against the yellow oak desk.
“This is where I work,”he said.”Where the blood is let. It’s where the freedom and romance and intrigue of being an Artist stops and the gutwork of being a writer begins. And sometimes, this is where I am afraid... and old... and tired." He paused and stared blankly out the window. "Look around. Make yourself at home. Sit a while," he pointed toward the only empty chair in the room.
I remember wondering if, given the chance to sit at that desk and write on that old typewriter, would some inspiration or muse filter into my fingers. I definitely could feel the magic in this space.
That morning, he went back to work, tapping out his column, as I took in every detail of the familiar old cabin. The silence was only broken by the sound of his fingers clattering on the keys of the old gunmetal gray IBM Selectric typewriter, as the ball spun and hit the paper.
“This ought to about do it,” he said, as he pulled the final sheet from the typewriter. “Come on and take a ride down to Radio Shack with me so I can fax this off. We can catch up on the way.”
His pickup was full of cigar butts and beer cans. The dash was covered with old mail, filled yellow legal pads and advertising circulars. A half-spent roll of toilet paper was flattened between a dog-eared road atlas and the windshield. Yellowed newspapers and Dairy Queen sacks littered the passenger seat.
“Shove all that stuff on the floor,” he said, as he climbed in.
His old truck didn’t take that caliche road much better than my Honda. We bottomed out a couple of times but smoothed out on the highway. Out on the Farm to Market road, we traveled in silence most of the way. The wind burned as it whipped my hair into my eyes through the open windows of the pickup.
Despite the rattling old truck, he’d come a long way from the barefooted, nomadic oilfield child he wrote about in Diddy Waw Diddy: Passage of an American Son. That season, his memoir had just been published, but it was a long time coming. The first draft of Diddy began in the summer of 1967, when Billy Porterfield was the first Paisano-Dobie Fellow. Part of the award was the luxury of a year’s residency on the goat ranch and retreat of the late J. Frank Dobie, writing and honing his craft. Diddy was born there.
Over the next twenty-six years, he rewrote that memoir eight times, and finally said, “Bastante.” Enough is enough. He came to realize that he was not writing the Bible. He said it was time to “ask the dead to forgive me and the living to grin and bear it,” and go to press. Along the way, he said he had “robbed Billy to pay Paul,” plenty of times, giving up fragments of his memoir to newspaper columns, magazines and, that plague of journalists, the collection of miscellanea. Repurposing, he called it. Through those incarnations, Billy always felt like he was simply renting his reminiscences, rather than selling them. Finally, in the spring of 1994, with the release of Diddy amid some fanfair and commotion, he had just about found a comfortable position for resting on his laurels.
• • • • •
It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers – because if you ask a writer anything, you usually get an answer – still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
• • • • •
Billy’s father was a roughneck and a driller who gave his best years to the oilfields. He dreamed that his firstborn son would go to school and learn to be a geologist, making a career in soft expensive loafers rather than steel-toed boots. When Billy chose to drill for truths amid words rather than black gold in Texas soil, Tice Porterfield was flabbergasted.
“You’re studying what?” he asked.
“Journalism,” Billy told him. “I want to be a reporter. You know, work for newspapers.”
That didn’t make a lot of sense to a man who only took the Sunday paper and then, only to read the comics. Billy estimates that in his career, he wrote “something like six million words and my father read damn few of them.”
In a letter Billy wrote to me about his father, he said,
I covered murders and manhunts and talked to men about to sit in the electric chair. I was with Meredith and King and Carmichael when they marched through Mississippi, I have been roughed up by rednecks because I was a “nigger-loving newsman” and beaten by rioting blacks because I was “a honky newsman.” I have sat down with whores and princesses. I have talked to astronauts and assassins. I have supped with presidents and sipped with peons. I have entered worlds my old man could never imagine. But he always told people I type for a living.
Billy cut his journalistic teeth on the police blotter, as a cub reporter alongside Dan Rather – Billy was on the Houston Chronicle desk and Dan held down the KTRH radio beat, their desks side by side in the combination newsroom. As Dan headed off for the broadcasting camera lights of New York, Billy was beating a path through the graying depths of the American Midwest. He blazed a trail through the Detroit Free Press and the Chicago Daily News, before finding his way back to the land of his soul.
In 1969, a siren song called him back to Dallas. A couple of old friends were starting a progressive news program for the Dallas Public Broadcasting Station. Dallas seemed to be as good a place as any for this gypsy child to settle into and call home. When he talked about Dallas, he would say, “Ask anyone. Dallas in the late ‘60s was like a foreign country to any normal Texan.”
If you can call it settling, Billy carved a niche for himself in the Dallas area as a career columnist for the Times-Herald, a creative writing teacher at Southern Methodist University, and executive producer on that Channel 13 news program.
He knew he couldn’t leave Texas for love or money again. When the shine wore off of Dallas, he bought a little house in Austin where he could freelance and his wife of the moment could go to grad school. Those were less than salad days, he admits, “We lived on a wiener,” he remembered, “but with such passion.”
By final count, he’d been married more than a handful of times; grown up with Texas journalism during its most promising, raciest years; been fired by media moguls across the country, and proudly admitted he was “just bullheaded enough to keep on following my own star.”
This boomtown baby of the dustbowl had grown roots that ran deep into the caliche and solid rock of the Wimberley hill country, searching for cool water, old friends and new words.
The hopeless, romantic wanderer was back home in Central Texas. He had found a perfect life-mate in Diane, an El Paso-raised child of Jewish parents, who loves pagan shrines and Pre-Colombian culture. They found their haven on a Wimberley hilltop, where he could spend his days writing about the Texas he knows by heart, and she, juggling her time between a successful video-editing career and their mountaintop refuge.
“Diane works like a Trojan,” Billy used to say. “It’s a great balance, between the two of us. We are so different. She is really tightly wound. The only time she can relax is when she is completely alone. So I built her this sort of grotto shrine as a place she can go to meditate – and relax. It’s our Garden of Broken Angels.”
This bucolic South Texas Gethsemane-Stonehenge creation was hand-built with writer’s hands as a gift for Diane. Billy had finished his latest book and had just quit his job as a columnist at the Statesman. He reveled in the magic of the place. Over the years, as I waited for him to finish a story or dig up an old column he wanted me to read, I wandered into the garden. This would come to be my favorite place on his mountain.
He liked to tell me the story of that summer gift, and I heard it often, “It was wonderful for us – for me. It was so dry that summer –both figuratively and literally, but there was just enough foliage that she didn’t notice it as she drove up the hill each night. I built it in a magical little grotto on the hill. It was a wild refuge where I would bury the dead – little birds and pet cats and other assorted creatures. That spring, a tornado had come through and one little finger reached out and clipped the biggest oak in the grotto, marking it as an electric and spiritual place. So I dug stone and hauled rocks and wheel-barrowed up and down the side of the hill until, six weeks later and seventeen pounds lighter, I finished it.”
All of the angels and icons in this rocky garden are noticeably broken. He explained, "I went over to that place at The Junction to buy some terra cotta angels and ceramic Madonnas. I looked and looked and couldn't find what I wanted. So I asked the guy if he had any broken angels or anything. He said, ‘Yeah, over in that pile, but they’re – uh –broken.’ I bought every broken angel he had. I don’t want to put anything in my stone garden except broken angels, birds, bowls and what-have-you. I like to think that everyone who comes into this little Stonehenge is broken in some little way, and this might help them get through their own battles.”
On that almost-summer Monday, the silence of the garden was broken only by a buzzing hummingbird in search of a mid-day treat, and the far away echo of some heavy road equipment grinding away in pursuit of progress a couple of hills away. An aggressive mockingbird dive-bombed the old tortoise-shell cat stretched out on a bench in the sun. Yet a surreal emptiness in the air effectively cleared the minds of all who stopped and listened.
You have to listen to your soul, he told me. As I took careful notes, he said, “Embrace your muse. My muse is a woman, a female. I think she kind of looks like a siren or a mermaid. In Spain, they call it your duende – an elf or goblin who dances just out of your reach. She holds those words that are just beyond the tips of our fingers. The thoughts we are trying to capture on paper. Poets, artist, bullfighters, gypsy dancers, all have a duende – a sense of death. We recognize that we are only here for a short time before death takes us. My duende reminds me to live passionately while I am here. She’s playful. Sometimes she holds that next story just a little out of my reach. Most of the time, I try to keep my muse as true to my total experience as I can without strangling her. And sometimes when I want to give up and quit this crazy life, she calls for me to swim a little farther out than I think I ought to.”
As he reflected on a lifetime of following his muse and chasing his duende, he laughed at his track record. “Maybe that’s my trouble. As much as I read all the Greek tragedies and all the classics, I was damned to keep repeating those same mistakes over and over.”
“Go out beyond the buoys” he added, a little free advice from the mountaintop. “The first time Diane and I went to Galveston, we floated on inner tubes way out beyond the buoys. Always the practical one, she said, ‘This makes me uncomfortable. I am afraid we’re going too far out. There could be an undertow or something.’ I told her, ‘It’s ok. Hold on to my hand. That’s where I’ll always be – beyond the buoys.’ And she’s still here with me.”
Billy’s beyond-the-buoy energy belied a lifetime in the newspaper business. After four decades of storytelling, reporting, opining and reflecting, Billy had a handful of self-penned books long out of print but well within reach on the shelf above his computer: a moderately successful release, and six boxes of manuscripts waiting to be read. Most of his published works were about Texas – a mythical place, a caricature of itself. But truth was at the heart of his best work.
A couple of essay collections with such working titles as “Wow Women and Wimpy Men” and “Dream West” were fastened with banker’s clips and precariously piled next to boxed reams of paper with intriguing labels like Tales of the Lightning Monster and Cold City; and leaning against the wall was a catalog box labeled “Chaucer in the West,” a collection of travel pieces, journeys and meditations.
In later years, he picked up paintbrushes and added a primitive dimension of vivid color to the carved mermaids and concrete saints who live around his House of Fables. He has wandered the hilltop, collecting – words, stories, and heart-shaped rocks. Yes, some were a little crooked, and a few were broken, but hundreds of heart rocks each found a place of honor on ledges, walls, in buckets and planters, and each means something special.
And along the way, he remained forever drunk on language. That day on the mountaintop, he said “After forty-four years of uneven performance, I just hope for a good twenty more years to sort of come through the rye. When I was a kid, I used to say, ‘I want to be a great writer,’ never just ‘I want to be a writer.’ And today I still want to be a great writer. Another year comes and goes. Summer’s almost here. Maybe it’s getting kind of late to be saying that, but I still want to be a great writer.”
• • • • •
I am on my way home from the new Seton Hospital in Kyle. Got the call this morning that Billy’d taken a turn for the worse.
Room 331. You can’t miss it. His is the room with the yellow and black flag outside the door that reads “Bed Alarm” in big block letters. The nurse explained that if he were to try to get out of bed, the alarm would sound. “We don’t want to get up off the bed and walk around, do we? We might go too far,” Nurse David explained, in a tone of voice generally reserved for conversation with toddlers.
Fluid in his lungs. Pneumonia. He is really out of it. Doesn’t recognize anyone. Dehydrated. Weak. Mumbling incoherent words. Typing with his fingers on the hospital blanket. He opens his eyes to the florescent glare and squints in pain. He calls me Molly. Another old friend from another time.
I lean close and try to make sense of Billy’s words. His eyelids are gummy with sleep. But it is as if his eyes are moving back and forth behind curtains. And it sounds like he is having a conversation with someone. But it is clearly not with anyone in our world. Through the slurred mumbling, I can make out some of the words as he whispers, weakly, softly, “…that pen… almost ready… okay… just one more … warm water… I need to… I need a….oh… take… my hand… I’ll be … too far….”
Too far? The words fade to nothing more than a soft siren song. I stand beside his bed. I squeeze his hand once more and I make myself think I feel him squeeze back. I close my eyes and think of duendes and broken angels, mermaids and mountaintops.
His hand falls from mine. The bed alarm sounds. The nurse arrives and I step back. He looks at the monitor and reaches for the wristband. Do-Not-Resuscitate in bold, block letters. Impact font, I think. Nurse David touches Billy’s wrist at the pulse point, and glances up as Billy shudders and gasps a delayed breath and then starts to breathe regularly again.
In that instance, I get it. She has been there all along. His muse. His duende. She is there now. With him. Ready to take him farther than he has been before.
To write the next chapter.
To be a great writer.
But not yet.
This time he came back.
I think of the mountain and the familiar story of Billy’s duende. And how he would tell me, “Sometimes she holds that next story just a little out of my reach. And sometimes when I want to give up and quit this crazy life, she calls for me to swim a little farther out than I think I ought to.”
I can’t tell you exactly where this story ends but I don’t want it to stop here. I’m hoping it goes on a little farther. To somewhere far out beyond the buoys.
• • • • •
We looked up one evening and the summer was gone.
That is how he started the story about the last Father’s Day he spent with his dad. He went down to Seguin and took him to lunch at the Aumont Hotel café – meatloaf and mashed potatoes. “Daddy,” he said, “While we’re in town, I want to get you a present – a new straw hat, a new pipe, or something.”
“Naw,” Tice Porterfield said. “Don’t need nothin’. Got plenty of everything I need.”
“You mean to tell me you couldn’t use a thing from me,” Billy asked.
He described his father carefully putting down his fork and giving Billy a familiar look of tired resignation and low expectation.
“All I need,” he said, “is a little time and a few kind words.”
Fourteen months have passed since that close call at Seton Hospital. Billy is fading fast. We’ve packed up all the boxes and files of his work and donated them to the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University, to be properly catalogued and archived. The House of Fables, that writing shack on the hill out behind his house in Wimberley, will soon be lifted from its pier and beam foundation and carried down the hill, repurposed into a guest cottage behind someone else’s house.
Diane and I have dinner once a month, as she wends her way through the Medicare maze and eldercare attorneys, and tries to figure out how to navigate the high wire that keeps him in long-term health care.
And, selfishly, these days, I spend less time with Billy at the Texan Care Center and more time with his books, letters, essays and columns. He doesn’t know me any more by any name or memory, and I am still looking for who I want to be and maybe for that person he always thought I could be. I am still wandering backroads and shortcuts, looking for that True North that he has always had a knack for finding.
It’s there – I can almost see it. If I can just muster the courage to swim out a little further.
Just beyond the buoys.
Today, the legendary journalist and author is lost in his own mind. When he moved to the Alzheimer care facility about three years ago, guilt or something like it drove me out to see him several times a week. Some days he’d forget who I was completely. Other times he knew me well – and occasionally he thought I was his old colleague, Molly Ivins. I went with the flow, and listened, and talked. Our weekly visits stretched to every other week. Lately, weeks have gone by with me thinking I needed to get over there but… And so it goes.
Some of what you will read below could be disputed. Some of what you read, I garnered from conversations long ago. Some of the details are colored in like a lower case “e” on an old Royal typewriter. Others may hit a little above the line. But in the words of the newspaper editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
Out Beyond The Buoys
I can’t tell you exactly where this story begins. Certainly not here, as I walk out of the Texan Care Center. This is just one day of many that are becoming more and more alike. Visits with an old friend.
You might recognize his name. He used to live on top of a mountain in the Texas hill country. Today, his home is on the Armadillo Trail wing of a very nice assisted living center. It’s not hard to find. Just follow the signs in the cartwheel-shaped building. It’s to the left of Roadrunner Alley. And just beyond the Cactus Cantina. I go there a lot. I’m still bothered by the pre-school décor and the Texana-theme. And I’ll never get used to that smell of stale piss or rotting minds.
He’s getting worse. But he is pleasant. Agreeable. I carry the conversation, rambling on about things of no consequence. Old names he remembers. Backroads he loved to wander.
I find myself repeating back to him those stories he used to tell me. Stories I know by heart. I tell him the one about working for whorehouse madam and sleeping in trees and trailer parks. And the time Molly Ivins knocked his tooth out in a Houston bar, and the publisher of the paper put an extra $25 in his paycheck to cover the dental bill. Or the time he ordered a set of encyclopedia from a young and hungry Willie Nelson. I recite these stories like they are scripture.
I want to push him into those memories and find a place in his brain that has not worn thin. And I watch for a spark of recognition in his filmy eyes. Sometimes I am rewarded.
But most of the time, when I ask him something, he just nods. “I think that is a very good question.” He asks with deliberation, “What kind of answers are you looking for?”
When he struggles to find a word he is looking for, his fingers move on the bed sheet or lap blanket, as though they are typing on a keyboard. It’s as though the words he has lost are right there at the tips of his fingers, but just out of reach.
Two decades ago, he told me that the same story can start in many different places. Because he had a habit of tossing out the first page of anything he wrote, he told me that he liked starting his stories on the second or third page – and letting them wander farther than they should. So today, maybe this story begins on page three, with mermaids and broken angels, buoys and mountaintops.
• • • • •
It was a ruthlessly bright Monday morning in May. I climbed to the top of his mountain in search of a hill country-sort of truth that might be found in his writing shack. the House of Fables. I was coming out to write a lifestyle piece about his new Harper-Collins memoir. Regional features were my bread and butter in those days. But more than that, I was looking for direction.
I’d made this trek many times before, as a student, a friend, and even for a short while, his editor for a regional entertainment magazine. Billy didn’t believe in email in those dawning years of the Internet, and I liked the excuse to come hang out on his mountaintop. But I hadn’t been out in a couple of years. I guess I hadn’t needed him for a while.
So it felt like coming home as I turned off the pavement and opened the gate, drove through, and got out to close the gate behind me. The first rule of the ranch is to always close gates behind you. But then everyone knows that.
A mile or so down the road, the ruts finally ended completely. A rusted green Ford stepside pickup was parked next to an old tractor. The truck hadn't been there long. Johnson grass grew up all around the tractor and morning glory vines wove into the engine block. The grass was flattened under the wheels of the pickup. He was around.
A trail led up the hill beyond a well house and through a grove of cedar trees. A couple of hundred yards up on a little rise, I came to the old rock house. An old blue merle border collie hobbling out the door and started a trill of non-stop barking.
I had been plainly warned by his son and his wife that Billy had grown to respect no sense of time. These days, he eats, sleeps, reads, and writes, they explained. Sure enough, a sundial, the only clock evident on the property, read high noon. So much for daylight savings time.
Billy may not have had much use for time, but his sense of direction had always been pretty sharp. He knew every backroad and cut-through in Texas- and had taught me the pleasures of taking the long way home. Yes. I would come to learn that if I was lost, he was a certain true north.
That day, Billy was working on a deadline– repurposing an old story into a weekly column for some little East Texas newspaper. “Make yourself at home. Give me a minute and I will finish this up. Then I have to run down to the Radio Shack to fax it to the Malakoff News,” he called, from the door of the cabin.
I remembered the first time I had come out to visit him – to talk about being a writer. I followed him into a 16 x 20 room filled with stacks of boxes spilling over with ragged and spent yellow writing pads. Ladderback chairs held wobbly wooden crates filled with old newspapers, three framed pictures leaned against the wall waiting to be hung, and a dusty guitar leaned against the yellow oak desk.
“This is where I work,”he said.”Where the blood is let. It’s where the freedom and romance and intrigue of being an Artist stops and the gutwork of being a writer begins. And sometimes, this is where I am afraid... and old... and tired." He paused and stared blankly out the window. "Look around. Make yourself at home. Sit a while," he pointed toward the only empty chair in the room.
I remember wondering if, given the chance to sit at that desk and write on that old typewriter, would some inspiration or muse filter into my fingers. I definitely could feel the magic in this space.
That morning, he went back to work, tapping out his column, as I took in every detail of the familiar old cabin. The silence was only broken by the sound of his fingers clattering on the keys of the old gunmetal gray IBM Selectric typewriter, as the ball spun and hit the paper.
“This ought to about do it,” he said, as he pulled the final sheet from the typewriter. “Come on and take a ride down to Radio Shack with me so I can fax this off. We can catch up on the way.”
His pickup was full of cigar butts and beer cans. The dash was covered with old mail, filled yellow legal pads and advertising circulars. A half-spent roll of toilet paper was flattened between a dog-eared road atlas and the windshield. Yellowed newspapers and Dairy Queen sacks littered the passenger seat.
“Shove all that stuff on the floor,” he said, as he climbed in.
His old truck didn’t take that caliche road much better than my Honda. We bottomed out a couple of times but smoothed out on the highway. Out on the Farm to Market road, we traveled in silence most of the way. The wind burned as it whipped my hair into my eyes through the open windows of the pickup.
Despite the rattling old truck, he’d come a long way from the barefooted, nomadic oilfield child he wrote about in Diddy Waw Diddy: Passage of an American Son. That season, his memoir had just been published, but it was a long time coming. The first draft of Diddy began in the summer of 1967, when Billy Porterfield was the first Paisano-Dobie Fellow. Part of the award was the luxury of a year’s residency on the goat ranch and retreat of the late J. Frank Dobie, writing and honing his craft. Diddy was born there.
Over the next twenty-six years, he rewrote that memoir eight times, and finally said, “Bastante.” Enough is enough. He came to realize that he was not writing the Bible. He said it was time to “ask the dead to forgive me and the living to grin and bear it,” and go to press. Along the way, he said he had “robbed Billy to pay Paul,” plenty of times, giving up fragments of his memoir to newspaper columns, magazines and, that plague of journalists, the collection of miscellanea. Repurposing, he called it. Through those incarnations, Billy always felt like he was simply renting his reminiscences, rather than selling them. Finally, in the spring of 1994, with the release of Diddy amid some fanfair and commotion, he had just about found a comfortable position for resting on his laurels.
• • • • •
It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers – because if you ask a writer anything, you usually get an answer – still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
• • • • •
Billy’s father was a roughneck and a driller who gave his best years to the oilfields. He dreamed that his firstborn son would go to school and learn to be a geologist, making a career in soft expensive loafers rather than steel-toed boots. When Billy chose to drill for truths amid words rather than black gold in Texas soil, Tice Porterfield was flabbergasted.
“You’re studying what?” he asked.
“Journalism,” Billy told him. “I want to be a reporter. You know, work for newspapers.”
That didn’t make a lot of sense to a man who only took the Sunday paper and then, only to read the comics. Billy estimates that in his career, he wrote “something like six million words and my father read damn few of them.”
In a letter Billy wrote to me about his father, he said,
I covered murders and manhunts and talked to men about to sit in the electric chair. I was with Meredith and King and Carmichael when they marched through Mississippi, I have been roughed up by rednecks because I was a “nigger-loving newsman” and beaten by rioting blacks because I was “a honky newsman.” I have sat down with whores and princesses. I have talked to astronauts and assassins. I have supped with presidents and sipped with peons. I have entered worlds my old man could never imagine. But he always told people I type for a living.
Billy cut his journalistic teeth on the police blotter, as a cub reporter alongside Dan Rather – Billy was on the Houston Chronicle desk and Dan held down the KTRH radio beat, their desks side by side in the combination newsroom. As Dan headed off for the broadcasting camera lights of New York, Billy was beating a path through the graying depths of the American Midwest. He blazed a trail through the Detroit Free Press and the Chicago Daily News, before finding his way back to the land of his soul.
In 1969, a siren song called him back to Dallas. A couple of old friends were starting a progressive news program for the Dallas Public Broadcasting Station. Dallas seemed to be as good a place as any for this gypsy child to settle into and call home. When he talked about Dallas, he would say, “Ask anyone. Dallas in the late ‘60s was like a foreign country to any normal Texan.”
If you can call it settling, Billy carved a niche for himself in the Dallas area as a career columnist for the Times-Herald, a creative writing teacher at Southern Methodist University, and executive producer on that Channel 13 news program.
He knew he couldn’t leave Texas for love or money again. When the shine wore off of Dallas, he bought a little house in Austin where he could freelance and his wife of the moment could go to grad school. Those were less than salad days, he admits, “We lived on a wiener,” he remembered, “but with such passion.”
By final count, he’d been married more than a handful of times; grown up with Texas journalism during its most promising, raciest years; been fired by media moguls across the country, and proudly admitted he was “just bullheaded enough to keep on following my own star.”
This boomtown baby of the dustbowl had grown roots that ran deep into the caliche and solid rock of the Wimberley hill country, searching for cool water, old friends and new words.
The hopeless, romantic wanderer was back home in Central Texas. He had found a perfect life-mate in Diane, an El Paso-raised child of Jewish parents, who loves pagan shrines and Pre-Colombian culture. They found their haven on a Wimberley hilltop, where he could spend his days writing about the Texas he knows by heart, and she, juggling her time between a successful video-editing career and their mountaintop refuge.
“Diane works like a Trojan,” Billy used to say. “It’s a great balance, between the two of us. We are so different. She is really tightly wound. The only time she can relax is when she is completely alone. So I built her this sort of grotto shrine as a place she can go to meditate – and relax. It’s our Garden of Broken Angels.”
This bucolic South Texas Gethsemane-Stonehenge creation was hand-built with writer’s hands as a gift for Diane. Billy had finished his latest book and had just quit his job as a columnist at the Statesman. He reveled in the magic of the place. Over the years, as I waited for him to finish a story or dig up an old column he wanted me to read, I wandered into the garden. This would come to be my favorite place on his mountain.
He liked to tell me the story of that summer gift, and I heard it often, “It was wonderful for us – for me. It was so dry that summer –both figuratively and literally, but there was just enough foliage that she didn’t notice it as she drove up the hill each night. I built it in a magical little grotto on the hill. It was a wild refuge where I would bury the dead – little birds and pet cats and other assorted creatures. That spring, a tornado had come through and one little finger reached out and clipped the biggest oak in the grotto, marking it as an electric and spiritual place. So I dug stone and hauled rocks and wheel-barrowed up and down the side of the hill until, six weeks later and seventeen pounds lighter, I finished it.”
All of the angels and icons in this rocky garden are noticeably broken. He explained, "I went over to that place at The Junction to buy some terra cotta angels and ceramic Madonnas. I looked and looked and couldn't find what I wanted. So I asked the guy if he had any broken angels or anything. He said, ‘Yeah, over in that pile, but they’re – uh –broken.’ I bought every broken angel he had. I don’t want to put anything in my stone garden except broken angels, birds, bowls and what-have-you. I like to think that everyone who comes into this little Stonehenge is broken in some little way, and this might help them get through their own battles.”
On that almost-summer Monday, the silence of the garden was broken only by a buzzing hummingbird in search of a mid-day treat, and the far away echo of some heavy road equipment grinding away in pursuit of progress a couple of hills away. An aggressive mockingbird dive-bombed the old tortoise-shell cat stretched out on a bench in the sun. Yet a surreal emptiness in the air effectively cleared the minds of all who stopped and listened.
You have to listen to your soul, he told me. As I took careful notes, he said, “Embrace your muse. My muse is a woman, a female. I think she kind of looks like a siren or a mermaid. In Spain, they call it your duende – an elf or goblin who dances just out of your reach. She holds those words that are just beyond the tips of our fingers. The thoughts we are trying to capture on paper. Poets, artist, bullfighters, gypsy dancers, all have a duende – a sense of death. We recognize that we are only here for a short time before death takes us. My duende reminds me to live passionately while I am here. She’s playful. Sometimes she holds that next story just a little out of my reach. Most of the time, I try to keep my muse as true to my total experience as I can without strangling her. And sometimes when I want to give up and quit this crazy life, she calls for me to swim a little farther out than I think I ought to.”
As he reflected on a lifetime of following his muse and chasing his duende, he laughed at his track record. “Maybe that’s my trouble. As much as I read all the Greek tragedies and all the classics, I was damned to keep repeating those same mistakes over and over.”
“Go out beyond the buoys” he added, a little free advice from the mountaintop. “The first time Diane and I went to Galveston, we floated on inner tubes way out beyond the buoys. Always the practical one, she said, ‘This makes me uncomfortable. I am afraid we’re going too far out. There could be an undertow or something.’ I told her, ‘It’s ok. Hold on to my hand. That’s where I’ll always be – beyond the buoys.’ And she’s still here with me.”
Billy’s beyond-the-buoy energy belied a lifetime in the newspaper business. After four decades of storytelling, reporting, opining and reflecting, Billy had a handful of self-penned books long out of print but well within reach on the shelf above his computer: a moderately successful release, and six boxes of manuscripts waiting to be read. Most of his published works were about Texas – a mythical place, a caricature of itself. But truth was at the heart of his best work.
A couple of essay collections with such working titles as “Wow Women and Wimpy Men” and “Dream West” were fastened with banker’s clips and precariously piled next to boxed reams of paper with intriguing labels like Tales of the Lightning Monster and Cold City; and leaning against the wall was a catalog box labeled “Chaucer in the West,” a collection of travel pieces, journeys and meditations.
In later years, he picked up paintbrushes and added a primitive dimension of vivid color to the carved mermaids and concrete saints who live around his House of Fables. He has wandered the hilltop, collecting – words, stories, and heart-shaped rocks. Yes, some were a little crooked, and a few were broken, but hundreds of heart rocks each found a place of honor on ledges, walls, in buckets and planters, and each means something special.
And along the way, he remained forever drunk on language. That day on the mountaintop, he said “After forty-four years of uneven performance, I just hope for a good twenty more years to sort of come through the rye. When I was a kid, I used to say, ‘I want to be a great writer,’ never just ‘I want to be a writer.’ And today I still want to be a great writer. Another year comes and goes. Summer’s almost here. Maybe it’s getting kind of late to be saying that, but I still want to be a great writer.”
• • • • •
I am on my way home from the new Seton Hospital in Kyle. Got the call this morning that Billy’d taken a turn for the worse.
Room 331. You can’t miss it. His is the room with the yellow and black flag outside the door that reads “Bed Alarm” in big block letters. The nurse explained that if he were to try to get out of bed, the alarm would sound. “We don’t want to get up off the bed and walk around, do we? We might go too far,” Nurse David explained, in a tone of voice generally reserved for conversation with toddlers.
Fluid in his lungs. Pneumonia. He is really out of it. Doesn’t recognize anyone. Dehydrated. Weak. Mumbling incoherent words. Typing with his fingers on the hospital blanket. He opens his eyes to the florescent glare and squints in pain. He calls me Molly. Another old friend from another time.
I lean close and try to make sense of Billy’s words. His eyelids are gummy with sleep. But it is as if his eyes are moving back and forth behind curtains. And it sounds like he is having a conversation with someone. But it is clearly not with anyone in our world. Through the slurred mumbling, I can make out some of the words as he whispers, weakly, softly, “…that pen… almost ready… okay… just one more … warm water… I need to… I need a….oh… take… my hand… I’ll be … too far….”
Too far? The words fade to nothing more than a soft siren song. I stand beside his bed. I squeeze his hand once more and I make myself think I feel him squeeze back. I close my eyes and think of duendes and broken angels, mermaids and mountaintops.
His hand falls from mine. The bed alarm sounds. The nurse arrives and I step back. He looks at the monitor and reaches for the wristband. Do-Not-Resuscitate in bold, block letters. Impact font, I think. Nurse David touches Billy’s wrist at the pulse point, and glances up as Billy shudders and gasps a delayed breath and then starts to breathe regularly again.
In that instance, I get it. She has been there all along. His muse. His duende. She is there now. With him. Ready to take him farther than he has been before.
To write the next chapter.
To be a great writer.
But not yet.
This time he came back.
I think of the mountain and the familiar story of Billy’s duende. And how he would tell me, “Sometimes she holds that next story just a little out of my reach. And sometimes when I want to give up and quit this crazy life, she calls for me to swim a little farther out than I think I ought to.”
I can’t tell you exactly where this story ends but I don’t want it to stop here. I’m hoping it goes on a little farther. To somewhere far out beyond the buoys.
• • • • •
We looked up one evening and the summer was gone.
That is how he started the story about the last Father’s Day he spent with his dad. He went down to Seguin and took him to lunch at the Aumont Hotel café – meatloaf and mashed potatoes. “Daddy,” he said, “While we’re in town, I want to get you a present – a new straw hat, a new pipe, or something.”
“Naw,” Tice Porterfield said. “Don’t need nothin’. Got plenty of everything I need.”
“You mean to tell me you couldn’t use a thing from me,” Billy asked.
He described his father carefully putting down his fork and giving Billy a familiar look of tired resignation and low expectation.
“All I need,” he said, “is a little time and a few kind words.”
Fourteen months have passed since that close call at Seton Hospital. Billy is fading fast. We’ve packed up all the boxes and files of his work and donated them to the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University, to be properly catalogued and archived. The House of Fables, that writing shack on the hill out behind his house in Wimberley, will soon be lifted from its pier and beam foundation and carried down the hill, repurposed into a guest cottage behind someone else’s house.
Diane and I have dinner once a month, as she wends her way through the Medicare maze and eldercare attorneys, and tries to figure out how to navigate the high wire that keeps him in long-term health care.
And, selfishly, these days, I spend less time with Billy at the Texan Care Center and more time with his books, letters, essays and columns. He doesn’t know me any more by any name or memory, and I am still looking for who I want to be and maybe for that person he always thought I could be. I am still wandering backroads and shortcuts, looking for that True North that he has always had a knack for finding.
It’s there – I can almost see it. If I can just muster the courage to swim out a little further.
Just beyond the buoys.
For more information about this project, presentations and speaking engagements, please contact Diana Hendricks.