Cadillac Jack Read online

  For Diane Keaton Queen of the Swap-Meets

  Contents

  PREFACE

  Book I

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Book II

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Book III

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Book IV

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Book V

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  PREFACE

  Perhaps the most severe drawback to a long career in writing is that one is forced to read the same author every day for a great many years.

  The author, of course, is oneself.

  Great scholars may spend a lifetime in daily investigation of Shakespeare or Dante, but few novelists are much like great scholars, and even fewer are Shakespeare or Dante.

  To read oneself every morning and afternoon for more than a quarter of a century, as I have now done, is at best a strange chore. As thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of one's own sentences cross the page in front of one, they seem, each year, to move more predictably. They may plod, or they may rush, but whatever pleasure one may once have taken in their lilting rhythms or their little graces has long since vanished.

  At least, mine has. I rather enjoyed the daily tramp of my sentences up until about the time that I wrote Terms of Endearment. Midway through that book the endless parade of these sentences began to lose its fascination for me; it was as if they were parading in a circle. I began to have the distinct impression that sentences which ought to have been embedded in earlier books had somehow wiggled free and were circling around again.

  And not just sentences, either: paragraphs, characters, relationships and motifs all seemed deadeningly familiar.

  I have always had a horror of self-repetition, the quicksand that swallows so many middle-aged novelists, and was not cheered to find it swallowing me. I had no interest in recycling my own oeuvre a few sentences at a time. And yet it seemed to me that that was more or less what I was doing.

  Cadillac Jack is a response to this dilemma. The book's beginning was simple. I was standing on a street comer in Washington, D.C., one day, waiting for the light to change. A black man was waiting, too. Just as the light changed a Cadillac drew up in front of us, and a jolly gentleman waved at the black man, who immediately brightened. "Ho, ho, Cadillac Jack," he said, waving. The car passed on, and I crossed the street a happier man. Life had just handed me a title; all I had to do was find a book for it.

  I decided to seek it in the world of the swap meets, flea markets, junk dealers and small-time auctions, which I had haunted for many years as a bookscout—it had always seemed to me an interesting and somewhat neglected subculture. Maybe it could be made to yield some fresh-seeming sentences, at least.

  In the event, my sentences didn't hasten to reform, but I wrote the book anyway, determined to hang in there, if only because I really had no place else to hang.

  The book that resulted seems a little odd. A friend remarked that it reminded her of certain Diane Arbus photographs of people with their love objects, which were sometimes, but not always, other people. The friend thought the novel particularly resembled an Arbus photograph of a woman who had dressed her monkey in a snow suit.

  I am easily convinced by almost any description of one of my books, and immediately began to think of Cadillac Jack as the sort of book in which someone would dress a monkey in a snowsuit. Early in the narrative someone does put two pugs on a dinner table, which is just as bizarre.

  I rarely think of my own books, once I finish them, and don't welcome the opportunity, much less the necessity, of thinking about them. The moving finger writes, and keeps moving; thinking about them while I'm writing them is often hard enough. Writing a book that holds one's own interest until it can be finished is, for the middle-aged and reasonably prolific novelist, a heavier challenge than many would like to admit. I wrote two drafts of this one, burdened the whole way by a sense that something was lacking. I remain uncertain whether the lack was in the tale, or merely in the main character, Cadillac Jack.

  What's certain is that Jack is a very detached man. I might have called the book Portrait of the Artist as a Detached Man, except that Jack isn't an artist. He's a scout—a man who finds things, not a man who makes things. Yet the character of mine he most reminds me of is Danny Deck, a young writer who raced across the lawn of my imagination some twelve years ago, in a book called All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. Both men are constantly being reminded that they aren't normal, usually by women they're in bed with. Danny Deck becomes convinced that his detachment is a by-product of the artistic vocation; he comes to resent that vocation because it seems to him it deprives him of any hope of a settled domestic life.

  Jack doesn't resent his vocation—antique scouting—and doesn't rage at his exile from the hearth and the bassinet, as Danny does. The latter was a bruised optimist, convinced that he could love one woman forever if he could just rid himself of the alienating demands of art. Jack isn't so sanguine. When he yearns, he yearns for individuals, not for a home. He recognizes that he is most at home when he is in motion, roaming the country in his search for exceptional antiques.

  As an antique scout. Jack is a student, and a fairly acute one, of the way in which people relate to their objects. He would like to hope, at first, that people are better at loving other people than they are at loving objects, but his bleak conclusion is that human love is unstable, whether directed at another human or at a Sung vase. The people he meets are as fickle in regard to their objets as they are with one another; they cling to a fine thing for years and then get rid of it in an hour, much as they might a fine person. They become indifferent alike to hall clocks and spouses. In Jack's world, only obsession seems to generate tenacity; moderate love, whether between people and people or people and things, seldom seem
s to last very long.

  These dark pessimistic meats are stuffed in a light pastry of social satire, most of it directed at the ways of Washington, D.C. I had been reading Pope and Waugh in the year I wrote the book; I had also been pondering my twelve years in Washington. The city, as the old nest collector observed, is a graveyard of styles. It is also a city of museums, and its defining attitudes are curatorial. Indeed, its ponderous social life is not unlike a museum exhibit, in which a good many of the major canvases have long needed dusting. The book became a kind of exhibit of capitol portraits, done, in so far as I was able, as Alexander Pope might have done them.

  To the portraits in my capitol exhibit I added a parallel sequence of Jack's women, done with perhaps a bit more charity.

  The textures of the book are sometimes appealing, but what of the aftertaste? Is detachment of the sort Jack manifests a workable subject for fiction? Boringness, for example, is not a workable subject; it only leaves the reader bored. Will Jack's detachment frustrate the reader as much as Jack himself frustrates the various women he escapes? Do readers, many of whom are women, resent detachment as much as women do?

  Having raised that question, the teller is happy to take refuge behind the tale.

  —Larry McMurtry October 1984

  Book I

  Chapter I

  Boog warned me about Washington, but until I saw the rich lady set her pugs on the dinner table, I didn't take him seriously. A staple of my relationship with Boog is that he warns and I ignore.

  “It’s because you're self-made that you're so reckless," he said. "I wisht I was self-made."

  Actually, to look at Boog, you would hardly think he was made at all, not so much because he's fat and ugly as because of his shiny suits and slicked-down hair. His ties always have silver in them, augmented by colors like yellow, or puke green, a style acquired during the twenty years he spent being a Congressional aide to a cheap politician from East Houston.

  It was during those years that he learned his way around Washington well enough to be able to warn me about it, though probably he would have warned me even if he hadn't known what he was talking about. Boog freely admits that it's easier to give advice than it is to lead an interesting life.

  "D.C.'s diffrunt from Waxahachie," he maintained. "It's filt up with them stump-suckin' women."

  One of Boog's problems is that he insists on speaking in terms that can be understood by the common citizens of Winkler County, Texas, the county his family happened to own. His brothers and sisters had all finally killed themselves off in adulteries and small-plane crashes and other popular forms of risk-taking, leaving him sole heir to

  Winkler County and the fifteen million barrels of oil that were said to flow beneath it. He's not reluctant to spend his money, either. The day I met him I sold him a narwhal tusk for $3,000 and I’ve been selling to him regularly ever since.

  What I am is a scout. My trade name—Cadillac Jack— derives from the fact that nowadays I do the bulk of my traveling in a pearl-colored Cadillac with peach velour interior, a comfortable vehicle in which to roam America.

  I roam it a lot, too, continually crossing and recrossing the continent in pursuit of objects of every description. I've sold Italian lace and Lalique glass, French snuffboxes and pre-World War II Coke bottles, English silver and Chinese porcelain, Purdey shotguns and Colt revolvers, Apache basketry and Turkish ceramics, Greek cheese-boards, Coptic pottery, Depression glass, Peruvian mummy-wrappings, kilims, Aubussons, icons, Tibetan textiles, camel-pads, netsuke, scarabs, jewels, rare tools, early cameras and typewriters, barometers, Sevres, miniatures, lacquer, screens, tapestries, classic cars, railroadiana, Disneyana, Eskimo carvings, Belgian firearms, musical instruments, autographs, Swiss music boxes, Maori war clubs, and so on.

  If you happen to want a World War I parachute—and a lot of people seem to—or a fly-catching machine—never patented but produced in some quantity by a German immigrant in Flatonia, Texas, in the 1890s—I'll try to come up with one. Those fly-catching machines are really wonderful: The flies stick themselves to a little honey-covered roller and are then scraped off" into a pan to be fed to the chickens, sort of like crackerjacks.

  Most scouts specialize, but not me. I'm too curious, too restless, too much in love with the treasure hunt. I keep on the move constantly, covering as much as I can of the vast grid of dealers, collectors, accumulators, pack rats, antique shops, thrift shops, junk shops, estate sales, country auctions, bankruptcy sales, antique shows, flea markets, and garage sales that covers America like a screen. Nobody can check every square on the grid—I once spent a profitable three weeks hitting nothing but garage sales in the Chicago area alone—but I pride myself on covering more of it regularly than any other scout. I buy and sell as I go, seldom keeping anything more than a week or two. My kind of buying is like my kind of falling in love: a matter of immediate eye appeal. I fall in love with objects, each in its turn, my only problem being that as I get older I also get pickier. First-rate objects don't excite me anymore: I want exceptional objects, and those can take a lot of looking for.

  I wouldn't be driving the pearl-colored Cadillac had it not been for an extraordinary Sung vase that happened to be in Mom and Pop Cullen's junk barn in De Queen, Arkansas. It was priced at $20 and surrounded by sets of reproduction fireplace equipment priced at $150 the set. The vase was so obviously an exceptional thing that I had one of my rare attacks of conscience.

  "I don't know," I said. "That vase looks to me like it could be worth two or three hundred dollars. I wouldn't feel right paying you less than a hundred for it."

  In saying as much I was breaking the first law of scouting, which is that you never implant in the mind of an owner the notion that something he or she has for sale might be worth more than its stated price. It's not simply that the owners are then likely to raise the price: It's that they may freeze altogether and decide not to sell the object until they can figure out what it's really worth—something they usually never get around to doing.

  But I knew the Cullens—they just sold junk because it was easier than farming, and they weren't obsessed with prices. I had bought a good Parker shotgun and some nice Tennessee butter crocks from them on my last visit and all I had in mind was to cheat them $80 less.

  Momma Cullen was practically insulted, as I had known she would be. She didn't suspect me of mere foolishness— she suspected me of offering charity, since I had prospered sufficiently by that time to be sporting a new Buick Estate Wagon while she and Old Man Cullen still had the same worn-out Dodge pickup and the same dusty, run-down junk bam. Momma Cullen was a large woman who seldom got up from the big Sears and Roebuck chair she installed herself in every morning. The chair had once been covered in blue imitation velvet, but had worn so white in places that it reminded me of the whiskers on an old dog's muzzle.

  "Aw, that thang," Momma Cullen said, squinting at the vase through her bifocals. "Why that dem thang won't even hold flowers. Where'd that thang come from. Poppa?"

  Old Man Cullen looked at the vase for about five minutes, scratching his leathery neck and trying to get his thoughts together.

  "Momma, I guess it come from that Yankee schoolteacher," he said. "That one that gassed herself. I don't know where else we would have got it."

  I gave them the $20 and drank a Delaware Punch with them, to help smooth over the insult. De Queen seemed to be the only place left in America where Delaware Punches still came out of the pop machines, all of which were so old themselves that I could have sold them for big money in Houston or L.A.

  "Now, Jack, don't you drive too fast," Momma Cullen said, as I was leaving. "You ought to get married and raise a family, but if you don't, look out for some of that Depression glass. I'll pay for that stuff."

  Old Man Cullen just stood and looked. I don't think he had entirely satisfied himself about the origins of the vase, and was still slowly working back in his memory, from one junk buy to the next, hoping to come to the one that had cont
ained the vase. Even unobsessed dealers like to remember where their wares came from.

  I wrapped the vase well and put it in a small, brass-bound nineteenth-century traveling trunk I kept for just such a purpose. Naturally I realized that I had just become rich— or at least rich enough to buy the car of my dreams, which at that time belonged to a Cadillac collector in Ypsilanti—but I didn't feel elated, or even happy. I knew perfectly well that I had just shot up and over a peak, and could expect to work the down side of the hill for several months or years. I might live to find objects as great as the vase, but not for $20. The discrepancy between quality and price that made the find almost miraculous was a once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime thing. I could wander through thousands of flea markets and scale an Everest of junk without a combination such as that one coming up again, and I knew it.

  Five months later the vase auctioned at Sotheby's for $106,000, to a discreet Swiss collector who had probably never happened through De Queen.

  Of course, Boog was right not to credit me with much sophistication. In my rodeo days I had seen a lot of America, but mostly only its filling stations and rodeo arenas. Once I became a scout I tended to spend a lot of time in the parking lots of the same arenas, since that's where a lot of America's flea markets are held.

  All in all, I had not exactly lived a high-rent life, except for one week I spent in the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Los Angeles, as a guest of Universal Studios. The reason I was their guest was because they were contemplating a film about my career as a world champion bulldogger.

  During my stay at the hotel I rode in the elevator with Muhammad Ali and thought I saw Steve McQueen in the coffee shop. But soon the week was up and nothing came of the movie.

  I might have mastered the freeway system in every major American city, but the truth was I spent most of my time with people like Mom and Pop Cullen, who would have considered Waxahachie a frightening metropolis. Stardom on the flea-market circuit, as Boog well knew, does not necessarily equip one to dine with the power elite.

  Which brings me to the second part of Boog's admonition: the part about the stump-sucking women.