Let’s go back to Blue Rock
In late November, John Clanton and I accompanied Jim and Ford to the hill country south of Austin, Texas, for a party celebrating the release of a literary journal called the Blue Rock Review. A few of Jim’s poems were published in the journal.
I wrote a brief blog entry about it awhile back. Today I was looking through my notes from that trip. I’d been saving the material in case I needed it for a story, but I don’t think I need it. So here it is, mildly edited, straight from my notes to you.
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We’re in a stone lodge-style compound in the hill country south of Austin. The place is owned by Billy and Dodee Crockett. Billy is a touring musician. He’s fit and bright-eyed with long dark hair and a crushing handshake. Dodee is some sort of banking or investment executive. She’s tiny with a shoulder-length brunette bob and prominent cheekbones; she bustles around, making sure everything’s in order, while Billy stays out of the way.
The compound includes the main lodge, the Quiet House (a separate guest house) and various outbuildings, all of a type. The main lodge, where the Crocketts live, has a series of balconies and decks, an opulent professional recording studio and a performance hall. The lodge also has a tower overlooking a deep valley. The river ordinarily runs through the valley below, but it’s dry now, and the Blue Rock — a fairly massive bluish boulder in the midst of the river bed — sits there like a tiny island.
Jim is amazed by the silence outside the lodge. It is striking. There’s no noise but the faint whisper of wind.
Jim has been here before. Once, he stayed in a guest room. He looked out the window and saw a deer. He’s not a hunter, and he doesn’t like urban sprawl. We passed a fawn and a doe on our way in. “Some people would look at that and want to shoot it,” Jim said. “I don’t know. How could anyone want to do that?”
Jim is happy here, the happiest I’ve seen him (Ken’s note: Up to that point, anyway). His friends are here. They’re writers, poets, photographers, musicians and artists, and most of them recognize him at once. He gets to talk about his books with his community. People are interested in what he has to say.
The colors of the lodge are all comforting earthtones of gray, tan and brown. A sitting room is separated from the gourmet kitchen by three wooden steps and a row of bookshelves no more than four feet tall. One wall is dominated by a towering stone fireplace, flanked by wooden bookcases. Double glass doors lead out to a deck that extends the length of the lodge. Another high bookshelf, perhaps 10 feet tall, sits opposite the fireplace and just off-center. In front of it, two wooden tables have been pushed together into an L. Copies of the Blue Rock Review sit at the top of the L, stacks of them, and Jim’s books sit in three smaller piles nearby. Nathan Brown’s books sit beside his, and a row of CDs occupy the base of the L.
Nathan is Jim’s closest friend here. He and Jim participate together in poetry readings, here and elsewhere, and Jim’s admiration for his friend is apparent in the way his face lights up when he sees him. Nathan is a photographer as well as a poet. He’s here with his girlfriend, Ashley, and a child.
The bookshelves are packed with a variety of books, CDs, DVDs and knick-knacks. “Christian Theology” and “The Christian Theology Reader” share shelf space with a carriage clock and a few smaller timepieces. An assortment of Penguin trade paperbacks sit there, too, near an oversized shelf filled with art books. Other shelves hold books on astronomy, philosophy, history and more.
Christmas music plays from wall-mounted speakers, and stockings hang from the mantle.
At the top of the lodge’s tower is a room with 360-degree views of the hills, river, wildlife and scrub trees. There’s a comfy couch, a table with an ornate Scrabble set and a pair of binoculars mounted on a tall tripod. Jim’s eyes are drawn to a yellow house on the nearest hillside. It’s a sprawling place, certainly expensive, but unlike the other houses in the valley, its bright color erupts from the earthy landscape. Jim can’t quit looking at it. The house so bothers him that he once wrote a poem about it.
“It’s sad,” Jim says. “I don’t know what it says about me that I come out here and look out on all this beauty, and the first thing my eye goes to is that yellow house.” Even here, in what is to Jim an idyllic landscape, minor annoyances distract.
Blue Rock is an isolated place. Tiny roads wind through the countryside, and directions include instructions such as “turn at the Baptist church.”
Jim is hoping that he’ll be invited to spend the night here. It’s happened before, and he clearly wants to stay here again, but he won’t ask. Too impolite. It’s a measure, perhaps, of his desire to be liked, to leave people with a pleasant impression, that he won’t request something he very much wants even though this may be his last opportunity to get it.
About 3:30 p.m., after driving seven hours to get here, Jim learns that he has only four minutes to read his poetry. It’s the same amount of time Nathan and a female poet get, but it’s not nearly enough. Jim perches on a window seat near the double doors in the book room and leafs through his poetry books, muttering quietly to himself as he plucks yellow Post-It notes from pages and revises his planned reading list.
“Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut,” he says, smiling.
Jim is wearing jeans and the same multi-colored striped sweater he was wearing the day I met him. He’s very slight, like most people here. Few of them carry more than a couple extra pounds, and most are attractive and in their 30s or 40s. They talk about art and lake houses and wear carefully chosen casual shirts — most comfortably untucked — and jeans. The men have short hair, and most have glasses. The women have bob haircuts or longer hair pulled back from their faces. Everyone is well-scrubbed, and their casual looks are calculated and expensive.
They’re all aggressively friendly. They call the books “merch” and make bad word-nerd puns, like “Don’t be-merch your reputation.” Everyone seems to have a camera.
At 4:05 p.m., five minutes after the event’s scheduled start time, the doors open to paying guests. Dozens of people paid $15 a pop to gain entrance. Admission cost includes the readings and musical performances, a copy of the journal or a T-shirt, and snacks. There’s a problem with the audio mix, so instead of entering the performance room immediately, the attendees are diverted into the kitchen and book room, where they surround the “merch” tables. “Twelve of our artists are here tonight,” Dodee tells one. “They’ll sign books here later.”
The guests are almost exclusively white. Most are women 50 or older. They wear bright clothes — banana yellow pants, embroidered Asian vests, lime sweaters, gold shawls. Most wear jeans. One man has a quarter-sized peace sign hanging from a beaded necklace and is wearing blood-red athletic shoes, blue jeans, a gray longsleeved casual pullover and a black formal vest with a silk back. Another woman wears a black velvet longsleeved shirt, black fringed suede boots and tight leopard-print pants, all combined with a green fleece vest with three black bears printed on the back. Others are dressed formally, apparently regarding this as an event destination.
Jim moves among them with a smile on his face. No matter how much success he’s enjoyed as a father and professional, this is where he’s happy. This thing is his. He’ll share it with his family, with those who are watching, but it’s really something for him. He may only get four minutes in the spotlight, but they’re his four minutes. He’s already savoring them, even though the reading won’t be for another hour or so. At the same time, he seems nervous, standing a bit aloof from the crowd.
Earlier, he’d watched as Ford walked out onto the deck and down an uneven staircase to a platform further down the hill. “Ford said he’s going to go find someplace quiet and listen to his music,” Jim says. “He’s not really good at mingling yet. In fact, I think he’s bad at it.”
“I’m not so good at it, either,” I say.
Jim pauses. “I’ve gotten better,” he says. “I think.”
The performance begins. Billy Crockett welcomes people to the Blue Rock. “Somehow it worked out that I just started looking into the western sky about a week ago,” he says. “Have you seen those two bright things in the sky? That’s Jupiter and Venus. Venus is the headlight, and Jupiter is the bright planet, and they’ve been getting closer every evening. I looked it up on the Sky and Telescope website, and guess when they converge. Tonight. Isn’t that fantastic? We’ve got our own little convergence of folks here coming from far away, you know. Whatever orbit you’re in, you’ve found your way here.”
Joining Crockett on stage are Mac McAnally, an acclaimed country songwriter, and Jon Dee Graham, an Austin legend whose smoky voice rings of authenticity. They banter and play music. After awhile, they take a break, and when they return, Jim is called up on stage to read.
He sounds shaky at first. I’m worried that the star power in this room is going to crush him, that he won’t be able to compete with the sound system, the celebrity, the guitar trio. He’s just one guy with one voice.
But Jim wins them over. He tells them a little about his condition, leaving out the terminal part, and warms them up with three quick poems. One expresses Jim’s disdain for Southern rock music, which doesn’t seem calculated to endear him to this audience. Then he busts out his secret weapon, a poem called “On Remembering Poetry.” The poem endeavors to force people to remember it by insisting that they won’t. It’s filled with funny lines, and the audience responds perfectly, laughing at the appropriate moments and making Jim’s face light up like a beacon. He’s controlling this crowd, pulling their strings, making them dance to his tune, and by the time he reaches the end (”You won’t remember this poem. You won’t remember this poem. You won’t remember this poem. I’m not wearing any underwear. You won’t remember this poem.”), the audience is his. They rise up and give him a resounding standing ovation.
Ford is excited when it’s over. “They were playing some crazy country-type (music),” he says to his father, “and you said that stuff about Southern rock, and I thought, ‘Damn, Dad … they’re not gonna like that!”
“Well,” Jim says, “they’re not really doing Southern rock here.”
“I know, but it’s pretty close.”
“At least it wasn’t Lynyrd Skynyrd,” Jim says.
Ford’s reply is fervent: “Thank God!”
At the end of the night, as we’re getting ready to go eat Italian food with Nathan, Jim finds out that Jon Dee Graham loved “On Remembering Poetry” so much that he told Crockett he needs a copy of it. Jim is so flattered he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Graham didn’t bring any CDs to sell, but he has a few out in his vehicle. He gets one and trades it to Jim for a copy of Jim’s poetry book, “Antidotes & Home Remedies.”
Jim talks about Graham all the way to the restaurant. The Italian food is great. It’s a fitting ending to Jim’s amazing day.
Keeping up with the Chastains
It’s a wonder Jim and his family haven’t thrown us out already.
In the past three weeks, photojournalist John Clanton and I have logged a lot of hours with the Chastains — visiting them at their home, meeting them for coffee, attending events with them, going with Jim to medical appointments, etc. Over the weekend, we accompanied Jim and his 14-year-old son, Ford, to a small town in the hill country south of Austin, Texas.
Two of Jim’s poems were published in the Blue Rock Review, an arts journal, and he was invited to read some poems at the journal’s release party. Among the others who performed were OU creative writing professor Nathan Brown and Mac McAnally, who was recently named entertainer of the year at the Country Music Awards.
Jim killed. He read four poems and ended to applause so loud it shook dust from the ceiling.
Tomorrow Jim is going to show us around his office. Must be “Bring Your Stalkers to Work” day at the Capitol.
For more information about the Blue Rock, go to http://events.bluerocktexas.com/previous-events/detail/the-blue-rock-review-volume-iv-friction-release-party/
