HUNTSVILLE — (This is the title essay in a book of mine that the University of South Carolina Press will be publishing in 2011. George Garrett, a long-time friend and mentor of mine, died almost two years ago, a terrible loss to American and Southern literature. This piece is a chronicle of one of several reading tours we went on together.)

When the late, great George Garrett came out to Texas one April a few years back to do a little reading tour, I got to go along, not because it had really been planned that way but because the benevolent deities assisted in arranging it.

Originally the plan had been for George to come out for a roast of our late dear friend Eddie Weems, the Texas writer – has a book on the devastating Galveston hurricane of 1900 and the great Waco tornado, books about Indians, etc. –  but Eddie begged off because he said he had recently had an operation on his leg and just didn’t feel like standing before a crowd and making fools of a bunch of guys who were trying to make a fool of him. In a way I was glad that it didn’t work out, because Eddie was a force to be reckoned with, every bit as bad as a Galveston hurricane or a Waco tornado, and he would have hacked a lot of people off.

At any rate, Baylor was to be in on the roast, so the English Department there asked me whether, since George was willing to come out for a roast of Eddie Weems – whom they didn’t particularly like because he often laughed at the way they thought and did things – wouldn’t he be just as willing to come out and help them celebrate a new endowment for poetry, to the tune of right at half a million bucks: the amount of the endowment, not George’s fee.

George agreed to come for slightly less than that. I set up a reading at Sam Houston State, of course, and since I already had invitations to read from my new book of stories at the University of Texas and SMU, they were delirious when I proposed that George and I read together.   

George liked coming out here anyway, because he had Houston and Rice University connections and lots of friends at UT, and he just in general liked the state and its people, but that’s how George happened to be in Texas this particular time.    

Now, the fact is that I really enjoyed traveling with George. He was fun. He knew everybody in the Western World worth knowing and a few in the Eastern and lots in both arenas who aren’t worth knowing at all, and he had a story or two on anyone you’ve a mind to name. Why, his Fred Chappell stories alone could fill a thousand miles of highway. Always funny stuff. The only problem was that I couldn’t keep my sunglasses on because I was wiping my eyes every five minutes, and I had to stop every hour or so and take salt tablets to replenish my sodium. Trips with George were always tear-blurred pilgrimages for me.   

Well, bright and early on a Tuesday morning in April George and I set out on our tour. My wife and the kids kissed me good-bye and hugged George, who’d been staying with us, and off we went, with Sharon’s last words ringing in my ears: “Y’all go on and have a good time. I trust you, George.” Did you ever observe that if the old maxim “A man means only half of what he says” is true, then the parallel maxim for women must go “A woman says only half of what she means”?   

My wife did not say, “I trust you, George, but I don’t trust Paul any farther than I can throw his 200-pound-plus body,” but that is precisely what she meant. Actually, I hoped that she did trust me, after 28 years of marriage, but one never knows about women – this is a blessing of many dimensions, of course, and if we men had even half the sense we profess to have, we would cultivate our own mystique. To reveal all is to invite plunder. I think that she was saying to George, “Don’t let him drink too much or we might all be horribly embarrassed, and remember that this is our home state and we know lots of the people you’ll be seeing.” I gave her the old thumbs up sign, which to a woman might mean anything under the sun.   

Now, traveling and doing readings with George was sort of like the way the novelist Allen Wier put it once: You feel like the local redneck singer getting to tag along with the Beatles or the Stones, which dated Allen as much as it did exalt George, but you get the point. I mean, George was the show, the main dish; you were just the warm-up, the garnish on the side.

If you read before George, you were dead; if you read after him, you never were alive. So what we decided to do at SMU, our first stop on the road, was to alternate: George would read first for 15 minutes, then I’d read 15; then George, then me. This was George’s gracious manner of ensuring that the audience couldn’t just pretend I didn’t exist. It worked out fine, so we decided to do the same staggered reading at the University of Texas the next night.   

When George and I got to Austin Wednesday and met our contact, a former creative writing student of mine who was coordinator for the Center for Writers at UT, she slipped us a little note advising us that we had been invited to dinner at the – THE – country club with George’s old friend, former Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby (now also deceased) and his wife and Tom Staley and wife – Tom directed the Ransom Research Center at the university. See, this was another advantage to traveling with George: There were all sorts of little surprises like that popping up. As I say, he knew everybody. We had the entire Austin Country Club dining room to ourselves with these dignitaries, and waiters were dipping in and out, calling Bill Governor and answering to his every whim. And the food and liquor were free. George didn’t let on that it was any more or less than what he had expected.

We did our gig that night before an enthusiastic audience, who were gracious enough to applaud even for me, then partied heavily at a graduate student’s house. In typical Garrett fashion, George allowed himself to be passed around among students and faculty, as content to talk to an undergraduate about the fundamentals of writing as to a humped and bespectacled professor about the current directions of American fiction.

Since I’m not particularly good at parties – I’m shy, to begin with, but the real reason is that I let a .45 go off in the bathtub with me once and lost most of the hearing in my left ear and a little in my right (good place to clean a gun, since if you drop the tiniest little spring or pin, you can find it – but you don’t want it to go off in there, especially with the door closed) and just can’t hear well at all in crowds. I spent most of my time just standing around drinking and grinning and nodding at the faces that swam before me and trying to remember what it was like being a graduate student with nothing to your name but a VW Beetle and a new wife and being deliriously drunk on love and life and learning.

(Next week we continue with the tour.)



Paul Ruffin, 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate, is Texas State University System Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of English at SHSU. His web site is pauldruffin.com.