Chapter 1

“New Speedway Boogie”

Words by Robert Hunter; music by Jerry Garcia

Copyright Ice Nine Publishing

Who can deny? Who can deny?

but I think in time we will

“Alas! what is this wonder maladye? For heat of cold, for cold of heat, I dye (for love).”

Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde,” (1385)

“Jack, if you’ve got nothing new or useful to say, then sit down and shut the fuck up! This is family business anyway.” I calmly stated. My sister’s current boyfriend was trying to be helpful, namely by constantly putting in his oar, by trying to get me to agree to things that were most certainly disagreeable. Namely, that his girlfriend, my sister, ought to receive the majority of our late father’s estate – which was laughable, and entirely against the direct terms and express spirit of his last and final will.

Not a chance in seven hells! My father was quite explicit about this. Even into his late 70’s dad was sharp enough that you could cut yourself by just listening to him.

I can’t say that I genuinely love my older sister, but she’s family and I try to make allowances. She’s also not the brightest crayon in the box; if you gave her a penny for her thoughts, you’d get change back. Her current boyfriend isn’t much smarter, but at least he’s usually obliging, but sometimes he needs a ‘reset button’.

It was true that Darlene had worked for dad here at the speedway for pretty much her entire life, since she was barely older than a toddler, well over forty years now, but it was always in extremely menial capacities. She could be trusted, minimally, to collect parking fees and sell hot dogs, popcorn, sodas and snow cones... and with supervision, even work the cotton candy machine. Earning an hourly pay at minimum wage that never exceeded 20 hours a week... all so that she could continue to collect county, state and federal welfare, supplemental assistance for children, SNAP food benefits and even state cash for her four dependent children (by four different fathers). Not to mention also free medical care and private charity support from a half a dozen local country assistance agencies and churches. Except for serving concessions here, she’d never held a real job in her entire life – and never wanted one!

If you Google search ‘Welfare Queen’, a photo of my sister would probably appear right at the top listing of results... and she was proud of it! Like my father and his relatives, she was ‘Traveller’, and within the Irish Traveller culture, there exists an ethos of taking advantage, ‘getting our own back’ from the larger, settled communities around them. Us vs Them! The trouble was, unlike our father, she just wasn’t very smart about it. Darlene just couldn’t understand either why it was ‘inappropriate’ to drive around in a late model Cadillac Escalade, complete with a full leather interior and every available extra feature while also claiming poverty to dozens of state and local charity institutions.

She was even hoping that her current beau would hang around long enough to knock her up a time or two more, before her current brood of offspring grew too old to generate yet more unlimited free cash benefits for her! Usually, they didn’t stick around for long. Some guys like a gal who’s more than a few fries short of a Happy Meal, but her very special level of craziness is also a very acquired taste that few can endure for longer than a few months... so the men in her life come and go, about equally quickly.

Unlike me, she’d also reconnected closer to our old cultural family roots, which were clannish and insular, to say the least. The Traveller men, never well educated, tended to work the road as transient semi-skilled blue-collar workers and only come home over the winter. Jack was likely hoping to find a way to deal himself into a seat at our lucrative family business... but that wasn’t going to happen. Even Darlene was just smart enough not to let a virtual stranger grab any slices of ‘her’ pie, even if she was sleeping with him and hoping for another punch or two on her Welfare ticket.

Just to make things clear, I laid down the law again, for the two dimmer folks in the room that each would be out of their depth standing in a rain puddle. Dad’s will was going to stand... and from now on I would now be taking over and running the family business.

Frankly, I didn’t really want the job... but I knew that Darlene (with or without Jack) couldn’t handle it. Also, in about another two weeks or so I was certain to be let go by my present long-time employer anyway, and at least for now I didn’t have anything else better to do with my life. I’m sure somehow, from his grave, that dad had planned this all out, perfectly, as a means to bring me back into the fold... and for good.

I had three choices: I could let my sister ruin what my father had built in over fifty years of effort; or I could sell it all off and split the cash; or I could keep running the place and try and keep all the wheels on and rolling. I chose the latter option, and frankly I didn’t have any other better choices at the moment.

My own ‘good and steady’ job as a senior maintenance engineer in Dallas was about to get outsourced. Currently, I was training a fairly nice young Nigerian kid who was obviously being groomed to replace me, at about half of my current salary. Eager to cut down costs (especially employees about to become fully vested in the corporate retirement program) my property management company was out-sourcing everything that wasn’t an actual ‘profit center’ for them. Keeping the lights and A/C working in their high-rise office buildings was apparently optional to them!

I had some savings and only one ex-wife to minimally support who was living in another state, so living for a while in my dad’s trailer wasn’t going to be that much of a hardship. Besides, like many Traveller homes, his big double-wide mobile home admittedly looked like shit on the outside, but it was damned near a palace on the inside. Much nicer than my sister’s own smaller trailer, which was one reason she’d wanted to move into his.

Nope, dad had wanted me to have it, probably to lure me back home again - it was right there, stated directly in his will. Well... it worked.

I could tell you a thousand stories about my father. We weren’t ever what you would call ‘close’, really, but you just couldn’t help but admire him. He always claimed to be Welsh Traveller, an off-shoot of the slightly more notorious Missouri Travellers from the Wyldewood region, and he was proud of it... but never advertised that fact. No... not Romany or even gypsy. Unlike them, or his Irish Traveller distant cousins, he was much more adaptable and somewhat less bound by tradition. He settled here as a young man in Loving County in the early 1960’s while most of the rest of his itinerant clan remained further north, near Dallas, or a few that went further south, to Lovett, Texas. Furthermore, rather than remaining as a ‘breed apart’, a point of pride with the closed culture of his clan, he assimilated tightly into this largely rural county community and he cheerfully called it home.

Loving County, and our nearest town of Hillside Lakes, was a pretty nice place for a kid to grow up in the late 1970’s and into the 80’s. We were in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, northwest of Austin and southwest of Dallas and Waco, surrounded by hills, lakes and trees, small friendly towns and family ranches as far as the eye could see in any direction. I almost stayed, but following his example, I expunged myself of even more of our old family traditions and I left for the big city right after high school, to stay and work, but honestly... not to ‘bleed the beast’ and prey upon the larger population. That wasn’t my father’s style either.

He settled here for a reason, as good then as it still seems to be now today... he saw opportunity. My father didn’t abandon quite all of his cultural upbringing – ‘The gullible were put on this earth to be gulled!’ he repeatedly told me from the time I was a young boy. On the other hand, he also warned me that ‘Sheep are meant to be sheared, but do it gently and make them think they’re getting a shampoo and slight trim instead!’

Now, many years later, I’m just starting to fully appreciate how clever my father really was!

When he arrived here in Loving County, the local county school system was just starting to grow, full of the kids of the late baby boomers, and the current county owned football stadium located about seven miles outside of Hillside Lakes was already old, outdated and considered a fire hazard. The county considered it a safety liability and had pushed through a big bond at the prior election to build an all-new big/better facility. Once the funds were raised and the contractor was hired for the new facility, the old dilapidated property was put up for county auction. There was only one bidder – my father, and it took nearly the entire $1000 that he owned to his name to buy it.

Everyone in the county thought he was nuts. The old facility was named after Robert ‘Bobbie Quick Gun’ Bauer, who was a long forgotten silent movie era B-Western cowboy who’d been born here in the 1890’s. Even before the depression, the dirt track around the football field had been used as a local motorcycle race speedway. Everything about the place was old and run-down, and all of the local ranchers thought that it would cost way more to clean up that twelve-acre hilly site than the grazing land would be worth to them.

But my father saw opportunity right from the start, namely that the so-called temporary field that the county school district was going to use for the next year for its middle and high school football games until the new stadium was complete, was even older and more decrepit! Admittedly, an unusually convenient late night fire to the bleachers, which destroyed nearly the entire old wooden structure, helped to bring the school district athletic supervisors right into my dad’s clutches, hats in hand... eager, desperate even, to make a ‘temporary’ sort of leasing arrangement.