Thursday, July 22, 2010
Skip Tracer Installment 16: Walker Gets Lucky
Skip Tracer / Novels Gordon Young — Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 3:32 PM
After high school, Walker had dreams of attending an Ivy League school, but a middling math score on the S.A.T. undercut his impressive G.P.A. and stellar recommendations. Trinity College in Connecticut accepted him, but offered no scholarships. With his dad gone, money was an issue. He and his mother weren’t destitute, but there wasn’t a spare $40,000 sitting around to bankroll Walker’s education.
When Tulane in New Orleans offered him a full ride, including housing, there wasn’t much discussion. His mother liked the idea of him being close to home. Walker wasn’t that excited about Tulane, but what was the alternative?
Like many freshmen, Walker was overcome with a desire to remake himself once he arrived on the Garden District campus in 1979. He started by telling everyone he was named after the famous Southern writer Walker Percy. He’d admired Percy’s celebrated novel, The Moviegoer, when he read it for the Colonel, even though the book had thoroughly confused him. After a few beers, he’d even tell people his dad had been boyhood pals with the author. Walker was his mother’s maiden name, but he thought the lie might help establish his sought-after reputation as a brooding Southern man of letters.
Around the time he began slipping the apocryphal origin of his name into conversations with girls and English professors, he toyed with the idea of smoking a pipe. He thought it might make him look more mysterious. In his more critical moments, he felt that he looked a bit too much like John Denver, minus the smugness. At 6’ 2” Walker was just tall enough to appear gangly, but too skinny to be imposing. His childhood habit of slightly tilting his head to the left when he talked gave off a hint of deference that he was beginning to dislike. He tried to remind himself not to do it, and that, in turn, made him seem stiff and distracted in conversations.
He bought a pipe at a pungent little tobacco shop near campus. He’d pose with it in front of the slightly warped mirror in his dorm room, but he could never bring himself to use it in public. The pipe might go over at an Ivy League school, but not at Tulane. Besides, he agonized enough about saying the right thing; he didn’t need a prop to distract him further. Instead, he decided to go a few days without shaving to make himself look a bit more threatening. He didn’t make any lasting friends in college, but he did keep the five o’clock shadow grooming policy as he grew older.
Walker was going to be a novelist, but a practical one. He wrote for the student newspaper, The Hullabaloo, where his literary flourishes, reporting skills and willingness to swear in print earned widespread popularity among students and the wrath of the administration. He took every journalism class offered, including one taught by a columnist at the Times-Picayune, who set Walker up with some freelance work writing book and film reviews for the paper. After graduation in 1983, Walker saw journalism as the perfect way to get ideas and pay the bills while tackling his real writing at night. Besides, it was easy.
Two years out of Tulane, Walker was a sportswriter for The Dallas Times Herald. He considered it beneath his talents. He frequently reminded himself it was just a way to earn money before the inevitable move to New York, where he planned to build a reputation freelancing for major magazines, maybe write a non-fiction bestseller to get some visibility, then start work on a novel. With some tinkering, he might even expand the Colonel’s story into a book. This was a big picture plan, of course, with no real timeline. Whenever it came to specifics, he got nervous.
To his credit, he started research on a biography of Jackie Robinson, one of his heroes, and was diligently pitching story ideas to national magazines every week. The rejection notices from The New Yorker, Esquire and even Ladies Home Journal covered an entire wall of his apartment, but it was only a matter of time before he got a break. He was only 24.
He tried to console himself by elevating his mundane sports stories to the status of literary journalism. The editors weren’t buying it, and his references to F. Scott Fitzgerald in high school football stories or the use of foreign words like sangfroid in profiles of local coaches were excised by his editors.
“Walker, come over here,” Lamar Boykin, the sports editor, yelled to him across the newsroom one day. It was a familiar occurrence. Boykin was holding a printout of a story on a high school basketball game Walker filed the night before. Boykin stared at Walker like he was trying to restrain himself. The dark bags under his eyes and his thinning black hair scared Walker. He looked old for 40. “You buried the lead again. How many times do I have to tell you. People want to know the score of the damn game before you tell them...” he paused to look down at the printout “before you tell them, and I quote, ‘Ross High played with a schizophrenic tincture of swagger and self-doubt that attends a team with marginal talent and lofty expectations.’ Jesus, Walker, ‘tincture?’”
“It means...”
“I know what it means. And this lead is a tincture of bullshit and too many college English courses. There, I used it in a sentence. Do you believe me now? This is a game story. I don’t want suspense. I don’t want pronouncements on the inner psyche of the team from Dr. Freud, which you don’t have a clue about anyway. I want to know who won the game and what was significant about the game. All right?”
“Got it,” Walker mumbled, hanging his head.
“Look,” Boykin said, his tone softening, “You’re a good writer. I know that. But you’re trying to do too much. This isn’t where you try out your Tom Wolfe routine. Just show me you can write a clean, simple game story with detail and color. Think about writing with economy. Go home and read some Hemingway tonight.”
Walker told himself he had to make a move, but he was reluctant. He alternated between visions of himself being praised as a great writer by beautiful Manhattan women and living alone in a dumpy basement studio in Brooklyn writing newsletters and updating Fodor’s Travel Guides to survive. He wasn’t sure he could do it.
In the midst of this indecision, he’d driven to Austin one Saturday during the fall to interview a football player from Dallas who got cut from the University of Texas team for “academic difficulties.” The rumor was he couldn’t read. A grad student who the athletic department paid to tutor the player had tipped Walker off to the story and set up an interview for him with the kid.
Walker was a couple hours early, and he planned to check out the stadium on game day for a little color in case the story panned out. That was when he saw Bridgett break away from the crowds headed to the game. She was tall and striking and had what he’d come to identify as a default look of appraisal on her face, like she was constantly sizing things up. He thought she glanced at him but wasn’t sure. Her blonde hair was short and straight, not teased out and frosted like most of the girls on campus. She had on stiff, unfaded dark blue Levi’s with two-inch cuffs and a Blondie concert t-shirt.
- Bill Crews
- Bridgett Finn
“Your English is very good,” she said when he asked her for help.
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you a German? Deutschlander?” she asked, smiling. “Based on the question, I just assumed you were from another country. Our football is different from your football, you know.”
“This is working out just as I’d planned,” Walker said, shaking his head, exaggerating his embarrassment.
“If you want to get to the stadium, find somebody outside with a beer and a big ‘T’ painted somewhere on their body and just follow them. It shouldn’t be that hard.”
“I thought following you might be a better idea.”
“Following me is a bad idea,” she said and paused a bit, looking right at him. “If you want to find the stadium.”
“I never liked football that much anyway.”
Whenever he told the story of how they met, he liked to conclude by saying, “I never filed that story on the player.” But wary of sounding too much like he was bragging, he’d adopt a shy grin and look sheepishly at Bridgett as he said it. Walker knew that his audience on any given occasion would create their own fantasy of what happened, filling in the blanks with material far more titillating than reality. They had shared a battered wooden study table in the library and talked about books and writing and their mutual desire to achieve some measure of literary fame. It was the kind of conversation where each person feels free to tell their life story to a willing audience.
Bridgett led Walker down the circuitous path that brought her to Austin. Raised in San Francisco, she’d gone to Stanford planning to study French. She switched to Spanish when the only French class she could get her freshman year met at 7:50 in the morning, which violated everything she knew about French culture from watching old Catherine Deneuve movies. Walker had only a vague notion that this was a reference to a famous actress, but he smiled in knowing appreciation of the line.
By her senior year — after extended stays in Europe — Bridgett could speak both languages fluently, plus some German, but she had gravitated to the English Department after auditing a course on translation theory. She became obsessed with understanding and documenting the decisions made by translators as they labored to shepherd great books from one language to another. She imagined them being more than a little disgruntled by their relative anonymity and the perception that they were viewed as some sort of blue-collar language welders. She was particularly interested in translators who were also fiction writers. She pored over their novels, short stories and poems, then scrutinized their translation work searching for their linguistic fingerprints — examples where their own style worked its way into the work of other writers.
Walker was mesmerized by this academic exotica. Who knew that there were grad students out there studying translators?
Bridgett admitted that in her fervor for translation, she managed to flunk astronomy and world religions. A pair of F’s presented some difficulties when she applied to Ph. D. programs after she graduated in 1981, but a solution soon presented itself. When her favorite professor and mentor left Stanford to chair the well-respected English Department at Texas, he talked Bridgett into following him there. It wasn’t her first choice. Like any good Californian, she’d visited Mexico and Europe more often than Texas — Mexico 5, Europe 3, Texas 0.
She ultimately decided the personal connection would offset the disadvantages of attending a school known for areas other than the one she hoped to study. And Austin had a great music scene and a friend told her it wasn’t anything like the rest of the state.
While she and Walker talked in the library with the band playing in the distance, Bridgett told him she detected something in his manner that she’d noticed in her interviews with translators, a certain calculated self deprecation mixed with pride.
“You want to show off for me, but you’re smart enough to know that won’t work,” she said. “I like that.”
It was the first time Walker experienced Bridgett’s habit of saying things that he would never dream of uttering. Walker instantly decided he’d found someone he could tell almost anything, so she became the first person he’d ever told about the Colonel. He launched into the story 25 minutes after meeting her that fall afternoon in 1985.
They started a long-distance relationship that put Walker on the road to Austin, about three hours from Dallas, every weekend. When Bridgett finished her coursework and began her dissertation a few months later, she loaded her books and clothes into her Honda and moved to the Big D. They lived in a charmless apartment complex with popcorn ceilings and wall-to-wall beige carpet dotted with cigarette burns. And they plotted their escape.
Coming Monday, July 26
Skip Tracer Installment 17: Writing your way out of a paper bag
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