The sights through the window were not all that remarkable in the daytime. But there were trees in Union Square and occasionally people: pantomime fags and elderly insurrectionists.

  And you could be treated to the odd traffic snarl along the avenue—and the operetta that went with it.

  The window was convenient, in other words, if you got tired of watching the mechanism inside Cooper’s jukebox, or meditating on the hand-lettered sign which hung above the mirror behind the bar—a sign which said: TOO MUCH AIN’T ENOUGH.

  That motto had been Cooper’s favorite ever since Billy Joe Shaver used the line in a song titled “Old Five and Dimers.”

  I had been drinking alone but enjoying it when Cooper finally leaned in beside me at the bar.

  D. Wayne had been running around acting like an owner, talking to the four or five other customers in the place, whom he no doubt suspected to be undercover fire insurance inspectors and juvenile officers.

  When I told Cooper about Herb Grant and my power play in the limo as we drove down to his joint, D. Wayne only grinned and said, “Too much ain’t E-nough.”

  Now as he slouched at the bar he said he thought it was time for him to switch from beer to a South Dallas martini.

  The bartender gave Cooper his drink and gave me another J&B.

  “Well, here’s to all them little blonds at poolside,” Cooper said.

  He put away most of his South Dallas martini in one gulp.

  He said, “You know, one thing you’re gonna be needing, Frank . . . which I been intending to bring up . . . except you’ve been busy . . . is what you might call your basic new driver for the Silver Goblet.”

  “Where are you going?” I said. “Back in the Marines to keep from getting married?”

  “That’s another thing,” D. Wayne said. “Looks like I ain’t gonna get married.”

  “Why not?”

  “Same reason I can’t drive for you no more,” he said. “This joint we’re sittin’ in.”

  “If it’s taking too much of your time, get somebody to run it for you,” I said.

  “Frank, that just shows how much you know about certain things,” Cooper said. “You can’t let nobody run a joint for you. If you let somebody run a joint for you, the first thing you know, it’ll be their joint, and you’ll be phonin’ up trying to get a reservation for dinner.”

  “You must know somebody who could handle it,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know all kinds of people who’d be real good in this binniss,” Cooper said. “But there ain’t none I’d let run my joint unless I had me some damned old lettuce I wanted to send somewhere by way of a rabbit.”

  D. Wayne asked the bartender to do it again.

  He said, “Looks like this sucker’s gonna be a gold mine, is what it looks like. It needs my full attention, Frank. I can’t tend to that silver auto-mobile and this gold mine at the same time and do either one of ’em much good. I can’t go flogging it out to the Left Coast and all that, either. I got to watch my joint, Frank, is what I’m tryin’ to say.”

  “What happened with Katherine?” I said.

  “That’s a real fine woman, old Katherine,” said Cooper.

  “Katherine’s a singer,” I said.

  “We were about as much in love as any two people could be who didn’t exactly agree on everything,” Cooper said.

  “Did you have an argument?”

  “Naw, there wasn’t no argument or anything,” Cooper said. “It wasn’t no argument on my part at least.”

  I said, “It’s not like Katherine all of a sudden to develop a dislike for gold mines.”

  Cooper said, “What happened was, she sat in here one night and started talking about how good it would be if I had a different kind of entertainment on Tuesdays. Or maybe on Tuesdays and Fridays both. She mentioned Cole Porter and some of them folks.”

  “I suppose she suggested that she could even appear on the bill now and then,” I said.

  “Now, Frank, I didn’t want her to give up her singin’,” Cooper said. “Katherine’s singin’ was too important to her. I never would have said that. Her singin’ was one of the reasons me and her fell in love. All I said was, I wouldn’t mind her singin’ in my joint if she could do a whole lot more ‘Honky-Tonk Angels’ and a whole lot less ‘Poor Fuckin’ Butterfly.’”

  “I don’t see why that would upset her,” I said.

  “Aw, it didn’t really,” he said. “Katherine don’t actually have a temper, as you know. She looks about half tame even when she’s hot.”

  Cooper was right about that. Katherine had a cynical placidness to her that was part of her allure. But if you looked deep, you began to see all the years in the piano bars. If those years had ever given her that thing show business calls the bruised-by-life quality to her voice, she might have become a big star, and the years would have been worth it to her. But they hadn’t. The years had only given her the loser’s disease. It wasn’t the worst disease in the world, and Katherine certainly had other virtues, but she had the disease, and it was one without a cure.

  “I guess she said it was better for everybody if she just took it on to another cabin,” I said.

  “That’s pretty near it,” Cooper said. “There ain’t no hard feelings or anything.”

  I motioned to the bartender for another backup.

  “Life’s a funny old raccoon,” I said.

  “Ain’t she?” said Cooper.

  I asked D. Wayne how he was going to like being wealthy, seeing as how Cooper’s Country was a gold mine.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I believe I can tolerate it. I don’t think it’ll be a shuck harder than bitin’ down on a dandy old pair of titties and prayin’ for lockjaw.”

  39.

  COOPER PARDONED HIMSELF for a while to go check the arithmetic of his bartenders and waitresses. And he said he also wanted to see if his chef had learned how to say chicken fried steak in Puerto Rican yet.

  I was looking out of the window at the traffic just as a taxi double-parked in the street and a door opened. Sally Hawks got out and walked around the Silver Goblet to step onto the sidewalk and head for the entrance to Cooper’s Country.

  I twisted around to face the mirror.

  Sally eased into a bar stool next to mine and took the cigarettes out of her shoulder bag. She lit a Winston and blew the smoke at an angle slightly away from me.

  “Also,” she said, “you knew the dog could sing.”

  I ordered Sally a drink.

  “How was Switzerland?” I said.

  “Very Swiss.”

  Where around Geneva, I asked, were they shooting the movie.

  “Across the border in a French village,” she said.

  “They’re shooting The Magic Mountain in France?” I said.

  Sally said, “The director says the location looks more like Davos than Davos.”

  It occurred to me that Sally had returned home a day early. I asked if the junket had been cut short, or did she miss me?

  “I got tired of hearing words like idiosyncratic,” she said. “Listen, I want to talk about what you know I want to talk about, so let’s talk about it.”

  “How’d you know where I was?”

  “Arleene,” she said.

  “She tell you about Grant?”

  “Yes.”

  “And me?”

  “She said you outdrew him, but you only winged him,” Sally said.

  “When did your flight get in?”

  She said, “We’re not talking about what I want to talk about, are we?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to tell me that you’re more than just a hired gun,” she said.

  “I intend to be,” I said. “But I have to win first. That’s my charter. Is this for journalism or for us?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said.

  I took a swig of Scotch and said, “Kaplan was an actor.”

  “Gee, that’s surprising,” she said.

  “D. Wayne made the phone call to Skidmore,” I said.

  I watched Sally as she seemed to dwell on that news for a moment, and I thought I detected an effort on her part to fight back a grin.

  “I didn’t think the Skidmores were bringing a lot to the dance,” I said.

  She said, “So you figured you’d give them a little massage?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “But I didn’t know I’d get that much makeup on my hands.”

  Sally asked about the rest of it.

  “Believe it or not, I didn’t know about the Roman candle. And I didn’t know the dog could sing,” I said.

  “Watts and Travers?” she said.

  “They didn’t know it, either,” I said. “I had a couple of other things standing by, of course. But they wouldn’t have been as real as what really turned out to be real.”

  Sally finished her drink. She put out her cigarette. She picked up her bag. Then she pulled me off the bar stool and started dragging me out the front door by the arm.

  “What are you doing?” I said, in something of a giggle.

  She pushed me into the rear seat of the limo and got in behind me.

  She flicked on all four TV sets, which happened to be showing a soap opera, a game show, a movie, and a panel discussion, and she raised the volume on each set to its peak.

  “All right, tough guy,” Sally said. “Of all the things you’re surrounded by right now, tell me which one is real.”

  She removed her tinted glasses and did something to her hair that made it fall around her shoulders. Her hands worked their way over a path on my chest and up past my neck where they caressed my lips and one of my ears. Her body began to fit into mine and she gave me the longest, dampest, most vigorous kiss I ever got from a famous author.

  “You’ll have to tell me what’s real,” I said, coming out of it. “You’re the executive producer on this one.”

  Looking back on how Sally then forced the two of us lower into the seat, and thinking about all of the stunning late-afternoon theater that followed, I have wondered how I would shoot the scene for the ending of a movie.

  The way that seems to appeal the most to Sally and me, us being romantics, is to open on the first kiss through the back window of the Silver Goblet, and then move gradually into an aerial view of Gotham with the limo sparkling like a diamond in all you can see below.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Dan Jenkins is the author of ten best-selling novels and seven works of nonfiction. In a career spanning more than sixty years, he has written hundreds of newspaper and magazine pieces. A former senior writer for Sports Illustrated who achieved national acclaim for his stories on golf and football, Jenkins is currently a columnist for Golf Digest. He was a 2012 inductee into the World Golf Hall of Fame and is the 2013 recipient of the Associated Press Sports Editors Red Smith Award for major contributions to sports journalism. A native of Fort Worth and a graduate of TCU, he lives in Fort Worth with his wife June.

  The late Edwin (Bud) Shrake was born and raised in Fort Worth. He wrote for the old Fort Worth Press and the Dallas Times Herald before moving on to the Dallas Morning News and then to Sports Illustrated in New York City. He worked for many years in Hollywood and racked up a number of screen credits before settling in Austin. In addition to Limo with Dan Jenkins, Shrake wrote nine other novels, published an anthology of his shorter pieces, and was coauthor of seven nonfiction books, including the best-selling sports book of all time—Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book.

 

 

  Dan Jenkins, Limo

 

 

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