A South Texas Gulf Coast winter approaching was nothing like what I expected it to be. I continued to work on the house. Jeri’s wife Odette had given us some carpet squares from a construction job she had worked at. Our living room was a series of carpet remnant squares that were all earth tones left over from the 70s. I added color where needed and where the carpets had been wearing.
In preparation for Brooke and Grandma’s visit, I painted the bathroom. Dad’s reaction to the painting of the bathroom strongly indicated that I had clearly done a lousy job when he said that with all of the paint that I had gotten on the bathtub, he was surprised that I just had not painted it.
I was still unemployed. We had retracted into a bit of a leaner mode. We were not frequenting bars as much as we used to. Dad was carrying everything. We saw Jeri and Odette more often.
During this time, Dad and I founded our famous Sunday Morning Gentleman’s Club. The TABC patrolled the beaches on Sunday mornings looking for people with open containers. Drinking alcohol in public before noon on Sundays was not permitted. The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Officers fined a lot of people for this violation.
At this point in my life, and at this place in the world, this sort of restriction seemed very unreasonable. I guess it’s kind of like telling a teenager that they cannot do something, and ultimately they find a way. The Sunday Morning Gentleman’s Club was our way.
There were four core members, my Dad, me, Steve, and Glenn. Every Sunday at 10 AM sharp everyone would arrive, and the dart games would commence. On the stereo, Joan Jett, Robert Palmer, Little Feat, Joe Walsh, CCR, Uriah Heep, Montrose, and many other, classic artists would play while we sip beer and enjoyed throwing darts and talking about what happened the previous week or anything that we wanted to discuss. We threw an initial dart to determine teams and away we went. A favorite team name was the MG’s (Mike and Glenn). Every time Steve and my Dad were kicking our butts at darts, Glenn would walk up to the throw line and say, “The MG’s fixin’ to kick into high gear, there.” These Sunday morning sessions highlighted all of the best of our friendships, our ability to make snacks, our sense of humor, and our intellect.
Sometimes someone would bring someone extra. When Steve‘s father-in-law was visiting from Pennsylvania, he came. I do recall that day, the conversation was dominated by the price of potatoes in Texas and Pennsylvania. Some Sundays were better than others.
Another time, Steve arrived telling the story of how his wife had a crash with their Chevette on Alister Street right in front of the Ice Box convenience store. She was so upset. She flung the driver’s door open and bolted out of the car, sprinting through the Ice Box parking lot and through the backyard and as Steve told it “one hand on the fence and never broke stride“ Crying hysterically. I sort of always envisioned this scene with Chariots of Fire music playing in the background. That phrase about “one hand on the fence” is one I have used 1000 times since then because it fits so many situations.
These were things that we talked about, always starting with a recap of what happened to us all the week before. Then it moved on to more knowledge-based content, followed by the telling of past stories. The games usually continued until about 1 PM. And then everyone went their separate ways.
On Thanksgiving, Jeri and Odette invited Dad and me to their house for dinner with their two children. They lived in Flour Bluff which was a town on the north end of South Padre Island just east of the causeway that led into Corpus Christie. They lived in a one-story house in which the yard was surrounded by a 4-foot chain-link fence. Jeri naturally wheeled and dealt with everything. He would go to the Thunderbird Drive-in Corpus every weekend and just sell things that he couldn’t help but acquire. He would come home with about $800 every weekend, he called it his spending money. $800 in 1984 was something.
The cars that he had in the yard were models all throughout the 1960s and 1970s and everything was for sale at all times. The car he drove the most was the 1965 Chevrolet Impala SS, dark green with a white interior. Everything he drove had For Sale written in white shoe polish on the back window followed by the phone number 939-7407.
If someone on the island needed a car and they told us they were looking for one, I would drive them to Jeri’s and they would buy a car. Glenn bought a Chevrolet station wagon one time. Texas was pretty cool, you never change plates they always went with the cars. so when you bought one, you pretty much drove on someone else’s registration, the rule was as long as you knew what the registrar’s name was, you were good.
Thanksgiving dinner was great. Jeri talked about Costa Rica and how he did not see it happening. Jeri had a lot of friends and a lot of connections. He knew a guy named Bob Jackson over at Koch (pronounced coke) Refinery in West Corpus. He said we could show up over there at 7 sharp tomorrow morning and press for jobs. Jeri knew the meaning of the word “no” just as much as he knew the meaning of speed limits he was confident he and I could get in as an instrument fitter and a fitter’s helper.
When dinner was over, it was decided that I would stay at Jeri’s that night out in the yard in his 69 Chevy pickup that had the slide-in camper on the back. Early in the morning Jeri and I would trek across Corpus Christi and go to the refinery and try to get hired.
That night I was cold. This was South Texas. I’ve never seen cold here. With a bit of coffee in me, we jumped into Jeri’s 65 and headed out South Padre Island Drive, the main artery that spurred through Corpus.
In South, Texas, when a heater hose breaks on your car, you don’t fix it, you take the good hose and you loop it back to the engine, because who needs heat in South Texas? So the 65 had no heat because the heater core was bypassed. We froze to death on the way into the refinery that morning. I will never, ever forget our reaction when we first heard a person on the radio tell us what the temperature was in Corpus Christi that morning. It was a brutal 53°! By our reaction, you would have thought that they said -3. Oh, how things have changed! 5 months of Texas summer and my blood was as thin as water.
Jeri and I did not get those jobs that day, but his friend Bob told us that he would figure something out. We headed back to Flour Bluff. Jeri was a joy to drive with, he never drove slow anywhere. He had been nailed for speeding so many times that when he did get pulled over now he and his wife changed places so that, they could either get out of the ticket or at least not have it go against his license.
Jeri had this fascinating way about him. When we were on the highway, he literally looked at every person we passed by. He studied people. I think it is what made him such an incredible buyer and seller. There was always assessment in his studying people. But it went deeper than that, he just knew how people were feeling and could read so many things about them. He was brutally honest. I was a mere kid of 19. Jeri was one of the people that was kicking my butt into adulthood.
That day Dad picked me up in Flour Bluff. We were hopeful that I was going to have a job soon and what was cool about this idea was that I could learn a trade.
I was always assuming that my 72 Dodge Dart was capable of “this or that” great thing. Although that 225 slant six was one of the best engines ever made, dependable and economical, and would go down in history as one of the finest ever, my personal feelings were as over-inflated as the air shocks I had on the car. On the drive home, Dad said “98“. I asked “98 What?” “98 miles an hour, that’s how fast this thing can go”. He shook his head, “That’s something you don’t wanna do, with the air shocks on the back of this, it was all over the place”. Yep, that was my dad.
Dad was in his winter mode. Spending a Saturday making homemade meatballs and sauce and freezing them in Ziploc bags. Making homemade bread. He found a recipe for something called Turkey Stuffing Bake on a Campbell Soup can and made it. At 19 years old, my tastes have not developed very far. They matured a great deal from when I was a kid and hated everything. Dad once told me that as a small child, the only two things in the world I would eat were the skin of Kentucky Fried Chicken and hotdogs. Now I liked fast food, Shake and Bake pork chops, steak, and pizza. I still had a long way to go. As far as cooking, fried dough, Shake and Bake, and MAYBE not burning a steak on the Weber, were pretty much my limitations.
I liked the way Dad cooked though. He had this invisible drive for curiosity that made him almost like a scientist. I appreciated the exciting curiosity and creativity that he had. It made cooking cool, even though I couldn’t do it.
The big surprise for me was that I loved the Turkey Stuffing Bake. It had peas in it. Peas were something I absolutely would not even tolerate! But here I was loving this dish. Years later, I would stumble across an index card that he glued that recipe to. In his absence, I would make this recipe to try to relive these days. This one thing was basically a spark that started a giant culinary forest fire for me and with it, I inherited all of Dad‘s creativity and his mad scientist-like mindset.
The most amazing about this is at a time when I felt the weight of not being effective, not contributing to the finances that Dad really needed me to, I really gleaned something so powerful from this. It was a type of training that is going to go down through generations. It already has. My sons also cook. I see my father’s particular brand of creativity in them as well. My only regret is that my dad did not live to meet them or see the talent manifest.
Over the next few weeks, Jeri told me to be ready. He had absolute faith in his friend and his friend’s connections to get us jobs. Although the initial phase of my father and my reuniting was over, it was clear that we had an incredible bond, a real friendship. We synced well, and we were ready for whatever came ahead. All I needed was a job.