The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir Read online

  My father remembers vividly the early morning that Charlie crossed the creek and walked onto the lower forty of Granddad’s farm, pausing to cut a pliant young fork from a cedar tree with his pocketknife and cleaning it as he walked. When he was finished, he held a rough instrument. The two prongs functioned as handles and at the midpoint joined together in a single stick: a wand.

  Charlie asked Joe where he wanted the well and Joe pointed out a general area, which Charlie walked across, holding this dowsing rod out in front of his body, casually. About halfway across the space the divining stick plunged as though of its own accord into a dry furrow. Charlie smiled and circled the area a little and then held the humble instrument forth again and walked back across the spot at a forty-five-degree angle. Joe watched with his usual stoicism as the dowser crossed the same spot and the cedar branch plunged anew, as though forced by unseen hands into the parched earth.

  My father and young Joe were watching this performance expectantly from the top rail of a corral fence, and at this point Charlie called them over and took two pairs of pliers out of his coat pocket.

  “Now this time, boys,” he said, “I want you to walk with me. And I want you to clamp down on the handles of this here twig with all your might and if you allow it to bend even a smidge, I’m goin’ to thrash yuh.” He winked and smiled.

  This, the third time, Charlie walked across at a ninety-degree angle with each boy pacing him on a side, gripping the pliers with fierce concentration. As they came to the appointed place, the branches began to twist and bend in the pliers, complaining and weeping. The bending became a tearing and rending as Charlie walked closer to the spot. Then the cedar bent at ninety degrees toward the ground, in spite of any counterforce the two strong young men could exert. Joe Killingsworth stood, doubtless dumbfounded, chewing a stalk of hay. Whatever his true feelings, they would be held in check.

  The demonstration presaged good fortune, for Killingsworth dropped a well on that spot within a week and artesian water came bubbling up and flooded the thirsty soil of its own accord. The well itself remains, and I have quenched my thirst there on many a sweaty, humid summer afternoon. So must Robert Webb and Ann Killingsworth have shared the miraculous water. Despite the seeming disparity of fortune and ambition that divided the families as surely as the rambling scar of the North Fork, young love budded under the rustling leaves of the cottonwoods before the war.

  1969

  I sang in public for the first time on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark. My voice was untrained, though it had benefited somewhat from years of hymn singing. I was restless and looking around for some way to take advantage of my notoriety. My closest companions were Fred Tackett and Patricia, my majordomo Jim Beniche, my father, who had come out from Oklahoma to help me with my production and publishing endeavors, and Howard Golden, an ambitious and industry-savvy young attorney. Oh, and there was Satan. Old Scratch. The Devil.

  Satan was a semipermanent houseguest, getting a divorce and managing a girlfriend but finding time to lounge by my pool to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and works by Carlos Castaneda and Ken Kesey. I had a sauna installed in the old pool house, with a shower and an old gothic church window in the dressing room to the outside. We sat there in the fragrant heat, Satan and I, and had contests to see who could stay inside the longest at the highest possible temperature. It is gratuitous to add that he most often won these contests with ease. We engaged in long meandering conversations, mostly about his philosophy, which was not to have a philosophy. No one, before or since, was funnier or more ready for a bit of rowdy.

  He was unimpressed with the new Corvette. He had discovered an advertisement in a local newspaper announcing the sale of a number of cars and other machinery at Carroll Shelby’s warehouse. Carroll’s years of Class-A sports car racing were winding down and Cobras were for sale. We were among the first on the scene and wandered in well-oiled ecstasy through row after row of race cars, trucks, tools, a Cobra turbojet boat and other pricey knickknacks, finally coming to a reverent halt in front of a 427 Shelby Cobra, Carroll’s personal ride. The Devil flashed his grin.

  “Now here’s a sled,” he murmured reverentially, folding his arms and taking a step back, the better to take it in.

  The Cobra crouched in immaculate Shelby racing blue, the embodiment of barely restrained violence. It flat-out scared me. I had seen Cobras from the stands at Laguna Seca. I had seen little red 289s scooting around Hollywood with an impertinent snarl. I had never seen this big block monster 427 up close, especially Carroll’s car with its decidedly indecent bulging bonnet and flaring chromed exhaust headers, each one the diameter of a small cannon.

  Shelby sauntered over to join us.

  “Well, ya want me to wrap it up fer ya?” he drawled, betraying Texas ancestry.

  “How much you want for it?” I asked.

  “Thirteen thousand.” He leaned over the car and looked at his contorted reflection in the curvature.

  In today’s money that was about $130,000. I looked at the Big D. His grin had stayed in place, so I said to Carroll, “Can you give me ’til tomorrow to think about it?”

  He looked me up and down, surely thinking, No way this kid has thirteen grand. Then he said, “Okay. Tomorrow.”

  We walked out of there and crawled into the stifling heat of the Corvette’s sumptuous little cockpit. The ’Vette had gotten smaller. It was shrunken and ladylike and didn’t sound nearly as gnarly as before. I started her up and looked over into the Devil’s cold, gray blue eyes.

  “Buy it,” he said.

  Now known as a Super Snake it was reclassified as a 427 Cobra Semi-Competition. Although many 427 SCs were raced and never saw a public road, they had titles and were legal to drive on the highway. There were only two of these Shelby race-ready cars ever built. One briefly belonged to Bill Cosby, and now one of them was mine.

  I had an inspiration to drive that Cobra up to Vegas to see Elvis Presley. Presley was staging a comeback at the International Hotel and the Hollywood cognoscenti were all vying for tickets to witness the second coming of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Some, it must be admitted, were merely jealous or envious and interested in seeing the King lose his clothes. A casual perusal of rock history will reveal that Presley knew this and was terrified by the prospect of failure. Having missed the Presley phenomenon the first time around, I was mildly skeptical but curious.

  As usual, the Devil was amiable to any brand of mischief and readily agreed. It was late afternoon when we got started, wearing leather jackets and carrying a Sucrets box prudently packed with ready rolls to ward off the ennui.

  “Well, you must be happy,” I said to Satan as the big engine cranked over in a petulant mood, cantankerously launching a couple of blue Roman candles into the air.

  “In general, or about something in particular?” he asked without breaking his blinding Southern smile.

  “Don’t think I’ve forgotten it was all your idea … this Cobra thing.”

  He beamed brighter and laughed. “I seem to be at my best during moments of indecision, if you haven’t noticed.”

  The car coughed and hacked its impatience all the way down Hayvenhurst to the red light and ramp leading to the Ventura Freeway. We came to a stop, stifling our wild anticipation, and at first did not notice the CHP trooper mounted on a motorcycle as he coasted slowly to a halt beside us. He looked us over with a hard face, the typical Übermensch with his tiny, immaculately groomed red mustache and glossy knee-high leather boots. The afternoon sun was dropping behind the eucalyptus trees that lined the roadway. He looked; we waited.

  The Cobra waited as well, but with less patience at the long red light. Behind the wheel I was sweating bullets as the big cam cranked over and each time caused the car to dance its nervous little dance with an ear thumping whump, like a grandfather clock with giant stainless steel balls.

  I watched the temperature gauge move upward ever so slightly, as the big engine politely coughed and cleared its
throat. The electric cooling fans in the intake scoop up front automatically came on and whirred.

  “No!” I screamed at the car telepathically. “Don’t … not now…”

  At that second the Cobra launched one glowing, incandescent blue ball of half-burned fuel with a tremendous report like a signaling cannon, and then another: two missiles in quick succession. Both made direct hits on the trooper’s polished right boot. He was stomping his boot on the ground trying to get the fire out and almost jumped off the motorcycle but thought better of it. The light turned green. He reached up and keyed his motorcycle off, impassive, and stiffly extended the kickstand and parked the bike upright in the middle of the street. Nobody else moved.

  “Turn off the ignition please,” he said so softly I could not make it out over the sound of horsepower.

  “Excuse me?” I begged politely.

  “I said turn the Goddamn ignition off!” he barked, suddenly animated enough to place one hand on his gun and the other on my vehicle.

  I thought about our Sucrets box full of high-grade weed and looked over at Satan, whose expression was deadpan. His sangfroid was rarely displaced.

  “Do you realize, sir, that these baffles are illegal?” He gestured at the side pipes.

  “These baffles are factory installed on this vehicle, Officer. Without intentionally contradicting you I think you will find the inspection sticker is in order on this car, sir.” When it comes to politeness I am hardly ever upstaged.

  He leaned over and stared at the current inspection sticker with jaundiced eye. I had him, I thought.

  “License and registration please,” he ordered tersely. As I complied he looked at the racer from head to taillight shaking his head in silent anguish.

  “All right then, Mr. Webb,” he said after inspecting my papers. “I’m going to be writing you a citation this evening.”

  “For what?” I blurted in an unforgivable loss of cool.

  With a self-satisfied smile he handed me the ticket and my license, remounted his iron steed, and rode on to the Ventura Freeway without even a backward glance. I restarted the car and in the dim light of the instruments managed to read his deformed handwriting on the proper line: “For excessive display of speed.”

  I choked, handing the ticket to Satan, who howled with laughter. We both chortled as I revved the engine and put the hulking Hydromatic trannie in drive. He had written us up for an excessive display of speed while we were stationary and the engine wasn’t even running. The Devil and I tooled the Cobra up the Van Nuys on-ramp to the Ventura Freeway and headed southeast toward San Bernardino and Elvis’s opening night at the International Hotel.

  1941

  On a Sunday afternoon, news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor arrived in Western Oklahoma. My dad was visiting in the Killingsworth homestead and by chance, as in hundreds of thousands of American homes, the austere brown radio was on at that exact time. Joe Jr. and my father struggled to find the Navy’s huge Pacific base on a map and showed the family where it was.

  When things quieted down Joe Jr. and my daddy went outside on the porch. Joe pulled him closer and whispered, “That means us.”

  Within a couple of months Dad had boarded a Greyhound and taken the ride up Route 66 to Oklahoma City where he presented himself for the draft.

  At first the war went so poorly against the superior machines and manpower of Japan that the government misled its own citizens as to the seriousness of their situation and secretly prepared for a physical invasion of the westernmost states. Down amid the whispering cottonwoods Robert and Ann spoke often of impending catastrophe; Robert would be taken soon and sent into the maelstrom of total war. They had no illusions as to the outcome.

  At some pivotal moment they decided they would marry before it was too late, even though Ann was only a sixteen-year-old junior at Sweetwater High School. At seventeen, my father’s dates with Ann to this point had been carefully monitored. The only way Dad could date my mother was with her brother Joe Jr. and his girlfriend Jean along, including the caveat that all traveling must be done in my granddad’s ’42 Pontiac.

  A conspiracy was hatched. My dad went to his uncle Ernest, a persistent black sheep, even on the Webb side where it might be said that standards did not run quite so high as they did across the creek. Ernest had a beat-up old Ford that he loaned to my dad for an afternoon drive to the high school. In an amazing display of testosterone-charged hubris, Dad picked Ann up at school and took her up the road twelve miles to Erick, the scene of a hastily convened wedding party at Uncle Virgil’s place. The group made a short trip to the Methodist minister’s home and there the two kids were married, my mother in her school clothes and my father wearing a pair of blue jeans and brown shoes, tall and lithe and good-looking but now on the wrong side of the law.

  With thirty-five dollars between them they headed for Lubbock, Texas, cuddled in the backseat of a Greyhound bus. But when the cooing newlyweds arrived in Lubbock, the terminal was crawling with cops. Dad was promptly clapped in irons and charged with kidnapping.

  The next morning Ann was driven home by her indignant parents, her dreams betrayed by a girlfriend in whom she had foolishly confided details of the plot. For my father, alone and behind bars for the first time, life had taken a sudden depressing turn.

  Voices were raised on the Killingsworth estate. Ann was in a high temper over my father’s predicament in the Lubbock jail and for once laid down her own version of the law to her normally unassailable father and his equally phlegmatic counterpart. If they didn’t get Robert out of jail immediately, she said, they would have to watch her every second for the rest of her life; otherwise, at the first opportunity she would run.

  She meant it and they knew she meant it. Dad was released from jail and drove the old Ford back to the Sunshine Ranch, still smarting from his first encounter with the law.

  He went to work as a hired hand up on the highlands east of the creek, and he and Ann lived together in a one-room shack with an outdoor lavatory. To hear him tell it they were happy, even though their time together was of the borrowed variety, and too soon the day came for him to pack a single suitcase full of essentials and make the trip to the train depot in Sayre.

  The morning was pleasant and cool, and both families, after all that acrimony, turned out to say good-bye. They were all dressed in their Sunday best except Charlie, who for reasons of his own, was elsewhere. There were tears, kisses, and hugs, and then the big Santa Fe locomotive took Robert away.

  He finished basic training two months later. He had excelled, particularly with a rifle, earning a marksmanship badge. Ann settled herself with relatives near Camp Matthews on the outskirts of San Diego. They were able to see each other in almost painful intervals of intimacy knowing Dad was destined for the South Pacific. Perhaps there was no other way, but high in the government, great men were impatient to have the war over and done with, and the most expeditious, not the most humane, tactics were employed.

  Such were the anxieties and fears that filled the waking and sleeping hours of the young lovers until the night my father was ordered overseas. The soldiers received no warning. They were told to pack and pray and present themselves at the trucks that would take them down to the great harbor and the ships of war. As the trucks trundled along the highway that by chance ran just past where Ann lived, Dad agonized over not being able to leave a note or even place a phone call. He eased his KA-BAR out of his duffel and carefully cut a small peephole in the canvas that covered the back of the truck. Through the tiny hole he saw Ann’s little house come into view and as quickly disappear. It was the last he would see of her for thirty-seven months.

  1969

  The Cobra went up to one hundred miles an hour as easy as cream goes into coffee, still grumbling and launching fireballs from time to time, betraying an insatiable appetite to be in her comfort zone, which was another fifty miles an hour faster. Real race car driving was trickier than it looked on television. It took all my focus
to keep it straight and between the white lines as we penetrated out into the Inland Empire on Highway 10, past Ontario and its gigantic speedway, eventually toward Colton, home of my alma mater, and birthplace of my muse, the lovely Susan Horton.

  Night fell. Now we were cruising. Past San Bernardino on Highway 15, then onto the wide, buff-colored Mojave Desert. The evening chill and increasing altitude seeped into our clothes as the engine bit into the colder air. We homed through the desert on a mostly empty road. No gas stations, no houses, no roadside phones or rest stops, just the cacti, mesquite, and tumbleweeds of the high desert.

  There, the Cobra powered down and slowed to a crawl in a slight depression, and then stopped. Even the Devil looked stunned.

  We waited, the only two figures in an otherwise lifeless tableau. Hours crawled by and no assistance came. The questionable novelty of our situation quickly turned into fathomless boredom and irritation, punctuated by fits of temper directed at the Cobra (“fucking piece of shit”) and the desert (“my left ball just froze off”). Finally the Devil got so cold he stood in a tumbleweed and ignited it with a cigarette lighter. There he stood, his feet and legs swathed in boiling flames, smiling his enigmatic smile.

  “Does that work?” I asked.

  “Not really. I’m signaling.”

  Eventually a kindly driver chanced upon the pathetic scene and agreed to take us, shivering and babbling our gratitude, into the nearest town, humble Barstow. We checked into Leon’s Lucky Deuce Motel, a dung heap, and fell asleep. I dreamed that I was in Las Vegas and meeting Elvis.

  The next morning the Evil One and I staggered to Leon’s Lucky Deuce Garage. Leon was hunched over the engine compartment, undoubtedly challenged by the Gordian knot in the guts of the Cobra. “It’ll be ready when it’s ready,” he grunted. We headed to Leon’s Lucky Deuce Grill and Grocery for breakfast.

  “Places like this will be history soon,” said the Devil. “Soak it up while you can. In ten years that garage will be a parking lot and this joint will be a strip mall.” The Devil was always throwing that kind of shit in my breakfast.