The Man Who Dreamed up Luckenbach
Hondo Crouch took a tiny town with a funny name and created a magical place where folks could forget who they really were. The trouble was, Hondo forgot too.
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Often Hondo’s pranks were intended to bring down the self-inflated, but you have to wonder who the audience was and whom they benefited. In Houston Hondo would stand around in the Museum of Fine Arts. Whenever a group of pretentious-looking women self-righteous about art passed by, Hondo would pretend to sneeze, cupping his hands over his face. When they looked at him, he would remove his hands, revealing a glass bubble dangling from a nostril. Once, Hondo met Rex Allen at an airport along with members of the press. With one finger up his nose, Hondo approached the star and pretended to wipe snot on the lapel of his gleaming white suit.
One night I walked into the bar at the Inn of the Hills in Kerrville and saw Hondo seated on the floor beneath the grand piano. He was very meticulously spreading out a meal that he had carried with him in a rumpled old paper bag. The Inn of the Hills had just opened and was pretty much the place to go and be seen at that time. When asked what he was doing, Hondo said that someone had told him that he just had to have dinner at the Inn, and since he couldn’t afford it, he had brought his own. What he was doing, of course, was making fun of the middleclass people from the small Hill Country towns who were so impressed by what was basically a new motel. Watching Hondo, I felt embarrassed because no one was laughing, but then, everyone in the room was paying good money to be there.
Whether he knew it or not, Hondo was engaged in guerrilla theater. He was breaking the rules of acceptable behavior to prick the bourgeoisie. Though some were certainly amused, he irritated a lot of people in Fredericksburg, particularly the hardworking, steadfast Germans. I don’t think, however, that anyone condemned Hondo, or, for that matter, made the connection when Juan turned out to be one of the most rebellious teenagers the Hill Country had ever seen. He compulsively challenged every authority and took every risk in search of limits. Then Kerry — the quiet son, dark and handsome, an honor student, and an outstanding athlete at St. Stephen’s — came home from UT and had his first psychotic episode.
In her book Becky went into most of this without sparing the details. She wrote about how her mother hungered for love and affection, how Hondo, lying in bed with Shatzie, told his wife that she would never understand him, and how Hondo’s mother, as a kind of warning, gave Shatzie the slug that killed Harry Crouch. Becky said that as a family they were always mystified by Hondo, that when there was a crisis, they often had no idea of what Hondo thought or felt until weeks later when a similar event would occur in the little make-believe world Hondo had created in Cedar Clippings.
After poring over Becky’s book several times, I felt more puzzled by Hondo than ever. It was almost as if in death he were once more playing one of his favorite games on the ranch, where a frequent taunt was “If it had been a snake, it would have bit you.” Hondo, for the benefit of his children and friends, liked to leave something treasured in plain sight and wait until someone saw it, or, in a more elaborate game, he would leave a trail of obvious clues leading to something that was of no value whatsoever.
With this in mind, I decided to go out to Luckenbach, which is certainly one of Hondo’s more obvious clues. I had already been to San Antonio to see Becky, who seemed as mystified as ever, and I had spent an evening with Juan on the Block Creek ranch. Of Hondo’s children, Juan was the one who spent the most time in Luckenbach and who felt that he finally knew his father. He and Hondo lived together on the Fredericksburg ranch until Hondo died. Juan inherited the ranch, but he leased it to Cris to pay the taxes and moved onto the Block Creek ranch, where he and his wife turned the old hired-hand’s shack into a honeymoon cottage. To get to the house, you had to drive several miles on rough caliche roads, stopping along the way to open three gates. They keep one of the gates locked and have an unlisted telephone number to protect their privacy against people from the Luckenbach days who might drop in or call.
In his own way Juan is just as compelling as his father. He is a slight but well-built man with Hondo’s brown eyes and Shatzie’s blond hair. There is something warm and vital about Juan and also something wild that makes men follow him into hair-raising stunts and that makes women — in the same spirit — throw themselves at him. He seems to thrive on physical danger. Because he broke the rules and jumped out of his helicopter in Viet Nam, he was the only survivor of the crash.
Juan isn’t the type to speculate about other people, but one night, after he drunk all the beer in his house and a gift pack of German wines, I asked him about Hondo. What had he wanted to do? What did Luckenbach represent? Juan thought about it, then said that Hondo’s main accomplishment was being Hondo and that what Luckenbach represented was personal freedom. As Juan saw it, a couple from Dallas could leave the kids with the babysitter, come to Luckenbach, and do whatever they wanted without their neighbors or anybody else knowing about it. He recalled one woman, a contestant in one of the chili cookoffs, who entered a stick-horse-riding contest. “I guess she really wanted to win something,” Juan said. “She didn’t take off her clothes, but it was pretty incredible what she did with that broomstick. Hondo could get people to do anything. One Sunday afternoon some of those chili cookers were out from Austin with a cannon they would drag around. Hondo would get everyone to stand out in the street in formation. When they fired the cannon, everyone would fall down and play dead.”
As he talked, I thought about Andy Warhol, who could get people to do anything by appealing to their narcissism. It was an odd comparison, but Juan made Luckenbach sound like a happening, a replay of the sixties for the sort of people who had stood by and watched angrily or enviously while students and hippies broke all the rules. Those same people, under the auspices, of the quintessential small town, could shed their inhibitions and make up for lost time. I’m sure that no one thought about it at the time, and that if there was a connection, it was subconscious, but given the context of student demonstrations and Kent State, the mock group assassinations in Luckenbach took on different overtones.
WHEN I ARRIVED IN LUCKENBACH ON A Sunday afternoon and drove into that shady little cul-de-sac that lies above Snail Creek, I thought of that ominous moment in westerns when you first see the village and from the pervasive air of torpor you know it has been invaded by outlaws. In front of the general store a mean-looking dog, part pit bull and part hound, stood barking where it was chained next to a truck. A large, beefy man dressed like a biker — black boots, greasy jeans, keys on a chain, and a sleeveless T-shirt that revealed tattoos — stepped out the side door of the old general store and walked down toward the creek. Inside, a handsome man in his late twenties with a long braid hanging down his back was working behind the bar. Through the back door I could see a small group of people sitting beneath the oak trees, drinking beer and watching a game of washers.
I got a beer, and then I did what I had always done in Luckenbach — I went to the wall opposite the bar and studied the framed photographs from magazines and newspapers that attested to the celebrity of Luckenbach and its inhabitants. In the old days it had been strange to look at the pictures and turn around to see Guich and Hondo. They were both photogenic men, and given the appearance of the current bartender, I wondered if that was just coincidence or if Luckenbach was a little backwater of narcissism.
There were some new pictures, but the old one of Hondo with his hat tipped back, sitting on the porch and strumming a guitar, was still there. The Saturday Evening Post ran the photograph in 1964 with a story called “LBJ Country,” and in the text, Hondo was portrayed as a coy rancher who, when asked by a tourist for directions to the LBJ Ranch, pretended to be so country that he’d never heard of it. The photograph and story confirmed Hondo in his role. It was a wonderful photograph that made you want to know the man. Looking at it, I thought of what Juan had told me — that Luckenbach hadn’t had an idea since Hondo died, that Luckenbach had been Hondo and had died with him.
I studied the rest of the photographs, then took my beer into the front part of the building, where it was too dark to see the dusty, cobweb-covered remains of the general store and post office. The front door was open, so I went out on the porch to wait for Roy McNett, who had agreed to meet me there. In 1977 Roy moved to Luckenbach to be the bartender. He hadn’t known Hondo, but he had witnessed an interesting period in the history of Luckenbach. After Hondo died, a group of regulars — people who were mostly in their thirties and lived in the area — took it upon themselves to keep Hondo’s spirit alive. They watched Kathy Morgan “like a hawk” to make sure she didn’t change anything. They complained to her when things didn’t seem the same. On Hondo’s birthday they gathered to listen to tape recordings of Hondo speaking. They erected a likeness of him — a small bust — and when things seemed right, they would raise an index finger toward the sky and say, “Hondo’s here!” One of them, a man who had moved to Gillespie County to be near Hondo, became the unofficial hagiographer and spent two years researching and writing the life story of Hondo Crouch. When the song about Luckenbach came out and the tourists flocked in, the regulars sent out press releases recounting the resulting desecration. They felt that Luckenbach belonged to them, and they resented outsiders, which was fairly ironic, since everybody was supposed to be somebody in Luckenbach.
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