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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While I waited for Roy, I read the graffiti scribbled on the front of the store. Then a man and a woman pulled up in a large, squishy-looking LTD. He was in his forties, heavyset and balding. He had on sandals and blue-jean cutoffs that exposed his white, hairy legs. The woman — bleached hair and a little pudgy — was wearing Bermuda shorts, sandals, and a loose-fitting top. They acted like they might be in love. As they started for the side door, I cut back through the store so I could observe them as they walked into the bar. They did exactly what I had done. They bought beer, looked out the back, then studied the photographs for a few minutes. I couldn’t overhear them, but I could see the man pointing and could imagine him saying, “See, that’s Hondo Crouch, and here’s Hondo and Guich with Goldie Hawn. You know Guich. He used to be that real dumb cop on Carter Country.” They could stand there and look at the photographs, then turn around and see it all. Maybe even the bartender was someone famous or was going to be famous. After they went into the general store, four women who looked like Easter eggs in pastel pantsuits came in. They did the same thing.
I hesitate to generalize from such a small statistical base, but I think that looking at those photographs is an important part of being in Luckenbach. Most of us who grew up in Texas watched television and movies, and we noticed that for the most part we lived in conventional houses and neighborhoods rather than on large ranches with cattle and oil wells. We grew up feeling like we were missing something, that our personal lives didn’t quite muster up. By coming to Luckenbach, we can momentarily align our two realities. We can stand there in the store and see how real it is — it isn’t a movie set, it’s obviously old — and at the same time, we can look at photographs and see that Luckenbach exists on that other plane. To first-time visitors, it is like standing with a foot on both sides of the state line. For an instant they know exactly where they are. To regulars, I think, Luckenbach was the trapdoor in their perception of everyday life.
After the women in pastels disappeared into the general store, Roy McNett arrived. Judging from his appearance, he had been a likely successor to Hondo and Guich. With dark hair and eyes, a moustache, and clean, regular features, he was good-looking in a wholesome way. He was wearing cowboy boots, freshly laundered jeans, and a starched shirt. He got a bottle of J.W. Dant’s out of the truck and suggested that we sit at the picnic table on the far side of the game of washers. As we walked under the trees, a bed of beer caps rustled beneath our feet.
Roy said that he first came to Luckenbach in June 1977, and he liked it so much that first night that he talked Kathy Morgan into giving him a job. She said he could live in the egg house, a small frame building not far from the picnic table. He went home to Beeville and quit his job as editor of the Bee-Picayune. By the time he moved back for the Fourth of July weekend, the Jennings-Nelson song was out. Four thousand people came to Luckenbach the first weekend he was there, and the crowds didn’t let up till school started. Television stations sent film crews out, while radio stations and newspapers called from all over the country to ask what the weather was and how much beer had been sold. Roy told me about how he was interviewed while he took a bath in the creek and how there were only two employees to take care of the crowds. At night after he closed down the bar and went to the egg house to go to bed, he never knew who would be there waiting for him. He eventually took off for Colorado, but he ended up just down the road in Blanco, where he and his father own the Blanco County News.
People drifted over to talk; sitting around the table, everyone was pretty vague about why they kept coming to Luckenbach. Sometimes the music was good. Sometimes there was something magical. I gathered from the atmosphere that I had chosen a day when Hondo had better things to do. Bored, we all watched a duck mount a chicken, and someone pointed out Waylon’s Wall — a wire fence that the Alcoholic Beverage Commission made Kathy build to define the limits of the property. In the history of Luckenbach, the erection of the fence was an event comparable to the arrival of barbed wire on the open range. The mention of Waylon Jennings reminded someone that neither he nor the songwriters from Nashville — Buddy Emmons and Chips Moman — had ever been to Luckenbach. Guy Clark, who wrote “L.A. Freeway,” told them about Luckenbach in Nashville and they decided it was what you heard Texas was supposed to be. Someone else at the table remembered how tourists had started stealing the signs off the store, and then someone told how a drifter had had the nerve to steal Hondo’s guitar — the memory of that act of irreverence brought the conversation to a halt for a moment. On a lighter note, Roy said that the sign for Luckenbach had been ripped off so often, the highway department no longer bothered to replace it. As I listened, I realized that there was a deep-seated concern for authenticity. Most of the people at the table — though regulars — were relative newcomers who had never known Hondo. They regarded him as a founding father, white-haired, above reproach. Unlike Guich, Hondo hadn’t gone to Hollywood. He had refused to “go commercial.” His had been the authenticating presence.
But from my point of view, Luckenbach was a history of thefts and betrayals. Benno Engle betrayed Hondo, Shatzie, and Guich when he didn’t tell them they would lose the post office. Hondo and Guich betrayed the Luckenbach community by bringing in all the crowds. Guich betrayed the spirit of Luckenbach when he went to Hollywood, and Kathy Morgan betrayed the past by letting things change. The song and the thefts were simply the last in a series of betrayals that had begun to sound like the begats in the Old Testament. Perhaps it was this heretical thinking at Luckenbach, but suddenly a stiff, cool breeze blew in from the east, bringing clouds that looked like rain.
I stayed at Luckenbach long enough to get thoroughly chilled. When I got in my car to leave, I remembered what someone had said — that Hondo was “just as good as Mark Twain except he didn’t write as much.” I thought about Twain and Huckleberry Finn — how the book captured the Mississippi, how Huck and Jim stayed alive from generation to generation, and how they in turn kept Mark Twain alive — and I couldn’t understand how anyone could make the comparison. Most people, if they were going to make comparisons, said that Hondo was like Will Rogers, and it’s true that there was a physical similarity. The first time I saw Rogers on an old newsreel, I thought immediately of Hondo. I was therefore surprised when years later I read in Hondo’s diary that he wanted to be like the humorist.
We all want to be like someone else, but if we are ever going to do anything original, to make a lasting and genuine contribution, we have to outgrow our heroes and be ourselves. Hondo, on the first page of his diary, said that he knew he was different. He wanted to put down his story so that someday he could read it. Hondo wrote about his job at the chemical plant in Corpus, about swimming and hunting, but the one thing he never did, at least not in his diary, was to look inside himself to see why he was different. Perhaps celebrity, followed by his father’s death and his own fateful shoulder injury, had come too soon, but in a way it is almost as if he took his third diary entry too much to heart. The sort of motto seen in offices and barrooms, it said, “It’s not what you do its what you make other people think.” In Luckenbach you didn’t have to do anything. The key verb there was “to be.” Everybody is somebody in Luckenbach.
As I drove home to Austin, I remembered being a little boy, standing on the side of the swimming pool with other little boys, all of us poised for a dive, and Hondo calling out, “All right, men, on your marks…” I liked him so much. We all did. He understood how much we wanted to be men.
That memory had made it difficult the last time I saw him at Luckenbach, dressed like a fool in a stovepipe hat, a bearskin coat, and jeans tucked into his boots. I had taken someone I cared about to meet my old friend. When we went up to say hello, Hondo immediately pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, something he had written, a joke. I tried to talk to him, but he had a routine to perform. We made no connection, and I felt like I was onstage, refusing to play my role. I supposed to most people it looked as if Hondo was just being himself. The irony was that Hondo had such a hard time being himself, and I think that was part of the deeper appeal of Luckenbach. He acted out in public the struggle that we were all having to be ourselves. After Viet Nam we couldn’t feel innocent or virtuous or young or any of the things we thought we had been. The tragedy was that Hondo gave too much. He chose to live out his public role as an old whittler who chewed tobacco and said funny things, and in so doing he carved away what was personal until he had made himself into an icon, a roadside curio anyone could get.
But memories — at least those that are old and personal — are arbitrary, and like dreams, they can be interpreted. Knowing this, I will end by remembering a night in the Hill Country when Hondo took a bunch of little boys out coon hunting. It was cold, and the stars were white. We ran through the creek bottoms, shining flashlights up into the trees. I can remember the excitement, being out in the dark and being part of a pack. When it was time to go and we were getting back in the truck, Hondo noticed that I no longer had my flashlight. I said that I had dropped it down by the creek — I wasn’t sure where. Hondo told the other boys to wait while he took me to look for it. As the two of us walked through the pasture, I was sure we would never find it, but after retracing our steps for a while, there it lay, silver in the grass. I like to think of that cold night when Hondo taught me to go back and look for what I’d lost.
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