Strange Peaches

When anybody asks me what Dallas was like during the time of the Kennedy assassination, I always refer them to one book: Edwin "Bud" Shrake's Strange Peaches. Later, they always say, "Wow, I didn't know Dallas was like that." But it was. Beneath its surface of Christian piety and conservative business values—ideas trumpeted in the pages of the Dallas Morning News—the city was wild, lawless, and seedy, particularly downtown, with its strip joints, greasy spoons, and bars right out of a crime movie.

Shrake's 1972 novel brings that world of big money, organized crime, right-wing politics, and prostitutes, all laced with booze and drugs, into sharp focus in the months leading up to November 22, 1963. The narrator, a tall, sardonic Texan named John Lee Wallace, is a TV actor, the star of Six Guns Across Texas. Based loosely on Shrake, who at that time was a well-known sportswriter in Dallas, John Lee drops out of stardom to return to Big D, where the parties never stop. His best friend is Buster Gregory, a wild-man photographer modeled on Shrake's friend Gary Cartwright (also a well-known sportswriter who is now a senior editor at Texas Monthly). Together they set out to make a documentary about modern Texas.

John Lee's celebrity status draws him into the orbit of an array of eccentric figures, including Big Earl, a wealthy businessman based on Dallas billionaire H. L. Hunt who eats weird health foods and writes corny songs. John Lee also takes up with Jingo, an exotic dancer at the Carousel Club who goes by the nickname the Tiger Lady. Her boss is Jack Ruby, who appears in the novel under his own name. Events hurtle toward the arrival of the president on November 22. As his motorcade passes Dealey Plaza, John Lee, camera in hand, stands close enough to reach out and touch JFK with a golf club. Then the shots ring out, and he captures the entire assassination as it happens—an echo of the famous Zapruder film. "It's the movie we've been making," Buster realizes as fiction and reality merge until, farcically, a goat eats the invaluable footage.

As post-assassination Dallas swarms with guilt, recrimination, and paranoia, Buster gets busted for marijuana possession, and John Lee lights out for Mexico, where he acts out the outlaw persona of his television show. He gets involved in a shoot-out with some drug dealers, and at the end of the novel he plans to return to Dallas with enough dope to buy Buster out of jail.