Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter (Including Various Digressions About Sex, Crime, and Other Hobbies)

Gary Cartwright's 1982 collection, Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter (Including Various Digressions About Sex, Crime, and Other Hobbies), brought together the best of his work from such magazines as Harper's, Rolling Stone, and Texas Monthly (where he has been on the staff since 1982). And his best was very good indeed, for during the seventies, when most of these pieces appeared, Cartwright ruled.

Several of the stories provide a vivid background to the wild doings of Cartwright and his friend Edwin "Bud" Shrake in Shrake's novel Strange Peaches. In "Who Was Jack Ruby?" Cartwright paints the definitive portrait of one of the all-time great losers, the volatile minor mobster who ran a sleazy strip joint in downtown Dallas called the Carousel Club and shot Lee Harvey Oswald in front of God and everybody. Jada, the redheaded stripper who worked at the Carousel and liked to drive around Dallas in a gold Cadillac convertible wearing a mink coat, high heels, and nothing else, makes a cameo appearance.

Cartwright had a real empathy for the down-and-out, the outcast, the bizarre. One of the most compelling pieces is a long profile of Candy Barr, the most famous exotic dancer in Texas history. Cartwright visited Candy, née Juanita Dale Slusher, at her cottage in Brownwood long after the headlines and the fame. The star of Smart Aleck, the best-known porno flick of the fifties, she had a prison record (marijuana possession) and a penchant for poetry. Cartwright calls her a "great survivor, [a] great lady."