L. on Wheels
On an eight-day road trip with Larry L. King, the crotchety West Texan who wrote some of the greatest magazine stories of all time, only one thing was certain: I never knew what was going to come out of his mouth next.
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“No, he actually sent it to me, but I felt that was too little too late. So I appointed Reverend Shrake to succeed him and sent Shrake detailed instructions on the park’s layout: twenty-one statues of varying poses and heights, but none under twelve feet tall, with some making speeches, some singing songs, some bestowing blessings, some receiving accolades. Twenty of them were to be arranged in a circle, with the tallest one in the center, with a jeweled clock in its belly button exhibiting the time of day.
“Well, Shrake sent me a letter saying he couldn’t quite get right the statue that was supposed to be kicking a football. As if that weren’t bad enough, he refused to knock down his house, which happened to be on the site where I’d finally decided the park should be built. And he claimed he’d only been able to raise five dollars and thirteen cents, so I fired his ass too and demanded he send me the funds, which he never has. I still hold that over his head. He’d better not mess with me or I’ll turn him in. Embezzlement is a crime.”
You don’t build a career like Larry’s merely by BSing, no matter how good your BS might be. His first real acclaim came for political stories. He left Texas for good in 1954 to take a job on the staff of “Congressman J. T. ‘Slick’ Rutherford, cowboy statesman,” as Larry still calls his old boss on first reference. He turned to writing full-time after Kennedy was shot, and the persona he presented—“Dress like John Wayne, quote a little Shakespeare”—made him an in-demand commentator on JFK’s successor. Larry’s 1966 Harper’s story, “My Hero LBJ,” is the favorite of America’s preeminent cultural historian, David Halberstam, who would later join the Harper’s staff with King. And Larry still laughs about his two weeks as a news show pundit after a Harper’s column he wrote accurately predicted—make that demanded—that Lyndon Johnson would not run for a second term. But Larry made his name with more-personal stories, writing about people and places that would have otherwise been forgotten, like his birthplace of Putnam, which was all but shut down after Interstate 20 rerouted traffic away from its lone blinking light. He wrote about places like those as someone who’d actually lived there, forging a brand of participatory New Journalism that, for his fans, rang truer than Hunter S. Thompson’s waking nightmares or George Plimpton’s locker room slumming. “America in the sixties was increasingly affluent,” says Halberstam. “It was the first time people ever talked about disposable income. But Larry was from a part of the country that was barely electrified, barely even touched by the New Deal. His was the voice of a region but also of a generation.”
Larry’s greatest achievement, by his own estimation and by that of us True Believers, was a 1971 story for Harper’s called “The Old Man.” The story described a car trip that Larry took with his dad, an 82-year-old blacksmith, dirt farmer, and lay preacher. Their relationship had been one long struggle; for Larry, Clyde King was a man of frustratingly few yearnings. But as Clyde got along in years, he admitted to small holes in life’s experience that he wanted to fill. Despite living in Texas almost all his life, he had never visited the Alamo or the statehouse. Those were the wishes that Larry fulfilled, and six weeks later, after Clyde had died from complications brought on by hardened arteries, or, really, from a lifetime of refusing to visit the doctor, Larry would turn the trip into his masterpiece. It sounded in his customary professional Texan voice, but it spoke to universals, of small dreams and big disappointments, of loved ones locking horns with a ferocity they’d never inflict on a stranger, and of what was left when the battles were over. He wrote of these things knowingly, and sweetly.
Now it was late afternoon. His sap suddenly ran low; he seemed more fragile, a tired old head with a journey to make; he dangerously stumbled on a curbstone. Crossing a busy intersection, I took his arm. Though that arm had once pounded anvils into submission, it felt incredibly frail. My children, fueled by youth’s inexhaustible gases, skipped and cavorted fully a block ahead. Negotiating the street, The Old Man half-laughed and half-snorted: “I recollect helpin’ you across lots of streets when you was little. Never had no notion that one day you’d be doin’ the same for me.” Well, I said. Well. Then: “I’ve helped that boy up there”—motioning toward my distant and mobile son—“across some few streets. Until now, it never occurred that he may someday return the favor.” “Well,” The Old Man said, “he will if you’re lucky.”
I’d brought up “The Old Man” when I pitched Larry the idea of turning our car trip into a story, which is part of the reason he’d initially balked. But sitting in the lounge of the Knoxville Hilton, where he rewarded me and Dave for our first day’s labor with about half a dozen each of the Bloody Marys he’d once enjoyed more than Kools, he started to talk about “life’s cursed attrition.” Of course, he began in his customary fashion—“So I said, ‘Rockefeller, if you got so much goddamn money, how come we’re sitting on the floor eating bait?’ and I got up and walked out of that goddamn sushi place!”—but then he started to run deeper.
“What I always wanted,” he said, “was a place in that first tier of American writers, with the Vonneguts, the Mailers. I don’t think I ever did quite manage it.”
“But if you’ve got all those stories that will last forever—” I started.
“No, Shakespeare is forever,” he said. “Mark Twain is forever. Those stories of mine won’t last forever.”
“Forever or not,” I continued, “you wrote ‘The Old Man,’ and no one will ever capture fathers and sons better than that.”
“That may be true. That’s the one story that came the closest to being what I wanted. When I gave that one to Willie Morris, in 1970, he told me that people will be reading it for fifty or a hundred years. Well, I told him I thought that was an exaggeration. But they still are. It’s still picked up and anthologized, and that’s after thirty-five years. God, I cried a lot writing that. I wanted it to be just right. And I worried a little bit about was it any good.”
We sat and watched the television behind the bar for a second, where the Bengals and the Broncos were playing on Monday Night Football. Larry returned to an earlier discussion of a technique that an NFL quarterback famous in the sixties had once advised was the absolute most productive manner in which to give pleasure to a woman. Then we went up to bed.
I made my first real mistake of the trip just outside Gadsden, Alabama. We were headed to Oxford, Mississippi, where Larry had scheduled dinner with some old friends, and the plan was to get to town in the early afternoon and take some time to rest up. Manning the map, I saw that a couple of connecting state highways offered a straight shot across Alabama, so I directed Dave to turn right at Gadsden.
This was officially two-lane, backwoods Alabama: thick trees and deep green brush that seemed to reach over the road and block out the sky; cars on blocks in front of beat-up mobile homes; and every business a garage, a used-tire store, or a restaurant or bar bearing the name of somebody’s mama—Sara’s, Lola’s, Foxy’s. We were soon stuck behind a series of logging trucks, and with every pebble that flew from the big rigs’ tires and snapped—pop!—off our windshield, Larry would yell out, “Snipers!” But the detour ceased to be quaint about the time our air conditioner stopped blowing cold. The scene was all too familiar for Larry, whose mind drifted back to tense all-day drives just to get through Birmingham. “My God, when the first civil rights wars were coming, in the fifties and sixties,” he remembered, “the people down here were clannish and hateful. If you drove through here with D.C. tags, they held you personally responsible. I had plenty of folks cuss me and throw stuff at my car. They were so paranoid that for years it seemed like every car in Mississippi had a bumper sticker that read ‘The most lied-about state in the union.’”
Larry asked me to plug in his nebulizer, a device that fed him lung medicine in a fine mist. I slid its adapter into a power point in the console and hollered, “Contact!” into the backseat. Larry yelled, “Contact!” right back and bit down on the machine’s mouthpiece to take a fifteen-minute treatment. At one point he pulled out the mouthpiece and said, “I guess it’s a good thing we can’t pass anybody or one of these goddamn old Alabama women might think I was sucking on my bong.”
Once in Mississippi, we refound the interstate, and the air conditioner started back up. Reinvigorated by the nebulizer, so did Larry.
“Burt Reynolds and I got into a little feud on Whorehouse. See, what charm as that show had was because the sheriff was an older fella, and the madam had reached middle age, and they’d had a romance since they were both very young. But Reynolds refused to play the sheriff as ‘an old fart,’ as he put it. And since he was then the number one box office star in America, the studio let him have his f—ing way. So I got pissed off. I knew a bunch of gossip columnists, and I started calling them up and suggesting they ask what I thought about Reynolds. Then I’d answer, ‘Well, I guess he wears those elevator shoes because he’s about half midget, and he wears that wig because he must be bald. But I suspect he’ll do an all right job.’
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