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Ted Moore was my best friend for over 50 years. I met Ted at South Junior High in Abilene, Texas, in 1953. We were introduced by our mutual friend Cary Cooke. Ted and I found out that we were both scheduled to go to the woodshop area that afternoon after school where we were to get our asses beaten--Ted for acting hostile in woodshop, and me for stealing a toy that made the noise of a cow when you turned it upsidedown and back over again-- I mean, it let loose a beautiful loud moo, as though from a real cow. And if you jiggled it up and down, it would laugh, a very evil kind of giggle. So in Home Ec class, yes, I took Home Economics (because the best girls were in there and they opened it up to boys only one semester a year), I let loose a full cow moo one day and my teacher, Miss Williams, who had been a sergeant in the Women's Marines during the Korean War, caught me red-handed and took my moo cow toy away from me. I saw her put it in her desk, where she kept all the stuff she took from the kids. At lunch, I went around and had a friend boost me up and into the window of her classroom. I stole my own toy (actually it had belonged to my brother when he was a boy). Next day Sergeant Williams nailed me, read me my rights, and then sentenced me to twenty licks out in the woodshed. That is what I was doing there with Ted that afternoon. I stood behind Ted in the line of kids waiting to get whacked, and when they called him up to get his, he told me how he would be damned if it would hurt and he damn sure wasn't going to cry no matter how hard they hit him. A business math teacher, R.A. McCollough, we called him Rat's Ass, because of the R.A., whipped Ted. Twenty hard licks. And Ted never cracked anything but a sneering of his anger at them for disciplining him in so barbaric a way. I knew when I got up there I couldn't cry or show any sign of pain just like Ted. That's how much I already dug the guy and how much he was beginning to influence me, and after I finished my tearless session with the mighty Sergeant Williams, twenty Marine-pissed licks, he was waiting for me outside the woodshed. Then we had a loud macho session about how fucking tough we were and how frustrated Rat's Ass and the Sergeant had been for not being able to make us even whimper. For the next six years at least, Ted and I were inseparable. Neither of us had gotten love, understanding, or encouragement from our parents as kids. By the time we met, both of us were left on our own, had our own rooms, cars, lives, and we from that mutual dimension convinced ourselves we were brilliant, misunderstood kids who were going to shun the teachings of people we had no respect for and learn life on our own and in our own ways, different ways, however, as Ted was an accomplished logician by the time he got to high school where he could take Vadin Hiner's Physics classes and all the algebra, trig, and calculus he could swallow on the way to becoming a true scientist. I, on the other hand, was heading myself toward a literary lifestyle, more bent on imaginational accomplishments through writing, painting, and music. I wanted to write books, poetry, and play the piano madly. Through our connections, Ted and I learned by listening to music, especially blues and jazz (later Ted and I both developed a widely knowledgeable and astute love of classical music, about which we extensively corresponded), and reading wonderful books like Robert Lindner's "50-minute Hour," the author of the great "Rebel Without a Cause," which I read after the "50-minute Hour." Both books were Ted's idea. He loved psychology, mad about Freud. He got me fascinated with psychology and in return, I turned him on to the blues guys like Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), while we both despised and hated Elvis and the Hillybillies that hung around Ted's father and his music studio. We held everything we did in life under a psychological microscope-- Ted interpreted the mathmatical progressions of things while I gave them characterization and heavy sarcastic stares that penetrated into the concrete solutions to the abstract mysteries of life. And we knew psychology quite well by the time we parted and went our merry ways, including deep studies into sexual psychology. Ted and I read Havelock Ellis when we were 14, 15, fascinated by Havelock's stories, like the one I remember of the sailor who got so locked up (one of the top sexual problems of male dogs, by the way) in his girlfriend's vagina during hyperactive intercourse on a Thames wharf so definitely his screams attracted a couple of bobbies and eventually even the London tabloids. And Ted and I both wanted sex so bad--I mean we were so well-read in it, surely when we finally got some we'd be princes in the eyes of all those hot Abilene High babes we both cynically considered almost every time we were together--not only were we real men, we were confident we were better at everything we did than all the other Abilene kids our age put together. Ted proved all through high school that he was superior to most of his peers. I know I was Ted's only friend at that time. Cary Cooke introduced us, but we soon dropped Cary and hung mostly to ourselves (I still was friendly with Cary since we went to the same church and I always saw him at Monday night bible class, which was a social event for us kids in that church (the Victory Bible Center, owned lock, stock, and barrel by a quaint character named Joe Temple, what everybody called him as far as I can remember--I never heard him called the Reverend Joe Temple, nor do I recall Joe ever calling himself that), really--I guess now I see I led two lives in Abilene, one with Ted and one without Ted, the latter certainly the least in importance).

Ted and I developed an odd hobby. We began spontaneously making up of our own brand of IQ tests (we would jot them down on pieces of paper all during the day then arrange them into tests before we saw each other). We gave the tests to each other the next time we got together, first thing we did,giving ourselves time to answer the questions--questions only we knew the answers to--questions about Dostoyevski, another one of Ted's favorites--or a tricky question about an obscure blues record I had bought from one of our trips to the jukebox man up on North Fourth out passed Walnut Street, up the street from the infamous Hotel Wilson, a black hotel that when you passed it, there was always blues blaring from its club's jukebox--and Ted and I would drive past that place over and over, until one night, they simply said, why don't you two crazy white boys just come on in, which we did, hearing the blues at its roots that night and many a night after that (later discovering the Main Event Club on the main street of the black neighborhood in Abilene, out around Cedar Hill Cemetery in the valley under Holy Hump on which sat Abilene Christian College. Ted really loved those IQ tests. Of course we never scored high on these things; the questions were too eccentric for anybody, including us. We were more proud of our ability to ask unanswerable questions than we were of scoring high on the tests.

Ted was my soul brother. He was the young man with whom I learned the essentials of becoming a high-flying human experiencer and thinker--we were going to become great men--and Ted did become a great man, after struggles most people couldn't have handled--a famous father who was an asshole; being so smart he had trouble dealing with ignorance, and to Ted, most people were ignorant as a hayseed; an anger at life that drove Ted sometimes to mad wildnesses; a fierce striving to be the strongest (Ted worked out with weights every day that I knew him), smartest (Ted was valedictorian of the Abilene High class of 1957, and Cary Cooke was the salutatorian), and most brilliant human being that ever turned and told Abilene, Texas, to kiss his ass as he left to conquer the world.

Well, on Monday, January 21st, in Morgantown, West Virginia, where Ted had been a professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of West Virginia for many years, Ted Moore left this great old Earth--moved on out into the abstract--losing at last to thyroid cancer, after battling, and he told me he knows he died during the operation that kept him alive, a deadly spinal virus, losing the use of one of his legs to the point he had to drag his foot in order to walk, and then being hit with degenerative arthritis in his final years, losing the strength in his legs, arms, hands, eventually his whole body. From his graduate school days at the University of Houston, Ted was involved with creating some of the original quantitative management theories that developed in the sixties in industrial engineering departments, theories that led to "reengineering" or what we now know as "downsizing," a scheme that took over the global marketplace in the late eighties and early nineties. Ted was the first genius I ever met. He got to live 62 years, 41 of them married to a wonderful woman, who he told me when he met her he was going to marry her--that she understood him. She was the one. And Charlene really was the one. I never knew her that well. Ted and I parted company in the early sixties--afterwards, he married Charlene (I remember visiting them in their first apartment in Abilene--they had a cat named Thelonious)--and then I married my wife Mary and moved to New Orleans--though Mary and I and Ted and Charlene (yeah, I know, the movie) went down to Lowake and ate fabulous steaks together in 1964 at the occasion of my parents' funeral; then I went down to Houston one time and stayed with Ted and Charlene for a few days; and then, in 1972, Ted and Charlene and their son Tommy came to New York City and visited with Mary and me--we got them rooms at the Sutton East Hotel, which Ted loved because it was efficient and economical. Ted was really in love with economics by then and told me one time his big ambition in life was to be Secretary of the Interior or Secretary of Commerce in Washington. That was the last time I was to see Ted. We wrote incessantly after that, but never got a chance to get together again. We had the best damn long-distance friendship ever. But now Ted is dead--and he would encourage me to use the word "dead" and not a euphemism. For Ted was not a euphemistic kind of guy. He was explicit as hell and wasn't afraid to let you know it, either. Ted will never leave my memory. I still hear him and see him and know him in my subconscious. One of the greatest men I have ever known. L Ted Moore. My friend for life. 1939-2002.

I AM MENTIONING TED'S PARENTS, STARTING WITH HIS FATHER

Ted's father was Winston Moore. I am going by what I recall from many, many years ago when I met Ted, as the story above says, around 9th grade (Ted was in 8th grade), which would put the year at 1953. I met Ted that spring, and by the end of the summer, we probably saw each other every free day we had, except Sunday, when I was forced to "go to church," though later, my parents allowed me to miss Sunday night church and stay home and watch the Steve Allen Show or the Bob Hope Show, though it was the Steve Allen Show that was the funniest. After my parents went to church, sometimes I would call Ted and he would come over and we would watch teevee and talk. One time I told him to bring his drums. He had a short set of Gretschs, I think, a bass drum, a tub, a snare, hi-hat, a big ride, and a medium cymbal. My parents had bought me a piano, a Mason and Hamlin, back when we lived in Dallas when I was eight and taking piano lessons. Buying me a piano was a big deal. My mother had a pride and joy pump organ daddy had bought her for a hundred bucks. I beat the holy Hell out of that organ. That's where I started showing talent, so much so, my brother, just back from WWII in China, and living with us, said he would pay for my piano lessons out of his GI benefits. The piano mother bought me wasn't the piano I wanted. The one I wanted was one we had gone to look at, my mother and I, on a weekday evening, over into central Dallas, around Mc Kinney, Cole, Lemon, that area. I remember it was a nice low house back under some trees and surrounded by shrubbery. A grizzled older man met us at the door. He was a big fellow, though gone to grey and pot belly. He wore suspenders, I remember that. The piano he had for sale was a blonde spinet that he had customized, a common practice in those days (they were either reconditioned or rebuilt). The customization included putting a mirror all across the nameplate back board, the lid sliding under it to hide across the tuning posts that held the strings taut and in key. Then he had sanded it down to its natural wood grain, put a varnish finish on it, which brought out the wood's brightest color, and it was like a new piano, it was beautiful, a boy's dream piano. The old dude selling it sat down and demonstrated it. He played the "Spanish Two Step," a Bob Wills's tune I knew since even at that age, I was a great fan of Bob's. Bob wasn't country. He was western swing. Bob imitated the swing bands and jump bands of the day, like a mixture of Louis Jordan and Gene Krupa playing fiddle tunes and Mexican-flavored waltzes and stuff like that. I told my mother I thought the old dude was Al Strickland, who had been one of Bob's mainstay pianists throughout the forties, until the late forties when he was replaced in the band. My mother told me to shush it, but I eventually managed to squeak out the question, "Are you Al Strickland?" to which I got a charming, smiling, happy reply of "Yes, little man, that's who I am. Do you like Bob Wills?" "Yes, sir, I do," I replied with a grin, much to my mother's chagrin, for to her Bob Wills was the Devil himself (Bob was a heavy drinking, cigar smoking, womanizer of a playboy--his band was called The Texas Playboys, plus he played for dancing, and to my mother, dancing was more a sin than smoking cigars and womanizing, though drinking went along with dancing as far as rating as a sin). After that introduction, I wanted that piano so bad, but it wasn't to be. My mother couldn't afford his final offer. So I got the Mason and Hamlin, from where, I don't even remember. I know we kept it until my parents' deaths in 1964 when my brother and I sold it in a house sale (we even sold the house in that sale). So, the Mason and Hamlin had come to Abilene with us from Dallas and by the time it got to Abilene it was rickety but still fun to play, and I would sit for hours pounding away at it whenever neither of my parents were at home, especially every day after school when they both were at work and didn't get home until after five, which gave me an hour or more to flail away under the spell of my pianistic urges. My mother didn't like me playing the piano because by the time we moved to Abilene, I was playing boogie, blues, and jazz exclusively. Long gone were "the Marine Hymn" and "Davy Crockett" (the sheet music my father gave me as a birthday present one year). So Ted would come over on those long ago Sunday eves and that's how we started playing music together, Ted not a good drummer really and me not a good pianist really, but we somehow managed to hunt and peck our ways to a resemblance of a unified effort of covering the blues tunes we were learning off the radio and records we began buying seems like every afternoon after school at the jukebox man's store out on North Fourth across Walnut toward ACC.

Winston Moore

Ted's father [that is the man himself above] was an imposing man. He was baby faced, tall, heavy set, with broad shoulders, and he came upon you like a rushing wind, squealing into the driveway in his big black Cadillac (and I loved Cadillacs in those days, before Lincoln Continentals became the Texas luxury car of choice--Lincolns became the luxury car of choice when blacks used Cadillacs in a defiant way to get back at Mr. Charley. Black man gets a little money and the first thing he does is buy a Cadillac, a louder, longer, and more ostentatious one than Mr. Charley's...so, in his creative way, Mr. Charley switched to Lincolns--blacks never cared much for Fords, so Charley picked a Ford product--later Lyndon Johnson would verify this by driving his Lincoln Continental lickety-split around his Perdenales Ranch to the delight of all the Yankee news people who he always invited down to the ranch for some good-old-boy fun. Lyndon drove with a can of cold beer between his legs on the seat of his Continental, as a matter of egotistical fact--yes, the President of the U.S. drove while drinking--a lot of them do that, including our current farcical prez, Dubya). Plus, Ted's father wore very expensive Western-cut tailored suits, some of them bright yellow or bright red, all topped off by a big Stetson wide-brim (the one he's wearing in the photo above, probably). When I met Ted, he and his family had just moved back to Abilene from Hollywood, where they had all moved after the phenomenal success of Winston Moore's finest piece of poetry, a chartbreaking tune called "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes."

Like I said, I met Ted in junior high [South Junior High, called "South" because it was on the southside of Abilene, though it did have a oil painting reproduction of Robert E. Lee on his horse Traveller in its auditorium and the football team was called the "Rebels"--it was a segregated school, too, though they did allow Mexican kids to go to Abilene public schools. I once asked my mother why I could go to school with Mexicans and not blacks, and she simply shrugged me off by saying it was the law or God's will, something lame like that--and it was, a rapacious law for which most whites still have a guilty conscious, though they would rule Jim Crow back in effect the minute blacks should become too successful or grow toward a majority (see my jazz lecture on whites playing black music on the Jazz Lecture page)--I have always contended that the white man will not give up power in the United States--he would rather end mankind as it is than do that. That's why our Texas adopted prez (he was born in Connecticut don't forget--a Yankee boy, really) is so rather scary as President of the World--remember his dad's New World Order?--catch my political drift?] and we began to hang, Ted and I and Cary Cooke, a friend I had become acquainted with at the church my parents attended, though I must admit I can't remember how Cary and Ted came to know each other [maybe Cary will tell us the story one day], though it was Cary who insisted I meet Ted, saying we were both so much alike. So, the three of us became the closest of friends and hung out quite a hell of a lot of time, going to movies especially. Cary was a brilliant young man, too. I think Cary was much more "cultured" than Ted and I. He studied the violin and knew all along he wanted to go to Harvard. His mother's family was an old Mississippi first family and Mrs. Cooke was charming as well as funny to me, calling Cary "Kay-ree" and calling pancakes "battah-cakes." Cookie's [yep, that's what we called him] father was a very nice man, very smart, a chemist, I believe, working in the lab at the Anderson-Clayton, a company out of Houston, cottonseed oil production facility in Abilene. Ted and I were very close friends with Cookie for several years. We went to Lake Brownwood with the Cookes. Mr. Cooke took Ted and I and Cary to the Rice-Navy Cotton Bowl game in 1959--I think it was that game because Cookie had gone to the World Cup in Brazil 1958, the years of Pele's fabulous play, the summer before. The trip to the Cotton Bowl was the first time I ever ate in a Howard Johnson's. Mr. Cooke bought us lunch at the Howard Johnson's on Highway 80 in Fort Worth after the game. I remember I had a ham steak in redeye gravy, which became one of my favorite vitals of all time. Mr. Cooke brought our attention to the colors of the HJ dining room. They were a seaweedy green and a strange overripe peach. Mr Cooke told us they had done a psychological study of what colors made people the hungriest and these colors had come out on top. All the Howard Johnsons in the world were those colors, even the hotels and motels later.

Here we are, Ted, Cary, and David Michael in high school, Dear Old Abilene High. I am the elder, a year older than Ted and Cary. We aren't a bad looking bunch of dudes, Tres Amigos. Pretty well dressed, too. I am wearing my pink and black outfit. Even that tie is pink and black.

I was quite sure Slim Willet was a millionaire. He made bales of money off "Don't Let the Stars." Not only in the C&W market but into the big time, the Top 10 or whatever it was called in those days. Not Top 40, that came later with Gordon McLendon over at KLIF in Dallas, when I was in college up in Denton, thirty miles north of Dallas, and listened to KLIF continuously because they played Jimmy Reed, Bobby Bland, those dudes. Yeah, guys like that were in the Top 40, but Slim was in the Top 10 of AM pop radio of those early boring fifties, the Eisenhower (Ho-Hum) years. Oh, those politicans, Ike included, were crooked as snakes at night. Everybody cracked jokes about how crooked politicians were. Those 2-bit fleabag, 2nd-storey, failed streetcar-chasing lawyers around Abilene all got smart and ran for political office, got elected, Omar Burleson was the Abilene Congressman, a good ole boy from stem to stern, and went from stone-soup-eating white trash to land-owning, money-soaked, gentlemen of great social aloof. Winston "Slim Willet" Moore had come back to Abilene rich, yes, but not accepted by the Abilene social elite, the first families, and there were many. Oh, Slim had his own little world. It was rumored he had an interest in 4 Star records, with Rose Maddox, and two other country stars, but of that I am not sure, and Ted never talked about his father's affairs except to curse them. Slim was "good" to Ted in terms of material things. Ted had more than the average kid. He had a big hi-fi player. He had his own room, small and off the kitchen, but his, all his, with its own door that led out into the big backyard. Later he would get his own car. But Ted knew those things were just to put him off, you know, like "Here, son, here's some nice things that will occupy your time and you'll then leave me alone... I am too big a star to show you any fatherly love--hell, son, the stars are literally in my eyes." Slim back from Hollywood had built that house on Leggett Drive in Abilene's Elmwood West area, an area that had been developed after the war big time. All new modern, big homes, on winding streets called "circles," "loops," "lanes," all built on the wild prairie, sodded and paved, but barren, though each new home planted trees, and there were trees behind Ted's house along Elm Creek, big beauty, original trees, elms, oaks, cottonwoods. My parents' house was directly behind the Moores but across the creek, then across Elmwood Drive, the old rich area of Abilene just called Elmwood, then across an alley, and there was our little Cape Cod fronting on Grove Street (called Santa Claus Lane around Christmas because of farolitas everybody on the block put out around their housetops, and along their driveways and entranceway sidewalks and along the curbs up and down the street--farolitas being candles placed inside paper sacks weighted down and kept from catching fire by a bottom full of sand). In that house was the best my folks ever had it. Though the house looked small from the front, my dad, being born and raised a carpenter like his daddy (old George Madison Green had built the first Abilene High School), had added on in the back a big concrete-floored, 180-degree-arced, steel-framed-windowed sun room facing the magnificent west and then later adding on an apartment for my Grandmother Cole, Maude E. Cole, who we called "Mibby," my mother's great and kind mother, kind that is until she was with her daughters Marie (my mother) and Gertrude, my Aunt Gertie, a short, sexy babe of a woman, tough as she was pretty, set in her ways like my mom and my grandmother. And wow could they go at it. Wild fiery fights that started with words and ended with screams and sometimes slammed doors and disappearances for several minutes, gradually coming from where they had gone to get back together --at least to eat, though, you could always bet heavy on even with the three of them together at a dinner table, a meal starting off pleasant enough, but you knew you had a sure bet, because you knew they would eventually evolve back into their perpetual arguing and soon one of them would run from the table crying and the relative brawl would begin anew. I got a sadistic kick out of these Cole-sister-mother battles, sometimes to the point of aggrevating them to extended melodrama. I could be a little bastard. Had a mind of my own just like the Cole girls and Mibby. My dad, hell, he tried to tame them, but they would gang on his poor old ass and drive him cowering out of the picture.

Then it was rumored Slim had an interest with Paul Kellinger down in Monterrey, Mexico, where Paul owned a raunchy but blasting 100,000-watt radio station, XELO, with a tower atop Saddle Mountain, a huge hulking mountain that reigned over Old Monterrey. Then Paul had another station in Via Acuna, Mexico, across from Del Rio, Texas, XERA. These stations broadcast from late afternoon far into the night, signing off as 100,000 jobs at dawn when they went to local Nortena, mariachi, ranchero, Mexican music. If Slim had a piece of that pie, he was in great shape. I have seen old Paul himself up at the Leggett house, out with Slim in his backyard, actually attached to the two-car garage, recording studio, a nice one, soundproofed, air cooled, plenty of mikes, a set of drums, a piano, a console with two reel-to-reels built into it, and all around the room stacks and stacks of boxes full of 45 rpms, the record of the day in terms of popular consumption. 45s contained two tunes, an A side and a flip, B, side, the hit on the A side and the B side just there as filler. What's on the B side of all the "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes" 45s that were made at Slim's peak? Who the hell knows? Not me.

And everybody and his dog recorded "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes." It was a fine little tune. Slim said it came to him when he was thinking about a soldier stationed in Abilene during WWII who had written that in a letter back home to his girl as he was going off to fight and probably die in the South Pacific theater--"Don't let the stars get in your eyes, honey, 'cause someday I'll return and you'll know you're the only one I'll ever love." I don't think the song applied to Slim's wife, Ted's mother, Jimmy, a really sweet young woman at the time I met her, from Clyde or Coleman, one of those West Texas towns around Abilene. She had met Winston Moore young, given up all to marry him and have two kids, Ted the firstborn and then Tim, Ted's younger brother.

Slim did a version of "Don't Let the Stars," the Maddox Brothers and Rose, and the big one, Perry Como (I mean, Perry was big, ex-barber, a cool Bing Crosby (somewhere on this web site I talk about Bing Crosby being a minstrelsy performer--one could then conclude Perry carried minstrelsy to its coolest form--Perry even slurred his speech in a black sort of way, same as Bing, a black imitation speech)). Perry's is the "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes" that made Slim rich, gave him his pomp...and Slim was big in country western, on after the stars had gotten totally into Slim's eyes and he was pulling tunes like "Tool Pusher From Snyder" and "Hadicol Corners" out of his trick bag--nothing comparable to "Don't Let the Stars," which to me was a damn fine little tune. I never told Ted, I wouldn't have dared, but I have done the tune in my own act. We all believed Slim wrote "On the Wings of a Dove," too, a hillbilly religio, conscience-pesting, poor old sad cowboy confession song, but we could have been wrong about that. I was quite surprised a few years ago to come across a KD Laing special on television and lo and behold, she started singing "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes." I thought she did a great version of it, though I don't know what Slim would have thought about KD. I wonder if KD ever heard of Slim Willet before she heard the song?

I knew Winston Moore was a poet long before I knew Ted because my brother A.C.'s wife, Betty, had gone to Hardin Simmons University in Abilene with Slim and his brother, Omar (I am pretty sure that was his name), and both Betty and Winston majored in English. Betty said Slim asked her out one time but she courteously turned him down. She said he admitedly wrote poems and read them many times in front of their class. To Betty, they weren't bad poems, either. So I knew of Slim and his ambitions long before Ted came along and I got myself up in Slim's business many, many times from 1953 until 1961 (when I left Abilene for good, moving to Dallas, after my brother had moved to Dallas to work on the Dallas Times-Herald; I also was very familiar with Dallas, having gone to Denton to college and the short drive from Denton to Dallas, or Fort Worth). Oh, I wasn't in his business, but he knew me. In fact, one time he very civilly talked to me once when he came into the studio to get something and I was sitting doodling on the studio piano waiting for Ted, who was busy doing something in the house. Slim asked me about what kind of music I liked, you know, and I told him blues and jazz, and he said, well, that was good, but not to expect to make any kind of career in blues or jazz, implying that I should learn some country western and maybe he would need me for a gig--you never knew. He did use Ted one time I remember, up in Old Glory, Texas, at a big barn dance up there. Ted actually enjoyed the gig and really wasn't cynical about it like he normally was about anything having to do with his dad. I mean Ted never revealed much about his family life. Say you asked him about his life in California, he would talk about it in pleasurable language, about going to the beach and the sun and the sweet life, but if you asked him about his father, he didn't know or care about that...the bastard (Ted always ended any talk about his father by cursing the man). For that reason, I never forced Ted to talk about what he had gone through as a child. I always felt there was a very tragic story there and I liked Ted too much and we read psychology together, dig, so I was sensitive enough psychologically that I couldn't ask him to relive his life to me. Besides, we were "now" people long before we heard of Timothy Leary, though we did know Tom Lehrer, the MIT songwriting and performing parodist and we loved that witty, urbane son of a bitch. His cynicism really fit our feelings to a tee. The past had no value to Ted and me. The past was full of unanswered questions and being cowed into shyness, which Ted and I fought by acting as tough as any kid we knew in South Junior High or later in Abilene High, and believe me, there were some tough sons a bitches going to Abilene High. Two of the toughest were the Rogers twins, Elvin and Melvin. They were from Hendrix Orphans Home, or Hendrix Home as it was politically correctly called, way out on the Buffalo Gap Highway south of downtown Abilene. They were bussed into Abilene every schoolday. Even the girls from the Home were tough, but Elvin and Melvin--whoo boy; I saw them rock and finally overturn some poor kid's car in front of the Abilene High gym one time. They accused the dude of insulting their sister. With Ted and I having the attitudes we developed between each other, it was inevitable that one of us would eventually have to face down one of the Rogers twins.

THE FIGHTING ALMOST EVERY AFTERNOON BEHIND A HAMBURGER STAND CALLED "JACK'S"

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