A Deeper Blue by Robert Earl Hardy Read Free Book Online Page A

but nothing too serious. “If we wanted to go see a girl, we had to write a letter, and the girl had to go down and put us on the list. That was called ‘calling.’ We went ‘calling’
    to St. Mary’s.” Froker elaborates: “Basically the interaction was highly supervised, very controlled, but you could sneak around, and a lot of guys did. There was a St. Mary’s girl who was really taken with Townes in his senior year. He was a good wrestler, Where I Lead Me
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    and they had a tournament up in Minneapolis, where she lived.
    Between matches, the two of them went off to some janitor’s closet somewhere and got it on. I heard that from a couple of different people who swore it was true.”
    Some of Townes’ other later proclivities surfaced at Shattuck as well. One of them was gambling. Says Froker, “if you went into Townes’ room, it wouldn’t be long before he pulled out a deck of cards and said, ‘come on.’ Most people, including myself, knew that Townes was a pretty good poker player…. Most kids that age, we’d be sort of conservative—even though it was just pennies or whatever, it was real money—but he would just really go for it, and raise and raise again and again. He won a lot because people would generally just back down.”
    Luke Sharpe recalls driving with Townes to Indiana in Mrs.
    Van Zandt’s Thunderbird in their junior year, and reflects that
    “he was certainly indulged, and he was offered every opportunity, which Townes, in my opinion, resolutely rejected.” Luke and Townes grew apart after their junior year, and for very specific reasons. “I was just more of an organization kind of man. I had done well in the military, been a floor officer, et cetera. I had been there longer than Townes had been. So I was much more of an institutional kind of boy than Townes. Senior year, we lived in different dorms…. And by then he was doing a lot of glue.”
    Townes had most likely started sniffing glue sometime in his junior year, but as a senior, it became habitual. Glue-sniffing among teenagers in the mid-1960s was not terribly uncommon, especially where alcohol was hard to come by and before marijuana became more widely available. But it was—and is—a dangerous intoxicant, and the pursuit of that kind of a serious “buzz”
    represented something of a dividing line between students just looking for fun and those with more extreme proclivities.
    As Sharpe puts it, “Even among the guys who were not following all the rules, he was still pretty out there. He was pushing it.” Somehow, an incriminating photograph of Townes appeared in the Shattuck yearbook at the end of his senior year:
    “Townes with a tube of Testors [glue] jammed up his nose,” as 32
    A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt Sharpe recalls. “He did graduate and move right along, notwith-standing those pictures in the yearbook,” but, Sharpe says, “it was trouble.” Other classmates recall, similarly, if in less graphic detail, that Van Zandt indeed graduated in spite of some vague, questionable circumstances. Shattuck records show that he graduated ranked at number twenty-two in a class of seventy-six students.
    Harris Van Zandt came up with a way to help his son focus his energies that summer: he sent Townes to Pecos, in West Texas, to work with a seismograph crew in the oil fields. Mr. Van Zandt most likely intended to effect in his son what had been effected in him when he worked in the oil fields as a young man: a strengthening of character. But it’s possible too that he was testing him. Townes had graduated from military school—
    an accomplishment about which Harris must have had doubts at some points—but he was still “different”; he had not “hardened.” Hence, to Pecos Townes went. He worked with a crew for a few weeks, then, with two weeks left to work, he lit out for Dallas, unannounced and unbeknownst to his parents. He stayed with a friend from Shattuck there, then with