It’s about 225 miles from Alvarado, south of Fort Worth, to Stonewall, west of Austin. Driving south, you cross the Brazos, ascend the Edwards Plateau, and keep going until you reach the Pedernales. The notorious writer, Terry Southern, was born in Alvarado in 1924. Lyndon Johnson landed in the world in Stonewall in 1908.
Alvarado’s in a county called Johnson, but it’s named for Middleton T. Johnson, who marched in Mexico under Zachary Taylor and was not of the former president’s clan. No, the writer and the president didn’t have a coincidence like that in common. And, at first glance, little else, though they shared the archetypal death of legendary Texans: they died of bang-the-drum-slowly broken hearts, Johnson in 1973, Southern in 1995. Maybe that’s why I can have great admiration for two men who seem so different. Maybe it’s something else.
Southern’s first hit book, Candy, was published in America in 1964. It was a satire of the sexually explicit kind, what a fire-eyed Southern Baptist would call, “por-un-awg-ra-phee.” It was a breakthrough year for Johnson, too. He beat Barry Goldwater in a landslide.
I was eleven years old and growing up on the bayou in Houston, Texas. For a puberty-pushing boy, the Candy media controversy was like a slow fly to a hungry frog. The book, of course, was as unavailable to me as actual sex. But just hearing the storyline was enough to make my feet slip off the pedals of my bike. The nectarous Candy Christian, dove of infinite compassion, gives of herself joyously and without concern for the shortcomings of her erotic grantees. Adolescent self-doubt evaporated in a sun-bright universe that appeared welcoming after all. Who needed Suzie with the freckles and the dark brown eyes, Suzie who called us stupid and whispered threateningly to her friends. We had Candy.
My friends and I talked knowingly and endlessly about the book. One competitive pal, call him Sammy, claimed to have read a copy pinched from his older brother. Later I judged that he’d read or been told enough that he could narrate the part about the humpback with great verisimilitude. It’s a cruel penance to see that there are today online study guides to the once-upon-a-time deliciously forbidden Candy. That Sammy wrote them is not inconceivable.
Southern and Johnson seem as different as the buggy aliens in Star Wars’ Chalmun’s Cantina on the desert world of Tatooine. Southern was a merry celebrant at the “Un-Birthday Party” for Johnson at the ’68 Democratic convention in Chicago. He wrote a short story, “Blood of the Wig,” that included a grotesque, drug-fueled fantasy about Johnson and the body of John Kennedy (“It must be a case of…of…NECK-ROPHILIA.”). Johnson created the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in 1967 not long after “Blood of the Wig” was published. It’s not known whether that must be a case of RE-TALIATION. At least I don’t know.
In 1964 another obsession crowded Candy in my imagination: LBJ. Johnson jostled alongside the comely girl in my unsuspecting consciousness, which, now that I think of it, was as motley and unfathomable as Chalmun’s Cantina. Still is, most days.
There were some natural and easy reasons for my youthful attraction to Johnson. My family had a little house on the Llano River just down from the president’s much grander river retreat. The president was not only from my home state, I saw him often out on the water.
Also, in June of ’64, I attended a summer school cunningly sold to prideful parents as accelerated learning for the “academically able.” To learn something about politics, we had a mock election. I don’t think the lesson I learned was what the teacher had in mind. By the luck of the draw, I was Johnson. My competitor, a shy, earnest boy, was Goldwater. I won by a few votes. My vanquished foe cried, and in a misguided attempt to make peace, I named him vice-president. He cried harder. My “campaign manager,” who thought he’d earned the honor of my patronage and whose dad was involved in Houston city politics, went berserk. He got his father to pay a visit to my parents to complain of my political ineptitude. But my dad could beat up his dad, and he did so with nothing but a scornful snarl. My manager’s suddenly meek old man said, “Th-thank you for your time,” and fled, dragging my crestfallen schoolmate out by the elbow.
So when Johnson opened a little campaign office a short bike ride from my home, I was, as the pollsters say, already leaning Democratic. I can still remember the rather bemused faces of the election workers in the window when I rode away, my body and bicycle plastered with Johnson-Humphrey buttons and bumper stickers. I pedaled home, all the way with LBJ.
Meanwhile, Southern, on a roll, wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s devastating 1964 anti-war satire, Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Eldridge Cleaver, in Soul On Ice, would refer to “Lyndon Strangelove.” But the film’s president, Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) was nothing like Johnson.
In fact, Johnson, even while escalating the Vietnam War, campaigned against Goldwater by tapping into the same atomic fear that made Strangelove a success. In a 30-second Johnson campaign ad, we see a little girl pull petals from a flower as she counts from one to ten. We zoom in close, disappearing into her innocent eye. A male voice begins the by-then familiar rocket launch countdown, from ten to one. We see a nuclear explosion. Johnson narrates, in an urgent, stern but pleading tone, “These are the stakes: To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”
Southern, with corrosive satire that polite society could condemn but not ignore, wanted to wake us up. With his ad, Johnson wanted us to dream the particular nightmare that would be a Goldwater presidency.
Still, I believe the two men shared more than we suspect. They were prairie humanists. Texas seems to grow them, despite occasional appearances to the contrary. Southern and Johnson were empathetic men acutely aware of human weakness, including their own. They were superficially selfish, but in the end they gave much more to the world than to themselves.
Too bad Johnson couldn’t seek more comfort from his encounter with Candy, even if he only met her in the adolescent imagination of an 11-year-old boy he didn’t know. His fear that the freckled Suzies and competitive Sammies of the world would think him weak caused him to take the nation into a tragic, unwinnable war in Vietnam. Southern courageously set himself against a world that needed waking, then wondered why he was alone.
With a little maturity and some real life girlfriends, I bid Candy adieu long ago. But Southern and Johnson remain close to my heart. Even when I marched against the war I couldn’t bring myself to march against Johnson. I felt some vindication when he returned to the Hill Country and grew his hair long down the back of his neck. See, he was one of us after all.
If you aspire to prairie humanism, you got to have a lot of space inside, elbowroom for a speed-freak scribbler and a power-sick president, for instance.
This has a nice “Cadillac jack” feel to it. Chalmun’s Cantina? Unbelievable.