Having a drink with Larry McMurtry ...
My friend Richie from up the street asks me, "When do you find time to write?"
"Late at night is the second best time," I tell him, "for me anyway." He waits for the rest of my answer. "But my favorite time is before sunrise. Five a.m. While you're still sleeping."
Richie cringes just at the sound of "five a.m." "You set your alarm?" he asks.
"No, I just wake up some mornings and know it's time to write. I awake the hound (Simone, our Italian greyhound) and we go downstairs together. She goes back to sleep on the sofa and I pour a large mug of Kona coffee and head for the keyboard.
"Hey," Richie says, "I've always heard that writers drink. They're famous for it."
"Lots of stories there," I say. "Famous writers drink famously. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Chandler. If you want to read about the drinking habits of American writers there's a book by Mark Bailey called Hemingway and Bailey's Bartending Guide. I'm not in there. NPR did an entertaining story on the book a few years ago, and you can read the piece online at NPR's site.
"Richie, I don't know anyone who drinks while they write. Kona coffee is my companion when I'm writing. With half-and-half."
"Not even one beer?" he asks.
I stare at him. "At five in the morning? Beer is for watching a game, and when you bring it over."
"But what about at night?"
I laugh. "What are you doing, researching a book on the drinking habits of friends and writers in your neighborhood? Sometimes at night I have another cup of coffee. Sometimes I have a lime Dr Pepper. I call it having a drink with Larry McMurtry.
"McMurtry? Lonesome Dove? I love that book!"
"Me too," I say. "Wait right there. I want to read you something from another book of his." I make a beeline for my small writing room and the McMurtry section of the bookshelves. Next to the massive volume that is Lonesome Dove I find an unassuming, thin little book, and take it back into the living room.
"This is it," I tell Richie. "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Two hundred pages of non-fiction. Larry McMurtry's stories about Archer City and Texas, and reflections on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, who was a German literary critic. Oh, and Dairy Queens, of course. He calls them 'simple drive-up eateries, taverns without alcohol ... in the arid little towns of west Texas.' I want to read you the opening sentence of the book. It's kind of long, but you know how I love a good run-on sentence. Here's how McMurtry begins the book:
In the summer of 1980, in the Archer City Diary Queen, while nursing a lime Dr Pepper (a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even in the next Dairy Queen down the road—Olney's, eighteen miles south—but easily obtainable by anyone willing to buy a lime and a Dr Pepper), I opened a book called Illuminations and read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller," nominally a study of or reflection on the stories of Nikolay Leskov, but really (I came to feel, after several rereadings) an examination, and a profound one, of the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical memory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative in our twentieth-century lives.
"That's some sentence," Richie says. "Let me look at it." I hand him the book and watch him read it slowly, his brow furrowed. Finally he looks up. "I don't get the second half of the sentence, but I like the Dairy Queen part."
"And the lime Dr Pepper?" I ask. "The first time I read that I jumped into the car and drove up to Times and bought a six-pack of Dr Pepper and a couple of limes and raced back home. You know what? It is a great little drink, whether you're writing or not."
"Never had one," Richie says. "The lime part, I mean. I like Dr Pepper."
"Hey, I grew up with Dr Pepper. That's part of growing up in Texas. Dr Pepper. RC Cola. Nehi."
"Let's do it!" Richie says. He has that wild look I've seen before.
"What, fly to Texas?"
"No, let's have a lime Dr Pepper. You have any in the house?"
"Not at the moment," I say. "A lime or two, but no Dr Pepper."
Richie jumps up and heads for the front door. "Don't just sit there," he says. "Let's go to Times. I'll drive."
"Safeway is closer."
"Let's go then," Richie says, "we're burning daylight!" A man on a mission. I follow him out the door. I know that in a few minutes, not long really, we will be back here, sharing a drink with Larry McMurtry. Who knows, maybe Richie will be inspired to do some writing himself. Just not at five in the morning.
Tags: Dairy Queen, Kona coffee, Larry McMurtry, Writing
