Cajun-Fried Turkey Tried to Ruin My Life
The Dallas Years were more tragic than hip until 30 years ago today
One of my best years ever was 1992, when I started working at the Dallas Morning News. For the first time in my life, at age 36, I had a decent-paying job with full bennies, and do you know they had a big closet where you could take all the office supplies you wanted?!
I was so happy in Big D, I reversed my position on the once-hated Dallas Cowboys. Living in Dallas and not cheering on “America’s Team” was like growing up in Hawaii and hating the beach, which was me in the ‘70s, denying myself the best thing about my hometown just because of sunburn, salt water, sand and having the physique of a nine-year-old.
Troy and the Boys put the whole city in a good mood, as they marched to the Super Bowl with only one remaining obstacle: the San Francisco 49ers. The rivals would meet on Jan. 17, 1993 for the NFC Championship.
That was the day after my friends from Canada, the Tragically Hip, played Deep Ellum Live. They had a day off on Sunday, so I arranged for a Cowboys watch party. With Cajun fried turkey on the menu! Nowadays, any yobo can go to Academy and buy whatever he needs to mainline a gobbler and fry it in the carport, but back then you had to know someone.
As we picked that bird clean amid orgasmic moaning, Aikman threw for over 300 yards, the defense grabbed four turnovers and Dallas won 30-20. I had been told that if the Cowboys won I’d be on the Dallas Morning News team to cover the Super Bowl, so I was also cheering myself. “You’re going to the show!” one of the Gords said.
There’s a journalism rule: Don’t befriend the people you have to write about, which in my case was musicians. Beers, yes, but no meals together without a tape recorder on the table. I’d been real good about avoiding “friendola,” but it went out the window with the Hip, who were kind of a Greek chorus in pivotal moments of my life, ages 33-39. The band was huge in Canada, playing arenas and stadiums, but in the States they remained a club act. My big joke with them was that I didn’t believe they were really big in Canada. One of the guys would talk about, say, replacing the Rolling Stones as the first act to play the new hockey arena in Toronto, and I’d mimic the “this guy’s high” gesture with the marijuana tokes.
I met them in Chicago in 1989 through their U.S. publicist Susan Levy of MCA Records, who talked them up enough to draw me to the Avalon, an upstairs rock club on Belmont Avenue where everybody played (Marley, Springsteen, Ronstadt, Waits, etc.) when it was called the Quiet Knight, but nobody cool played there anymore.
The Hip was two guitars, bass, drums and a smiling singer who paced the stage as if he forgot what he was looking for. Then, suddenly, Gord Downie would unleash a quivering vibrato, with the band throbbing in support. “He’s 38 years old, never kissed a girl” was the saddest lyric I’d ever heard, then they followed it with the obliterative “New Orleans Is Sinking” to close the show in a heap. Some nights you just need to get your ass kicked.
It just so happened the band was staying at the Comfort Inn on Diversey Street, almost directly across the street from where I lived, so I caught a ride home in the van, and we hung out for a couple hours, drinking beers. They were really cool, humble guys who hid their ambition behind manners. We hardly ever talked about music.
How do you get 39 Canadians out of the swimming pool? Yell “everyone out of the pool!”
Levy hired me to write the bio for the Hip’s second album, Road Apples, so I went down to New Orleans for a few days in September 1990 while they were recording at Daniel Lanois’ Kingsway studio in the French Quarter.
The Hip was crazy for Cajun/Creole food, so we ate dinner every night I was there at Coop’s Place across Decatur street from the studio. “Do you have Cajun-fried turkey?” I asked the waitress, and she said “nah.” Did any place in New Orleans serve it? “Not that I know of,” she said. I’d just had that spice-injected, fried deliciousness at a wedding and couldn’t stop thinking about the next time. “We’re gonna have Cajun fried turkey one day, and you’re gonna know what I’m talking about,” I said to the band.
I didn’t know you could get CFT in Dallas until an old lounge singer at the Balcony Club named G.T. Reed told me about Cade’s Bowl o’ Beans on Good-Latimer. “Bring your own turkey and Cade will fry it up for you for $15,” said G.T. I went to check it out the next day, driving so far east that the Good dropped off along the way and it was just Latimer. But omigod was that authentic South Louisiana food worth the miles! There were no yelping foodies in ’92, so the line was only about 10 minutes. You’d have redneck truckers next to Black activists and nobody cared. The two most un-racist places in America are Off Track Betting and a joint with good, downhome cooking.
Cade told me they fried turkey only one day a week, so I brought my frozen bird in the Saturday morning of the Hip’s show in Deep Ellum and picked it up that afternoon. The smell in the car drove me crazy, so I had to pull over and get a couple bites. Yep, just as I remembered!
My apartment wasn’t big enough, so we had the Cajun-fried pigskin party at my editor Lisa Broadwater’s house. I brought the Canuck rock stars, she brought her friend Victoria. While the boys were outside playing basketball and Lisa was in the kitchen reheating the turkey, I was alone with Victoria, who was thumbing through a book of Robert Frank photos. This was one of the most naturally attractive women I’d ever seen, and so charming! She was looking at one particular photo a long time. It didn’t look special to me. “What’s so great about that photo?” said I, the wizard of ice-breakers. And she showed me the story the photo told with tiny shoes on the fender, the “do not disturb” sign in French, a few other things I can’t remember. This was a beautiful woman who could teach me things! When Victoria left after about an hour, I announced, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.”
We had our first date, pumpernickel burgers at the Stoneleigh P, after I returned from the trouncing of Buffalo in the Super Bowl. Ten days later we were declared husband and wife by her father, a Church of Christ minister. Man, he saw me coming! She was my problem now.
Victoria’s one of my best friends, the mother of my son, and we’ve come to love each other. But we were never in love. She was going through a personal crisis when we met, and I knew I was a life raft. I knew it! But even with a projected success rate of 4-7%, I had to give this marriage a try. We honeymooned in Italy, and a couple months later one of our waiters from the bar in Rome next to the Pantheon, just showed up at our doorstep in Dallas. He came to profess his love for Victoria. She had that effect.
If the waiter had waited a few months, she might’ve went back to Italy with him. We would’ve broken up, but being in wedlock (a perfect term) required lawyers, and that was enough to keep the procrastinating roommates together. I understood that I was being punished for lust and delusion, and ready to take my lumps until I could figure an exit strategy. Then she got pregnant.
By the divorce we hated each other, but we loved our little boy more, and he made us a family. Our divergent parenting styles complemented each other. I was such a helicopter parent I’d play Wagner when I drove Jack to school, while his mother, well, let’s just say of the dozen or so times one of us forgot to pick up Jack, V was responsible for 12 or so of those times.
About five years ago, Jack was driving back from Dallas, where he’d gone to see his dying grandfather, and his car died on I-35, about two hours north of Austin. It was nighttime and the best solution was for Victoria to come down from Dallas to get him, and then we’d deal with the car the next day. (It never ends, if any of you young parents are wondering.) So many bad things can happen on the side of the road at night, so worst case scenario played out in my head. Then I got a text from Vic: “I’ve got the package!” Ha ha. Haven’t heard that nickname since Jack’s elementary school days. All that fear went to love.
Victoria often gives magazine subscription for gifts, wrapping up one of the issues. One Christmas I got a year of Esquire, with this magazine:
But it turns out that marrying Victoria is the failure of which I’m most proud. When I met her I had five thousand dollars to my name. A week later I was broke, and would remain so for years. We had originally planned to get married at the courthouse- just me, her and the members of the Tragically Hip (kidding). But once the church became available, it became as big a wedding as could be arranged in less than a week. I had hoped to pull off this matrimonial caper under the radar, but made a fool of myself in front of about 150 people. Our first dance was to “Crazy” from the jukebox at the Stoneleigh P. No shit, Patsy Cline.
Waking up in the honeymoon suite at the Stoneleigh Hotel the morning after, I knew I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t real. We hadn’t earned that moment. Just two weeks earlier she was dating MC 900 Foot Jesus, and now she was married to MC 6-Foot Doofus.
But the other feeling I had that first morning post-nup was one of self-satisfaction. I did it! I paid for the suit and her dress and the flowers and everything else, and married the most charismatic person I’d ever met who wasn’t right for me. But in the end our fucked-up family turned out pretty damn good.
Without the bad times the good times don't mean as much. Problems have a way of working themselves out. Don't sweat the small stuff, but groove instead on the big picture that is the miracle of life. And if you have love in your heart you're never alone.
For his 18th birthday in 2012, I gave Jack a ukulele, and his mother took him to New York City to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Death of a Salesman. Both impacted him greatly, and for the past 12 years he’s been writing poignant song-poems and performing them, mostly in San Marcos, as Jack Henry. Today’s his 30th birthday, and me and Vic couldn’t be more proud that he’s never wavered from his career path, no matter how much rejection is part of the deal. The only time he’s not been writing songs and playing music is when his guitars are in the pawn shop.
There’s another rule of journalism- don’t promote your kids- that falls by the wayside today. Jack has just recorded his debut studio album Kafka In a Sundress (out in June) and the lead-off single “Beautiful People” is doing well on Spotify. It’s the San Marcos River song of the summer! Let’s see if we can get the number of listeners to 3,000 on his 30th birthday.
Writing that makes me younger for a few minutes. Enjoying the music, too. I moved to Austin 50 years ago, and now with my hearing aids and glasses on, I go back through my own memories and unwrap them like candies and smile. Thanks for that, Michael.
Outstanding writing MC! I feel like I was there.