Quitters' Paradise
(Page 6 of 7)
September/October 1996
Robert Draper, Texas Monthly (www.texasmonthly.com)
The youngest of the three is asleep on the family bed. The other two are in school. The eldest son, says Janelle, wants to study rocket aviation. Eventually he'll be leaving the desert, going off to a university. She and her husband are okay with that. I notice a Collie Ryan mandala on their wall. The little home is buttressed with hope.
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Proprietor Angie Dean opens the doors of the Starlight at five every afternoon, and one by one the Terlinguans shuffle in. Ken Barnes, the town's venerated self-taught paleontologist, strides up to the bar in his straw hat and holds out the day's find of dinosaur bones, which are passed around the bar to grunts of admiration. Laurie arrives fresh from the Chihuahuan town of Creel, her truck loaded with Mexican craftwork that she will sell to the trading company. One of the evening's musicians begins tuning his mandolin. By ten after five, every bar stool is taken.
One of the occupants is Spider, who must have just gotten paid, since Angie doesn't give him credit--unlike the trading company, where Spider owes $30, and the Study Butte Store, where he is $125 in arrears. 'The way I see it,' he tells me, 'I've got to get paid two or three hundred dollars every week, because I like to drink a lot of beer and dip a lot of snuff.'
When I carefully ask him if he thinks he's an alcoholic, Spider doesn't miss a beat. 'I know I am! Hell. Four DWIs, disorderly conduct. I don't deny it.'
He laughs and returns to his Budweiser. The talkative, compact-looking man in the gimme cap and sunglasses is Terlingua's latest project. Spider has been here five years, and it is fair to say that he did not arrive brimming with communal spirit. After being tossed out of the army in 1970 for brawling with his fellow soldiers--'I was a loner, and when the others picked on me, I'd go crazy on 'em,' he says--the Vietnam vet spent the next 20 years roaming South Texas and Mexico. He acquired the spider tattoos on his arms and neck from an artist in Ciudad Acuña, but the nickname came first, given to him around the time he got into a brawl in Del Rio. When a former brother-in-law purchased a few acres near Terlingua in 1991, Spider got in on the deal and settled down in an old camper parked in the rubble. But, as one of the locals puts it, 'It took him two years to arrive here mentally.' Spider agrees: 'I was still angry when I got here. My first year, I punched out one guy and threatened to kill another.' Terlinguans were aghast: A loner-monster was in their midst. Then Angie stepped in. Observing Spider's skill as a concrete pourer, the Starlight owner asked him if he would design a sign for her establishment's rest rooms. Spider did so, using metal spikes for the lettering, and a concrete artist was born.
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