One Man's Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell

XXIII. Keep Your Eyes in the Sky

152 XXIII KeepYourEyesintheSky The night at the Fair was as sobering as the air-conditioning bill in summer. It kindled intensely private fires in me that over the next years I kept well under wraps. Though a feeling of urgency incinerated me, I would contain my desire to again live the life I once sacrificed everything for. I could hold onto the dream. In my heart of hearts, I knew it wouldn’t let me down. This was an acceptable , perhaps necessary, counterpoint to the hurricane that was blowing in my head night and day. This storm of grave disappointments and the harshest of realities was beyond me. Until it blew itself down to gale proportions, I would remain at its mercy. It probably helped the staggeringly slow pace of my life along to have these titans waging constantly in me. When one threatened to blow me away, the other would give hope if I could hold on. As a result, the rest of my college career was punctuated by new songs, performance dates, and recordings in juxtaposition to this strange new career that I was dutifully preparing for. I still hoped each musical performance would be a little more encouraging than the last and give me a sign that music could again be my real career. “Vince and I had a life-drawing class together,” remembers my basil-growing friend Franci. “Art school was good for Vince because Keep Your Eyes in the Sky � 153 it slowed him down. The drive to do music never went away, but he diverted himself with school, and it ate up three years. It gave him something to focus on and do. But he never lost sight of the playing.” The resource I appreciated the most in 1985 was time with my buddies the beasts. I was alone with my animals for much of time that year when I wasn’t attending a class. We’d watch TV side by side, mesmerized kitties and me. My felines would raptly follow the birds that soared across the color screen in those National Geographic PBS specials. When the herds of water buffalo grunted, or the nostrils flared on the hippopotami sinking into the river, the cats twitched and eagerly shifted their weight from one paw to the other. Their eyes never left the screen. They appeared no less interested when the show would dissolve to the expressionless and droll pledge-drive host. Buffy, the aging, blue-gray Australian heeler, and I would play with a Frisbee out in the yard before sunset. The dog had a curly tail. I loved that cattle dog more than most of the people I had ever known. Our history had been a long one. We had traveled together for many years between the clean snowfalls of the Sierra and the soaking rains of San Francisco Bay to the filthy slush of New York City when the trees of Central Park were leafless and heavy with ice. Twelve-pound Pup, a Wizard of Oz-looking little dog, came to me wild from the woods around Bastrop, Texas. That fuzzy little mister would scale the chain-link fence at Music School in a heartbeat , like a seasoned rock climber. He roamed the neighborhood for several streets around like a representative of the property owner’s association. My conversations with these best of buddies were some of my most important. Regardless of how tough it was and how hard circumstance came down, they cared for and needed me. I cared for and needed them. They never looked at me with anything but love, from 154 � One Man’s Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell the initial day I came home in 1983 looking like a chatty cadaver. They counted on me for love, canned cat food, and pooch noodles. My reward was they never failed me. I never failed them. But, the world was not standing still and neither was I. Myoldmusic-colleague-turned-lawyer,DavidRodriguez,dropped by from time to time with Brian Ferry and Lou Reed tapes for me to peruse. I thought that was novel. I was being exposed to music by my friend the barrister. He never stayed very long, but he tried to bring me some of the world I didn’t go out to see much anymore. We found time to coauthor a song. He did the music, and I...