The Early Posthumous Work

Now We See Us, Now We Don’t

62 Now We See Us, Now We Don’t When I was growing up in Houston, there wasn’t any Dallas. No Miami Vice, and no Designing Women. Watching television in those days, you could get the impression that the three places into which the country was divided included its two cities—New York and Los Angeles—and the Wild West. The TV seemed not to know that there were, or had ever been, cities down south. With a selection of other TV fare ranging from Perry Mason to Perry Como, Ed Sullivan to Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, it was not surprising that my best friend and I might look to the many Westerns then being broadcast for a friendly or familiar attitude or accent. Even though the closest I ever got to horses was watching them out the car window on highway trips, I could still identify with Westerns, in which the word “Texas” was spoken again and again, usually with a drawl. Sometimes they even got the drawl right. Larry McMurtry writes somewhere of noticing that cowboys were the number one fans of cowboy movies, a phenomenon which I suspect is more general than that. I mean that it’s not limited to one’s occupation. I’m sure they’re up there in Fargo (and Minnesota) watching Fargo, over and over. As a child, though, I had an allegiance not only to Westerns but to any show set east of Los Angeles and south of the Mason- Steven Barthelme 63 Dixon line. Drama, comedy, news, it didn’t matter, as long as Texas or Houston or at least the South figured prominently in it. In fact, Hurricane Carla was about the biggest TV show one of those years, special because it meant the country was watching us, rather than us watching them. Ordinarily we had to search much harder to find ourselves on TV. One of our favorite shows was set in New Orleans. Yancy Derringer was a half-hour series starring an actor named Jock Mahoney, whose interpretation of the lead role owed more than a little to Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler. The series appeared in the late fifties, and that year my friend and I assumed the roles of the insouciant gambler and his silent sidekick, as they plied their trade in the Big Easy before it was called the Big Easy. My friend was older, so he usually got to be Yancy Derringer, there in his living room, and I played the stony-faced Pawnee companion, Pahoo, which I privately thought the better role. Yancy Derringer was an aristocrat and a dandy, and didn’t do much but play cards and romance women in gigantic dresses, but every week he managed to get into some kind of jam, usually arising from his exaggerated Southern sense of chivalry. Then he’d have to rely on his namesake, the derringer pistol which he kept in his hat. If that didn’t work, it was time for Pahoo, his faithful Native American companion, to show up and get Yancy out of trouble. Pahoo, played by X. Brands, tended to settle matters with a sawed-off shotgun, which was a big part of his considerable charm. He had once saved Yancy’s life, and, according to the show, Pawnee etiquette required him to keep on saving it for as long as the series stayed on the air. Not long, as it turned out; Yancy Derringer ran for only thirty-four episodes (according to Wikipedia), which makes these two characters’ place in my memory seem all the more remarkable—maybe that should say pathological. In the years that followed, new shows caught my attention. Some Westerns, but there were others as well. Several were set in New Orleans, such as Bourbon Street Beat, which lasted a year, 64 The Early Posthumous Work and much later one of the best-written TV shows I’ve ever seen, a brilliant sitcom called Frank’s Place, which was a critical success but a ratings failure. Once I even found a show set in Houston itself, a series pilot called Hernandez, Houston P . D ., in which they talked of Telephone Road and such, but the pilot wasn’t picked up and the series never made it onto the regular schedule. That was shortly after Ryan O’Neal and Jacqueline Bisset made a film called The Thief Who Came to Dinner, not...