Sam Shepard was doing his best to be polite to a couple of indefatigable fans who’d collared him at the bar in Austin’s Four Seasons Hotel. I had just walked in when Sam spotted me and waved. His admirers parted to give me room to step up and shake Sam’s hand.
We’d met in 1985 at the New York premier of his play, A Lie of the Mind, and crossed paths a couple more times over the years. This was November 1996 and Sam was in Austin to make a movie with Diane Keaton. When he waved to me I figured he just needed a familiar face to signal to the fans that someone he knew had arrived, but he asked me to stay and have a drink. His fans took the hint and moved off.
The place wasn’t crowded, and we took a nearby table. Not knowing one another well, we had little ground for familiar small talk, asking after one another’s family and such. And Sam didn’t want to talk about the movie he was shooting in Austin. He did take time to needle me good-naturedly about my knuckle-headed effort to get him to let go of his anger at filmmaker Robert Altman back in 1985.
I respect Altman’s work, and he was at the A Lie of the Mind after-party. I was glad to meet him. But Sam was mad as hell at Altman for cutting the film version of Sam’s play, Fool for Love, in Paris without Sam’s involvement. With a bemused Altman watching me from nearby, I suggested Sam patch it up with Altman. He rejected the suggestion with a couple of choice words. What was I thinking? Until that day I’d not met either man.
Post-script to the tale: The next time I saw Sam was 1991 at Austin’s famous La Zona Rosa. I was with a large party when Sam and his wife were seated at a table just a few feet away. When he saw me, he smiled and said, “Fuck me. It’s Altman’s friend.”
Anyway, Sam had some things he wanted to talk about that night in Austin, especially Texas writer John Graves. While I don’t have any notes from the conversation with Sam, I’m still coming to grips with questions he left me with. He started by asking if I knew Graves. I told him no, but that I greatly admired him and still had my father’s first edition of his Goodbye to a River.
Goodbye to a River is an elegiac account of Graves’s 1960 canoe trip down a stretch of the Brazos River near Fort Worth. “Progress” was threatening the river Graves had known. “Men increase; country suffers,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, the Brazos was there, and I was on it.”
Sam was impressed with Graves for many reasons. I think one of them was the writer’s practical intimacy with the natural world. Graves knew his world was threatened in many ways, but it was his world and he never lost trust in his relationship with it.
We talked on about Graves for twenty or thirty minutes before Sam stood abruptly and told me he’d be right back. When he returned, he brought a copy of A John Graves Reader, published a month or so earlier. He also brought a copy of his new book, Cruising Paradise, which he handed to me and told me to look at the inscription:
Glenn
Luz en la noche
(Light in the night.)
For all I know, Sam regularly signed copies of Cruising Paradise with Luz en la noche. Still, I was touched by the gesture and thanked him. Sam smiled and opened the Graves book, pointing to the first page of the short story, “The Last Running.” His nod to the page said, “Read this.”
In the story, Graves embellishes a tale briefly told in Goodbye to a River about legendary South Plains cattleman Charles Goodnight. It’s about a 1923 showdown between Goodnight, or “Buenas Noches” as the Comanches called him, and an old Comanche named Starlight.
At one point, Graves’s narrator says that light is “the most lost of all causes.” The line startles me because I take it to mean that hope is lost, more lost even than other lost causes.
Did Graves believe the cause was lost? I don’t think so. And, there is evidence in much of Sam’s work that he didn’t believe that either. In his play, Suicide in Bb, there’s a conversation between his characters, Niles, a musician, and Petrone, a detective, that goes like this:
Niles: Did you listen to the music!
Petrone: Yeah. Sure.
Niles: What did it say?
Petrone: What?
Niles: What did the music say? Did you hear it?
Petrone: Yes. It wasn’t words. I mean it wasn’t words like we’re talking now.
Niles: Of course not! What did it say?
Petrone: It said that there was a chance.
There is a chance. There is light in the music, in the music of the words and of the world. It is not easy to hear. We have to listen.
Of course, there’s evidence of Shepard’s trust in the light in the simple fact that he inscribed “luz in la noche” in a book he gave away. The phrase also appears, if awkwardly, in his play, The Tooth of Crime (Second Dance).
Both writers engage us in soul-wrenching worlds that could leave us dispirited. But there’s so much light in the music of Sam Shepard and John Graves’s storytelling that we find the cause is not lost at all—if we listen.
I worry that I wasn’t listening well enough that night to hear fully what Sam had to say. Niles, the musician in Suicide in Bb, repeatedly asks Petrone if he listened to the music. Niles makes it clear that simple contact with an artist is not enough. We have to listen.
I saw Sam one more time before he died in 2017. I think it was 2012, and I was sitting outside Jo’s Coffee on South Congress in Austin when I heard someone call my name. It was Sam, his elbow resting on the window frame of an SUV, in the parking lot of the hotel next door. He said he’d come to town to see a friend. He was in good spirits; we visited for few minutes before he drove away.
In the posthumously published Spy of the First Person, Sam spoke of a night out with his family in New York as he struggled with ALS, the disease that would kill him.
Escucha la luz en la noche. Listen. Here’s what Sam said:
Our whole troupe, our little band hit the street. The thing I remember most is being more or less helpless and the strength of my sons. A man pushed by his sons in a wheelchair from a crowded restaurant to a street with nobody on it. A man sitting on shaggy wool with a Navajo blanket across his knees.
The moon is getting bigger and brighter. The Strawberry Moon. Spotlighting our little troupe. The full moon. Two sons and their father, everyone trailing behind. Going up the middle of East Water Street and it’s really bright now. The full moon. We made it and we hobbled up the stairs. Or I hobbled. My sons didn’t hobble, I hobbled.
Nice, Glenn!
I've crushed on Sam Shepard and his work for years -- learning he was a fan of John Graves and Goodbye to a River adds to my appreciation.
And it brought back a memory of the summer before my senior year in high school...1966...my dad was a John Graves fan and took my brother and me on a canoe trip on the Brazos, to experience it as described in Goodbye To A River, before it was gone. I honestly don't remember much of that trip, except seeing my dad with a copy of the book in his hand, referring to it along the journey. It was late summer, the river was low, and we portaged a lot.
What sticks in my mind was what happened just after the trip, being at home with my mother, who told me she and my dad were divorcing. Apparently, she expected that my brother and I would be told of the split on the canoe trip, but that didn't happen. And I was the one who ended up breaking the news to my little brother, when it became apparent to me that he didn't understand why our dad was now living somewhere else. I didn't really understand it either. It made me sad and angry, feelings that continued to permeate my last year living in our home town.
Our family fractured that summer -- Goodbye to a Family -- and my parents went from being the people in my life who knew the answers, knew the way....to just people...who were groping along, making mistakes, with no solid truths to impart about the way forward....not unlike my own 17-year-old self. Each of us has to figure out how to listen to the light in the night.
In '87, I convinced KPRC-TV to let me do an anniversary piece on "Good-bye to a River." I think it was 30th year since publication. I rented a canoe and put in with a camera guy and a second camera on another canoe and we took off just outside of Glen Rose. Graves, who had initially agreed to talk to me on camera, changed his mind. Gave no explanation. But I followed the river course and we did outtakes on the history and quoted his work and got some great photography of landscape and weather and interviews with people living on the water. They lamented change and they hadn't even been there before Possum Kingdom Dam had been built. I've devoured most every word Mr. Graves ever wrote, and, in some ways, I think "From a Limestone Ledge" might be the equal of River.
Anyway, this is lovely writing. If there were a real world power for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I would have become Sam Shepherd. Only other Sam I would've wanted to become is that Sam Elliot guy. Neither one of them could have written this piece, though, my friend. It is lovely and literate. Keep 'em comin'.