The Dance

In the spring semester of my junior year (1965) at the University of Texas, I was seized by the notion that the school would be a better place if I got myself elected to the student Senate. Apparently I had forgotten a nugget of wisdom I had learned in high school when I had dabbled in student politics: If you get elected to an office, you have to attend all the meetings.

This was the ’60s, and rebellion was in the air. I had sprouted a defiant little beard and allowed my hair to grow fairly long. In Austin’s humid climate, it leavened into an unruly puff of curls that had lain dormant during my high school years in the arid Texas Panhandle. Austin introduced me to my curly hair.

I don’t recall the specific issues of my campaign, but I’m guessing they all funneled down to one: Shallow frat-rats and sorority girls had taken over student government. A great university needed the voice of an independent young lion who had read Plato’s Republic from cover to cover; who could represent all the disenfranchised students in the departments of philosophy, classics, and literature; and who would transform the student Senate into a solemn deliberative body.

Early in the campaign, someone suggested I should seek the advice of a fellow who actually knew something about student politics: Jay Westbrook. I called him and arranged a meeting. Jay wore a suit and tie (very unusual in those times) and had the confident air of a political operative who had guided many student campaigns from a back room.

I don’t remember the advice he gave me (it didn’t help), but I do remember meeting his friend, a tall young man with penetrating blue eyes: Whitley Strieber. Years later, Whitley became a successful author, and I read a book he wrote, Communion, about his abduction by “visitors.” It was a strange and disturbing book.

My opponent in the student Senate race was an establishment candidate, an attractive Pi Phi from Houston who had a clear understanding of student politics: If she was the candidate of the Greeks, she would win. It was that simple.

The Greeks had refined campus politics down to a few basic steps: Spend a lot of money on printed signs and posters, use underclassmen pledges to plaster them all over campus and in store windows on the Drag, and turn out the vote. My opponent ran no campaign. She didn’t hold a “position on the issues” or make speeches or try to convince anyone that she was intelligent. (I did). On Election Day, she sat in a booth on the mall with her sorority sisters and gave out cookies.

I ran an earnest campaign and tried to whip up enthusiasm among students in the College of Arts and Sciences, many of whom regarded the whole thing as a massive irrelevance. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on printing, so I depended on volunteer help. We created our own posters at poster parties.

It was at one of those events I met the love of my life, the woman who would become my wife, Kristine Dykema. She came with a friend of mine, a big, happy engineering student from California. (Engineers didn’t have to read Sartre or Samuel Beckett or Jean Genet, so many of them were still happy). I noticed that Kris was tall, dark, shapely, and beautiful. I remember thinking that my friend was dating above his level and probably didn’t deserve her.

Beyond that, I didn’t pay much attention to her, an act of carelessness I can’t explain, except that I was preoccupied with my political destiny. My time would have been better spent flirting with Kris and trying to steal her away from Teddy Bear, the big happy engineer. Anyway, I lost the race for student Senate, and the university plunged into another year of darkness under a Greek regime.

There is a footnote to this campaign. Somewhere in the yellowing files of The Daily Texan resides a page with photographs of all the candidates in the race for student Senate. My portrait shows a somber young man, serious but not crazy, whose chin and cheeks are fluffed with a downy boy’s beard.

On the same page is a photograph of clean-shaven, short-haired fraternity boy named Richard Friedman, whom Texans know today as “Kinky”: founder of a rock band called The Texas Jew Boys, author of detective novels, columnist, humorist, and occasional candidate for governor of Texas.

Kinky and I never crossed paths at UT. I met him 30 years later at book-and-author functions. By that time he had evolved into his identity as a postmodern cowboy, wearing boots, a black hat, and a black frock coat, and smoking a big black cigar in places where smoking was not permitted.

In September 1965, the first semester of my senior year, I lived in an off-campus apartment but took my evening meals at a place called College House, which served as a gathering place for people who didn’t fit anywhere else. Some thought of themselves as artists, some as intellectuals. They were too liberal in their politics to feel at home in a regular fraternity or sorority, but not radical enough to seek companionship in the shadowy fringe that was brooding over Marx and Frantz Fanon.

The residents of College House were readers and thinkers, good students, and I suspect many of them went on to earn graduate degrees and became college professors.

At 6 o’clock every evening, 50 or 60 College House residents and associate members (who, like me, didn’t live there) gathered in the dining room and ate at long tables. After the meal, we listened to a program provided by a guest speaker, then spent an hour or more discussing the topic.

One evening we heard a presentation by a young man who belonged to the Society of Friends and argued the case for pacifism. Even at this early date, many residents of College House opposed the war in Vietnam, and the speaker’s pacifist views received a friendly response. I waited for someone to raise the obvious questions about pacifism, but it appeared the speaker was going to make it through the program without a challenge.

So I asked, “Are you saying that if someone broke into your home and threatened your wife and children, you wouldn’t defend them?”

“That is my position, yes,” he replied.

“Pardon me, but that sounds crazy,” I said, not meaning to be rude, but there was still enough of the unwashed country boy in me to rebel at the logical consequences of dogmatic pacifism. It struck me as indefensible and immoral. If you allow bad guys to bump off good guys, you’ll end up with a rotten society every time.

I caught a few icy glares from the students around me, but one member of the audience was applauding in silence: Kristine Dykema. She lived at College House and my question impressed her. Years later, she told me that right then she knew she would end up marrying me.

Had she shared that revelation with me, I would have been stunned. I had hardly noticed her. But one evening, weeks later, I did notice her. She was an unusually beautiful and graceful woman—feminine, not loud or crude or sloppy like some of the other girls. Her dark features and last name made me think she might be Greek, Lebanese, or Jewish.

I made my way over to her and slipped into the serving line behind her. We talked for a while and I finally got around to asking, “Do you have a telephone?” She smiled and said, “Yes.” I waited. She didn’t give me the number and it made me so mad I stormed away. I wasn’t going to beg for her phone number!

The next day I was eating lunch in the student union with a friend named Olin Clemons. I told him about this girl who, for a moment, had caught my eye, “but she had her chance and she blew it. I’m finished with …”

At that moment, someone slipped up behind me and placed her hands over my eyes. When she removed them, I looked around and saw her … and melted. She stayed just long enough to give me her phone number. When she left, Olin flashed a smirk and said, “What were you saying?” We shared a laugh. I had been turned wrong side out, and Olin knew it.

Later, I asked Kris why she hadn’t given me her phone number the first time. She said, “Well, you didn’t ask for it. You asked if I had one. I didn’t want to assume too much, and you should have been more specific.”

I began calling her in the evenings, and we had long, pleasant conversations. I learned that her mother had been born in Scotland and her father’s people were “black Dutch,” a mix of Dutch and Spanish blood. She’d been raised Presbyterian, enjoyed singing, and was taking a class in modern dance. Her family had lived in Michigan until she was 12, then moved to Dallas. She had graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School and was studying interior design at UT.

When I asked her out for a date, I learned I wasn’t the only blade on campus who had noticed her charm and beauty. She had a long list of suitors, and I had to wait my turn, which had a souring effect on my disposition. To me, it seemed obvious she needed to get rid of those other louts and spend hours and hours every day staring into my eyes and laughing at my witticisms. To that suggestion, she said, “You’re too pushy.”

Indeed I was. Kris was like no girl I had encountered at UT. She had poise, grace, intelligence, and depth, but she wasn’t desperate to reveal everything she knew. There was a deep honesty about her, and a wisdom that came from quiet places. She was comfortable with herself, and I felt comfortable being with her.

We had a few dates, but not enough to suit me. She kept reminding me that she was taking five courses and needed to study at night, and that she’d been dating those other boys (worthless bums, in my estimation) long before she’d met me.

Something had to be done about this.

At Christmas break I made the long drive from Austin to my hometown in the Panhandle, 550 miles north of the UT campus. That gave me 11 hours to think and scheme. Somewhere around Guthrie, where a traveler began to notice the bite of Panhandle winter, I came up with an idea.

Kris had told me that she loved to dance, and was enrolled in a modern dance class in the Drama Department. I had written and produced several plays while I was working at churches in New York City.

I would write a dance drama, with Kris dancing the lead role!

Most people who write dance dramas are theater majors. At the very least they know something about choreography. I knew nothing about it. I’d grown up in a church that frowned on dancing (Southern Baptist), and came from Protestant stock that didn’t have the genetic material for it.

No problem. I knew Kris could handle the choreography.

I rolled into Perryton around 11 o’clock that night. My father had gone to bed at 10, a ritual he observed regardless of who was there or who was coming to visit, be it me or the Queen of England. At 10 o’clock, he would rise from his chair, invite his guests to stay as long as they wished and to turn out the lights when they left, and he went off to bed.

In college, I had become a night owl, and at 10 o’clock I was always ready to plunge into long and deep discussions about … well, life and art and religion; money, politics, foreign affairs. When I tried to explain this to my father, he would say, “I’ll see you in the morning.” He had a business to open on Main Street.

My mother was just as predictable the other way. No matter how late I arrived, she stayed up to welcome me home. When I drove in from Austin that night, we visited for an hour or so, and when she retired I went into the study where my father kept his stereo and Yamaha grand piano. I sat down at the table where he worked his crossword puzzles, composed letters, and studied the Bible and began writing on a legal pad, blocking out scenes and writing dialog.

By the time I went to bed at 4 o’clock, I had sketched out the rough draft of a dance drama called Adam, Adam.

To my knowledge, no copy of that script survives, but it remains a vivid memory. It had three characters: a male character named Adam, a female character who personified life and fertility, and a female character who personified death. The two female characters had only a few spoken lines, and most of the action centered on the choreography, as they danced around Adam. The Life character danced with a lighted candle. At the end of the play, she passed the candle to the Death character, and she blew it out.

The mood of the play was dark, reflecting the angst that hung like cigar smoke in college classrooms during the ’60s. Or maybe it drew from half-forgotten Sunday school memories of Job, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes. As author Herman Wouk has noted, parts of the Old Testament “express despair with black eloquence not bettered in modern literature.”

I spent several days revising the play, typed it up, and mailed a copy to Kris in Dallas. I called her up and said, “We’re going to put on that play, produce it ourselves—I don’t know where, but we’ll find a place. You’ll dance the lead and we’ll get Ellen Deacon to take the other part. I’ll do Adam’s part.”

I had given the Adam character some lines of dialog but no dancing.

After the Christmas break, we threw ourselves into the project. Kris and Ellen made their costumes (back then, girls knew how to sew) and worked on their makeup and choreography. They might have gotten some outside help but did most of it on their own.

Meanwhile, I created a musical sound track, drawing from my collection of classical music LPs and those of my roommate, Lawrie Ellzey. I have forgotten the music I chose for Kris’s part (it was warm and melodic), but I remember my selection for the Dark Lady: Ralph Vaughn Williams’s frigid and forbidding Symphonia Antarctica.

Lawrie and I had grown up together in Perryton and shared a small house east of campus. The location is now buried beneath a temple erected to honor a local politician who spent billions of other people’s money on buildings, highways, and parks, and put his name on them: Lyndon B. Johnson.

Lawrie was working on a doctorate in chemistry at UT and played an important role in our production. He was one of those fellows who couldn’t dance, sing, or act, but knew where to get a top-of-the-line Ampex tape recorder and how to wire one electronic device into another, hook it all up to a sound system, and make everything work—exactly the technical skills we needed.

After we had rehearsed the play for several weeks, I got permission to use the stage at the Wesleyan Student Center on Guadalupe Street, just a short distance from the UT student union. We made our own posters and tacked them on bulletin boards around campus, and put on two performances, Friday and Saturday nights. Lawrie was backstage, running the lights and sound.

Today, looking back, I’m amazed that we ever thought we could do such a thing, and that we did it so well. We drew a decent crowd both nights, and the girls gave flawless performances. Kris was spectacular, grace personified. Watching her I fell even deeper in love.

Our rehearsal schedule forced a new reality upon Kris’ old boyfriends: They were out; I was in, almost as if by design. Heh, heh.

My father drove all the way from Perryton to attend the Saturday performance. I don’t recall him saying much about my script or acting skills, but he sure took notice of Kris. “That’s quite a girl,” he told me. About six months later, when she spent a few days with us in Perryton, he crooked his finger at me and led me back into his bedroom.

He closed the door and said, “If you don’t marry that girl, you’re crazy.”

At the time, I considered myself light-years away from the responsibilities of marriage and family, and the very thought of it caused me to break out in sweats. But I didn’t forget his admonition, which slashed like sharp steel through fog and ambiguity and went right to the heart of things.

It was an important message for a father to communicate to his son, the most valuable piece of advice he ever gave me. And he did with only eight words. Professional writers spend years trying to learn such thrift with language.

Anyway, the dance drama turned out to be a huge success. I snagged the leading lady, got her phone number, and 49 years later, we’re still married.