Watching Hud with My Dad

My pop died of emphysema several years ago, and I've always wished I'd had more time to visit with him. He wasn't around much when I was a youngster. My mom always said, "Your daddy worked hard, but he also played hard." And if you'll pardon my language, my dad was a cross between Archie Bunker and Brando's description of his father in Last Tango in Paris: "He was a super masculine, whore fucker, bar fighter."

My dad was from Tennessee. His name was Hugh L., and the L. was only an initial and didn't stand for anything. Having a middle initial as a substitute for an actual name was evidently a custom in the hills of Tennessee where my dad grew up in the 1930's. There is a common joke there that the people are so poor they can't even afford a full name, and could only afford a middle initial. My dad eventually told everyone the L. stood for Larry, just to get them to shut up about it, I guess. Larry is what my mom called him until his dying day.

My dad was a kind, compassionate man, but he had a rough exterior and was an unrepentant womanizer. Growing up in Chicago in the 1960's, on the very few, rare occasions my dad was home and not working or playing, I was actually able to watch TV with my dad. We couldn't watch any comedies. If I turned it to Get Smart or Hogan's Heroes, he'd say, "Get that shit off there." So I'd have to turn it to Gunsmoke, The Rifleman or Wanted Dead or Alive. Testosterone city. Needless to say I was a bit deficient in the sense of humor department as a child and later in life. What my Dad did like was: he liked beer, he liked women, he liked baseball and he liked country food; food like biscuits and gravy, and wilted mustard greens soaked in bacon bits and hot grease. Cracklings, even, whatever the heck that is. And he liked a good western, too.

The only time he really busted my ass when I was a kid was when I took too long to water the pigs during the heat of the day in the burning hell of a Texas summer, and when I went swimming in a stock tank without permission near a place called Hippie Ridge in Wise County, Texas. But he was always busting my balls about something later in life, in my early twenties especially, when I was a shiftless, lazy, college dropout, Rimbaud wannabe. But, short story long, when I knew the old fucker only had a few years left to live, I loaded the car up with VHS movie cassettes and drove up to Roane County, Tennessee to see him. I tried to take a variety of movies for him to see. Some movies I took I knew he would like, like the Clint Eastwood western, The Unforgiven. (I always get choked up at the end when those prostitutes come out in the rain to see Clint Eastwood ride out of town.) And some movies I took just to mess with his head, like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. When the little dwarf in the red room sucks up the corn from a silver spoon in an extreme closeup while the soundtrack plays in reverse, that's about the time my dad said, "Sheeeit, son, get that shit off there." Leave it to David Lynch to blow my dad's mind. That's about the time I hit the eject button and I popped in Hud.

I knew my dad would probably get a stiffy watching Hud, because he was Hud, in so many ways. Ruggedly handsome like Newman, with chiseled features and a confident swagger. I never once heard my dad laugh in his life... seriously... never! I heard him chuckle once or twice, either watching a John Wayne movie or some other western movie that had a brief moment of comedy between scenes of killing dark-skinned people. But, by golly, he sure liked watching Hud! Hud, the drunken, womanizing cowboy. He came pretty darn close to laughing a time or two, especially when Hud was extricating himself from the clutches of a jealous husband. My dad told me of a few such close calls in his life. When my dad was sober he wouldn't have two words to say, but when he was drinking, he was a hillbilly raconteur who would get on a drunken binge and couldn't shut up. I'll withhold some of the scandalous details since there might be women and children about. I think you get the picture.

Hud was adapted from the Larry McMurtry novel, Horseman, Pass By. Hud's younger brother is played by Brandon de Wilde, the kid from Shane as a young man. Larry McMurtry is a life long native of the Wichita Falls area, where my mom and dad and our family lived a time or two. There are some good chapters on the making of Hud in Larry McMurty's book, In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Released in 1962, Hud is a great movie and a great nostalgia trip for anyone who grew up in Texas. Academy awards went to Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas, and to James Wong Howe for his brilliant cinematography.

I was glad my dad and I got the chance to watch Hud together one of the last times I saw him. It was one of the very few times we ever bonded, as they say. If you could call it that. That's when my dad told me that I was named after a character from the Zane Grey western novel, The Lone Star Ranger, and General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project. My mom, who eventually divorced him, had always told me I was named after some of my dad's Air Force buddies. I know my dad wasn't much of a role model, but he was my dad. We don't get to pick them. It's like the genetic lottery. I guess I could have done a lot worse. He was a good man most of the time, except when it came to married women and booze. He never was there for me as a kid, but he always put food on the table. Now I suppose he's up on that great big barstool in the sky.