The Garner Files: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

and married the wrong women, but he wasn’t evil. He died in 1996 at the age of eighty-five. We lost Mama Grace in 2002.
    I ’d started driving on country roads when I was ten and got my license the summer after I turned fourteen, when I was hired by a salesman for Curlee Clothes to drive him around the state of Texas. I was a combination chauffeur/traveling secretary/babysitter. I tookcare of the samples, kept the books, and tried to keep my boss away from whiskey. He had an ulcer and mixed his Scotch with milk. He wasn’t supposed to smoke, either, so I doled out his cigars. He’d take a suite at the Baker in Dallas or the Rice in Houston where he’d sit around all day drinking with the buyers. I’d end up doing the selling. The guy offered to adopt me, but I wanted to be on my own.
    I worked in food markets and clothing stores. I cut trees for the telephone company. I hauled Sheetrock. I was a dishwasher, a janitor, a dockworker, an oil field roughneck, and a carpet layer. I worked on a line cleaning chickens. (God help you if you accidentally nicked a gizzard.) I was a hod carrier on a construction site—that’s the guy who brings bricks to the bricklayer in a box at the end of a pole.
    I was also an insurance salesman, but not a very good one. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Here’s some widowed mother of three who can’t afford to put food on the table . . . I’d take one look at her and say, “No, ma’am, you don’t really need insurance.” Otherwise, I tried to give my all. I was usually the best worker they had, though I never really liked to work and never stayed on a job more than a few months. I don’t think I was ever
fired,
but I’d quit as soon as I’d saved enough money to coast for a while.
    In those days, I went whichever way the wind blew. I had no ambition and wasn’t interested in getting an education. I just drifted here and there. I never had a job I liked enough to stick with until I took up acting, though it would be two or three years before I began to enjoy it.
    When people ask me if I had a “bad” childhood, I’m never sure how to answer. I just did what was necessary. I had to make a living, because nobody was supporting me. While other kids my age had chores and allowances and curfews, I was holding down grown-up jobs because I had to feed myself and put clothes on my back and a roof over my head. It was simply a matter of survival. People have said it’s right out of Dickens, but I didn’t think I had it tough, because it was all I knew.
    Looking back, I think I was better off having to do it earlier than later. Tell you what: You want to put pressure on somebody, live through the Depression. In Oklahoma. In the dust. After that, studio executives don’t bother you at all.
    G rowing up in Norman I was lucky to have two great friends, Bill D. Saxon and Jim Paul Dickenson.
    I’ve known “Billy Dee” almost my whole life. We’re the same age. We went through grade school and junior high together, and we’ve stayed best friends these many years. Bill’s late wife, Wylodean, was also a dear lifelong friend. She was in my class all through school. Over the years, she always welcomed me to the Saxon home, where I spent a lot of time. Most important, Wylodean made chicken-fried steak just the way I like it.
    When I was growing up, Bill’s family lived on the street behind us, and our back porches faced each other. I remember playing with him along a little creek that ran between the houses. When we were in our early teens, Bill and I worked together at a combination feed store and hatchery. We’d drive the truck to take feed and seed out to people, and we’d bring back chickens.
    Bill’s dad and another man owned a bank south of Norman in a little town called Paoli, Oklahoma. They had all their money loaned out on broomcorn and cotton. When the Depression hit, the bottom dropped out of the market for both crops. The bank went belly-up and Mr. Saxon came back to