STORIES
If our lives are a book, the cars we drive define the chapters.
These are stories featuring cars, trucks, and even RVs that played a role in the lives of the people who owned or drove them. Many are set in Fort Stockton, Texas and involve a cast of characters in and around the dusty southwest Texas town. A lot of the stories are shared around the table at The Grounds for Divorce, where the ‘regulars’ meet.
Pull up a chair and let Lucinda pour you a hot cuppa joe and enjoy.
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CLASS OF ’43, CHAPTER II: Tag Cameron
CHAPTER II OF FIVE Tag Cameron was the kind of boy Fort Stockton liked to claim as proof of concept. He had the face for it first. Not pretty, not delicate, not the kind of looks that belonged in a movie magazine and wouldn’t survive a West Texas wind. Tag’s handsomeness was built for this…
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CLASS OF ’43, Chapter I: Darnall Davis
CHAPTER I OF FIVE Darnall Davis learned early that survival was mostly about calibration. How loud you spoke. How fast you moved. How much of yourself you allowed the world to see at one time. Out beyond Fort Stockton, where the land flattened into a geometry of work and weather, his parents calibrated every day…
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HOSE AISLE THEOLOGY
Sunday mornings in Fort Stockton have a particular looseness to them, like the town itself has loosened its belt a notch and decided nobody was going to jail before noon. The sun comes up polite, not bragging, just enough warmth to remind you that winter is a rumor told by people who don’t live here.…
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THE TOPOGRAPHY OF A TOPAZ
Nobody in Fort Stockton woke up that Tuesday expecting prophecy to arrive in the form of a 1993 Mercury Topaz GS Sedan. But prophecy rarely checks in with the Chamber of Commerce, and anyway, the Topaz glided down Dickinson Boulevard with the self-assurance of an undercover librarian. The thing was Oxford White with a dark…
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MOVIE REVIEW: GOLDFINGER
By Jimmy Don Ventura Movie Critic, Stockton Telegram-DispatchGuest Reviewer — CMC Blog COLD OPEN: NO WARM-UP LAP REQUIRED I don’t ease into Goldfinger. I never have. You don’t tiptoe up to a movie like this. You open the door hard, let the hinges complain, and see who flinches. February needed a film with some weight…
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FULL SERVICE NOSTALGIA
There are few things that truly improve Fort Stockton, and fewer still that do it without a committee, a grant, and at least one person storming out of a meeting in a huff. Most “improvements” arrive in town like a traveling salesman: too shiny, too loud, and gone before anyone admits they were fooled. But…
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THE LAST IVORY BONNEVILLE
By the time the sun began scraping itself off the horizon, the 1960 Pontiac Bonneville was already glowing like a pearlescent apparition rolling down West Callaghan. Folks who’d been in town long enough knew that glow on sight. That Shelltone Ivory—the paint code CC for the more studious car buffs—caught morning light the way a…
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SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST
I was sitting at the bar of the Cattle Baron Hotel in Fort Stockton the way a man sits in church when he isn’t especially religious—upright enough to look like I was trying, but with my attention drifting toward the exits. It was 1959, the kind of year that still expected men to keep their…
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IN THE MOOD
Hank did it on a Tuesday last spring, which in Fort Stockton is the day most likely to produce a scandal—because everybody’s awake enough to notice, and nobody’s busy enough to pretend they didn’t. I saw the thing before I saw Hank. It sat just outside the Lucky Lady Lounge like a cherry-red hallucination somebody…
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AMBASSADORS, RELATIONS, AND BUTT DUST
Rex Hall had the look of a man who’d just learned the pharmacy was out of refills, mercy, and quiet afternoons, all at the same time. He sat at the big roundtable in the middle of the Grounds for Divorce, shoulders slumped, coffee cooling untouched, eyes fixed on nothing in particular. Around him were the…