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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IN THE BAG — PART II: RETURN CLAIM
Nobody in Fort Stockton had ever heard a car quite like that. That isn’t to say they hadn’t heard fast cars. They had. Plenty of them had come through over the years—Mustangs driven too hard, Camaros driven too loud, and the occasional Cadillac trying to remind folks what success was supposed to sound like. And…
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STARTING TO FEEL A LITTLE RUSTY
There are some mornings in Fort Stockton that don’t arrive so much as they seep in. They come through the cracks in the blinds, slide across the kitchen table, and settle into your bones before you’ve had your first sip of coffee. Rusty Hammer had lived through enough of them to know the difference. This…
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LIFE IS A SAFARI. A GRAND SAFARI.
The first time anybody noticed the Pontiac Grand Safari outside Grounds for Divorce, most assumed it belonged to tourists who’d made a navigational error serious enough to involve prayer. The wagon sat crooked beneath the diner sign like a grounded cruise ship from the Nixon Administration. Mesa Tan paint. Fake woodgrain peeling near the tailgate.…
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GOAT BALLS, RADIO WAVES, & A LINCOLN ZEPHYR
By the time Dr. John Romulus Brinkley rolled into Fort Stockton in the spring of 1938, folks had already heard enough stories about him to believe at least half of them. Some claimed he’d cured a man in Oklahoma of arthritis, cataracts, melancholia, and a weak handshake using nothing but goat glands and a bottle…
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MOVIE REVIEW: FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF
By Jimmy Don Ventura Movie Critic, Stockton Telegram-DispatchGuest Reviewer — CMC Blog There are movies about cars, and then there are movies where the cars are just trying to survive the people driving them. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off falls squarely into that second category, and I mean that with all the respect a man can…
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A COUPLE WISE ASSES
If you sat long enough at the big round table at Grounds for Divorce, you’d eventually hear every story worth telling twice, and a few that ought to be buried under caliche. This one came in like a dust storm from the north, carried on the back of a certified envelope and the kind of…
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FORT STOCKTON GETS A SIGN
If you’ve lived in Fort Stockton long enough, you come to understand that some things don’t die. They just dim a little, hum quietly to themselves, and wait for somebody with the good sense or poor judgment to plug them back in. The sign showed up on a Tuesday. That alone should’ve raised suspicion. Nothing…
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TWO OF A KIND
By the fall of 1958, Weldon Pike had reached the age where a man either settled down into the shape the world had made for him or else took one last wild swing at becoming the fool he’d always suspected he was capable of being. He was thirty-nine years old, owned a modest feed-and-seed concern…
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LYING HIS ASS OFF
By the time Lucho rolled into Fort Stockton in that old 1950 Ford F-2, folks were already doing what folks in Fort Stockton do when something unfamiliar shows up on Dickinson Boulevard—squinting at it like it might explain itself if you stared long enough, like maybe if you gave it a minute it would confess…
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THE LONG WAY HOME
On Friday afternoon, the Cadillac sat under showroom lights like it had already been forgiven for something. The men at Oil Patch John Deere-Cadillac kept a respectful distance from it, the way folks do around something expensive enough to change their posture. It wore its McKinley Gray Metallic paint like a promise, low and long,…