Several teenagers in my hometown struggled with alcohol when I was growing up, but I only knew one: Fielden Poolaw, a classmate of mine at Anadarko High School.
Fielden was a Kiowa with a copper complexion and elongated earlobes that looked like someone had stretched them. He wore his hair short and went around in a rumpled, grey trench coat, which he rarely took off. The trench coat gave him a vaguely sinister appearance, which is probably the look Fielden was going for.
About one out of
five kids at my high school were Natives, but the white kids and the Indian kids lived on different planets. Fielden, however, had a couple of things going for him that
bridged the gap between the white world and his Kiowa world.
For one thing, Fielden had an evening job taking tickets and popping popcorn at the Redskin Theater. Fielden sometimes let a few of his friends slip into the theater without paying, and he
occasionally gave out free bags of fresh, hot
popcorn—heavily seasoned with orange popcorn salt.
And Fielden had
another thing going for him. He was the leader of a gang of Indian
kids who hung out at the Redskin. These
Indian boys--probably popcorn addicts--swore an unspoken oath of fealty to Fielden. He could dispatch them
on a moment’s notice to rescue any friend who was getting harassed or bullied—and
there was a lot of harassment and bullying going on in Anadarko when I was
young.
So Fielden was a
handy guy to know. But he only dispensed his favors (protection and free
popcorn) to his friends. So how did someone become Fielden’s friend? By providing him with something he
desperately needed—transportation.
Fielden was too
poor to own a vehicle, and he depended on white kids to drive him around in
their parents’ cars on the weekends. I was one of Fielden’s chauffeurs, and I often drove him around the drag—the endless loop between the Tastee Freeze
Drive-in on the east side of town and the Powwow Drive-in on the west side.
As I said,
Fielden drank way too much. He was generally stewed when I drove him around on
the weekends. I don’t think he ever carried a gun, but he pulled a claw hammer
out of his trench coat once, telling me cryptically that he was expecting
trouble.
I liked Fielden, and I wasn’t afraid of him. When I was with him, I felt like I was on the
precipice of a great adventure; and in fact, Fielden and I experienced an
adventure together—at least a minor adventure.
One Friday night
I was driving Fielden around in my father’s 1950 Chevrolet pickup—a death trap
that constantly leaked brake fluid. The truck had once been black but had
turned an orange-gray color. The undercarriage was so rusted that there was a
hole in the floor, and I could actually see the road beneath me when I drove. It
had a faulty alternator that I had to pound with a pair of pliers to get the
engine to crank. Oh yeah, it was a
dreamboat—a real chick magnet!
On this
particular night, Fielden collared me to drive him to the teen hop at the Caddo
County Fairgrounds. This was an easy assignment because I was going to
the teen hop anyway—the King's Men were playing.
But Fielden had
a stop to make before the teen hop. By a series of grunts, he guided me down an
alley behind Broadway Street and told me to stop at the back door of the town’s most notorious bar—the Merchants
Club!
Yes, the
Merchants Club—the seediest of Anadarko’s seedy bars. The Merchants Club—a bar
with an attitude-- which kept its double front doors flung wide open so that all of Protestant Anadarko could peer into its dark and smoky maw
in the hope of seeing a neighbor sucking down a Coors, a Jax, or a Stag,
accompanied—we hoped--by a woman other than his wife.
But, of course,
our neighbors didn’t hang out in the Merchants Club. It was a bar for Indian
men, and a middle-class white guy would be nuts to go inside.
Perfect place
for Fielden, however. And I knew when we drove up to the Merchants Club’s back door
where he had been getting his booze. Fielden mumbled a stern order to wait and
then slid silently into the back door of Hell itself.
I waited and I
waited. And then, through the pickup’s rear window, I saw an Anadarko cop
walking down the alley, checking for unlocked doors. He was carrying one of those
long, heavy flashlights that double as a nightstick. Uh oh!
The officer
tapped the window glass with his flashlight. “What are you doing here, kid?”
I was terrified.
What in the hell did he think I was doing behind the Merchant Club? Buying
booze? Cocaine? Soliciting a prostitute? Planning a burglary?
My mind reeled
with the shock of adrenalin, and for once in my otherwise dull-witted life, I
did some fast thinking.
“Officer,” I
said, “my truck won’t start.”
Then I
explained how beating on the alternator would sometimes get the engine to turn
over. The cop said he had seen that problem before and offered to help. I
raised the hood on the most dangerous and ugly truck in America and started
beating on the alternator with a crescent wrench, while the cop shined his
light into the engine compartment.
Then I quickly
scrambled back in the truck, turned the key, and the engine cranked right
up. “Thanks for your help, officer!”
And
in fact, he had been helpful, and I
felt bad about deceiving him.
But where was
Fielden? To hell with Fielden, I thought. I’m getting out of here.
And then, with
almost perfect timing, Fielden came out of the backdoor of the Merchants Club
with two quarts of Coors Banquet Beer, bottle tops peeking coyly out of brown
paper bags. My heart stopped beating
If Fielden was
surprised to see the cop, he didn’t show it, and the cop didn’t seem surprised
either. The cop didn’t say anything. Fielden didn’t say anything. And I didn’t
say anything. Fielden climbed in the truck, and off we went.
About five
minutes later, Fielden and I were at the teen hop. I parked the truck, and we bought
our admission tickets—a buck apiece. I
had had enough excitement for the night, and I began drifting away from
Fielden, hoping to lose myself in a crowd of dancing
Oklahomans.
But Fielden
followed me—lurching across the dance floor with a quart bottle of Coors
squeezed under each armpit and concealed beneath his trench coat.
Then, when he
was only about two feet from me, an enthusiastic girl doing the Twist—I think
she was from Fort Cobb—bumped him.
Fielden’s arms
flew up and two quarts of Coors crashed on the concrete floor. Flying glass
went everywhere. The bottom of Fielden’s trench coat was drenched in beer.
Fielden had been
trying to tell me something just before the beer bottles broke. What was it he
wanted to say? I’ll never know because a squad of Rotarians, the teen hop’s
zealous chaperones, hustled him out into the darkness.
A few months
after that memorable evening, I went away to Oklahoma State University, where I
wasted four more years of my life. Fielden stayed in Anadarko and slipped deeper
and deeper into alcohol. He died in
Florida at the age of 33. I think he was in rehab at the time.
I learned that
Fielden was buried in the cemetery next to the Redstone Church, situated
below a bluff that overlooks the Washita river.
Did Fielden die
a Christian? I do not know, and I do not care. And, at this stage of my life, I feel
sure God doesn’t care either.
But what the
hell do I know? Fielden and I spent hundreds of hours driving around Anadarko
together, and I don’t think I ever asked him a single question.
Nevertheless, if
there is a heaven, I’m sure Fielden will be there. After all, paradise would
not be paradise without fresh, hot popcorn, seasoned with orange popcorn salt.
And nobody popped popcorn better than Fielden.
