Being a Mad Dog and Reflections on Bud Shrake’s Passing

Original "Mad Dog" Dies of Cancer

Notes on Mad Dogs (Austin Chronicle Story by Clay Smith)

By Steven Long

I’ve been a Mad Dog for more than 20 years I suppose. It’s a distinct honor I cherish. Since my induction I’ve carried the frayed membership card in my wallet never showing anybody just how important I clearly am. It was given to me in a smoke filled Galveston bar by one of Texas’ literary lions. The card has been to Europe countless times, logged coast to coast miles with me, hugged the seat of my saddle as I tried to stay on the back of my horse, been for more than one dip in the Blanco and Guadalupe rivers and has long reassured me that I am, in fact, a bona fide Texas writer. It has sat quietly next to my butt in its own place of honor through meeting three presidents and lord knows who else.

The card has never gotten me out of a traffic ticket, and it didn’t keep me from getting fired by the Houston Chronicle (an honor I now cherish). I’ve never even flashed it to impress a friend with a literary inclination. I have haven’t shown it to my daughter Michelle Long Brown, who can boast legitimate literary credentials of her own as a published American poet. Yet it’s been there, quietly sitting in my pocket wedged between every driver’s license I’ve ever owned (I just can’t part with them); my voter registration card; a long forgotten receipt for a traffic ticket the statute of limitations has long ago run out; and numerous phone numbers scribbled down but never transferred to a database on my computer.

The Mad Dogs were founded by some of the Texans I most admire. At the top of the list is Texas Monthly’s Gary Cartwright. But he wasn’t alone in this star studded gathering of intellect. There was Ann Richards, Jody and Pete Gent, Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, Larry L. King, and a bushel basket full of other Lone Star luminaries.

And now another of the founders has passed. Bud Shrake died in Austin after a bout with cancer.

You couldn’t be around Gary Cartwright for very long before a Shrake story popped out. The two were best friends for almost 50 years. And it was “Jap” Cartwright who introduced me to Jody Gent, one of the most remarkable women I’ve ever known. She was Shrake’s assistant and confidant for decades and is a Texas literary lion in her own quiet way. Her husband Pete wrote the football classic “ North Dallas 40,” but Jody made it sing.

What the Mad Dogs did was nothing short of revolutionary in stodgy, old fashioned, and the mostly backward Texas of the ‘60s and ‘70s. They changed everything from country music to the way we write and look at our institutions, politicians, and culture, all the while pointing out its foibles with a love unimaginable for say, Connecticut, Nebraska, Indiana, or any of the 49 lesser states. Best of all, they had the ability to laugh at us all - and mostly themselves. They dranks hard, played hard, smoked a little dope, ended up in jail sometimes, and then reveled in the adventure they had because it had the makings of another great story to tell.

Texas frequently slips back into its backward mode – just take a look at the makeup of state government for the last decade - but from time to time a Mad Dog like Ann Richards comes along and just turns things upside down and backwards. I expect the mossbacks in Austin are heading for another comeuppance sooner than they might believe if recent elections in Dallas and Houston are an indication of what’s to come. Bud Shrake will be buried in the State Cemetery next to his beloved governor.

I was inducted into this elite group of Texans at a small table for four at the sadly departed Old Galveston Club, a former speakeasy bulldozed for what developers call "progress.". Sitting with Gary Cartwright and his late and wonderful wife Phyllis, and the irrepressible Jody Gent, in true Mad Dog fashion the beer ran down our throats like the Lucas Gusher.

Jap and Phyllis rank among Texas’ most accomplished raconteurs. I can modestly say, I’m no slouch at storytelling after a lifetime in journalism. And Jody - well the stories never stopped.

At the time, Texas Monthly just published my first book, Death Without Dignity. It was winning awards and getting glowing reviews. I was also running Galveston’s In Between Magazine and paying my dues (awfully costly, I might add) as an investigative journalist.

Behind the old bar, the late Santos Cruz shook another Margarita as Jap, Phyllis, Jody, and I talked. The veteran bartender was no minor raconteur himself. I told the Austin literatti how Galveston lore had it that Cruz invented the drink on a cold winter night at the island’s Studio Lounge for singer Peggy Lee. Cruz was always happy to confirm the story. I think the story made it into Jap's book Galveston, a History of the Island. I later learned directly from Lee through a friend that she didn’t drink. Santos was probably a Mad Dog himself.

Jap reached into his pocket and extracted a “Texas Monthly” business card and took out a ball point pin. On the back of the card, he wrote, “Mad Dog inc.” and continued by penning “Steve Long is a member.” And then Jap inserted the Mad Dog slogans. “Everything that is Not a Mystery is Guesswork,” and “Doing Indefinable Services to Mankind.”

Jody and Jap signed the card making it official.

Cartwright is a mentor to me. In the months when he lived on the island, he gave me the confidence, and yes arrogance, to call myself a Texas writer. For that I owe him and Bud Shrake a debt of gratitude for founding the Mad Dogs.

I just wish I could have thanked Bud personally. I never met him.

________________________________

Slaughtergate

Humane Society Makes Name Official
(KHOU Video)

A Different Kind of Murder
(But Murder None the Less)
 -- by Steven Long

The victim stood trapped in a steel box as the assailant stood above repeatedly stabbing her in the back. He was aiming to sever the spinal cord but continued to miss. Finally, on the 13th thrust of the stiletto like knife she dropped to her knees and lay on the concrete floor, her spine destroyed, but her mind very much alive. A chain was wrapped around her numb legs and she was hoisted head down as she saw a sharp knife come toward her and felt the slice into her carotid artery. Finally, mercifully, she lost consciousness as her four feet were chopped from her body.

This murder was unusual because it was documented by a news photographer from a Texas newspaper. You see, she and a reporter had penetrated the bloody halls of a slaughterhouse in Juarez, Mexico. The story by San Antonio Express News reporter Lisa Sandburg has stunned the nation, and perhaps will finally persuade Congress to move to pass an act that will finally end this horror. The story broke simultaneously also in the Houston Chronicle.

The Mexican abattoir, and another in Canada, has been busy since equine slaughter was finally outlawed by the legislatures of Texas and Illinois, and the laws banning the killing of horses for human consumption were upheld in two federal appellate courts.

America has never had a hunger for horse meat, yet it is considered a pricy delicacy in parts of Europe and Japan. Years ago, two foreign owned companies saw an opportunity and opened slaughterhouses in Fort Worth and Kaufman, Texas, and also in DeKalb, Illinois. For years, despite protests from local residents, the killing of horses took place in these locations to the tune of 100,000 per year until the two Texas plants were shut down late last year, and the Illinois kill was closed a couple of months back.

And make no mistake about it; the method of killing a horse in America was no less painful, cruel, and clumsy than in the foreign slaughterhouses. It was just mechanized. The U.S. plants used what is called a captive bolt gun. With this device, a rod was discharged with the idea of hitting the head sufficient enough to stun the animal who was about to meet its maker and be transformed from a living beautiful creature to red meat displayed in a foreign butcher shop.

But the captive bolt missed its mark as often as not and the horses endured unspeakable suffering until they were finally subdued by a lucky strike. As in Mexico, horses were hoisted by one leg into the air, their throat slashed, and they were dismembered - as they bled to death.

The killing of horses for their meat is big business. The industry would have you believe that only old, broken, frail, and useless horses go to slaughter. That is the big lie. Fat, healthy, horses are bought at auctions across the land not because they are useless and old, but because they are healthy and filled with meat. Most often, their owners take them to the auction hoping that the horse they have loved for years will go to another adoring home to be used for wholesome recreation.

Recently I was sent a chilling photograph. It showed the carcasses of horses inside a kill plant hoisted in the process line. Below, their hooves had just been severed. In the foreground was a hoof with a horseshoe on it. That horse was never meant for slaughter. It had been cared for by a farrier in the past six weeks (the proscribed period for shoeing a horse). Its owner had paid the farrier at least $80 to trim and shoe the animal. The horse clearly had gone to auction, its owner hoping it would be sold into a good life as a work horse at worst, or as a pleasure horse which was more likely.

Instead, the highest bidder was the "killer buyer," a bottom feeder in the horse industry. From that point on, the horse knew nothing but misery. At auction's end, it was loaded on huge crowded trailer, taken to a feed lot likely hundreds of miles away, and then shipped on a cattle truck with ceilings built for low slung cattle. From there, the horse was again shipped hundreds of miles to the slaughter plant.

The cruelty which goes on 24/7 in this business is unspeakable.

Congress now has before it the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act. It will not only outlaw slaughter from the federal level, it will also make illegal the transport of horses to slaughter, including transport to plants currently operating in Mexico and Canada.

Until that happens, horses will still be stabbed to death, be hoisted by their feet in the air, their throats slashed, and then be bled to death as their bodies are cut apart while still living. If this happened to humans it would make the horrors of Auschwitz look merciful.