On the following Thursday, there was another Christmas Party in Dallas for the employees of the ad agency that worked with the McDonald's account. While there, I found out that they were planning on purchasing a $12,000 radio controlled robot for promotional events, and would need someone to be trained to operate it. Of course I let it be known that I wanted to be the robot's "dad."

I dropped by my parent's house and they were painting.  Dad still had his cassette tape logging project going on too. Mom was down in her back and told me that dad had brought her breakfast in bed! That was a first.  I was still collecting computer games and had accumulated over 200 of them. Many were downloaded from other computers while connected on line.

I was spending a lot of time on my computer. In fact, I suppose it was fair to say that I was addicted to it. All I could think about was getting home and learning more about the technology, or the programming languages. I was fascinated by it all and couldn't get enough. This became a real problem when Rhonda would come over. I would hang out with her as long as I could before I had to get my nose back into the computer. We actually had arguments over it. One particular night she got so upset with me that she started crying. She felt that I was more interested in the computer than I was in her. That is an interesting thought. If I approached it from a literal angle, I did find computers more "interesting" than ANYTHING or ANYBODY at that time. It wasn't a slam against her. It was just a fact. 

I was at that point of my life where I shouldn't have had a girlfriend, but I did. I should have just dated when I wanted to date, not gotten involved with anyone who would make demands on my time, and left it at that. But I didn't. I'd made my bed and I had to sleep in it. If I was going to live like a married man, even though I was single, I had to deal with the consequences, and those consequences started with not being able to do everything I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. If I wanted to keep Rhonda, or at least keep her happy, I would have to start trying to figure out how to NOT do the things I really wanted to do sometimes, and make myself do other things, while wearing a smile. This wasn't about Rhonda. This was about me being spoiled for so long. Being in Savvy all those years had allowed me to keep the schedule of a Royal Prince, who comes and goes as they wish, and doesn't learn much about the importance of "sharing" time with someone else. I didn't understand the concept of getting happiness from making someone else happy. It was something I would have to work on for years to come. 

Roy Papajohn stopped by the club. He was the older brother of George Papajohn, a friend from school. Roy worked at the Great Southwest Museum of Western Food, a restaurant with Nick Kithas.  He told me that George would be coming to town any day and he would get in touch with me. Long time family friend of the Miller family, Linda Morgan, was stopping in and singing with us from time to time. Linda had a great, powerhouse voice and we loved it when she sang with us. I was having strange dreams about Napoleon. I couldn't recall anything about the dreams other than they were strange, and featured Napoleon Bonaparte.

We played two nights at a club in Muenster, Texas called The Ranch. It was a very peculiar venue for some reason. We couldn't figure out what it was about the place that we didn't like. I suppose mostly it was a combination of things. The club was in a very small town, it was over an hour from home, and it felt more like we were playing at a Pancho's Mexican Restaurant than at a rock and roll club. The people were nice to us, but it was a small venue compared to what we were used to.  We were thankful it was only a two-niter! 

I spent Christmas Eve with my parents. My brother Ray's in-laws were visiting too. They seemed like nice folks. On Christmas night, we had a lot of friends show up at the club. From my old school days were George, Debbie, and Patty Papajohn and Raymond Menchaca. Brother Chris dropped by with our old friends Cliff, Carla, and Jackie. Lot's of folks came over after the gig and we played Summer Games, an Olympic competition game on my computer. 

After Muenster, we headed to Cardi's in Austin to do a week, including New Year's Eve. On the way, the equipment truck broke down again and had to be towed to the club. Every time that truck broke down, our pay dropped considerably. The old rattletrap had turned into a black hole that ate lots and lots of our money and never so much as burped a 'thank you.'  We were about to put an end to that mess for good.

We had to leave the truck in Austin while we played the next gig in Pasadena. Someone named Delan hauled our equipment to Pasadena for us in his van. While in Pasadena, the truck was supposed to be repaired. We put our light man, Rabbit, on a flight back to Austin to pick it up, but he found that the truck hadn't been picked up by the repair place yet. The mechanic told him it would be another day before they could get to it, so Rabbit flew back to Pasadena.  We finished out the week and rented a U-Haul truck for our stuff. Ambrose, Rick Miller, RJ, and Dan headed home on I-45.  I ended up driving Rabbit and Rich Mauch to Austin so they could drive the truck home.  It was only 162 miles out of the way, but what the hell... 

We got to Austin and found the truck still sitting at Cardi's where we'd left it! The mechanic said he was on his way to get it, so I left them with the truck and headed home. There was a message for me on my answering machine when I got in. Rich and Rabbit had called to say that the mechanic didn't have to take the truck to the shop to see that it had suffered a busted block! That was the end of the line for the old truck. We just left it sitting there and never went back for it. (I've heard stories that it actually sat in the back parking lot of Cardi's for years after the club went out of business.)  Rabbit and Rich had to fly home. Rabbit never dreamed he could rack up so many frequent flyer miles working as a light man for a local rock and roll band.

Back home from our road trip, Rhonda started talking about us possibly moving in together. If not right away, maybe when the band thing ended. I couldn't think about it at the time. I was about to be moving in with Jim Wise at his big hacienda in Arlington. We'd have to see how things went. We were living life in the band taking it one day at a time. We knew anything could happen and it could all go away at any moment. All it took was a couple of good weeks to make us forget about the fact that Savvy was terminal. We found ourselves living in denial a lot of the time. 

I tallied up the stats for the year 1984:

We played 268 nights.
Savvy's FW = 118
Savvy's Waco =  69
Cardi's Austin =  18
Cardi's Beaumont =  11
Cardi's Pasadena  = 6
Cardi's Houston = 5
Cardi's Lake Charles = 4
The Ranch (Muenster) = 2
Great Escape (Tulsa) = 4
Matley's = 5
Austin Roks = 4
Tango = 15
Bandy's (Corpus) = 7

We played shows with Tommy Shaw, Robin Trower, and Madame X. We were supposed to open for Lita Ford but John Bloomstrom got his wires crossed on that deal. We went to the World's Fair, Bourbon Street, and went skiing at Winter Park. We said goodbye to our friends Larry and Deana Patton. The following clubs closed their doors for good; Austin Roks, Tango's, and Beaumont Cardi's. We also said goodbye to Richard Burton, James Mason, and Truman Capote.

We said "hello" to 1985, hoping a new year would bring better luck. But hoping was one thing. Seeing the writing on the wall was quite another. The year started in Pasadena, then two days off, followed by five nights in Waco. It was terribly cold. The crowds were decent, and we even got a few encores that week, but we knew that no matter what songs we worked up, or what we wore on stage, it was pretty safe to say that our best days in Waco were behind us for good. In fact, all our days at the Waco Savvy's club were behind us. We'd never play there again after January 13th, 1985.

There seemed to be a lot of unspoken tension in the air among the band. Everyone could sense that the end was near. Things just weren't on the upswing anymore, and hadn't been for some time. As Rick Miller had put it only a few short months earlier, we just weren't "happening" anymore. The old sparkle was gone. We knew we'd avoided it for about as long as we could. Before long we would be forced to either come up with a miracle, or break up. The "hail Mary" passes that we kept coming up with were just quick-fixes, and were only postponing the inevitable.

Meanwhile, the corporate clown business was booming. I rode in a Martin Luther King Day Parade.  It was ten degrees below zero! But the funny thing about that event was the white powder residue around one of the nostrils of one of the company rep's.  It was his big day to shine in the community and there he was with glittering, snow-white particles falling from his nose onto his expensive Italian black suit. Maybe it was nothing. Perhaps he'd been eating powdered donuts. (Interestingly enough, he wasn't with the company for long after that event.)

Finally, it was time to make the move to Jim Wise's house. Rich and I moved on January 14th, which also happened to be dad's birthday, but it was our only day off for a while and we had to utilize it. Jim's house was located on San Marcos Dr. in Arlington. It was a huge house, with separate living areas buffered by a large living room. So Jim could practically live in his side of the house, and Rich and I would have the other side. Jim was just moving in too, so we ended up furnishing the place mostly with my stuff since I had accumulated quite a bit of furniture over the past few years. But I was used to being the "master of my domain" - and at Jim's I would be reduced to the rank of "tenant". I was okay with it for the time being. Jim was really easy to get along with and we loved to watch comedy videos. Once we started laughing, I would usually end up with asthma. 

The day after our massive moving effort we were back on the road again. This time it was for five nights at a club called Kristy's in Enid, Oklahoma. Kristy's was basically a beer joint in the middle of nowhere. The wind was gusting so hard during equipment load in that it felt like 20 degrees below zero. The club was completely dead for the entire week. Even the hotel that we stayed at was horrible! There was some kind of stench floating in the air all around the area during our entire stay. Dan told me that it was due to the exotic spices being used for cooking by the people in the area.  At Kristy's, the bartender kept telling us to turn the volume down until we couldn't go any lower. It was a depressing trip, and the cutting cold only made it more miserable for everyone. And the pay wasn't that great either.

Enid was one we would all quickly put behind us. It was followed by three nights at Savvy's in Ft. Worth, and then we had seven days off! It was time to go skiing again! It couldn't have come at a better time either. We were going to Squaw Valley, in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. It had been the home of the 1966 Winter Olympics. All the history was great, but really all I was interested in was getting back out on the slopes again. The scenery was unbelievable. It was actually winter time and there was lots more powder to ski on this go round. And then there was the fact that Dan had opted out of this trip. Despite the craziness of the previous ski trip, a part of me knew I would miss Dan this time. I'm not sure I would have missed him quite as much if I'd known he was back home forging the silver bullet that would soon put the Savvy beast out of its misery once and for all. 

CHAPTER 63:  STANDING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

SAVVY STORY INDEX

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