It`s always easy to tell the bad guys in one of A.W. ”Bill” Gray`s novels.
They`re likely as not to be feds.
That`s feds as in law-twisting federal prosecutors, squirrely FBI agents and mean-as-snakes, throw-away-the-key federal judges. Sometimes, the villains also include corrupt local politicians. How corrupt? Well, they`re Texas politicians.
Note the opening line of Gray`s last novel, ”Size,” which takes place in his hometown of Dallas and another of Gray`s favorite haunts, Las Vegas:
”Sizemore Brandon`s conclusion re: the federal prosecutor after studied observation of the clean-shaven face, the slightly jutted jaw, and the pink, fresh-scrubbed skin: a Class-A (expletive).”
This point of view doesn`t seem peculiar when you consider Gray`s background before he turned to writing novels for a living. A boyhood friend, early road manager and carousing partner of golfing great Lee Trevino, the 50- year-old, 6-foot-2-inch Dallas native has also been a federal civil service bureaucrat, a professional high-stakes poker player and an insurance broker.
In the latter capacity, he ran afoul of the mail fraud statutes-unjustly, he insists-and ended up serving more than four years in Texas and federal slammers, playing jailyard softball with the likes of convicted family slayer Jeffrey (”Fatal Vision”) MacDonald and some other fellows a lot scarier.
”I knew some pretty bad guys,” said Gray in a recent chat in Philadelphia at a writers conference, a gathering he attended courtesy of his parole officer.
This is not to say that Gray makes good guys out of actual bad guys-at least not all the time. Like his idol, Elmore Leonard, Gray creates some bad guys who are really bad, like these two low-lifes from ”Size”:
”The door to the suite opened and the two Latin thugs came in. The skinny one regarded Gurney with a half-smirk. His silenced Beretta hung at his side. . . . The short Latin`s upper lip curled. He took two quick short strides and stood over Yucca-baby. He nudged her ribs with his toe. She moaned softly and stirred. Grinning as if he was enjoying himself, the stocky Latin shot her twice in the head. His arm jerked. The silencer spit orange flame.” Size Brandon is the hero of the book. A big, lovable lug who likes little kids, rescues a damsel in distress, gets squeezed and railroaded by the feds and always tries to do what`s right-killing people only when they threaten his boss or his girl.
Don`t get Gray wrong. He likes a lot of cops, pols, judges and ordinary people, too. In fact, his latest novel, ”In Defense of Judges,” deals with a group that probably doesn`t like to think of itself as in need of defending. Gray is a college graduate, has four kids and a lawn, and his wife, Martha, is a successful Dallas travel agent. It`s just that he likes other kinds of folks, too.
”I`ve run with gamblers and bank robbers,” he said. ”And I`ve run with men who`ve run for governor.”
Given the history of Texas politics, some might not be too quick to see the distinction. Which is more or less the way Gray sees life, or at least fiction. His characters, including his heroes, swim in a sleazy gray area between proper and respectable and evil and mean. Like many of the feds in his books, his protagonists walk both sides of the law.
Crossing the line, Gray suggests, can be instructive. As he observed: ”I think that everybody, as part of their education, should spend at least six months in jail.”
He certainly didn`t start out in life headed for one. He was born in Ft. Worth and grew up in Dallas` solidly respectable, middle-class University Park section, the son of a Firestone tire store manager. He went to Highland Park High School, graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1962 and took a job with the federal General Services Administration, looking forward to a nice, safe, suburban future as your average American bureaucrat.
”I hated every minute of it,” he said.
But, when he`d been a kid hacking around at a driving range near his old neighborhood, he`d become the friend of a hot-shot young golfer named Trevino from a nearby Mexican section of Dallas.
In 1965, when both were in their 20s, they were sitting around drinking beer one night when Trevino mentioned how much he`d like to enter the Texas State golf tournament.
”Hell, you want to go,” Gray said. ”I`ll back you.”
Using some of Gray`s savings for up-front money, Trevino entered the contest and finished well enough to win $1,200.
”We split it,” Gray said. ”A couple of months after that, we won $2,250 in the Mexican Open. I decided to quit work and live off Lee`s winnings.”
With a bankroll of $3,000, they got in Gray`s Oldsmobile and set off from Dallas on a tour that took them through a wide swath of Central and South America.
”He played golf and I talked with the senoritas,” Gray said. ”We had some good times, a lot of high living, but we came back flat broke. I did get him into the U.S. Open. He finished 40th and won $600.”
Trevino, who occasionally sees Gray at golf tournaments and appears as a figure in his novels, went on to bigger and better things.
Gray continued to bum around golf courses, and he became a skillful enough poker player to support himself when he needed to. Eventually, he went into the insurance business with a company in Los Angeles.
Gray returned to Texas and, tired of working for other people`s insurance and bonding companies, decided to go into business for himself.
”What I did was figure out a loophole in the state law that allowed me to start an insurance company without an insurance license,” he said.
His licensed competition was unable to put him out of business, he said, but-in the kind of curious coincidence that occurs in his novels-the federal government had him indicted for mail fraud because the name of his firm was almost the same as another company doing business in California.
He was convicted, he appealed and, while the appeal was pending, he was arrested by Texas authorities and held for six months without trial in the Harris County Jail in Houston. When his appeal was denied, he was turned over to federal authorities and spent nearly four years at various federal prison farms and other facilities.
He was paroled two years ago and will be fully free in 1992.
Getting along in prison is just like getting along on the outside, only a little scarier, he said.
”I saw a lot of violence,” he said. ”Saw people lose teeth. One kid had his jaw broken by two deputies because he gave them a hard time. There was one guy in solitary who committed suicide by biting through the veins in his wrist and bleeding to death.”
”Ninety-nine percent of them in the joint are just like you and me. But everybody`s on edge at all times. The worst thing of all is the boredom. You`ve got to learn how to do the time.”
Gray decided in prison that he wanted to be a writer.
”I realized that nothing that I ever did was the same kind of experience that other people have,” he said. ”I told myself, `I`m going to start writing books. That`s how I`m going to earn my living.` ”
He sent his first effort, penned in the pen, to a publisher, who referred it to a well-known New York agent, who didn`t like it.
”He told me it needed a strong central character,” Gray said.
His next effort was ”Bino,” with as strong a central character as ever told a Texas jury to imagine bathtubs full of marijuana and money. The book was sold to the E.P. Dutton Co. in 1986 for a $4,000 advance. It has since earned him about $50,000, and, with ”In Defense of Judges,” his advances are now in the six-figure range. He has a horror novel, written under a pen name, due out next February, and is hard at work on a crime novel under his own name, titled ”Stroke.”
He has all kinds of ideas for books, mostly coming out of his unique experience, but he notes that experience alone doesn`t suffice.
”Life is not like fiction,” he said. ”In life, we don`t have all those byplays and plot turns. A skillful enough writer can make those believable.” Some lives, however, are more interesting than others.
