It was Stacy Gruby’s fault.

He’s the one who gave Troy, and later all of us, the next hare-brained scheme.

In August of 1981, my girlfriend returned to school in New York. I was going to Portland to visit my family before returning to Seattle. There was something I wanted to do before I left Missoula, though. All summer long I had been looking longingly through a music store window on Higgins, at an electric bass guitar. I wanted to learn a rock ‘n’ roll instrument, and this was it. I had been really taken with the bass while listening to bands over the last two years with great bassists: notably The Who (John Entwistle), The Police (Sting), and Cream (Jack Bruce). This one looked just like the Hofner bass Paul McCartney played in the early days (and still uses, for old time’s sake). It was only eighty dollars. I decided I wanted that bass more than I needed my bike, so I sold it – for eighty dollars.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, Troy had grown restless. He was annoyed when both of us left  for the summer, letting him hold down the real (but mind-numbing) job and pay the bills. Over the summer, I believe that grew into a resentment, if not toward us, then toward his situation. He quit his job and planned to go hitchhiking for awhile. For some reason that I do not recall, Troy ran up a huge phone bill and a total of $1000 in debts. Right before I was going to leave for Portland, Troy showed up in Missoula, and he and Mark decided they would hitchhike to Oregon. They needed some money for their trip. Even though Mark and Troy had earned money all summer, and I hadn’t, I was the only one of us who had any money.

Eighty dollars, to be exact.

You gave them your music money? Are you daft?

Yes, I let them talk me out of that Paul McCartney bass. They hitchhiked to Corvallis, Troy’s home before Missoula, and I went to Portland. In ‘Corn Valley,’ as Troy used to call it, they met up with an old grade school friend of Troy’s, Stacy Gruby. Stacy told them how he and some friends had gone to west Texas, gotten jobs working on the oil rigs, and made mounds of cash. To say that Troy was fascinated by this story would be putting it mildly. The wheels started turning in his head that day and didn’t stop.

At mom’s house in Portland, I answered the door one day and was surprised to see Mark and Troy, fresh from their Corvallis trip. We took a walk up through the neighborhood, where my family had lived since 1974. At the Irvington School playground, where I had played when I was ten, they told me what Stacy Gruby had told them about roughnecking in Texas, and how much money was to be made there. Troy thought we should go there, and proposed a Texas Plan over the Seattle Plan.

One thing the both of them always ragged me about was my cautiousness. (Steve ‘Life-in-the-Slow-Lane’ Dehner, they had dubbed me.) It was true. I had been a little daredevil as a kid, but as a teen I developed an aversion for what I considered unnecessary risks. I did not apologize for it, though, because in my mind, without my caution to balance their impetuousness, I’d have been jailed or dead several times over just in the last year.

Irvington School playground today.  In the ’70s it had a playground in the corner area to the right. It included a high slide and I loved to jump off the top of it. As a kid, I was always jumping off of things.

So, not surprisingly, I balked at the Texas Plan. I said no. Mark leaned toward no, so the Texas Plan was shelved.

I returned to Seattle by train on September 4th, in time for the Kinks concert that night. Before I left, Nana took me shopping for my 18th birthday, which was coming mid-month. She bought me a brown knapsack, which, while a little ragged,  I still have after over 31 years and thousands of miles on the road.

When we were all back at the 20th Avenue apartment, we partied for a couple of weeks, around the Kinks show, visitors from Missoula, and my 18th birthday. But after the fun, the outlook was bleak. There was no food, no money, and there was back rent due. Mark and I had to work two weeks before getting a check. We resorted to shoplifting for food. Even then, we subsisted mostly on water, potatoes and butter. (Troy wouldn’t eat margarine.) We owed debts we could not pay off. The goal – a trip to Europe, our reason for moving to Seattle in the first place – was as remote as it had ever been.

It was time to rethink our plans. By the end of the month, Troy had another job, but for the last four weeks he hadn’t stopped thinking about Texas. What was calling to him, tugging at him? Was it a walkabout, an escape, a quest? He hated the feeling that his path was being carved out for him by his attachment to us, to a job. Whatever else he was after, he wanted to break free.

He made his decision. He was going to Texas, whether we came or not. He wasn’t interested in being talked out of it. Mark and I still considered it too uncertain. Troy moved out.

If it’s freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.
-Edna Ferber
Giant

Thus the Alliance was broken. Mark and I moved into a studio apartment on First Hill. We all walked away from our debts, the bills, the back rent, all of it. Troy stayed with his mom for a few weeks, then left for Odessa, Texas, and a long, lonesome trail.

Before he left, the three of us got together to bid him farewell. Troy was a forever-friend, smart, lovable and reckless. It was Troy in the first place whose easy friendship with Mark and then me had made this triad we called the Alliance, and now he was breaking it. He seemed to be breezing away just as easily. I was sad and disappointed to see him go, and I wondered when our paths would cross again.

As we parted, Troy said to us, as we had heard him say dozens of times – and just as casually –  “See ya on down that road.”

“See ya.”