“Life is tough, but it’s tougher when you’re stupid.” John Wayne

In her classic essay, John Wayne, A Love Song, the writer Joan Didion remembered meeting John Wayne when she was a child and he was stricken with cancer.

She wrote that when John Wayne “rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases.”

Didion remembered, as I do, the great scene from War Of The Wildcats, where Wayne tells the girl that he would build her a house “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods go.”

Although the men in her life had many virtues, Didion wrote “they have been John Wayne and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. And what man, really, could ever be another John Wayne.

Didion could as easily have written those passages through the eyes of most men, we all live in the shadow of John Wayne. I think that every boy, even hopeless wussy-men nerds like me, took John Wayne his dreams and fantasies. We all wanted to be John Wayne, even in the age of feminism, a transition he could ever make.

He was the Iconic Man. Like  him or not, you had to respect him.

As Director Raoul Walsh said when he first saw Wayne, “dammit, the son of a bitch looked like a man.”

I am a man, and I do not look in any way like John Wayne (see photo above, of Gus kissing me while hold him upright after each meal).

I am not that kind of man, but I have often wished I was, he is in my mind and my imagination, and I do have my John Wayne moments,They came to mind today while I was-reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the Didion essay collection with the Wayne remembrance. I loved the piece so much I have a copy of the book to each member of my Writing Workshop.

Wayne has always been in certain of my dreams, some people are simply bigger than life. What frightened and bullied and lonely wed-betting boy has not prayed to his Gods to be John Wayne for just a few days, beat the bullies into a pulp, win the best girls and take charge of his own destiny.

I remember when I fell in love with Maria, I bravely (turning to jelly inside) knocked on the door of her barn studio in West Hebron, and declared my love for her.  She was getting divorced, and was free, and was making up her mind about me. Desperately, I turned to John Wayne for inspiration, women just seem to melt like ice in July when he was around.

“Courage is being scared to death…and saddling up anyway.” – John Wayne.

The words coming out of my mouth simply stunned me, i had reached into some part of my unconscious that i did not know existed: “I love you and will take care of you,” I said, “and I promise you I will love you in ways that will make you squeal with joy.”

As I said it, I nearly fainted, I didn’t really even know what I meant. I was sure she would either run screaming out of the room or laugh at me.

But she did know what I meant, and smiled and gave me a come-hither look that almost made me squeal with joy. It was a John Wayne moment, like when he took the girl and went riding through the draw and into the sunset.

Or maybe the scene in Mclintock where he chases the ferociously independent Maureen O’Hara through town and spanks her in public. He would not dare to do that now.

Times change, of course, and if I did that to Maria, I would most likely end up in the hospital with my legs broken, she would not find it humbling or attractive. After that,  the me.too movement would eat me (or him) alive and he would end up disgraced or in jail.

It’s fascinating to see how women were portrayed just a few decades ago, and what is unacceptable now. There are parts to John Wayne, that I don’t care to have.

So I came on quite differently.I felt like a real man who had expressed my sexuality out in the open, something I had never done before. I couldn’t take it for granted, like Wayne did, I had to say it and hope it went over well.  I was a wussy-man, an older man, a scared man.

As it happened, I got the girl, and rode off with her to my big old farmhouse (s) on the hill, where we have lived happily.

My John Wayne moment was my version of telling her I would find her a river where the cottonwoods grow.Life is never that simple, at least  not for me.

As it is, we don’t have cottonwoods here, but I did find her a river where the apple trees grow.

Other John Wayne moments come to mind, I found that I needed to channel John Wayne sometimes in the country, where there is often no 911 handy and there are lots of feral, rabid, mean-spirited and dangerous critters around and not just a few drunken fools with big guns.

A big John Wayne moment:

One day some kids walking up the road from school ran to the house and told me breathlessly there was a rabid raccoon coming out of a culvert right by the road and a few feet from the pasture where our donkeys and sheep grazed. They were afraid of the rabid raccoon, as country kids are taught to be.

Where I live, when you call Animal Control, they don’t come rushing over to your house with guns and nets, they ask you if have a gun, and if you don’t have a gun, they ask if your neighbor has a gun.

As one officer told me,  “there’s one of me and millions of crazy critters. Best to shoot it if you can.” (In New Jersey, where I had lived, if you saw a rabid raccoon or skunk, a SWAT team would show up with lights and sirens and big guns, and seal of the streets.)

I had a gun, a .22 rifle I quickly purchased in the country and took lessons to learn how to use. I think Maria was watching from the house, I’m not sure, but the google-eyed kids were watching me closely. I had them stand far away, watched the poor raccoon hissing and foaming at the mouth at the opening to the culvert.

I coolly waved to the kids to be cool – careful to show calm and steadfastness as the poor raccoon inched towards me. He was about 7 or 8 feet away. I thought of John Wayne in “Texas Cyclone,” standing so tall at the Pecos River. I pointed the rifle towards the culvert, pulled back the bolt to see if there was one in the barrel, flicked up the safety.

I knew I was being watched and puffed up like a real man would, facing a great  (or medium) danger by himself This, I thought would impress Maria and the kids might even admire me.

There was one shell in the chamber, eight more in the magazine. I stepped forward, taking one final look around me to make sure no people or dogs or animals were in the line of sight or close by, sighted through the telescope and fired off five or six quick rounds.

The heavy-eyed raccoon (the rule in the country is if you can get close to a raccoon, shoot it). The raccoon twitched and fell over. He was in pretty bad shape.

The kids cheered me on, and then left, I said they couldn’t come near the raccoon. In an hour, I went out, poked it to make sure it was dead, used old gloves to pull into a plastic bag, wrapped it up and took it to the vet. He would send its had to a state lab for testing.

The kids were long, and I felt no great regret, the poor raccoon was in a dreadful way.

The while thing was quite John Wayne-ish You didn’t get to do this in New Jersey or the other cities I had lived in.

I came into the house, and I could see Maria was just a bit surprised and impressed. “Are you okay?,” she asked, worried I would be upset by the killing. Why sure, I said, checking rifle to make sure the barrel was empty. If I’d had a pistol, I would have blown the smoke out of the barrel.

I put the rifle back in its case, re-loaded the magazine, stored it in another room hidden in a draw. I made the sure the barrel was clear, and left the gun for cleaning later.

Was it my imagination, or was Maria looked at me with wide-eyed admiration and gratitude when I came back into the house. Her man had shot the dread raccoon. I’m sure this was what she was thinking, but what she said was,  “I hope you got rid of the body. Gross.”

“If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”  – John Wayne.

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Another John Wayne moment came here on the second Bedlam Farm when an ill-tempered rooster started attacking Maria every time she came near him. One days she came into the house bleeding, the rooster had come up on her from behind and clawed the rear of her legs, drawing blood and leaving long cuts and scratches. She was rattled. Maria is tough, but I know she would never harm an animal or shoot one, it is just not in her DNA.

I said nothing, I went and got the gun, took it out of its case, loaded the magazine, carrying the gun outside pointed downwards and away and went out looking for the rooster. If there is one sacred role on any farm I am on, is that we do not have animals that hurt people. That is a crime with a certain death sentence, and I am the judge and jury. I warned the rooster several times and chased after him, shouting and waving my arms. But you cannot out-rooster a male rooster, they will happily give their live to be mean.

Just look at Congress, the biggest gathering of roosters in the entire agricultural sphere.

I found him – I no longer remember his name.

He was walking in the pasture with a high mound of grass behind him, perfect. He looked at me, thinking about charging. I looked in the eye, more or less, and said “nobody hurts Maria on this farm.” And I fired four quick rounds into his heart and two into his head. He dropped over to one side, twitched briefly and died. Maybe I was thinking of True Grit, one of the best shootout scenes in Wayne’s career.

But this was a silent fantasy, the kind I used to have at night when I was 10. This was a rooster, after all.

I think there is nothing more John Wayne-ish or mannish that sticking up for your woman in that way, a value I have since worked to shed. Maria is just as likely to stand up for me, and I appreciate it.

Maria is a lot tougher than I am, and smarter.Too smart to be out in the pasture on a hot day shooting an ill-tempered bird. That is not of course, an actual sign either of manhood or courage. It is a John Wayne dream, he crept into the heads of every boy I knew.

I picked up the rooster by his feet with one hand, and the rifle on one shoulder (safety on) and the rooster in one hand, I marched down to the back pasture and left him out for the coyotes.

So the bottom line is this. I know I can’t be John Wayne, and bear no resemblance to him. My kind of manhood is quite different. But it has surely evolved. As a New York Times book reviewer once said of me, “Katz keeps a gun up there on his farm and he’s not afraid to use it.”

I am not afraid to use it, nor do I wish for anyone to take it away from me. And I very much doubt that John Wayne would have wished for or used an AR-15 to fight his battles. He was way too much of a man for that.

He has showed me how to stand tall and be calm.

“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and i puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”   – John Wayne.

The above is my favorite John Wayne quote. I can just picture it in his manly, wise, sing-song voice. You wouldn’t see those nasty dweebs on Facebookj or Twitter questioning the wisdom of it either. They would never dream of trolling John Wane, his very existence was a coward-repellent.

I have no idea what the quote means, of course but I try to live by it every day. John Wayne is in my dreams too.