The Lone Star Texas Swing Museum Closes For Good

“Well, it’s a knock off, Henrietta.” The pronouncement was final. Henrietta stared up at the white Gretch hollow-body guitar that sat on a stand in a glass box, posted prominently in the middle of the room. It was decorated like a Nudie Suit, edged in a white leather and chord, speckled with bright blue paisley swirls and shapes crowding the electric workings and bridge. The pearl-handled whammy bar hung from the shiny Bigsby style bridge etched with pistols and stars.

With its matching white leather strap, itself adorned with horses, eighth notes, and stars, hung just so down the pearl in-lay neck, Henrietta was not prepared to hear the assessment spoken out loud.

“How can that be?” She asked, sipping absently from the large coffee tumbler with the Texas Playboys sticker wrapped around it.

June, from her stool behind the glass-topped display case by the exit which served as the gift shop for the Lone Star Texas Swing Museum, watched her mother with The Assessor and knew that it was not going to be good. June knew that tumbler wasn’t just coffee and that today was going to be a bad day. The coffee was a new feature of her mother, brewed by the Nespresso Machine that June’s aunt, her mother’s sister, bought her, not for Henrietta’s love of coffee, but more as a way to mask what had started with grief and had grown into a crutch, earlier and earlier in the day on weekends, to earlier and earlier in the week, to every day. Henrietta’s drinking had become as much an exhibit of the Lone Star Texas Swing Museum as the cluttered odds and ends that littered the display cases.

So June looked away from the scene, and tried to look back at her pre-cal homework. She wasn’t supposed to be doing it on the glass display case, while she was working in the museum, but no one had been into the Lone Star Texas Swing Museum in a whole month since that man who happened to pop in. And he just wanted directions to Waco.

“West on 7, north on 35,” was what June helpfully told him. Her mother wanted ten dollars from him for the tour, but the man explained that his car, with his wife and kids, was still running and he couldn’t stay for “no tours.” June’s mother followed him out, clucking about parking and running a business. After that, Henrietta put up a sign outside the entrance that read “Restroom Inside.” But even the promise of relief didn’t bring in the crowds she had hoped for any more than that guitar.

June couldn’t look at her pre-cal either.

Her eyes wandered again around the cluttered room. For that is what the Lone Star Texas Swing Museum was, really: a room cluttered. It had actually been a beauty shop, as her mother liked to remind her, from a time when people took trains and busses to visit the city. June assumed her mother meant Austin or Ft. Worth. Her father, who died suddenly last year had inherited the shop from his aunt twenty years ago and himself being a failed musician instead of a failed beautician, took out the sinks at each station and installed shelves and display cases which he then filled with an archaeological record of rockabilly, western swing, mid-century knick-knacks, junk, and everyday items that he tried to pass off as some historical record of an important time in American history.

June didn’t get it.

And neither did most anyone else in Texas. She didn’t know much about the business of running a museum, she had been spending her afternoons and weekends there for as long as she could remember, and in all her years, she hadn’t seen much in the way of business. When she was younger, she felt like she was growing up in a strange toy store, full of interesting things she was not allowed to touch, a leather jacket in one case, a violin bow in another, black and white photographs of men with funny hair-dos, old magazine covers, so many small-sized records, playbills, and colorful posters. Even as a kid, she knew the name Elvis, but Buddy Holly, Spade Cooley, Carl Perkins? Not even as she got older could she keep track. And it all started to sound the same to her, each record her mom and dad put on the museum speakers, whether it was The Light Crust Doughboys, or even Bob Wills.

Lately, she really started to doubt the whole thing. But for her dad, it was a passion, as she had come to learn about the tragic origins of that word in school. For her mother, who June watched with more and more world-weary maturity, chasing her father and his dream of curating an era of music long gone by, it was a heavier and heavier weight, bearing the brunt of her father’s intractable mania.

A few years before he died, suddenly of a heart attack, as so many men his age do, June’s father came into the museum with a huge smile and a big box. Inside the smile was that childish giddiness that drove his dreams of a kitschy homage to his passion. Inside the box was that white Gretch hollow body guitar. Within the day, her father had assembled a display for the guitar and closed the glass around it. And still no one came to the museum. June’s father died shortly after and her mother had started looking for a way out from under the mess.

She took another pull off her coffee and walked around the case.

“Are you sure?” Henrietta leaned in, inches from the glass, making small, but quickly dissipating spots of exhale fog from her nose. June watched her, she knew the sound she would hear if she were close enough. Her mom, when annoyed, would chuff out through her nose, more so lately to hide the smell of alcohol and coffee that would inevitably expose her as one who was sure that it was “noon somewhere.”

The Assessor shot an “is there anything you can do to help me” look at June.

“No, pal,” she wanted to say. “There is nothing I or you, or even one hundred sudden guests to the Lone Star Texas Swing Museum could do.” Instead, she looked back down quickly at her pre-cal homework and pretended she cared about common factors.

“Mrs. Kleeve,” The Assessor went on delicately. “This is indeed a good-looking piece. And it has been marvelously maintained. But this guitar is not from 1952, when Billy “Lightnin’” Geezer was recording and performing. You can tell by the way the truss rod is bolted into the body.” June’s mother pulled away from the glass like it shocked her nose.

“Well,” she retorted moving in close to him to examine the nape of the guitar’s neck. “It is over sixty years old, might have needed a repair or two over the years.” The Assessor pulled away from June’s mother’s face, likely repelled by the Irish in her breath. He collected himself with the “aww shucks” look that June had seen on the faces of her friend’s parents on countless sleep overs and at countless soccer games. No one in the small Texas town understood her father’s vision, accepting as they were of his motorcycles, pomade, and manic reverence for the past. And no one in that town understood what June’s mother, liberty curls and red lipstick behind tear-drop shades aside, was doing raising a daughter with that man. They understood the drinking though. And after her father died, the town had quietly pitched in more and more, like a small town does, to make sure June had what she needed.

“Henrietta,” He started, folding his clip board under his arm and scratching at his nose. “I worked with Jake until—and I have been working with you this past year. I paid more than fair prices on the pieces that had their bona fides. But this is a—”

“You cheap sunofa—” June heard the anger welling inside her mother. It had been brewing.

“Now, Henrietta,” The Assessor took a step back. Smart man, June thought.

“You’re trying to pull one over on me,” she slung an arm at June who she included whenever she needed a sympathetic edge. “On us!”

“Henrietta—"

“Don’t you ‘Henrietta’ me,” June had heard the remonstration aimed at her father towards the end enough times to know that flames and claws were next. “I have heard enough bullshit judgment from the assholes in this town my whole life than to hear any from a worm like you, you sniveling—”

“Henrietta!” The Assessor turned as red in the face as the red leather jacket that Buddy Holly had supposedly worn at a skate rink in Abilene. June’s Mother took a step forward and steadied herself with a hand on the glass guitar case.

“Henrietta!” The Assessor took another step back. June was impressed with how quickly he moved. “Honestly. This guitar is a prop, probably from the Hard Rock Café that was burglarized in Round Rock.” The Assessor pointed a finger at the Nespresso coffee maker on a table near the back-office door. “That coffee machine is more expensive than this guitar. That coffee machine is probably the most expensive thing in this whole junk shop!”

Even June bristled at that one. Henrietta went nuclear. In one motion, swift and smooth in the way only a qualified and experienced drunk could execute, she slung the tumbler of coffee at The Assessor’s head and shoved the display case with the guitar over at him. Rage at this man who ledgered value on her life, rage at the guitar that stood like a cheap, gilded totem of failure, rage at the drink that had replaced her will to live, rage at the memorabilia that dragged Jake down and away from a life that could have been something else, anything else.

June had been waiting for this, as a passenger on a roller coaster waits for the big drop. She slid off her stool and shoved her pre-cal off the counter, ready to shatter the counter-top glass.

The Assessor was not ready.

He had the steps to dodge the tumbler which impacted into the Buddy Holly display on the wall behind him, but the guitar case caught him on his back foot. He threw all he had into catching the tower of glass that came tilting toward him, his clip board flying away from him like an ill-shaped frisbee. The wooden base and the glass box separated, freeing the white guitar which landed hard on The Assessor’s feet, further tripping him up. He was so focused on protecting himself from being showered with glass that he failed to concern himself with remaining upright and he fell full tilt into the Bob Wills display, knocking the shelves of cracker tins and violin bows into the Hank Williams display next to it. Like dominos, each display case, laden with curios and artifacts that no one would pay to see, fell into the next down the row of repurposed styling stations. Carl Perkins, Merle Haggard, Patsy Kline, on through the ages, they fell until the last case, the small corner homage to Eddie Cochran, a heavy wall clock inexplicably featuring his face, dislodged and fell onto the Nespresso coffee machine, smashing the water tank and knocking the sleek black form, the only modern thing in the museum, to the linoleum floor, coming apart like June’s mother’s hopes of escaping that cluttered time capsule.

After it all came to rest and quieted, Henrietta sagged in a long sigh. Without pomp, she walked slowly to the back of the museum, past the wreckage and past the astonished Assessor, who sat on the remains of a display, holding the glass like the lid to the box containing the bomb that had just gone off. Only when Henrietta reached the broken Nespresso Coffee Maker laying in pieces on the floor, exsanguinating water from its broken workings did she give voice to her sorrow at the mess around her.

She let out a wail that approached the word “woe” which rose in volume as she stepped over her coffee machine, opened the door to the office and went in, door slamming behind her with a finality reserved for old wooden trunks and coffin lids.

June and The Assessor made eye contact as he stood up, delicately set the glass case down next to the white guitar, and brushed himself off. With his assessor’s eye, he found his clipboard which had landed on a pile of old records laying about like unraked leaves. He picked it up, smoothed out his papers and made for the door.

It was then that June came around from behind the counter, interposing herself between The Assessor and the exit, the only thing in the museum he had really wanted.

“That Nespresso machine,” she pointed at its wreckage. “That was worth three hundred dollars and you broke it.”

The Assessor, slowly looked back at the coffee maker, then back at June, squinting one eye. For a beat they stood in silence among the mess. Faced with this teenage girl standing in a tableau of collected failure, he quickly tucked his clip board under one arm and fished his wallet out of his trousers.

Pulling out two bills, he said: “I’ll give you two hundred.” June gave her own beat, deftly snatched the proffered bills, then quickly turned and walked out the door, leaving her pre-cal homework, her mother, and The Assessor blinking and behind in Lone Star Texas Swing Museum.