Tuesday, March 9, 1999
Realtor-turned-writer hopes to slither toward
success
By Bill Whitaker
For those who collect any and all rattlesnake memorabilia during
Sweetwater’s annual rattlesnake roundup, Vivian Allison’s
contribution may prove one of the most offbeat yet.
Amid the usual rattlesnake roundup items to be found in the
Nolan County Coliseum this coming weekend, including rattlesnake
pen sets, rattlesnake belts, rattlesnake bikinis, even rattlesnake
toilet seats, is Vivian’s humble literary offering —
Footprints of the Garden Snake.
The aforementioned “garden snake” is a rattlesnake
that talks to people, albeit initially with a lisp. If that’s
not enough, the author also throws in an asteroid hurtling toward
earth, poet John Milton contemplating what Paradise Lost might
have been like had it been turned into a musical, and comedian
Jim Carrey masquerading as a congressman, a la the late Sonny
Bono.
It’s a wonder Vivian’s friends aren’t themselves
wondering if the widow and low-key mother of three hasn’t
been dabbling in hallucinogenics. Certainly, her comic offering
— and it’s most definitely not a children’s book
— is wildly surreal, slithering in the company of such off-the-wall
writers as Ken Kesey and Tom Robbins.
Even the Garden of Eden works its way into the maddening mix,
though Vivian is not kind to televangelists and their ilk.
“Politicians and TV preachers just irritate the stuffing
out of me,” she remarked after I stopped by her southside
apartment last Friday. “I mean, on the surface, the novel
is about somebody named Concho and a talking snake traveling across
America. But a lot of it is really about politicians, TV preachers
and their sort.”
This, then, is what Vivian Allison intends to market alongside
the rattlesnake pen sets, rattlesnake belts and rattlesnake toilet
seats.
I wished her lots of luck.
Evil mind?
All this strangeness comes from a woman who used to be a Realtor
and spent any extra time she had compiling richly descriptive
lists concerning ranches and farms she was trying to market.
“People kept telling me the writing and descriptions I
furnished made them feel like they were right there on those farms
and ranches,” Vivian said. “And one day I decided I
was going to write something. I mean, really write something.
So I moved the pool table out of the study, sat down at the computer
and started writing.”
Her major opus is what sounds like a lurid romance-gone-sour
epic. Still in the works, it’s called Julia’s Quicksand
and concerns a woman who is adopted as a child, later unwittingly
marries her half-brother, and eventually sets out to destroy her
father by way of a scheme involving computer hacking.
“I think Vivian accepts life how she finds it,” friend
and fellow writer Sue Turner told me. “It all comes out of
her evil mind. Despite what you might think after meeting her,
she’s really a whirlwind of passion.”
Certainly, she learned something about conniving while in the
real estate business. For instance, while trying to sell a ranch
up in Stonewall County during a drought, she slyly went out before
some prospective buyers arrived, set a multitude of pen-raised
quail loose around four pond sites, then waited for the buyers
to go hunting.
When the bird dog went up to the very first few quail and discovered
the birds wouldn’t even flee in panic, the prospective buyers
— veteran hunters, too — knew they’d been had.
“It served them right, though,” Vivian said. “I
knew they only came up to bird-hunt and not to buy. But they seemed
happy about it. I mean, these quail had nice soft breasts, not
muscle!”
Down her dress
A faithful member of the Abilene Writers Guild who spent part
of her youth as a farm girl growing up in Oklahoma, Vivian insists
she has nothing against snakes. In fact, she named her main character
in Footprints of the Garden Snake after the Concho water snake.
But she does [RTF bookmark start: Return][RTF bookmark end: Return]tend
to associate some cold-blood reptiles and amphibians with earth-shaking
catastrophe.
That, too, may come from her childhood.
“We had a lot of experiences with bugs and snakes and
all that,” she told me. “We lived near the Canadian
River and I still recall vividly my sister and one of my friends
chasing me with a frog, and I screamed and screamed and screamed,
and they thought it was so funny to put it down my dress.
“Well, I screamed so much, my dad came down from a windmill
he was working on a quarter of a mile away, just to come and see
what on earth was wrong. The strange thing was, I’m the one
he sent indoors!”
Bill Whitaker, who included frogs among his boyhood pets and
to this day refuses to eat frog-legs, can be reached at 676-6732.
You can e-mail Bill at whitakerb@abinews.com.
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