Carl excused himself to go dance. Some heavy people are light on their feet, and that’s Carl. He ought to appear on Dancing With the Stars. Then he returned to the table and outlined his master plan, the ultimate haven for the knights of the road. Unlimited amenities for the gear-busters. “Yeah, we’re gonna have the truckers’ swimming pool, the truckers’ hot tubs, and that’s only the beginning. From there we’ll expand into a dream community for truck drivers. I’m talking about the truckers’ bank. The truckers’ chapel in the woods. The old-truckers’ home and the truckers’ cemetery.
“And,” he continued, those blue eyes of his gleaming in the darkness, “I’m going to install these little video screens that show porno movies in each one of the truckers’ shower stalls so that the truckers will jerk off faster. That way, we’ll use a lot less hot water.”
So Carl Cornelius was thinking about energy issues even back then.
The grand opening occurred on a Saturday afternoon in mid-September. We had run a couple of spots on WBAP radio, featuring Carl’s voice. He sounded better than Bill Mack. “Come one, come all,” Carl boomed and promised free beer and barbecue. He also promised a “Wild West shoot ’em up show” featuring the world-famous Sunset Carson.
Monk White chartered a bus for his friends to drive to the event. When we arrived, the parking lot was jammed. Pitch free beer and chow, and multitudes will assemble. They were there from Cleburne. They were there from Maypearl. They were there from Waco. Hell, one guy drove up from the cancer ward at the Scott and White hospital in Temple. It was a glorious occasion, although the knife fight in the parking lot was not part of the scheduled entertainment. The food line extended out of the restaurant and across the parking lot, all the way to the proposed site of the truckers’ chapel. Cornelius realized the beer would soon run out, so he held back a keg for his own consumption and put it in the walk-in cooler of the Carl’s Country store.
Sunset Carson was something of a disappointment. Carson, who had appeared in several westerns in the earliest days of talking pictures, was having problems with his colostomy bag apparatus and was unable to perform the shoot ’em up show. He stood at the head of the food line and shook hands with the locals. Still, Carl was ecstatic over the turnout. His mood did sour later when he entered the cooler to enjoy his private beer keg. Some enterprising guests had beaten him to it and drained the entire thing, though they never bothered to leave the cooler. They were passed out in there, frozen into grotesque postures. Once revived, they were banished from Carl’s Corner forever.
The truck stop in its original form had been a Jim Walter model home, with gerrymandered expansions engineered by Carl. The truckers’ swimming pool was a converted grease pit. It didn’t have a drain. Soon, the poolside became a gathering place for girls of the hooker persuasion. When Monk White mentioned his concerns over this demographic, Carl shrugged and grinned and said, “What do you want me to do? I can’t keep ’em out.”
Right away, the joint became a people magnet. Then, a year later, it became a roadside landmark with the arrival of the frogs. Those frogs, six of them, had originally appeared on the roof of a nightclub on Lower Greenville called Tango. They were the creation of artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, a genius when it came to major outdoor eye-catching installations. That big cowboy boot across from the airport in San Antonio is Daddy-O’s work, along with the giant iguana that appeared atop the Lone Star Cafe in New York City. But the frogs remain Daddy-O’s most enduring legacy.
He did all the work in a place Daddy-O called the Frog Factory near the nightclub, and his work was heroic, because he was on crutches throughout. Engaged in an argument with a business associate, Daddy-O had taken a stack of important documents belonging to the woman, and he’d thrown them out of a moving car. The woman jumped from the vehicle to retrieve the papers, and while she was bending over to gather the stuff, Daddy-O ran up from behind, attempted to kick her in the bottom, but fell and broke his leg.
The frogs were a terrific success, but the nightclub wasn’t. It failed because the 19-year-old son of a friend of mine set off a teargas bomb in the place one night in 1983. Carl, being savvy, bought the frogs from the Tango owner, Shannon Wynne, for $6,300, and their fame was instantaneously secured. So, too, was the fame of the truck stop.
Carl was rolling. What he did next was convince the people living in the doublewides on the unincorporated property that surrounded the truck stop to vote to turn Carl’s Corner into a town. Then Carl staged an election, and his townspeople agreed that becoming the only place on the highway between Dallas and Waco that sold alcohol was a swell idea.
Now the Corner was poised to thrive. National media seemed enthralled with the notion of a town like this. Carl was featured, for instance, on a segment of A Current Affair. I actually called my parents and insisted they tune in. “I invented this character,” I emphasized, and then watched Carl on coast-to-coast TV, standing in his parking lot, and, on camera, say to some woman, “Come on inside and I’ll give you an enema.”
The glory of Carl’s Corner achieved its maximum ascendency in 1987, when it became the site of Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July picnic. The event was not a financial bonanza. Most of the names announced to perform at Carl’s and listed in the paper were scheduled to pick and grin at some event in Washington, D.C., the very same day. Merle Haggard did show up for the show at Carl’s, but one of the security goons working backstage roughed up Haggard’s wife. He got mad, refused to go onstage, and split. So poor old Willie Nelson got up there and sang for about eight hours. I was there, but I don’t remember much. One of the von Erich boys offered me a muscle relaxer, and I really haven’t been quite right ever since.
Photo courtesy of Carl Cornelius
Within five years, Carl’s Corner had grown from a concept drawn on a paper napkin at Ma Brand’s to what was threatening to become one of the leading tourist destinations in the whole Lone Star State. Looming just over the horizon was the sneering face of disaster.
On August 6, 1990, Carl was conducting a city council meeting. On the agenda was a proposal to bring casino gambling to Carl’s. “We ought to be able to do it like the Indians do it. Willie can front it,” he was telling his minions. “Willie’s one-eighth Cherokee. That ought be enough. Hell, they voted him Indian of the Year two or three times.”
Another topic of discussion at the council meeting was the brakes on the town fire truck and how much money would be required to fix them.
That’s when somebody yelled, “Fire!”
Seventeen fire-fighting units responded, but not much was left. The frogs, miraculously, survived. So did the inventory from the Big Owl liquor store. Carl rescued that, along with his vast collection of XXX-rated movies. But that was about it. Naturally, there was some speculation that the blaze had been a Miami Beach special. But who torches his own place when he doesn’t have insurance? Because Carl’s was a municipality, after all, he had been red-lined by the insurers and could not afford the premiums. If anybody had torched Carl’s Corner, it had been one of the local chapters of the Fellowship of Christian Arsonists. Among the 58 churches in the Hillsboro area, Carl’s was known as the Devil’s Den. Made sense to me. Everybody knows that Southern Baptists are habitual barn-burners. But the cause of the blaze was determined to have been faulty wiring in the AC.
Monk White arrived at the scene just as the sun was rising the following morning. “What I remember is a helicopter circling overhead and total devastation,” Monk says. “Carl and some other guys were hosing down the safe, trying to cool it enough to get the $10,000 that was inside. It was an awful scene, and then, pretty soon, who in the hell would drive up but Willie Nelson? He said, ’Come on, Carl. Let’s drive over to my place [in nearby Abbott] and have a drink. You’re going to rise from the ashes.’”
Willie played some benefits that enabled Carl to begin the rebuilding endeavor. But the truck stop never really regained its pre-fire elan. So Carl’s Corner was financially compelled to go topless. He built a club with mirrors and thick carpets and called it Images. It was very un-Carl-like, really. The talent was unfortunate. Young women with missing teeth and legs like chopsticks. Carl girls. They say that all topless dancers hate their fathers. If I’d been the father of any of these girls, I would have hated them back. I did learn one thing from Carl. How to talk to a topless dancer. “Just ask them one question,” he said. “Is your boyfriend in prison, or is he hiding out at your house?”
Those were bleak and dismal times, down there at Carl’s.
Courtesy of Bob Wade
Now Carl Cornelius sits in a little white frame building, across I-35 from the site of the Willie’s Place empire that is poised to blossom and grow in that happy little town on the highway. Carl is happy that Daddy-O Wade has been retained to refurbish the frogs at a secret location, and only Daddy-O can fix them because one was decapitated en route to the restoration site. Carl can hear the ceaseless thunder of the traffic, the surging melody of I-35, while reading 2,200 e-mails a day from well-wishers on the biodiesel project. He’s been back in the Times again. He’s talking on NPR. For the first time in his life, Carl Cornelius can flex some serious financial muscle, thanks to Willie Nelson and a largely Dallas-based investment group. Carl is destined to become rich. Rest assured, though, that Carl Cornelius will not be corrupted by the almighty buck. He has committed the Sermon on the Mount to memory, and he realizes that no man can serve two masters.
Forget the dough. Through great times and through the very worst, Carl maintained his aura.
In 2002, I found myself in Monaco interviewing who was then Crown Prince Albert in the palace office that used to be occupied by his mother, Grace Kelly. Prince Albert, perceiving that I was Texan, surprised me by asking point blank: “In Texas, have you ever encountered a man named Carl Cornelius? Fabulous man. One of the most memorable people I have ever met, there in that place of his. He called me Al Bob.”
Carl remembers Al Bob, too. “Yes. As a matter of fact, Prince Albert owns a certificate that identifies him as the Honorary Police Chief of Carl’s Corner, Texas,” Carl says. “In return, Albert promised me that when his father finally died, and he became king, that Albert would knight me. Well, he’s the king, and it still hasn’t happened yet.”
By now, the man knows that despite the giddy outlook of the moment, vexing issues lurk ahead. As the biodiesel program gains PR traction, Willie Nelson and his entourage are cited in Louisiana for carrying a pound and half of marijuana and a variety of mushroom not normally found in the produce section. With this news, Carl’s demeanor is awash with unconcern. “Everybody in the world knows that Willie smokes dope,” he says. “The people of Louisiana also know that he raised $20 million for them after Katrina.”
Carl’s deepest disappointment now lies in the realization that his keystone of the master plan of Carl’s Corner will never take form. “A roadside pyramid, bigger than the biggest pyramid in Egypt, right over there,” he says, gesturing at the vacant acreage that lies across the state road. “Built entirely out of old busted truck tires.” Carl shakes a tired but weather-proof head. “Can’t get the tires now. Got my hands tied there. Damn bureaucracy.”
He turns and ambles back into his office, the little white barn on the interstate. Somebody from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office is on the phone, and old Carl figures he should take the call.
Mike Shropshire profiled Rangers pitcher Chris Young for D Magazine in April 2005. He is the author of Runnin’ with the Big Dogs: The True, Unvarnished Story of the Texas-Oklahoma Football Wars (William Morrow, 2006).
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