Son-of-a-gun cowboys have lots of fun

Gaston de ROSAYRO

As a little boy living in my grandfather’s sprawling suburban estate I dreamed of being a cowboy. In the mid to late 50s, I was in love with the Wild and Woolly West. My dream of being a cowboy included a deep desire to have a full cowboy outfit that included the hat, shirt, jeans, boots, and a pair of revolvers in leather holsters hanging from a wide, hand-tooled gun belt with a shiny, silver buckle. Dreams have no limitations.

I had cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, and Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, was my hero. But I longed for a pair of Roy Rogers’ style pistols even if they were just cap guns. It was a magical time when the lines between good and evil were so clearly defined, and the good guys always won. But I needed those guns badly.

I used to walk up to my parents and grandfather in full cowboy regalia. Then I would drawl in my best imitation the immortal words of old Gabby Hayes, the Roy Rogers sidekick who when disarmed said: “I feel kinda naked without my smokepole!” I would also quip: “I cannot cut a swell without my shooters!” Which in effect means I could not present a fine figure without guns. I believe it was persistence and the impertinence of my infuriating cowboy lingo that finally made the adults relent. Just imagine! One Christmas morning my brothers and I were gifted the exact set of two pistols each in tooled leather holsters on gun belts with big, shiny silver buckles by my grandfather! These gifts were exactly like what we had dreamed of so intently.

Wow! No other Christmas gift from my childhood was as special as this one in my memory. Except of course when our indulgent grand-pappy unbelievably topped it all off with the ultimate surprise of real guns, Gecado air rifles.

These top of the line RR cap pistols were toys that looked and sounded pretty real. The explosive caps were made of red or yellow paper layered over little mounds of gunpowder less than a quarter-inch wide. The caps came in a roll that fitted over a spindle inside the six-shooter and fed out at the top of the pistol when fired. Firing a cap pistol with the loud ‘crack’ and a puff of smoke was an exciting moment, one that looked similar to those cowboys firing their pistols on the silver screen.

All through that Christmas Day, and for several days afterwards during our school vacation we must have driven my grandfather, my father and mother up the wall with our running through the house firing our pistols at one another, hiding behind furniture to avoid being shot, and jumping out to take a shot at the villains.

And there were the comic books which I firmly believe are actually good for young children! I myself could be living proof of this, having read sheaves of quality comic books as a child from publishers such as DC, Marvel and Dell. I can tell you with certainty that they initially helped increase my vocabulary and instilled in me a love of reading. A lot of the criticism of comics comes from people who think that children are just looking at the pictures and not putting them together with the words.

Possibly it may be the case with some children, yes. But not me! My grandfather realised quite sagaciously that comics were the first step in inculcating the reading habit in impressionable tender minds. And he was spot on. We revelled in reading the exploits of the American cowboy celebrities of the time such as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Wild Bill Elliot, Tom Mix, The Lone Ranger and a host of other Hollywood screen idols.

When comics turned into novels and novels into movies, John Wayne became a favourite western hero. He taught me to swagger with my double rig cap guns and taught me a few smart aleck lines.

In conformity with most children of cultured Ceylonese families in the 50s, who spoke English fluently, I was conversant with American history, perhaps even more than many of my Yankee contemporaries themselves. That is because of the popularity of the third kind of westerns and novelettes based on real-life Old-West pioneering personalities, such as Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James, Buffalo Bill Cody, Kit Carson, Jim Bowie, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Annie Oakley among a host of others.

The comic book world has its own slang and jargon just like any other publication. Even more than books with lots of dialogue, comics can be easy to understand and full of idiomatic language as it is actually spoken. I also learned quite early that American English was strangely different from English English.

I was also made aware by the very presence of ungrammatical sentences not to use them. You latch on quickly to certain words and phrases in American dialect such as for example “allow, guess, reckon”, which means to think. Or the word “gotten,” where “got” is being used as the past participle of “get.” But, most atrocious to the stiff upper-lip English purists was the heavy use of contractions such as “ain’t, can’t, don’t, and couldn’t”. So, as a matter of fact, you learn not to use words and phrases you shouldn’t, sorry, should not.

I annoyed my whole lot of playmates with the cowboy insults such as ‘bushwhacker,’ ‘sidewinder,’ ‘varmint,’’saddle bum’ and ‘ornery cuss’ to name a few. One day my brother Denis and I were facing each other gunslinger style and hurling vile cowboy imprecations at each other. With hands over hips in the traditional stance of Dodge City mayhem before we went for the draw Denis said: “This town ain’t big enough fer the both of us. Be outta town by high noon.”

I fired back: “Shut your big bazoo (mouth). And you’d better eat them words or draw, you no good son-of-a-gun!” For the life of me I just could not understand at the time what I had said that had offended my father. He ordered me to disarm and warned me to mind my language in future.

My mother and aunts watching the drama went into titters. There was a lot more chortling from the ladies after I unbuckled my gun belt and handed it over to my father saying: “I feel kinda naked without my smokepole!”

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