NOVEMBER 2025 SULLYGRAM:  Dear dead friends come to visit me now and then. They return in some form of consciousness across the rainbow bridge from a better beyond. Just now it’s my cowboy brother-by-choice stealing into my thoughts, the grandson of famous Hanging Judge Roy Bean whose notorious life was a TV series back in the 50s and a Paul Newman movie in 1972. The judge once held a heavyweight boxing championship on a sandbar and kept a pet bear named Bruno outside his saloon-courtroom. Known for his “law west of the Pecos,” his unconventional nature passed undiluted into his grandson Freddie Bean.

To say Fred was colorful is like calling a rainbow drab. Charmingly self-effacing, you would never think he’d been married five times (the first for three days to a model when he was 18 because she promised to buy him a vette). Exit a few more marriages and Texas said it would no longer recognize any more of his states of matrimony. He was a novelist, a genuine cowboy, and a finalist in steer roping at the nationals, losing out, he told me, because no one told him the horse he was riding used a “juice spur.” We met a little by reputation and a lot by the sheer mystery of recognizing mutual eccentricity across a crowded room. The bond was instant.  

Living half a country away from each other, I guess our infrequent get-togethers read like a picaresque novel. We would cross trails from very different lifestyles and it was like resuming a conversation that had paused just minutes earlier. But we probably lived more in those too few episodes than most friends savor in a life. There was the time I was driving back from Glenn Frey’s 3-day birthday bash at LaQuinta, California, and somewhere around New Mexico I started thinking I could swing through Texas. The steering wheel just kept pulling to the right until I was staying with Fred at his hideaway near Belmont (I think) on a river whose name I never knew. Juice spurs not needed because we had kayaks instead of horses. Then there was Loren Estleman’s annual hoot outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, with down-to-earth luminaries like “Dutch” Leonard that ran for several days. But the one that comes back to haunt me now was the one I could not know would be the last time I’d see Fred. That was a Western Writers of America annual conference in Arkansas where Fred had lassoed me to be the featured speaker.

Westerns – tenderfoot Sully? As I like to say, when you don’t belong anywhere, you belong everywhere, even when your credentials in a genre are thinner than a fly’s ankles. There are incestuous connections between genres, if you know the circuit. As it happened, I had published two stories in Western anthologies (“Whores in the Pulpit” and “Judas and Jesus”), and I did a lot of public speaking.

Western folk are as unassuming as they come, polite to a fault, and not given to pretenses, which is why I was at ease standing at the podium before a packed house. Fred, always nervous and jumpy, was pacing just outside the auditorium doors at the back and able to hear my voice through the PA. “I want to thank the Governors of Texas and Arkansas for allowing Fred Bean to cross state lines,” I began and the crowd laughed warmly. I pictured Fred stopping suddenly out in the hall, and the impulse to prod him a little more became irresistible. “I didn’t mind sharing a room with Fred last night, but I drew the line when he started talking about having my children,” I said. The laughter this time was a roar that surged to hysteria when Fred poked his head through the doorway and shouted, “I’ll get you for this, Sullivan!”

I’m still waiting on his revenge because Freddie Bean died barely into his 50s. Guess he’s up the trail a ways, mounted on a pale horse, scheming some elaborate prank to play on me. He’ll deliver it debonaire and I’ll receive it deadpan, but we’ll both be laughing inside. The day he passed was marked with surreal horrors for me. I had just moved to Minnesota, was sitting on the hill between my house and the lake in the new millennium, watching the Paul Bunyan I had hired for two-thousand simoleons to take the tallest oak for miles around down to the roots. The oak was lightning blasted, dead, and Man Mountain Dean was chain-sawing the heavy crown branches, lowering them to the ground in shock cord harnesses when his hand got caught in the loop. Blood shot out of the ends of all his fingers as the massive weight took up the slack. When he finally got back on the ground, I had to talk him into going to ER, and then the phone rang…

It was Loren Estleman calling from Whitmore Lake, Michigan, telling me he had just heard Frederic MacArthur Bean had died. Apocalyptic. I sat on that hill staring at the lightning blasted oak half fallen. Sky, water, lake, air. The elements had called a much-beloved cowboy home. I wanted to let the tears flow, couldn’t. Freddie wouldn’t like that. A cowboy has a code, and tears are never part of it. Besides…he’s going to get me for what I did in Arkansas. He said so. Almost makes me regret putting a rubber snake in his bed (Fred hated snakes more than Indiana Jones did) and another under a BBQ hood where he was cooking his 3-day brisket with panther piss sauce. Almost.

May you ride into sunsets forever, bro; no need for the juice spur.

Photos: #1 poker game w/Fred reaching into my chips; #2 doctored photo sent me by friend.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan