Buried Memories. Irene Pence
so he would leave nothing behind. When he heard the sound of an engine coming closer, he looked up and saw Betty’s car roaring toward him. Quickly, he dashed between two cars in just enough time to avoid being hit as Betty swerved past him, spraying him with gravel.
Moments later, he left for Little Rock, grateful to be alive.
By August of 1979, Betty had pulled herself out of the doldrums and gone to Charlie’s Angels Bar, located in the shadow of Dallas skyscrapers, but in a rough neighborhood. She watched a woman on stage shed her clothes. The idea hit her that she possessed all the necessary attributes for the position.
Betty picked up her drink and left to find the manager. The potbellied, balding man listened to Betty’s verbal application, all the time eyeing her curvaceous figure.
“Lady, you can’t just show up here and go to work,” he told her. “You gotta audition. And auditions are held on Thursday nights. Actually we have a pretty good crowd because people like to see amateurs on the stage. Some don’t know what the shit they’re doing, and it can be pretty funny,” he said, and chuckled. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-two,” Betty said, shaving off ten years. She held in her stomach and assured him, “I’ll know what to do.”
On Thursday, August 27, 1979, Betty arrived early to learn the ropes from the professional dancers. A teenage boy directed her backstage to a dressing room. The open cubicle had dirty, peeling paint on the walls. A large room filled with mirrors and lights served as the communal area for dancers to fix their hair and apply makeup.
An experienced stripper, a tall redhead named Candy, gave Betty pointers. “Honey, when you’re out there onstage, try not to think about being naked. The first time’s always the hardest.”
Betty smiled. “Don’t you worry about me. This ain’t my first rodeo. You think I haven’t taken off my clothes in front of men before?”
Everyone laughed, and Betty pulled out the string bikini she brought with her. Candy told her to shave everywhere; then she’d be back to show her how to apply the pasties.
Betty busied herself shaving and smoothing on body makeup, then went back to her new friends. One of the experienced dancers dabbed a bit of rubber cement inside a silver-sequined pasty and told Betty to place it over her nipple. The dancers laughed hysterically as they watched Betty try to cover the large dark areola of her massive breast. She didn’t get it right the first time and tried to pull it off to adjust it. She winced.
“Don’t worry,” Candy said, “the rubber cement will peel right off afterwards.”
Betty felt her stomach flutter as she waited backstage for the master of ceremonies to call for “Sexy Tiger,” her new stage name derived from her CB handle. She peeked through the curtains to watch other novices strut awkwardly over a stage carpeted in a distracting plum-and-gold floral pattern.
The audience, three-fourths male, looked much like the people she had served in bars. Many wore tired cotton T-shirts and jeans. A few businessmen had come in for quick entertainment and a cold drink. They had removed their suit coats and loosened their ties.
After forty-five minutes, Betty heard: “Ladies and gentlemen, I now give you someone we might find dangerous to play with, ‘Sexy Tiger.’ ” A smattering of applause greeted the recorded bump-and-grind music belting from a tape recorder. Betty pranced on stage, gyrating her hips, and waving her raised arms back and forth over her head. The air conditioning chilled her bare body, despite the hot floodlights ringing the stage. But after a few minutes, she found the coolness refreshing, remembering how sizzling it was outside.
The audience warmed to her with chants of “Take it off, take it off.” She reached around for the tie on the back of her bra, but found it knotted and awkward to loosen with one hand. She wanted to look professional, but instead she fumbled as she tried to separate the ribbons. The task became particularly difficult because she tried to keep in step with the music at the same time. Finally, she jerked off the top, only to pull away one of her pasties too. The crowd went into hysterics. Betty couldn’t understand their laughter until she looked down at the stage floor and spotted the glitter of silver sequins in the stage lights.
She had to think fast, and she didn’t want to appear like some embarrassed teenager. She twirled around, bent down, and in a flash picked up the pasty and waved it in the air. The crowd roared its approval. Then she slithered up to the microphone and said in her sexiest voice, part Marilyn Monroe and part Mae West, “Is there some nice gentleman in the audience who’d like to assist me in putting this thing back on?”
Seven men rushed the stage. The first one to arrive took the pasty from her, and with his other hand held on to her breast. Half drunk, he awkwardly aimed for her nipple. The audience screamed with laughter.
Suddenly, another man in a black suit shoved him away and approached Betty. He opened a leather wallet that held his identification: “Dallas Police Vice Squad.” Betty’s shoulders slumped. When she had seen him earlier in the audience, he appeared to be thoroughly enjoying the show.
“Come with me,” he said as he escorted the angry woman off the stage. The police arrested Betty and charged her with public lewdness. She gave them her first married name, and her charge read, “Betty Lou Branson knowingly engaged in an act of sexual contact with Archie Phillips by allowing him to touch her breast while said person was in a public place.” Later, a judge fined her $250, and unbelievably slapped her in jail for thirty days, and put her on probation for a year.
Six months after Betty’s failed dancing attempt, her matrimonial prospects were back on track. She called Ronnie Threlkeld in Little Rock and told him she had filed for divorce. Threlkeld didn’t object, even when Betty said, “I’ve finally found someone who’s good to me and treats me right.” She further insulted Threlkeld by telling him she had refused to use his name as soon as he left town. It didn’t matter, she was going to have a new name before long.
She had been filling her truck with gas at a truck stop in Mesquite one day when Doyle Wayne Barker, a tall, good-looking man, noticed her and struck up a conversation. He worked in construction as a roofer, and lifting heavy tiles kept his body lean and taut. He fit the mold of Betty’s other husbands, with his brown hair and eyes, and tan skin. He had a shy but ready smile, and wore a small goatee.
Barker had previously been married for eight years and had two sons from that union. Once Betty invited him to her Dallas apartment, he immediately took to her son Bobby.
Barker worked for Jerry Kuykendall, who owned a roofing company. The company was a forty-five-minute drive from Cedar Creek Lake, but Kuykendall had a farm outside of Mabank within shouting distance of the lake. He considered Barker his lead roofer and his most valuable employee. Barker never minded staying an extra hour or so on a job, not wanting to leave a roof half protected if a storm blew in, and he never complained about hammering down roof tiles when the weather turned glacier cold and made his fingers so numb he could barely feel the hammer in his hand.
Jerry Kuykendall’s son, Jerry, Jr., was Bobby’s age and the boys became “running buddies.” The families frequently visited the lake area, and the boys hunted in the big pasture behind Kuykendall’s farmhouse, went fishing at Cedar Creek, and frequently spent nights in each other’s homes.
Betty told everyone, “Wayne is just the man I’ve been looking for,” but she said that about each of her husbands. With little fanfare, she and Wayne married in Dallas on October 3, 1979. However, Betty and “just the man she’d been looking for” fought constantly and separated seven weeks after the ceremony. The husband of Betty’s oldest daughter, Faye Branson Lane, told Betty that Barker was a big drinker in the Seven Points bars and would intentionally bump into other customers just to start a fight.
They eventually divorced in January 1980.
Shortly afterward, Betty almost died from head injuries received in a serious car accident. She had a basilar skull fracture, lacerations, and a cerebral concussion. Migraine headaches she’d experienced as a child returned and her hearing loss worsened, forcing her to wear