NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOE

Not Your Average JOE J.P. S. Brown likes to tell stories.

And this Arizona author has many to tell, particularly about his escapades trading cattle in Mexico. Once, he rented a plane in Tucson to rush medicine to a herd of sick cattle he'd corralled in Navojoa, Sonora. On the return trip, the plane's engine quit. With only 12 seconds to make a decision, Brown landed the plane on the freeway below, right behind a Volkswagen.

"I was going to eat the Volkswagen," he says, "so I veered off the road down a sharp incline, clipping one wing on a telephone pole. That Volkswagen never had a clue. He just kept on going."

It took hours for the Mexican police to arrive.

"Why did it take you so long?" he asked. They shrugged. "Because, you know, when ever we get called on a deal like this, all we ever find is chicharrón [fried pork rind]."

Brown escaped without a scratch, one more close call in a lifetime of risky exploits.

The Mexican people of the Sierra Madre call him El Mostrenco - The Unbranded One.

a bantam rooster, and his carefully creased Silver Belly Stetson perched on his head in a cavalier cowboy style. For luck, he attaches a turquoise tiepin to the front of his crisp white shirt. Yet Brown has seen little luck in his life time. Like the single-engine aircraft he often piloted in his Mexican cattle-trading days, his life has been buffeted by updrafts and down drafts, as if set on autopilot for self-destruct.

Brown first became famous in 1970 when his novel Jim Kane was published at the begin ning of America's urban-cowboy craze. The book chronicles the adventures of Brown's alter ego, Jim Kane, who ranched and traded cattle in the wild Sierra Madre of Mexico. Hol lywood turned the book into the movie Pocket Money, starring Paul Newman and Lee Marvin.

Brown then wrote The Outfit, about gather ing wild cattle on a vast Nevada ranch, and after that, he wrote The Forests of the Night, the story of a Mexican rancher in pursuit of a killer jaguar.

Tucson author and longtime Arizona High ways contributor Charles Bowden first met Brown in the early 1980s when Bowden was editing City Magazine in Tucson. After read Brown's father, Paul Summers, was "wild as a wolf," a cowboy who lived, played and drank hard. At age 5, Brown accompanied his dad from their Nogales, Arizona, ranch to a cow camp in Mexico, where he got an early start cowboying. On the trail, Summers gave his son shots of mescal "to freshen your horse."

When Brown was 9, his mother divorced Summers and married another cattleman, Viv ian Brown, who adopted the little boy, mak ing him Joseph Paul Summers Brown. After attending a Catholic boarding school, J.P.S. Brown graduated from the University of Notre Dame, where he found his gift for writing.

After a hitch in the U.S. Marines, Brown returned to the borderlands to ranch and trade cattle. "I was happiest in the Sierra Madre," he says. "The minute I got on my horse and started up the trail from San Bernardo, I was home."

In those craggy mountains, Brown came to know the country in much the way as the wild cattle and jaguars that roamed it. He formed lasting friendships with the campesinos

"I'd use the whiskey to keep me going when I was writing"

It's their affectionate name for someone they'd like to claim. In his heart, Joe Brown is as Mexican as he is American. After a lifetime on both sides of the border, he still sometimes resembles a renegade maverick bull, tearing through life with reckless abandon. But there are many sides to Joe Brown. These days, he often speaks softly, with a humility born of hard knocks, in contrast to his rowdy years when he could drink anybody under the table and would start a fistfight "just to see things come apart."

His life has brought him some fame, but little fortune. He calls himself "a gambler." He's been a boxer, Marine, journalist, cattle trader, rancher, prospector, movie wrangler, whiskey smuggler and fiction writer - but, above all, a cowboy. Brown writes mostly about cowboys because it's the life he knows. "People should know about the real animals, men and women who make their living alone in vast country, doing work that takes risk, instinct and courage," he says.

His relationships with women have been tempestuous. One of his five wives, for instance, poisoned him.

At 79, Brown still stands tall and straight Reading Brown's first three books, Bowden made a point of meeting Brown.

"He's the only writer I ever sought out in my life," Bowden says. "I think The Forests is without a doubt the finest novel ever written in our region, and the botanical accuracy of it is stunning. All three of those novels are liter ally classics. If he never writes another word, he's still created a better body of work than anybody else in the Southwest."

Brown has won several literary awards, but despite the accolades and Hollywood success, he's been sabotaged by hard luck and his own behavior. His publishing house went under, the nation's infatuation with cowboys faded, and Brown refused to cater to either the pub lishing world or Hollywood.

Joseph Paul Summers Brown is a fifth-generation Arizonan. Both sides of his family homesteaded Southern Arizona in the 1850s. By the time Brown was born in 1930, his extended family owned 26 ranches and ran more than 30,000 head of cattle on both sides of the or farmers. But as much as he gloried in that country, it never rewarded him with riches. As Brown hints in Jim Kane, dishonest traders, drought, disease, capricious Mexican regu lations and problems legally crossing cattle at the border left him frequently broke and frustrated.

Brown didn't begin writing in earnest until 1964, when he contracted hepatitis in Mexico and went to his grandmother's house in Nogales to recuperate. Unable to work, he thought he could support himself through writing. It took six years before these early stories, which became Jim Kane, were pub lished. By then Brown was as hooked on writ ing as he was on whiskey.

"I'd use the whiskey to keep me going when I was writing," he says. "I'd get into this groove where I didn't stop working except to eat and sleep. Pretty soon I wouldn't be sleeping, and then not eating, and then I'd just drink until I crashed."

The Hollywood life and parties during the making of Pocket Money exacerbated the alco holism. Paul Newman insisted that Brown be present during the filming. Brown pushed to have parts of the movie filmed in Navojoa, Mexico. When Brown and the movie company

pany jetted to Navojoa, the whole town turned out and threw a grand fiesta. But the director decided to shoot the movie in Zacatecas and revised the script so it no longer conformed to the book.

"By then I was through with them," Brown says. "I got really mad and told them all off one morning in Zacatecas. I told them they were a bunch of sorry SOBs. I made myself unpopular with the movie people and it just flattened my career."

Marital problems also plagued Brown. He barreled through three wives from 1952 to 1965. His third "wife" was actually his mis tress, a Zapotec Indian who'd been kidnapped and forced to work in a Navojoa whorehouse. Brown paid the madam 10,000 pesos for the woman and set her up in Navojoa, to house keep and look after his two kids from a previ ous marriage. The former prostitute learned of Brown's plans to marry Arizona author and journalist Jo Baeza. The mistress became furi ous and she tried to shoot Brown. The gun misfired. Next, she laced Brown's stew with strychnine. He survived.

"She was actually a good person," he says. "It was just her nature, and she had a right."

Brown's 1965 marriage to Baeza, another longtime Arizona Highways contributor, lasted eight years and was equally turbulent. During the fervently creative period when Brown wrote his first three books, on the rare occasions that he was home, he read aloud to Baeza. She critiqued each chapter. But after eight years, the marriage unraveled due to Brown's drinking.

"I still love Joe. I always will," Baeza says. "Our marriage was great, but I just couldn't live with him."

After not speaking to each other for some 30 years, Baeza and Brown began to correspond. Their renewed friendship resulted in Baeza's editing of The World in Pancho's Eye, Brown's 2007 novel based on his Southern Arizona childhood. Of all her ex-husband's books, Pancho's Eye is Baeza's favorite.

Brown's marriage to his fifth wife, Patsy, has lasted 34 years. Brown got sober in 1992, but it took his mother's death to bring him to his senses. He knew his mother was dying, but he was stuck on the border at Calexico trying to cross a bunch of quarantined cattle.

"I could have found somebody to take care of those cows," he says, "but I also couldn't get away from that bottle. My mother died on the same day my cattle crossed, and I came to her funeral drunk."

Patsy told her husband: "You've got to grow up. You're going to kill yourself, or kill me, or just drink yourself to death."

Something finally sank in. Brown quit drinking for good.

But drinking wasn't his only challenge. In 1987 he suffered his first heart attack, and since then his blocked arteries have caused six more coronaries. Brown nearly died after a massive heart attack in 1999. His heart stopped, and he recalls going to a "very pleasant place."

coronaries. Brown nearly died after a massive heart attack in 1999. His heart stopped, and he recalls going to a "very pleasant place."

"I had this great feeling of immensity," he says. "I began to examine my conscience, but every time I began to accuse myself, a voice reminded me that I'd done something good to balance the scale. Then all of a sudden it was over and I was back in the ICU."

Brown last suffered a heart attack in 2005, after a 66-day writing binge that created his latest novel, Wolves at Our Door, which brings Jim Kane back as a 70-something borderlands rancher who faces off against drug lords and smugglers.

By the 1990s, Brown had lost two ranches and a fine Tuc son home after rolling the dice and borrowing against movie contracts that never materialized. In 2002, he and Patsy retreated from Tucson to Patago nia, where they now live at the Rocking Chair Ranch on Harshaw Creek.

Brown's goal is to write 30 more books "If God gives me 15 more years," he says. "I'm going to turn my talent into another cow ranch," he adds, "so I can raise and trade cattle until all the money I make from my writing is gone again - even if it finally kills me."