SAM SHEPARD. Jeez. Life's a living hell because of Sam Shepard.

Your sister's in love with him. Your mother's in love with him. Jessica Lange, for Pete's sake, that blonde-haried, brown-eyed, gorilla-yer-dreams, even she's in love with him.

Your girlfriend says to you: "Why can't you be more like Sam Shepard?" She buys you denim jackets, refuses to wash your bluejeans, pickles your tongue with shots of tequila. "Why don't you buy a lasso?" she suggests. "Buck broncos, for Christ's sake. Dip snuff, do chaw, go smokeless, anything."

You explain that men who use chewing tobacco suffer higher incidents of lip and gum cancer.

"Be a man," she pouts, hands on hips, cowgirl-style. "What's a little bleeding? Besides, I like yellow teeth. I think they're, ya know, sexy."

Just for her, you take to dipping. She's happy. Gets you a ten gallon hat. Enraged, you slap her in the face. "Oh, Sam!" she exclaims. She likes you even more.

Next day you go to kiss her and she kicks you in the groin.

"Wha'?" you moan, breathing deeply, slowly. "Wha'd I do?"

She laughs and struts away, brushing make-believe dust off the seat of her bootcut corduroys.

"Hmmph!" she snorts. "You can take it, cowboy. Jes' go on back to your filthy c-countess. I ain't never wan't see you ag'in!"

You wonder where she picked up the Midwestern accent, consider chasing after her. And what's all this countess business?

"The hell with it," you say, climbing into the cab of the four-whell drive Chevy Ram she made you buy, tossing a handful of oats and alfalfa to a U-Haul full of haggard-looking thoroughbreds. "I don't need her. I don't need anybody."

You pop Merle Haggard into the tapedeck, pound your fist and sing along: "Take me back to Tulsa, I'm too young to marry. Take me back to Tulsa, I'm too young to wed thee." For some reason you start thinking about your girlfriend's neck. You've been singing along, having a good ole time, then you start to cry just thinking about your girlfriend's neck. "Her neck," you sob, flipping on the wipers. "Oh, man! I miss her...lousy...n-neck!"

It's an ordinary neck. But you miss it all the same.

A mile out of town you turn on the radio. The bulletin's half over before you realize who it's about: "...star of Fool for Love, nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Right Stuff, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child and the Cannes Film Festival for Paris, Texas, a man who's been called by some the next Eugene O'Neill, by others the Hollywood heir apparent to the late actor James Dean, Sam Shepard, today, got his hair cut."