Washburn and Gordon Simms

Washburn and Gordon Simms are friends, agent-manager and, in Washburn’s account, partners in a Western identity that neither can entirely separate from the other. Simms has profited from Washburn’s stardom, but their connection exceeds business: he has inhabited the gunfighter’s triumphs vicariously, while Washburn admits that their desires and sense of self have become difficult to disentangle. Their reunion before Washburn’s return to the Never-Ending Western Movie makes that intimacy visible—and exposes the melancholy beneath it.

A Partnership Built on the Gunfighter

Gordon Simms is Washburn’s agent-manager and an old friend. His business arrangements have made him wealthy: for Washburn’s ten biggest years as a star, Simms took thirty percent of his earnings. He is still pursuing investments, including a seabed-mining scheme, and talks about them during the drive toward the Set. Washburn recognizes the familiar pattern of another get-rich-quick proposal, but the conversation also establishes the practical foundation of their relationship: Simms manages the career through which their shared Western legend was made.

That partnership has never been simply managerial. Simms rubs the back of Washburn’s neck as they approach the Set, treating the return like a fighter’s entrance into the ring. He is excited and envious, bouncing on his toes as he watches the man who can still ride into the desert. Washburn contrasts Simms’s short, heavy, nearly bald appearance with the tall, slow-moving gunman Simms longs to be. The contrast is affectionate but revealing: Simms cannot play the heroic role himself, so Washburn’s performance becomes a way for him to live it.

Shared Glory, Different Bodies

Washburn describes their past in the plural. He and Gordon Simms rode the danger trail together; their trusty .44 cleared opposition until they were supreme, the best gunslingers in the West. The division between performer and manager remains real—Washburn rides, Simms watches—but the story they tell about those years makes the gunman’s victories theirs. Washburn goes so far as to describe himself as Simms’s manhood, a formulation that makes their emotional dependence vivid while exposing its imbalance: Simms’s access to masculine heroism rests on the career and body of his friend.

Gordon Simms had wanted their story to end in a final, definitive walkdown on a dusty Main Street, a grand retirement in a blaze of gunfire. Washburn wanted that ending too. Instead, cautious opponents left him with a final, ridiculous year in the Movie, riding around with his six-shooter ready but finding nobody willing to fight. Their shared ambition for a glorious exit could not make the ending happen. The gap between the spectacle they imagined and the anticlimax they experienced gives their bond a quiet disappointment: the great years belonged to both men, but neither could control how they ended.

The Return and Its Diminished Stakes

When Washburn comes back from Bel Air for a cameo, he is no longer returning as the unchallenged star of those years. The engagement is a no-kill contract for a comedy bit with Old Jeff Mangles and Natchez Parker. Gordon Simms sees the appearance as a mockery of what they stood for; Washburn suspects that he feels the same. The change in the work therefore reaches beyond Washburn’s career. It diminishes the shared identity through which Simms, too, has experienced the danger and glory of the Western persona.

As they arrive, Gordon Simms gives Washburn a final rub on the back, still wishing he were the one riding out. Washburn understands the envy without dismissing the affection behind it. He acknowledges that it is difficult to know where he ends and Gordon Simms begins, or to distinguish what Washburn wants from what his friend wants. This uncertainty is not resolved by the return: the cameo offers no restoration of their former supremacy, only another performance under conditions neither man would have chosen as their ideal ending.

A Farewell Without a Showdown

Before Washburn crosses into the Set, Gordon Simms shakes his hand and grips his shoulder, saying nothing in the manly Western style he has acquired through years of association with Washburn—of, as Washburn puts it, being him. The silence makes the gesture carry what speech might have made explicit: their intimacy has been learned through a role, repeated until its mannerisms have crossed from the screen’s gunfighter into the friend watching him.

Washburn then turns away from Gordon Simms and Consuela and gives them his familiar two-finger salute before stepping into the Movie. The farewell is affectionate, but it is also a separation between the life outside the Set and the persona that has bound the two men together. Gordon Simms remains behind, unable to take Washburn’s place; Washburn rides on, aware that the shared legend cannot give them the clean, triumphant ending they once imagined. Their relationship is thus both the support system behind the gunfighter’s career and one of its costs: the role has joined them, but its final meaning remains inseparable from the disappointment of its decline.