Mardi Gras 1976

Recently we've gone on a Facebook bender, belatedly (we're a late adopter, adapter, whatever), and primarily to reconnect with people we haven't seen, or not so much, in 20, 30, even 35 (!) years (as opposed to people we haven't seen in 5, 10 years––we always figure we'll run across them at Wal-Mart, or Whole Foods, or a Metro stop). We're naturally wary of anything as mind-habituating as Facebook, and very shortly we may be seeking out a 12-step program to cure us of this new enthusiasm, our latest in a long line of attention-deflecting addictions. The Facebooking, as we were warned it would, sent us stumbling down Memory Lane and into our "archives," a sturdy hatbox we've lugged with us for 30+ years and into which we've stuffed old photos, letters, unserved arrest warrants and such, and where we came upon the photo accompanying these words.

It shows a street scene during Mardi Gras, 1976, captured in the Hub City by our pal R-b, an avocational photographer who grew his own at home---that is, shot and "developed" his photos with chemicals and trays an so forth in makeshift closet-darkrooms. (How ... old-fashioned.) About 10 years ago we were visiting R-b at his southwest Houston home and remarked on how much we dug the photo, and he asked---or, to be accurate, demanded––that we take it off his hands and never return it. We said, "Sure,"* because this picture speaks to us on many different levels and draws forth a wealth of associations--most all of them blue-sky happy, in their way.

We're not 100-percent positive of the photo's vintage, but the movie advertised on the marquee was released in 1976, according to various authoritative Internet sources (and starred Elliot Gould and Diane Keaton––we never saw it and don't even wanna know what it's about). It's obviously from some time in the '70s, as you can tell from the gent in the foreground with the shades and form-fitting denim and the extremely boss hat (all of which he may have purchased down the street at an establishment called Right On Fashions, which last we looked was still extant, with a somewhat updated and hip-hop-ized selection of couture). It was for-sure taken at Mardi Gras––R-b confirmed this for us––and froze a typical instance of street-dragging on Shrove Tuesday, possibly between parades (there was the big "white" one in the a.m. and a "black" one at 1 p.m.). The street is Jefferson and the theater likewise was the Jefferson. (For recently arrived immigrants or students who failed their 8th grade U.S. history TAKS exam, this "Jefferson" was un presidente de Los Estados Unidos who swung the steal of the century [19th] when he "purchased" a broad swath of the North American continent, then called "Louisiana," at a fire-sale price from this dude Napoleon, who was kinda like the mack-daddy or whatever you call it these days of this country called France, which is in Europe, thus doubling the size of los Estados Unidos and priming future generations of Yankee Traders to [thank God] steal most of the rest of the continent from Mexico.)

The movie title, of course, speaks to us across the years of the fleetingness, the ephemerality, of time and desire. The theater is long-gone, razed at least two decades back. It was where, we believe, our father took us to see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance--why, we have no idea, as it was the only time we remember him taking us to a picture show, although he took us lots of other places. Some years later, right out front there, we had a non-Mardi Gras Epiphany or revelation of sorts, after our mother had dropped us and some other goofballs off to catch a Saturday afternoon matinee of an Elvis movie (which one we can't recall––they were pretty much all the same after Kid Creole, and all good). While standing in line we noticed something we had never noticed before, although it may have been there all along, right in front of us, and that was the presence of a second line of youngsters at a smallish ticket window off to the side. The kids in the other line, we noticed, were all directed by the manager up the side stairs to the balcony. We took our seat, unwisely, on the floor just in front of the balcony's edge, and sometime during the movie a shower of popcorn and ice rained down on first-floor customers, causing considerable commotion as the ushers hoofed it upstairs to police the antisocial behavior. Although at the time we did not enjoy that uncomfortable, sticky sensation, if we ever meet a black man or woman our age who was in the balcony that day to watch Elvis we'll ask them if they threw ice or popcorn on us, and if he or she says "No" we'll ask "Why not?"

But mostly this picture makes us think of Mardi Gras, and all the great fun we had, from the time we were a little kid until late adolescence and early adulthood, running wild and free and mostly unsupervised with boon companions through the downtown streets of the Hub City. How we discovered those hidden spots--like the bleak, urine-stained pedestrian passageway that ran alongside the underpass beneath the train tracks, and still may--and how we found you could traverse a good portion of the downtown by going roof-to-roof atop the adjacent storefronts. How blue the sky looked, and how there seemed to be no boundary between that blue sky and our mind, on the Mardi Gras Day when we experienced a bit of heightened consciousness and stood staring upward, transfixed, right there on Jefferson Street. How at 11 or 12 we threw up after gorging our self on junk at the street carnival that was always staked at the foot of Jefferson, and how we subsequently spent what seemed like two long, queasy hours searching for a usable pay phone so we could could call our parents to come and get us. How, going back to when we were 5 or 6, before we were running wild and free, we were forced to costume-up in a "Confederate general's" uniform--with epaulets!--that our Granny, bless her, had lovingly sewn for us. And much later on, how we'd unhesitatingly hook up with––in the dated sense of the term, meaning hang out with--people we didn't know and would never see again after that Tuesday.

We learned some other stuff at Mardi Gras, too, like what Hemingway (or we think it was Hemingway) meant when he said that one of the educational advantages of growing up in a small town is that you come to realize why the man with the big cigar has the big cigar. In our case, it was realizing why the man on the float in the crown, robe and fake beard was on the float, while we were down on the street with the jostling throngs waving our hands and begging him to toss us some plastic junque.

And it was, truly, all good.

We don't know anybody in the picture, but we know everybody ... the little fellow with his dad, walking purposefully off to the right ... the pig-tailed girl in the back, turning to look down at something on the street, maybe something she stepped on, or in ... the little girl in the foreground, gazing up pleadingly at her father, with the look of distress, maybe ... her father in the boss hat, waking tall and proud with his shoulders back and the pretty-good-lookin' woman with the popcorn at his side ... Everybody happy, or sad, or happy-sad ... stunned, expectant, searching, hungry ... dragging the street ... throw me something, mister ... in the moment we call "now" that's always passing.

*Dialogue guaranteed verbatim.

Alone at Last, In the Cold Bunkhouse of Time

Banjo Jones, Brazoria County’s strongest and handsomest blogger, has brought to our attention the news that Dennis Kucinich, in what appears to be an oblique attack on the Obama administration for not pushing hard enough on a public health-care option, has invoked the memory of long-dead cowboy star Roy Rogers and his faithful long-stuffed ride, Trigger (perhaps he’s metaphorically equating O to a dead horse, it’s hard to tell, although that would suggest a heretofore unseen level of wit on the congressman’s part).* Banjo, whose upbringing apparently was similar to ours, confesses that as a very small person RR was his hero--perhaps second only to Jesus in the pantheon?--and that he was so eaten up with the man that he demanded to be called “Roy” and wore a cowboy hat nearly ’round the clock.

We, too, were besotted with Roy, we presume through repeated exposure to the Roy Rogers Show, which we must have been consciously viewing even before it was in the rerun cycle. Roy looms large in one of our earliest childhood memories/traumas: We were vacationing with our family in Galveston--the Jack Tar Inn being the preferred vacation destination until the rising affluence of the 1960s swept us to more exotic locales, such as Destin, Fla.--and playing on the beach with a set of small plastic figures (We called them “Little Men,” as in, “We’re gonna make these Little Men the Japs and these Little Men over here are gonna kill ’em all.”) that included representations of Roy and Trigger and possibly second bananas such as wife Dale Evans and TV sidekick Pat Brady. We had positioned Roy and Trigger, who must have been our prized possessions, atop a sand castle when an unexpected wave broke over the beach and swept Roy and his plastic steed out to sea. Forever. We have a faint Kodochromatic visual memory of searching frantically in the waves for the disappeared Roy while a sub-set of older relatives, sunning their flaccid and pasty skin on the beach, chuckled at the spectacle. We positively recall crying inconsolably over our loss. When our kids were younger and hung up on some piece of molded plastic from Wal-Mart our parents delighted in telling them the story of Roy’s disappearance at sea, an incident which of course we have now transubstantiated into a Grand Metaphor of Loss of Innocence, or sump’in. Jimi Hendrix wrote a song about it.

Looking back, we can’t fathom Roy’s widespread appeal, except for the fact that he always kicked the bad guys’ arses. From this vantage point, he looks to be just a square-jawed puffball of puddin' and virtue, nothing much to distinguish him, except from certain angles now his face definitely projects an Asiatic quality (seriously--check it out!). He lacked any semblance of edge, as compared to, say, Gene Autry, who as a younger man aspired to Sing Like a Negro and performed passably well at it, and who in the episodes of his TV show we catch on the all-Western cable channel looks more distracted than earnest, like he’s got business elsewhere and needs to walk through the scene as quickly as possible so he can get on with becoming an incredibly rich guy/baseball magnate. Our late ‘50s worship of Roy soon gave way to maniacal adulation of Mickey Mantle (a damnable by-product of which was a devotion to reading the sports page, which we trace to the Mantle-Maris home race of the summer of ’61), which then gave way to sublimated man-love of Bob Cousey, allegiance to whom we eventually shifted to another Bob, Dylan, who soon had to make way for Faulkner, William ... which was about our last stop for the hero worship route.

Then there was the always touchy question of Roy’s relationship with his ineffectual comic sidekicks, that hoary literary trope dating to Sancho Panza and beyond. On TV that role was filled by the aforementioned Brady, who never had a chick (or gal, as they were sometimes called) and instead spent his days riding an old jeep he called Nelly Belle, which often wouldn’t start or sometimes broke down when the bad guys were on his tail, while Roy consorted with Dale and never failed to shoot off his 6-gun. Hmm ... (To this day we cannot hear the Stones’ Start Me Up on a commercial for credit cards or an erectile-dysfunction medicine, whatever they’re using it to sell, without a picture of Pat Brady, struggling to fire Nelly Belle’s ignition, passing through our mind.)

Earlier, in the movies, Roy’s sidekick was played by the wispy-bearded George “Gabby” Hayes, perhaps the quintessential sidekick, a true exemplar of the Olde Weird America, much more fly-specked and funkier and easier to imitate than the smooth-shaven and TV-ready Brady. Gabby apparently was quite promiscuous in his sidekick duties, performing them under not only Roy and Autry but also Hopalong Cassady as well as John Wayne and Randolph Scott. That boy got around! We were never clear on on the true nature of Gabby’s relationships with these Alpha types, but check out the potential Brokeback scenario in this video segment, wherein Gabby and Roy are bivouacked in a room by their lonesomes while just outside some non-gay callebreros and their ladies jounce on the dance floor. The song these two sequestered cowpokes are singing? It’s called We’re Not Comin‘ Out Tonight ...

*Say what you will about Kucinich, but he far and away has the best-looking wife of any perennial presidential candidate, perhaps in our nation’s history, and that would include the late Mrs. Harold Stassen.

The Last Time We Saw Robert Novak ...

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Earthbound ’69

Journalist-author Ron Rosenbaum posted a couple of pieces on his blog this week that work as a healthy but gentle purgative for all the sentimental, overwrought and insipid glop churned out by the electronic and newsprint media to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the first moon landing. It’s clear now that the premature passing of Michael Jackson was truly a large-scale tragedy, primarily because it deprived the world of his sharing of his memories of Neil Armstrong’s one small step. (Jackson, of course, would later popularize the moonwalk on a scale that Armstrong, alas, never attained.)

Yes, we remember the day the Eagle landed and Armstrong walked. We were playing golf that day. With our good friend R-b. At the country club, where we both pursued the solitary sport with maniacal determination and a crazed competitiveness. (Neither we nor R-b were much cut out for the country club: Both of our dads worked in the oilfield—we never heard anyone back then call it “the oil business,” which is where George H.W. Bush must have worked—and ours, having clambered his way up from driving a wireline truck to wearing a tie and running his oilfield services company’s local office, had the family’s club dues paid by his employer as both a perk and business expense.) On that day in July we had played the front nine and stopped at the little snack shack that sat between the 9^th and 18^th greens.

The snack hut—a thrown-together wood-framed structure with a covered but unscreened porch—was run by Joe Decuir, a gentle but stupendously large and well-muscled black man with a shaved head (not so fashionable back in ’69) and a small, well-tended mustache who claimed to have once been given a tryout with the Saints, even though he never attended college. We whiled away many long summer hours of our 13^th through 15^th years talking with Joe Decuir on many subjects, and although there were some on which he remained guarded he had a natural graciousness and sensitivity that, at least to our mind, managed to transcend the obvious gulf of race and class between himself and two suburban white boys who talked shit, stupid shit, like suggesting he’d enjoy listening to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (which he didn’t).

Joe always had the radio going, and when he wasn’t regaling us he was singing along. On Saturday afternoons he’d really come alive, wailing and keening as loud as he could without disturbing the nearby linksmen. That was when the local Top 40 station would turn four solid hours over to Paul Thibeaux, “The House Rocker,” owner of “House Rocker’s Record Shop,” who’d play only the best of Black America’s favorite music, past and present, while plugging at the top of his lungs a local nightclub or a “big wedding dance” out in some exotic rural locale like Frilot Cove, which he’d pronounce as “Free Loco!!” Sometimes he’d excitably end these commercials with a personal guarantee to would-be customers: “No harm will come to you or your car!” Joe Decuir loved Paul Thibeaux, as did we.

Joe talked often of sex, a subject on which he professed to posses vast experience and expertise, and on which we had none of either (we believe it was from Joe that we learned of the Black Man’s supposed historical aversion to cunnilingus, which we see now as a dated 20^th century notion). Once, on a steamy afternoon, he provided us, gratis, two ice-cold beers—just one each. We were grateful, possibly because it was not the Falstaff that we occasionally filched from the refrigerator at home. Another time, after the discussion had rolled around to exactly how strong he was—he perhaps had initiated the discussion—Joe emerged from his kitchen and, standing adjacent to one of the pillars that held up his humble fiefdom, began slamming it with an upward thrust of his giant forearm, much as he would had he been exploding off the line for the Saints. The building shook and shuddered, and the post jumped a little bit off its concrete foundation. We feared he was going to knock the place down. He was the strongest guy we knew.

On a wall behind the screened-off counter, in the kitchen where Joe cooked up delicious burgers and fries, hung a shitty little black-and-white TV bolted to a rickety stand, and it was on that instrument that we saw the moonwalk, although “saw” is not quite the right word. The picture, already dark and cloudy from the moon transmission, was made more so by the quality of the TV and the counter screen we had to watch it through. We remember having to crane our neck and shift our eyes as afternoon shadows pitched into the kitchen, and after a while that seemed to be more trouble than it was worth.

We don’t remember much of the rest that particular July day when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. We knew it was big deal, or course, but not one that really touched us, not like, say, Otis did with Try a Little Tenderness. We suppose that as Neil Armstrong prepared to tee one up on the lunar surface we finished out the back nine at the country club, arguing with R-b over gimmes and the lies of our respective balls in the rough, perhaps making fart noises or clearing our throat as he drew back to putt. Neil Armstrong’s walk has faded into a fuzzy, indistinct memory, one we initially registered at a poor angle off a bad TV image. But Joe Decuir we remember clearly.

"From the Stink of the Diddie to the Stench of the Shroud, There is Always Something ..."

War broke out between the states
And they joined up with Quantrill.
And it was over in Clay County
That Frank and Jesse finally learned to kill.
-- Warren Zevon, Frank and Jesse James

A parlor-game question arising from the highly entertaining (and much-needed!) Blagojevich diversion is whether Illinois is the most corrupt state in the union. This would seem to lead to a subjective judgment that in the end would escape empirical verification, yet Slate’s Jacob Weisberg gave it a whack recently by comparing Blagojevich’s homestate with Louisiana, which, as Weisberg notes, has a long history of “flamboyant and shameless” political corruption. Weisberg cites statistics compiled by Corporate Crime Reporter showing Louisiana led the nation from 1997-2006 with 326 federal corruption convictions, but suggests Blagojevich-era Illinois has “gone carnival” (nice phrase!) and is on the verge of snatching the crown.

We know nothing of Illinois---we’ve visited there a few times and believe it to be somewhere well north of Arkansas---but we do possess a small bit of knowledge of the political folkways of Texas’ neighbor to the east. Although a Texan by birth and bent of mind, we spent our formative years, and some deformative ones, across the Sabine in the Hub City. Growing up in the middle-class suburbs there did not necessarily gift us with any insight into the political workings of the state, although we took an early interest in government and can still do a fairly exact impersonation of the late Warren J. “Puggy” Moity. (“Ol’ Puggy ain’t gonna lie to ya,” we often heard the antic private dick-cum-scandal sheet publisher intone during the 30-minute rants he would air on local TV stations on Saturday afternoons, during which he’d cut loose with all manner of libel and invective against state and local politicians [some of it non-judgment proof].) No, everything we know about Louisiana politics---and lots that we know about human nature---we learned at our first reporting job, on the Atakapalousa Tribune,* in Atakapalousa* ("300 bars and One Church," as the saying went), the parish seat of St. Erastus Parish.* It was one of the best educational experiences we’ve ever had, and although our two years there seemed agonizingly long at the time, looking back we wish we had been more attentive and in the moment, rather than wasting our time plotting how we were going to get to the New York Times, or at least the Shreveport Journal (neither of which, alas, were takers).

St. Erastus, which sits less than a half-hour drive to the north of the Hub City but was several decades removed in socioeconomic development, was generally believed to be the second most corrupt parish in Louisiana, after Jefferson Parish outside of New Orleans, which was controlled by “Mob boss Carlos Marcello.” (We believe that was his full name.) Mob Boss Marcello’s tentacles were said to stretch far westward to St. Erastus, primarily through some undocumented and unspecified interest in the two whorehouses---what a quaint term!---that operated openly, flagrantly, in the parish.** One was near the parish line to the south, out on the main highway and up the road from the thoroughbred track outside the Hub City (the track has since moved to Atakapalousa, after Hub City voters refused to allow casino gambling on the premises); the other, called “The Spot,” was deep in the woods near the levee along the Atachamattamapa,* supposedly the swiftest-flowing river in the U.S. (They had a big “rock festival” on its banks in ’70 or ’71 and six or so naked hippies drowned after jumping in for a swim---true story.) We had seen no actual proof Marcello had a hand in these or other sporting endeavors in the locality, but back then we believed that he did and we believe it to this day. (We never patronized either establishment, because at the time we wouldn’t think of actually paying for it, and besides, we were only pulling down $195 a week.***)

We arrived in Atakapalousa with a freshly obtained college degree, some unremarkable clips from our college paper, and as stupid as a telephone pole. Our second or third week at the paper the editor told us to call the head of the Chamber of Commerce, the elder of a local German-Jewish merchant family, who had a tip for us: The newly sworn-in mayor and his father were set to make $10,000 (if we remember correctly) for handling the legal work on a big bond issue the city council had just approved. (At the time $10,000 would have seemed like a lot of money to us, so it might have been more.) We remember sitting with the kindly old city comptroller, an honest but wary wage-earner with a hangdog look, requesting he supply us with the pertinent documents and having him clarify for us just exactly how a “municipal bond issue” worked. It turned out that while the mayor had pushed for the debt issue he had abstained from voting on it, thus absolving himself of any direct conflict under the law as it was then written.

The mayor was just a little older than us---a big, friendly, boyish guy who had made his name as quarterback on the Tulane squad that was the first to beat LSU since’48, something like that. Someone---probably the Chamber of Commerce guy, who must have had a long-standing beef with the mayor’s big-shot lawyer father---requested that the D.A. investigate after our story appeared. But the D.A., as the mayor told us with a noticeable sheepishness, was his “godfather,” so the matter was somehow kicked to the attorney general---a good friend or distant blood relation of the mayor’s father, according to the mayor (who, again, related this circumstance with matter-of-fact embarrassment). Nothing came of it, of course, not that we figured it would, and the mayor (now a big-time plaintiff’s attorney) remained friendly and became a decent source for us. But the incident did leave us with a greater appreciation of Coppola’s Godfathers I and II, particularly Michael’s warning to Fredo to never go against the family, and it gave us a heads-up to the murk we’d be blindly wading into for the next couple of years.

There was always something similar afoot, and a sizable cast of raffish characters, a real-life Runyonesque crew with country Cajun accents. It wasn’t like we were a crack investigative reporter, although we could be industrious when aroused; the stuff just fell in our hands and those of other reporters, like overripe fruit. It helped that there was no competition---the Tribune (long since swallowed into the Gannett maw) had the place to itself---and that our editor was a decent guy with solid news instincts. He was the kind of crusty old-school journalist who chain-smoked his way through his second bout of cancer (we were surprised to learn a few years ago that he was still among the living) and was generally fearless in pursuing stories, a stance that’s not easy to maintain in an incestuous (often literally) small town. (He lost his job, of course, before we vacated the premises, and the chain owner replaced him with a pious, pud-faced Baptist from Mississippi who began running a “Bible verse of the day” on the front page.)

Yes, there was corruption a’plenty: Most hilariously, the boat ramp that the police jury (county commission) president had quietly built with public funds on private property for a friendly constituent---an “ol’ boy,” as the official explained to us, who had some disability that prevented him getting over to the public ramp down the road (perhaps this was just an early example of privatization). The story prompted a number of complaints from other boat owners wondering where their taxpayer-funded boat ramps were, and the police jury president, a jowly, humorless Boss Hogg type, decided not to seek re-election.

More seriously, there was as the long-running story that we worked on with our good pal Mike of the $25,000 bribe that Clyde Vidrine, an aide to Gov. Edwin Edwards during his first term, claimed had been given to Edwards (in cash, in a brown paper bag, of course) to clear the way for the permitting of a toxic waste dump in the middle of the woods in the parish directly to the north of St. Erastus. A year or so earlier Vidrine had written and published Just Takin’ Orders: A Southern Governor's Watergate, a book of much statewide notoriety in which he alleged numerous finely detailed instances of felonious behavior in the Edwards administration. The bribe had been touched on briefly by Bill Lynch, an investigative reporter for the New Orleans States-Item (RIP), who suggested there was a lot more to the story and we should pursue it. Mike had stumbled into the Vidrine connection when he been pulling string on the mysterious dump site after it appeared on the EPA’s first Superfund clean-up list---no one locally, not even the residents of a nearby trailer park, knew of its existence. Out of the blue he got a call from Vidrine, who had returned to his nearby hometown after his banishment from Baton Rouge. “You kind of stepping into my pasture there,” Vidrine told Mike. We eventually met up with Vidrine---framed on the cinder-block walls of his drafty "office" were the same pictures that appeared in his book of him with Myron Cohen and Ann-Margaret---and later traveled to Baton Rouge to interview Edwards. We cannot get our hands on the clips, but if memory serves Edwards never directly denied that money exchanged hands for the permit but dismissed the matter with his usual line of charming BS, claiming that if there was a bag of money left in his office “Clyde” had taken it and blown it all on booze and whores. We do remember being somewhat underdressed for the interview, appearing in the gubernatorial office in our skeevy leather jacket and black Chuck Taylor high-tops. The governor asked where we’d acquired our footwear. Many years later his charm would wear thin and his wit would not save him.

Near the end of our apprenticeship in St. Erastus we got a call from somebody at the U.S. Attorney’s office, which was all the way up in Shreveport, a good five-hours drive away before the completion of the interstate, telling us to request File No. so-and-so and that it might make a good story. It turned out the Justice Department had been quietly investigating a local school trustee for a while and was about to strike a plea bargain with the man. It would be the first time the feds had prosecuted a vote-buying case under the Voting Rights Act. The infraction involved the purchase of the ballots of 60 or so black voters in Atakapalousa, who (memory fails us here) had been given some kind of gratuity---maybe $5 or $10---for their help in ensuring the white board member was elected. The trustee’s brother was the superintendent of schools, and their family had a wholesale and retail gasoline business that contracted with the school district and other local governments. The trustee avoided jail time but had to resign his seat, a grievous inconvenience for the family. We had not initiated the investigation, just written about it at length---and pretty much the way the assistant U.S. Attorney told it----but the episode seriously soured our relation with then ex-trustee, who thereafter would greet us only with an icy “Hey … babe …” that we found both funny and faintly menacing. (The last time we saw the old boy he was hosting a show on the local cable access channel---who says there’s no second acts in American life?)

A couple days after the court case concluded we were walking in front of the courthouse when we ran into one of the state district judges, a crotchety, spiteful old asshole whose father had been a judge, grandfather had been a judge, etc. (and whose extended family was the one supposedly maligned by Huey Long for allegedly having “black blood,” a remark which by legend if not fact led to Long’s assassination by a family in-law). The judge said he had read our stories, chucked a bit, then turned contemplative: “Y’know, in the old days we’d just give the niggers a chit before they went to vote---like a, a … wooden chit,” he recalled, almost wistfully, “and later we’d let ’em re-deem it for a glass of whiskey.” Such is democracy.

There were many other stories---some too complicated to explain here, some the particulars too lost to memory for quick-and-dirty retrieval---but one of the most telling involved the sports editor at the Tribune. On one Super Sunday the state police---or maybe it was the feds---raided a downtown bar that had made what seemed to us to be exceptionally large book on the game. From under the glass on the bar the authorities confiscated a check for $1,000 made out by the sports editor to the bookmaking barkeep.

The sports editor was a lightly closeted gay guy---sort of mean-prissy, overly dramatic, just an obviously full-on gay dude, but damned for near-eternity to be sports editor of a small newspaper in a nowhere town in the late 1970s (which in retrospect fills us with wonder and a sort of admiration that he managed to pull it off, at least adequately---he got the scores right---in that environment). He was the queen of his small fiefdom and something of a load. Late at night, when the newsroom was clear of all but the sportswriters and yours truly and our hard-working pal Mike, the sports editor had a bad habit of loudly deploying the word “nigger” when grousing about some high school athlete or another. This would send Mike, who was and is an upright dude, around the bend and right up into the sports editor’s face. The sports editor would respond with a torrent of vituperative bitchiness. All this caused us to look with some disfavor on the boy.

When it came time for the bookie’s trial, the sports editor was called to testify about the forever-uncashed check he had written. For the next day’s paper, down in the story but not too far down, we wrote the following paragraph: “R---r B----t, who identified himself as the sports editor of the Atakapalousa Tribune, testified about a $1,000 check …” Etc. We wrote it that way for a laugh, figuring our editor would fix it for us, but as with too much off the under-deadline crap we churned out each day (5, maybe 6 stories, all written between 8 a.m. and the 11:30 a.m. deadline and baked in Camel filters and black coffee), it sailed right on to the front page, unmolested. Now we realize that our editor, who also did not care for the sports guy, probably left it that way intentionally.

That afternoon the sports editor stormed into the office, slammed down a stack of fresh papers on his desk and bellowed, at us and everyone else in earshot, “Why the fuck did you put in that I ‘identified myself as the sports editor’ …?”

We had no ready answer other than the truth: “Well, you did … I mean the prosecutor asked you to identify yourself, and that’s what you said,” we replied. “And y’know …,” we added, unconsciously articulating the secret motto of the true Louisianan, “I just couldn’t help myself.”


*To cover all behinds, mostly ours, we have changed the locale names just a bit here.

**The district attorney, a Georgetown Law grad who favored gaudy checkered sports jackets, once told us that the whorehouses were allowed to operate "because that's what the people want." This was during the same surreal conversation when he informed us, without elaborating, that his wife was Sicilian.

***Although this is irrelevant to our story, we did patronize on an evening or two a topless bar in the vicinity of the racetrack called The Galloping Jugs. We just wanted to record that name for posterity.

A Little Bitty Story ’Bout America, Told, We Hope, Without Saccharine or Sentiment

Back during the Democratic primaries, when we’d ask our mother about Obama, she’d wrinkle her forehead and raise her eyebrows before muttering darkly about the “cult-like” trappings of his popularity. This was---is---a not uncommon reaction among people whose intelligence we respect, including the Libertarian guy behind the counter at a Starbucks we frequent who, on the day after Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, claimed that the whole fussy production reminded him of The Nightmare Years, the William Shirer tome on Hitler’s rise to power. We tend(ed) to agree with these assessments, except that instead of a home-grown, Oprah-ized fascism---suggested by that precious Orwellian admonition to “become the change you’ve been waiting for”---we saw a benighted but goofy idealism toted like a giant chip on the shoulder by the young and would-be young, one that would surely be shattered by a head-on collision with reality (which has surely come, as you can trace through Obama’s transformation in cinematic archetype from Elmer Gantry to Cool Hand Luke, a much more appealing pose).

But we entertained our mother’s objections seriously. She voted for Clinton in her Democratic primary---support that, as for many women her age and younger, was surely aspirational. Plus, she admired the woman’s resiliency and her hard-nosed MYF* do-gooderism. She even likes Bill, a lot, but ruefully, most likely because he reminded her of some needy, too-eager-to-please first graders she had taught over the years. (She’s the only person we know who actually read the man’s jillion-page autobiography.)

We found her post-convention aversion to Obama odd, though, because she’s a Democrat who can count on her fingers the Republicans she’s voted for over the past 60 years. That includes Eisenhower, twice, and a school board candidate who was the son of a beloved and respected principal she worked for. (“He’s a very nice boy, and intelligent, but he’s a, y’know, Republican,” she explained after raising a yard sign for the boy.) There may have been a GOP candidate or two for governor of Louisiana in there somewhere, although she stuck with Democrat Edwin Edwards, one of the most corrupt politicians of post-World War II America, because he as promised had paid off his support from schoolteachers with nice retirement benefits. She has long been disdainful of the entire Bush clan. Back in 2000 she presciently dismissed the incoming president as a “drugstore cowboy,” and just two weeks after he launched his misadventure in Iraq she stood glaring at CNN and declared, through clenched teeth, “That SOB has a tiger by the tail, mark my word.”

So she’s pretty much a yellow dog Democrat, an affiliation that dates far back into Texas’s and our nation’s past. Hers is not the typical story of small-town, segregationist Democrat-turned-conservative suburban Republican, but rather of small-town segregationist Democrat-turned- moderately conservative Democrat, and remaining one. The party may have left her, but she did not leave the party.

A distaste for Vietnam helped maintain the allegiance after LBJ departed, but she primarily remained a Democrat because, like many white Southerners, she found it impossible to deny the moral claims of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement---impossible to square the supposed point of World War II and the ideas about liberty and freedom she was exposed to in college with the everyday brutal reality of enforced segregation in the Deep South. These people did not march or agitate but quietly resolved to acquiesce. They were not heroic, but they went against their raising. That’s hard to do.

Our mother grew up in deep East Texas, in the same little town from which future San Francisco mayor Willie Brown fled while still a teenager. A little to the north of there sits the burg of Greenville, which as, she recalls, once famously welcomed visitors with a cheery sign proclaiming “Greenville: The Blackest Land and the Whitest People.” Her father, a “railroad doctor” for Southern Pacific, was a power in local politics, maybe the power, and back then “power” meant Democrat and in much of East Texas Democrat meant “Dixiecrat” or the Texas Regulars, as those who had soured on FDR’s overreaching and the national party’s tentative embrace of civil rights called themselves. She remembers taking a train to Dallas to accompany her father to a state convention, maybe the one where the Texas Regulars threw their support to Strom Thurmond. “I didn’t know anything about politics,” she says. “I just wanted to go to Neiman’s.”

Some years later, in the early ’60s, long after my grandfather had died, I was party to at least two strange, overheated summer nights when relatives sat around the big oak table in the dining foyer of the House of Seven Gables-style manse my mother’s family had occupied for almost a century. Through a thick haze of cigarette smoke, they argued, argued, argued until late in the evening, voices rising loudly and falling as they debated the changes that were stirring even in their little nowhere town. The word “nigger” occasionally lit the air---these were not uneducated or even unrefined people, more like what they used to call small-town shabby genteel, but they were of their place and time---and the bitterness was as thick as the smoke. On one side, alone, was my mother, who had gone away to UT during the Homer Rainey years and never really returned home, and on the other was my aunt Rosalie and my grandmother and other relatives and dropper-bys. In the face of unanimous opposition from others around the table, my mother maintained that whether they liked it or not integration was coming and they best reconcile themselves to it. One or both of these evenings ended with her in tears (we believe our father, who did not enjoy confrontation or too much political discussion, must have retired to the big front porch to discuss SWC football with another non-combatant) and suggestions that she was a traitor---to her family, and a whole way of life.

We look back now and see our self on those nights as a Stuart Little figure, quiet and watchful in our PJs, absorbing it all while being violently transported a new kind of adult wakefulness by the vehemence of the discussion, the dropping of the masks. We recall rooting quietly for our mother and admiring her intellect and obstinacy, her unwillingness to back down.

Not that she’s a flaming liberal. She’s got no use for affirmative action or illegal immigration and little tolerance for the Al Sharptons or anyone else who hollers “racism” when the facts could just as easily suggest another interpretation. After Obama’s nomination she professed to be up in the air. “I don’t know what I’m going do,” she’d say when we’d inquire. “Oh, I know why you’re not going for Obama,” we teased. “You know I’m not like that,” she’d say, genuinely offended. “Yeah---we understand, believe me, we understand,” we’d say, reflecting our own dissatisfaction with the choices, but like the jerk we are we did wonder whether 1930s East Texas was just too deeply ingrained in her to let her vote for a black guy.

Then came Palin. “I guess I’m going with Obama,” she said without much enthusiasm. And the financial crisis. “Yeah, I’m with Obama,” she said with slightly more conviction. “He did pretty good in that debate, I thought.”

And there it is. She’s not voting for the guy because he’s black---that’d be the last thing she’d do. And she’s not voting for him because he’s a Democrat. She weighed the imperfect options before her and made her choice, reluctantly. And whatever happens on Nov. 4, we have to stand back in wonderment at how far our mother, now in her 9^th decade, has traveled from home. If we told her as much, she would, to her credit, probably suggest that we are full of shit.

*Methodist Youth Fellowship, for you infidels.

Myron Anderson’s Listening Back: Another Good Thing about Houston

One in an Ongoing But Very Sporadic Series On Our Town’s Many Fine But Perhaps Not Readily Apparent Qualities and Attractions, Which We Often Overlook as We Spend Seemingly Interminable Moments Going From There to Here and Back …

A month or so back, when only but a select few bloggers were calling attention to the somewhat overripe commentary of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, we heard Sen. Obama declare that the choice facing Americans is between “marching forward or looking back.” At that moment an image bloomed in our mind’s eye and we could see them, the Obamaphiles, coming just over the rise, hut-hutting along, lockstep, brimming audaciously with hope, resolutely fired-up and ready to go, somewhere, while the very air seemed to billow with the strains of some jaunty martial music---was it the theme from The Bridge Over the River Kwai they were whistling? At the head, of course, was the senator himself, sporting a Lincolnesque stovepipe and pair of vintage Chuck Taylors and tossing his baton into what seemed like the upper reaches of the stratosphere.

The mind’s music was alluring and we felt the pull---we could see our self teamed with the senator in an old man’s game of two-on-two, us raining downs 3s from way behind the line, like World B. Free in his prime, Obama using those sharp elbows to clear the lane and put back our rare misfire, or kick the ball back out to us with Russell-like precision, and after two decisive to-11-by-ones victories we’d knock off for some green tea and foreign policy discussion---but ultimately we knew that we must open our eyes again and draw the blinds on the passing procession, for we are a “looking back” sort of individual and attended too many Mardi Gras parades as a youth.

Fortunately, the next day was Friday, a day we were once forced to observe by the consumption of fish at the L.J. Alleman School cafeteria (frozen fish sticks or an ice cream-scooper of a substance passed off as étouffée, which we believe was a lump of white rice doused with ketchup and containing two or three “shrimp”) and which we much later voluntarily welcomed with early-evening rounds of “Jack” and billiards while the unpleasant, hectoring sound of the Marshall Tucker Band’s Can’t You See wafted through the smoke-choked rooms of The Brass Rail. But these days, the days of our early dotage, we celebrate Fridays not with dated religious superstition or barroom debauchery but with a quick morning listen over our car radio to Myron Anderson’s Listening Back show on KTSU, 90.9 FM. It’s a definite improvement on our previous Friday rituals.

Mr. Anderson, or Myron, if we can be so familiar, has been on the air since 1981 (we believe that’s what we heard him say during his last anniversary show) and since the show’s debut there has been much more music produced for listening back. In fact, Myron says he plays music for people who came of age in the “’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s”---a declaration we found sobering when we realized that persons whose salad days passed in the 1990s might now be listening to “oldies.” Yet Myron seems to stick mostly to the music made by black Americans from roughly the early 1960s through the mid 1970s, and for that we and other H-Town oldsters are grateful.

On some Fridays, when we must ferry our 14-year-old Obama supporter to school, we find our self fighting for our right to listen back as the middle schooler presumptuously switches the dial over to 104 or 96-point-something, whatever it is. Ordinarily we shrug and let it pass---radio, after all, is for the young---but on Fridays we must slap her hand and assert our parental prerogative. We tell her to listen closely and learn. Greek and Latin may no longer be necessary, but an educated person should be able to speak with knowledge of Gamble-Huff and the Philadelphia Sound and know the words to every song Otis Redding ever sang, even the obscure shit that wasn’t released until 30 years after his death.

On the morning after we heard Obama delineate the choice facing modern Americans we were riding alone, running late and cursing the red lights and the other motorists who had the gall to be out driving on the same roadway as us. Oblivious to our plight, Myron and a sidekick were reminiscing about great blaxploitation (not a term Myron used) flicks of the early 1970s, the ones we so enjoyed as a Young White Negro-in-Training, and playing music from those movies. He spun Bobby Womack’s swelling theme for Across 110^th Street, then concluded a mini-Star Set with Womack’s strangely beautiful Hairy Hippie (“I’d like to help a man, when he’s down, but how can I help ya, Harry, when you’re sleepin’ on the ground? Sorry, Harry, you’re just too much weight to carry 'round.”), which was attached to no movie but was a great song nonetheless. Then Myron spoke lovingly of The Liberation of L.B. Jones, reeling off the names of all the actors and giving special mention to Lola Falana, who, as he observed, had “some legs.” We heard no more, for we had arrived at our destination, but we needed no more, for Myron had set us in mind of the Fridays when we were young, full of Jack and free of cafeteria fish sticks, and the whole world---perhaps even Lola Falana’s legs---seemed open and beckoning.

Sweet Hitchhiker (A Cautionary Tale of the Road)

The recent mass exhumation of the literary remains of J. Kerouac (that’s us in the group picture, back row, third from right, holding our Bic aloft), which culminated, we hope, in this belated but very sharp appreciation by Louis Menand in the recent New Yorker, as well as an even more belated parsing by New York Times tight end David Brooks, who uses the 50th anniversary of K’s On the Road as an excuse for Baby Boomer-bashing (which is OK when we do it, ’cause we earned the right), compels us to document for posterity---or whenever this Internet thing craters---our first hitchhiking experience, which coincided, perhaps fittingly and perhaps not, with out first massive, nerve-mangling hangover experience.

Our story begins on a Friday evening, during the summer after either our freshman or sophomore year in high school, when we laced up our desert boots and sauntered over to our friend St-ve’s house to “spend the night,” as we informed our parents. We did not inform them that St-ve’s parents were away and his older brother, who was either a senior in high school or may have been in college already (but whatever his academic standing was a nice guy, and we were sorry to learn of his recent passing away), was throwing a party for his peers, and that St-ve had beckoned over some of his associates to mull around the periphery and observe the proceedings, perhaps pick up a few pointers in the art of acting “older.” The plan was that we---that is, us, St-ve and another buddy, R-b---were to arise early the next morning and head up to a weekend “ranch” north of town where St-ve had arranged for us to clean out a barn and rebuild a fence for some rich guy.

We passed the evening eating popcorn (the kind that was actually popped on a stove; this predated the advent of that nasty, carcinogenic microwaved crap, as well as the advent of the microwave) and sipping from the many available bottles of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, a popular beverage of the day which in the not too distant future we would be purchasing from the 7-11 with our doctored high school I.D., which proclaimed us to be two years older than we actually were but showed us to look two (or more) years younger than we actually were. There was swingin’, swayin’ and record playin’: lots of Beach Boys and the Buffalo Springfield one with On the Way Home on it, and somewhere in there, as the evening took on a hazy, golden glow and St-ve’s brother’s friends began retiring to various secluded parts of the house, The Lettermen’s A Summer Place. Emboldened by the Boone’s Farm, late in the evening even we undertook to do the boogaloo with a Weejun-wearing, mini-skirted blonde of 18 or 19, who most likely perceived us as “goofy” and “harmless” (as well as “drunk”) but of course was unaware of the dark and powerful sexual energy coiled within our mostly hairless 15-year-old body.

We had had a nip or two here or there dating back to 7th grade, but were a decided amateur in the art of drinking, and we eventually partook of so much Boone’s Farm that we puked half-digested popcorn all over self before puking out what seemed to be all of our insides, then passed out---or fell into a coma---at the foot of a tall oak in St-ve’s front yard. It was there that we awoke shortly after dawn and noticed that R-b had also ended his evening at the foot of a tree, about 10 yards away. We had never felt so bad, maybe to this day (and if we try real hard we can recall the smell of the regurgitated Boone’s Farm at the base of our throat, laced with the fine tang of urped-up popcorn). But somehow we pulled our self together enough to be on board a couple of hours later for the drive out to the work site.

Then came the bouncing ride with the clanging tools in the back of a pick-up, the overpowering smell of the creosoted timber at the barn, our pressing need to vomit again shortly after arriving, and our subsequent announcement, after only an hour or so of desultory toil in the blistering sun, that we would be forgoing the further opportunity to earn $1.75 an hour stringing barb-wire and would be heading for home. Our pending departure was met with derision by St-ve and R-b, and we exchanged a round of insults and counter-insults that most likely were confined to such terms as “little girl,” “big pussy” and the chart-topping favorite “you big f-----' queer.” Such were the parameters of male adolescent repartee in the Hub City.

Unbeknown to us, St-ve and R-b would pack it in within the hour and drive back to ease their hangovers in the leafy green of suburbia, but we were in a decided hurry and made the long walk down the dirt road and out to the highway, where we stuck out our thumb by the side of a thoroughfare called the Evangeline Thruway (‘cause it went straight through town, we think). In very short order we were picked up by a car driven by a small brown-skinned gentleman, a native of the Subcontinent who must have been affiliated with the petroleum engineering branch of the local diploma mill, as there would have been no other reason for an Indian from India to be in that town then, the non-chain motels all being locally owned. Not too long after we climbed in the car, which was stuffy and stinking of B.O., the driver inquired in a small, tentative voice whether we would like to stop at the coming-up-on-the-right K-Mart to try on bathing suits. Not believing we had heard what we had heard, we asked the driver to repeat the question, which he did, but at much more of a mumble. We politely asked to be let off, immediately, then proceeded to walk all the way home, a good 5 or 6 miles as the crow flies.

This, we’re embarrassed to say, was not to be the last time we would hitchhike, or drink to excess.

Would You Have Run Away from Home to Become a Beatnik If You Knew That The Man Who Wrote On the Road Lived With His Mother?

We didn’t write that headline, although we wish we had. We lifted it---stole it, we mean---from the May 1970 issue of a short-lived publication called US: The Paperback Magazine, just as we lifted (stole) our 95-cent Signet paperback copy of On the Road (“The riotous odyssey of two American drop-outs by the drop-out who started it all …”) from a defenseless little antique-y bookstore in our hometown whose name in English means Without Concern. We believe that small yet shameful act of thievery, which we may have committed under the mistaken notion that there was something Kerouacian about the gesture, occurred around 1969 or ’70. That was only 12 or 13 years after the original publication of book, but the Signet edition we five-fingered was already its 15th printing.

The printings probably have crossed into triple digits by now, Sept. 5 having marked a full 50 years since On the Road appeared, a suitable occasion or good excuse for the narrowing stratum of Americans still preoccupied with matters literary to chew over the fate of Kerouac’s work. The consensus seems to be that while it’s not a very good novel---some have even relegated it to the critical remainder bin marked “shitty,” starting with Truman Capote’s sneering, contemporaneous dismissal of Kerouac’s style as not writing but “typewriting”---it nonetheless hit America with a massive and sustained impact, leaving a deep and wide cultural crater whose outlines can be clearly discerned today, even through the obscuring haze emanating from Paris Hilton, Norman Hsu and other pure products of America.

We did not participate in this dialogue, mainly because no one asked us to but also because we read On the Road for the first and only time when we were 15 or 16, and even though we absorbed the book straight into our nervous system we haven’t retained much in the way of particulars (we do remember our delight in discovering that Kerouac/Sal Paradise's travels with Neal Cassidy/Dean Moriarty brought them along a path through South Louisiana and East Texas with which we were intimate). The book was a little different than we expected, and we recall detecting a deep sadness and yearning throughout, something our adolescent mind was not built to fully grasp and our as-yet-unkicked-ass could not relate to.

Now we find our self older than Kerouac was when he died, a bloated and sodden memoirist whom Alfred G. Aronowitz visited shortly before his passing and wrote about in the article that appeared below the purloined headline above. It is this late period Kerouac that interests us today: The homebody whose liver gave out as he sat drinking and watching I Dream of Jeanie with his mother, the middle-aged prude who shunned the excesses of the 1960s he helped set in motion, the conservative who defended the war in Vietnam and sat still (very) to be interviewed by William Buckley. Those latter developments were taken as proof of derangement by the then-ascendant cultural left, but Kerouac’s conservatism---and by that we mean we mean the “conservatism” we detect in the recent works of Bob Dylan (a deep respect for American locality, reverence for the past, an abiding love of nature and the outdoors, suspicion of modernism, cosmopolitanism, consumerism, globalism and all other isms)---was always evident in his books, and his person.

We would argue that Kerouac’s significance has been grievously underestimated: Without him, or more accurately without the influence of the poet Gary Snyder on him, the environmental movement wouldn’t have gotten the traction it did in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Without him, there would have been no “rucksack revolution” (and thus no REI catalogs and no Outside magazine). Without him, the White Negro (“At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro …”) would have been still-birthed by Mezz Mezzrow. And without his interest in and ad hoc practice of Buddhism, there would be no suburban moms spouting The Four Noble Truths and folding themselves into asanas at the Hot Body yoga class.

The only dialogue on Kerouac in which we have engaged of late came a couple of years back with a woman who was then instructing us in the practice of yoga. The Yoga Lady was a nice person but apparently resistant to irony: She drove a Lexus SUV with a “Kerry-Edwards” bumpersticker and another that said something like “Why do people move to the suburbs to enjoy nature and then cut down all trees?” One day, in the course of the idle chat that ensued before class, she was moved to say she had recently read On the Road, for some unexplained reason. “How did you like it?” asked another student, a school librarian. The Yoga Lady, who had just turned 40, made a sour face and said she did not like the book at all. “Why?” we asked. “I … um … I dunno … I think it was all the drugs, all the drug-taking.” Yes, there was much drug-taking in the book: Kerouac and his thinly fictionalized characters partaking of Benzedrine (then legal), some pot, some cheap red wine, perhaps a paregoric cigarette or two. William Burroughs shooting junk here and there; the Cassidy character with Burroughs in Houston and the two searching for a friend in "every shooting gallery in town." But all this seemed incidental to us, beside the point, and as usual we were moved to correct the record. Assuming our English professor persona, we began to expound, “Well, you have to understand the context, the times, in which it was written: It was not long after World War II, The Bomb shadowed everything, blah blah …” The Yoga Lady’s face remained blankly impassive, and our final argument sputtered to a close: “Guess you woulda had to have been there,” we shrugged, and shortly thereafter the Yoga Lady was leading us through a round of Sun Salutations.

"In the empty Houston streets at four o'clock in the morning a motorcycle kid suddenly roared through, all bespangled and bedecked with glittering buttons, visor, slick black jacket, a Texas poet of the night, girl gripped on his back like a papoose, hair flying, onward-going ... "

Our Summer of Love (Naked If I Want To)

Nineteen sixty-seven, yes: but for us, the Summer of Golf, the Summer of Lawn Mowing, the Summer of Listening to Albums (phonograph recordings that spun on a turntable and were translated into sound by a needle), the latter and former of which we did, quasi-religiously, in the company of our best friend R-b, the middle activity one we pursued alone, with our dad’s Lawn Boy, 6 or 7 yards at $3 per---a reasonable price, even then, and these were big lawns by today’s standards. We’d take the proceeds, the first money we’d earned, and save it for incidentals when on the links ---hamburgers, French fries, tees, balls---or to buy phonograph recordings at a downtown record shop called Leisure Landing (actual name), where all the new 33 1/3 long players could be had for a steeply discounted $2.79 (or maybe it was $3.79). Then we’d sit in R-b’s bedroom and listen to his little “stereo” with the blue speakers, tuning our heads to messages from a world that seemed faraway and exotic but even then was barreling our way.

At that point, though, our interest in these doings was limited to the music, to whanging the Sunshine of Your Love riff on the guitar or trying to grow our hair out, a little, but primarily to listening to the great albums that were issuing forth that season, at least the ones we could find. To that end we’d glean direction on our consumer purchases from Hit Parader and the ersatz hippie magazines (we think there was one called Eye, and one called Cheetah) that’d we’d flip through while loitering at the newsstand next to Leisure Landing, which reeked of Have-a-Tampas and whose proprietor booked racetrack wagers from behind a high glass counter. Or we’d pick up on something new from the loosely formatted local Top 40 station, where we first heard Sgt. Pepper’s---they played almost every song off it, this in the days before the proliferation of “underground” FM stations. For his part, R-b would buy a record based solely on the psychedelic goofiness of the cover or the outrageousness of the band’s name, which is how we came to be sitting in his room on a rainy Saturday afternoon listening to as much as we could take of an agonizingly bad and pretentious (although we didn’t know what the word meant at the time) album by Ultimate Spinach (for some reason we have a clear visual memory of this long-ago interval of meaninglessness but can no longer recall what our kids sounded like when they were tykes---one of the brutal mysteries of time, we guess).

Ah, but the good stuff: It wasn’t just Sgt. Pepper’s but Traffic’s first album (Paper Sun---a cogent, poppy dissertation on life as illusion), The Doors’ scary first album, the initial Hendrix offering (for several weeks that summer the radio advertised an upcoming concert at the Lakeshore Auditorium in Baton Rouge featuring the Monkees and opening act The Jimi Hendrix Experience), Cream’s Disraeli Gears (this stuff was educational: We consulted the World Book Encyclopedia to determine who or what this Disraeli was), the Mothers of Invention’s Absolutely Free ... The music was better not because we were young and stupid, but because it was better.

One of R-b’s impulse purchases was the first Moby Grape album, which we spun constantly that summer and fall. Most of the above-mentioned music still holds up but this one sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, or in a shack in the woods behind Uncle Jed’s house in 1934. No tangerine trees and marmalade skies, but a careening, amped-up insistency. A love song titled Hey Grandma (“You’re so fine, but your old man is just a boy”) and harmonized questions without answers: “Would let me walk down the street, naked if I want to?” and “Can I buy an amplifier on time?” Not just timeless, but utilitarian.

The Moby Grape album was mildly infamous because one of the band members was photographed on the cover surreptitiously shooting the bird, a middle finger stretched out over a knee, or a washboard, something. The guy was trying to appear casual, like kids still do when flipping one in the class picture, but it was the first thing you noticed when you looked at the album. The record company airbrushed the protruding digit off the cover of future pressings, but R-b got his copy early. It came with a poster of the album cover, enhanced to many times scale, the bird-flipping big as day. R-b put the poster up on the wall, but his dad walked into his room that night and made him take it down.

Our Unsentimental Education

Musta been ’73 or ’74 (we’re pretty sure it was ’73, but we lost our diary) and we were standing on the corner, not in Winslow, Arizona, but on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley near the University of California campus, not searching for soul food and a place to eat but rather an establishment that on a Sunday afternoon would cash an American Express Traveler’s check, one of a dozen or so in denominations of $20 that for security purposes we kept tucked down in our sock inside our left hippie-prole workboot---the sum of a fortune we had amassed washing dishes and tending the “salad bar” (pre-self serve era) at the Bonanza Steakhouse on Johnston Street in the Hub City.

Standing with us was our traveling companion and high school classmate P-t R-----d, a hardcore backpacker and birdwatcher (the latter a pastime we would not come to appreciate for three decades or so) who aspired to study ornithology at Cornell but wound up joining the Coast Guard (he may have gone to Cornell later, though; we lost track). We had been in the “Bay Area,” as we learned it was called, for 2-3 weeks, “crashing” at various locations, including on the ground behind a mansion in the Oakland hills where the drying-out father of a Stanford-attending friend of ours was working as a caretaker, on the ground behind a church in Berkeley, on the ground in a rancid burnt-hippie/speed freak “pad” in ’Frisco and not on the ground one night at the YMCA, where we discovered most of the gentlemen lodgers to be annoyingly aggressive in their practice of homosexuality. And there was a week in there where we rented a room in a fraying but not-bad Victorian boarding house-hotel for a grand total of $20---that was for the entire week (!) ---near the Castro District, although we chose to sleep on the floor and allowed P-t the full comfort of the four-poster bed, perhaps because of our latent fear of joining the throngs of annoyingly aggressive homosexuals amok in that pre-AIDS bacchanal. Or maybe we had developed a taste for sleeping on the ground.

So we were standing there on the corner, two aimless smooth-faced hippie boys from the provinces, when this short but sturdy black guy with an unfashionably close-cropped Afro and serious mien comes striding toward us. A man of purpose, carrying a clipboard and with a pen tucked behind one ear, wearing a camo vest and the sort of thick, black horn-rimmed glasses that today signal “I’m a cheeky would-be urban hipster, although somewhat behind the curve” but back in that day simply mumbled “Socially awkward.”

“Hey, what’s happenin'?” said we, our standard greeting of the time (these days we just say “¡Hola!"). The guy looked official, in some way, so we thought he might be able to help: “Listen, do you know where we could cash a Traveler’s check around here? We’ve been to a couple of places but they want us to buy something.”

“Yeah, just a minute though,” the clipboard-bearer said with buzzsaw penetration. “I’ve got this petition I wish you would sign.”

“What’s it for?” we asked, carrying the conversational ball while P-t grinned from the sidelines.

“We are,” the clipboard-carrier explained, “asking U Cal to offer a class in Marxist criminology.”

It took us a second to formulate a reply, which went something like: “Really? I didn’t know there was something … that there was a school of, um, criminology that was Marxist … ah …”

“There is. Would you sign it, please?”

“Well, we don’t go to school here, actually. In fact, we’re not even from around here.” Trying to be helpful.

Mr. Officious drew his clipboard back and said, “Yes, I could tell. Where are you from? Mississippi? Alabama? Just a couple of overprivileged white boys … I bet you make fun of ‘rednecks,’ right? You don’t even know why they’re called ‘rednecks,’ do you?”

We were young and non-confrontational and much more willing to take people as they came than we would be in just a few years, but that one bit down into us as we flashed on our father, from whom we were then at a chilly remove.

“No, we don’t make fun of rednecks. And we know why their necks are red,” we said, putting into our reply as much fuck-you spin as we could muster.

“Yeah, OK,” said the would-be scholar of Marxist criminology. “You can cash your check down there,” pointing to a Rexall Drug Store down the way with the distinctive orange-and-blue sign you used to see everywhere in American cities. Trying to be helpful.

We went as instructed, but of course they wouldn’t cash the check.

Man, With Cigarette (Still Life)

Our compadre Banjo Jones ushered in the New Year by giving up cigarettes. Instead of subjecting regular readers of his Brazosport News to the days and works of his quest, he’s launched a whole new blog, Stop Smoking with Banjo Jones, which we have added to our list of must-reads and suggest you do, too (if we could be so bold).

This is a subject that interests us--- the subject of Banjo foreswearing the cigs---not just because we’re big fans of The Brazosport News but because we once worked with Banjo at a since-discontinued publication out on the freeway and thus inhaled second-hand smoke from his cigarettes, and he from ours. Kind of a bonding experience.

We were surprised to learn from his blog that Banjo did not start smoking until the relatively advanced age of 27. From what we remember, Banjo was a natural with a cigarette---he wielded the butts with a certain authority and athletic grace, and that, of course, is at least half of what smoking is about (the other half being the health benefits and the sweet nicotine fragrance a smoker exudes). Banjo smoked like he rolled out of the womb with one hanging off of his lip.

Banjo’s new micro-blog naturally got us thinking about one of our favorite subjects: us (and our constituent parts---me, myself and I) and our own heroic struggle to shed the cigateen habit. This was not a subject we had considered for many years, although at one time we did actually devote at least a few of our waking minutes (or seconds, more accurately) to the questions of 1.) Why we smoked and 2.) Why we couldn’t stop.

We actually managed to quit the habit when we were at above-mentioned publication, after several stops and re-starts and a prolonged to habituation to other nicotine products (not recommended) as well as the incessant chewing of tooth picks (yum) and gum. We deployed these crutches, and still may, but basically we gave up smoking the same way we’ve given up other habits, bad and so-so: by erecting a steel wall in our mind against it.

In other words, by sheer exertion of Bush-like willpower (which is good for giving up stuff like booze and cigarettes, not so good for running a pointless, false-premised war in the Middle East). Not that we’re strutting on the flight deck under a "Mission Accomplished" banner.

We don’t remember our last cigarette, but we do remember when we decided to quit, once and for all: We were at a state Democratic convention being held at the then-new George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston (when these events were considered “newsworthy,” which they aren’t), puffing hard and mindlessly tapping away one of those primordial Radio Shack “Trash 80” laptops that we never could seem to get to work right, when we suddenly felt light-headed. We looked up and around the little area that had been cordoned off for the press and for some reason were moved to take inventory.

Of the 21 people we counted in the area, 19 were smoking at that moment, including us. We zeroed in on one of them, a guy who worked at one of the Dallas newspapers (when there were two), a funny and generous presence who died a few years ago of cancer, and for just a moment he appeared to be a cadaverous X-ray as sucked on his cig. It was one of those moments of heightened awareness we’ve very rarely experienced while in a mostly natural state, and the whole Pavlovian nature of the smoking racket was writ large before us.

“Man, we gotta quit this shit as soon as possible---this is weakness,” we said in a memo to our self.*

It took a while but we eventually had our last one (thus far) and can honestly say we haven’t missed it physically, although over the years at several points when things weren’t going our way (which, as with you, is most of the time, right?) we would conjure a mental image of our self sitting in the back yard on cool, crisp evening, drawing hard on one under a full moon. But this was just a self-mocking distraction---tempting our self with the mere notion of tempting our self. It’s easy for us to imagine how smoking would actually make us feel, and it passes. We tend our garden, watch the birds, take a long walk down a well-beaten path, hum the chorus to I Am the Japanese Sandman.

Smoking isn’t genetically encoded, we presume, but we’re pretty sure a person with a certain genetic make-up is more disposed to smoke than others (as well as take up other habits to vent anxiety, relieve boredom, look cool or whatever it is that drives people to reflexive behaviors). A few years ago we were looking at separate pictures of our grandfathers from the late 1940s and spotted something we hadn’t previously noticed: In the photos, informal family shots, each old man appears to be trying to place out of view a smoked-down cigarette lodged between the index and middle fingers.

Our mama smoked for a good 40 years, stopping cold turkey after our daddy, who never smoked, had bypass surgery in the mid-1980s. Sometime after that, she told us that she never inhaled, ever. Drew it up the nose and blew it out. We laughed our ass off but she swore it was true and basically challenged us to disprove it.

One reason we laughed is that although she might not have inhaled we certainly did, on those many nights we’d sit at the kitchen table eating supper or doing homework and she’d be across the way, grading papers and rounding off her days with a steady intake of Salems and the two Falstaffs she allowed herself. We didn’t like it, and sometimes we’d complain and she’d stub one out or blow the smoke away from us, but somehow our discomfort did not work as aversion therapy and we smoked our first one about the same time Eric Burdon did, gradually but inexorably advancing from puke-sick-every-time to teen smoker. Later, drink, employment, women, asshole buddies and just plain assholes all worked to reinforce our reliance on the coffin nails (and we’re incapable of imagining a bar without smoking---it seems against the natural order).

Our mother is an obstinate little woman with an iron will and undertook no crutch---no gum, no patch, no tooth picks, etc.---when she put the habit behind her. But for most of us it’s hard to quit without some substitution, and blogging would seem to be an excellent way to stave off the cravings, especially since blogging and smoking are similarly compulsive behaviors.

As Banjo shows, there’s a rich vein to mine through a smoking/not smoking blog, from the financial considerations---how do people of modest means afford ’em now?---to the vast body of folklore about smoking, such as the valuable advice we received as a young person that lighting up a mentholated cigarette first thing on waking was a guaranteed cure for constipation, which it was and probably still is (we’ve moved on to prunes and Grape Nuts).

Then there’s the exorcism angle. Back in the '70s, maybe the '80s (it all runs together from this vantage), there was the preacher we used to see on TV whose name was Jack Van Impe. In between healing congregants of cancers and tumors Van Impe would turn his powers on less severe afflictions: Some forlorn, broken-down looking sort would stand in front of the preacher and Van Impe would wind up and slap him upside the forehead, knocking him on his ass while hollering, “Out, foul nicotine demon!”

Who are we to say it didn’t work?

* All internal dialogue guaranteed verbatim.