Texas: Part I

[mallorys_camera]

Texans are very friendly. On the plane I sat next to two sturdy, red-haired teenagers, brother and sister. They whispered together in covert tones through take-off and stabilization at thirty-three thousand feet, then the girl leaned over and inquired, "Is this your first time in Texas?"

In point of fact, it was not. George Peterkin, the scion of the tugboat dynasty, had taken me to Houston many, many years ago. I remember very little of the adventure except the Picassos and Matisses in his grandmother’s River Oaks mansion, the relative ease with which his sister Julie scored legal scripts for Dexedrine and making love with George one night under dripping wet sheets against the amazing, enervating heat – this was before air conditioning had become quite as ubiquitous as it is today.

I did not share these reminiscences with the twins. "Yes, it is," I told them.

"Where do you live?"

"California."

"Californians don’t like Texans much, do they?" said the girl.

"I think we’re a little afraid of you," I said.

"We’re coming home from camp in Colorado."

"A Christian camp," said the boy. "Rock climbing and mountain-biking are character-building for Christians."

For the next seven hundred and fifty miles we discussed the moral lessons lurking behind downhill acceleration. The twins did not do video games or rock ‘n’ roll. Not even Christian rock ‘n’ roll. It took me a while to realize I was being evangelized.

Once on the ground and outside the baggage terminal, it was monstrously, staggeringly hot. I wondered how civilizations could flourish in heat like this – serious civilizations with Chevron stations and Denny’s franchises, twinkling neon just visible from where I stood beyond the far perimeter of the airport. No signage ordinances here. The sweat poured off me. Hot and humid. I realized suddenly we were very near the Gulf of Mexico.

The place where I was standing was the rendezvous destination for numerous buses, vans and jitneys. I was waiting for a bus that would cart me thirty-five miles away to the Astrodome. Various drivers stuck their heads out the windows to accost me: "Where you going?"

"The Holiday Inn at Reliant Park," I’d tell them, searching their eyes desperately for any spark of recognition.

"Is a long way. You want to wait for the bus. The bus cost twenty dollar. You take the taxi, that cost you fifty dollar. But maybe the bus stop by now. It late."

Indeed the long twilight was just about over. I was really exhausted, it’s amazing how much doing nothing except fighting phlebitis and reading old copies of People Magazine for twelve hours takes out of you. I’d brought along a biography of Pamela Digby Harriman and scored a copy of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook at the Phoenix airport, but my concentration wasn’t up to the challenge. I remembered the day I sat next to Elizabeth, Jeannie’s mother, in the car and watched her read the same paragraph of an Anita Shreve novel over and over again, each time with apparent pleasure. Alzheimer’s had shrunk her concentration span to a window of 30 seconds. I wondered then: What happens when that window shrinks to a single second, when all you have to process are the primal emotions of the here-and-now?

A limo driver approached me. Asked for a light. "My ride cancelled. I take you where you’re going."

"How much?" I asked.

"Sixty dollar."

Somehow the success of my fledgling business enterprise hinged upon my ability to wait out the bus, to pay only the twenty dollars that was the fair price in a competitive market. "If it doesn’t come in twenty minutes," I told him. It was very dark and I felt as though I was close to fainting.

The bus finally came.

A ride along endless, traffic-choked freeways but there was air-conditioning. "The air," the driver called it: "Is that enough air?"

This place is not so very different from that place, I thought looking at the billboards and businesses that dogged the sides of the road – Motel 6’s, Texaco’s, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola. The only way you would know that it’s different is if you had to spend a lot of time outside. Which most people figure out ways to avoid doing.

I arrived at the Holiday Inn at Reliant Park five minutes after the close of room service. I was hungry. In fact, I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything all day. So I went inside the motel restaurant which most incongruously was done up in a Hollywood motif, a painted mural with Elvis and James Dean and Marilyn Monroe disporting in a kind of cafeteria-style afterlife. I was the only customer and the night manager fawned all over me. "For you, we are open!" he cried. "You are beautiful woman – your hair, I love. Are you married? Your husband is a lucky man."

I felt like telling him: you don’t have to work quite that hard, I’m always a big tipper irrespective of blandishment or other reminders of differences in class circumstances. But I figured that would embarrass him.

He sat down at my table, kept me company as I choked down a plateful of indifferently breaded and fried shrimp, then brought me my bill.

"Ah! Room 1023," he said. "You have great view from 1023. Where are you from?"

"California."

"They don’t like Texas in California."

Went back to my room. The air conditioner only had two settings, Antarctica and Greenland. When I turned it off, we were back to a hundred degrees in the swamp so I kept the air going, threw on a sweater and crawled under three blankets into the bed.

Precisely at ten o’clock, Ben called. "I’m thinking of getting a new tattoo," he told me. "A chili pepper! In honor of the store. For good luck."

"A new tattoo," I said. "Great."

"So how is it there?"

"It’s a place," I said. "Texans are very friendly."

"They are," he agreed.

"But they’re really defensive about Texas," I said. "They seem to expect that nobody else likes Texas."

"That’s because Texas is too big, too weird and the people there have too much power. Don’t forget: George Bush comes from Texas."

"I read that some place," I said.

In the middle of the night I woke up with a panic attack. Daddy/Daughter night on the tube. On CNN, the daughters of Saddam Hussein were explaining what a great Pop Saddam Hussein had always been, while on TNT Sissy Spacek reprised her Oscar-winning role as The Coal Miner’s Daugher between infomercials for a cleaning reagent infused with the miraculous powers of orange oil. I walked over to my window to check out the heralded view. There was the once-proud Astrodome, besides it a billboard: Another Hometown Hero. What the hell did that mean? I thought for one cranky second. Then I let it go. Ebullience and positivism: those are my new credos. Friendliness and slack toward all, always excepting myself. By the time Loretta Lynn met up with Patsy Cline, I was ready to fall back to sleep.

Comments

[idylld.livejournal.com]

This is great stuff. What happened next?