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By chris Date: 2008 Jul 19 Comment on this Work [[2008.07.19.01.31.16412]] |
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Saturday, December 08, 2001: Nederland, Texas Oil is in the air here. You know this immediately, even when you can't smell it (and a lot of the time you can). This place would not be were it not for oil. And that explains much. So today I drove over to the Spindletop museum gift shop to buy some Christmas presents for my parents. All I wanted was some quiet, undisturbed browsing time, but the effusive shop attendent would not leave me alone. She kept pushing big gaudy Texas coffee table books at me. "And do you have any little ones? Might I recommend..." (Everyone has little ones around here. They come with the Chamber of Commerce welcome package...) Anyway, I had to think of something. And fast. "Well," I said, "I thought I'd pick up some things for my parents in New York. We'll be visiting them in a couple of weeks. That's where I'm from, actually." That did it. She quieted down and left me alone. There are times when it's good to be a Yankee in Beaumont, Texas. [later] There is no better lesson in small-town anthropology than walking down the main drag to a Stop-n-Rob a mile away to buy a Diet Big Red and some cheesy little surprises for your girl at 12:30 on a Friday night. It's kind of funny, actually. You see all these young guys - where are they during the rest of the week? - cruising up and down in their monster pickups, stereo shaking the pavement, extra-bright headlights shattering the darkness... (The "music", I might add, always seems to be some questionable rap-metal variant or sleazy brand of Southern-fried hip-hop. Why is it never Bach? Or Shostakovich? Or Charlie Parker? These are questions too deep for me.) Thus do we see all of life's great issues writ large: What is it they're searching for? When they find it, what then? And, tangentially, what woman in her right mind would find such displays of testosterone-overload alluring? I have no answers. I just try to get where I'm going and then make my way back home. Saturday, November 03, 2001 Strange, demonic dreams... Nyquil and Portishead do not mix. First - I believe it was first; it could have been last. I can't be sure - I was pushing myself down one of the halls of my former college in a wheelchair. It was the building with the huge, cavernous lecture halls. And I remember I was drunk with speed, with the sensation of flying through the air. My arms were tired, but that was alright. I arrived at one of the doors. A large crowd was squeezing their way through the doors to one of the lyceums. I recall folding up my wheelchair and carrying it inside. Then suddenly I was with my mother and my sister. A movie was about to start. It was supposed to be a light comedy I'd seen before. I told my mother there was a hilarious scene where Jack Lemmon rolls down the steps in my Grandparents' backyard. It's true, I said. You can see their yard, their car, the way they had their house fixed, the neighborhood - everything, just as it had looked in 1954. I thought about how I'd never be able to walk down those stairs again without thinking of Jack Lemmon. We were enjoying the movie. Then - and I'm not sure, or maybe I don't want to be sure, just how this happened - my sister became my wife. But it wasn't really my wife. She was curled up on the seat the size of a cat. I stroked her black hair and whispered into her ear. Nothing was wrong that I could determine. But the mood of the film was changing. In my dream I began to become aware of a menace. I became conscious of the darkened room in which I lay. I remember saying to my wife: I'm in such a deep sleep now, it's a good thing you have no desire to throw a gasoline-soaked sheet into this room. The projected images on the screen were different now, too - Hiroshima, Dresden, North Vietnam. I knew I had to make myself get up. My mother was now glancing at me strangely. She apparently was still looking at my sister beside me. Before I could really explain it was hours later. I was home with my parents. We were just getting home from some sort of screening. No one was happy. It was dark outside and it was winter. It was cold. (October, 2001) "Somewhere in the world tonight it's still 1979." -Andy Warhol Friday night dispatch from the land of the Damned... Only Zima can make this place tolerable. Zima - or a hell of a lot of Lone Star. From our balcony earlier, my wife and I could see the unholy glow of the Friday night football game. And we could hear it, too - loud enough to make me wonder how those actually in the stands can endure it. But lo, I have come to bring you all Good News, which is that the Nederland Bulldogs have triumphed over the Orange Mustangs (or 'Stangs, as the announcers referred to them). (Orange: another swampy little town about a half-hour to the east.) Something about all this, though, cuts through my cynicism and makes me...happy. As a former - and some would say forever - Catholic, such elaborate ritual never fails to reach me on some level. But this is not good, I'm sure. The Nuremberg and Nazi Youth rallies were rituals too. Oh well. I leave you all now to your own devices. Good night. Sunday, October 14, 2001 Stasis here... First genuinely cool night (for the Gulf, that is - or "Guff", as they say in these parts). Had some wild weather last night. A cold front ran into some tropical moisture and...WHAM. Most impressive were the clouds. They were like smoke. And come to think of it, that's what it may have been. You never know around here when some noxious accidental release from one of the refineries might come wafting by. "They say that when rain falls in a v-shape a tornado is next," said my wife as we sat on our balcony and watched the rain come down in v-shape patterns. Low and whispy clouds flew past. I sat out there and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. We went to sleep. But driving into Beaumont today we saw that a tornado had apparently touched down. What was once an auto repair shop sat crushed along the side of the highway. 80-foot pine trees were snapped and the guardrail was mangled. There had been warnings all day yesterday as well. At lunch I heard that one had been spotted on the ground not far from here. Going back to answering phones was hard as hell - and not because I was scared. I'm not scared. I'm not scared in the least. That's my problem. Thursday, September 27, 2001 Good things: fall nights in Southeast Texas when the humidity has dropped well below eighty-percent...fish strip baskets with white gravy from DQ...living in a place where DQ is actually open in late September...my beautiful funny brilliant wife reading Talk magazine in bed...the way the moon looks floating in a clear cloudless sky over these coastal marshes and prairies...the air for once not smelling like crude oil...the fact that cities and people and places other than our own even exist...the fact that anything exists in the first place...the tiny ancient-looking Apostolic church down the road from here that sits defiantly in the shadow of the local Baptist MegaChurch...the sound of New Orleans jazz at 9:32 on a Thursday night 26 miles from the Louisiana border...the friends and lovers and even enemies in our lives...Tony Bennett singing "The Shadow of Your Smile"...the limestone of the Texas Hill Country...sour green apples...and...the red dust of Utah...(etc.)... Thursday, September 06, 2001 September. 2001. Twenty-two hundred hours. Latest dispatch. For one thing, the mosquitos are back. Makes sense. Daily downpours will bring the little fuckers out. Then there are the dragonflies. They scare me. And nothing scares me. I can hear them flying into the light when I'm out on the balcony smoking. See, they're not normal dragonflies. They're bigger - 5, 6 inches long, at least. They have eyes like cats. Like snakes. All the moisture here does strange things. Black mold is infesting the houses. The chemicals from the refineries are impairing brain functioning. All that matters is God and wide-screen TVs. Some days the mail never shows up. And no one notices when the mail never shows up. Here on the dismal low edge of the high Southwest, I think of opposites, of inversions. I think of the desert. "Here I possessed nothing in the world. I was no more than a mortal strayed between sand and stars, conscious of the single blessing of breathing. And yet I discovered myself filled with dreams." -Antoine de St. Exupery That is all. There is nothing else to say for now. Thursday, August 16, 2001 Tonight I had to drive to the ocean. So I started off - well after dark - on the roughly 30-mile trip, threading my way through the gauntlet of refineries in Port Arthur, and then through Sabine Pass, a little town more lit up by the surrounding oil platforms than anything actually in the town, before ending up at Sea Rim State Park. Where the highway ends. Literally. US 87 beyond Sea Rim is blocked off, having been too severely damaged by storms in the past. At one time a person could drive from Sabine Pass all the way to Galveston. It was dark at Sea Rim. Very dark. I could see the stars - and that's not always the case in this part of Texas. Houston is virtually a city of perpetual day. But there the stars were... Off to the west on the tabletop-flat horizon was the glow of Beaumont. To the east was Port Arthur. But they seemed insignificant amid the vast blackness of salt marsh and bayou and prairie and thicket. Development proceeds, but it can only go so far in a place like this. The Golden Triangle is saved by its mud... There was also the lightning. It was more or less clear on the beach, but off to the north the clouds were shot through with impressive displays of light. No rain was falling, through - pure electricity at work up there. The breeze blew strong off the water. I couldn't stay long. The place, beautiful as it was, creeped me out. Looking out in the black sea of grass lining the beach, I thought of all the alligators that I knew damn well were out there. Somewhere. Wednesday, August 15, 2001 (music notes) Gustav Mahler. I highly recommend his symphonies - vast, grotesque, sprawling museums of horror and exultation - to anyone seeking escape. They are unmatched. When I was 20, Mozart was my favorite composer. When I was 25 it was Beethoven. Now that I'm nearing 30 and have seen a few things, I find incredible peace in this man's creations. He wanted to house whole worlds in his music, and that is exactly what he did. As one of Freud's patients in late-20th Century Vienna, he was famously neurotic - and superstitious. To wit: For whatever reasons, most composers have died before finishing their tenth symphonies. Mahler was concerned about this - and for good reason, too; he'd already predicted his demise in music before - so he titled what was really his tenth symphony "Song of the Earth" and passed it off as a song-cycle of sorts. Once this was done and he was convinced he was safe, he began work on his Tenth Symphony - and died. So...for sheer ebullience I recommend Mozart; for blind rage, Beethoven; but for escape there are none better than Mahler. Dewar's is good, too, but that's cheating. Monday, August 06, 2001 Anyway, my exploration of Southeast Texas (my "home" for the time being) continues. I drove out to Liberty this weekend, one of the oldest Anglo settlements in Texas. Sam Houston practiced law there at one time; three brothers from the area fought and died at the Alamo. It was about an hour away, and the drive out there - through little one-stoplight towns like Nome and China - was very interesting, very therapeutic. I never tire of rural Texas, be it in the East, Central, or Western part of the state. It seems, especially in this, the most densely-populated, part of the state, that every ten miles or so down the road you can count on another little town with its water tower, twenty-five Baptist churches, and Sonic. If I were an archeologist, I would denote the peoples living in Central and Eastern Texas the "Sonic Culture"... Tejas my Tejas! But seriously, the drive was a fascinating one for a lover of diverse landscapes. Visible just to the north of the road - a rather narrow two-lane highway - was the imposing green bulk of the Big Thicket. South and west of me for as far as I could see was nothing but prairie punctuated here and there by stands of live oak and other hardwoods far off in the distance. This was prime rice acreage, but mostly - it seemed to me - rangeland. Cow country. Liberty was nothing special. When driving Texas backroads, getting there is 90% of the fun. It had better be, or the traveller is doomed to near-certain disappointment. The museum and cultural center that I had read about wasn't where it was supposed to be ("Oh, that moved," said the woman I asked about it in town, "it's, uh, thataways now" - she motioned vaguely to the north - "a bunch of miles up the road you get .. you take, uh, a right and then a left.") But I stayed a while, visited some old buildings, including a plantation that looked like it belonged several hundred miles to the east in Louisiana. I asked the clerk in the Stop-n-Drive if he sold any postcards. "Which kind of postcard?" He asked, thoroughly confused. I told him I was looking for the paper kind that you mailed. "If we have any" - he pointed to the back of the store - "they'd be back there somewhere." I never did find any. I bought a package of Zingers and left. Incongruities abound in the Texas outback - which is why I love it. If I were the arrogant Yankee that I sometimes come off as, I'd still be back in New York. Before getting out of Dodge I drove to the edge of a bluff overlooking the Trinity River and snapped a quick picture. I wasn't that far from home, but this river looked different than the Neches. Its red banks were sharply eroded, presaging the canyons that can be found in other river systems farther to the West. But I wouldn't visit them that day. Another drive, another trek. Time to leave. Driving back took much longer than it did to get there. I was delayed considerably by a side-trip that I took on a farm-to-market road somewhere between Liberty and Nome. The road stretched out for seemingly fifty miles before me - nothing but tallgrass undulating in the breeze, a distant farmhouse or two, and the straight line of telephone poles. I thought of Glen Campbell and his song... How strange it is that the heart of the Heartland - the American Midwest - should reach down this far into Texas. But there it was. I turned off that road after about half a mile onto a dirt track - it seemed safe enough, no high center, no mud - and then (stupidly, in retrospect) off into the tallgrass. Why? To check out a lone pickup truck - its white body bleached even whiter by the pitiless Texas sun and rusted by the monsoon-like rains - propped up on cinder blocks surrounded by the prairie grasses. Its four tires - rims and all - were gone. The hood was opened, as was the driver's side door. The seat was ripped, the sun visor down. I wondered who left it there and why. Considering that this was Texas, and most certainly private land, it occurred to me that this was probably someone's back yard. Maybe it belonged to a grizzled, hard-bitten rancher named Red in that little house way in the distance. I scanned the horizon for rising clouds of dust, approaching vehicles. Nothing. Silence. But the abandoned truck wasn't giving up any of its secrets, nor would the sea of grass I had set myself adrift in. The prairie and plains, like the desert, reveal themselves slowly, over lifetimes, in long silences. Quick and easy answers are for the city. And the city was waiting. Tuesday, August 14, 2001 Fear and Loathing In Married Life I think she loves me. I do. I want to believe in all that sappy shit. Really. I just need to sit outside before sleep, out under the bright Texas stars, and listen to the swamp sounds and watch the small planes circle over the nearby airstrip. I need to breathe deep in the humid air, feel the cool concrete beneath my bare feet, and just watch... For a while. Tiny dots of light far above the lobolly pines grow larger. Some of these planes are coming in to land, into the wind that blows balmy and steady off the Gulf, and I hear as they buzz alarmingly low over the house. Some have just taken off, and I wonder where they're headed. Dallas? San Antonio? Midland? I need to be up there with that solitary pilot - too tired to talk and too bothered by something to stop thinking - as they contemplate the black space of this state from several thousand feet. I need to be up there with them as they traverse the distance from these bayous and sticky, godforsaken sloughs to places that are high and dry and infected with a different kind of loneliness. Do they notice how the pines and live oaks and prairies turn into limestone hills studded with cedar, then near-barren flats of mesquite and cactus and agave, then seemingly nothing? Where there is nothing, there is nothing to cause you pain. No danger of the real being indistinguishable from the unreal. But there's always danger here. Danger follows the living. And we are still living, still here, somewhere near the middle of this life. Life is pain, say the Buddhists. They're right (about some things). And then there's art. All art is autobiography. All art is fiction. Friday, July 20, 2001 Clouds Mountains. All my life I've lived in their shadow. Whether it was growing up in New York State's Hudson River Valley, attending college on the fringes of the Catskills, childhood adventures in the Adirondacks, or working for brief period in New England - mountains have been a constant, always lurking there on one or more horizons. In winter they were snow-covered; in summer they were impossibly green. But they were always there. To those who live in such places - unless they happen to be of the sort who never verture outside to do anything (and they exist everywhere) - the hills are places of renewal, places of refuge. "We need to go up in the mountains," my Father would say to me often when things were strained between us, when communication had broken down, as though it would fix everything. And maybe it would have, too. But I'm no longer there. I'm in another world now, on the muggy, boggy, buggy flatlands of Southeast Texas. The swampy prairie. Except for the mosquitos, this must have been a nice place once - a sea of tallgrass extending all the way to the real sea, the Gulf of Mexico (or, as people around here say, the "Guff"). Indeed, it must have had a certain charm - before, that is, becoming a sacrifice area for the petroleum industry. Now, lurid fires burn just atop the scrub forests, which don't hide the many refineries nearly well enough. At night they light up the skies like vast, unholy cities with their yellow glow. In fact, when I first saw this part of the state, driving in well after dark, for a moment I thought they were cities. "Who knew Port Arthur had such an impressive skyline?" I commented to my wife. She corrected me. (She's the smart one in the family.) Port Arthur - along with Orange and Beaumont - are the three cities that comprise what is still called the "Golden Triangle". Although just what is golden about it my wife and I have spent much time trying to figure out. And the air smells funny, too (that's funny, as in bad - NOT "like money", as the locals at the Leo's Exxon station say). But it's not all that way. There are the clouds. Clouds are the closest thing we have down here to mountains. I have never seen such clouds in my life. They roll in off the Gulf, giving us our subtropical climate, and mass like huge monuments of white quartz. They remind me of looking up into the Southern Rockies from the main street of Telluride, Colorado. In places like that - Telluride's box canyon - the mountains surround, envelope you. So it is here with the clouds. They are some consolation. In New York I considered myself an exile. I longed for Western spaces and Western vistas, for distance. But in Texas I am an exile too. Any natural-born pantheist would be. I'm nothing special. The clouds aren't enough. Neither are the late-day thunderstorms - spectacular though they are - that break almost daily over the Big Thicket where it reaches down into the bayous and pastures around Beaumont. The South will have to go on without me. "This world is not my home," sings the congregation in the Baptist church. True, true... I know what they mean - though it's something altogether different from what they're thinking. What comes to mind for me are mountains, clouds, deserts... At the end of the day they're all we really have. And I wouldn't have it any other way. That is my inheritance. Thursday, March 29, 2001 Life is becoming increasingly surreal. I now spend my days working at the E-Z Mart, feeling like I'm trapped in a Kevin Smith movie, thinking, What in the HELL did I go to college for? The one good thing is this: I now know that journalism is what I want to do. Good. Fine. But until then, M---- and I have needs. And I'll be damned if I'm going to be high-minded but broke. So I ring up LOTTO tickets and 40s. And the hours fly past, the way hours should. J--, my manager: "H---- is doing that all wrong. But she's a Yankee from Missouri." Me: "I'm from New York. What does that make me?" J--: "A damn Yankee." |