OLD AUSTIN

          

My hormones have been running pretty high these last couple of years. My tolerance for bullshit is low. Call a bitch a bitch—that's my motto now, let the chips fall where they fucking may. It just hurts so bad because this town was, at one time, so cool. Good herb, fine pussy, low rents and all, or comparatively low compared to now that everyone has moved here. The growth is mind-boggling even if the selection of women has improved from very good to excellent. Even on what may otherwise be a bad day in River City you can see some really fine hos. 

        Swimming at Barton Springs, drinking at Scholz’s, sitting on the Capitol lawn in the twilight of a spring evening, doobie in my hand, that was the old Austin to me. State troopers were too intimidated to say anything, they didn't want to seem like hicks. Today you try that shit on the Capitol grounds and you may end up dead. 

        For me personally the memory of a time is actually mostly audio. The de rigueur L.P. for my early years in the World Capital of Live Music was Rumors, you just couldn’t get Fleetwood Mac out of your head, even today "Rhiannon" or "Landslide" playing somewhere can still make me stop and just listen. Some of my memories of the old town are visual but most of those came after getting high and technically don't count because tripping is not real. Just call me Old School. Those were still some of the best times of my life. 

Saw only four live acts, during almost exactly 50 years, unless you also count the house band at the Chili Parlour, this should give you an idea of what the music was like: Dough Sahm playing “96 Tears” on the Drag, at The Hole in the Wall, relatively recently which to me now means, like, in the last quarter-century, you know?

Springsteen with Clarence Clemons, and the Beach Boys, both at the Super Drum on campus, back in the prior day, like mid-80s. Junior Walker maybe five years before that, singing "Shotgun" at Antone’s, a long long time ago in a different town. Later, in Africa on my pilgrimage to see the motherland, just for the record the music was "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty. The last few years? Also British music, it’s Simply Red, "Holding Back the Years." Looking back now at whatever this is, memoir or confession, that was the “old Austin,” back in the day. The town just isn't the same anymore. Let me ask you a question, this may seem incongruous: 

        You ever ride the Number 1? 

If you want to get a quick and dirty view of what River City has become you just need to take the Number 1 Bus. The route starts somewhere far south in, like, almost San Antonio? Comes up Congress Avenue past new and trendy shops, restaurants, saloons. Crosses the river, past the Texas Capitol, past the Governor’s Mansion, past the Travis County Courthouse, past the campus, then past the State Hospital—and rolls by the headquarters of the Texas Rangers. Look for a building with antennae like a crawling and repugnant bug. 

The #1 covers many of the social services stops in town, then and now, if you're unemployed or “at risk” or just out of your fucking mind which has always been a significant demographic in ATX. The head-jobs and druggies used to mostly come out at night but my most formative experience in Austin, in almost a half-century living here, actually took place during the day and south of the river where there’s usually less chance of mischief. 

It was a Saturday, late morning, coming back on foot from Big Stacy Pool on the edge of Travis Heights? So, like, you walk up the hill from the pool to Congress Avenue and there’s this little park on the corner, across from what was a X-rated theater, now a tech start-up, remember what it was like back in the day? 

On the opposite side of the street from that nursing home, you know the location, you could almost smell the pee from inside when you walked by out on the sidewalk? So, like, homeless have always used the park as a place to hang out during the day, especially when it’s hot, which is like most of the year. Cops are usually not too far away waiting for a chance to bust some balls or break some heads. If memory serves me this was like right around where that Biblebelt East Texas white boy State Senator, Nixon was his name, same party but no relation to the former president, got busted as a John back in the day. Now you remember? 

He picked up what he thought was a working girl but she was actually carrying a badge in her panties. That may have been before your time if, like so many, you’re new to River City. 

So, like, a lot of hookers work or worked the South Congress area after the Eastside became just another part of Hipsterland. That was kind of the way things were beginning to roll even in Old Austin, back in the day. So, like, this was the turn of the century, turn of the millennium, 2000, or just before, and on the bus my preference is always to sit up front, like, to watch the road?

 Sometimes chat with the driver, like, if he’s got anything to say? 

Some of the drivers just sit there, it’s all they can do to handle downtown traffic, dodging all the new construction, but others got a decent rap. You have to talk to the motherfucker to find out if he’s got game, there's no other way. That was part of small town Austin life, while it would never have occurred to me to talk to the driver on a bus, for example, on a visit to in Houston. Austin bus drivers can get a rap going if they want to, this is a pretty high-brow town. Anyway sitting up front with me behind the driver that day was this couple, looked like small town folks, Ma and Pa Peckerwood from Giddings or Milam or some East Texas shithole like Bastrop County before Elon Musk arrived and the City of Bastrop got fern bars and French restaurants, to replace the feed stores and Western wear shops. Not to sound all ignorant or bigoted or anything.

So, like, there were a couple of black guys in the small park on South Congress Avenue, up the hill from Big Stacy Pool, two niggers just chillin', minding their own black business which the U.S. Constitution says a man has a right to do? Maybe getting high too which is cool, each to his own herb, indulge or not, that's supposed to be the mantra of this town. At least if you white. So, like, the bus was stopped at that corner next to the park, waiting for a green light. 

The old guy from Bastrop looks out the window at the two brothers in the park and he says to his old lady, straight up like they're still in Bumfuck, East Texas, or wherever, not like he’s in the New Trendyville, on the Third Coast where he actually is. 

“There’s two kinds of coon," he says. His wife looks at him expectantly. "Them that walk on four legs and”— Bubba crooks a finger toward the window, indicating the two brothers chilling in the park—“them that walk on two.”

 His wife chuckles. He slaps his thigh. Has a good laugh and smiles big. With both teeth. And then he looks over at me just sitting down on the other side of the bus aisle but pretty close and he realizes that he spoke loud enough for one of the ones that walk on two legs to hear. And he stops smiling. So, like, if this was Chicago or even L.A. the motherfucker would have been dead right there, boom boom boom, at least two in the chest, nine mil or magnum, no explanation needed. But this was happening in the old Austin where we always tried to be civilized, where we tried to be understanding even of rednecks—our challenged brothers and sisters from Bastrop and beyond. 

And what he said didn’t really bother me, you know? 

        Because he was up front about it. You knew what you were dealing with until relatively recently, because you knew what prejudice looked like, like Billy Bob, like this motherfucker here sitting at the front of the bus with his old lady. He looked like white trash, or just plain trash irrespective of color. Nowadays, the dentition is better but the sentiments can be the same. Hipsters have replaced hillbillies. 

They just don’t say shit in the seat next to you, at least not without looking around first, they may not ride the bus as much as you might think either. They’re on bicycles or driving hybrids. That was actually one of the last times that this changing River City felt “real” to me, to tell the truth, that day on the bus with Ma and Pa from Milam County. It wasn’t the last day or anything, wasn’t the beginning of the end like Winston Churchill talked about but it was the end of the beginning like the great man said too. 

For me in the beginning, which meant arriving when the Democrats had just moved out of the Texas Governor’s Mansion for the first time in over a century and a kind of gloom was hanging over this allegedly liberal town. The D's were dead men walking in Texas but didn't know it yet. To set the scene.

        My first crib in Austin was on the third floor of the Alamo Hotel between the not-yet-extant Elephant Room, which would one day officially become my bar, and the original location of Whole Foods, which hadn’t yet been built. Not because the two sites, Whole Foods and the Elephant Room are related somehow but because they were my primary reference points downtown for years, basically the years when W was in office. The Elephant Room would become my personal bar like the Cedar Door was my professional bar back in the day, as my principal place to sit down for serious drinking. Long before the origins of Whole Foods, actually, as a funky little organic grocery store, just down the street. Back in the day only hippies and nature freaks and the wealthy shopped at W.F., which had a selection the size of a convenience store and had not yet become a nationwide symbol of conspicuous consumption. To set the scene geographically every significant location in my life was within a 30-minute walk from the State Capitol. 

        The Alamo was a residence hotel full of pensioners and transient musicians and people who couldn’t put together first and last month’s rent for a real apartment—people like me. The Alamo had a barbershop and restaurant on the first floor but you probably didn’t want to get your hair cut there and you definitely didn’t want to eat the food.

        My room had a four-poster bed, half-bathroom, hot plate and windows that opened out over Guadalupe at Sixth Street. Who could ask for anything more? The Alamo Hotel was a few blocks from the back door of the Governor's Mansion, which was about to be occupied by a family of Republicans from Dallas named Clements, who was an oil guy and ex-Reagan Administration defense guy. Anyway for a year the Alamo was my home and the hotel still has a special place in my heart, not to sound overly sentimental, because my first and most enduring drug addiction was nurtured there, in that tiny little room on the 3rd floor. The hotel’s most famous guest, living downstairs from me, was Sam Houston Johnson, former President Johnson’s little brother. No lie—it was super-cool living that close to Texas Royalty! Sam Houston Johnson had lived at The Alamo for years if not decades before me. We met once in the hotel elevator and he looked just like any old scary white man to me.

        This particular member of the Johnson family was already in his sixties at the time, some ancient age like that, like me now btw, and was alleged to be involved in a wide variety of improprieties and even illegal shit and was not a favorite with the rest of the Dead President’s family, hence his chosen location, the Alamo Hotel. A kind of exile, sure, but still on the LBJ Ranch so to speak.

        So, like, he dies one day—Sam Houston Johnson we’re talking about because the great Lyndon Baines Johnson had already gone to the last round-up, like, five years before my arrival in River City. To set the scene chronologically. Hearing one day of Sam Houston’s demise my first instinct was to run home and check out his room and see if he left behind anything interesting. But the door was locked and the room had probably already been cleaned out by the U.S. Secret Service or whoever takes care of those matters.

        Generally-speaking my first impression was that Austin was fucked up but it was a largely holistic experience. My metrics: Weed was cheap. As an adult, no longer just smoking other people's shit, bought my very first bag, a full oz, for $35 dollars in 1979. It was called “Bastrop Special,” which was marginally better than homegrown although it most likely came from Mexico like every other smoke you bought locally. This weed had a lot of stems and seeds that you had to remove first, not to sound underprivileged compared to today's pothead. And pussy in ATX was free or reasonably-priced. 

Just like a bag of weed, $35 for a “half and half,” a vice cop told me, that is a suck and a fuck, in East Austin, along 11th Street, but at that time maybe not yet on South Congress Avenue where Senator Nixon got busted later. Overall, a black man in River City, if he had the right rap, could still run his game with enough intimidation and white guilt to get away with shit seven times out of ten. Any of the other three-out-of-ten chances a cop might shoot you but call me an optimist, seven out of ten was good enough. That was the old Austin too, it was kind of beautiful back in the day, but RIP, motherfucker, because that way of life is dead and buried now. 

If you asked me to put a date on when the world started changing for the worse that would be kind of hard to say but it was an era—a political era, a "social climate” you might call it, that coincided with a new family moving into town. Basically when the Bushes were living in the Governor's Mansion, yeah. 

        At first it was still go-with-the-flow even after they hit town. The family was kind of cool, especially the twins, even if they were Republicans. Weekends you could walk by and see the parties on the grounds of the Mansion, the back fencing didn't include barbed wire yet, and machine guns, you didn't feel like you do now that snipers are tracking your movements, waiting for a step too close. When the prior resident Ann Richards lived in that house and you passed by on the back sidewalk at night you could swear that you heard women's laughter and you probably did. 

At Governor Bush’s parties, though, during those late summer afternoons, the women wearing sun hats and holding icy drinks—even if W himself was on the wagon, which he was, born again and all that. It turned out he only drank blood. 

Sometimes, also in the late afternoon, if you visited Central Library down the street from the Mansion which was a place to hang out if you were on foot, and needed to cool down, you might see the Bush twins allegedly studying upstairs on the third floor. The Bush girls were old Austin, too, first LBJ’s daughters and then Jenna and Barbara, they were all somehow cool but their fathers were not. 

Anyway if it was a weekday just before the millennium you could stand on Congress Avenue and look up at the front of the State Capitol and if it was anytime, say, after 10 a.m. but before four in the afternoon there was a silver Continental parked out front like the owner was home, W's car. He was in. If he was already running for president, or so it is said, but not having seen this myself? Are you interested in a little political gossip that is a sure thing?

You would see W walking south on Congress Avenue, towards the river, headed in the direction of the Elephant Room actually, but not for the booze. But because his campaign headquarters for president was in the building next door to the club. Next door to the club that was my bar, actually, not that there’s anything wrong with that, the old Austin was a small town in every since of the word.

If it was early in the campaign before the Secret Service was all over him he might be walking alone, or so it seemed, because there was almost certainly a plainclothes guy in a car and on foot. If you watched the future President of the United States go into his campaign office and you kept watching the door, or so it is said? This is a great anecdote even if it's not true—but it is true. A few minutes later you might have seen a less familiar figure follow W into the building. Michael Dell. 

        Yeah, that Michael Dell, the computer guy. 

He was an early backer of W’s, a principal money guy, so they say or said and that's true too. Today all you'd need to do is look at the police surveillance tape to know about political hookups downtown, with the Colorado River as a backdrop. There are more cameras covering the Capitol District than in all of Hollywood. That is another change this black man is not entirely comfortable with, the New Austin, but it’s progress, no? Point is that you knew shit in River City, even important shit, without having to work at it, back in the day. The lazy man’s way to be informed: You just had to be in ATX. At the time you were still seeing people downtown or you knew people who were seeing people downtown. 

My boss came into the office one day during those years, the Bush years as governor, and said, like, he just saw former Governor White at a wine store on West 6th Street, a few blocks away from our office. Which blew my boss’s mind. 

“Mark White buys bad wine just like me!” or words to that effect. That's what my boss said. A small town, yeah. Whole Foods, a few blocks down from the wine store, was pretty much the center of my social existence at the time—no longer hanging out at my dealer’s apartment up near the Drag, which had been Ground Zero for me back in the day, not the Central Library anymore either, management didn't like too many Negroes at the main location. Suddenly my principal hang-out was W.F. 

        To set the scene.

Not the current Whole Foods, not the present mothership but the prior mothership, next to Book People, just across Sixth Street from the current locale. So, like, Whole Foods had these awesome muffins, outrageously over-priced like everything else on the aisles, and like only one good deal, one reasonably-priced item in the whole fucking store. Water. You could buy cold mineral water allegedly from Italy in a big green glass bottle for like one dollar and carry it around in your backpack and survive in downtown River City during summer when even an African-American warrior whose ancestors ran barefoot on the savannah, hunting alongside Simba the lion—and whose ancestors also worked in East Texas cotton fields, hoeing a tough row—starts to sweat. 

        You feel me? Personally, it was never my plan to shoplift at Whole Foods, back in the day. Even in the Old Austin where racist privilege still existed, and was so very hurtful to the Black Man. Not that the thought didn't occur to me to rip off the store, as a kind of revolutionary justice. Except W.F. has always seemed like a risky environment for a Negro, not worth it, not for a fucking aubergine or organic beet. 

        Done a lot of grazing thru the years, sure. 

One used to be able to eat one’s way from one end of the store to the other but that’s just human nature, right, not a crime? Grazing makes up for the high prices on days you actually make a purchase at W.F., because it’s all such an outrageous rip-off? Stop me if you've heard that rationalization before. The state trooper working the Whole Foods front door one afternoon, his instincts about me back in the day were right on but his luck was bad because there was a receipt in my pocket. Maybe not my receipt but a receipt nonetheless and it’s not like he was going to go item by item through my bag to be sure. At least the state troopers are usually polite even if they are profiling which this one was, he was a Hispanic dude which gave him points in my view, like, me sharing his pain as member of a minority group. Suffice it to say he got me on a good day. My medication was working. 

        He didn't really stop me but he was about to, so my preemptive move was to approach him first, save the pig the trouble. He didn’t draw his gun or pull out the cuffs or anything if that’s what you’re wondering. That’s not where this is going, that's not my memory of the old Austin in this case. 

        This Latino cop was cooler about his suspicions which the state pigs usually are, they're really polite, you know? But before the pig signals me to stop, which he didn’t really do, he’s looking at my bag of goodies—but doing it in a discreet way because this was an expensive store where wealthy white people came to shop and security didn’t want to make a big scene or put a wealthy white liberal off enjoying his or her foie gras or Perrier by clubbing a nigger to the ground during store hours. Not while customers are still enjoying the shopping experience. 

So, like, you know, after his professional curiosity had been satisfied we got to talking and somehow the conversation turned to W who by then was President Bush and it turned out this state police porker wasn’t an ordinary trooper, not Highway Patrol, or a mere driver’s license examiner. He was Capitol Police, working store security as an extra gig. We got to chatting, yeah. Austin was still a small town and people were not too busy to talk, not like now with all these greedhead techdogs who never have time for human bonding. 

This Latino guy said that on Election Day 2000 he was actually on duty at the Governor’s Mansion and W was home. Yeah, that's what he said. And that's where it got interesting. So, like, W came out out of the house early that morning, onto the front lawn, in his robe and slippers or whatever, to collect his morning newspaper, trying to act like an ordinary guy in Austin, Texas, in case the media was watching which they were. 

There were news vans and reporters already camped out, on West 11th Street, as close as they could get to the Mansion. So, like, my question to this state trooper working the W.F. front door was, like, stop right there. Stop right there. 

        Stop! 

This is completely professional curiosity on my part: what newspaper? What newspaper did W subscribe to? And the trooper said W actually subscribed to two newspapers that were delivered every morning to the front door of the Mansion, the Wall Street Journal and the Houston Chronicle. So, like, not the Austin American-Statesman which meant Bush was actually smarter than he looked. 

That’s a joke, actually. 

The trooper continued, we’re still standing in the sliding doorway at Whole Foods, just far enough inside not to trigger the electronic sensor. It's cool inside, he’s still checking out the people leaving, discreetly, but no niggers or Mexicans coming or going and therefore no one with probable cause to stop, right, isn’t that how the Texas criminal justice system works? He continued with his rap. 

And he said him and the other officer on duty that morning, on the lawn of the Governor’s Mansion, said to W, that day, that morning, Election Day 2000, Y2K, the Year of the Millennium in the World Capitol of Live Music: 

        “Hey Governor, how’s it going?” 

        And W, who was always nice to the help, pretty cool one-on-one—so people in Austin said—rolled his eyes and smiled what must have been his good-old-boy aw-shucks peckerwood smile and replied, half-joking, “It’s going to be one of those days,” which it was. It was actually "one of those days" for like the next month or so until the Supreme Court ruled that those votes in Florida didn't count. 

Or, like, for the next few years, actually. 

        Through Hurricane Katrina, certainly, or until the waterline dropped. Until the surge started working in Fallujah too, that would just be an uneducated guess. And that, like, fit with all the available hearsay in ATX. 

        Never saw the big guy in person during those six years he was a resident but everybody told me, both D’s and R’s, that Governor Bush was very charming personally, when they went to his office in the Capitol, or the Mansion, or wherever, very personable one-on-one. They also said he was always the smartest guy in the room, at least in Austin, which seems doubtful now in light of later events in D.C. and abroad, like in Baghdad. But that’s what people said who met him when he was governor. The smartest guy in the room, no shit. 

And this one chick, a hot little Chilean “abnormal psychologist” specialist-type chick who wanted my bone, frankly, not that it’s important here—this is a true story. Like 100%. 

She asked me once about W in a hostel somewhere during a prelude to a hookup, and knowing that Austin is my home, what is he really like, she wanted to know. 

Who? 

“President Bush,” she said, and my response was he’s very personable one-on-one, because that's what everybody told me in River City. She looked at me and answered, completely serious, this is absolutely true, “They said the same thing about Adolf Hitler.” After that—since then—when people ask me about George W. Bush, based upon my knowledge of ATX, my answer is to skip straight to the chase and say he’s a fucking Nazi. No lie. 

My last Whole Foods encounter in the Old Austin was among the beautiful people and high prices but not on the bulk aisle. 

In express checkout one afternoon there was a striking older white lady, one or two customers ahead of me in line, and somehow she looked familiar. Don’t know what she was buying although it was too expensive whatever it was. 

She looked like she could afford it though, not Michael Dell-rich, not like she could buy the whole store, just whatever she wanted in it. What struck me most were her clothes. 

Her apparel. 

She was rich enough to be understated which in Texas means wealthy indeed. Fashionably broken-in jeans, almost chic, like someone had worn them for her to soften them up, and a sheer very expensive maybe even silk blouse and a thin gold bracelet on her wrist, not like the ingots that ordinary Texas mega-rich women wear. 

This wasn’t oil money, or cattle wealth, actually, it was political gold which means respectability as well as cash. Her hair, kind of golden too, actually, was perfect, a helmet but perfect. 

She looked well-cared for and sure of herself. It was Ann Richards. 

We chatted for a second. It had been twenty years, more, since we’d last seen each other, in the Travis County Courthouse when she was still Precinct 1 County Commissioner, whose district was West Austin, back in the day. We talked on the telephone once when she was State Treasurer too but that conversation was a long time ago in an Austin that no longer exists. 

Ann’s rap after she got beat for reelection was that she never looked back. That’s what she told interviewers if she was asked, what happened happened, she said, she lost, W won. That was that and she moved on with her life. Which meant going to New York or wherever, working as a political consultant, a commentator or strategist or whatever. That’s what she said. That's what she did, documentary evidence proves it. 

But by the time we ran into each other at Whole Foods, that version of history was no longer holding up. What had happened in the meantime was 9-11 and Iraq, W had four years in D.C. at that point, when we met in express checkout—this was like September or October, the fall of ’04 at the end of his first term in the White House and a lot of people were dead who otherwise would not be. The metrics, the numbers described it all, particularly body counts. 

And you could kind of see that on Ann’s face. She had fucked up and she knew it. Ann Richards didn't say anything, she was too smart for that, too experienced especially after four years in the Mansion up the street and even longer in the Courthouse, across the way. She certainly wasn't going to say anything to someone who was not in her inner circle. She kept her mouth closed but her features were harder to control. 

Nothing was said but nothing needed to be said, it was all written on her face. You might think she was ill but the cancer hadn’t been diagnosed yet. This was something different, regret. It’s kind of like illness but the symptoms can be harder to diagnose or might mimic other conditions. Not being a psychologist or anything, not like my Chilean friend who called W a Nazi. My bet was that Ann felt responsible. She felt guilty for unleashing George W. Bush on an unsuspecting world. W’s political career was one baby that needed to be strangled in the crib. Ann Richards was the last politician with the motive and the means to do it. 

The election hadn’t only been about her, contrary to what she may have believed at the time. As the pundits like to say elections have consequences, mostly for people other than the candidates. The trouble is, and this may have been Ann’s thinking, when you bring in somebody to go dumpster-diving you can’t always be sure whose dumpster it’s going to be. Maybe that was what she feared about playing hardball. She tried to be a pistol-packing mama and all for the press but by then it was too late. 

It's amazing that people who never knew her talk about what a liberal saint Ann Richards was. If she was a saint, the Texas Governor’s Mansion was the wrong place for her to be. Who a leader nurtures—who a leader praises—is important and she did a good job of that, encouraging women to join the process, and all, being a mentor you would call her, a role model. But just as important as whose career you start is whose career you end. By that measure she failed. We shook hands and she went her way. She was living around the corner in some condos. Whose other principal resident was one of President Johnson's daughters, Lynda Bird or Luci Bird, whichever one lives here in town. 

Watching Governor Richards walk away, no security, no assistant, nothing except the purchases in her hand. In this town that's what it sometimes came down to, yes, even “in the Old Austin.” No matter how important you were. One day you ended up carrying your own groceries out of Whole Foods. It could be a lonely walk through the parking lot. 

Anyway, that day, going back inside and collecting my shit—and the receipt—and saying to the checker, like, “Do you know who that was? That was Ann Richards.” 

The guy was a hipster, probably a glass-blower or mixed-media artist just working the cash register to pay for the herb that gave him inspiration. He was completely unimpressed. 

“I just saw,” he told me, “Sandra Bullock in produce.”