Beach of Love

 

There is a beach in southern Mexico where the whiteness of the sand can blind you and at night the moon hangs like a lamp above your bed. It is on the Pacific Coast, where the horizon is blue and as limitless as eternity itself and the waves can swallow you up without missing a beat. The prehistoric hills of the state of Oaxaca begin behind the last sand dune and stretch on until they join the major range of mountains between the coast and the state capital, also named Oaxaca. The bus trip between Puerto Angel, where the beach is, and the city of Oaxaca, where most people begin their journey to the coast, can be steamy or rainy, sometimes bitter cold, sometimes get-out-and-help-the-driver-push.

Puerto Angel is a pleasant fishing village of a few thousand souls. It’s easy to imagine that the Port of the Angel got its name from a nervous priest trying to counter the bad mojo of the nearby beach. The beach was christened Zipolite by the Indians who, long before Cortez landed in the Yucatán, made human sacrifices there. The name means Playa de la Muerte, or Beach of Death. But it is the ocean, more than anything else, that gives the name “Zipolite” meaning still.

“Once,” someone may mention in casual conversation on the beach, “seven people drowned here in one week.” Who knows if the story is true? The Mexicans who live here year-round are the only people who could keep an accurate count of such things. But to them—as they sell their beer and bananas and fried fish to the young Europeans and Americans on the beach—seven drowned gringos are not a much greater tragedy than one drowned gringo. The Mexicans on the beach are a hardy and skeptical people. They go into the water only to fish, and they carry crowbars to discourage stray sharks.

The Mexicans know how deceptive the water at Zipolite can be. Just when you think you know the currents, you’ll put your feet down for a rest and realize that you’re in over your head. You’ll raise your legs and start swimming in, a little more tired than you were a minute ago, and then the first big wave will hit and send you tumbling end over end underwater. Then another wave will hit, and you’ll begin to understand why the Indians named the beach what they did.

In all truly exotic places, the one extreme, danger, is balanced by another extreme—at Zipolite, by romance. The young visitors to this alternative vacation spot know the mile-long stretch of sand by a more popular name: the Beach of Love. You need only look at the women strolling by to know why.

The beach attracts a disproportionate number of French-speaking people (Quebecois, French, and Swiss) who travel Mexico for months at a time, in vans and cars, and camp on the sand or live in thatched-roof cabanas with Mexican families. Some of the European women work for their room and board, shuttling beer from the Mexicans’ refrigerators to the men on the sand. Some of the tourists, especially the French, believing in a liberal education for their children, rear their babies alongside the Mexican babies. The French women also set fashion on the beach, dressing for the evening in wet hair, dangling earrings, and oversized men’s shirts.

There are gravel-voiced Italian girls at Zipolite who know how to blow cigarette smoke straight up, away from the eyes of the men they talk to so intently. There are sleek American girls, tall and tan and glittering with bracelets, who look like models: hip, tough (an air that Europeans cannot achieve), looking for something, anything, excitement. They will never be this young and beautiful again, and they know it.

Some of the American women are products of the Eastern Establishment, Smith College graduates who chopped sugarcane in Castro’s Cuba, women whose every liberal bone trembles at the thought of being made love to by a South American or a Mexican. Granola Girls from Colorado and Central Texas, preoccupied with whole foods and the occult, come to Zapolite to consult the stars. In groups these women walk down the beach, moving like troupes of performers. They are all casually athletic and hard-hearted—a little cynical, as all beautiful, willful women are—and after two weeks in the sun at Zipolite their breasts resemble scoops of chocolate ice cream.

The opportunities for love at Zipolite are first-rate, especially for women, because the Latin men on the beach—Mexicans, Italians, South Americans—are much more prepared to pamper women and to be pampered by them than the average Western male is. The Latins believe that women want first, foremost, and above all to be made love to. And in such a setting!

When the sun rises, it is as if God has chosen you personally to view the best of His creation. If you get up early—most people find it impossible to sleep through the red sunrise—the sea looks like molten silver, and there may be wild horses playing on the sand or porpoises playing out near Pelican Rock or, farther out still, whales jumping, while thirty pelicans line up wingtip to wingtip to form an eerie V and silently glide southward along the shoreline to the next bay, where they meet the fishing fleet as it comes in with its morning catch.

At the end of the beach, below Casa de Gloria, the hotel that sits on top of the cliffs, there are shallows in the surf where lovers can lie on the sand and be washed by the tide, where a man and a woman can spread out in the water face to face, like a four-pointed human star, whispering and kissing.

But looking out over the water and commenting on the allure of this place, Alejandro of Mexico City (there are no last names at Zipolite), who has come all the way from school in France just to chase girls over the New Year’s holiday, put into words the fear that is in the back of every visitor’s mind. “Very beautiful,” he said, gesturing at Zipolite’s charms, “but you pay for what you get.”

Casa de Gloria is not a traditional hotel. There are no rooms, just cabanas with dirt floors. When Gloria has many guests, as is the case during “high season,” roughly from December to April, she may lead you to a palm-leaf lean-to, where you can sling a hammock and sleep in between trips to the beach. There is no running water at Gloria’s, and there are outdoor toilets only.

Gloria is a mystery, a woman of unrevealed origins, and she likes it that way. After eight years in the Oaxaca sun, Gloria is so dark that she could pass for a Mexican if she weren’t so robust, so clearly the product of Anglo civilization and culture. She is American, from California or the deep Southwest—that much is certain. But whatever else there is to learn about Gloria comes in bits and pieces, colored by the karma of the beach. For a radius of fifty miles, Gloria is the most gossiped-about person, especially among the Mexicans, some of whom are convinced that she is a witch.

She runs Casa de Gloria the way Humphrey Bogart ran Rick’s American Cafe in Casablanca. You might overhear her confide to someone at the counter in her restaurant, as she did recently, “I used to own a zodiac shop in L.A.” You might hear her talk about having been married at age fifteen. Or if she’s being especially sharing, she may tell you the story of the small altar in front of her restaurant. It’s an altar like those found everywhere in Mexico, with a place for a candle below a picture, except that the picture is not of Christ or the Virgin but of what appears to be a California sun-child—Gloria’s daughter, who died of malaria at Zipolite a few years ago. After her daughter’s death, Gloria closed down the hotel and returned to the States for a while. But she gives the impression that she could never leave for more than a few months, that she too will die here one day.

The beach directly below Casa de Gloria has been set aside by custom as a nude-bathing area. The Mexican matrons who control the rest of Playa de la Muerte view nude bathers with the grim disapproval of Grand Inquisitors. Gloria herself is no libertine. At her hotel, clothes must be worn, and sometimes, when she has just warned someone wandering up from the beach to put his clothes back on, Gloria gives another impression—that no matter what she may have believed more than a decade ago, when she first drifted to Mexico burned out from the sixties, she no longer advocates free love. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen,” she says with some horror. “a couple comes here, and in a few days he’s sleeping with somebody else. Then she’s sleeping with somebody else. Then she splits for the Yucatán with somebody completely new and leaves the kids here.”

Everybody stays at Gloria’s: post-commune, pre-computer travelers who roam the Western Hemisphere like gypsies, bringing along children and a car, looking for positive vibrations and natural surroundings; oil heiresses and French grandmothers who arrive in taxis from Acapulco or Puerto Escondido, 35 miles up the coast, and walk the beach at Zipolite just as naked as the day they were born; people who for one reason or another are on the run from their old lives. The thing that most of these people have in common, and the thing that is mildly unnerving to the unbeliever, is that they came to Oaxaca because their astrological charts told them to. Make no mistake, though. For all of Zipolite’s spiritual attractions, the highest priority of the tourists here is to get a good tan.

One February, on this strange beach with its strange aura and alternative values, a minor morality tale was played out. The afternoon the trouble began, Gloria sat in the dark in her house, talking to her adopted son, Juan. She was trying to explain to Juan why his fiancée had just run off to the mountains. Nineteen-year-old Juan was to have married fifteen-year-old Lucy, a waitress in Gloria’s restaurant. Things had begun innocently enough that morning when Gloria took a complaint from one of the guests about Lucy’s manner. Nothing new about that—Lucy, a pretty, jaded girl, worked ten-hour days in a hot kitchen and didn’t think much of the frivolous foreigners she served. Gloria passed the complaint on to Lucy’s mother, Josepha, who also managed the restaurant, and that’s where the argument started. Gloria told Josepha, “This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that about your daughter.” “Your daughter”—Gloria used the phrase over and over again, talking to Josepha. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the yellow moon that had looked like Satan’s eye a few days before, maybe it was just tension related to the impending union of these two families, but whatever the reason, Josepha flew off the handle and started throwing dishes. By the time the crockery was swept away, Josepha had departed for her village in the mountains, taking Lucy with her and vowing never to return.

Gloria explained to Juan what had happened, without ever really apologizing, not even for her poor choice of words with Josepha. Standing there in Gloria’s house at dusk, the wind off the Pacific blowing through the windows at his back and causing all manner of chimes and amulets hanging from the walls and furniture to jangle softly, Juan listened attentively, ignoring Gloria’s husband, Carlos, who was moving restlessly around the room.

Finally, as Juan stepped outside into the night and started down the trail to the hotel, Gloria called him back. “Forget everything here,” Gloria counseled him in Spanish. “Forget me and Josepha. If you love Lucy, go after her and find her and don’t look back.” Juan stared at Gloria for a long second. Without saying anything, he disappeared down the trail.

The next morning, just after sunrise, Gloria’s guests were awakened by a bloodcurdling scream, followed by the sound of crashing dishes. The guests who were already up and ordering coffee in the restaurant said the scene resembled an act from some steamy play, with fiery Carlos, who is 26, telling Gloria, who is 38, “You took the best years of my life!”

The argument had heated up, and Gloria had screamed as if she had been stabbed through the heart. Then Carlos started throwing dishes. He and Gloria had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary (Carlos is Gloria’s third husband), and they were supposed to go away to Oaxaca for a few days’ celebration. But when Carlos left that morning, he left alone, stomping down the beach. Within hours Gloria had packed a bag and gone after him, leaving one of the restaurant employees, Starlight—a delicate Belgian woman and a veteran of every quiche joint and Perrier palace on the Granola Trail between Colorado and California—in charge.

Suddenly almost the entire staff of the hotel was gone, yet 25 guests remained. Drastic measures were called for if Casa de Gloria was not to fall into the sea. In Gloria’s absence, therefore, Casa de Gloria came to be ruled by a Council of Five, headed by Starlight and including four guests, none of whom had even been in Mexico three months earlier. The council took control of everything from the hotel’s purse strings to its menu.

The four governing guests were Barbara, an advocate of every liberal American cause since Selma and a particularly close friend of Gloria’s (they both had lovers younger than themselves); Peter, from rural Sweden, a real gentle man, who had met Barbara on a commune in the Midwest; Wolfgang, from Stuttgart, a young man with an earthy sense of humor (it was he who first suggested that the International Diarrhea Championship be held at Zipolite); and Wolfgang’s beautiful girlfriend, Diana, an artist.

Gloria’s instructions were that the hotel was to be run the way it had always been run—on instinct, making enough money to meet expenses and a little more. She had made it clear that she would be happy if the hotel was still standing when she returned. So, in the absence of the demands of grinding capitalism, the hotel managers, that is, the Council of Five, chose an alternative business goal: maximizing time on the beach. Gloria had kept the restaurant open from eight in the morning until ten at night, but the Council of Five changed the closing time to nine and added a siesta from two till four in the afternoon.

The issue debated the most, however, was who would sleep in Gloria’s house. No one wanted to, although everyone was embarrassed to say why. They all thought the place was spooky. Gloria’s house had been built by a Texan named Robert, a genius, apparently—it was said that he had spent only $800 to create one of the most beautiful seaside homes in the world. The house was eight-sided, made of thick bamboo, with rough tile floors, and it sat on a cliff a few hundred feet above the Pacific. Surrounding the house was a corral, where Carlos kept a horse, and a sign above the corral—a sign like those you see over ranch gates in Texas—read “NIRVANA” in block letters. Inside the house, among other furnishings, was a chair made entirely of whalebone. What revealed the most about Gloria’s character and interests was the rows of books in her bookcases. A quick look at those books made it easy to see why the local campesinos thought Gloria had gone beyond the bounds of standard Judeo-Christian morality: Bhagavad Gita, The Tahitian Book of the Dead, Jesus the Son of Man, by Kahlil Gibran, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, and No One Here Gets Out Alive, the biography of the late Jim Morrison.

The last thing Gloria said before leaving was that George—a handyman and, as he frequently boasted, a native Texan—had no authority in the kitchen. George fancied himself the best cook at Casa de Gloria (there was some evidence to back him up), and he ignored Gloria’s instructions. In the days that followed, Starlight, more an ethereal than a real being, found herself intimidated by George’s tough talk.

George was from East Texas, somewhere. He was vague about how he first arrived in Oaxaca (and it didn’t seem tactful to ask), but he did say that he had been at Gloria’s “a year, this time.” He was apparently either on the cure or waiting out some storm in Texas.

George was definitely preparing to sit out World War III, which he believed imminent. Every night before dozing off, he listened to Voice of America on the shortwave, and in his semiconscious state he heard the political commentator talking about Soviet intransigence and Cuban adventurism (half of the broadcasts were devoted to attacks on communism). With the Voice of America and old copies of Newsweek as his only sources of information, George thought that Armageddon was just around the corner. No one had the heart to tell him that the wind could carry the radiation as far as Oaxaca, easy, and that if he really wanted to escape the bomb, he needed to keep going south another few thousand miles or so.

George considered certain social graces mere frills to the business of LIFE. More than once he walked into the kitchen when Starlight or someone else was slaving over a big pot of vegetarian chili, took a taste, and pronounced, “This is slop! Who do you think’s gonna eat this?” Not all the guests spoke English, but there was no missing George’s meaning on such occasions. His comments, and sometimes the food itself, had an adverse effect on the restaurant’s trade. A few guests deserted Gloria’s restaurant to eat at the casas on the beach. And sometimes Starlight retreated from the kitchen entirely, leaving everything in George’s hands.

Still, the hotel was surprisingly well run. Sure, there were minor problems—guests came, guests went, as at any other inn—but only once did any guests leave because they did not like the accommodations. They were three older American women who arrived out of the blue one day; they must have taken a wrong turn leaving Acapulco, and they looked as if they belonged to a tour group from Fort Worth. They were genuinely shocked by what they ate and what they saw at Zipolite.

What they saw was the beginnings of the decline of Western civilization—decadence, marijuana, Oaxaca gold going for $20 a half pound, people who had lost their dreams because every night they went to bed stoned. But as the American ladies might have learned, had they stayed, being unable to dream at Zipolite is really for the best. There is so much unreality at the beach that nobody ever misses his dreams.

Zipolite is patrolled by Mexican marines from the naval base in Puerto Angel. The marines do double duty as the local police, and when they patrol the beach (usually once every other day), they look for marijuana smokers and nude bathers. Hiding behind rocks, carrying rifles bigger than themselves, the marines will watch for a while—if the bathers are women—before telling them to put their clothes back on. It is a tribute to Gloria’s influence on local politics that the marines are forbidden to set foot on her property, although they can search the Mexican-owned casas on the beach at will.

The day after Gloria and Carlos departed, however, the marines came to the beach three times, and they returned every day, repeatedly and without warning. The stepped-up visits created a paranoia at Casa de Gloria, and it only worsened with reports (which turned out to be true) that the army had begun conducting surprise searches at the crossroads outside Puerto Angel. All of this official activity led the members of the Council of Five to believe that the hotel was due for a raid or trouble of some sort from the authorities. They began to think that without Gloria or Carlos on the premises, the hotel was vulnerable. Starlight didn’t speak Spanish, and none of the five had working papers. They knew that if the authorities ever came to the hotel, they would probably shut it down. After all, for those few days Casa de Gloria was the weirdest social phenomenon in the state of Oaxaca, in a country where such things are noticed.

To her credit, Gloria doesn’t allow liquor or drugs on her property. But while she was gone, the rules were bent. There were times late at night when, had the marines ventured up from the beach, they would have found almost everyone stoned or in the restaurant pigging out.

But on the tenth day after Gloria’s departure the spell was broken. Peter went into Puerto Angel to shop for the restaurant, and a taxi driver told him that the military checks and patrols were part of the search for a dozen guerrillas who had escaped from the state police up the road in Pochutla. Peter didn’t know Oaxaca even had guerrillas, but it was good news nonetheless.

That afternoon, as Peter emerged from the market, he heard something even better. He ran into an American woman, an artist living in Puerto Angel, and as they exchanged pleasantries, she said, “You mean Gloria’s not back?”

“What?” Peter said.

“I had an opening for my work in Oaxaca two days ago,” she said, “and I ran into Gloria and Carlos. They were back together. Juan and Lucy were with them too, and Juan said that he’d found a ring. They said they were going to Mexico City for a day to visit Carlos’ family, but they were supposed to be back yesterday.” The wedding ceremony, she added, would be held on the beach below Casa de Gloria, followed by a celebration that would wake the dead.

Within hours of receiving the news, the Council of Five began to disband. Since Gloria was returning, everyone went on with the plans that had been postponed by her departure.

Amid tears of farewell Barbara and Peter left for the Yucatán, a first step on their way to West Virginia, where they would build a house and start their married life. Wolfgang and Diana left for Nuevo Laredo, to go from there to visit a friend in Austin before flying home to Germany. And Starlight, leaving a new crew in the kitchen—all of them guests of the hotel—was headed for Guatemala as soon as Gloria arrived.

In many ways Barbara was the most perceptive member of the Council of Five, and the night before she and Peter departed, she commented that Casa de Gloria seemed to have a life of its own. She suggested that maybe it wasn’t the first time that Gloria had taken off and left her hotel in the hands of the guests. Seventy cents a day plus meals is too low a price to pay for paradise, Barbara said. Guests who spend a long time at Casa de Gloria end up making another contribution to the upkeep of the hotel. And because they do, Barbara said, they will remember their vacation at Puerto Angel for the rest of their lives. If Gloria is a witch, that is her magic.

The Plot to Steal the Alamo Flag

In February 1998, two Texas officials arrived in Mexico City on a confidential mission, carrying the qualified blessings of Governor George W. Bush. They were met in the Mexican capital by the chief of the narcotics affairs section of the U.S. Embassy, although their visit had nothing to do with interdiction or money-laundering, sniffing dogs or electrified fences.

The Texans, one of whom was the state librarian, had specific instructions from the U.S. Embassy about how to behave in Mexico City. They had been advised to demonstrate a sensitivity to the less-than-rosy view which Mexicans have of their historical relations with the United States, and especially with Texas. Included on their two-day itinerary, as outlined by the embassy liaison (parentheses included), was “the National Museum of History (a.k.a. Chapultepec Castle) where there is a small display on the ‘Texas Insurrection’ and the Mexican-American War, the Ninos Heroes Monument (dedicated to six cadets who died defending Chapultepec Castle from the U.S. Army in 1847) and the Museum of Foreign Interventions,” the last of which is devoted to invasions of Mexico by French, British, Austrian, Spanish and, of course, American troops.

“Visiting [the exhibits] shows that we are aware of Mexico’s enduring pain from this period of its history,” the Texans were advised by their embassy guide. “President Clinton, incidentally, laid a wreath at the Ninos Heroes Monument when he was here last May. Through all of this, we should hope to establish the necessary rapport to get a green light for….” The Texans’ effort to “understand” the tortured Mexican historical consciousness must have seemed particularly surprising to their hosts. Texans have spent most of the last two centuries not caring much what Mexicans think about anything. The reason for the new-found sensitivity was that the Mexicans had something the Texans wanted – wanted very badly.

In the fall of 1835, two companies of volunteer riflemen crossed Louisiana’s western border into what was then still, officially, Mexico. Called the New Orleans Greys because of their distinctive uniforms, the volunteers had come to fight for the rebellious Republic of Texas.

The arrival of reinforcements was so welcomed that the colonists of East Texas gave the Louisianans a special gift: a flag, made of blue silk, about the size of a bath towel, bordered by white fringe. The silk featured the likeness of an eagle, wings spread, and below the eagle the words, “First Company of Texan Volunteers from New Orleans.” The riflemen carried the flag to San Antonio and the Alamo mission where rebels were preparing to defend their position against the Mexican Army. The flag remained at the Alamo, and was captured and sent south as booty of war.

For almost a century – until 1934, when the flag was discovered by a Texas official in a drawer of the Mexican national archives – the Greys’ banner remained forgotten. But in the more than sixty years since the Texas Centennial (when Texans first officially became obsessed with their own history) the piece of faded silk has been the subject of pleadings and requests – and at least one private bounty, of $36,000, for its return by any means. A kind of ritual has developed for representatives of the Lone Star State, from Governor John Connally in the mid-Sixties onward, to ask the Mexican government for its return. During the Texas Sesquicentennial, for example, U.S. Senator Phil Gramm flew to Mexico City on a one-man mission, promising to return with the banner. The Mexican president refused to see him. An attempt was later made to attach a clause to the North American Free Trade Agreement, requiring Mexico to give back the flag as a condition of ratification. The Mexicans resisted. Over recent years, the Greys’ banner has seemed to grow again in importance to Mexico, in direct proportion to which its return is demanded by Texas. The plan was to take the flag on loan from the Mexicans for an exhibit and refuse to give it back. Governor Bush didn't think of the idea, he's not that smart, he just approved it. Even then, as he would later do in the White House, he viewed himself like an executive chairman, reviewing options presented to him and making the final call. There's a lot of deviousness in foreign affairs and W was apparently cool with it, even in Austin.

The State of Texas’ most recent strategy for repatriating the banner dates to a proposal made by a former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, actor John Gavin. Tired of being asked to intercede with the government of Mexico to request its return, in 1982 Gavin suggested instead that Texas officials find something that the Mexicans wanted and trade. With Ambassador Gavin’s prompting, authorities in Austin searched the state’s archives. Among the “vast amount of property taken” which General Sam Houston reported capturing at the battle San Jacinto (when the Mexican Army was defeated and President Santa Anna captured) were three battle flags, belonging to the battalions of Toluca, Matamoros, and Guerrero. The three flags were apparently restored by the state of Texas. Details are scarce. Although none of the banners individually has the importance of the Alamo silk, together they became the foundation of the attempt for the Texans to get what they wanted.

The wheels of state government turn slowly. The effort to trade the three Mexican battalion flags for the Greys’ banner began in earnest almost a decade after Ambassador Gavin’s suggestion, with the quixotic intervention of Carlos Truan, state senator from Corpus Christi. “It all originated with a conversation I had with the consul of Mexico,” Truan later explained to selected colleagues in the Legislature. “We had worked on a couple of projects that resulted in a [good] relationship with Mexico and then in our discussion we just stumbled into the flags and he thought it was a good idea if we could have a display of the flags, not necessarily an exchange of flags, and unfortunately one thing led to another and people assumed, particularly in Mexico, that we wanted to take their flag back and bring it over here.” When the project was publicized, the reaction in Mexico was outrage. In the earliest grades Mexican schoolchildren are taught that their country’s destiny would have been far different if not for the intervention of Americans, starting with U.S. assistance to the treacherous Texans. The idea of returning the flag was, therefore, repugnant south of the Rio Grande.

But after Senator Truan’s misinterpreted suggestion, stateside support (including radio call-ins, and mass mailings to the Mexican government) began to grow in Texas for a swap. It was in this context – Texans trying to promote an exchange, and Mexicans feeling the pressure – that George W. Bush was inaugurated as Governor in 1995.

Caught up in the pomp and circumstance of his upset victory over a media-friendly incumbent, at first Governor Bush seemed bemused when reporters insisted on asking about the issue. “I think it is important,” the Governor-elect said doubtfully. “[But] it is going to require Texas and Mexican officials to have a cordial relationship before any flag swap or swap of artifacts takes place.” Just after his inauguration the new, Spanish-speaking Governor amplified his goodwill theme. “I believe that the best way to retrieve the Alamo flag is to have a cordial relationship,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “I believe that the best way to accommodate matters is to have a respectful relationship so that when and if the flag is returned … that it is done out of friendship as a gesture of goodwill.”

And, “Whatever we have of Mexico’s – I understand that there are paintings or other flags – we’d be willing to make a swap,” Bush promised, suggesting an ignorance of the exact details.

George Bush’s conciliatory approach was circumvented by direct legislative action. During the new Governor’s first legislative session, state lawmakers granted authority to the state’s chief librarian (whose office includes responsibility for Texas’ archives) to negotiate with the Mexicans for the flag’s return. At the same time the U.S. Congress was also passing a resolution asking the Mexicans simply to give back the Greys’ banner. All this legislative activity seemed to irk the Governor, who favored personal diplomacy: “The truth of the matter is, if I could go and convince the right Mexican official to work a loan agreement for the flag, I suspect that would be a more efficient way to do so.” Still, in a private letter to State Librarian Robert S. Martin in October 1995, Governor Bush seemed to acquiesce to the Legislature’s plan. “There would be nothing more pleasing,” he wrote, “than for all of us to affect an exchange of things of history, whether it be on loan or forever.” In public Bush was going farther: “I hope I’m the Governor that is able to hold up the flag.”

Both tracks, diplomacy and arm-twisting, were rendered ineffective a few months later when the Mexicans announced that they had “lost” the artifact in question. Sylvia Moreno, a reporter for the Morning News, attempting by telephone to track down the flag’s exact whereabouts, was told at each Mexico City museum she called that no one had the Alamo silk. Mexican archivists indicated that the flag had been mislaid – or taken – by unknown hands. In Texas, this news was greeted not for what it was, a face-saving excuse, but as fact, and was widely ridiculed: the Mexicans had mislaid or allowed to be stolen, Texans believed, what Mexico had been refusing on principle to return for sixty years.

Progress came the following year, on two fronts. An Austin attorney, attending a “high-level” dinner party in Mexico City, reported back that Mexican officials were no longer claiming to have lost the Alamo flag and, in fact, that the Mexicans suddenly seemed receptive to the idea of a trade. About the same time an isolated Congressional inquiry arrived at the U.S. Embassy asking about progress in the search for the banner. “Such inquiries are normally assigned to the Embassy’s political section for action. I had no professional interest [in] the issue,” wrote Alan Smiley in a recent letter about the controversy. At the time, Smiley was the Embassy’s narcotics control officer, responsible for coordinating U.S. policy regarding drug interdiction efforts in Mexico. But Smiley happened to see the cable and took responsibility for the inquiry nonetheless. Smiley’s interest was actually quite personal. His great-great-great-great uncle, a Tennessee lawyer named Daniel Cloud, died defending the southeastern palisade, near the chapel of the Alamo, in 1836.

After consultations with Texas officials, including the librarian Robert Martin, and after learning all he could about the Alamo flag itself, Smiley developed a three-part plan to get the flag back by, well, less than direct means. “Phase One was to suggest [to the Mexicans] the formation of a bi-national team of textile restoration experts to restore not only the Alamo flag but [the] three Mexican Army battalion flags as well,” he said later, explaining his efforts on Texas’ behalf. “Phase Two, only to be presented to the GOM [Government of Mexico] after Phase One had been approved and restoration was well underway, was to have been a traveling exhibit of the four newly restored flags – first in Mexico, then in Texas. Phase Three was to have been the indefinite extension of the Texas exhibition of the flags, so the Alamo flag, in effect, remained in Texas forever. Both Phase Two and Three were tightly held secrets, not to be discussed with either our GOM counterparts or our Mexican operatives. We didn’t want the GOM to think there was anything more to this than scholarly interest in preserving all four flags before they all turned to dust.”

The effort to dupe the Mexicans began with limited success. As an embassy officer Alan Smiley had contacts throughout the Mexican bureaucracy and he was eventually able to locate the flag itself. It was being housed in the basement of the National Institute of Archaeology and History (INAH, as it is known by its Spanish acronym). One of Smiley’s “operatives” was even able to get in to see the flag and to assess its condition, which was not good. At the same time a plan of sorts was being developed about how best to approach the Mexican bureaucracy. Early on the decision was made to cut a wide detour around the foreign ministry, on the theory that the Mexican diplomatic service would not be helpful at the best of times: the foreign ministry was apparently under a new, American-bashing management. “Rosario Green, the new Secretary of Foreign Relations,” Smiley wrote to librarian Martin in early 1998, “is very nationalistic and at least a little ‘anti-gringo’ (although she has been very well-behaved so far). I may be proven wrong, but I see this project coming to a dead standstill when it hits SRE [the Secretariat of Foreign Relations] unless it already has a lot of forward momentum behind it.”

The decision was made, then, to restrict Texas’ approaches to officials of the Mexican national archives. Smiley found, however, that the response even at this level was not warm. A series of letters was written, composed at the Capitol in Austin and reviewed for Spanish grammar and Latin sensibilities by Smiley at the Embassy in Mexico City. The result was nada. The lack of response was particularly troubling, because Alan Smiley’s tour of duty in Mexico was coming to an end, and he would no longer be able to assist in regaining the flag that his famed ancestor had died for. As Smiley’s time in Mexico approached an end, the Embassy official wrote to Dr. Martin in Austin: “I will draft another letter to INAH for your review. We may want to say that you are perplexed for not having received a response to your offer, especially since you had understood that there was a definite interest in preserving these artifacts of the past. I would then suggest that we give INAH only about two more weeks to respond. If no answer is forthcoming at that time, I propose that I (or we) meet with the INAH director personally to find out how HE would like to see this issue advance. There is a tremendous risk in this latter approach. A visit from an Embassy official is very likely to get an all-or-nothing response; the door could close and stay closed for years to come.

“On the other hand, as it now appears that I’ll be concluding my tour in Mexico as early as the end of April, now may be the time to push the issue. Since we are no longer receiving Congressional inquiries on this issue and since you are unlikely to find another Embassy officer with as great a personal interest in these artifacts, support from the Embassy will probably dwindle significantly after my departure. For this reason, I think we should consider ‘going for broke’ if there is no response to your next letter.”

There was no response, and the Texans began to pressure their Mexican counterparts for a face-to-face meeting. “Most of the appointments that I was able to set up,” according to Smiley, “were cancelled at the last moment due to any number of excuses.” But eventually the Mexicans were tied down to an exact date, in February 1998, and Martin, together with Carolyn Palmer, a prominent San Antonio Republican and a former museum administrator, who serves as chairwoman of the State of Texas’ board of historical archives, flew south. “We have pursued the matter very quietly, working with the Secretary of State’s office. We [had] conferred with the governor’s office, who encouraged us to pursue [the effort],” Martin said in later, unpublicized testimony before a committee of the Texas Senate. “We went down for two days in Mexico City. We met with the national archivists. We met with the deputy director of the Instituto Nacional [of Anthropology and History]. They were very gracious and very polite but the net bottom result was that I came away with the distinct message that they are completely uninterested in even discussing any trade or sale or repatriation or anything else.” Ms. Palmer was of the same opinion. “We got the idea,” she testified, “that they felt like they were taking quite good enough care of the flag and they intended to keep it.” Alan Smiley, more experienced in Mexican affairs and customs than either Martin or Ms. Palmer, described the Texans’ reception by Mexican officials as “rude by Latino standards
”

“Latin Americans in general, I have learned,” Smiley (who before joining the State Department was an Army intelligence officer serving south of the border) said later of his failed mission to highjack the flag, “are suspicious of conspiracies. Mexicans in particular are gravely suspicious of anything and everything the United States says or does, no matter how slight the perceived impact on the interests of Mexico.”

Smiley and his compatriots seemed unable to acknowledge that they were, indeed, “conspiring” to trick the Mexicans into surrendering the Alamo flag. The plan was simply to refuse to return the flag to the Mexicans when its came to Austin as part of the exchange. Dr. Martin, for his part, offered a unique view to the Texas Senate of the reasons for his failure – and at the same time demonstrated that face-saving was as important north of the Rio Grande as south: “In the entire history of the army of the Republic of Mexico,” the state librarian explained, “they have won four battles – the Alamo and Goliad were two of them – and [the flag] was a powerful symbol to them that on occasion they have beat the yanquis, and they’re not interested in giving it up.”

Despite their unwillingness to trade, the Mexicans did, however, make a proposal of their own to the visiting Texas officials. Instead of a traveling exhibit of the flags, the Mexicans suggested a presentation in the United States of the Latin viewpoint of the historical relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Following his visit to Mexico City, Dr. Martin wrote to Luciana Cedillo Alvarez, a high-ranking cultural affairs officer in Mexico City, “I am preparing my report to officials here in Texas, and remain very hopeful that we may be able to proceed along the lines we discussed, with an exhibition presenting the Mexican viewpoint of the history of relations between our countries. It is extremely important that citizens of the United States, and of Texas in particular, become better informed on this important subject.”

Dr. Martin’s letter was, of course, a last grasp at the flag itself. Not long after reporting to Senate leaders, from whom he took a beating on an unrelated matter, Martin retired from state service and returned to academia. Eventually Alan Smiley took his new posting, this time to Honduras. The Alamo flag remained, and remains still, in Mexico City.

Recent historical evidence has not been kind to Alamo-era Texans, or Mexicans. Researchers have begun to accept as authentic the diary of Jose Enrique de la Peсa, a Mexican army staff officer who fought at the Alamo and who was later imprisoned for opposing the dictatorship of Santa Anna. De la Peсa’s mention of the seizure of the flag is brief but colorful: “Before the Sapper Battalion, advancing through a shower of bullets and volley of shrapnel, had a chance to reach the foot of the walls,” the Mexican soldier wrote, “half their officers had been wounded. Another one of these officers, young Torres, died within the fort at the very moment of taking a flag. He died at one blow without uttering a word….” De la Peсa’s diary confirms accounts of Mexican brutality, and also explodes the “to the last man” legend of the Alamo defenders – which is, even more than the flag, the great treasure of Texas’s heritage. Even though it's not true. Nonetheless the state has built an $80 million museum in downtown Austin (featuring films glorifying Texas history) for which the Alamo flag, “tainted” by surrender or not, would be a major attraction.

There are several theories circulating in Austin about the exact circumstances under which the Mexicans might actually return the flag. The first, of course, features the “Bush factor.” If George Bush is elected president, according to one hypothesis, the Mexicans might decide to give back the Alamo flag in order to ingratiate themselves with Washington. The problem with this hypothesis is that it’s not entirely clear how much the Mexicans want to please the powers-that-be in the United States. Another theory may be more probable. This scenario likens Texans’ attempts to recoup the flag to a seduction, in which a woman agrees to sleep with a man not because she desires him, but because she is exhausted from the pursuit. In a weak moment the Mexicans may simply get tired of saying no. This seems to be the theory that Texans are working under, and it might be successful given enough time.

The clock is ticking, however, on this particular approach. The colonists of East Texas did not sew a flag that was intended to last for centuries. The last report obtained by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City describes the Alamo silk as being in a “very deteriorated” state (which in part explains Smiley et al.’s haste in trying to acquire it): “virtually all the fringe on the edges is gone, there is a large hole that has obliterated one of the eagle’s wings, and the flag has faded almost completely to white.” When the two Texas officials visited Mexico City they were shown records documenting scrupulous care but they were never allowed to see the flag itself, and its condition may be worsening with each year. (The care of the Mexican banners in Texas hands has been a little better. One, which was for a time on display at the San Jacinto Battleground Museum near Houston, underwent restoration. In fact the two others were also restored, per report, including the removal of 160-year-old blood stains, after the visit of the Texas officials to Mexico.)

Probably one day the remains of the Alamo flag will make the long trip back across the Rio Grande. But before an exchange can take place two changes in consciousness will have to take place: the Mexicans will have to come to terms with what they did, and failed to do, during their time as sovereigns north of the river. (They will, in short, have to get over the loss of their northern territories.) For their part the Texans may have to admit that the “Texas myth” is just that – a myth, designed to entertain the tourists, and to encourage school children. Of these two mental changes the Mexicans probably have the easier adjustment to make.

OLD AUSTIN

 

        1.

        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 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 for me. State troopers were too intimidated to say anything, they didn't want to seem like hicks. Today you try that shit on the Texas 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 Rumours, 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. 

Saw only four live acts during almost five decades unless you also count the house band at the Chili Parlor or the Elephant Room, this should give you an idea of what the music was like back in the day: Dough Sahm playing “96 Tears” on the University 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, thank you very much, and the Beach Boys, both at the Super Drum on campus, back in the prior day, like early 80s. Junior Walker maybe five years before that, 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 most significant music was "Nights over Egypt" by the Jones Girls. The last few years? It's British, 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? 

        2.

        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 Capitol, past the Governor’s Mansion, past the Travis County Courthouse, past the UT 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 insect. 

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, 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 South Congress 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 dried pee from inside when you walked by 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 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. 

        That was part of small town Austin life, while it would never have occurred to me to chat with the driver on a bus, for example, on a visit to Houston. Bus drivers in Austin 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, 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 speaks 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 bends 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. 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. That was the way it felt to be a Black Man in the World Capital of Live Music at the time. That was actually one of the last times that this changing 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 here along the banks of the mighty Colorado River when the Democrats had just moved out of the Texas Governor’s Mansion for the first time in over a century? A kind of gloom was hanging over this allegedly liberal city. The D's in Texas were dead men walking but didn't know it yet. To set the scene.

        My first crib was on the third floor of the Alamo Hotel between the not-yet-extant Elephant Room, which would one day officially become my bar, my drinking hole, 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 George W. Bush was in office as governor and as president. 

       The Elephant Room would become my personal bar like the Cedar Door was my professional bar back in an earlier day, as my principal place to sit down with colleagues for serious drinking. Long before the origins of Whole Foods, actually, as a funky little organic grocery store. Back in the day only hippies and nature freaks/Druids or the wealthy shopped at W.F., btw, 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. Most involved water.

        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 hotel 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 was a few blocks from the back door of the Governor's Mansion, too, which was about to be briefly occupied by a family of Republicans from Dallas named Clements, the patriarch being an oil guy and ex-Reagan Administration defense official. To set the scene. Anyway for a year the Alamo was my home and the hotel still has a special place in my heart, not to sound super 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 resident, btw, living downstairs from me, was Sam Houston Johnson, former President Johnson’s little brother, btw. No lie—it was super-cool living that close to Texas Royalty! Sam Houston had been at The Alamo for years if not decades before my arrival. We met once in the hotel elevator and he looked to my innocent black eyes just like any other old scary white man.

        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 maybe 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. The city then, lo those many years ago, was what people moving here think they will find today, accessible in every sense of the word. My life and work almost never took me south of the Colorado River, except to swim, no farther west than Deep Eddy Pool or east of Montopolis Dam and only then not to swim but to score a baggie. A task that seemed to occupy a good deal of my twenties, actually, back in the day in River City, looking for weed. On the north side my effective range was the university or an occasional chat with a minor drug dealer or disgruntled graduate student, often the same guy, cooking crystal meth in the alphabet avenues beyond campus. 

        Today people would call the area inscribed by these borders "downtown" but back in the day it was the whole town and you ran into important people a lot on the few blocks of Congress Avenue between the south face of the Texas Capitol and the Colorado River, not because you were important or somehow “in the know” but because you lived in a small town. The Capitol, the county courthouse and city hall, and the federal courts and federal offices were all located within a few blocks of each other off Congress. Austin was a one-horse town and the horse was government. And music.

        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 and/or incriminating. But the door was locked and the room had probably already been cleaned out by the Secret Service detail from the ranch 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 a young adult with a job, trying to be responsible, 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 all underprivileged compared to today's pothead. In my earliest experiences weed was rolled, at somebody's house, on an album cover, which may have first led me to appreciate Fleetwood Mac. 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 Congress Avenue where Senator Nixon got busted later. The senator would have probably been looking to pay around $100, that's my estimate, including inflation, unless he wanted something really kinky or he got the legislator's discount. 

       God knows what you would pay for similar services today after the city's expensive high tech transformation. Anyhow in the old Austin, overall, a black man, if he had the right rap, could still run his game with enough dissimulation and white guilt to get away with shit seven times out of ten. That's my personal calculation. 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 arriving in town. Basically when the Bushes moved into the Governor's Mansion, yeah. You didn't want to say there goes the neighborhood but it was kind of like that, bro.

        

        3.

        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 the Big House, before the Bushes, 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 on the grounds of the Mansion, though, during those late summer afternoons, the women wearing sun hats and holding cool 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, and drink water, you might see the twins allegedly studying upstairs on the third floor. The Bush girls are old Austin, too, in the best way, 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 Lincoln 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 sense of the word.

If it was early in the campaign before the Secret Service was all over him the Governor might be walking alone, or so it seemed, because there was almost certainly a plainclothes guy in a car and on foot. Governor Clements for example always had the same black state trooper in civilian clothes at his side when he was exposed to the public, even the press. Anyway if you watched Governor Bush, the soon-to-be 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 white guy 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 in downtown Austin, Texas, with the Colorado River as a backdrop. There are more cameras covering the Capitol District now 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, 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, and said, like, he just saw former Governor White at a wine store on West 6th Street, a few blocks away. 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 was a few blocks past the wine store and 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 main locale now. 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 downtown during a Texas summer. When even an African-American warrior male 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. 

        Personally, it was never my plan to shoplift at Whole Foods, even back in the day. Let me be clear. Even in the Old Austin where racist privilege was so blatant and was so very hurtful to the Black Man's soul. Not that the thought didn't occur to me to rip off the store, actually, as a kind of revolutionary justice, or wealth redistribution, you know? Except W.F. has always seemed like a risky environment for a Negro, not worth it, not in the old Austin, or even today, not for an aubergine or organic beet. 

        Done a lot of grazing thru the years, sure. 

Grazing makes up for the high prices on days you actually make a purchase, because it’s all such an outrageous rip-off? Stop me if you've heard that rationalization before. So, like, the point is that one time this state trooper working the Whole Foods front door, this one afternoon back in the day, in the Old Austin, his instincts about me were right on but his luck was bad because there was a receipt in my pocket. Not necessarily my receipt but a receipt nonetheless. This was looking to be one of those other three-out-of-ten chances of a bad outcome in River City, the black man just running his game, and for me usually involved police.

        He was cooler about his suspicions which the state puercos usually are, you know? But before the pig signals me to stop, which he didn’t really do, he’s looking at my bag of Whole Foods goodies—but doing it in a discreet way because this was an expensive store where wealthy & powerful white people came to shop and security didn’t want to make a big scene or put a 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 Whole Foods 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 Texas Highway Patrol, or a mere driver’s license examiner. He was Capitol Police working store security as an extra gig. He was Mexican. We got to chatting, yeah. Black Man and his Latino brother, you know, even if he was a pig.

        Austin was still a small town and people were not too busy to talk, not like today with all these greedhead techdogs who never have time for human bonding. 

        Or time for small town gossip, either.

This cop said that on Election Day 2000 or Election Day +1 when the new owner of the White House had not yet been declared, 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 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 Governor Bush was actually smarter than he looked. 

That’s a joke, actually. 

The trooper continued, we’re still standing in the sliding doorway at the old Whole Foods mothership, 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? 

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 said—rolled his eyes and smiled what must have been his familiar 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 years he was in River City but people said, both D’s and R’s, that Governor Bush was very charming personally, when they went to his office at the Texas Capitol, or at the Mansion, or wherever, a very personable guy one-on-one. Someone 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 was the impression of meeting him when he was Governor of Texas. 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 that’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 had told me. She looked at me and she 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 this bucolic River City, my answer is to skip straight to the chase and say he’s a fucking Nazi. No lie. 

        4. 

My last memorable encounter in the old Austin was also among the beautiful people and high prices of Whole Food 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 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 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 a town that no longer exists. 

Ann’s rap after she got beat for reelection as governor was that she never looked back. That’s what she told interviewers if she was asked, what happened happened, she said, she lost the election, 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 former Governor Richards appeared in express checkout—this was like September or October, the fall of the end of W's first term in the White House and a lot of people were dead who otherwise would not be, including a couple of hundred thousand Iraqi civilians. Exactly a decade had passed since W beat Ann and it had been a rough few years for humanity. It started, actually, at the Texas Capitol with executions that W ordered as governor. Those were the metrics of the era when old Austin came to an end, 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 street from the Mansion. 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 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 person with the motive and the means to do it. She made the error that is unforgivable in this town. She ran a poor campaign. 

        The trouble is, and this may have been Ann’s thinking, when you bring in somebody to go digging in dumpsters you can’t always be sure whose trash it’s going to be. A lot of shit happens in Austin. Maybe that was what she feared about playing hardball. 

It's amazing that people who never knew her still talk about what a saint Ann Richards was. If she was a saint, the Texas Governor’s Mansion was the wrong place for her. 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 political 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 V.I.P. 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 $200-an-ounce herb that gave him inspiration. He was completely unimpressed. 

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