CHAPTER 1, X is for Xavier
What were Jenna and/or Barbara Bush doing, back in the day, in that car on Lavaca Street just up from the Texas Governor’s Mansion when a cop’s red and blue lights came thru the back window? What they were doing, without knowing it, was initiating, you could say, a case of corruption that would involve Austin police and the Bush family and lead an important Latino journalist to lose his job for trying to pursue the story. To set the scene. It’s unclear if it was both of the First Children or just one because the girls, when they were out and about in Austin, were sometimes together and serving as their own posse. You could guess that it was just Jenna because she had a wilder reputation while Barbara was said to be more studious but let’s say, for the purposes of discussion, that it was both. After all Barbara may have gotten away with a lot of shit—like an unauthorized sleepover by a boy at the Mansion when the sisters were students at Austin High—because everyone naturally blamed Jenna. Not to be judgmental.
Another question that will also turn out to be important to this narrative is do you know what bodyguards are really there for? Not just to protect the wealthy and important but to keep them from doing dumb shit or to get them out of trouble after they’ve done it. Does that make sense?
So, like, not all the circumstances of the police stop are clear. There may have been intervention of an unidentified high public official whose full name features a “W,” like for example George W. Bush? And may have involved the Texas Department of Public Safety or the U.S. Secret Service, depending on if the unidentified high public official was living in the Governor’s Mansion or in the White House at the time. The stop of the Bush boopsie(s) by Austin police, whatever was going on in the car, which was illegal, well, let’s put it this way: the pigs would have taken a nigger or a Mexican to jail but not the Governor’s daughters or the President’s little darlings, you feel me? To set the scene.
What is known is that there was weed present in the car which would not be a big deal today but was at the time and would have meant that somebody was arrested. What we also know is that as APD was actually getting ready to do its job and put handcuffs on Miss(es) Bush, a chase car arrived with a Bush protective detail. What we don’t know is if the bodyguards were summoned by a panic button, some kind of electronic alert that was activated, or if the chase car was actually following the car with the weed. What we do know is the name of the reporter who heard about the incident and tried to get to the bottom of why the Bush girl(s) didn’t go to jail like anyone else. He was Guillermo X. Garcia and he was the Texas bureau guy for USA Today, stationed in Austin. We know that the “X” stands for Xavier. We also know that eventually he got a call from his boss in New York telling him to come to the office and, per Guillermo, “bring the computer,” that is his work computer. And we know that's when he got fired.
Chapter 2, Booty Called
Guillermo was a predator. And a very good reporter. He was the best reporter it was my pleasure to meet in fifty years in the business. If he says he got fucked by the Bush Family he probably did because Guillermo fucked a lot of people himself—they all deserved it—and he knows what it's like. Mostly though Guillermo didn't say much about the traffic stop on Lavaca Street. He always kept his cards close to his chest about his stories and about his life and if you asked him something he'd turn it back on you and ask, like, “What do you want to know that for?”
Guillermo is from Laredo, old school Latino. They just don’t talk about shit. June Griffin who was Guillermo’s wife—she’s an Austin girl, btw, they raised three boys together after meeting in Mexico City when Guillermo was the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers, which includes the Austin American-Statesman and the Atlanta daily newspapers? June was working at the Mexico City News at the time they hooked up although later, while raising the kids, she studied acting and became a sex-bomb in B-movies. Anyway, June came up to me one day after they had been married like ten years and said that she had just learned, from Guillermo’s sister, that Guillermo had an older brother who was killed in Vietnam. You can imagine how June felt, you know what women are like about sharing and all that, but that’s just what old school Latinos are like. Whether it’s traffic stops or family history. And it didn't bother me that Guillermo hadn't told me either. Usually guys are totally cool with not sharing. Sometimes we wish there was more of it.
Guillermo’s middle brother, named Fausto, just died a year or two ago and the obit online mentioned that he was a pilot in Vietnam and it said specifically in the obituary that Fausto, who became an inspector for the Customs Service, riding out on a boat to meet freighters arriving at the Port of New Orleans, the obit said that Fausto “never talked about” his time in Vietnam, either. Literally. Although Guillermo never told me, the oldest brother who was killed was apparently also a pilot. The only hint that Guillermo ever gave was once, when we were talking about dropping bombs from a plane, in a journalistic context, and he said that is the most vulnerable time for the pilot because the aircraft has to slow down and fly straight in order to drop the ordinance accurately. And another time he mentioned that Latinos had the highest casualty rate of U.S. grunts in Vietnam. To set the scene.
You may say, so, like, why don’t you just ask Guillermo what happened? Because we’re no longer sharing.
We’re no longer talking, actually, it happens, but guys aren’t like chicks who have to lay blame. Neither of us is at fault. Our relationship was complicated by West Texas geography. So, like, what happened is that we met in Alpine, in Brewster County, home to nothing in particular, to do some heavy drinking and dope smoking? Which would have been a perfect time to discuss events on Lavaca Street back in the day. Kind of like those dude movies or chick flicks where friends of either sex get together to renew ties and commit bad behavior away from spouses. This kind of road trip is actually a much more dangerous activity than you may realize, you can renew ties or break bonds altogether. To set the scene. Guillermo and me hadn’t seen each other for a while when we hooked up.
So, like, one night we went up to McDonald Observatory in the mountains of nearby Jeff Davis County, watched Skylab or the International Space Station or whatever it was orbit overhead, with the naked eye, and then headed back down the desolate mountain road and by the time we reached Alpine again we were no longer each other’s favorite people. The take home is that friendships can have expiration dates just like marriages. Shit happens. Guys get over it and move on.
But if you were to ask me? Me not being old school Latino and all? It’s that damn machismo—that black people call cheesmo—that is common among a certain ethnic group, not to point fingers or anything. In a nutshell, despite our great masculinity, black men are not afraid to cry. We run our mouthes just like chicks do too, but what we say lacks the bitchiness. If this really were a buddy movie, think of me as the Denzel Washington character, with Guillermo played by Bernicio Del Toro. Bernicio is pretty cool, and all, especially in the first Sicaro movie. But in my defense, there’s only one Denzel, you feel me?
So, like, it’s too bad because Guillermo and me were more similar than even we ever knew. He had the Republicans—the Bush family—undue influence and official misconduct. For me it was the Democrats—the Hobby family—perjury and manslaughter. Both stories were fueled by drugs. Another similarity is that the perps in both were white chicks who, in my modest opinion, have replaced white men as the principal bad guys in the modern world. The difference between the two? The Texas establishment got Guillermo, but shouldn’t have, and didn’t get me, but should have.
Chapter 3, The Judge on the Telephone
Once, on my way to an interview at a building across the street from the Texas Capitol—well, like, this building had a cool little parking garage, underground out of the heat, and there was an empty parking space that was more than adequate for my motorcycle. So, well, like, that’s where my bike ended up. And then the parking attendant came over with this expression on his face that you would probably see on the face of a Muslim if he caught you desecrating the Koran or a priest if he caught you hitting on a nun: not just disapproval, but the parking attendant's head turned painfully to the side, looking at me with an expression approaching disbelief, almost horror. “That,” he informed me, “is Lady Bird’s spot,” belonging to President Johnson’s widow, who owned the building. Well, fuck me. The point is Austin was a small town occupied by a lot of powerful people, who sometimes ended up on the police blotter, although there was no indication that Lady Bird Johnson was one of those, like she smoked dope or got caught drunk driving or whatever.
Still, as a police reporter, which was my first job, and then as the courts reporter, chasing public officials became my bread-and-butter, my meal ticket, like Guillermo’s, although only part-time. Like when you recognized someone’s name after an arrest, or more likely heard someone’s name involved in something but the person didn’t get charged? Wrongdoing in public life is a pretty good assignment in this town, actually, as you can imagine. Guillermo was the expert in the American-Statesman newsroom but for me at the beginning it was only my backup gig.
My beat was certainly never “black people” per se, but there were only two Negroes working the City Desk at the time, back in the day, and because we knew the culture and would do a better job than white reporters we did a lot of Eastside coverage as well. Sometimes it was just a form of translation, like, white people have a lot of curiosity even today about African Americans and sometimes your job is merely to interpret the culture, to translate and especially to let white people know when they’re treading on dangerous ground, you feel me? Like, no, you don't want to go there, or, that over there, that's quicksand, my friend. Or it's the jungle. Although that’s no longer an accurate description now that East Austin has been gentrified.
For me the work also often meant writing about "firsts," first black this, first black that, as White Society tried to make us believe we were being integrated into the Chamber of Commerce culture of the town. The aftermaths of police shootings, certainly, then as now, listening to the dead Negro’s mother ask why they had to shoot him six times, you know, if he was unarmed? It was always the same shit, basically the same story, just as it is today. Someone still has to write it. One weekend, me on cops but new to the job and Guillermo as my backup, we went to a police shooting. Black guy of course, dead on the ground outside a house, he was unarmed, Guillermo was shocked, one of the few times but yeah, presumably because he was from Laredo and there were no niggers to shoot down on the border. Although this was my first police shooting as a reporter it wasn’t my first exposure to white cops with guns as an African American. Most cop killings of black men were shot in the back. Because the brother was unarmed and doing what unarmed black guys do best, running. Only later would the Austin police start using the “I thought he was reaching for something” justification. Not all the gunfire was one-way though.
It was particularly frustrating covering the police because the local pigs were determined to make all the same mistakes dealing with the Black Man that every other southern police force had already made. The last cop in Austin to be killed in the line of duty, a year or two before my arrival on the scene, was a Latino who was machine-gunned by a white drug dealer. But the one before that was a white guy who started hassling Muslims selling the Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks downtown on Congress Avenue, in other words soul brothers, strong black males like me. Couldn’t have helped the guy who got hit with AK-47 fire—when somebody empties an assault rifle into your chest it’s a karma moment, God is telling you to lie down. But having completed my newspaper internship in Atlanta, the so-called Black Mecca, and knowing a little bit about the Nation of Islam, if anybody had bothered to ask me prior to the fatal encounter my advice would have been don’t fuck with the Nation. Cop or no—magnum on your hip or venerable .38, you may not live long enough to use it. Those Muslim brothers don’t play around. If you mess with them or disrespect their religion, someone is going to end up on the ground, probably facedown and perhaps bleeding out. Oh well. The message got passed on to the police directly, just a little late to help the aforesaid officer. So, like, there was like some racial polarization in the city, yes, you could say that.
The American-Statesman newsroom was in a shitty building at what is now Republic Square, in front of what is now the federal courthouse. The building looked like a very long doublewide trailer and included the printing plant. Today everyone is jaded about the press but at the time people still bought the newspaper and read the editorials and discussed what was in them. Our desks were in rows in the newsroom, no cubicles, and the City Desk was literally a row of desks with a lot of telephones in the center of the room. Sitting at the desk in front of me was the political editor, a white cat named Ford who left right after my arrival, he went to be press secretary for the new Republican governor who people talked about like he had horns and a tail. Which it actually turned out he did have.
Sitting in front of the political editor was Guillermo who became my role model and my in-house source of weed, not that that's important here. There was also a black police reporter who sold weed but his shit was not as good as Guillermo's and was more expensive. In fact Guillermo never even charged me and he became my best friend. Not to get all sentimental.
There was a scanner to load our stories, written on typewriters, into the nascent computer system. The only computers belonged to editors, in order to do their thing or write headlines or whatever. You did the actual reporting using the telephone or by in-person interviews or by going to the courthouse and pulling files. Watching Guillermo, since he was my role model and all, every once in a while he hung up the telephone, rose to standing next to his desk, bent his elbows and reached out like he was grabbing someone around the hips. Then he thrust forward his own hips. It meant that Guillermo had just fucked someone or was about to fuck someone. It was kind of beautiful, actually, that hip thrust. Today reporters like to trade influence and if a reporter, who is usually liberal, goes after anyone it will be a Republican or a Latino or black Democrat, because we're considered expendable. But back then everyone in Texas was still a Democrat, except the new governor. So, like, if you wanted to draw blood in print, the target was almost always a D not a R. Which didn’t bother me or Guillermo in the least.
For example: have you heard of the Texas Railroad Commission, that regulates oil and gas production in Texas?
The Railroad Commission is a three-member statewide elected body that OPEC was based upon, and also the Mexican drug cartels, because the whole idea of energy production, like with drug sales, is limiting competition and maximizing profits. Shortly after my arrival, Guillermo wrote a great investigative story that the Commission had set the price of natural gas in a private meeting, an executive session actually, instead of a public vote as the law required. It was a big deal because the three commissioner had broken the law and could have been prosecuted and they even came to the newsroom to complain to the editor about Guillermo’s nefarious story. Which was totally accurate and the editor listened politely and then said, basically, to the members of the Texas Railroad Commission, go fuck yourself. All three guys were Democrats but conservative Democrats which were kind of like Republicans are today. Which also taught me something about Guillermo’s methods. Sometime later Guillermo introduced me to his best friend from Laredo, a Latino guy named Robert, who happened to work for the Texas Railroad Commission.
It’s my bet, although Guillermo didn’t tell me, this is what happened in the case of the Bush traffic stop on Lavaca Street too. So, like, the chase car, full of state troopers, appeared at the stop. The Austin police were getting ready to do their duty and take the Miss(es) Bush in, and the troopers said fuck you, no you’re not. APD was pretty pissed off but what were they going to do, get in a gunfight with the Texas Department of Public Safety? Guillermo got tipped off by a Latino cop. The local police department was just starting to diversity, a few niggers but a lot more Latinos, and some of them reached higher ranks and it was my belief that’s how Guillermo got turned onto the Bush story in the first place. How cool is that? That kind of intra-ethnic leaking is a lot more common that you think, even now. Practically all Jewish reporters are tied into the Jewish network and getting leaks from other Jews. And there were black officials who would tell me things that they wouldn’t tell a white reporter.
Overall, just a few decades ago reporting was still an intimate experience in this town. Interviews were still one-on-one, you knew the people you were fucking or about to fuck, you looked them in the eye when you gave those first and final shoves. Which is what Guillermo taught me. Covering the courts also meant dealing with the alphabet agencies of the federal government, FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS as well as the Secret Service which had a big detail in town to cover President Johnson’s family and the LBJ Ranch. It was kind of cool but also kind of scary for a young blood like me.
One day the City Desk clerk called me to the telephone. She said there was a judge on the telephone for me. You might think, “Oh wow,” that’s cool, but being a 22-year-old African American thug my reaction was more, like, “Oh shit. What did I do?”
It was a federal judge. A white cat named Sessions, calling from his chambers in San Antonio. It was a different age, what can you say?
He told me that he had just been appointed Chief Judge of the Western District of Texas, that includes Austin, Waco, San Antonio and El Paso. He wanted me to do “a little write-up,” no shit, about his appointment. After the warm pee stopped running down my leg, what was there to do, except say, “Yes, Your Honor.”
The interesting thing is that a couple of years later Judge Sessions was appointed Director of the FBI by President Reagan. Sessions’ tenure in D.C. eventually ended in scandal, apparently caused by some behaviors of Mrs. Sessions, which proves my whole point, doesn’t it? In just my time in the saddle, women were going from saints to sinners, from princesses to perpetrators. As they were liberated, women were beginning to do much of the same illegal and/or evil shit that guys have been doing all along, that made me feel like some of my life choices weren't so terrible after all?
Meanwhile Guillermo was about to get his own call from a federal judge reaching out to the City Desk and wanting to talk to an editor. To set the scene.
